Page 42 of The Bootlegger’s Bride

H e sat on the dock of his lake house sipping a beer and staring out over the blue moss-edged water.

The weather had turned cool that week though warmer today, approaching eighty at noon.

The still air held scents of the lime-green moss, the sandy shore, and the lake, where dragonflies—“snake doctors,” kids called them—buzzed the surface.

Atop the far shore before towering cottonwood trees sat a line of yellow-flowered Jerusalem artichokes bending west toward the sun.

The day lay placid, but A.J. was not. Moving into new territory.

More foreign in a way than Nam. Though he had a plan.

To show her the house for the first time.

Then to tell her about his journey thus far and into the future—as well as he knew.

And how he wanted her to join him on it.

Finally, he would repeat to Lana the first six words he had uttered to her a decade earlier.

Still, he had no clear idea how she might respond.

A lot can happen when you’re apart. Feelings can evolve.

Your situation can alter. Things can turn on a dime.

That thought drew him back to another fateful Independence Day, the hot afternoon twenty-three years earlier when he learned of his father’s death.

Then the frigid February morning he found his mother’s body captured in lake ice, his eyes now moving involuntarily to the spot beyond the dock where the underwater spring poured forth.

The two defining events of his young life forever linked by their suddenness, locale, and emotional freight.

His early childhood paradise loomed in hazy memory, like a fading dream.

His parents ice skating hand-in-hand across the frozen lake.

In summer, Father fly-fishing from the bow of the rowboat.

Mother astern paddling them over the hushed lake at sundown, A.J.

sitting on the slats at her feet. Playing checkers with his father in front of the glowing, good-smelling fireplace as his mother, legs bent beneath her on the sofa, read from a thick book, soft music floating from the radio.

Bogdan and others arriving for a Labor Day barbecue, the women in flowered dresses, the men in linen shirts, the conversation at times lapsing into his father’s incomprehensible mother tongue.

Kneeling beside his mother and father in the garden atop the lakeshore pressing seeds into moist, sandy earth.

Those memories framed a longing for the Eden from which he, along with his mother, had been banished.

Yet now he hoped to recapture it with Lana.

A.J. heard tires scrunching on the gravel drive above the lake bank.

He rose and climbed the stairs to the backyard.

He spied her rising from a lime-colored Pontiac GTO.

She wore jeans, sandals, and a white silk blouse opened at the neck, her dark brown hair just touching her shoulders.

He approached and they brushed cheeks, her familiar scent invading him.

They embraced—not passionately but tentatively, like brittle old women.

She laid a hand on his chest. “How long has it been, A.J.?”

“Nearly a year.”

“Seems longer.”

“Yeah, it does.”

With A.J. then home on leave and Lana doing her residency at a St. Louis med school, they had managed to spend most every night together.

Their lovemaking still transcendent. They lived in the moment, avoiding any talk about the future, where life might take them professionally, geographically, or emotionally.

Or what danger A.J. might face wherever he might next be deployed.

Uncertainty in the air. Neither knew whether their paths would one day forever dovetail or diverge.

He turned to admire her car. “Nice ride.”

“When I finally got a real job I thought it time to ditch the Rambler, metaphorically speaking.”

“Never figured you for a muscle car.”

“You know I’ve always liked muscle.”

“I noticed. Come on in. I’ll get you a beer and show you around.”

He led her through the back door into the den. Her eyes moved from the white baby grand to the fireplace to the bookshelves.

“Lovely. What a great room.”

“For some families life centers around the kitchen or TV room. This was our bivouac.”

She moved to the books that lined the western wall, standing on tiptoe to examine the top shelves.

A.J. studied her sharp Greek profile and the way she moved, as lithe as a teenage cheerleader.

And still with a curiosity for all things.

It reminded him of his parents, always delving into something new.

“Wharton, Twain, Fitzgerald, Tolstoy, Chekov, Dostoyevsky, Bobby Burns, and Walt Whitman. Nice stuff.”

“Mom’s books. Dad’s are down here. Fiction, too, but also history, philosophy, psychology.”

