Bunny Man's Bridge

by Ted Neill

  “You want to keep it or throw it back.”

  I knew it was small for a bass, but it was the only catch of the day. We needed at least one fish.

  “Keep it.”

  Gary put it in the back of the boat by the battery and took us away from the shore. The sun was a white ball in the hazy sky, its light diffuse, our shadows faint.

  “Not biting much today,” Rick said.

  “I think it’s because it’s been so hot. They’ve probably moved into cooler water,” Uncle Gary said. He stopped the boat in between two islands, where he thought the water would be cooler, then set us adrift. Rick decided to use the same bait as me. Gary switched to firetails. My fish was still on the bottom of the boat, its mouth rhythmically opening and closing. Once in a while it would flap around, making the same artificial thunder on the bottom of the boat that I had earlier that morning. Finally he was still, except for his fin, which would move pointlessly in the empty air.

  “Is he dying now?” I asked.

  “Ah, I’ll take care of him in a minute,” Uncle Gary said.

  I had seen my brother stick a knife in a fish’s head to kill it before cleaning it. I hoped that they would do something like that to my fish. It seemed humane. I turned my back and cast off to the side. I felt better if I could ignore him.

  The brown end of a cigarette floated by in the water. I looked up to see Uncle Gary lighting another one. It surprised me that he would litter in the lake that he spent so much time fishing in. I hoped that Rick or Gary would catch a fish so that I wasn’t the only one pulling them into the boat to die. Uncle Gary finally rigged a line and dragged my fish in the water. Gary’s face was obscured by his sunglasses and hat. I could no longer recognize him.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Getting the water to go through his gills. It will revive him.”

  “Oh.”

  We had drifted into parts of the lake I had never seen before. I asked Rick how close we were to Vesper Island.

  “It’s farther down that way, past these little islands. We usually fish around there in the afternoon.”

  “There’s fish there?”

  “Oh yeah, there is.”

  “How close do we go?”

  “Depends on how we drift. We can go real close if you want a look.”

  “No, it’s okay.”

  I left my line alone while I fumbled in my jeans to make sure I had brought my pocketknife, although what use it would be against ghosts I was not sure. My rosary would have been better, and I regretted not bringing it. Gary was slowly bringing in his line. Rick was casting. Neither seemed too concerned about being close to Vesper.

  “Here he is,” Gary said as his rod twisted and bent. “He’s big.” Gary stopped reeling and adjusted the drag on his rod, hoping to tire the hooked fish out. His face fell, the rod going still and straight.

  “Damn.”

  “Got away?” Rick asked.

  “Yep, that was my fish. I should have just hooked him instead of playing with the drag.”

  “There’ll be others.”

  “Not the way they’re biting today,” Uncle Gary said.

  Rick said he was getting lots of nibbles where we had drifted. Gary heaved the cement anchor over. Only six feet of cord went out before it stopped.

  “It’s only that deep out here?” I asked.

  “Yeah, it’s only six or seven feet here.”

  “I can touch that deep in the pool.”

  “I bet you can.”

  “Want to try?” Rick laughed. I didn’t answer.

  It was nearing noon, but it felt like it should be two. Gary reeled in his line and put his rod in the boat before settling next to the motor and revving it. Water bubbled at the stern as the propeller churned. “I’m taking us over to eat lunch.”

  “Sounds good.” Rick pulled in his line and set it across the bow. Gary turned the motor on high and took us into the open center of the lake. The noise from the motor was becoming softer. The boat was slowing down. I looked back to Gary, who was leaning over the stern. We were now going half the speed as before.

  “What’s wrong?” Rick asked.

  “I forgot to charge the battery yesterday,” Gary said, gunning the sick motor.

  “How much juice does it have left?” Rick asked.

  “Enough to get us to the other side, I think. We’ll have to use the oars to maneuver for the rest of the afternoon, otherwise there won’t be any power to get us home.”

