Lone Wolf (5 page)

A hopeless feeling washed over me.

Bob led me out onto one of the five docks. On one side, secured with braided white nylon rope, bobbed an aluminum boat, about fourteen feet long, loaded with fishing poles, tackle boxes, nets, and life preserver cushions. “That’s my rig,” Bob said. The other side of the dock was empty, and Bob reached for a metal chain slipped around one of the posts. I recognized it as a stringer, with oversized hooks that closed like a baby’s safety pin through a fish’s jaw and kept your day’s catch fresh, and underwater, until such time as you wanted to bring it in and clean it.

Before Bob pulled the stringerful of fish out of the lake, he said to me, “Whaddya say, tomorrow morning, I take you fishing? We’ll go out early, before you have to start helping your dad with camp chores.”

I shrugged. “Sure,” I said. It actually sounded like a fun thing to do. More fun than with my son Paul, griping about not having his Game Boy with him.

Bob gave me a thumbs-up. “Wait’ll you see what I got today. We got some good eatin’ here, that’s for darn—”

He pulled the stringer out, and there was nothing there but five pickerel heads that had been raggedly, savagely separated from the rest of their bodies.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Bob said, shaking his head slowly. “Those fucking dogs. Again.” He looked back in the direction of the farmhouse. “They love their fucking fish.”

7

“S
ORRY,” BOB SPOONER SAID
when he came into Dad’s cabin later. “No fish. They made a break for it.”

“You’re shittin’ me,” Dad said, sitting at the kitchen table, breaking up romaine leaves into a bowl. “They got off your stringer?”

“It’s amazing,” said Bob. “I must notta snapped the clips shut. I’m an idiot.”

Bob had told me he wasn’t going to tell Dad about the pit bulls eating his fish. Dad had had a bad enough day, what with a dead guy being found on his property and wrecking his ankle. When I asked him how he could be sure it was the Wickenses’ dogs, Gristle and Bone, Bob explained that Timmy Wickens, or one of his grown sons, often brought the dogs down by the lake, letting them off the leash to splash around in the water.

“Couple times, I’ve seen those little bastards coming out of the water, fish in their mouths, chewing them up and swallowing them like dog biscuits. And then we go out, check our stringers, there’s nothing there but the heads.”

“You complain?”

Bob smiled at me, like I was a poor, simple soul. “You try talking to those people.”

Sooner or later, I felt, I was going to have to.

Before Bob came over with his fish story, I went back to Dad’s cabin and found him leaning up against the kitchen counter, slipping a key off one of four nails that had been driven into the wall. He tossed it to me, and, not being particularly sports-inclined, I panicked as it flew through the air toward me. You don’t want to miss a toss from your father. Somehow, I got it, and he said, “That’s for cabin three. You can use it long as you want.”

“Okay. But I don’t mind camping out here on the couch, in case you get a chance to rent it. Besides, you could probably use the help around here, like grabbing you the TV remote.”

“No, it’s okay. You take it. You should have some privacy. There’s some sheets and blankets in the closet in my bedroom you can use.”

Fine, I thought.

“Tomorrow, I’ll show you what needs to be done around here. Couple days, I should be back to normal.”

“I can take as much time as you need,” I said, although I knew I couldn’t stay away from work that long. With only a year in at
The Metropolitan
, I didn’t have much rank and hadn’t earned many favors. “I talked to Sarah, she said she’ll clear it for me with the other editors.”

“How’s she doing? You still making her life hell?”

“Like father like son,” I said.

The words were out of my mouth before I could get them back. They just slipped out. You could almost see them hanging in the room. I wished there were some way to reel them back in, stuff them back into my big, fat mouth.

Dad looked at me, and I was expecting him to give me a blast, but instead, he turned his back to me and washed his hands in the sink.

“Dad, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, studying his hands as though getting them clean was the most important thing he’d ever had to do.

“Really, I’m sorry. That was a cheap shot. That’s not how I feel.”

Dad grabbed a towel, wiped his hands off. “Sure it is,” he said. “You’ve always thought I was hard on your mother. I know that.”

“No, no, that’s not true. When I was little, yeah, you could be a bit tough on her, on all of us, but later on, when we got older, I don’t know.”

“I know you blame me for that time…”

I paused. “What? You mean when she went away? When I was twelve?”

Dad turned away, pivoting on one foot so as not to put weight on his bad ankle, and hung the towel back on the rack on the oven door. He said nothing.

I said, “She was gone for, what was it, six months?” Still no response from Dad. “I remember she phoned all the time, to talk to me and Cindy, but I never saw her once for, like, half a year. All you’d tell us was that Mom needed some time.”