She followed him into the kitchen where he pulled two brown beer bottles from the Frigidaire. Then to the front room. It lay cool and dark thanks to the tall maples, willows, and sycamores in the front yard shading the home from the early afternoon sun. She sat on the curved turquoise divan.

“Given that it was abandoned for ten years, the place looks great.”

“Fifteen. Supposed to be a temporary thing. My aunt and uncle asked whether I wanted to sell it or rent it and put the money aside for college, but I couldn’t swallow the idea of anyone else living here.

So, I told them to wait until I was ready to come back and collect stuff I wanted to keep.

Which took only a decade and a half. Now I want to keep the house and everything in it. ”

“What changed your mind?”

After a beat he said: “Well, some things got settled.”

He avoided her gaze. How much might she have heard or surmised about Richard Dupuis’s unsolved murder?

Lonnie Sullivan told him that when The Blue Note subsequently closed, local Baptists looked upon Dupuis’s strangling as a community service, with some gossip crediting A.J.

as the likely perp. If Lana had heard those rumors, how might it have affected her regard for him?

But she merely pursed her lips and said nothing. He went on.

“Over the years Aunt Helen checked on the place and kept it clean. Raymond winterized it, fixed whatever needed fixing, and cut the grass. Year after year it stood vacant, like a mausoleum, or a museum of a family that had ceased to exist. I came only once to get some books and ventured no further than the den.”

He sat next to Lana and lifted from the coffee table there a black leather-bound journal. “Aunt Helen left this here for me—Mom’s diary. Begins on the day she met my father and ends the day she learned he’d been killed.”

He leafed through it, running fingers over the pages as if caressing the words penned there.

“Their first kiss, first date, first time they made love.” From it he pulled a black-and-white photo.

“A snapshot from the day they met.” He turned it over and read, “‘Fairmount Park, Collinsville, Illinois, August 5th, 1939.’” He handed it to Lana, who studied it.

“What a handsome couple. Heartbreaking to see them so happy knowing how things turned out.”

“Here’s her entry from July fourth, 1943, a year before Mom learned he’d been killed:

I sit abed writing by candlelight flickering in humid night air that carries the fresh green scent of the sleeping cornfield across the road and the creamy fragrance of the gardenias I planted beneath our bedroom window.

Jan lies asleep beside me, breathing softly.

At sunset, after friends and family had gone, we sat arm-in-arm on the front steps watching A.J.

, barefooted and bare-chested, swing from weeping willow branches pretending he was Tarzan.

Then he chased fireflies, golden eyes winking at us in the dark, signaling all was right with the world—at least the small sphere where we happily reside…

Now the cicadas have begun to serenade me. Sleep steals up.

He folded the cover closed. “According to her journal they had five years of sublime happiness. A mandate to grab and savor whatever life hands you while you can. It’s been hard to grasp why she gave up on herself.

Why she had to die. But she’s still alive and vital in these pages.

So is he, as little as I remember of him.

His scent—I recall that, a tobacco and man smell.

Most always smiling. Strong arms tossing me in the air and catching me.

I figured he’d always be here to do that.

Can you love someone you never really knew? ”

“Likely easier than someone you know only too well.”

“Then I’ll continue being enigmatic,” he said, bringing a smile from Lana but nothing more.

They moved back outside and down to the dock, now in the shade of the tall lake bank, and sat on the Adirondack chairs there. He asked about her new job.

“It’s perfect. A South St. Louis pediatric clinic co-owned by one of my professors. And more money than I’d hoped for. A dream come true, to be able to work with kids and stay close to family and friends.”

“Good for you. I admit I know nothing about children except for my inner child, always in need of correction.”

“What about him, A.J.? More adventuring?”

He shook his head. “I’m hanging it up. One more deployment, six months, and finished.

For a while it was okay. But my recent gig training ARVN Special Ops recruits got me thinking.

Bad enough dying like my father in a good cause—if there’s ever is such a thing in war, but…

” He bit his bottom lip. “I read in yesterday’s paper that we just flew a hundred and fifty bomb missions, blowing the hell out of whatever and whoever was below.

Poor fucking Vietnamese. Good for the St. Louis economy though, churning out napalm, ammo, and fighter jets. ”

“War. The way of the world. What drove my parents here. So, what next for you?”