Born Under a Lucky Moon (16 page)

Chapter Sixteen
July 1986

I
carried the plates the way I was taught: one on my left forearm and the other two in my hands. “Fried perch sandwich,” I said, and put one in front of Evan, “and a junior BLT burger, medium,” I said as I set another down in front of Dad, “with a side of fries,” and the last dish went between them. “Need another Coke or anything?” They shook their heads and I went back to the kitchen.

The Bear Lake Tavern was located on the Bear Lake Channel, which connects Bear Lake to Muskegon Lake. From Muskegon Lake you could head out to Lake Michigan if you had a boat, and everybody around here had one. It was like having a car in this part of the world. The Bear Lake Tavern was built in the early 1900s and hadn't changed a lot since then. It was a roundish one-story building painted brown with red trim. The windows faced the docks, which were usually crowded. The lunch crowds were huge during the summer. The boats at the dock usually delivered hordes of Teds along with the locals. Inside, there was a dark wooden bar with a beer cooler, also trimmed in red, built into the wall behind it. Every other wall was covered with photographs of famous North Muskegon sports figures: the State Championship football team from 1918, the BLT “Brew Crew” softball team from 1975, a guy from NMHS who played briefly for the Detroit Lions proudly posing with a football. All were hanging alongside the many Michigan State University or University of Michigan pennants. One long wooden table ran down the middle of the room with other tables surrounding it. My friends and I had spent many a night at the long table laughing and gossiping. When we all went off to college we brought our new friends back with us to share the experience. I'm not sure they got much out of it; it was a tradition that came from spending your whole life in the town.

Sometime in the nineteen seventies, Tommy Loyse had bought the place. He tried to turn it into a restaurant and not a tavern, in his mind making it respectable for parents to bring their kids there to eat. But every family I knew was already doing that. Tommy had renamed the place the Bear Lake Inn. It was painted on the sign, but it never took. To the locals, it would always be the BLT, or the “Blit.” We didn't just go for the Stroh's. The Blit had the best damn burgers in the world. I mean that, really. Rumor was that it was because of the grill—that in almost one hundred years, the grill had never once been cleaned, and all that grease gave the burgers their distinctive flavor. Now that I worked there, I knew that was not true. But for whatever reason, the BLT burger and fries was about the best-tasting meal I'd ever had. The fried perch sandwich was a close runner-up.

The Blit was packed, and I was running my ass off. Evan hollered “Ketchup?” at me, and I tossed it to him from about six feet away. He snagged it with one hand.

“Miss, can we please order now?”

I turned my attention to a blond Ted. He was wearing a yellow Izod shirt with a light blue Polo button-down shirt over it—both collars up, of course—khaki shorts, and the requisite Docksiders, all brand new. I took his order for the French Dip sandwich, an order that confirmed the fact that he was not from around there. Who would order the French Dip? I turned to his friend, then stopped and smiled. I hadn't seen Fudgie Shaw since Lucy and Chuck's wedding. “Hey, Fudgie.”

“Hey yourself. How's Lucy doing?”

“Good. Mom talks to her more than I do, but I got a letter. Said she's studying twelve hours a day to pass her Russian finals. Her graduation from the Defense Language Institute is in about a month.”

“What's Chuck doing?”

I was a bit fuzzier on Chuck. Lucy didn't seem to talk about him a lot to Mom. “I think he's finishing up, too. His two-year stint is about over.” I didn't mention that Lucy had called Mom crying one night and told her that Chuck had been getting into fights on base and that he kept getting tossed into whatever prison the army had reserved for such offenses.

The bell in the kitchen rang, which meant that food was up and ready to be served. I moved away from Fudgie's table after taking his order. “Hey, come see me soon. I have a question for you. It's about Lucy.”

Fudgie waved and said, “I'll stop by tonight,” as I ran back through the saloon doors to the kitchen. My shift was over around 4:30, when the lunch crowds had left and the dinner crowds hadn't started yet.

