Jake and the Unseen Lake

Chapter 1

Chris

Right away you knew it was a front for something. I’m rumbling and coughing off the lonely tributary of a winding highway into the unplowed environs of a boarded up gas station. No, it’s half-boarded, in a sort of we’re-not-open-but-we could-be-tomorrow-or-later-or-just-we-didn’t-finish-breakfast-yet kind of way. Passing under the typical petrol station shelter, the rig sighs to neutral and I roll it in next to an old Pontiac, which is covered with two inches of new powder at this point.

The main door creaks that way you expect a small town filling station’s door to sound—fast and high, like it’s been opened hundreds of times before by strangers keen on a warm welcome. And so but already there’s too many people in here for the lack of cars, striding tangentially of each other for definite purposes unapparent to me. I stomp my boots off.

The tangential paths lead my eyes to incongruous corners of a haphazard room, a main desk behind a snapping fireplace which itself bisects a strange assembly of overstuffed faux-leather chairs that face nothing in particular. A dim lunch counter is obscured by department store racks of t-shirts off to my right, circuitous shelves of dry goods are brightly illumined beyond a massive pegboard, and a forgotten hallway holds forgotten Native American paraphernalia that some tourist thought about buying once just to bide their time and to pretend they had done something with their day by looking at these wall hung objects of insistent value—20% OFF!—but then they touched their chin and no, but turned on their heels as if to be sure to have appeared thorough in their browsing and then sighed and dropped their arms and look up with their eyebrows demonstrating their satisfaction at being assured they did not in fact find the Native American art piece for which they were somehow specifically searching. Anyway, so they buy two cookies and look around for the bathroom without making a big show of looking for the bathroom, hoping to communicate that sort of well I didn’t come in to just use the bathroom but you know if my eyes pass over one then yeah sure I might as well pop in and use it ok sure oh yeah there it is huh ok I guess I’ll pop in.

So I do just that and make a confident nod to someone who’s just appeared behind this main desk busying themselves within unseen work but also half-undistractedly standing at servant-attention, and with the pace of my walk I try to indicate hi yes just heading to the bathroom the location of which I have indeed ascertained right over here, but all I really say is ‘hey.’

So but I’m in there, and I feel like I should hurry it up so I can quickly reemerge and explain my presence to whoever feels the need to tend to it, the presence, and I’m wondering what this whole operation could be a front for, but mostly I’m wondering if there’s wireless. And as I’m wondering all of this, I happen to notice that woah this bathroom was really gerry-rigged in here, the slate of the sink having been cut by a masonry saw just so the door of the stall will fit and close, and in the meantime, my hands and fingers have already removed my phone from the left pants pocket and touched all the appropriate places on the touchscreen to ascertain the ever-important wireless situation.

And now I think of this joke from an Asian comedian I heard where he goes to China and he’s hoping to see an Americatown neighborhood where there’s lots of overweight white people yammering in loud English dipping things in ketchup and ranch and looking for free wireless. But so either way I’ve got my heart set on coffee and maybe a baked good of some kind, but is this the kind of place where I can sort of camp out for a good bit of the day I wonder—and that’s how this day got started anyway.

The afternoon before I had emerged finally from the Southern limits of Utah, driving with great purpose out of the Navajo Cliffs of Zion across some vast and unexpected pastureland but it looks like windblown desert to me. There’s a gathering late-winter storm, or I don’t know maybe it’s a dissipating storm I’m bad at that game, and I’m glad to feel alone, no big towns up ahead and I’m wanting/hoping to just be able to drive for a few hours, though I don’t want to get to the Grand Canyon just yet. Weirdly I’m emerging from the desert, thinning traffic, but the road is rising and winding until I have sweeping views of the red cliffs north of me, so I play the trumpet amidst some trees until the wind has numbed my hands.

Back in the car and there’s the reluctant feeling again, where I want to delay the inevitable (it now being dusk) where I have to put this land literally behind me and head south, and so but I’m finding myself in this forest now, the road all to myself and the snow-covered ground has this inviting quality to it, like this R. Frostian peaceful abyss and so I think yeah I’ll camp here and I leave the rig and start walking deeper into the forest. And so I’m gently squinting against the cold of sundown hands in pockets and realize that I’ve passed beyond the inviting threshold I had first noticed from the road and into a lost sun-starved heavy darkness. So sudden was the change (or the realization) that I’m spooked and I retrace my steps to the car and set up a tent for the night, looking forward to some morning coffee at this half-abandoned looking place lored for it’s baked goods, which is okay with me.

It’s all quickly falling snow in the morning and again there is this ominous current humming under the pace of white flakes that’s just a little too brisk for R.F.’s New England daydreams. So zip to it packing up the gear and I’m in the car rumbling in reverse back towards the road, trying to ignore that heaviness from deep in the trees.

I’m reckless now throwing the wheel around without really first cleaning off the rear window, and not wanting to lose momentum I gas myself right out of last night’s tire tracks into a foot of snow.

Someone answers the phone at the inn after one ring and it’s bizarre because it’s one ring but they also sound sort of absent or distracted like they were expecting me to call but oh-yeah-here-he-is-yep-we’re-here, ‘hello, Jacob Lake Inn.’ And so I’m thumbing a tourist mag I picked up two days ago about AZ all Jan Brewer smiling and bathrobes overlooking resort pools and hot air balloons, and in the sideview here comes exactly the kind of rusting-out pickup I want to see.

