The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

by Katya Apekina

  He cracks up. We laugh longer than we probably should because it’s not that funny. I look at the picture again and laugh harder. No, it’s pretty funny. Charlie pulls the menu off the table so we can’t look at it anymore. He catches his breath, takes a sip of water, chews on the ice, grins.

  And then, we’re just staring across the table at each other, smiling and not saying anything. Several minutes go by like this, or maybe much longer. I look away. Something in his face looks so open that it makes me embarrassed. A feeling drills through me, down my throat and between my legs. Our ice water in the plastic octagonal glasses casts long shadows on the tabletop. Little black-and-white oceans.

  “W-w-what are you thinking about?” He breaks the silence first.

  “I guess… that I’m happy,” I say, looking up at his face, but not his eyes.

  He nods. “Happiness was like a bull and they were trying to hold on,” he whispers weirdly.

  “What?”

  “It’s a l-l-line from your dad’s book,” he says. “S-sorry, I thought you knew it.”

  “Oh, no,” I say. “I’ve never actually read him.”

  Whose happiness had Dennis been writing about? His and Mom’s? The Happiness Rodeo. I’d say he and Mom did not manage to hold on very well. They both fell off and what? Happiness trampled them? C’est la vie! What a weird metaphor. I wonder how you say bull in French? Vache? No. That’s cow. Happiness is like a cow. The waitress is like a cow. Her belly, bisected by that apron, looks like an udder. She licks the tip of her pencil and takes our order. Neither of us get what we said we would.

  When she leaves, Charlie lights a cigarette. I gesture for him to pass it to me.

  He hesitates. “I d-d-didn’t know you smoked.”

  My hand brushes against his fingers as I take it.

  “I don’t,” I say, and let the cigarette hang out of the corner of my mouth without breathing in.

  I try to do a smoke ring. My mom taught me how once, but I start coughing.

  “You al-l-l right?” he asks, taking the cigarette back, and pushing my water towards me.

  I nod but can’t stop coughing. An old couple in a booth across the restaurant is watching us. The woman has tubes coming out of her nose, connected to an oxygen tank. I wave and cough, wave and cough. Take a sip of the water, a deep breath.

  “That was embarrassing,” I finally say after I’ve stopped coughing. He must think I’m a real idiot.

  “It’s probably better not to start anyway,” he says with the cigarette in his mouth. The cigarette changes his face. It’s sexy. A little bit tough.

  The waitress sets down a monster stack of pancakes in front of me. “Anything else?” she asks Charlie.

  I watch him pour hot sauce over his eggs and dip the wheat toast in the yolk. We chew for a while in silence, staring out at the mountain. Unlike the ranges in the distance that look blue or even purple, this mountain is covered in light green grass. It looks like a very difficult golf course.

  “So,” I say after I swallow several mouthfuls of pancake. “What about you? What are you thinking about?”

  That you’re also happy? That you think I’m wonderful despite my making an ass of myself with the cigarette?

  He finishes chewing, swallows, then carefully puts the cigarette in his mouth before answering. “Mountain top removal,” he says.

  What?

  He keeps the cigarette in his mouth as he talks. “See the grass up there?” He points with his fork, the tines gluey with yolk. “It’s not supposed to look like that. A coal company, probably Massey, blew the top off that mountain to get to the coal, turned the surface of it into a fucking moonscape, polluted the water and air with chemicals. There’s a big toxic lake in there with the runoff, called a slurry pond. People around here, children, are 30 times as likely to get cancer, asthma, all kinds of nasty stuff. Then the coal company ‘beautified’ the whole mess by planting that bullshit grass…”

  That’s what it is! He hasn’t stuttered. It must be having a cigarette in his mouth. Maybe that’s why he smokes. Or, maybe it’s because he’s ranting about the mountain. Like if he talks about something he cares about he overcomes it or something.

  “What?” he asks.

  I shrug.

  “You’re l-l-looking at me funny.” The stutter is back. He puts the cigarette out and reaches for my hand across the table. “So, do you want to go?”

