by Scott Carson
“Because I’m not here on police business,” he said, and then he walked to the car without another word, his hand clenched so tightly around the keys in his pocket that the edges bit into his skin.
They didn’t speak on the drive home. It was nine miles from the jail to the house. They drove through the heart of Torrance and wound up into the Catskills, Maiden Mountain looming in the fog, and below it the Chill—or, technically, the Chilewaukee Reservoir. Nobody in Torrance County called it anything but the Chill. Steve lived above the reservoir, well outside of town.
The rain had lessened, but a low gray mist hung around the brick ranch house that Steve had bought twenty-four years earlier with his wife. The yard looked bleak in the autumn mist, the grass browning, the woods long past full leaf. The basketball hoop where he’d spent so many hours with Aaron, games of H-O-R-S-E and around-the-world and free-throw contests, still stood in the driveway, but the old net was rotting, just a few filthy threads dangling from a rusted rim. Steve kept meaning to tear the whole thing down. It was nothing but an eyesore, and driveway basketball games were not coming back to the Ellsworth house. He could never bring himself to do it, though.
He pulled his cruiser into the drive and parked beneath the ancient hoop. Cut the engine and spoke without looking at his son.
“I’ve got to get back to work and catch up on the time I wasted on you this morning.”
“Sure thing,” Aaron said, popping the door and starting to step out. Steve grabbed him by his collar and slammed him back into the seat with force that seemed to startle—scare?—them both.
“The fuck are you doing?” Aaron said, and his voice cracked, the hard-guy act fading. He looked like a child once more, and there was a hint of fear in his eyes that both disturbed Steve and pleased him. You didn’t want your own child to be scared of you, but when you needed him to care, wasn’t fear better than nothing?
“I will be at work, so that gives you the rest of the day,” Steve said, forcing himself to stare into his son’s eyes, “to pack your things. Whatever you want to take from this place, go on and take it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m evicting you,” Steve said, and suddenly he understood the reason those old stories had been floating through his mind on the drive to the jail. It wasn’t the rain; it was the knowledge of what he had to do, and knowledge of the way those things intersected. Once, his grandfather had been forced to evict an entire town in the interest of greater responsibilities.
“Evicting me?” Aaron echoed in disbelief. “I’m your son!”
“Yes, you are, Aaron. You’re my son, and I love you. But I do not know how to get through to you anymore.”
“Oh, come on.” Aaron rolled his eyes. If you could get paid for rolling your eyes, the boy would already be retired.
“You’re my son,” Steve said, “and you’re also supposed to be a grown man. Been back here nearly a year after you washed out of the Coast Guard, and you’ve got no job, you aren’t taking any classes, you aren’t doing a damn thing except getting arrested and bringing shame down on this family. And you don’t care. I can’t be the only one who cares. I can’t.”
“You’re throwing me out? You’re serious? You are throwing me out of my own house?”
“Your mother and I bought that house. Your name isn’t on the deed. But I am giving you an option if you want to stay. There’s paperwork on the kitchen table about Peaceful Passages.”
“Oh, you gotta be kidding me.” Aaron lifted one tattooed hand to his face. “I’m not going to rehab. I don’t need to go to—”
“If you’re willing to go there, I’ll pay for it, and I’ll welcome you back here when you’re done. I’ll also pay for a lawyer to argue that you don’t need to take up residence in my jail. I’ll put my name and your mother’s name on the line for you again, in the courtroom and as a job reference. If you go that route, I’m in your corner against all comers, son. Do you understand that?” Steve was talking fast now, and his voice was thickening. “That’s where I want to be, but you gotta meet me halfway, Aaron. You have to.”
“It was just a bad night, and you haven’t even bothered to ask a single question about what actually happened!”
“Peaceful Passages for three weeks,” Steve said. “You come out of there, and then you come home. But if you’re not going there, then you’re not staying here. You figure out where you want to lay your head down tonight. If you want it to be on Tyler Riggins’s couch with ten beers in your bloodstream and whatever you put in your lungs or up your nose, you can go that way. Your next bed will be in a cell. We both know that. And, Aaron? This morning was the last time I’ll put up bail. Believe me on that.”
“This is bullshit.”
“Sure. So was the arrest, I know. So was the dishonorable discharge. So was everything in life that hasn’t gone your way. It’s all bullshit, isn’t it, son? Never your fault.”
Aaron smirked. It was an expression he’d patented in the past few months, one that said, Old man, you just don’t get it, you don’t begin to understand, you’re so damn dense that all I can do is laugh about it.
“You used to work so hard,” Steve said. “You’d go down to the lake and swim in the cold, swim in the dark, it didn’t matter, you worked your ass off because you knew what you wanted in life and you cared. Look at yourself now. I bet if you went out to the Chill and tried today, you wouldn’t be able to keep your head above water.”
“Like hell I couldn’t.”
“Well, you can’t do it in any other aspect of your life!” Steve shouted.
