Cradle Lake (10 page)

“So how did you know the lake would fix the Morris boy?”

“I didn't. It was a gamble. But I knew the kid wasn't gonna make it if we didn't try.” Hank leaned across the table. “Once you're dead there's no fixing it. The lake can't help you anymore.” He selected another beer from the six-pack.

In the grass, Jerry Lee made a slight whimpering sound but didn't move.

Alan's sharp laugh was like a whip crack in the silence. “You're fucking with me, right? That's what this is? Hazing the new kid on the playground?”

Hank's eyes remained sober. His expression did not change. He popped the cap off his fresh beer and took a long pull.

“Come on,” Alan said. “A lake in the woods with magic healing powers? That's what you want me to believe, isn't it?”

Hank didn't answer. He looked away. In the distance, the mountains were enormous black crenellations speckled with moonlight against the night sky.

“Yeah, okay, I saw the car hit that kid.” Alan couldn't deny that. “But seriously, man.” Yet he recognized the slow surrender in his voice and knew he was having a hard time convincing himself that it was some sort of joke. Eventually, he held up one hand in a show of surrender. “Okay, fine. If that's the case—if what you're telling me is true—then how come we don't bottle up that water and cure fucking AIDS across the globe? No more cancer, no more heart attacks, no more pain and suffering.”

“We can't do that,” Hank said flatly. “The lake is a gift. It's also our secret. It's our responsibility to keep it that way. And now you're part of that secret, too.”

“Why?”

“You saw what it can do.”

“But why does it need to be a secret?”

“Because there's no such thing as utopia. Bad things happen in life which allows us to appreciate the good things. We get sick and it makes us appreciate being healthy. We work a nine-to-five all week and enjoy the weekends more than the guy who sits home on unemployment.” Hank took another swig of his beer. His eyes had grown distant, as if he were in the midst of recollecting a childhood memory. “But there's a more practical reason, too.”

“Yeah? What's that?” Far off, a whip-poor-will cried out. Alan had read somewhere that whip-poor-wills were the harbingers of death.

“Georgie O'Rourke goes to the lake to mend a broken bone. The bone heals but he begins having seizures. Less than a year later he's dead. Massive brain hemorrhage. Or one of the Finto kids—who found the lake one afternoon and thought it would be a great place to swim—goes mad for no apparent reason and tries to stab his old man with a fork while the family's sitting down for supper.” Hank shrugged, suggesting perhaps the lake had everything or nothing to do with these bizarre incidents. “Or last summer, Lily Breckenridge backed over her Doberman with her car, broke the poor dog's hip. She carried it to the lake and the hip was healed. But later that winter, the dog gave birth to a litter of puppies that all came out … well, they came out wrong.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means there is a
give
and there is a
take.”

“Those stories are just coincidences. They don't mean anything.”

“Sure enough,” Hank said. Then, after a pause, he said, “I want to tell you about Owen Moreland.”

“Owen and Sophie Moreland were your average middle-class couple in their late forties, and they lived on Cedar Avenue in one of those little A-frame houses. Owen was a pharmacist who opened up shop on Market Street. He was a quiet, kinda nerdy guy but nice enough that he'd say hello whenever he passed you on the street. Sophie worked as a claims adjuster for a big insurance firm in the next town, but she did most of her work out of the house.” Hank took a breath and asked for another cigarette.

Wordlessly, Alan shook one from the pack and extended it to him along with a book of matches.

Hank lit it and looked at the glowing red eye of the ember for what seemed like an eternity before he spoke again. “It became obvious that Sophie found the lake a few months after moving to town. To the best of my knowledge, no one had ever told her about it, so I assumed she had been out hiking and happened to find the path that leads to it. She lost ten or twenty pounds seemingly overnight, and even her skin looked healthier, her eyes more alert. Younger. She began running these charity races, and she even got first place in one of them. Was in the newspaper and everything. One of the judges, a guy named Botts who lives on Tulane, clocked her at a steady six-minute mile for the entirety of the race. He said she wasn't even out of breath when she crossed the finish line.”

