Garden Lakes Read online

  Garden Lakes

  Jaime Clarke

  For my brothers, Jeremy and Jared —

  and in memory of John Kalien (1921-2010)

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  It would be the hottest day of the year. The temperature would climb steadily toward a new page in the record book, some 125 degrees by two o’clock, obliterating all previous records. We wouldn’t learn of the devastating effects—Sky Harbor International being shut down because of melting runways, the body count among the elderly whose air conditioners had failed—until our return from Garden Lakes, and by then the story would be mythic, a legend we would hear over and over as we grew older.

  Our concerns that morning were not of the weather. We were weary not only from having risen with the sun, but from having spent the preceding month sauntering by the bulletin board outside of Principal Breen’s office, anxiously awaiting the posting of the roster of those select juniors who had been chosen for a fellowship at Garden Lakes. Historically, Garden Lakes fellows had gone on to good colleges or to celebrated careers, and while for some the opportunity was merely a jewel in the crown, for others it was an academic life jacket, keeping them afloat until the fall semester of their senior year, the one last chance to bring up the old GPA.

  The delay in posting the list had been due to vandalism to the statue of Saint Francis Xavier in the chapel courtyard. Someone spray-painted the head lime green, and a rumor reached the administration that the vandals were juniors. Principal Breen threatened to cancel the summer leadership program if the responsible parties didn’t come forward. We juniors let our displeasure be known and were relieved when a pair of freshmen took responsibility (though they would later claim they had been pressured into accepting the blame) and the roster was published the last Monday of classes.

  And so as we boarded the red and white school bus, RANDOLPH COLLEGE PREPARATORY stenciled unevenly on the sides, the relief we’d felt the previous Monday had been replaced by sheer amazement. Simply, those of us who had been selected for Garden Lakes still had the feeling that the whole thing was an illusion, that we’d be prohibited from realizing the honor; but once we glimpsed the school bus, looming like a time machine in the parking lot, we believed. Even if we’d had a crystal ball, we couldn’t have guessed what lay in front of us. Before that morning, we didn’t know how to flatter or cajole or threaten; or how to use suppression, silence, or misdirection in the service of motive. We did not believe in altruism (as far as we understood it)—self-sacrifice was for those who had cashed in their ambition; our understanding was that personal achievement would lead to success in all facets of life, and that such personal achievement could be obtained through hard work and dedication. But our fellowship at Garden Lakes would change that, poisoning us, widening our arsenal for achieving objectives and forcing our will. The story of our fellowship would be as legendary as the heat that summer, the two stories told in the same breath. But as we took our seats, all we had on our minds was privilege and the chance for distinction.

  Duane Handley jumped on the bus first. Hands, who would one day lead his family’s sixth-generation brewery to ruin, was the star guard on our basketball team. Even as an underclassman, he’d stood out among everyone else in our class. He was taller, more muscular, and always smiling, which didn’t go unnoticed by the students at our sister school, Xavier College Prep. He even seemed smarter than the rest of us: Hands had discovered that if you took British Literature instead of American Literature, you could cross the street to Xavier, since Randolph offered only American Lit. (Crossing the street only in the figurative sense, as a cement walkway with fencing had been erected over Central Avenue; we all took to calling it the Bridge of Sighs, named for our reaction to the hordes of blue and green plaid skirts coming and going.) Xavierites figured this out too, and soon American Lit classes at Randolph were filled with pleasant smells rather than odors, and you learned to preregister rather than risk getting wait-listed.

  Dave Figueroa sat next to Hands. Figs and Hands had been best friends since Lincoln Elementary, where they’d teamed to win the annual talent show with their air band, Line One. Figs lip-synched the lyrics to Journey tunes while Hands pounded out the backup music on an unplugged keyboard borrowed from the nearest high school band department. The two seventh graders tapped to play air guitar lead and bass would ride their talent-show glory to the end of their days at Lincoln.

