The Night Swimmers

by Peter Rock

  I never stayed there long; I had my own forts and hideouts to attend. Squirrel Hideout, Fish Hideout, Cave Hideout, Seagull Hideout, Chipmunk Hideout, Fox Hideout, Raccoon Hideout, Snake Hideout. They were not so well-known; in fact, they were secret, difficult to find. Not far from Horse Hideout was a fifteen-foot-tall pile of stones and gravel, forgotten, no doubt the dredgings of some channel. This was Lookout Hideout, which only I could scale, whose identity was known only to me. From it I could not see far, as it was surrounded by tall cedars, but I could look over into a wide tangle of prickly bushes, and in there, deep inside, was Rabbit Hideout.

  Rabbit Hideout was the headquarters, the nerve center, and held the secret to all the others. It was actually impossible to see, from Lookout, and almost impossible to reach. There was only one way in—a tight tunnel through the thick branches of the bushes, under a thick, prickly ceiling. In the middle of that treacherous snarl, the roots and branches had somehow grown upward and tangled above, so a small space was created, just large enough for me, nine or ten years old, to sit there completely hidden. I had a desk, in there, which was really only a flat, rectangular wooden box, one long side open. I kept a spare pocketknife in the desk, and a heavy piece of blue beach glass that I used as a paperweight. Under that piece of glass was a folded piece of paper, a very important map that showed the names and locations of all the other hideouts, their number constantly multiplying (finding and naming them was, after all, the point). At the bottom of that map, I know, was this symbol:

  Which was the symbol for my name—or merely my secret symbol, for it had no sound, and didn’t stand in as a code or placeholder for my usual name; it simply showed that I had found and named the hideouts, and that I had made the map, that I was master of these woods.

  In his journal on July 11, 1938, Charles Burchfield writes, “To see, in the upturned face of a child directed toward oneself, a look of complete trust, liking and admiration is to me one of the finest and at the same time most disconcerting experiences.”

  Four years earlier, he recounts this story: “Saturday afternoon—took Martha, Catherine & Arthur to see ‘where I burned a tree down’— . . . The children expected the remains of the tree to be there yet—I found a burnt stump near the spot which I declared must be the one. This little episode had something of the mystical about it. I can hardly describe how it felt. Somewhat of the strange reality of the dream. I had not imagined that this woods would still have the same beauty or romance that it had for me as a boy; but it did . . .”

  As soon as my daughters could speak, they began demanding stories of me, stories about myself when I was their age; I complied, and was startled that the majority of the ones that came to me were from Wisconsin, where my family only lived in the summers—a fraction of my boyhood. Perhaps this disparity is due to the fact that I wasn’t in school in those months, and had more freedom, due to the woods and the lake. Or perhaps it’s that there was so much forgotten, left behind and unfinished for me on that peninsula.

  This past August, I took my daughters there; this was only a few weeks, less than a month ago. It gives me so much pleasure to see the lake and the woods through their eyes, to walk with them through the places where all the stories happened, to be there in those stories and times again.

  The three of us, each daughter holding one of my hands, set off down the paths, under the trees. It was a gray, blustery day. My sister’s black Labrador ran ahead of us, came back to be reassured that we were following, then ran ahead again.

  “Tell us a story,” my younger daughter said.

  “Show us the forts,” said my older one. “Show us the hideouts.”

  None of it, of course, was quite as I remembered; still, it was there. We climbed Lookout—now covered in ten-foot maples, and sumac, and shorter than I expected.

  “There,” I said, pointing to an expanse of stones. “Rabbit Hideout was there, all under a snarl of prickly bushes.”

  “Where?”

  We descended Lookout, our feet sliding on the gravel, and came out of the shadows, into the clearing. I stood right where the wooden box, where my secret desk had been.

  “Someone cleared the bushes away,” I said, “but here’s where my desk was, where my map was, that showed where all the other forts and hideouts were.”

  “So we’ll never find them?”

  “How will we find them?”

  “I still know where they are,” I said. “Most of them, I remember.”

  They began to build their own fort, then, dragging branches and resting them atop one another, making a kind of lean-to. As they worked, I told them about the knives I used to carve, the different shapes and uses of those made from cedar and from birch, the fierce little daggers I carved from sumac. Taking out the knife that once belonged to Mr. Zahn, I broke off a piece of cedar and began to demonstrate.

  “If you already have a metal knife,” my older daughter asked, “why would you make knives out of wood?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It doesn’t really make sense. That was just what I liked to do.”

  The black dog lay in a patch of sunlight, watching us, snapping at flies, chewing on a bone. Overhead, the trees’ branches leapt and clattered in the wind.

  “A skeleton!” the girls cried. “A human skeleton!”

  “Is it a human skeleton, Daddy?”

  The girls had found the bleached, scattered bones of a deer, shards stretching from the shadows into the sunlight.

  “Maybe,” I said. “It could be.”

