Lake Overturn (7 page)

“We, as a family, volunteer every Saturday at the Mennonite soup kitchen. Have for years. Lawrence and I decided Gary should work there Sundays after church as well, and go to the Wednesday administrative meetings. Sure, he griped at first, but he’s done real good. He’ll keep on after his punishment’s over.”

Wanda allowed herself a glance at Gary, whose jaw hung open like a broken drawer.

“Your Honor, my friends think me and Lawrence are being too hard on Gary. I tell them that if I have any power at all as his mother, Gary will never darken the door of a courtroom again. He will never damage another person’s property. He will never harm a person littler than himself.”

Now Wanda broke down and hid her face against Gary’s shoulder. Then she lifted herself. “Thank you, Your Honor.”

The judge sat for a long time, holding the tip of his reading glasses in his teeth. A fear gripped Wanda’s heart. What if he put down the glasses and said, “Miss, you don’t seem old enough to be this young man’s mother”? Instead he put them on again, leaned forward, and wrote some words on the forms. Then he stacked them and pushed them away.

“In cases like these,” he said, “I usually levy a fine and require that the offender spend some time in community service. However, I would guess that you, Mrs. Wojciechowski, and your husband would be burdened with the fine, and not your son. I certainly don’t want to punish you when you appear to be raising the boy right. And as far as community service, you’ve already got him involved in projects more worthwhile than painting hydrants. So,” he turned to Gary, “young man, I have two requirements of you. Are you listening?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“One, honor your mother, just as it says in the Bible.”

Gary nodded.

“And, two, tell that Polack he’s a lucky man.”

B
ACK IN
E
ULA,
Winston’s sister, Liz, walked back and forth in front of the high school entrance, her thumbs hooked into the front pockets of her jeans. She was waiting for Winston, and had been for a half-hour. Her car was in the shop, and he was her ride home. All her friends had left already, and his car wasn’t where he had parked it that morning. Maybe he had gone to McDonald’s for lunch, and parked it somewhere else when he returned, or maybe he and Jay had decided to cut school. He was such a show-off, sweet when they were alone, braiding her hair as they watched TV, then disowning her when the guys showed up. She’d give him five more minutes, then call her mom from the pay phone.

Liz and Winston were easily identifiable as twins, but their sharp features, so delicate they could have been sculpted with a toothpick, made the boy somewhat elfish and the girl simply beautiful. And while Winston’s hair was plain brown, Liz’s was chestnut with strands of real red. Faint freckles splattered her cheeks and forehead like dried rust water on a window.

A Maverick pulled up in front of her, driven by Jay. He hoisted himself up to sit in the car window so he could talk to her over the roof of the car.

“Hey, Liz.”

“Hey, Jay. Have you seen Winston?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing.”

“Great,” she said, looking down at the toe of her sneaker, which was grinding into the concrete sidewalk as if Liz were crushing an insect.

“Do you need a ride?”

“Yeah.”

“Hop in.”

They drove out of the parking lot, past the cow field, onto the road that headed out toward Lake Overlook. Eula Schools had been built on the eastern edge of town in the late 1950s, since it was in that direction (toward the interstate and Boise) that the town was predicted to expand. But instead, the town had stretched south toward Lake Overlook, where the rich people lived, and north toward the sugar factory, where poor people worked, leaving Eula Schools still on the edge of town. There was a field next to the high school parking lot that contained what may have been the most abused cows in Idaho. They had been chased, ridden, pelted with rocks, and, once, spray-painted and herded by kids from a rival high school onto the Eula High football field during a game.

“So, how have you been?” Jay asked.

“Fine, you?”

“Fine.”

“You’re living at your mom’s, right?” Liz asked.

“Yep.”

“How’s that?”

“Oh, excellent. We get along great. She lets me do whatever I want. It really feels more like living on my own than anything.” Liz had never heard such wild insistence in Jay’s voice. He must have heard it too, for when she glanced at him, he jutted his chin up and turned briefly to watch a passing car. Then he added, “I still go to the Van Bekes’ a lot.”

“Sounds good,” said Liz. She had only asked to be polite. She didn’t really care.

They crested a hill and Lake Overlook lay sparkling before them.

“Wonder what happened to Winston,” said Jay.