For a moment they sat there staring each other down, Aaron’s face filled with hate, Steve dearly hoping his own was conveying both love and resolve. They were intertwined, always. When Aaron had headed off to basic, Lily sent him a photograph of a rescue swimmer in high, turbulent seas off the Alaskan coast, and beneath it she’d written You can’t spell resolve without love. Steve had told her not to send that. It’s corny, he’d said. Moms are allowed to be corny, she’d told him with a smile, both of them happy and proud that day, both of them blissfully unaware that a clot was slipping toward her brain.
“I want you to think about your mother today,” Steve said, and, damn it, now his voice was shaking and he was close to tears. He could not allow that—not today. Today he had to be hard.
“Get out of my car, Aaron,” he said. This time, he got the hardness.
Aaron hesitated, bristling, and Steve thought first that he was going to speak, and then that he was going to throw a punch. Instead he simply climbed out of the cruiser and slammed the door.
Steve watched him stride toward the house, head down, shoulders hunched.
The rain had started again.
4
After he finished burning the paperwork from Peaceful Passages Recovery Center, Aaron Ellsworth found the spare key to his father’s Silverado and then jogged through the rain to the truck, thinking that he’d head to a bar before remembering that it wasn’t yet ten in the morning.
He wasn’t sure if Tyler Riggins was out of his cell yet. Probably not. Tyler’s family wouldn’t jump quite as fast as the good sheriff.
For the last time.
What an asshole. Never even asking Aaron for his version of how the night had gone, just doing that bullshit routine of Big Cop Man, setting him straight. No questions from Sheriff Ellsworth, because he always knew the truth.
Somehow the most aggravating, bone-deep-insulting thing was the accusation that Aaron couldn’t still keep his head above water. Never mind that his father had meant it to matter in the figurative sense; he’d offered it in the literal sense, too, and that was the only thing that had stuck.
Of course I can still do the old swims. Every one of them.
But could he?
After thirty minutes of aimless driving, Aaron found himself pulling into the parking lot beside the dam at the Chill. Once he would’ve run here from the house, following three miles of ridg
etop trails that led down toward the lake. He’d swim, then run again, chasing those ridge trails away from the looming peak of Maiden Mountain.
Today he drove into the parking lot. There would be no running. He just needed to prove he could conquer the tailwaters below the dam at the Chill. Shove that in his father’s face.
The big reservoir was an important spot to his family—they’d had the job of evicting a handful of weird-ass hillbillies who’d refused their eminent domain money back when the reservoir was created. Aaron knew those stories, and he’d heard others as a boy, as everyone in Torrance had.
Most of the stories concerned the Dead Waters. It wasn’t even part of the lake itself but the flood control system built downstream. There was a place below the dam called a stilling basin, a sort of pond below the churning tailwaters, an area for the water to spread out in during flood season, to calm itself before it roared toward town. It was known as the Dead Waters because it was one of the few places where you could still see the remnants of the gutted, burned-out foundations of old Galesburg, which had been torched before the reservoir filled. Most of the area beneath the lake had been farm fields and isolated homesteads, but below the Dead Waters were the remains of an old town hall, two churches, and a school.
In a dry year, when the water was low and the sunlight slanted at the perfect angle, you could see the silhouettes of the ancient structures below, particularly one tenacious church steeple that reached for the reservoir’s surface like it was trying to gasp a last breath.
Or grasp someone from above and pull them down below.
His grandfather, a man who’d known Galesburg when it was a town and not an artificial reef, had forbidden him from fishing in the Dead Waters. Aaron had been happy enough to stay away, lunker walleye be damned. There was something undeniably strange about that area, particularly in the twilight, when the fish were active but the dimming sun also seemed to expose more of the buildings below than it ever could at high noon on a warm summer day.
Strange, how that worked.
Naturally, the place bred superstitions, and superstitions drew crazies. Aaron remembered at least a dozen times when his father had responded to some weird-shit trouble out there. A murder-suicide one year. A group of overdosed junkies another. The wife of a local doctor who’d been found standing on the ice, stark naked, in February. She’d gone into a psych ward and, to the best of Aaron’s knowledge, never come back out.
The area between the dam and the Dead Waters was a magnet for madness.
Or, if you were a swimmer, it was a first-class test course.
Down where the tailwaters thundered like a Rocky Mountain river between the dam and the stilling basin, Aaron Ellsworth had become the best swimmer Torrance County had ever produced. Night swims and cold-weather swims—those had been his secret.
He’d trained that way since boyhood, and when he shattered every Torrance County record and several state marks, it had been those swims in the dark and in the cold that gave him the edge.
The swims his asshole father didn’t believe he could still achieve.
Let’s see about that, Pop. Let’s see about that.
He parked the Silverado directly in front of a sign that banned everyone except for authorized personnel. Beyond the small parking lot was an eight-foot-high fence with razor wire coiled over the top, and beyond that a stark and dismal-looking stone tower that seemed like it should have been part of a Depression-era prison. That was where the dam operators worked, staring at computers and opening gates to allow water to flow through the spillway, or sealing them to keep the water in. Maybe there weren’t even computers inside; Aaron had no idea. He just knew it looked like an awful place to work. He’d never set foot in the gatehouse, just walked by it on his way to swim in the restricted area below, the only place in Torrance County that had any current.