  Figs, who would later in life succeed in covering up an embezzlement at the firm where he worked, was renowned for another reason: the sophomore class trip to Mazatlán, Mexico, over spring break, a trip sanctioned by Randolph as a way to throw students into the fire together, to make sure that they thought of themselves as a unit, a measurement of loyalty to their alma mater. For reasons that no one could point to, the sophomores didn’t have the cohesion that classes before had, but as Figs and Hands and the others blazed through Mazatlán over spring break, working their way down Avenida Camarón Sábalo, to Gus Bar, to Mundo Bananas, to Mr. Tony’s, their bond grew.

  How they got from there to a nondescript house brimming with girls named Rosa in the Naval Zone was the subject of much debate. Some thought they were going to a house party, others thought the ranch house was a roadhouse. A party of young men, some they recognized and some they didn’t, shuffled around the dirt front yard. They were eventually shuttled into the backyard, where the breeze from the Canal de Navegación picked up, blowing a typhoon of plastic cups and blue plastic bags in circles around them. Everyone except Figs went inside.

  Some assumed Figs had reconsidered, though, when they heard him in the musty hallway. A sound like thunder shook the walls, which no one noticed, breaking from their business only when the doors to their rooms flew open, Figs standing breathless and wide-eyed. “Federales,” he tried to scream. A panic gripped the house, the Rosas heading for a door leading to the basement, grabbing their camisoles and lace panties. Figs led a charge out a window in a back bedroom, jumping through the screen headfirst, landing miraculously on his feet. The sophomores laughed about “that night at Rosa’s” thereon after. But while they laughed vigorously at what happened in Mazatlán, they were secretly horrified by what would’ve happened if they’d been rung up by the Mexican police. They imagined they’d still be in jail, or worse. Needless to say, everyone was grateful to Figs for standing lookout, and it wasn’t a coincidence that he was elected junior class president the following year, a unanimous vote.

  The sole rift between Figs and Hands, which, had we known about it, might’ve provided the frame of reference that would’ve saved the fellowship that summer, occurred two months before the end of their eighth-grade year, on the graduation trip to Disneyland. As Figs and Hands attended school in a district with a dismal high school graduation rate, the feeder elementary schools felt compelled to treat graduation from the eighth grade with the pomp and circumstance of a high school graduation, renting a room at the Phoenix Convention Center and decking it out with ribbons in the school’s colors to give that statistical percentage of students who wouldn’t graduate from high school the look and feel of a real graduation. And prior to graduation, the “senior” class went on a bus trip to Anaheim for a weekend at the Magic Kingdom, all paid for by sponsors.

  Figs was lucky to make the trip. Two weeks earlier, he’d been busted selling lunch tickets to
sixth graders, having lifted a box when the print shop delivery driver asked Figs to keep an eye on his van, which the driver kept running for the air-conditioning. Unbeknownst to Figs, the school called the print shop to report the missing tickets, which were numbered with red ink, in order to get credit on the next shipment. So when students began presenting the same missing numbered tickets in the cafeteria, it didn’t take long for the lunch lady to shake down a fifth grader for information.

  The principal expressed his disappointment in Figs, but Figs didn’t feel it. While he affected contrition, he felt a certain invincibility—his eighth-grade head had swelled to the point that he believed his and Hands’s presence at Lincoln made people want to come to school. This overestimation didn’t manifest itself in arrogance—Figs had time for you no matter who you were or what grade you were in—rather, it became an endeavor he aimed to excel at. His popularity at school was a job that he loved, a job he hated to leave when the bell rang at three thirty, and one he couldn’t wait for when his alarm rang at seven a.m. He did understand what he’d done wrong—not in financial terms, but in terms of jeopardizing his status. The lunch-ticket stunt was to him victimless and had provided some much-needed pocket money, and he knew the principal would let him off. Which the principal did. The principal would, however, have to notify Figs’s parents, which was okay with Figs, as his parents, who loved him and whom he loved, were so devoted to their jobs that the only communiqué from Lincoln that would’ve garnered any attention was one saying that Figs was flunking out. His parents had witnessed Figs’s self-discipline grow, elementary school after elementary school, town after town; and so they never worried over him, offering their advice only when it was solicited, which was next to never.

