Lake Life

by David James Poissant

  “We get it,” Matthew says. “Enough.” He turns to Lisa, apology in his eyes.

  “Oh, this is nothing,” she says. “I work at Cornell.”

  Lisa tries to keep up. She’s liberal. She’s progressive. She’s a feminist. But, the ever-changing language, good Lord. Disorienting to be called intolerant by one grad student for learning the term non-binary too late. She likes this generation. She does. She admires their compassion, their drive for inclusion, social justice, civil rights. Still, they could learn a little patience, show a little more respect to those who came before. She was marching before these kids were born. Lisa will miss her students, but not the self-righteous ones, the ones so sure they have it all figured out at twenty-two.

  But Ken and Maya aren’t those people. They’re passionate. They care about the art they love and how groups are depicted in that art. That’s different than berating someone for not knowing the right words. By the look on his face, Lisa’s not sure Matthew appreciates Ken’s and Maya’s arguments, and that’s okay. He’s trying. He hired them, after all. Better to let him evolve at his own pace than shame him into fighting for the other side.

  Matthew pulls the fish from his belt into his lap. It resembles a balloon animal, the fish expressionless, mouth closed, eyes shut. It’s a fashion choice Lisa can’t comprehend. But then, she’s lived through bell-bottoms and Jams, shoulder pads and stiletto heels. Feathers in the hair were big for a while. Why not fish for belts?

  “Belt fish,” Matthew says. “A friend makes them. I keep thinking they’ll catch on.”

  Ken and Maya lock eyes, clearly trying hard not to laugh at their employer’s expense, already friends again.

  Matthew stands, and they follow him past the curtain to the boxes at the center of the store.

  “It will take some time,” he says, “but I think we can re-create your son’s collection. Where it gets tricky is the months. Marvel cover dates and release dates didn’t always match. A June book might be stamped August.”

  “I’ll buy June through September, then,” Lisa says. “Just to be safe.”

  Matthew stares at her. “That could be four hundred books. And some may be valuable. I’ll give you a discount for buying in bulk, but you’re still looking at over a thousand dollars out the door. And that’s if we have the issues. Probably, there will be some gaps.”

  “Whatever you have, I’ll take it. And I’ll need them rebagged. No stickers. No prices on the front. I want him to think these were his.”

  “You’re a good mom,” Maya says.

  Lisa would like to believe that. But were she a better mother, would Thad be so maladjusted, so damn sad? She’s not stupid. She knows how depression works, the stranglehold that nature has over nurture. But she’s a mother, and as a mother, it’s hard to believe that a child’s unhappiness is not your fault.

  Comic books won’t cure Thad’s depression, of course, but they might make him happy for a day, maybe for a few, and for Thad, any number of happy days is a lot.

  “Okay then,” Matthew says. He turns to the others with the seriousness of a coach rallying players for a big game. “Maya, you’re on X-Force, X-Factor, Excalibur, and Generation X. Ken, you’re on Wolverine, Cable, X-Man, and Deadpool.” He turns to Lisa. “Did your son collect Deadpool?”

  For all the ivory-bills that ever lived, Lisa couldn’t say. “Is Deadpool X-Men?”

  “It’s tangential,” Ken says, “but it’s canon.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Lisa says.

  “Better grab Deadpool,” Matthew says. “I’ll take care of X-Men, Uncanny, and Astonishing. Ken, grab a couple of old Wizards for reference. I don’t want to miss an issue.”

  Lisa half expects the man to say On three and make the others huddle up.

  “I’m so excited,” Maya says.

  “I’m gonna bag the fuck out of those comics,” Ken says.

  They’re giddy, all of them.

  “You’re welcome to sit in back, enjoy your tea,” Matthew says. “This may take a while.”

  “Thank you,” Lisa says. “I appreciate your time.”

  Matthew smiles, and it’s refreshing seeing someone who loves his job, who’s good at it. She wants that for her boys. She doesn’t care that they’re not professors or scientists. She doesn’t care whether they make much money doing what they do, though enough to live on would be nice. She’d just like them to come home satisfied at the end of each day, knowing that they’ve done good work. She wants that for them, that sense of purpose, purpose and the belief their time has been well spent.

  “You really are a good mom,” Matthew says.

  Lisa nods. She’ll take the compliment.

  “One last thing,” he says. He hesitates, steadies the fish swinging from his belt. “Just to be clear.”

  “What’s that?” Lisa asks.

  “All sales are final.”

  28.

