The Spot: Stories

Jack Dunhill, a.k.a. Bone, a.k.a. the Bear, a.k.a. Stan Newhope, a.k.a. Winston Leonard, a.k.a. Michigan Pete, a.k.a. Bill Dempsey, a.k.a. Shank, said, Not those waves but that little pucker on the surface out there is where the Cleveland water supply is drawn in, right there, and if you were to dump enough poison on that spot you’d kill the entire city in one sweep. Believe me, I’ve thought it out. You’d just have to hit right there, he said, pointing again, and then he turned to examine her gaze, and in doing so presented his face, weathered from years of picking blueberries and cherries in Michigan, and, after that, a merchant marine gig during Vietnam. You see, the water is unsuspecting until it hits that spot. It has no idea it’s gonna be collected, drawn under the streets, cleaned up, and piped into homes. Not a clue. But when it touches that suck, its future vanishes. No chance of becoming a wave after that, no kissing the shore and yearning back out into the lake. Instead, it ends up pooled on somebody’s lawn, or slipping down a throat, or spooned into a bowl of baby cereal. That’s the mystery of chance. One minute you’re one thing, the next you’re another, and choice had nothing at all to do with it. He paused, pointed one last time at the spot, shook himself free of his reverie, and pulled her close while she searched the water, tried to find the spot, and, failing to do so, said, I see it. I do. It’s right where you said it would be.

. . All this while killing time in Cleveland, waiting for the Mansfield john to show up to collect the girl, because against all odds he had sent payment in advance for an evening of pleasurable escort after succumbing to Shank’s well-polished pitch:

The girl’s name is Meg. Hell, name her whatever you want, but I’d like you to call her Meg when you greet her for the first time, my friend. Said girl being in the prime of her youth, fresh as a daisy and raring to go. She’d practically escort you for free if I weren’t around to mediate her desires, my friend, he said from a phone booth outside Ypsilanti, watching the girl as she sat in the car, fixing her face in the mirror. The Mansfield john’s number had come from a list of potential clients he’d been keeping, names and numbers whispered to him as he and Meg rambled aimlessly around the Great Lakes. OHIO MEN IN NEED, it said at the top in block lettering. Below were six names. He’d tried four of them already, with no luck, but this time he felt the guy taking the bait — a sense of urgency formed at the other end of the line as the Mansfield john succumbed to the image he had painted: a bright young girl entwined in a skein of sexual confusion, open to just about anything. A girl born out of the loins of Akron, smothered by a father’s touch, and then cast out to fend for herself. (He’d left out the boring details: the way he had come upon her small body curled up, asleep, beneath an overpass outside Port Huron; the long journey they’d taken around the rim of the state of Michigan, following the mitten, staying as close as possible to the waterline. He’d left out her delicate neckline and the shallow hopelessness of her gaze and the way he’d educated her in how to make use of her flesh to earn funds. He’d left out his former religious training at the Grand Rapids Bible Institute and the way God had failed to give him a precise indication of His Will.)