We Live in Water (3 page)

“Dad?”

Oren glanced at the kid, whose feet dangled over the edge of the bench seat and the scratchy Indian blanket he’d put there to keep the springs from popping through the torn upholstery. Michael was six, middle of three, only boy, and the only kid Oren got in the divorce. It had been his lawyer’s advice: if he didn’t want to pay so much, he needed to take a kid. So he got the boy. “Yeah?”

The kid’s head was tilted to the side. “Do we live in water?”

Oren dragged his cigarette. “What?”

“Do we live in water?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do we live in water?”

“I don’t . . . I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean do we live in water?”

“You mean like in the rain or something? In the ocean?”

The boy stared at him.

“I don’t . . .” Oren took a pull on the beer. “Do you mean
can
we live in water?”

“No.
Do
we live in water?”

The clearing had snuck up on Oren and he slowed, came into the cross of narrow country roads, nothing but dark walls of trees in four directions, and Flett’s roadhouse in the center of this clearing, the big one story, low-slung building with no windows and a stumpy sign that read:
TWO BRIDGES
. A single lightbulb pointed back at the sign, night bugs frantic in the dim light. Oren pulled the Merc into the parking lot, the cackle of rubber on gravel.

He took a breath. “Listen. I gotta run in this place for a minute.”

There were five other cars parked outside, including Flett’s Chevy and that bitch of a red Cadillac that Ralph Bannen drove. Okay. Flett must be in there trying to smooth things with Bannen, working out some kind of arrangement. Earlier that day, Oren and the kid had driven out to Flett’s new house overlooking the lake, and while the kid hung out in Flett’s basement, Oren had explained how bad he’d messed up, how he’d been nailing this guy’s whore of a wife, and how once on a drunk she happened to mention that her husband had a safe in the house. Oren guessed right off the wife’s birth date as the combination. He’d only taken a little money, but the guy apparently counted every night and hit it out of the wife that Oren had been over. The whole time Oren told this story, Flett just stared, until he finally said,
What guy, Oren?
And when Oren told him Ralph Bannen, Flett just shook his head. Bannen ran book and women at half the clubs in the panhandle, including Two Bridges. After yelling at him, Flett had suggested going alone to the roadhouse, talking to Bannen, and then having Oren come down after he fixed things up. So Oren sat at Flett’s house for an hour while the boy played in the basement. And now, here they were.

Oren dragged his smoke and stared at the kid again—blond like his mother, round-faced, big floppy eyelashes. He looked so much like her Oren wondered how he could like the kid so much.

“Sit tight,” Oren said. “I gotta see this man. Don’t get out of the car. You hear?”

The boy stared at him expectantly, as if waiting for the answer to a question, and that’s when Oren remembered the boy had asked one. “Look, I don’t know what you were talking about before, Michael,” he said. “Do you mean can we breathe in water?”

“No,” the boy said, as plainly as if he were asking for a sandwich. “Do. We. Live. In water?”

Oren pulled smoke again. And then he surprised himself by laughing.

1992

THE NUMBERS
clicked to a stop, the tank full, and Michael replaced the nozzle and screwed the gas cap back on the rental. He craved a cigarette. It was all he could do to not go into the convenience store and buy a pack. Two years and still . . . maybe he’d just feel this need forever. He started the car and pulled back onto the highway, shocks hunching up on the blacktop. It was more developed out here than he’d imagined, businesses all along this stretch, the grubby outskirts of a resort community: tavern, little grocery, machine shop, Western boot store, sawmill, wrecking yard, and a couple of nicer mobile home parks. From the news story, he’d imagined it more remote than this, forested and dark, not a civilized string of small businesses.

Locals called the area Two Bridges, this unincorporated strip of businesses connecting the northern and eastern shores of the lake—overgrown with restaurants and tourist stores, and on the busiest corners, the place Michael had come to see, the oldest thing in the area: Two Bridges Restaurant and Resort.

The resort was comprised of three newer buildings: a Western-themed restaurant and lounge in front, with faux wagon-wheel windows; a General Store that sold driftwood and Indian art; and the hotel out back, a big eight-story Vegas-style tri-sided structure with a sign promising, “Lake views!”