  Hand at the tiller, Richard follows the shoreline, careful to keep the trolling motor’s prop away from rocks. Ahead, a fallen tree breaks the plane of the bay, and Richard pilots past it. The day is breezy, which will make fishing the shallows a challenge, wind and low-hanging branches the fiercest enemies of fishing line.

  Richard slows, cuts the motor, and anchors. Here, this cove, is where his father taught him to fish.

  This lake, it wasn’t picked at random for the vacation during which he and Lisa found their home. As a boy, Richard’s family traveled to Lake Christopher for a week one summer. The drive was three hours, Georgia to North Carolina, an easy trip. His father was a high school teacher, a man of modest means, and the family camped—father, mother, and son in matching sleeping bags. That’s when there was land enough around Lake Christopher to pitch a tent. Probably the land was someone’s lot or hunting property, but back then no one noticed, or, noticing, no one cared. These days people care, the land bought up, developed, lots bulldozed, new houses going up each year.

  Richard checks the anchor line. The sun is high, light traveling eight minutes and twenty seconds to bounce off the ball cap he wears to protect his head. The lake bed is six feet below the boat, the water three feet deep where he will cast. All things are, at this moment, as Richard wants them. Where he can’t impose order on his family, let him at least impose a pattern on the lake. Let him anchor where he’s anchored a thousand times before. Let him bait his hook with the day’s first fat, glorious worm. Let him cast as he was trained to cast by his father sixty years ago.

  What has he done with the worms? He is… he is stepping on them.

  The blue, plastic tub leaves his boot heel with a suctioned exhalation, and Richard pries free the pinpricked lid. The worms writhe, unhurt, and he hooks one, casts it, and watches his bobber drop.

  The bobber does not bob. No fish bite. Impatient, Richard reels in his line. He casts again. He likes the shape the line makes letting out, the saddle horn silhouette of filament followed by the bobber’s thunk. He likes how the float dips before righting itself. So satisfying, like mowing a lawn, which Richard’s always done himself. An economy of lines, one way to do it right. Not like physics. Physics is messy, mathematical physics the work of prying a design from inside the mess. Or trying to. Trying and failing, then trying again.

  Richard casts once more. He’d have made a good fly fisherman had he taken time to learn the Carolina rivers or the ways of trout. Instead, he is what he is: a bass and panfish fisherman. No fancy flies or waders for him, just a fishing boat and a push-button Zebco reel, both inelegant but good enough.

  A tension in the line, and the bobber is under. Richard tightens his drag. He reels. The rod bows. The fish pulls hard, and Richard loosens the drag. He’s fishing on last summer’s line. Each year he restrings the reels, but this summer he’s been lazy. Hard to make himself go to the trouble when he won’t get a full summer out of it. He hopes the line will hold. It’s eight-pound test, but bluegill are wily. He’s watched small ones snap new lines with their pulls.

>   He kneels at the bow and pulls the trolling motor from the water. The fish pulls more line, headed toward the fallen tree. If the fish reaches the branches, it’s over. He’ll tangle in the limbs, and no amount of tugging will untangle him. Nothing to do but tighten the drag and hope the line doesn’t snap.

  Richard reels. Nothing breaks. He dips the net, and the fish is caught.

  It’s a bluegill all right, but not any old bluegill. Richard has just landed the biggest bream he’s ever seen. The world record, if he remembers right, stands at a little over five pounds. This fish isn’t that big, but it’s big enough to look transfigured out of all proportion, demon-possessed. Its forehead is humped, and its stomach bulges, scales like thumbnails. It’s as though someone stuck a bicycle pump in the mouth and inflated the fish. Tie a string to its tail, and you’d have a balloon.

  Bluegill are his favorite fish to catch because they’re always a surprise. They might break the surface green or blue, or leave the water with scales the color of pumpkin skin. The gill plates can be solid or striped, earflaps black or red.

  Richard Starling doesn’t get emotional about much, but he can get misty about fish.

  No one he knows would throw this fish back.

  He throws it back.

  He doesn’t need to eat it. Doesn’t need a picture or a wall mount to remember its size. He stows his rod and pulls the anchor up.

  The gas gauge is approaching E, and the marina isn’t far.

  For as long as Richard’s owned the house on Lake Christopher, Clyde has worked the marina gas pumps, filling boats, and Clyde is there today. He’s tall, back bent with age, and wears plaid long-sleeved button-downs, which he rolls to his elbows, arms speckled by the sun.

  The marina is small, a few dozen docks, a half-dozen boats tied up. The gas pumps are the old bubble-headed kind, their displays spooled like the faces of slot machines. A silver freezer advertises ice. On the west side of the lake, a mighty new marina’s being built. No doubt, it will put Clyde out of business in a matter of years.

