Fire Lake (2 page)

"There aren't any other cars in the lot,
Claude," I said.

"There were earlier," Jenkins said, "when
the bar was still open. We had a pretty good crowd tonight,
actually."

I thought about the ice storm I'd driven through. The
rain and sleet had been falling since sunset-hardly the kind of night
for a "good crowd" at a dive like this one. But I let the
lie pass, again, and followed Claude through the door into the inner
office.

It was a dark room--a little bigger than a utility
closet-with a cot on one wall and a stubby plastic table with a
TV on it, set across from the cot. The TV was the only light in the
room. The floor was littered with styrofoam coffee cups, and I could
hear a coffee machine burbling somewhere in the dark. The room
smelled strongly of coffee and faintly, but noticeably, of vomit.

A man was lying on the cot--his face toward the wall.
He didn't turn toward us as we walked up to him. He was wearing blue
jeans and a government surplus flight jacket with an American flag
stitched on one sleeve and a serial number stenciled on the back. His
long black hair curled wildly over the collar of the coat.

"There he is," Claude said with disgust.
"I'd watch your step in here. I been cleaning up his puke since
midnight. But I might have missed some."

I walked carefully to the cot--the styrofoam cups
crunching underfoot--and touched the man on the arm. When he didn't
respond, I shook him. He turned over on his back.

"Son of a bitch," I said, staring at his
ravaged face. I hadn't seen that face in eighteen years. But I
recognized him, all right. Lonnie Jack.

"You know him, then?" Claude said
hopefully.

"I know him," I said.

I shook Lonnie's arm again and he opened one
bloodshot eye. "How you doing, Lonnie?" I said. "How
you doing, man?"

Lonnie smiled at me, then fell into a stupor.

"His name is Lonnie?" Jenkins asked.

"Yeah. Lonnie Jackowski. Lonnie Jack, to his
friends." I turned to Jenkins and said, "Help me get him to
his feet."

Jenkins sighed heavily, then walked over to the cot.
Together we managed to loop our arms under Lonnie's arms and hoist
him to his feet. Lonnie opened his eyes, smiled goofily, and puked on
himself.

"Christ," Jenkins said, letting go of
Lonnie's right arm and backing away.

I managed to catch Lonnie around the middle, before
he fell. Giving Jenkins an ugly look, I worked Lonnie's left arm over
my shoulder and guided him to the door.

"Open the door," I said to Jenkins.

"Don't take him out there," he said. "He'll
just puke all over everything. Take him out the back." He nodded
toward a fire door beside the cot.

"Open the fucking door, Claude," I said,
giving him another look.

"Shit," Jenkins said under his breath, and
opened the door to the office.

I guided Lonnie into the office and over to one of
the orange plastic chairs. I hadn't been able to see him clearly in
the gloom of the utility room, but in the lamplight I could see that
his face was a mess. And it wasn't the sort of mess that came from
bumping into cars.

"How'd he get the black eye and the split lip?"
I said to Claude after I'd deposited Lonnie in the chair.

"Like I said, he must have knocked into some
cars in the lot."

I grabbed Claude by the shirt collar and jerked him
to me, butting him hard in the forehead with my forehead--like the
West Indians do when they want to make a point.

"Jesus!" Claude cried, grabbing his
forehead with both hands. His knees buckled and he started to wobble.
I held him up by the front of his shirt, until he got his legs back,
then pinned him against the counter with my body.

"Who beat him up?" I said, glaring at him.

"Christ, you hurt me," he moaned, kneading
his forehead with his fingers.

I balled a fist and he winced and turned away,
throwing up his right hand weakly to ward off the blow.

"Okay, okay," he said. "Why the hell
are you getting so physical all of a sudden?"

"Because he is a friend," I said.

Jenkins rubbed the red spot on his forehead again.
"There was a fight. At least, that's what I heard."

"Before or after he took the pills?"

Jenkins sighed. "Before. Some bikers. They hang
out at the bar on Thursday nights. I guess he rubbed one of them the
wrong way."

