Gun Lake (27 page)

Paul had no idea where this gun had come from. The photo—that had been one thing. And the newspaper, well, who knew about that? Perhaps he had—perhaps he had brought all these items to the cottage some time ago and just didn’t remember doing so.

That’s a lie, and you know it
.

Or maybe they had slipped out of his suitcase when he unpacked.

Another lie
.

The gun, however, was not small and couldn’t fit in a book or in a box. It wasn’t something you’d forget about easily.

Was someone playing with him? Someone from the river-boat? Someone angry he was gone? Who could that have been? Nobody cared that he had filled up his last day there, his last hour. You had to care in order to start playing with someone’s mind, in order to start haunting them.

Nobody cared like that about him.

Or did they?

The knock on his door jolted him. He froze, holding the pistol and feeling guilty.

“Hey, Paulie, want to go fishing?”

It was Freddie, his neighbor.

Paul stashed the gun in the drawer underneath the television and went to get the door.

Maybe it was all a big joke and someone would fill him in on it. Maybe it would even be Freddie telling him about playing with his mind.

Freddie didn’t let on, and Paul knew better. Deep down, he considered another possibility. The real, rational part of his mind and soul mumbled that possibility to him. It whispered a name. A
name from the distant past, but one that had been haunting him the last few weeks.

He just couldn’t believe—he refused to believe—so he ignored the voices.

Again.

SHE SAT ON THE EDGE of the bed and wept.

What would he do now if he could see her? Only minutes after dropping David off at the campgrounds and driving back to her apartment, Norah broke down into tears. There was no reason, really. She didn’t know why she was crying, either. It wasn’t PMS. It wasn’t because the lunch had been awful, because the truth was exactly the opposite. She hadn’t ever met a man as gentle and polite as David. At least she hadn’t met anybody like that in the past decade—and she couldn’t remember one before that, either. And she definitely had not gone out on—whatever their time together could be called—before. A get-to-know-you spontaneous lunch? Something like that. A cry for help, more like it. And if it was a cry for help, a desperate attempt for a kind of human contact—boy, had she picked the right person.

He was obviously running away from something and not wanting to talk about it. Was he married? He didn’t look like he was; he didn’t give off that married-man-cruising-for-chicks vibe. They hadn’t actually talked about relationships, but she thought a man like David must surely have someone else in his life. But maybe not now. Maybe that’s why he was running. Maybe his wife had left him like she had left Harlan. For different reasons, of course. She just knew that this man wouldn’t hurt anybody. He was different from Harlan and his friends. It was something she felt deep inside. She felt safe around him. And Norah hadn’t felt safe for a long time.

So why the tears? Were they tears of joy? When she dropped him off, he had thanked her for the ride and for being brave enough to go to lunch with him. And his last few words had stuck with her; she just couldn’t believe he’d said them. He could easily have said something awful like “Hey, hot stuff, we need to hook up again.” Kurt had made it obvious what sort of impression she made on him from the very start. But it was his last statement that sent her emotions into a tailspin.

“Look,” he’d said, “I don’t want to be too forward, and if I am being that way, just excuse me. But would you mind if maybe I saw you again? No pressure, nothing heavy. I just—I really feel good talking with you. That’s all. If you want to—if you have time or anything like that—we could maybe just—I don’t know—just hang out. Talk. That’s all.”

And she had nodded and told him that was fine. He’d said he would see her again at the Lakeside Grill. And then he had told her good-bye.

If you have time or anything like that
.

Time was all she had. Days and nights passed not in a blink, but in a slow blur. Sometimes she actually looked forward to going to work, spending time with waiters she didn’t know and hardly talked to, just to have personal contact. Sometimes she had felt lonely up in Maine, but that had been a different kind of loneliness. Her friends, the people she’d called her friends, had been only a call or lunch away. She had known the names of people in her health club, in the salon where she worked, even the stores where she shopped. She’d known the friends she shared with Harlan, even if just on the surface. How could she have been so blind to such luxury? Now she was starving for simple conversation, a little friendly human contact. And somehow she had found this guy, this man, who seemed to be in the same boat.