“Isn't it possible she was exercising, and that's why she lost the weight and became a good runner?”

“Sure. Anything's possible. Personally, I was hoping that was the case when people first started talking about her. But then Sheriff Landry began keeping an eye on their house at night. Sure enough, he caught Sophie leaving her house in the middle of the night, all decked out in her running gear. At first Landry assumed she was going for a night run, but he followed her anyway. Followed her right here, in fact.”

Landry,
Alan thought.
That's why I've been seeing the goddamn police car outside the house. The son of a bitch has been spying on me.

“He watched her go through the trees and onto the path until she disappeared,” Hank continued. “When she reappeared about an hour later, it was obvious she'd been out having a midnight swim.”

“What'd Landry do?”

“He stopped her and told her to stay away from the lake. He didn't need to explain its power to her as she'd already figured it out. He said she was abusing its power, using it frivolously, and it had to stop.”

“Did she stop?”

“Sort of but not because of Landry's warning.” Hank crushed out the cigarette on the sole of his sneaker and said, “Her husband killed her.”

Alan's beer froze halfway to his mouth. He stared at Hank.

“Turns out they'd both been going to the lake together,” Hank said. “Thing is, for all the good those little midnight swims did for Sophie, they didn't have the slightest effect on Owen. Or, more accurately, poor Owen seemed to get
worse.
He couldn't give up smoking, and by the time his
wife won that race, old Owen had actually strapped on another ten to twelve pounds. And whether it was from the long hours he'd been putting in at work or from his frustration at watching his wife grow younger and healthier while he got older and heavier, he seemed to be plagued by unshakable fatigue.”

“How come it didn't work for him?”

“I couldn't say. Sometimes it rejects someone for no good reason. Like my bum leg. Or old man Pasternak's wife who couldn't beat the goddamn cancer no matter how many midnight treks to the lake she took.”

For whatever reason, Alan pictured his father—blue skinned and massive looking on the stainless steel table in the basement of the morgue, that hideous yet subtle dime-sized bullet hole at his temple. From the top of his chest down he'd been covered in a flimsy white sheet, the twin tombstones of his feet pointing straight up at the acoustical tiles in the ceiling. And remembering this made him think of Cory Morris's single shoeless foot, the tip of his white sock curled over like a deflated balloon, flapping as Hank and the other men hurried him through the woods to the lake.

Hank repositioned himself in the lawn chair. “As one might expect, their marriage had already deteriorated. It was like Owen woke up one morning married to a much younger woman—a woman he was unable to keep up with. It wore on him, ate him up from the inside. Made him feel inferior. Even his work suffered and he stayed home sick more and more. Soon he shut down his shop and wouldn't come out of the house. Not that his wife noticed. While it wasn't exactly, you know, common knowledge, Sophie had
taken up with a young fellow from the firehouse, a kid in his late twenties. I don't suppose there's any need to go into much detail on
that,”
he added, a sly glint to his eye.

A chilly summer breeze stirred the trees. In the grass, Jerry Lee whimpered but did not move.

“Mr. Pasternak went over to the Moreland house one afternoon and knocked on the door. It wasn't anything any of us had conspired to do, and we didn't even know Pasternak was doing it until he told us later that evening at The Moxie. He said Owen answered the door wearing a pair of filthy boxer shorts and an armpit-stained T-shirt, his hair all screwed up into tight mattress curls and the stirrings of a lumberjack beard creeping up his jawbone. Pasternak asked him to come to The Moxie with him because he wanted to talk, but Owen shook his shaggy head and, without opening his mouth, shut the door in Mr. Pasternak's face.

“About a week after that, toward the middle of August, I was carrying some firewood down Market Street in Jonathan Nasbee's pickup—Jonathan's a good guy, works at the quarry—when I happened to catch sight of the Morelands' old blue Duster parked slantways outside the Laundromat. It was Owen's car, really—Sophie always said she wouldn't be caught dead in it—so I knew he was out and about. I pulled the pickup into the next available space outside the Laundromat and hopped out.