  He cut the motor, and we floated listlessly by a peninsula that ended in a small, mossy point. Gary opened the cooler and passed around the sandwiches my mother had packed for us. The sun had disappeared behind a bluish gray cloud cover that threatened rain. I was glad for the shade, hoping that we would call it a day soon. I had grown a bit bored. But Rick had other plans. He dropped his line and let the boat drag it along the bottom. Just a moment passed before the handle shifted and clanked against the side. Rick dropped his sandwich on the thwart and picked up the rod. The boat drifted backwards as the fish struggled to get away.

  “That’s it, you got him!” Gary said.

  The fish didn’t surface until Rick had brought it within Gary’s grasp. When our uncle lifted it out of the water, its body looked smooth as polished silver. Its mouth could easily encompass my fist.

  “That’s a good six-pounder,” Gary said while he proudly handed the bass to Rick.

  “We’ll have to get a picture when we get home,” Rick said.

  Lunch was eaten between casts afterwards. Gary caught two next, so he felt that he had made up for the one that had slipped away earlier. The air grew cooler with the sun hidden, and we rowed farther from shore, floating in between some quiet, wooded islands. The wind died down, and the water’s surface grew calm and glassy. Mine was the smallest of the four fish we now dragged behind us.

  “This is a good time of afternoon to catch fish,” Gary said, his reel whistling as he cast. The boat floated among the islands, and Rick would row us away from the shores when we got too close. I saw the last small island glide by quickly as the wind picked up and moved us into open water. There was still one island ahead, larger than the rest, sitting alone in the dark water.

  “Is that Vesper?”

  “Yep, it is,” Rick said, flicking his rod.

  “Should we anchor and fish here for a while?” I asked, worried that we were drifting too close to Vesper.

  “I’m not getting any nibbles here. How about you Gary?” Rick said, turning his head around to look at Gary.

  Gary shook his capped head back and forth. “I think we’ll just let the wind push us along. That bank over there goes out real far; we can fish all along it if the wind keeps up.”

  “Is there good fishing here, near Vesper?” I asked.

  “Some days it is,” Gary said.

  I continued to cast. Gary and Rick were oblivious to the menacing island. Its trees were indeed overgrown. Their branches crowded each other so much that they hung out inches above the water. A hawk flew across the water and alighted on one of the highest boughs that crowned the top of the island. I imagined that from the hawk’s perch he would be able to see the tops of the burial lofts and the skeletons adorned in their jewelry and headdresses.

  I went back to my fishing pole, letting my gaze wander as I reeled my line. The lake had grown dark as it reflected a sky the color of charcoal. An imminence hung in the air. The water was calm, but on Vesper I could see green leaves spinning and twirling in the breeze. Finally, a rumble of thunder reached us.

  “We need to clear the lake,” Gary said, turning to the motor.

  “If we use the motor now, we’ll be rowing all the way back to the marina. We can row over to Vesper,” Rick said.

  I was alarmed by his calm.

  “Isn’t it haunted?” I asked. “By the First Nations people?”

  “You mean Indians?” Uncle Gary asked, dipping an oar into the water and moving us towards Vesper. By the tone of h
is voice, I knew it was better not to correct him or even answer at all. Over his shoulder, sheets of rain had obscured the farthest shore. The boat was beginning to rock with the waves as the surface of the lake trembled in the wind.

  Rick took a paddle to the bow. I turned my head to ask Gary if I there was anything thing I could do to help, only to see a lightning bolt sear a treetop on the shore. A violent clap of thunder followed, as if to convince me of what I had seen. The first large rain drops were plopping into the water and banging the bottom of the boat. I untied the flannel shirt from my waist and covered my head.

  Rick paddled us towards a clear spot on Vesper then jumped into the shallows, landing with a splash, his feet sloshing through the water as he dragged us to shore to beach the boat. Gary tied the line of our fish to the cooler, which he deposited at the edge of the water.

  “Come on, Danny, get out of the boat!” he said.

  I set a foot out of the boat and into the water. With a reluctant step, I was on Vesper Island. A large wooden sign stood before me:

  VESPER ISLAND

  KEEP OFF

  WILD FOWL REFUGE.

