“You two have fucked … alone. I know it. And that’s terrible.”
“No,” K said very seriously. “No we haven’t.”
I didn’t say a word. There was a problem developing. It was, as all problems are, based off of a lie. Lies, plural, really. K told June that she didn’t sleep with me, that she wanted to sleep with me, that she wanted us all to sleep together. June was reluctant, but K kept pressing the issue. It didn’t quite go off the way K wanted. She was still trying to get the atmosphere right.
K took her hands off of me.
I said, “This is the exit here.”
June left the highway. I relayed directions from a hand-written note on a slip of paper. After a few turns off of the main drag, we were rising up into the mountain on a winding road flanked by tall Douglas firs.
I pointed at a small dirt road up ahead, “That’s it, there.”
The lake appeared before us. It was beautiful and expansive. The road became gravel that led up to a small stone house. It was a good-looking place.
We parked in the dirt driveway. Feral pulled next to us.
“This place is the shit,” he exclaimed.
I immediately went to the mailbox. There was an envelope in there addressed from Chicago. I opened it up. A small note written by Mark was included with the cash. It was all there. I could just tell it was. I didn’t bother to count it out or anything. I just put it back in the envelope and put the envelope in my back pocket.
I tossed the key to the house to K, who insisted on going in right away. I walked along the edge of the lake and looked across.
On the other side of the water, there were a few massive houses. That surprised me. Seth said that the house was isolated and that there weren’t any neighbors. Looking out, I counted five homes towering on the other side of Tull Lake.
One of them was very modern. The place, which looked like something out of the Hollywood Hills, had a sick-looking yellow speedboat docked on its pier. This place wasn’t how Seth said it was at all. It’d changed a lot in the fifteen years since he’d been here.
“It looks really developed over there,” Trish said.
“Yeah, huh.”
“Look at that goddamn cigarette boat,” Feral said, excited.
“What?”
“I don’t think that’s what it’s called,” Trish said. “It’s a speedboat.”
“Specifically, a cigarette boat,” Feral said. “Thing probably goes a hundred miles an hour.”
We walked inside the house. K and June were standing in the living room, slowly looking at all the taxidermy victims: six deer, bucks with antlers. A squirrel. A raccoon. A few large trout. Some ducks.
“Seth’s grandpa was a big hunter,” I said.
“Yeah, you can say that,” K said.
The place was nice but dated. The decor was left over from the early seventies. Feral sat down on the brown and orange couch, and dust exploded everywhere. I opened some windows.
K and June went their separate ways, leaving the house to go off and argue it all out. The relationship was disintegrating, again, right before my eyes. The problem was and always would be that June loved K but that K didn’t have an ounce of love for anything. To K, everything was just some kind of off-handed fun. It was beginning to hurt my heart just thinking about it: the way June looked at K, while K was looking at anything else.
I took a slow walk around the immediate property, looking for where I would build Seth’s tomb. What a thought. Where on the earth would I dig the foundation? Where would I place the blocks that I’d cover in stone face that would hold my friend’s ashes for as long as it takes rocks to get broken down and destroyed by the elements of this Earth? Later, walking back to the house, I found K sitting alone on the back steps. She looked different, she was wearing cat-frame glasses.
“Ripped my last contact,” she said. “Glasses from here on out.”
I nodded, “You still look good.”
“Listen, I don’t think we should be alone anymore. No more fooling around. I don’t see what the big deal is. But June is hurt.”
“Sure,” I said, looking beyond her, into the house, after the ghost of June’s presence.
Everything and everyone seemed like a ghost back then.
“We’ll all stay together. We won’t go off alone. It’s only right,” I said.
“Thank you.”
18
June doom hung dried flowers from her mother’s long-ago funeral over the sheer curtains in the mountain house guest room. Outside, everything flickered like the world was film being fed through an 8mm grindhouse projector. Splatters of light struck everywhere reflective, creating a slowly rotating light show — glass and high-sheen metallics caught the last rays of the falling sun. Reality was exaggerated. Colors were over-saturated: thick green, gold, plum.
I admired her silently from the doorway. Unaware of my presence, she nursed her last clove cigarette as if she could make it last forever. The last of the sunlight streamed in, making June glow otherworldly. Obsidian rock necklace, rings, opals, and turquoise. Legs crossed high. War-torn stockings. A few of her toes were exposed, and her nails were painted random, haphazard neons. K did that on the beach the day before we left. My blood moved.
“You look like punk rock Emily Dickinson,” I said.
“Thanks, I think,” she said, southern-drawled, as she faced me doe-eyed.
“Where’d the flowers come from?”
She pointed to her rabbit pelt suitcase, locked on the bed.
“You travel with flowers?”
“Everywhere! … And a gem collection, and a travel record player, some important albums, books, and one other outfit. The rest is a secret. Isn’t it nice that way?”
June, pointing at the window, said the dead flowers caused “negative energy” to bottle up, and that it fucked with “the flow of the room.”
“‘Cause you like negative energy?”
Her clove cigarette sizzled and popped.
“When the time is right, it’s useful. I think it’s dumb to try and stop it,” she said deadpan. She wouldn’t look at me. I made her nervous, which made me nervous. We kept ping-ponging that feeling for hours.
I scanned the room, running my eyes across June’s unpacked belongings.
She came with just that rabbit pelt suitcase, but she’d already found a lot of pretty, weird, artistic things to place all around the guest room like talismans. She was a scavenger. She could find beauty anywhere: the pine needle forest, dilapidated tool sheds, demonic attics, odd trails leading up into the haunted mountainside beside the cold rushing river. Interesting objects were everywhere: colored glass; old paintings, warped and yellowed by time; a crate of sheet-music for organ hymns; black and white showgirls with fresh faces from beyond the grave.
“Here comes trouble,” I said as I stepped over the threshold into her room.
“Come on. You know the deal. We can’t be in the same room alone.”
Direct orders from her girl, K Neon. There was too much tension. Too much had happened already. The three of us were welcome to do whatever we wanted with each other when we were together, but it was wrong and off limits for us to wander off alone, to pair up — however that broke down. Mathematics. A whole lot of sinister mathematics that no-one understood.
But K Neon was gone. She took my F-250 down the mountain with Feral and Trish. Supplies: groceries, beer. They were rumored to be searching out a hidden waterfall. I opted out of going because I heard June tell K, “I have a migraine headache.”
But she didn’t.
“You’ve never had a migraine in your entire life,” I said.
“How the hell would you know?” June smiled, full teeth. “Come no closer! I’ll have to kill you.”