Michael got out of the car, grabbed his briefcase, and walked past the restaurant down a sidewalk, between landscaped strips of grass, toward the front door of the motel. The desk clerk showed him into an office overlooking the hotel lobby, on a mezzanine directly above the front desk. A few minutes later a woman came into the room, mid-thirties, short and plump with dark hair and a round bosom and introduced herself as Ellie Flett. It was the woman he’d talked to on the phone. “You’re the lawyer from San Francisco who wanted to talk about his father?”

“Yes.” He offered his hand. “Michael Pierce.” And it occurred to him that he hadn’t really thought about where to start, or for that matter, where to go once he’d started. He reached in his briefcase and pulled out a news story that a clip service had found for him in the Spokane newspaper, just over the border from the lake, a story published four years earlier: “Historic Two Bridges Resort to Expand.” The story had been about the construction project, but it had referred to the resort’s history as a roadhouse and home for gambling and prostitution before this side of the lake was developed. As he handed the story over, Michael saw that his hand was shaking.

Ellie Flett didn’t seem to notice. She took the story and pointed over his shoulder to the same story, laminated and framed on the wall behind him with a handful of other clippings. Michael hadn’t expected this to be so hard.

“My mother died two years ago,” Michael said. “She raised my sisters and me. We never knew our father. It was something we never talked about. There were no pictures, nothing. She remarried when I was ten. A good man, my stepfather. Shane Pierce,” he added, explaining his last name. And as true as all of this was, it seemed like something other than the point of this visit and he rubbed his brow, confused by the disconnect he felt from this seemingly intimate information. “After my mother died, my sister found this note in her things.” Michael handed her a faded slip of yellow paper covered in small printed letters, as if a shy child had written the note.

Katie, Sorry I couldn’t take the boy after all. I got in some trouble. Just like you said. He’s a good boy. Tell him I said so. You tell him it’s okay he can do anything he wants.

Oren.

I’ll come back when I can.

Ellie didn’t look up from the note. “This was your father?”

“Oren Dessens,” Michael said. She showed no reaction to the name.

Ellie turned the page over. Stamped in light blue ink on the other side of the narrow strip of paper were the words
TWO BRIDGES
and, running down the left-hand column, the numbers one to fifteen.

“This is a betting slip,” Ellie said. One corner of her mouth went up. “I used to see these around the house when I was a kid.”

She stared at the slip like an old family picture. And then she laughed. “Back in the old days, before all the money flooded into the valley, they used to take sports betting out here. Games were written on a chalkboard and these numbers corresponded to each game on the board.” Ellie smiled at the memory and then looked down at the betting slip. “‘
I’ll come back
,’” she read.

“‘
When I can,
’” Michael finished the line.

“I guess he didn’t.”

“No,” Michael said. There was some other part to all of this, something about his own divorce, but Michael didn’t know how to tell that part. “I was surprised about my father saying he couldn’t take me after all,” he said instead. “My mom never mentioned me living with him. Shane, my stepfather, said the only thing my mother ever said about Oren was that he was a gambler and a drunk who took off for good when I was six. She heard he put out on a ship and figured he died of syphilis somewhere.”

Ellie was staring at him in a way that made Michael feel exposed.

“But,” Michael said, “naturally, when I found the story about this place . . .” He didn’t finish, and wondered, naturally . . . what? Did he expect to find his father here?

Ellie looked back at the betting slip. “Look. I’ve got a meeting I can’t miss. A convention we’re trying to get. But . . . do you want to talk to my dad?”

“Your dad?”

“Tim Flett. He bought the place in the fifties from the original owner, probably about the time you’re talking about. He’s not in the best of health, but his mind is still sharp. Maybe he remembers your father.”

They made an appointment to meet again in an hour. Michael left her office, took an elevator to the eighth floor of the hotel, and stood in the hallway looking out. From the top floor, he could see the lake in the distance and the two highways parting ways at a 90-degree angle from one another, skirting the shores of the lake and disappearing in a blur of commercial development.

Again, it wasn’t the way he’d pictured it, and it seemed odd to him that he’d pictured anything at all. Maybe it was the news story, which made reference to the dark history of the place: the Western toughs, the gamblers and hookers. And Oren’s note:
I got into some trouble
. Was this enough to fuel his imagination? And what about the other things he saw, the cowboy boots and Indian blankets, the bright shimmering wall?