  Rick pulled the oars and rods from the boat while Gary flipped it over. I was surprised to see the ground was bare of leaves. Instead, the earth had been packed down by the passage of geese, who’d left a scattering of guano and feathers. Gary pulled a blue tarp out from his day bag and ran inshore with it. Rick and I followed.

  “We shouldn’t be here, Rick,” I whispered.

  “Would you be quiet?” he said.

  Gary ran a spool of line between two trees, tied it, then threw the tarp over, forming an A-frame tent. We slipped under, just as the rain began to pelt the outside. We pulled the ends of the tarp under us and sat on them to keep the wind from taking it.

  “That came up fast.” Uncle Gary was shaking out his hat.

  “Is the boat safe? The water is really going to rise,” Rick said.

  “Yeah, I pulled it up far.”

  “And the cooler?”

  “Even if the water gets that high, it’s not going anywhere. I lodged it in between some roots.”

  “I bet those fish are scared,” I said. “Being stuck in that choppy water.”

  “Well, Danny, if we’re here long enough, I’m going to go out there and clean one of them for dinner,” Uncle Gary said.

  We sat for a while in silence, listening to the rain beat down and the thunder rumble overhead.

  “Well, what do you think of your first fishing trip?” Rick asked.

  I swallowed. The only thing on my mind was if we were in danger. “Should we be here?”

  “Why not? You afraid of ghosts, little brother?”

  When I said nothing in reply, Rick laughed. Uncle Gary spoke up and clapped me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, no Indian ghost is going to get you. People come here all the time.” He parted the sides of the tarp and reached outside. When he pulled his hand back inside, he was holding a crushed beer can. “This a great drinking place. Come here, tell a few ghost stories. . .. always makes the girls scared. Then they want to cuddle.”

  There was another peal of thunder, and we heard branches breaking and falling through the canopy. There was a crash right outside the tarp. I screamed. Rick laughed and told me not to be such a “sissy.” He started to lift the tarp. I pictured a broken burial loft fallen from the trees smashed onto the ground, just waiting on the other side, a ghastly moldering body sprawled out in pieces, a skull surrounded by a halo of broken beads and decaying feathers, grinning at us with a cursed smile.

  Rick pulled his head back under the tarp. His expression was undisturbed.

  “Big tree branch just fell, Uncle Gary. Did you set us up under a dead tree?”

  “No, but that was close.”

  “There aren’t First Na—Indians left on this island?” I asked, pulling my shirt off my head and putting it on properly.

  “They’re long gone, not a trace. You don’t need to worry,” Uncle Gary said, apparently finally feeling some sympathy for me.

  I swallowed the lump that had formed in my throat. A new noise came from behind the tarp, but even I knew it was not supernatural: it was the grousing and honking of Canadian geese. Evidently they had come to the island to hide from the storm as well. The tarp was a bit of a curiosity to them: they would poke and peck at it with their bills. Rick would poke back, and the geese would scatter before returning again to repeat their investigation.

  A half hour passed. There was little left to talk about. Dinnertime was nearing. My stomach ached. Gary decided to make a run to the cooler for what was left of our lunches. The thunder kept up for another few minutes. I grew more bored than scared. Finally the rain slackened, and the thunder eventually became less frequent. Gary pulled the tarp down to reveal a whole gaggle of geese milling about the place. They scattered as we emerged. It was not unlike visiting a petting zoo. I noticed a gosling dragging a tangle of fishing line with a lure in it from its leg. I bent to grab the gosling and free it, but it ran away. I had the sense that my uncle and brother would just grow impatient with me if I pursued it anyway.

  The waterline was higher, the cooler nearly submerged. The fish, invigorated by their temporary respite, were pulling on their lines as they tried to swim out to the lake. With my shirt removed from my head, I took a better look around the island. The rain had stopped. The drops from the branches above now were from shake-down showers only, as squirrels danced from tree to tree. The clouds had brought with them an early evening, the crickets already beginning to chirp.