“Yeah. I figured he was with you and the guys.”

“Why?” Jay asked.

“Why?”

“We’re not, like, married.”

“Okay,” Liz said with a whatever-you-say laugh.

“No, really,” said Jay. “I actually feel like we’re kinda, I don’t know, growing apart. I’m feeling more . . . serious these days. Maybe it’s moving out of Carl and Janet’s, or maybe it’s being a senior. Don’t tell him I said that.”

“I won’t,” Liz said, then added, turning toward him and nodding condescendingly, “We don’t really talk.” They had reached the Padgetts’. “Thanks for the ride,” Liz said. She leaped out of the car and ran up the lawn.

Jay pulled away and left the subdivision. He drove calmly until he reached the open road. Then, as if his fist had been set on a spring, it shot out and struck the dashboard. When he withdrew it, there was a crack running between the two air-conditioning vents. A drop of blood collected on his knuckle and fell, but his face never changed.

I
N THE WEEK
since Mr. Peterson had announced the science fair, Gene and Enrique had failed to agree on a project. Enrique had come up with dozens of ideas that had provoked little or no response from Gene. Now, as they zigzagged down the sidewalk from the bus stop, Gene taking care to keep awnings and tree branches between him and the sky, Enrique tried again: “Gene, I know you don’t want to do erosion, but it could be really neat. We could make a landscape out of dirt with little miniature trees and stuff. And we could have a fan blow it. We could show how the soil holds together when there’s roots in it. What do you think?” With this, Enrique stepped forward slightly, and bent to be in Gene’s line of vision.

“Erosion is boring,” said Gene.

“I know erosion is boring,” said Enrique, “but a model of erosion with a fan blowing dust around is neat.”

“It would be boring because erosion is boring. A model of something boring is boring. A model of something neat is neat.”

“Well, then, what is neat, Gene?” Enrique’s voice rose into a whine. “I come up with these ideas, and you shoot them down, but you don’t come up with any yourself. We only have a few days left. If we don’t come up with something we both like, I’m just going to do it on my own.”

They circled the car-wash parking lot and stepped through the tear in the chain-link fence to enter the trailer park. On Meadowlark and Goldfinch Lanes, the deepest corner of the trailer park away from the boulevard, bushes huddled against trailers, carports extending toward the lane like hands offered in greeting, frilly curtains hung in the windows, lawn statues and pinwheels peeped from flower beds, and an American flag hung from a pole that rose at an angle from one vinyl-sided garret. This was the quiet, respectable part of the trailer park, to which the long-term residents had migrated. The front spokes of the star-shaped trailer park—the only part visible to passing cars—was the rowdier neighborhood. For the more-or-less transient residents of these lanes, Robin and Sparrow, nothing seemed to stick to its intended purpose: cookouts became brawls; refrigerators died, moved outside, and became anchors for clotheslines; a broken-down, doorless car became a pirate ship for the children, complete with a Jolly Roger hanging from the antenna. The trailers here exposed the jacks and stilts and wood blocks that held them up off the ground, while on Meadowlark and Goldfinch Lanes, vinyl skirts modestly covered these underpinnings. It was to avoid walking down Robin or Sparrow that the boys’ mothers encouraged them to enter the trailer park the back way, through the hole in the fence.

The previous spring, Gene had become interested in the mechanics behind all of those spinning brushes in the car wash. Every day the boys had peered into the building on their way by, eventually lingering and hiding when cars entered. They got home with their shirtfronts damp and smelling of ammonia. Enrique had already got bored of watching the car wash when, one afternoon, one of the men who worked there decided to come around back of the building and run them off. “I’m going to design car washes when I grow up!” Gene had shouted in defense once they were safely through the fence. Enrique had shushed him. He could be so embarrassing.

After this, Gene went through a period of stopping to examine the morning glories that grew on the fence. He began by opening the flowers—which, by the afternoon, had twisted themselves closed like hand-rolled cigarettes—then turning the flowers inside-out. Sometimes Gene picked them and took them home to perform experiments on them. He put them in his closet to see if he could make them open and close by shining a bright light on them.