  The principal knew this too and flirted with holding Figs back from the Disneyland trip, but Figs lobbied a number of his teachers, who intervened on his behalf, citing an otherwise stellar academic and social record. So Figs was permitted to go, which was a relief, as Figs had been keeping secret his knowledge that Hands’s girlfriend, Julie Roseman, was breaking up with Hands to go out with him. This bit of treachery had developed innocently. Julie and Hands had been an item since the first of the year; it was reputed (and true) that Julie had been dating a freshman at the high school where her older sister went. Hands and Julie started to fool around at her parents’ house after school, though, and soon Julie had called it off with the freshman, inaugurating the trifecta of her, Hands, and Figs.

  Figs welcomed Julie as a part of his friendship with Hands. On the days that Hands didn’t have basketball practice, the three would end up in Julie’s pool, engineering the trampoline so they could jump from the roof and bounce into the deep end. Sometimes they’d invite others from Lincoln, but most times it was just the three musketeers.

  Julie tried to interest Figs in some of her friends, and Figs was interested in a peripheral way. But he had a girlfriend in Seattle that he’d met on a family camping trip to the Grand Canyon and to whom he’d continued to sign letters “Love, Figs,” and so he forced himself to stay within reasonable limits, imagining that his girlfriend was doing the same.

  But the letters from Seattle were fewer and fewer, until they stopped altogether. A succession of panic-induced phone calls yielded no return call. Figs had revealed to Hands his plan to move to Seattle after high school with his parents’ consent. The silence from Seattle, however, shattered those plans, and he consoled himself by showing up unannounced at Julie’s, raiding her father’s liquor cabinet, and chugging from a half-drunk bottle of Jack Daniel’s, taking long gulps, letting the amber liquid fill his cheeks, flushing it down his throat while his mouth filled again with the smoky flavor.

  Julie cleaned up the vomit in the bathroom while Figs lay comatose on the white leather couch in the living room. She called Hands and said he should come right away, but sometime between Julie’s call and Hands’s arrival, it happened. It had probably already happened, or the seed had been planted, but before Figs puked and passed out, Julie had been touched by the look of loss in Figs’s eyes. She’d never seen anyone so undone by love—not even her parents, the only model of love that she knew. And so when Hands pushed open the front door to find Julie sitting cross-legged on the love seat, staring at Figs’s lifeless form, he had no way of knowing Julie had fallen in love with Figs.

  Figs was to find out some weeks later, when he showed up at Julie’s for what he thought was a pool party. He found Julie poolside, alone. The clear pool water was still. “Last one in,” Julie said, and they scrambled out of their clothes. The pool cast a shimmering light, and before Julie’s sister and her boyfriend appeared, Figs realized that Julie loved him. The three had spent so much time together that they had a sort of telepathy. They’d also established boundaries, albeit unspoken, and Figs thought it strange when Julie brushed up against him on the underwater bench in the shallow end. She had never breached his space in that way, and he shrugged it off as having something to do with the fluid dynamics of swimming. But when she brushed him again, this time on her way out of the pool, Figs couldn’t help but read the signal, confirmed days later on an afternoon at Julie’s parents’ house when Hands had practice.

  Figs reasoned that just kissing wasn’t cheating; anyone can kiss anyone, he thought. Then he imagined Hands, his best friend, kissing Julie, and it took several hours to beat back the rage that built inside him. Figs wondered if he had been in love with Julie the whole time, and revisited his argument with Hands when Hands broke up with his girlfriend Kristina on her birthday. Figs had tried to convince Hands that breaking up with Kristina for Julie was a mistake, a bad decision guided by only one principle: Kristina wouldn’t let Hands go any further than taking off her shirt, and Hands was ready to try more.