  “Where?”

  “To a s-s-slurry pond. A little adventure.”

  “Okay.”

  His hand is warm and callused. I want him to touch my face and body with his big, strange hands and kiss my mouth. He’ll taste like hot sauce, cigarettes, and coffee. He’s so much more substantial than Markus ever was. The whole thing with Markus was ridiculous. I can’t believe that I was at all broken up over it.

  Charlie lets go of my hand and reaches for his wallet when the waitress sets the check down. I offer to pay but he doesn’t let me.

  And then he stands as if nothing has just passed between us. He walks ahead, not noticing that I am hesitating, that I hadn’t wanted the moment to end quite yet.

  I stop next to a table of church ladies. Will he look back and notice I have fallen behind? Turn around and look at me, Charlie. Am I testing him? Maybe. He keeps walking. Am I being immature? Probably.

  One of the church ladies, wearing a teal straw hat, puts down the salt shaker emphatically and says to the other: “Nancy Douglas is a bitch.” When Charlie gets to the door he turns around and waits for me to catch up. I run across the restaurant and almost into his arms. Into his truck, anyway.

  MAE

  After a while, the pounding of Dad’s typewriter slowed and slowed and stopped. Dad would be sitting in his room, and when he saw me looking at him from the couch he’d get up and close the door. Occasionally, I would hear a few taps but nothing like the racket I’d become accustomed to.

  Once I heard him literally banging his head against the desk. The noise woke me up and I knew exactly what it was. Don’t ask me how, I just recognized the sound, and sure enough, the next day he had a purple welt on his cheekbone, a big bruise, and when I tried to touch it, he swatted my hand away, no acknowledgement at all that this hand was connected to someone he cared about.

  Rose would call in the mornings and try to make plans with us, but Dad would come up with excuses not to see her. He didn’t tell her that Edie ran away. He must have felt ashamed.

  I remember eavesdropping on their conversation while Dad and I had breakfast.

  “It’s not healthy,” I heard Rose’s tinny voice coming from the receiver. “They should be in school. They need to be around people their age. You have a responsibility.”

  I hated people my age. They’d been nothing but cruel to me, or at best indifferent. I pinched Dad’s arm and looked at him pleadingly, my mouth full of unchewed cereal. Sending me away to school would have been a huge betrayal.

  He must have felt sorry for me, because he lowered his voice as if I couldn’t hear him, and said: “Of course, Rose. But it’s a delicate situation. You understand. They’ll start in the fall.”

  Rose was easily disarmed if Dad bothered with it. “Well, an evening class at a university, at least,” she said.

  “A university class. That’s an idea!” Dad said and winked at me. I looked down at my bowl of milk and shrugged, trying to appear neutral and agreeable, though I wasn’t keen on him getting rid of me, even for a few evenings a week.

  I’d hoped the whole idea of school would be forgotten, but later when he came out of his room for dinner after another tortured afternoon of not writing, he asked me what I’d like to study.

  “Nothing,” was the honest answer, but I said, “Photography.” I’d chosen it pretty much at random. Once, when we were still going on our walks, Dad had taken Edie and me to The Strand (18 miles of books!) and bought me a monograph of Garry Winogrand’s zoo photographs.

  Dad seemed pleased with my answer. He beckoned me into his roo
m. I hadn’t been allowed in there for days. It was a mess. Tangled typewriter ribbons. Overflowing ashtrays. Crumpled and torn pages on the floor. A sour smell. I sat on his bed and watched him dig through the boxes in his closet until he found what he’d been looking for: Grandpa Jackson’s old camera—a 35mm Leica, which I still use to this day.

  Dad showed me how to adjust the light meter but when I tried to photograph him, he grew irritated, said I was distracting him, and sent me out into the living room to photograph the cat.

  EDITH (1997)

  Charlie gets out a map and traces something with his finger before he starts the engine. I listen to my breath as I watch him concentrating, like he’s full of electric sparks.

  “There’s a path to a slurry p-p-pond,” he says, “not too far from here. A b-b-buddy took me once.”