What is he running from?

Maybe in time she’d learn. She probably needed to know. But the fact that he didn’t make any inappropriate comments, didn’t make any illicit suggestions, didn’t even look at her inappropriately when she got up and used the ladies’ room during dinner, helped her not to worry.

Norah was used to the way guys looked at her. Harlan had never even tried to hide it. Sometimes at home, when she walked past him, he would look her up and down and ask if she had gained weight or if the pants she had on were too tight or, when he approved of the way she looked, he might say something else. Something crude, or something that she knew meant something else. Norah had forgotten—had she ever really known?—what it was like to have a man sit across the table and listen to her. To be interested in her and talk with her—not at, or down to, but with. To look at
her
. The real her.

She guessed it wasn’t surprising that she was overcome with emotion. All of these realities hitting her—it was too much. But these weren’t bad feelings. She wasn’t upset. She wasn’t elated. This was just a different ground she was walking on, different from what she was used to. And unlike cold concrete or a rocky road, this one felt smooth and wonderful, like silky moss.

She needed to be careful, she knew. She didn’t know much about this guy, not even his last name. There were sketchy details about why he was up here and what he was doing and some things he didn’t want to tell her, but she had been the same way with him. Maybe, in time, he would tell her. And maybe, just maybe, she would tell him things too.

She realized she wanted desperately to tell another person her story. And while it might be nice having a sister type or a motherly type to tell her story to, it also might be nice—no, it would be more than nice; it would be uplifting and freeing—to be able to tell another man her story and have him understand. She wanted to believe there were good men out there, men who didn’t beat women and treat them like objects and try to own them.

David might be that man, that person she could confide in. She just needed to take it slowly, and to get a grip on her emotions.

WHERE TO BEGIN?

Kurt wasn’t accustomed to writing. He didn’t know how to express things deep down inside of him. He turned to a blank lined sheet in the notebook and wrote the names, both of them, and then looked straight in front of him. The lake glinted in the afternoon sun, already heavily trafficked with watercraft—big power boats, pontoon boats, Wave Runners and Jet Skis. He sat and watched the people enjoying their days off, the beautiful weekend. And all he could do was sit there and dredge up years’ worth of memories and regret.

You never decide one day to be a bad person. And what did they mean, really, by calling you a “bad person”? Bad for society? Bad compared to whom? Kurt could look at Lonnie and say, and know, that he was a bad guy. But he didn’t really think of himself as a bad person. But he’d made choices, and those choices had led him to something unthinkable. Something unpardonable.

He was serving thirty years and would have been eligible for parole in another eight. But none of those figures mattered. Nothing did. How could you parole your soul? How could you release your conscience from a self-imposed gulag of thirty life sentences? Getting out, being on the outside like he was now—it didn’t matter. What was done was done.

The thought of starting over again occasionally played in his mind, especially the last day or so. But the truth of the matter was that he had no intention of starting over. Starting over implied that you had a chance of doing things right, beginning anew. Kurt knew that would never happen.

He thought for a moment of his lunch with Norah, of the first normal conversation he’d had with a woman in years. Their time together had felt terrifying and invigorating all at the same time. But Kurt was well aware that someone like Norah wouldn’t want to have anything to do with a guy like him if she knew the truth. Her beautiful, sweet smile would have to be dismissed. Where he was headed, she couldn’t go.

All he needed to do now was get this written. Get these thoughts on paper and get on to the next thing.

He always failed when he tried to write. Every time, the page was left blank.

But today was the day, he told himself.

Today the words were finally going to come.

“Think there’s any hope for guys like us?”

Sean opened his eyes. He’d been leaning back in the motor-boat, soaking up the massaging sunlight. “Hope?” he asked. “Hope as in what?”

“I don’t know,” Craig said uncomfortably. “I was just wondering—”

“Hope for that?” Sean pointed across at a pontoon boat driven by a tanned, bald-headed man. People of assorted ages were talking, laughing, looking up at the sky. “For a family? For a nice leisurely life here on the lake? For some grandpuppies and a place where everybody gets together and feels good about themselves?”

