The Lake

ELEVEN

Leigh hadn’t seen her aunt and uncle since their trip to California when she was twelve, but she recognized them immediately when she stepped through the gate.

Uncle Mike looked a lot like Dad, especially his eyes. He was bigger, though—built like a football player. And, unlike Dad, he sported sideburns and a bushy mustache. His hair was considerably longer, too. Dad wouldn’t have approved of his brother’s appearance. Leigh felt relieved. She gave him a hug. His corduroy jacket smelled of pipe smoke.

She kissed Aunt Jenny on the cheek. The woman was surprisingly short. She used to be the same height as Leigh. Now the top of her head came only to Leigh’s chin. She was still as slim, however, and she still had a humongous bosom. She no longer wore the weird, harlequin glasses she’d had six years ago. Now she wore round lenses with wire rims. Granny glasses. A very good sign.

“You sure have sprouted up,” Aunt Jenny told her. “I considered it, myself, but chose not to. I enjoy conversing with belly buttons.”

Uncle Mike reached for Leigh’s carry-on. “Let me take that for you.” They started walking. “So how was your flight?”

“Just fine.”

“They feed you?” Jenny asked. “We’ve got a pretty long haul ahead of us.”

“We’ve got snacks. Or we can stop along the way.” Mike smiled around at Leigh. “Are you still crazy about McDonald’s?”

“Not quite like I used to be.”

“God, I remembered you hogged my fries.”

This might not be so bad, Leigh thought as she walked with them toward the baggage-claim area. Then she thought, Don’t kid yourself. Maybe they’re not as uptight as Mom and Dad, but they’re the same generation. They’ll have a lot of the same hang-ups, even if they do seem pretty cool for people their age. So you’d better watch out.

Their car was an old, battered station wagon. Mike loaded Leigh’s luggage into the rear, tossed in his corduroy jacket, which must have been smothering him in this hot, muggy weather, and came around to the passenger side. “Don’t see why we can’t all pile into the front,” he said.

Leigh sat between them.

“So,” Mike said as he started to drive, “we hear you’ve been dabbling in hippiedom.”

Here we go. “A bit,” she admitted.

“I don’t see that the movement’s produced any worthwhile literature.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Jenny told him. “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

“Ah, but where are the Ginsbergs, the Ferlinghettis, the Kerouacs, the Gary Sniders?”

“Mike misses the Beatniks,” Jenny explained.

“I was in Ferlinghetti’s bookstore just yesterday,” Leigh said.

“The City Lights? No kidding. We stopped in there when we were out visiting you folks. We sandwiched it in between the McDonald’s, so to speak. Do you remember that?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It was the high point of the trip for Mike,” Jenny said.

“Who’ve the hippies got? Kesey? He’s all right. Cuckoo’s Nest is all right. But who else?”

“Ginsberg’s still writing,” Leigh said. “Yeah, but he’s not a true hippie. He’s an over-the-hill Beatnik. There’s a difference.”

“Not a whole lot,” Jenny said. “Do hippies wear berets? Do hippies play bongos? Do hippies recite poetry in coffeehouses?”

“Mike’s a closet Beatnik.”

He started to declaim “Howl” in a deep, thundering voice.

“Oh, geez, spare us.”

Leigh started to laugh.

After a few stanzas, Mike quit his recitation. He and Jenny started asking the questions Leigh expected from relatives she hadn’t seen in years. How were her parents? How was school? Did she have a boyfriend? What did she like to do in her spare time? What did she plan to major in at the university? Did she have a career in mind?

They talked about themselves: the high school where Mike taught English and Jenny taught music; their cabin on Lake Wahconda; the new Cris Craft they’d bought two weeks ago; a drowning the previous summer when a fisherman’s boat capsized in a sudden storm; a legendary muskie named Old Duke that was said to inhabit the lake.

By the time they’d been on the road for an hour, Leigh felt completely at ease. Her aunt and uncle seemed easygoing and good-humored. They didn’t talk down to her. They treated her like an adult, a friend.

“Are you getting hungry?” Mike asked.

“I’m okay,” Leigh said.

“Thought I heard your stomach growl.”

“Not mine.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure there’s a McDonald’s around the next bend.”

Leigh doubted it. They were traveling along a two-lane road deep in the woods. The Big Bass Bait & Tackle Shop was the last business establishment Leigh had seen. That was ten minutes ago.

Mike steered around the bend. “Guess I was wrong. I remember I was wrong once before.”

“You can remember that far back?” Jenny asked. “Admirable.”

“You’d better break out the provisions, Tink.”

Jenny turned around. Kneeling, she reached down behind the seat. She handed back three cold bottles of Hamms to Leigh.

Mike started to sing the Hamms beer commercial about lakes and sunset breezes. Leigh pictured a cartoon bear playing a log like a tom-tom.

“We thought you might appreciate an authentic native snack,” Jenny said, twisting around and sitting down again. She had a box of Ritz crackers in one hand, a pottery crock in the other.

The crock contained smoked cheddar, which she spread on crackers while Leigh broke open the beers with a can opener from the glove compartment.

