Cradle Lake by Ronald Malfi

up with. It wore on him, ate him up from the inside. Made him feel inferior. Even his work suffered and he stayed home sick more and more. Soon he shut down his shop and wouldn’t come out of the house. Not that his wife noticed. While it wasn’t exactly, you know, common knowledge, Sophie hadtaken up with a young fellow from the firehouse, a kid in his late twenties. I don’t suppose there’s any need to go into much detail on
that,”
he added, a sly glint to his eye.
    A chilly summer breeze stirred the trees. In the grass, Jerry Lee whimpered but did not move.
    â€œMr. Pasternak went over to the Moreland house one afternoon and knocked on the door. It wasn’t anything any of us had conspired to do, and we didn’t even know Pasternak was doing it until he told us later that evening at The Moxie. He said Owen answered the door wearing a pair of filthy boxer shorts and an armpit-stained T-shirt, his hair all screwed up into tight mattress curls and the stirrings of a lumberjack beard creeping up his jawbone. Pasternak asked him to come to The Moxie with him because he wanted to talk, but Owen shook his shaggy head and, without opening his mouth, shut the door in Mr. Pasternak’s face.
    â€œAbout a week after that, toward the middle of August, I was carrying some firewood down Market Street in Jonathan Nasbee’s pickup—Jonathan’s a good guy, works at the quarry—when I happened to catch sight of the Morelands’ old blue Duster parked slantways outside the Laundromat. It was Owen’s car, really—Sophie always said she wouldn’t be caught dead in it—so I knew he was out and about. I pulled the pickup into the next available space outside the Laundromat and hopped out.
    â€œAs you’ve seen, that whole downtown section of Market Street is nothing but storefronts, each one family owned and passed down through the generations. Everybody knows everybody else’s business in other words. I’d imagine it’s quite a bit different than what you’re used to, comingfrom New York and all, but we like it that way.”
    Alan thought of the little no-name place in the East Village where he used to buy cigarettes and newspapers and of the proprietor, a grizzled old black man with salt-and-pepper muttonchops, who called himself Felix Gum-drop. Though he didn’t interrupt Hank’s story, it occurred to him that there were more similarities than differences between big cities and out here in rural nowhere. What was that story about the city mouse and the country mouse? He couldn’t remember …
    â€œAnyway,” Hank said, “before I could even get my fingers around the door handle at the Laundromat, I see him standing at the end of the narrow brick alley. I called out to him but he didn’t answer. He was standing toward the end of the alley, which is just a little brick walkway that runs between the Laundromat and the hardware store, the back of which is lined with Dumpsters and employee parking. Owen stared at something on the roof of the Laundromat. His gaze was so intense it was no surprise he didn’t hear me call his name, so I did it again, taking a step or two toward him.
    â€œThis time he turned around. With Christ as my witness, there was such a look of empty depravity in his face I could feel my stomach muscles clench and my blood turn to ice. And then he
smiled
at me.” Hank laughed nervously and swiped at the side of his face with one big hand. “There was a children’s program on when I was a kid, narrated by Shelley Duvall, about nursery rhymes and fables and—”
    â€œFaerie Tale Theatre,”
Alan said, with more excitement than he would have thought. “I watched it, too.”
    Hank grinned, still rubbing the side of his face, andsaid, “Yeah, that’s it. Anyway, there was this one episode about Aladdin and his magic lamp. James Earl Jones plays the genie. Do you remember