"You can do better than that, Claude," I
said menacingly. Jenkins flinched again. "I wasn't there. But
some of those bike guys . . . they sell shit."

"What kind of shit?"

"Whatever," Claude said. "I don't
bother them. They're regular paying customers, and around here we
can't afford to he choosy."

"Sure," I said. Six, ten, and even, Claude
got a cut of the action. It was a hell of a good reason not to want
the police nosing around. "Let's see the bottle you said you
found in Lonnie's hand."

"It's in the desk," Claude said.

I let him go, and he walked behind the counter. I
watched him closely as he opened the desk drawer. "If you come
up with anything but a pill bottle in your hand, Claude," I
said, "I'll break your fucking wrist off. I swear to God, I
will."

"Take it easy, mister," Jenkins said,
looking frightened. He plucked a pill bottle from the drawer and
brought it over to me. "Here."

It was a druggist's pill bottle--the kind they dole
out prescriptions from. The printed label was heavily stained with
mud, but I could still read some of it. valium, 10 mg. 100 Tablets. I
tilted the bottle up and looked inside. It was empty.

I stuck the bottle in my pocket and walked over to
where Lonnie was slumped in the chair. "C'mon, buddy," I
said to him, "we're going to get you some help."

I worked my right arm around his middle and lifted
Lonnie to his feet. He opened both eyes for an instant and stared at
me. "Harry," he said, with a silly smile. His eyes rolled
back and his head slumped down again.

"C'mon, Lonnie," I said, giving him a
shake. "You gotta help."

He moved his legs as if he were treading water.
Slowly, I worked him over to the front door.

"You ain't going to the police, are you?"
Jenkins called out.

I glanced back at him. "If I don't, it's because
of him. Not because of you. And if I find out you were fucking with
him, I'll be back."

Lonnie laughed stupidly. "That's tellin' him,"
he said.

I turned to Lonnie. "You asshole, you haven't
changed much, have you?"

He laughed again, then teetered as if he was going to
fall.

I caught him and put him back on his feet. "Save
your strength, buddy," I said, steering him through the door.
"You've got a long night ahead."
 

3

Somewhere around Tusculum, Lonnie got sick again. I
pulled the car off the parkway into a gas station lot and sat there
as he retched out the open window.

"You want to go to a hospital, Lonnie?" I
said to him when he'd stopped gagging.

At first, I wasn't sure that he'd understood me. But
after a moment, he shook his head decisively and fell back against
the car seat. "No hospital. No cops," he said heavily, as
if the one meant the other. He groaned like a sick animal. "No
luck. No luck at all."

He began to sob. I sat there, helplessly, watching
him cry. After a time his head lolled to the left, and he was out
cold again. I started up the car and eased back onto the parkway.

The rain kept falling, harder now, then turning to
wind-whipped flurries of snow, then back to icy rain. He'd picked a
good day for it, I thought. But then he'd had a flair for the
dramatic. At least, he'd had when I'd known him in college-an
age ago.

Eighteen years. I could feel it like another
passenger, like a teenage kid sitting between us. His kid, my kid. A
separate lifetime. I didn't know a thing about the man. Hadn't seen
him since we'd stopped talking to each other, one fall day in 1968.
And like that he'd dropped out of sight. I'd heard he'd gone to L.A.
Then to New York. And then I'd stopped hearing.

And now, on a miserable December morning, he was
back--beaten, burned out. A suicide.

I glanced at him from time to time in the rearview
mirror. He'd changed terribly. Face grown coarse, heavy jowled. His
eyes scorched to the sockets. His flesh yellowed. His mouth, fat and
red from the beating he'd taken. He looked fifteen years older than
he really was and ready for death.

When I'd first met him, he'd been a handsome,
twenty-year-old kid. Sad-eyed, thin-lipped. Like a short,
black-haired Peter Fonda. In fact, when Wild Angels came out in '67,
Lonnie'd taken to wearing a motorcycle jacket and posturing in front
of Harleys. He'd never gotten a cycle of his own--he was scared to
death of getting killed on one. But he'd liked the way he looked
standing in front of them. So had the coeds at the University of
Cincinnati. Lonnie's ladies. He'd had a gift with them.