  Figs knew Hands would remember that exchange, gentle as it was—Hands prevailing without further protest from Figs—when he found out about Figs and Julie. Figs had a trump, but he didn’t want to have to use it. A couple of weeks before, when Julie was at a doctor’s appointment, Hands had convinced Figs to go with him to Kristina’s house. Hands was vague about who would be there, and what they were going to do. It ended up being just the three of them, with Hands and Kristina disappearing into one of the back bedrooms when Figs went to the kitchen for another Dr Pepper. Figs watched an hour or so of cable and then left. Hands called him later that night, asking what had happened, saying he and Kristina hadn’t been gone but a minute, that Kristina had wanted to show him something in her parents’ room, which Figs knew was the official version should a version ever be needed. But it didn’t come up the next day at school, and Hands and Kristina passed in the hall like strangers.

  Figs and Julie fixed on her house as the venue for admitting their relationship to Hands. Figs had expected some shouting, possibly a fistfight. As music filtered from her sister’s room, Julie spoke. The tone in her voice belied her nervousness, and she explained the matter straight through. Hands was puzzled at first, looking over at Figs now and again. When Julie wound down, Hands looked at her and said, “Thanks for being honest,” before walking away without acknowledging Figs.

  In the week or two after, with nothing but graduation and a long, hot summer ahead, Figs and Julie managed to avoid Hands. His excision from their routine was easy, and the ease was disconcerting.

  The day of graduation, Figs met Hands outside the auditorium (he never knew if it had been arranged by Julie or was merely an accident), and after an awkward moment where Figs asked about his parents, Hands looked him square in the eyes and said, without hurt or malice, “I would have never guessed at your disloyalty.” He offered his hand, and Figs shook it, Hands’s words haunting him all through graduation, through the long summer, through Julie’s family’s surprise departure for Texas. He parsed that phrase out loud when alone and silently when in the company of others. He researched his past for any history of disloyalty and came up with nothing. He didn’t see it at first, his reflexivity keeping his spirit buoyant, but on a
particular late-summer afternoon, on a walk past Julie’s old house on Garfield Avenue, its windows shaded with the blinds and drapes of the new owners, Figs felt the full force of his betrayal, innocent as it had come about, and its lonely wake devastated him.

  He knew what he had to do, and the week before school started, he circled Hands’s house, working up the courage to ring the doorbell. Hands answered the door, his face creased by a tan he’d acquired at his uncle’s place in Rancho Palos Verdes, outside L.A., where Hands liked to spend part or all of his summer. Months of anxiety poured out and Figs halted a rambling explanation as it wavered into defense and simply said, “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m over it,” Hands said, welcoming him inside. Hands’s parents said, “Hello, we haven’t seen much of you this summer,” and Figs blushed, appreciative that Hands hadn’t poisoned his parents against him. They spent the afternoon plotting their course schedule and, like the rest of the incoming frosh, speculating about their chances with the girls at Saint Xavier.

  Roger Dixon was the most eager to board the bus. Some of us kidded Roger about how he sat ramrod straight during Mass, or about his symmetrical crew cut, but we always kidded gently because once Roger stopped taking the kidding, or if he thought you weren’t kidding but poking fun at him, a beating was doubtlessly in your future. There were a lot of beatings in Roger’s past. His father, Colonel Dixon, lived his life by a strict set of guidelines, and he expected Roger, who would later go AWOL in Iraq, to subscribe to the same joyless guidelines.

  Mike Quinn was the most reluctant to go. Q preferred to spend his summers in San Diego, or at his family’s condo on Catalina Island. But his father, Senator Quinn, thought Garden Lakes was an excellent idea for young men, and Q never had any say in the matter. Q, who would show up at the twenty-year reunion married to a swimsuit model, had long gotten used to everyone kowtowing to his father’s every wish, so he wasn’t surprised when he discovered he’d been named a fellow. He had learned to bargain with his father, though, and his stint at Garden Lakes was worth a senior trip to Europe, so Q decided he would try his hand at deferring the customary gratification summer brought.