On the top floor, Michael found he had cell phone coverage again, and he listened to a new message from Tracy: “I know you’re up in Idaho. I just wanted to tell you that I’m leaving Megan’s Babysitter Club books on the built-in in the living room.” And then she paused. “She’s worried about having something to read when she comes to your house.” The words
your house
were a kick to Michael’s stomach. He could tell Tracy felt it too. On the message, she sounded clipped, holding something back. “I hope you find what you’re looking for, Michael.”

He pressed the button to delete the message, but as her voice faded, Tracy said, “Oh, and one more . . .” but she was gone. He tried to call her and got no answer.

He met Ellie in the lobby. “You can ride with me,” she said and started for the front door before he could answer. She wore a soft black leather coat, and as he followed her out to the parking lot, Michael shifted uneasily. After the years of cheating on Tracy, maybe it was just muscle memory with him, the guilt.

“This whole area is different from how it was thirty years ago,” Ellie said as they drove away from the resort. “There were only two cabins on this whole side of the lake when I was born. Now, they’re like tract homes. Secondaries a mile from the lake go for four hundred thousand. Our little crop-duster airport is full of private jets.” She said a couple of celebrities’ names, conspiratorially, the same names that Michael had read about in his research, almost as if the names themselves had become tourist attractions.

They drove away from the crossroads, down the southbound four-lane highway, past an Indian casino, its parking lot jammed with cars. “This side of the lake was all forest back then,” she said. “It was the untamed side.” Michael thought about telling her that he’d pictured it that way. But what would be the point? “My dad tells some pretty wild stories,” she said. “Crazy how much can change in thirty years.”

He’d had that thought recently, too—how far removed he felt from a father who fought in World War II and gambled at roadhouses. “I remember driving from Tahoe one time,” Michael said, “and going through the Donner Pass and thinking that just a few generations before, that little spot was impassable, and turned people into animals. And now I can just . . . drive through it. Like any stretch of highway.”

They drove a few more miles, and then cut along an access road winding down a hillside above the shoreline. Ellie drove slowly past cute signs with nautical themes and stacked mailboxes above clusters of cabins and A-frames.

“My dad built the first cabin on this side, in fifty-five,” Ellie said. She turned off the road and they came around a huge boulder to the back of a modest, wood-frame building with windows facing the lake and stairs down to the rocky shore. Michael had the strange sensation of seeing what he’d imagined. “Thank you for doing this,” he said.

Ellie turned off the car and stared at the house. “That time of my father’s life fascinates me,” she said. “It’s hard to reconcile the stories he tells with the sweet, silly man he is now.” She opened her door and paused. “Oh. Before we go in . . . there’s something you should know about my dad. It can be jarring if you’re not prepared for it.”

1958

BANNEN SLAPPED
him like he was a damn woman. Oren Dessens spun and fell against the craps table, cheek stinging. He scurried backward, beneath the table, and against the scratchy cedar wall. He put his hands up as Bannen stalked toward him. “Wait, wait. Just listen to me—”

“Oh. He wants me to listen.” Bannen spoke over his shoulder, to nervous hacks of laughter. The place was nearly empty, just the handful of Bannen’s usual ass-sniffers, tough guys as long as they were together. It was dark, all the lights shut off except the one behind the bar. Bannen’s thick jaw was clenched and his white hair had come out of its straight furrows and was falling down in his eyes. “You believe this guy? Steals from me and now he wants me to listen to him. You believe this son-of-a-bitch?”

Oren looked up at Flett, standing beside the craps table, his shoulders turned a few degrees. He was fingering some chips and staring at his shoes. Oren had foolishly believed that Flett could run interference for him, plead his case to Ralph Bannen. Now Oren saw there was no way Flett could do that. And he didn’t really blame him. Flett was in no position to get him a deal. He owned the roadhouse but it was Bannen who ran book out of it and who paid off the sheriff, Bannen who brought the whores up from Wallace and who muscled the guys who couldn’t pay. Oren had thought he was pleading his case to the house by going to Flett, but Bannen had always been the house. And it was Bannen’s ex-whore wife he’d banged, and Bannen’s safe he’d broken into. He remembered something that Flett always said: only three kinds of trouble out here—money, women, and Ralph Bannen. I hit the trifecta, Oren thought.