Lake Charles Read Online Free PDF Page A

skin. Purple also smeared the wood spoon I used.
    “Is work going okay?” I asked her.
    “There’s no shortage of ill patients. Did you meet with Herzog?”
    “It’s all good.”
    “Uh-huh. You’d better get on it. Did Dr. Smith pull your wisdom teeth?”
    “That’s a bit downstream. Something else bugs me.”
    “If it’s anything to do with Cobb Kuzawa, stuff it.”
    “Why do you ride Cobb like you do?”
    “I don’t ride him. What’s on your mind?”
    “Edna is making noises to patch up her rift with him.”
    “I already heard it, and he wins my sympathy.”
    “Hearing you say that is a shock.” My wood spoon scraped the pot bottom.
    “How’d you like it married to her?”
    “True. You’ve spoiled her rotten.”
    Mama Jo scoffed. “She’s no more spoiled than you are.”
    “What did you tell her?”
    “Nary a peep.” Mama Jo’s keg chest heaved out a gravelly sigh. “They’ll sort it out. Until then I let her crash here. You’d be a smart lad to avoid those shark-infested waters.”
    My nod agreed. “I’ve got my own troubles in spades.”
    “But you’ve poked in your big nose, haven’t you?”
    “She might go on our fishing trip to Lake Charles.”
    “Lake Charles.” Mama Jo’s face wrinkled in chagrin. “Good grief.”
    “Cobb’s idea, not mine.”
    “Remember tomorrow is an even number day. You better top off your tank.”
    “Thanks. I’ve already gassed up.”
    “After you kids had nagged me nutty, I ran you up to see the earth dam. That’s the last time I laid eyes on Lake Charles.”
    “Pete Rojos told me Salem is Herzog’s secretary.”
    “Forget Salem. She’s out of your league.”
    “Huh? We dated a little.”
    Mama Jo’s wrist swipe left a reddish-purple daub above her eyebrow. “But then she got a Vanderbilt scholarship, but you were too smart and took up smoking and not just Marlboro Reds either.”
    “No-no, I quit that bad scene.”
    Weighing the truth in my statement, she didn’t respond. I let my eyes zone out on the dark syrup perking in the four pots as an oracle bubbled. All my life folks had noted a fertile imagination made me different. How could I refute them? Whimsical visions and voices staged a running drama in my thoughts. Spooky stuff for sure, but I wasn’t demented. My dreams kept my mental health in the pink.
    My memory also had the knack to recount the events clear back to my infanthood. My father, last known to work up north on the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline, had rocked our cradles. He smiled a lot. It was the first smile I remembered seeing. A crescent scar stamped his forehead. Not long afterward, he’d left Mama Jo, Edna, and me high and dry. Edna said she didn’t remember him at all.
    Three things were certain in my life: death, taxes and Mama Jo’s one rule to say nothing of Angus Fishback under her roof. I saw her collect and burn all the Polaroids taken of him. Growing up in a fatherless household, I felt estranged from other kids. Summer afternoons I waited at the front gate, half-expecting Angus to cruise up in a yellow-and-black Barracuda. He didn’t. I assembled a miniature Barracuda from a model car kit, a kid’s totem I parked on my bureau top. When she wasn’t hiding my baseball and glove, Edna kept me company, but she always had her sassy girlfriends to humor her. My best friend was Cobb, but Mr. Kuzawa drummed up chores to keep the rascal busy. So the lots of solitude let me to daydream away my youth.
    Uncle Ozzie was our family’s champion dreamer. Zany as a box of frogs said the town gossips. I’d one story about him. He’d shriveled to breath and britches. Cancer, said the oncologist. One muggy summer afternoon I prowled down our street on a spine-tingling safari for a five-year-old. I hailed him seated on a plastic milk crate by the grocer. His elfish face in the sun bore a leathery cast. Liberal on the Old Spice failed to mask his dying man’s smells of piss and futility. The glossy, blue backstrap to a .44