  Next the girls found the rusted grate of a grill, and built a shelf upon which they lined pieces of bone, special stones. That would be their food, in this wilderness where they lived, where they had to do everything for themselves. They made decisions; they discussed how their lives would be: a hybrid of The Boxcar Children and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

  I stood to one side, watching and listening for a while before asking, “What will I do?”

  “What do you mean? You’re not even here.”

  “Who am I? The father?”

  “We don’t have a father.”

  “Really?”

  “We’re orphans.”

  I wandered farther away, into the shadows beneath the cedars, still trying to hear what they were saying. After a while, I circled back, convinced them to let me take a picture.

  Then the dog dropped the bone in his mouth and suddenly barked. He shot away dragging his leash through the underbrush, up toward the road.

  We ran after him, laughing, spiderwebs in my face; the girls stumbled, shouting to not be left behind.

  When we came out of the cedars, onto the road, the dog was close by, tail wagging, being petted by a person, a woman with her back turned to us. Shouting, the girls went around, past me.

  The woman stood, shielding her eyes with one hand, and smiled as I approached. It was Mrs. Abel.

  She stepped forward, hugged me quickly, and then leaned back to look at my face.

  “You came back,” I said.

  “I wondered when I’d run into you,” she said. “It’s been so long.” She kneeled again, where the girls were keeping a hold on the dog.

  “And what are your names?” she said.

  I felt shaky, having her so suddenly there, after all this time. I was glad for the distraction, the shield of my girls, who were shouting, introducing themselves. I looked more closely at Mrs. Abel as she answered their questions. Older, yes, her long hair gone white, in a thick braid, but still slim and strong-looking, still in her faded jeans, a man’s Oxford shirt with a ragged hem. My shadow fell toward her, the dark shape of my head across the beaded toes of her pale blue moccasins.

  “We found a skeleton!” my older daughter said, pulling a bone from the pocket of her dress. “A skeleton of a person in the woods, near Daddy’s old fort.”

  “I believe it,” Mrs. Abel said, st
anding, and then we were all walking, back down the road, the four of us and the dog, toward the driveway to my parents’ cabin. The girls were holding her hands as we walked.

  “I’ve known your father a long time,” she was saying. “He used to think he was the best swimmer along this whole shore.”

  “He still is! He tells us.”

  “How about you girls—do you swim?”

  “I’m an Otter, but I could be a Seal.”

  “I’m in Polar Bear.”

  “Those are their swimming classes,” I said.

  “Impressive,” Mrs. Abel said. “You’ll have to come swim with me, at my house.”

  “Where’s your house?”

  “At the end of this road.”

  The girls looked over at me. “Can we go there? Can we swim?

  “Maybe,” I said. “Not right now.”

  Mrs. Abel swung her arms, gently jerking my girls forward. Her braid slid back and forth across her shoulders, a white rope against her pale blue shirt.

  “You’re here how long?” she said, glancing sideways at me.

  “Two weeks,” I said. “Five more days. My wife comes tomorrow—she had to stay behind, to work.”

  “I hear it’s beautiful,” she said. “Oregon. And you’re still writing.”

  “Trying to,” I said.

  We passed the dark opening in the trees where the cow path led up along the bluff, to where Mr. Zahn’s house had been. The girls began explaining the path to Mrs. Abel, and she exclaimed with surprise, as if it were unknown to her.

  “I’ve read some of your books,” she said. “I could recognize you in them. And that story about the crazy taxidermist—that reminded me a little of Robert, all the animals he made.”

  “Well, that’s pretty old.” I felt the weight of Mr. Zahn’s knife, heavy in my pocket. “I mean, I wrote that story a long time ago.”

  “Still,” she said. “And I finally got all your letters, as well. They were wonderful to read.”

  “You never wrote back.”

  “Well—” She smiled. “It was years late, when I finally got them. But it was nice to be reminded. That all feels like a different life.”

  Ahead, the Red Cabin flashed gray through the trees. Down by the main cabin, my sister was packing her car, preparing to drive home to Milwaukee. The girls let loose of Mrs. Abel’s hands and ran down the driveway, screaming, the black dog bounding at their heels. We watched them go.

  “You sent me the second half of the story,” I said.

  “What?”

  “About the girl and the bird, and the forest underwater. You sent it to me.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “I’d forgotten all that, the story—but then this spring I found it when I was cleaning out a storage locker.”

  “But why did you send it?”

  She laughed. “Because it reminded me of you, because you mentioned it, in your letter, and that reminded me. It was something my husband sent to me, once. He probably wrote it himself.”

  “So the girl in the story is you.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s not so simple—you should know that. It’s a story.”

  The girls began yelling at me, calling for me that my sister was about to leave. My parents stood next to the car, now. My sister slammed the trunk; the dog ran around and around, then leapt into the backseat.

  “We’ll have time to catch up, later,” Mrs. Abel said. “Don’t make them wait.”

  “Later?” I tried not to sound too anxious, too eager.

  “I have somewhere else to be, this afternoon, and tonight. In the morning? You can bring your girls by to swim.”