Out pops a pair of cute furry boots from the passenger door, and so I’m surprised to see this young couple commanding the machine, but sure yeah I’m all apologies for my laziness about my driving which is how I decide to characterize what is mostly just stupidity. But nevermind oh, Alaska cool yeah this and that Alaska and it’s all fine and we get the chain on the front and yank the rig around a bit, punish her because of something I did, and I pet her and apologize as usual.

But so she’s riding okay now just happy to be free and I’m back on the highway easing her up the blacktop on brown slush barely getting her to 25 mph, and okay here it is the gas station/garage with this fabled inn beyond it. Throwing down to second gear, I realize the whole deal is set back in that same ominous shadow, somehow the sun is bright white in the snowing late am, and yet this place is sort of forlornly offset from the road like it’s a part of the depths of the trees beyond it.

The white pickup truck somehow disappears down an unseen road and I’m left to park near a massive pile of stacked firewood and these snow-blanketed cars.

And anyway so out I come from the bathroom and I make a big show of drying off my hands on the front of my filthy trousers, loosening my scarf to simply hanging position, and one girl takes up sentry at the lunch counter in the distance to accommodate my overtures of is-there-any-hot-coffee-kicking around-heh--g’mornin’. I seat myself at one of the dark red revolving stools watching the sides of other faces dart past rhythmically, pushing in and out of two stainless steel doors with porthole-style glass leading to what one would presume to be the kitchen. The pace is steady without being frantic, much like the snow outside which seems to be neither relenting nor increasing.

Realizing I have no where to be any time soon or any sense of where that nowhere is, I make a motion to seat myself across the store/restaurant/lobby at the silent, lit fireplace, and the coffee attendee, after checking to be sure yes in fact all of the other stools have remained empty in the past six minutes, she follows me to the fire, somehow casual about matching the rhythmic step of the interweaving colleagues.

I soon learn that the whole staff 1) attends, used to attend, or will attend a university in Idaho associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, 2) did not necessarily know each other prior to their work here in middle of nowhere Northern AZ, 3) cannot or choose not to explain just why the owners of such an establishment would chose to hire, feed, and house a small battalion of young Mormons to operate said establishment, and 4) do not have any immediately apparent duties but are nonetheless busy and endlessly performing them.

Entertaining some meandering questions concerning LDS that I find myself suddenly and vocally curious about, various staff members pause at various angles to face me and chime in to answer my questions, but as I turn my head to hear the response of one, staff member that is, another will somehow seamlessly return to the invisible path from which they had briefly stepped, purposefully returning to a mysterious and one might imagine calmly and mechanically executed task.

Massive stove-length logs appear from outside my periphery during this time, maintaining a pleasant fire as I drain numerous cups of coffee. Each time I lift the cup, I somehow subconsciously move the (clearly) extraneous saucer, only to observe myself religiously and subconsciously returning the cup to its saucer, lest I place the cup somewhere else (such as on the carpeted floor where I am sitting/leaning/lying) and render the saucer observably pointless.

Now and then, staff members will depart from the fire’s vicinity where I have set myself, announcing nonchalantly specific tasks they must go perform. The staff announce them, I mean. “Turning on the fryer for lunch” and “making the buns” are mentioned passively and in a tone that implies that any lack of understanding on my part should be simply attributed to my mere unfamiliarity with the natural and expected duties of any staff member of the JLI. Other staff members lackadaisically attend to me who has now resituated himself at the lunch counter, wondering what rooms might exist beyond the walls of the immediately observable polygon in which I find myself. Meanwhile, further staff members arrive or rather return from unspecified places in unseen vehicles, and one quickly re-exits in order to operate a backhoe for the purpose of plowing the seemingly unnecessarily large parking lot.

I fetch my empty water jugs, and as one girl fills them, I remark at the surreality of the place, its isolation, its mysteriously numerous staff, and its incongruent preparedness for large crowds of customers who do not in fact seem soon to visit, nor are there sign of them having visited any time recently. I receive politely chuckled affirmations of these observations, but can garner no further explanation.

‘It was really strange…’ I sort of trail off.

‘On 89A, you said?’ he asks, his eyebrows denting the flesh between them.

‘Yeah, after you leave Fredonia and you’re heading towards Flag here.”

He gives the overturned glass a quick glance and then sets it down next to the others, throwing the towel over his shoulder.

‘Before Marble Canyon,’ I add, lifing my stout.

‘Mel, you ever heard of a place called Jacob’s Lake Inn?”

Mel slides his empty forward as the bartender starts opening another one.

‘Jac-OB Lake,’ I quickly interject.

‘Sure, yeah, there’s an old gas station there, and a roadhouse, you kind of pass it on your left right where it hits 67.’

‘This guy’s saying he had coffee at the roadhouse there.’

Not in the last twenty years you didn’t,’ he says turning to me. ‘That place hasn’t been open since the Stateys found out about the Dungeon.’

I inhale to ask what that’s all about, but I’m cut off by some loud commotion outside. My old Trooper’s spouting flames three times its height, the Alaskan plates blown clean off by the explosion.

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