“I don’t want to get into this now,” Dad said. He turned, and started to slip when he lost his balance trying to keep his weight off his injured ankle. I ran forward, but Dad caught himself before I got there. I handed him his crutches and he made his way over to the table.

“Pass me those buns,” he said. “I’ll butter them.”

Not long after that, Betty and Hank Wrigley showed up. He’d brought some booze, and she had a bowl of potato salad covered with Saran. Then Bob arrived, telling his lies about what happened to his fish, and soon after that, Leonard Colebert, the diaper magnate, came through the door that led to the porch, two pie boxes tied with string hanging from his index finger. He must have done a fast pastry run into Braynor.

It was a party.

We cooked and ate and drank, and drank some more. At one point, I was sitting on the porch, Colebert in a chair to my left and Bob on my right. Colebert, it seemed, had one topic he liked to talk about more than any other.

“There’s millions in diapers,” Colebert said. “We’ve barely tapped the market.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “You got all the old people thinking they need ’em now. I see all these commercials, these women, they don’t look a day over forty, running along the beach, getting their toes wet, prancing about, liberated from having to find a bathroom in a hurry. What else do you want?”

“Listen, this is just the beginning,” Leonard said, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “It’s all in the marketing. As you say, we’ve created this need among old people who might actually have been able to hold it, but now figure, what the fuck, who needs to, right? Let ’er rip. I mean, sure, there’s lots of people got a genuine need, but that’s a limited market. But what about everyone else, middle-aged and younger, who figure they don’t need a diaper? You for instance.”

“Me?” I said. “What about me?”

“Say you’re on a trip, you’re doing the interstate, you want to make good time, you don’t want to have to stop to take a whiz, so you wear a diaper, you can drive for hours. You’ve got your family with you, everyone whining about taking bathroom breaks, but you put them all in diapers, you get to where you’re going sooner, which means you can start having fun sooner.” He pointed his finger at me for emphasis. “We’re talking convenience. Like take when you’re watching TV, say, like, a Super Bowl, you don’t want to miss a touchdown while you’re standing over the can, shaking that last drop from your dick.”

Bob looked across at me, then gazed back at the reflection of a full moon in the rippleless lake.

“Gamblers, of course, have been wearing them for years,” Leonard informed us casually, like he figured everybody already knew this. “Say you’re playing a slot machine, you don’t want someone else taking your place when you go to the bathroom, that machine is yours, right? You know your win is just a crank away, you can’t afford to walk away. Or you’re at the blackjack table, you’re on a streak, you gonna walk away from a thousand-dollar payoff? When you’re in a diaper, you keep shoving in those nickels, you keep playing those hands.”

He rubbed his hands together avariciously. “The trick is to remove the social stigma around wearing a diaper, so that anyone can do it and not feel ashamed. Like, if you’re elderly, and you’ve got a weak bladder, if you’ve got a real need, you shouldn’t have to feel badly about wearing one, but other people, you know, young adults, they might feel uncomfortable about it at first.”

“You think?” I said.

“Advertising’s the key. You do a campaign, sign on somebody like Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie or like Bob Dole, remember when he did the Viagra ads? Somebody like that, respectable, big name.”

I looked at Bob and we both shrugged.

“Anyway, you get someone famous, the viewer knows they’re doing it in their pants, they think, ‘Hey, I can get my head around that.’ ”

Bob grabbed his beer by the neck of the bottle and took a very long swig.

“And let me tell ya,” Leonard said, “there’s more in diapers than what you think. There’s millions. Enough to build a first-class resort up here.”

Bob turned his head. “What resort is that, Leonard?”

“I’ve got a proposal for a chunk of land just up the lake”—he pointed north—“closer to Braynor. Sometime, we’ll take a walk, we’ll drive up there and hike in, I can show you. Both of you.”

Bob persisted. “What are you talking about, a resort?”

“A fishing resort. It’ll be beautiful. Like nothing this lake or any of the Fifty Lakes up around here have ever seen. First class all the way. Five hundred rooms by the time it’s done. First phase, we’ll have a hundred rooms I figure, then gear up the rest, a hundred at a time. Gives us time to get the waterfront redeveloped, put in a wharf—”

“Wait a minute, hold on a sec,” Bob said. “What lake are you talking about? You don’t mean this lake?”

“What lake you think I’m talking about?” Leonard said. To me, he said, “I don’t want you getting the idea I’m trying to put your dad out of business. There’s always going to be people, you know, people on a budget, need to come to a place like this.”

“Of course,” I said.