  With that, she turned and walked away from me.

  - 48 -

  That afternoon a storm was rising, rows of whitecaps out on the lake. The girls were making cookies, with my mother; my father sat on the couch, eating peanuts and watching the Green Bay Packers preseason report, complaining about the television’s reception.

  I was searching through the shelves next to the fireplace, looking for a book that I remembered, from when I was young. Next to my head hung the old marshmallow skewers, long and sharp and shiny, their wooden handles all colors, the paint faded and chipped.

  “Is it all right”—my mother appeared from the doorway to the kitchen; she was smiling, wearing an apron with a cow on it—“the girls want to eat some of the cookie batter.”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “They told me you found a human skeleton.”

  “We did,” I said. “Don’t tell anyone.”

  “They believe you,” she said, half-scolding me.

  “Not really,” I said. “They’ve known me their whole lives.”

  “And we met an old lady!” my younger daughter shouted from the kitchen. “We’re going swimming at her house!”

  “Mrs. Abel,” I said.

  “Claire Abel?” my mother said. “I didn’t know she was back. Where has she been, all these years?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Grambee!” my girls called. “The cookies!”

  My mother turned and went to them, and I returned to my search through the books. I pulled out histories of Door County, and the Berenstain Bears, and even books I had written, but I could not find the book that I sought, that I remembered from my childhood. What was it called?

  It was a book of scary stories, of hauntings, and the one I wanted to read was about a young woman walking a mountain path at dusk. The light was very important, the haziness, the way that she could not be quite certain what she was seeing. Because someone was following her, a shadowy figure, and once night fell it would be impossible to know if he was still following her, or getting closer, or where, exactly, he was. He? That was what was most disturbing about the tale—the young woman, glancing back, could not make out the person’s face, could not even be certain that it was a man, or a person. It could have been something else, something other. She even stopped and called out to it, once, twice, and the shadowy figure paused in its pursuit, but did not answer. When she turned, it resumed its pursuit, always keeping this shadowy, perfect distance.

  A little later, my father had fallen asleep, a bowl of peanut shells in his lap. My girls came out of the kitchen to tell me that the cookies were almost ready.

  “Tell a story,” the younger one said. “A story of when you were a boy. A trick story—”

  “But you can’t get hurt or in trouble!”

  “Someone has to get in trouble, but not you.”

  “At first it looks like it’s going to be you, but then someone else gets in trouble!”

  Later that night, I read A Wizard of Earthsea to my daughters, in the upstairs bedroom of the cabin. I could hear the wind gusting in the trees and the waves pounding the shore.

  “What’s an otak?” my younger daughter said.

  “Some kind of little animal,” her sister said. “That’s probably their name for squirrel or something.”

  I finally got them both to quiet down, and I lay between them, listening to the rain against the windows, on the rooftop, the wind in the trees. The knotholes in the ceiling looked like laughing faces, and the sound of the waves echoed off the bluff, above and behind the cabin, making it feel as if we were surrounded by water.

  I imagined the white stones on the beach, the raft rising and falling, tethered against the waves. As I drifted off, I thought I heard a piano—Chopin’s Fantasies, Beethoven’s Pathétique, talking back to the storm—and I could feel myself out in the waves, could see the flag at the end of the Zimdars’ dock, blowing out straight and square, candlelight flickering in the window of Mrs. Abel’s cabin.

  High in the cedars with the storm coming in, I sit on one branch and hold tight to another. I shiver, thrilled to think that no one knows where I am, hidden up here in t
he darkness, and then I imagine that there are others in the trees, all around me, all of us oblivious to each other, all believing ourselves to be alone in the storm.

  - 49 -

  The sun came out, by the late morning of the following day; the storm had cleared and the lake was almost smooth.

  My mother looked up at me from where she was folding laundry. “I didn’t realize you were so friendly with Claire Abel.”

  “Well, you know”—I gestured to my daughters, in their swimsuits, as I crammed towels and snacks into a canvas bag—“she mentioned it, she invited them, so now they’re obsessed.”

  I followed the girls out the door, down the stone pathway to the beach, then pointed which direction to go. We hurried along the shoreline.

  Mrs. Abel must have heard us coming; she appeared on the beach in front of her cabin, wearing a white robe, a towel in one hand.

  “Welcome!” she said, and the girls hugged her, pulled her toward the water, the end of the pier, where two folding chairs waited.

  When she untied and dropped the robe, it startled me, for a moment, that she was wearing a swimsuit—a Speedo racing suit, navy blue, her white braids swinging against the dark fabric.

  She dove, and the girls leapt in after her, and then all three of them were shouting at me to join them.

  “Can I wait?” I said.

  “No!”

  I set down the bag and pulled off my shirt; I unbuckled my sandals, then cannonballed in among them. The water was cold, colder than I expected, and I sprinted out, trying to warm myself before I doubled back to the pier. All the while I was trying to convince myself that here I was, here she was, and here were my daughters.