  I picture a sludgy swamp, the kind we have back home, hidden somewhere inside that grassy golf-course mountaintop. I picture Charlie and me holding hands and sinking into it, slowly, slowly. Warm toxic mud rising up our legs. That’s how fossils are made.

  We drive for a while up a narrow road under big industrial metal chutes. They look like broken amusement park rides, metal slides or deconstructed roller coasters. The road has gone from paved to gravel to dirt. By the time we drive off the road and park between two pine trees, the air outside is shadowy and blue. A sound like maracas. Crickets or tree frogs?

  “Won’t it be too dark to see anything?” I ask.

  Charlie shakes his head and passes me a flashlight. “It’s better in the d-dark.”

  I click it on, but he covers the light with his hand. “Not yet,” he says.

  We climb over a chain link fence and walk along a dirt path. We walk in silence in the thin gray light, with him several steps ahead of me. At one point the path curves and the trees thin out and we have a view of the highway below, the last bits of sunset reflected off the windshields of the passing pickup trucks.

  We keep walking. There is another fence, this one has barbed wire at the top. Maybe we should turn back if someone doesn’t want us here this much. Charlie doesn’t hesitate, though, and I don’t say anything. He climbs the fence in a couple quick movements, drapes his Carhartt coat over the barbed wire and holds it there so I don’t cut myself. Once I’m over, he carefully pulls the coat free without even ripping it. His movements are so swift, precise, and controlled—why doesn’t this extend to his mouth?

  It’s dark already when we get to a small clearing with the parked cranes and tractors. Their outlines look like dinosaurs. We zigzag between them, then continue on the dirt road into the woods. We see the headlights of a car in the distance, coming downhill, and Charlie pulls me in behind a big rock.

  “What are they going—” I start to ask him, but he shakes his head quickly and puts his hand over my mouth for good measure. What are they going to do to us? Is he scared at all?

  He breathes against my cheek, and I think he is going to kiss me but he doesn’t. As soon as the car passes, he gets up and we keep going. Even though it’s dark now, he still doesn’t want to use the flashlights. We almost trip when we get to the third fence. It’s waist-high and wooden. The wood is old and mossy, rotten. It must have been put up a long time ago and forgotten.

  LETTER FROM

  JACKSON MCLEAN TO DENNIS LOMACK

  January 4, 1969

  Dear Dennis,

  I hope you’re well and that your studies are progressing at Columbia. Things here have heated up. I’m sure you’ve heard from Ann about the charges against me. I’ve tried to shield Marianne from this as much as possible, but there’s only so much I can do. And on top of all this, my health is failing.

  As for the trial—I didn’t really expect to stomp on the face of “everything we hold sacred” and get away with it. It was inevitable that there would be a backlash. If you push in one direction, the pendulum will swing back with equal force, and here I am, standing in its path. I wish I could say that I share Ann’s stubborn optimism, but I don’t. If the trial won’t kill me, my illness will.

  This is a difficult letter for me to write because I admire you as a man a great deal. I consider you a friend and a decent human being. However, I think you understand why I asked you not to come. The truth is—and you can deny it all you want, but why lie to a dying man?—I have watched something growing between you and my daughter for quite some time.

  I am not writing this to hurt you. You deserve happiness, but not with my Marianne. She is sensitive and I know you well enough by now to say that you will harm her. I don’t care if it’s not intentional. I don’t care if it’s by accident. You will hurt her and I don’t want you near her. Do you understand? I should have never encouraged your correspondence. She is a child. She looks up to you and sleeps with your letters under her pillow and probably thinks that she is in love with you, but what does she know? What she feels will change. In two years you will be a distant memory.

  Please, stop writing her those letters, those awful letters, flirtatious but never overtly so. Why do you do that? So you can deny it when I catch you? Am I supposed to believe that your interest is pure? That I’m misinterpreting? Who do you take me for, Dennis?!

  Consider this a dying man’s wish.