“Now, we know we’re corrupting you here,” Mike said, “but we rely on your good judgment to keep your folks ignorant about this.”

“Mum’s the word,” Leigh promised.

“Don’t tell your mum, either,” Jenny warned.

The beer was cold and good. Maybe it was her hunger, but Leigh thought she had never eaten cheese and crackers half as delicious as these. She drank, ate crackers, passed some from Jenny to Mike, and later took over the cheese-spreading chores when Jenny knelt on the seat again to get three more bottles of beer.

She already felt light-headed, a little numb behind her cheekbones. So she watched herself, being careful to hold her giddiness in check and pronounce her words correctly when she talked. It wouldn’t do at all for them to think that the beer was getting to her. During the second beer, the numbness spread to her cheeks. The cheese and crackers tasted better all the time.

“I’ve about had it,” Jenny finally said.

“More for the rest of us,” said Mike, clamping his beer between his legs and taking another cheese-mounded cracker from Leigh.

Soon, the knife was coming out of the pottery crock with no more than a thread of cheese along its edge.

“Better swoop up the rest of it with your finger,” Mike advised.

“That would be gross,” Leigh said.

“You’re among friends.”

So she cleaned out the remaining cheese, licking it off her finger.

When her beer was finished, she folded her hands on her lap, sighed, and settled down in the seat. “That really hit the spot,” she mumbled. Soon, her eyes drifted shut.

When she woke up, the car was passing a lake. A boy standing in a motorboat was handing a tackle box to a man reaching down from the dock.

“We’re not there yet,” Mike said.

“A couple more hours,” Jenny told her.

“You guys must really live far out.”

“Far from the madding crowd,” Mike said.

Later, they stopped for gas at a place called Jody’s with two pumps in front and neon beer signs in the windows. A thin, red-haired man in bib overalls stared down at them from a rocker on the porch. “Mary Jo,” he called in a flat voice.

The door swung open. A girl wandered out and squinted toward the car as if she couldn’t quite puzzle out where it might have come from. “Don’t just stand there collecting dust.”

With a shrug, she trotted down the porch steps. She didn’t look older than twelve. Leigh took an immediate dislike for the man—sitting on his butt and ordering the kid to do the work.

“Help you?” she asked at Mike’s window.

“Fill her up with ethyl.”

The girl went around to the rear. “I don’t know about you guys,” Mike said, “but I’m going to make a pit stop while I’ve got the chance.”

The man watched them in silence as they left the car and climbed the porch stairs. Leigh was glad to get inside, away from him.

“A real charmer,” Jenny whispered.

“His kid’s no prize, either,” Mike said.

They walked past a deserted lunch counter. At the far end were two doors, one marked “Pointers,” the other “Setters.”

“Well, I’ll be doggone,” Mike said. He smirked and opened the Pointers door.

Jenny motioned for Leigh to go first. Inside the rest room, Leigh bolted the door. The window was open. She looked through the screen to make sure the man wasn’t skulking around. Behind the building was a jumble of weeds, then the forest.

The toilet seat looked clean, but she didn’t sit on it. She braced herself above it until she was done. After washing her hands, she held on to a paper towel as she unbolted and opened the door. She didn’t want to touch anything in this place.

Jenny entered. Mike was already at the other end of the lunch counter, wandering among shelves at the other side. Leigh went to join him. This part of the room had groceries, souvenirs, and sporting goods. “Something for everyone,” Mike said.

The man came through the door and stared at them. Leigh stepped closer to Mike.

“Help you?”

“Just looking around, thanks.”

“Gas comes to eight-fifty,” he said, and stepped behind the small counter next to the door.

Leigh went to a wire book rack as Mike headed over to pay him. The paperbacks were mostly Westerns and mysteries. Some had bent covers and white lines down the spines as if they’d already been read.

“Where you folks headed?” she heard the man ask.

“Up to Lake Wahconda.”

Leigh wished Mike hadn’t told him. Then she felt foolish. What was she afraid of? Did she think the creep would pay them a visit?

After paying the man, Mike wandered over to a wall map near the door.

What was taking Jenny so long?

Leigh returned her gaze to the book carousel. The man stayed behind the counter. He seemed to be watching her, but she forced herself not to look at him. She would not look. Her eyes slipped sideways. He was staring at her, all right. Not at her eyes, though.

At the peace button?

She wished she had left it in her purse.

Hearing quiet footsteps, she turned her head. Jenny was striding between the lunch counter and tables. “All set?”

With a nod, Mike opened the door.

“Don’t be strangers,” the man said, a smile on his flushed face.

Leigh hurried to catch up. With Jenny on the porch and Mike outside holding the door, Leigh was alone as she passed the man.

“ ’Bye, now,” he said.

She looked at him as he stepped back from the counter. She tried to smile, and thought for an instant that he was missing an arm. Why hadn’t she noticed that before? She started to feel sorry for him. Then she realized that he wasn’t an amputee at all. His right arm, from the elbow down, was inside his bib overalls. The bulge of faded denim made by his arm angled down to his crotch. There, the jutting fabric stirred with the motions of his hand.