Craig didn’t answer. He looked like he regretted asking the question. Wes, sitting in the stern of the boat, acted like he didn’t even hear them.

“This is our hope, man,” said Sean. “You gotta get your head out of the dirt. Or outta wherever it is. This is the only hope we’re going to have. That summer snapshot on the lake ain’t gonna happen. Too many people know what that mug of yours looks like. Doesn’t matter if people up here are too stupid to notice. Someone will, eventually. In the meantime, this is hope. Right here. Being in this boat, on a day like today, with a couple of beers in our hands. You can’t get much better than that.”

“Says who?”

“Says a guy sent to the joint a few years ago because of some crack-headed thing he did. That’s who.”

Craig nodded.

“Look, they set the rules; we broke them and had to pay the consequences. Fine by me. I agree. And then we broke some more rules, and who knows? Maybe there’ll be more consequences.
But right now we’ve got this boat and a lake and some beer, and that’s enough for me. If this is the only hope I got, I intend to take it. I deserve to have it.”

“Think so?”

“I know so. It’s all about the cards. All about the cards we’re dealt. And right now, my hand’s looking pretty good.”

There was a silence for a few minutes. The boat rocked back and forth. Sean looked back at Wes, who hadn’t said a word since they left the dock.

“You’re
not thinking of doing something stupid, are you?”

Wes just looked at him for a minute, then shook his head and uttered an unconvincing
no
.

“Wes.”

“What?”

“That wife of yours on your mind? Your daughter?”

“No,” Wes said. “I mean, yeah, maybe just a little.”

“Wes.”

“What?”

“Look at me.”

“I’m looking.”

“No, I mean you look at me and look at me good. You better not end up like Lonnie. You got that?”

“Yeah.”

“You go off running, I’ll find you. And I’ll finish what I started.”

Sean stared at Wes, and the big guy’s eyes were the first to slide away.

“I’ll finish it just like I finished it back in Texas,” Sean said.

There was another long, hard silence. Then Sean opened the cooler and grabbed another beer. He threw it at Wes, made sure Craig was set, then took another.

“Hope,” Sean said, then laughed and looked up at the sky.

HER PICTURE WAS becoming blurry now after so many beers. His eyes were having a hard time staying open, and sometimes they’d shut and stay that way for a few minutes, and he’d lose all sense of where and what and who. Then he’d wake back up and shake his head and look back around the room and at the television and then at this picture.

If you don’t stop drinking, you’ll never see her again
.

But it wasn’t that easy. He knew that. The trouble was, Collette didn’t know it.

The thing was, you didn’t just stop. You didn’t just wake up one morning and decide that something you’ve done for years, for decades, will suddenly just go away. It took a lifetime to become the man you were going to be, for better or for worse. Wasn’t that what marriage was all about anyway? For better or worse?

Yeah, maybe someone like Collette got a little more of the worse part. But Collette had her failings too. Sometimes she’d sit down and he’d see her chubby legs bunch up and see the cottage cheese thighs and he’d know he hadn’t gone and married some Victoria’s Secret model. Those girls weren’t even real, anyway. But the point was, Collette wasn’t perfect. Nobody was perfect. And this here, what he was doing, the drinking—well, it was just one of his imperfections.

Couldn’t she just get over it?

Don cursed in his mind and found himself waking up again. He took the can of beer and finished the contents and hated the lukewarm dregs.

Nobody’s perfect, he thought. Nobody’s ideal. You gotta work hard at marriage. You don’t just run off.

He stood up and went to the fridge. Empty.

What to do what to do what to do.

Don knew he had a shift tomorrow, had to be at work at seven. Seven to five. Driving around in the cruiser, sitting on his rear, doing nothing but looking and smiling and being bored out of his gourd. Maybe someone in a motorboat would cut some swimmer
in half. He didn’t want that to happen, not really. But if something
could
happen, maybe things would get better. Maybe if he didn’t have so much blasted time to waste away.