Evan came back to give me a ride home, not that he really needed to. It was only about a mile walk, but he knew I'd be dead tired, because I'd worked a double shift. I'd gotten a call at 6 a.m. that morning from Tommy saying he didn't have anyone to cover the breakfast crowd. Two of the waitresses had called in sick. More like they had called in “beach,” I thought, when I saw how sunny it was outside. Tommy knew I was the only one who wouldn't hesitate to come in when it wasn't my shift. He also knew that I could handle the entire restaurant by myself. He said it was like watching a perfect zone defense or something, the way I worked. I just got this rhythm going along with laser focus and somehow, handling twelve tables plus the dockside orders, I would not miss a beat.

I put fifty cents in the jukebox and watched the Violent Femmes slide into play. Evan and I sat in the now near-empty restaurant, both of us drinking coffee, since the Blit had no idea what Yogi tea was. “
Let me go ooonnn, like a blister in the sun,
” hissed over the speakers.

“Do you have to play such a head-thumping song right now?” Evan poured a good amount of sugar into his coffee.

“What's your show going to be about tomorrow?” I asked to change the subject.

“I'm not sure yet. The walleye are running pretty good right now in Lake Michigan. Nothing better than smoked walleye. And the blueberries are coming in, too, so maybe I'll do the segment out at Blaine's Blueberry Farm.”

“Could you get Mrs. Blaine to bake a blueberry pie for the show?”

“Nope. Already tried. I wanted to do a piece comparing Michigan blueberries to the poem ‘Raisin in the Sun,' but she's camera shy. Plus she said she doesn't like my show.”

“How come?”

“She says I get too philosophical. Said if people want that they can watch Phil Donahue or something. She says if it's a cooking show, then it should just be a cooking show.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah, huh.” Evan grimaced at the coffee.

I heard coins drop into the jukebox at the back. The opening strains of a song poured out.

“Oh no,” we both said.

There had to be someone from the Upper Peninsula hanging out in the Blit. Nobody else would ever play that song. The upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan generated a rivalry like cross-town high school sports teams. We, from the Lower Peninsula, called them You-pers—this, not so cleverly, from a slurring of the initials U.P. They in turn called us Trolls because we lived under the bridge—the Mackinac Bridge that is, and please don't pronounce the last
c
of Mackinac. It's pronounced “Mack-in-aw.” The good folks of the Upper Peninsula petitioned every now and again so they could secede and become their own state, which of course they wanted to name Superior State. They said it was because of their proximity to Lake Superior. But everyone knew it was really a slap at us Trolls. It'll never happen, though. Fifty-one stars on the flag would just be awkward.

But to play that song. And so early in the day. Usually it didn't get played until about eleven at night when everyone was in their cups. Gordon Lightfoot had written it. It was about a shipwreck that occurred in Lake Superior. One of those big freighters that moved cargo from the locks of Sault Ste. Marie into the Great Lakes had gotten caught in a storm.

What people don't realize is that the waters in the Great Lakes can become as ferocious as on any ocean. It's particularly dangerous during the fall months, when the winds whip the waters of the Lakes into a frenzy. This particular freighter, the speculation went, had gotten caught between two gigantic waves. The waves each could have been about thirty feet high, maybe higher. Enormous waves can occur much closer together in the Lakes than they can in the ocean. Further speculation was that the bow and the stern had each become balanced on the top of a wave. The freighter then split in the middle and went straight down, with all hands on board. No survivors. It was an incredibly sad event in our history. The song continued, “. . .
the wreck of the
Edmund Fitzgerald . . .”

For whatever reason, this song had become the anthem of the You-pers. I looked around and saw three guys sitting at the bar waving their beer mugs back and forth. One of them was wearing an
IRON MOUNTAIN IS MAGNETIC
T-shirt, so that sealed the deal.

You-pers.