  Crushed beer cans floated along the shore, picked up by the lifting water, their labels faded by the sun. I could count half a dozen black spots where other trespassers had built campfires. An empty, half-melted marshmallow bag hung snagged from the branches of a bush next to a crumpled page from a Penthouse magazine. The trunk of one of the larger birch trees was scarred with the initials of previous visitors. Someone by the initials of JT declared that he or she “WAS HERE” along with MJ, CC, BK, CF, JY, and TP. The woods were open; any underbrush had been trampled by geese, or the frequent trespassers, who had left cigarette butts and discarded airplane-sized bottles of liquor.

  The trees were empty of any burial lofts.

  The boat needed only a little bit of pushing since the water had risen. The lake was still choppy. Gary dragged up the cooler and set it in the bed of the boat. Rick picked up the lures and packages of bait that had spilled out when he flipped the boat. He left all of our trash and torn wrappers on the ground. When I tried to pick them up, he told me just to leave them. I still tried to leave them in a small pile—I’m not sure why—before I crawled into the boat. Uncle Gary gunned the motor.

  “The battery seems like it’s recovered some. With the wind at our backs we just may make it back without paddling.”

  Gary banked us away. We bounced hard on the lake’s surface. Vesper Island receded. By the time the marina was in sight, all we could see were the lights on the pier. The night around us was dark and moonless, but for some reason, I was not scared. We stopped at a fast food drive-through for cheeseburgers with fries and chicken fingers on the way home. I fell asleep after.

  I was supposed to watch Gary clean the fish when we got back to the house. He used his electric knife. They were, to my surprise, still alive. He never stabbed them in the head before he started to saw their flesh off, head to tail. I was able to stand just so that Uncle Gary’s body blocked the view of what he was doing. That way I watched without watching. My dad explained the real meaning of Vesper. It was a Latin word for “end of the day” or “evening.” I didn’t show much interest, I guess, because then he asked me if I was tired. I said I was and headed off to bed.

  I took the steps one by one and put my dirty clothes in the laundry chute. I brushed my teeth and put on my pajamas. My comic books were waiting on the bedside table. On the top of a stack, a female superhero, who was at once sinewy and buxom, was winding up for a punch to send her advers
ary into an abyss. The glossy pages shimmered in the light of my lamp, but something about them seemed like a lie all of a sudden. I opened the drawer, shoved them into it, and knocked it shut. I tossed over and stared at the wall, waiting for sleep.

  2.

  Tree House

  My father stared at his digital watch, its settings on “stopwatch” as it counted the seconds, and even the more rapid milliseconds. Whatever numbers he was waiting for appeared, and he lifted the top of the grill, releasing a pillar of smoke that cleared to reveal the drumsticks and chicken breasts he was cooking. I moved to throw the brown leaves that I had been collecting into the ash catcher. I watched, transfixed, as their edges glowed, and they turned to dust from one touch of the glowing red embers. It was dangerous, but dad wanted me to learn how to respect fire. I had managed, so far, not to be burned. When I ran out of brown leaves, I used green ones, which took longer to shrivel and gave off thicker smoke. But the transition from green to ash, then to nothing, still fascinated me.

  The phone rang inside the kitchen. I was not old enough to answer, so it was nothing more than background noise to me, adding to the sound of bird chirps, lawn mowers, and HVAC units that hummed in our neighbor’s, the Blumfields’, backyard—they insisted on AC even on mild evenings like this one, when my parents would open the windows so that breezes could waft through the screens.

  My mother came out onto the deck. “The Whitlocks just finished the tree house that Jim had built for Kent and Susan. Danny, why don’t you go over and see it?”

  My father cautioned me to be careful as I bounded down the steps of the deck. I was still small enough that I could have slipped and fallen through them, as they did not have backing like inside-steps, but I managed and ran around the corner of the house, looked in both directions, crossed the cul-de-sac, and made my way between two parked pickup trucks. I was too young to read the company lettering painted on their sides, but by the size of the tools and wood scraps in the truck beds, I knew the tree house had to be huge. The side yard was marked with piles of sawdust and trails of crushed grass, which I followed around back.