Once when Enrique was over watching TV with Gene, Connie had come upon a pile of withered flowers under the kitchen sink. Her body stiffened. Then she bent and grabbed the bunch of brown sticks and crumbling petals. Enrique had feared that she would yell—that’s what his mother would have done—but instead Connie came into the living room and turned off the TV, causing Gene, who hadn’t yet seen what she had found, to grunt angrily.

“Gene,” said Connie, holding out the sad bouquet, “give me your eyes. Give me your eyes, Gene. Give me your eyes.” Finally he looked up enough to satisfy her. “Clean up after yourself, and stop destroying flowers. Do you hear me?”

Connie rarely disciplined Gene; this was one of the few times Enrique had witnessed it. (How many times had Gene seen Lina yell at Enrique about something trivial? Her outbursts were always followed by a brief period of angry cleaning, then a hug.) It occurred to Enrique, as he watched, that Gene had trained her. She was addressing him exactly in the way he wished to be addressed—quietly, clearly, from across the room.

“I’m going to be a botanist,” Gene said, as if this would close the subject.

(“I’m going to build a submarine.” “I’m going to work at the water tower.” It seemed that each new interest not only replaced the last, but consumed Gene wholly, future and all.)

“That’s fine, Gene. In the meantime, clean up after yourself. Stop destroying flowers,” Connie had said.

Now, as they walked down Meadowlark Lane, Enrique put aside his anger to give it another try: “Halley’s Comet?”

Gene sniffed, as if the comet had personally offended him. In March the two had spent a few nights in sleeping bags in the dewy grass between their homes, and the most they had seen of the much-anticipated comet was a tiny yellow shape like a fingernail clipping among the stars.

“We could show those photos from Japan—it was brighter there—and make a diagram of its orbit.”

“Come inside,” Gene said.

“Why?” Enrique said.

“I want to show you something.”

“Is it for the science fair?”

“Yes.”

“Something we can do as a project?”

Gene didn’t answer, but climbed the stairs to his trailer. Before following, Enrique called across the empty lot, “Mom?”

“Yeah?” Lina called from inside.

“I’m going to Gene’s.” Ever since his mother had told Enrique she had been kissed, it had been important for him to know when she got home. He paid more attention to which homes she cleaned on which days. He couldn’t help it.

“Great,” Lina responded after a curious pause.

The boys went into the trailer, angled their bodies to pass Connie’s bed, and entered Gene’s bedroom. Gene opened a drawer in his desk—it only opened halfway before it hit the bed—and pulled out a pile of newspaper clippings. He handed the first to Enrique. It was from the front page of the
Free Press
, the local newspaper. “Hundreds Poisoned in Cameroon,” said the headline.

“This was last month,” Enrique said. “It was a rebel attack.”

“It wasn’t a rebel attack,” Gene said.

“What was it?”

“No one knows.”

W
INSTON BLASTED
Def Leppard on the way back to Eula, and Gary was jubilant. Winston couldn’t stop going over the details, retelling the glorious story. “Shit, Wanda, you deserve a fucking Academy Award! You cried for the judge. Gary, you got off scot-free! What a cheat! I had to pay a fine!
The meek shall inherit the earth
. Wanda, you are a master bullshitter. I fucking love you.”

Gary didn’t join in, but bounced gleefully in his seat.

Wanda smiled, nodded, even managed a chuckle, but she was in misery. Pain smoldered in both her thumb and chest, and occasional bolts shot up and down her arm between, just as the earth and the clouds volley bursts of electricity in a thunderstorm. It was intense, in part, because it would so soon be soothed. Without the prospect of relief her suffering would be less, she realized, but that’s how life worked. And although she had gotten swept up in the lie’s momentum—it had eased the pressure inside to let the story gush from her mouth—she now felt guilty. It must have taken a lot for that Mexican to become a judge, and he obviously regarded himself as hard-boiled and unflappable. How embarrassed he would feel if he knew how gullible he really was! And Mrs. Wojciechowski! The idea of this nice lady ever finding out she had been imitated, made fun of . . . Wanda couldn’t bear it. She felt as if she had torn down everything right in the world.

“God!” Winston said. “The soup kitchen! How did you come up with that one?”

“Dunno,” Wanda said. Never, ever could she admit that she ate at the Mennonite soup kitchen when she was broke.