By Richard Holinger
After drinking the beers he offers us, the man we are renting the Vermont lake house from takes us across the lawn to see where he lives.
“Nice trailer,” I say.
The man scowls. “It’s not a trailer. It’s a mobil home.”
We follow him down the hill to his 60-horse outboard he says is good for skiing and watching fireworks on Independence Day. Out on the small, indigo lake, he drives by the house where a woman from the Bahamas lives in summer. He cuts the engine and drifts by. Waves slap the hull like a winner’s fist after the fight is lost.
“The poor started moving into Union Pier. Places nice before, shoulda seen them after. I got out, come up here where people keep their places up.”
We tell him we like the cabin we are staying in, but don’t say we moved around the furniture and stored the plastic flowers, mosaic tables, and bust of Jesus onto the closet floor.
“I call her my Bahama Mama,” he says. As the house is lost behind a fence of blue spruce he pushes the throttle forward, leveling us home. “Never met her, though I feel as if I know her. A house and yard tell you a lot about someone. Some people don’t take care of property. People had your cabin last year we had to evict. Got to piling up garbage in the basement. Their cat had kittens. Gave one away, tried to flush another one down your toilet. Had to clean the whole system out. They let their boy pee on the floor, wherever he wanted.”
Because the lake is smooth, he has the throttle wide open.
“Tried a garden once, but let it go,” he says as if it were an animal he felt sorry for. “Building homes is a business like any other. Probably a lot like yours. What is it you do?”
I confess I am a high school English teacher who on weekends and vacations tries to write stories and poetry.
He asks, “Whaddaya write, Westerns?”
I think it over and answer, “Right.”
“Put me into one of them,” he says. “At two-fifty, six-foot-five, I’d make you a good outlaw. Keep the glasses off; makes me look more convincing.”
I say that that is how you make a character complex, by showing contradictions in his personality.
He smiles, puts into shore, lines up his boat along the dock, and offers up another couple beers.
Richard Holinger’s work has recently appeared in Chautauqua, SIR, Whitefish Review, Cutleaf, and elsewhere. Nominations include the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction 2025. Books include North of Crivitz (poetry) and Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences (essays). Finishing Line Press published his 2025 poetry chapbook, Down from the Sycamores, and a short fiction collection, Unimaginable Things, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Publications. He holds a PhD from UIC, and has taught English and creative writing from the secondary school to university level for decades. He lives in rural northern Illinois.
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