“Let's go. I can't take one more verse of that song,” Evan said as he grabbed his wallet and car keys. We wandered out of the Blit, and I threw some stale bread at the ducks waiting for their handout in the parking lot.

“Was that Fudgie Shaw who was in today?”

“Yeah, he's coming by tonight.”

“I thought you were still dating Walker.”

“I am.” I poked him in the side and made him squirm away.

“What's Walker got against us, anyway? He hardly ever comes around. You'd think we were contagious,” Evan said as he paused to light a cigarette.

“I don't really know. I think he thinks we're all disaster prone.”

“What have we ever done to him?” Evan asked.

I thought for a moment. “Remember that time we took our rowboat out on Muskegon Lake? And instead of buying a new boat plug Dad stuck gum in the hole? When the gum softened up, the boat sank and you, me, and Walker had to swim about half a mile to get to shore. We all had to take turns clinging to the Styrofoam cooler because we forgot the life jackets in the car.”

“Yeah, there's that,” Evan mused. “He lost his dad's lure box, too. Must've taken his dad all winter to hand-tie all those flies.”

“Two winters,” I muttered. Walker never let me forget it. Evan got in the car and leaned across the seat to unlock my door. I slid in. “Anyhow, I wanted to ask Fudgie a question. When we were at your wedding he gave Lucy something. I wanted to know what it was.”

“Nosy.”

“Yep, and speaking of nosy, why were you late for your wedding?”

Evan and Anna had only just returned from their honeymoon and I hadn't had time to talk to him.

“I don't really want to say. It was about Father Whippet.”

“What about him?” I prompted.

“Doesn't ‘I don't really want to say' mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“It was sort of like he had lost his robes. And we were helping him find them.”

“Lost his robes? Like at the dry cleaner's or something?”

“No, not quite like that.” He pulled up at the house. “Here you go.”

“Thanks, Evan.” I got out, slammed the door, and made my way up the walk. The back door was locked, but everyone in town knew that if you gave it a sharp bump with your hip it opened. Which is what I did now. I thought about my brother. Evan was a ship's captain and a food show TV host. He meandered around with a philosophy that life was meant to be lived. But the TV show only reflected one part of him. The other was dressed in starched whites with his captain's bars attached to his shoulders in very straight lines. He demanded a great deal from his crews and he got it. People just naturally loved Evan. He could read the Raytheon radar better than anybody, tell a story that would have you laughing so hard you would beg him to stop talking so you could catch your breath, tell from the waters when a storm was coming or the fish were running and at what depth. He knew that sometimes during a snowstorm the waters of Lake Michigan could turn the brilliant blue of the Caribbean. He taught me how to read a barometer and he knew how to steer by the stars with a sextant. Not many people knew how to do that anymore. He captained research vessels for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (the government can sometimes be too damn cutesy, as the acronym NOAA is pronounced “Noah”), and he captained party boats and private vessels.

He was commissioned to deliver a boat from Muskegon down to Fort Myers, Florida, once. Dad went with him. They crossed Lake Michigan to the Chicago River, then to the Mississippi, and then on down into the Gulf of Mexico. They had bikes with them and at every port they would ride around and talk to the locals, buy fruit from the roadside stands, and get a feel for the place. They were both pretty bummed out when they finally had to fly back home. Evan would tell tales of captains and their ships lost in the Great Lakes and of dead bodies floating up against the bow. He told stories of strange flying objects and of counting hundreds of shooting stars over Lake Michigan in late August.

And he tolerated me. He may have actually liked me. I'm nine years younger than my brother. Certainly when I was six and he was fifteen, we didn't have a lot in common. He moved in and out of the house like an apparition. But by the time I was nineteen and he was twenty-eight, we actually managed to carry on conversations.

Fudgie Shaw came over that evening. “Hi, Mrs. T,” he said to Mom, and gave her a hug. Then he opened the refrigerator. “No beer?” He looked at Mom.