Leigh rushed outside and dodged just in time to avoid a collision with Mary Jo. “Sorry,” she muttered.

The girl narrowed her eyes, stepped past her, and went through the doorway.

“Are you all right?” Mike asked.

“Yeah, fine.”

“You look a little shaky.”

She shrugged.

Before climbing into the car, she glanced over her shoulder. No one came out of Jody’s. She didn’t look again. Safe between her aunt and uncle, she gazed at the dashboard. The car bumped over ruts, then moved along the smooth pavement of the road and soon rounded a bend.

She felt frightened, violated.

When Mike turned his head slightly to check the rearview mirror, Leigh twisted around and looked back. A pickup truck was close behind them. Reflections on its windshield prevented her from seeing inside. The pickup swung into the other lane, gaining speed. Her stomach tightened. As the truck pulled alongside their car, a young woman nodded a greeting through the passenger window. Leigh glimpsed the driver, a heavyset man in sunglasses, wearing a ballcap with its bill tipped up. She settled back into her seat as the pickup sped by. A safe distance ahead, it eased back into the northbound lane.

“Something wrong?” Jenny asked.

“Just that guy back where we got the gas. He gave me the creeps.”

“You and me both,” Jenny said. “Not that he did anything in particular to deserve it.”

Oh no? Leigh thought.

“Too much isolation,” Mike explained. “It has a way of warping the mind.”

“He was warped, all right,” Leigh muttered.

“I feel sorry for his daughter,” Jenny said.

“Who?” Mike asked. “Mary Jo? What makes you think she’s his daughter? She and her folks stopped by for gas last summer. Ol’ Jody bashed their heads and planted ’em out by the woodpile, kept the girl.”

“That’s not very funny, Mike.”

“I guess not. You’ve got to admit, though, some pretty weird goings-on go on around this neck of the woods.” He glanced at Leigh. “There was a fellow a few years ago, Ed Gein—”

“Don’t get into that,” Jenny warned.

“Well, I don’t want to frighten you, Leigh.”

“Then don’t,” Jenny told him.

“But I want you to keep your eyes open while you’re staying with us. Just because you’re not in the big city, don’t let your guard down. We’ve got our share of weirdos.”

Mike was Dad’s brother, all right. This lecture had a very familiar ring to it.

“Mike is right about that,” Jenny said. “We’ve never run into any problems, ourselves, but…”

“I wouldn’t exactly say that.”

“Nothing serious. But you do want to be careful, especially if you go around anywhere by yourself.”

“I will be,” Leigh assured them.

As she gazed at the tree-shadowed road ahead, her mind traveled back to Jody’s. The guy there had wanted her to see what he was doing. That’s why he spoke to her as she was leaving, so she would look at him, see his overalls sticking out like a tepee. His hand in there. Moving around. Rubbing himself. While he stared at her.

Mike’s story took hold. She finished in the bathroom and opened the door, and stumbled over Mike’s body. Jenny was sprawled atop the lunch counter, screaming as the man plunged a hunting knife into her belly again and again. He stopped. He turned to Leigh. His face was splattered and dripping blood.

“Now you’re all mine, sweet thing.”

Licking blood off his lips, he stepped toward her. The knife in his left hand carved slow circles in the air. His right hand tugged his zipper down, reached inside, and freed his huge, engorged penis. He slid his hand up and down, slicking his shaft with blood.

I’d bite it off for him, Leigh thought.

No, I’d make a break for it.

She pictured herself whirling around and locking herself inside the bathroom. He kicked at the door. Her only escape was through the window. A tight squeeze, but maybe… She boosted herself up. Started squirming out. And saw the girl, Mary Jo, standing in the weeds below with an ax in her hands. “Oh no you don’t,” the girl said, and grinned. “We got her cornered, Pa!” she yelled.

Leigh’s heart was thudding. Her mouth was dry. How in hell would she get out of this?

Don’t worry, she told herself. It didn’t happen, and it won’t. He’s a goddamn pervert, but we’re out of there. We’re all in one piece.

If he had tried something, Mike would have fixed him.

Unless he took Mike by surprise.

Don’t get started again.

Why did Mike have to tell him where we’re going?

He isn’t going to come.

He could leave Mary Jo behind to pump gas, run the grill, and look after the shop. Take a gun and knife out to his pickup truck.

“You goin’ after that gal?” Mary Jo asked.

“Prime stuff, weren’t she?”

“Well, bring some back for me, Pa. You know how I like gizzards.”

Good Christ, Leigh thought. I must be going nuts, thinking up this kind of garbage. “Hey,” she said, “maybe we ought to sing something.”

“Great idea,” Jenny said.

“Do you know ‘Waltzing Matilda’?” Mike asked.

“Just the refrain.”

“Well, you’re with a couple of teachers.”

“Yep,” Jenny said. “We’ll teach you the words.”

“Singing’s dry business,” Mike told her. “Better break out some brews.”