Everything in Torrance was stagnant.
The tailwaters, though, could get intense. When the reservoir was high, the tailwaters could get downright mean, in fact, and that was how a kid from the backwaters of the Catskills had become the best in his Coast Guard rescue swimmer class.
Until they booted him from it.
There was only one car parked below the gatehouse tower, and Aaron recognized it as belonging to Arthur Brady, the dam operations supervisor since time immemorial and a friend of Aaron’s father. Old Arthur had spent years looking the other way when Aaron came down here to train. He was always edgy about it, making Aaron swear not to bring down friends, to keep it secret, but he’d allowed it. That probably had more to do with Aaron being the sheriff’s son than anything else, though.
There had to be cameras somewhere on the property, or at least a motion sensor, because you couldn’t pull into the lot without someone stepping outside pretty quickly. If an operator other than Arthur was working, Aaron had learned to park up on the shoulder of the road and walk through the trees. Today, though, it was just Arthur.
Aaron had barely gotten out of the truck before Arthur appeared, walking out onto the iron staircase that led to that single door and peering through the rain.
“Mr. Fleming?” Arthur hollered. “Is that you?”
“No. It’s Aaron.”
“Huh?”
“Aaron Ellsworth.”
“Aaron!” Arthur Brady put a hand on the railing and leaned out, and for the first time that day Aaron felt a pang of shame, wondering if the old man knew that he’d just bonded out of jail. He’d hated growing up the sheriff’s son, feeling exposed and disliked, but somehow Arthur Brady didn’t fall in with those memories of the town. He’d taken risks to give Aaron the best shot possible at getting out of this place.
“I sure didn’t expect to see you,” Arthur said, climbing down the stairs, boots clanging. “What’re you doing back in town, kid?”
I guess Arthur doesn’t read the paper. Or at least not the jail bookings.
“Just passing through,” Aaron said, not wanting any dialogue, not wanting anything except the press of cold, angry water. “I’m gonna take a swim. Old times’ sake.”
“Oh, not today, Aaron. You kidding me? Water’s runnin’ too high.”
“Not for me.”
Arthur gave him a forlorn look and nodded. “Sure, you’ll be fine, but I got a pain-in-the-ass inspector comin’ down here from Albany, lookin’ over my shoulder, all on account of the rain, you know? Last thing I need is for him to see somebody in the water.”
“I’ll be fast. Gone before he gets here.”
“He’s already late! I can’t risk it, Aaron.”
Aaron felt like he could hear a ticking in the back of his skull. “Arthur? Mr. Brady? I’m going to get in the water now.”
“Damn it, boy, this is not the day to screw with me. You can’t go—”
“Call my dad if you’ve got a problem with it,” Aaron said, and he turned and walked away, somehow feeling cocky and feeling like shit at the same time. Like throwing a punch or crying.
“If you see that inspector, you best stay out of sight, or I will call your dad!” Arthur shouted.
Aaron gave him a thumbs-up without turning.
He walked out of the parking lot and followed a footpath through the weeds and the small trees and then he came out alongside the spillway below the dam, where the water thundered and churned. There, in front of fencing and chains and signs that shrieked about trespassing penalties, he peeled off his hooded jacket, T-shirt, and jeans, until he was standing in his underwear in the rain. He rolled his socks and jammed them inside his shoes and left it all in a pile under the jacket as rain beaded on his bare skin. Already he felt better, stronger and cleaner. Meaner.
This place could do that to him.
He still wasn’t sure why he’d come here. Proving a point to his father? It was the wrong point, he knew that.
I’ll move out of the house and out of the town and find success, but first I’ll show him that I’m strong as I ever was. I’ll show him that much before I leave.
He ignored the pain of jagged rocks against his bare feet as he walked across the slick, treacherous riprap and down to the shore. Generations earlier this area had been home to the camps where construction workers lived in temporary housing, building the dam that would flood out the village of Galesburg. He’d heard stories of terrible fights between the Galesburg residents and the workers, but he wasn’t sure he believed them. After all, the workers had finished their task, packed up, and moved on. Who was left to tell the legend but the ones left behind? They tended to be a pissed-off bunch, too.
Aaron knew a bit about that.
But I’m leaving again, and this time I’m not coming back, he promised himself as he neared the water’s edge. One last swim to show the old man he’s wrong about me, on this count and all the others, and then I’m out of here. I’ll keep silent for a few months, make him rue the day he threw me out, and then, once I’m in good shape somewhere else, and he’s had time to chew on the loss of his own son, then and only then will I call him. I’ll invite him out to… to wherever the hell I’ve ended up—doesn’t matter where, because it will be better than here—and I’ll have him down for a nice dinner and I won’t say “I told you so”; I’ll just let him soak it all in. I’ll let him see how wrong he was.
He hesitated at the water’s edge. The current was really pulling today.
“Let’s go,” he said softly, unsure of the reason for his own pause and unsettled by it. Used to be, he’d hit the water without so much as a glance upstream.
If not for the hesitation, he might never have seen the photographer.