  Yours,

  Jackson McLean

  EDITH (1997)

  Charlie and I crawl across the grassy knoll until we reach the drop-off. From here we can see the tarry black lake glistening in the dark below us. On its oily sheen, a yellow smudge—the reflection of the moon. Charlie pulls his shirt over his nose and mouth and gestures for me to do the same. The smell makes me dizzy, permanent markers and dead animals, the guts and bowels of the earth. My mouth tastes metallic.

  Charlie grabs my hand and squeezes it. I can’t see much of his face in the dark, just his profile as he looks down below. He whispers through his shirt: “Eight hundred and fifty million gallons of carcinogenic runoff.”

  He lists more facts, but they don’t matter to me. The lake is beautiful. It’s something from a fairytale nightmare. It’s the embodiment of everything mean and awful and wrong, contained and glittering.

  We don’t stay long because the fumes are so toxic. On our walk back to the truck I keep thinking of Mom, of the pond inside her, of the broken dam and the sludge contaminating her, pouring out into her veins. If Mae were here, what would she think of all this?

  I know what she would say. She would say that I don’t understand anything, that it was she who’d been Mom’s slurry pond.

  “Are you okay?” Charlie’s voice comes from many steps ahead. “We need to keep walking.”

  Chapter 6

  EDITH (1997)

  The night air is warm and wet. I roll my window down all the way and let the breeze blow through my matted hair. I’m home. I’m finally home. This air is enough to make my bones feel like they’ve turned to cartilage.

  “Turn off at the next exit,” I say, patting Charlie’s shoulder. He clicks on the blinker. It’s been a long day on the road. Every once in a while he bulges out his eyes as if he’s being strangled, a technique, I think, for keeping himself awake. He’s been doing all the driving because I don’t know how to drive stick. He tried to show me in a dark parking lot after we stopped for gas but it didn’t go well.

  “Are w-w-we going to your house?” His question turns into a yawn.

  “To the hospital.”

  I know it’s late and that the hospital will probably be closed to visitors but I want to feel like I’m near her for a moment. It seems cold to drive all the way down here and not go straight there.

  I watch Charlie’s face as we pull up to the building past the sign: St. Vincent’s. There’s no flicker of recognition or judgment. I haven’t told him that it’s a mental hospital, so maybe he doesn’t know. Nothing about the building gives it away as such. Southern Louisiana has a lot of old haunted-looking places, but this isn’t one of them. It’s a newer construction, nondescript, seven stories tall with a fenced-in garden. I�
��d driven by it a million times and assumed it was an office park or a community college.

  The parking lot is mostly empty except for a few cars in a gated section that must belong to the doctors and nurses.

  “The lights are on,” I say hopefully, as Charlie pulls up to the front entrance.

  “Hospitals always l-l-leave the lights on,” he says.

  I get out while Charlie waits in the car. The front doors are locked. There is an empty room, a waiting room maybe, couches, tables, a front desk where a nurse or somebody usually sits. At the end of the room is an open door leading to a long, well-lit corridor. A security guard sits halfway down the hall, reading a newspaper. I knock and wave, but the glass is so thick it barely makes a sound. The guard doesn’t look up.

  I walk along the side of the building until I get to a hedge growing around a tall wrought iron fence. I think about all the fences we climbed in West Virginia, but I don’t try to climb this one.

  The fence goes around the residential wing of the hospital. The windows are square, ten on each floor. They’re the kind office towers have, the kind that don’t open. Of course they don’t open. Duh. It’s a mental hospital. In the rooms where the blinds are up there’s nothing to see—ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights.

  Which of these rooms is Mom’s? Is she even on this side of the building? I try to concentrate on each window. Do any of them give me a “Mom” feeling?

  This is stupid. Something Mae would do. If she were here she’d point to a window and be like, “That one! I just know!” like she has some kind of homing device in her brain that I don’t. But really, Mae, and obviously I never said this to her, but if you’re so “in tune” and always know everything, then why the fuck were you upstairs while Mom was in the kitchen, tying our old jump rope around her neck?

  A hand on my shoulder. Jesus. It’s Charlie. I hadn’t heard him get out of the car.