“My place’ll be first-class all the way. And we’ll hire first-class guides, to run charters. Get half a dozen guys on a boat, take them out to the lake to fish. Maybe have a dozen boats or more. That should be enough. You figure, a lot of people, they’ll bring their own boats up. We’ll need a marina, to sell gas down by the water. Say, I just had an idea, Bob.”

Bob looked almost too horrified to speak. “What?”

“I could hire you on, to run charters. You could spend your whole summer up here, running fishing tours. No one knows this lake better than you. You’d know every little nook and cranny where someone could find a fish.”

“If there are any left,” Bob said. “There’s already fewer fish in these waters now than five years ago, ten years ago. You put up some big resort, this lake’ll be fished out in no time. You’ll ruin it.”

Leonard waved his hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about that. There’ll always be fish. And listen, I gotta spend all this diaper money somehow!” He laughed.

“Let me ask you something,” I said.

“Shoot,” said Leonard.

“Are you wearing a diaper right now?”

Leonard smiled. “You can’t tell one way or another, can you?”

Bob got up abruptly. “I’m turning in,” he said. He looked at me, a sadness in his eyes. “We still on to go fishing in the morning?” He was asking like it was the last time he’d ever be able to do it.

“Yeah,” I said. “What time should I be ready?”

“Six-thirty?”

I swallowed. “Six-thirty?”

Bob smiled. “You want to catch fish or not?”

I sighed. “Sure, I’ll be ready.”

“And we’ll take a walk up there, right?” Leonard said to Bob. “Before the week’s over? Show you where the hotel’s going, the dining hall? Maybe, someday, even a casino? If I can get the license.”

Bob left without responding. Leonard watched Bob walk back to his cabin, then said to me, “He seems a bit upset about something, doesn’t he?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Hard to know what it could be.”

“Anyway,” Leonard said, recovering quickly from Bob’s slight, “my company’s also going to sponsor this new reality show. It’s just a blast, listen. They take this guy, and they tell him, you’re gonna love this, they tell him his parents are dead, killed in an accident, whatever. But the parents are alive, and in on the joke, and they get to watch their son planning the funeral arrangements, going to the funeral. It’s absolutely hilarious. Then, at the reading of the will, the guy finds out he’s been stiffed, he’s not getting anything, and then they bring in the parents, who are really alive, and, here’s the best part, because we’re the sponsor, it’s worked right into the whole plotline that everyone has to wear a diaper, because when this guy sees his parents are still alive, you know he’s going to shit his pants, right? So when…”

I went back into the cabin, unconcerned about seeming rude to Leonard. He seemed impervious to offense, giving or receiving.

Dad and Betty and Hank were sitting at his table, dirty plates stacked to one side, a dozen empty beer bottles here and there. I said, “I think the bear got the wrong person.”

Betty said, “That’s sort of what we were talking about.”

Dad said, “Come on, Betty, this doesn’t make any sense.”

I grabbed a beer, twisted off the cap, and took a chair at the table. “What doesn’t make any sense?” I asked.

“You knew Betty was a nurse, right?” Hank said.

I nodded. “You guys told me, you’re retired now.”

“Don’t even tell him,” Dad said. “He’ll just make something of it.”

“Arlen, I’m just telling you what I saw,” Betty said.

“What did you see?” I asked. I remembered how Betty and her husband had gone back into the woods alone, how he’d held up the tarp for her so she could get another look. I’d branded them ghouls at the time.

Dad shook his head, gazed down at the table, realizing it was pointless trying to keep Betty from telling me whatever it was she wanted to.

“I worked in Emerg for years,” she said. “Off and on, but I was down there a lot. In a lot of different hospitals, too. Most of that time, down in the city, but when we first got married, Hank and I, we lived up in Alaska.”

“No kidding?” I said. “I’ve never been up there, but have always wanted to see it. Ever since I saw that movie, with Pacino and Robin Williams, he’s the killer, and Pacino can’t get to sleep because the sun never goes down.”

“It’s beautiful,” Hank said. “You should go.”

“Sarah would love it, I bet. Can’t you take one of those cruises, see whales or something?”

“Can I tell my story?” Betty said. Hank and I shut up. Betty continued, “So I’ve seen the whole gamut, you know? From guys who’ve fallen off their fishing boats to teenage gang members who’ve been knifed in the head.”

“Yuck,” I said.

Betty shrugged. “A few times, in Alaska, I helped treat people who’d been attacked by bears. Maybe you saw that documentary, the one about the guy who lived with grizzlies, got killed by one? Remember how they brought bits of him back in garbage bags? I’ve seen that kind of thing. I’ve seen what bears can do, when they attack, which is still very rare.”

“I read that on the net,” I said. “They’d just as soon avoid people as have a run-in with them.”