After we'd stopped rooming together and he'd gone off
to L.A. to make his fortune as a guitarist, I'd asked one of his
women--a pretty sociology major named Joyce--what it was that
Lonnie'd had, why it was that so many coeds had been so taken by him.
She'd smiled and said, "Remember the scene in Wild Angels, when
the girl says to Peter Fonda, 'You're so cool, Blue'? That's what he
has. Lonnie's cool." I didn't remember what I'd said to her,
although I did remember being ticked off by the Peter Fonda
comparison, since Lonnie had cultivated it so carefully. But if cool
had been the currency in 1967 and 1968, Lonnie'd had it all.

We'd become good friends during the summer of '67,
right after I'd come home from the war. After a couple of weeks of
living with my family, I'd enrolled at UC and, in my off hours,
started hanging out on Calhoun Street where the hippies lived. At
that time, I felt more comfortable with the street people, with their
foxhole mentality, than I did with my folks or with other college
kids. Plus, the hippies liked to talk, to rap, as they said back
then. And I had this insatiable urge to talk--to justify what I'd
done in 'Nam, to explain it out loud, as if it were the plot of a
movie I'd seen.

For several months, I was ruled by that need--to work
off the bad karrna, the war karma. And I scared a lot of people away.
My folks, my friends, my professors, my classmates. I didn't scare
Lonnie. He'd lost an older brother to the war, and he was eager to
hear what it had been like. Eager to serve as a sounding board for my
rambling, nervous, nonstop monologues. He sat with me for hours,
in Love's, where I first met him, or at the Black Dome, where he
sometimes played guitar with a local band--listening to that movie
scenario I was recounting. And then one day in September, I realized
that I wanted to talk about other things. With Lonnie's help, I got
over that first hurdle. And started getting over the war. In a way,
he never did.

His older brother, Steve, haunted him. They had been
close as kids, and Lonnie had been badly hurt by his death. So had
his parents. They were lower-middle-class, patriotic folks who
thought that their son had died for the best of all causes. They also
thought that Lonnie was a sluggard and a coward for not following his
big brother into the grave.

In his blackest mood, Lonnie agreed with them. He saw
himself as a coward too--an underground man who'd climb back into the
society he'd rejected as soon as the war was over and it was safe to
come up again for air. The things he believed in--the love and peace
all his songs celebrated--were excuses to ball, to smoke, to have
fun, to turn a dollar. If he didn't have love and peace, he'd have
found other reasons to drop out. Unlike his brother, unlike me, he
wasn't taking real chances. And until he was willing to risk it all,
like I had done, like Steve had done, he wasn't a man.

There was nothing to say to him when he was in that
mood, except that he was wrong. And, to be honest, I wasn't really
sure that he was wrong. Although I lied to him about it, I think he
knew that my heart wasn't in my words. Even then, I had the feeling
he just wanted to hear another voice--a strong voice, a sympathetic
voice, a brother's voice. Later on, I wondered if a part of him
hadn't wanted to hear the lie in the voice too.

We'd rap for hours--about 'Nam, about Steve, about
his folks, about risk-taking and manhood and all the other crap that
twenty-year-old men talk about. Then Lonnie'd hole up in his room.
Smoke weed, listen to his own tapes. And in a day or two, he'd
resurface--himself again. Bright, funny, with a new girl or two on
his arm. His black mood forgotten. That was the pattern for the first
year that we roomed together. It started to change in the summer of
1968.

When I thought about it later, I realized that I'd
seen it coming for a long time. From the first time I'd heard him
talk about his brother, really, and then watched him go into his
room, put on the stereo, take out his lid of grass and shut the door.
It didn't stay grass for very long. Acid hit the street in late 1967.
Then came Blue Meanies. Soapers. PCP. STP. MDA.