“As you've seen, that whole downtown section of Market Street is nothing but storefronts, each one family owned and passed down through the generations. Everybody knows everybody else's business in other words. I'd imagine it's quite a bit different than what you're used to, coming
from New York and all, but we like it that way.”

Alan thought of the little no-name place in the East Village where he used to buy cigarettes and newspapers and of the proprietor, a grizzled old black man with salt-and-pepper muttonchops, who called himself Felix Gum-drop. Though he didn't interrupt Hank's story, it occurred to him that there were more similarities than differences between big cities and out here in rural nowhere. What was that story about the city mouse and the country mouse? He couldn't remember …

“Anyway,” Hank said, “before I could even get my fingers around the door handle at the Laundromat, I see him standing at the end of the narrow brick alley. I called out to him but he didn't answer. He was standing toward the end of the alley, which is just a little brick walkway that runs between the Laundromat and the hardware store, the back of which is lined with Dumpsters and employee parking. Owen stared at something on the roof of the Laundromat. His gaze was so intense it was no surprise he didn't hear me call his name, so I did it again, taking a step or two toward him.

“This time he turned around. With Christ as my witness, there was such a look of empty depravity in his face I could feel my stomach muscles clench and my blood turn to ice. And then he
smiled
at me.” Hank laughed nervously and swiped at the side of his face with one big hand. “There was a children's program on when I was a kid, narrated by Shelley Duvall, about nursery rhymes and fables and—”

“Faerie Tale Theatre,”
Alan said, with more excitement than he would have thought. “I watched it, too.”

Hank grinned, still rubbing the side of his face, and
said, “Yeah, that's it. Anyway, there was this one episode about Aladdin and his magic lamp. James Earl Jones plays the genie. Do you remember it?”

“Afraid not.”

“Well, there's a part in the show where the genie, who's really fucking bent out of shape, just turns to the camera and gives this fucking
smile.
Scared the shit out of me. Even today, I cringe whenever a phone book commercial comes on TV.” Another nervous laugh. This time, Alan couldn't help but smile at him. “When Owen turned and smiled at me in that alley, that was what he looked like—fucking James Earl Jones done up as Aladdin's genie. Had I been in worse shape, I could have had a heart attack right then and there.

“‘How you been?' I asked him. ‘Haven't seen you in a while.'

“‘Been around,' he says, his voice gravelly. Thankfully, he turns away from me, and I don't have to look at that hideous smile anymore.

“‘Folks been worried about you,' I tell him. ‘You been going down to the lake?' Because, see, this was well before Landry followed Sophie to the lake that night. Jury was still out.

“‘Do you see it?' he says, ignoring my question. He's staring at the roof of the Laundromat again with that same intense expression. In fact, he's squinting while practically standing on his tiptoes.

“‘See what?' I say.

“‘It's gone.' And there's some resignation in his voice. ‘You must have scared it off.'

“‘Must have scared what off?'

“‘They're all over the place now. Been following me. You just missed one up there.' Owen points to the roof.
'Must have heard you call my name. They're temperamental like that.'

“‘I don't know what you're talking about,' I say. And suddenly I didn't care, either, because I knew he was about to face me—and offer that hideous genie's smile. Which he did. And my blood ran cold all over again.

“‘It don't matter,' he says calmly enough.

“‘You and Sophie been going down to the lake, haven't you?' I say again—only this time I made the mistake of mentioning his wife. I knew it was a mistake the second the words came tumbling out of my mouth, but there was nothing I could do about it.

“‘Don't talk about her,' he practically growls at me.

“I could see the discolored patches under his eyes and his sallow complexion, and for one split second, he seemed to
age
right there in front of me. Like those time-lapse films that show the entire life of a flower in a matter of seconds? He just seemed to grow old.

“And later that night, lying in bed and unable to sleep, I would think about how he looked so old and wonder if the lake did that to him—that it wasn't only his worsening depression about his wife's affair, which half the town already knew about, but the lake itself. As if the lake was physically draining him. For the first time I wondered if in order to heal some people the lake had to drain that energy from others.” Hank paused, almost as if he wanted those words to sink in.