  “How’s things, Rich?” Clyde’s the only one who calls him Rich. Just started doing it one day, and Richard never felt compelled to correct him.

  “Things are fine,” he says. “Thanks for asking.”

  Clyde ties him off and moves to the nearest pump. He doesn’t have to ask which octane. He’s been gassing up The Sea Cow for decades, through the lives of three engines, two props, and a reconstructed hull.

  “How’s your family?” Richard asks.

  He’s never met them, but he knows that Clyde has a wife, Nadine, and a daughter, Cece. Cece is Thad’s age. She’s the rebel, the girl run off to Asheville. For a while, Clyde wouldn’t speak of her. Then Cece had a son, and all was forgiven, the way it is when grandkids are involved, or so he’s heard. Richard doesn’t expect to be a grandfather. Neither of his sons have expressed an interest in having kids. And maybe that’s for the best. He can’t quite picture them as fathers, as much as he’d love having grandchildren of his own.

  “Family’s good,” Clyde says. He fits the nozzle into the side of the boat and opens the valve, then seats himself in a battered lawn chair, vinyl straps, once red, now sun-washed pink. “Survived a tornado last year. Took the house, right down to the root cellar.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “Everyone’s okay. Insurance paid up, and the new house is nicer than the first. We lost the F-150. Never had insurance on that. Nadine got the cat and photo albums to the cellar in time. My father’s flag, too. I lost my Purple Heart, though. That one hurts.”

  Richard is of an age where most of his friends served. That he didn’t serve sometimes embarrasses him. Though of all the stories Clyde’s shared over the years, he’s never shared a war story, not once.

  “How’s your girl?” Richard asks.

  “Still in Asheville.”

  Clyde’s never mentioned a husband or boyfriend, or who the child’s father might be, and Richard knows better than to ask.

  “Cece makes clothes now,” Clyde says. “They sell in shops all over town. You wouldn’t believe what a dress sells for these days.”

  “Everything’s getting expensive.”

  Clyde shakes his head. “I’m ashamed. I helped vote that yahoo into office thinking things would change. I feel like a fuckin’—” Clyde winces. “Pardon me. I feel like a chump.”

  Richard says nothing. He’s never picked his friends by how they vote, and he’s in no mood, after last night, to talk politics again.

  “How’s Lisa?” Clyde says. “Cancer stay away?”

  “It did. She’s good, healthy. One year until retirement. I retired last month.”

  Clyde stands, extends his hand, and they shake. The valve clicks, and he pulls the nozzle from the tank. “Retirement. They give you a watch, or what?”

  Besides emeritus status and the standard compensation package, there were no gifts and little fanfare. There was a small reception, cake, a few words from the dean, and pats on the back, a bit of a letdown after so many years of service. Not that he’d expected much. He’d hoped Katrina would be there. He’d hoped to see her one last time.

  “No watch,” he says. “How about you? Nervous about the new marina?”

  “We’ll survive,” Clyde says, but, saying it, he won’t meet Richard’s eye, and Clyde is not a man to speak and look away. He returns the gas hose to the pump. “How are your boys?”

  It’s hard being a genius, harder still being the father of sons who aren’t, another thing Richard knows better than to say aloud. Instead, he says, “The boys are good.”

  They aren’t good. His sons have let him down. He loves them, and it pains him thinking so, but they have. He only wishes he knew where, as a father, he went wrong.

  Clyde gives Richard the price, and Richard pays in cash, telling Clyde to keep the change, just as he has for over thirty years.

  “Hug that grandbaby for me,” Richard says.

  Clyde unhitches the line from the cleat, and the boat rocks, untethered from the dock. “Shame about that boy.”

  “I heard,” Richard says, and leaves it at that.

  “How on earth does a thing like that happen?”

  How? Because drownings happen, thousands a year just in the United States, according to data Richard found last night on his phone. Drownings are more common than even SIDS. No consolation in this, of course, but neither is Lake Christopher somehow cursed. A lake this size, it was bound to happen. It’s a statistical inevitability.

  Clyde places a foot on the side of the boat, ready to push off.

  “Wait,” Richard says.

  Clyde returns his foot to the dock. He pulls the line taut.

  “Tie me off,” Richard says. “Before I go, I want to tell you the story of my daughter. I want to tell you about my little girl.”

  29.

  There’s no bar where the bar is supposed to be. What used to be the bar is now an antiques shop. Outside the shop, a man reads the paper on a bench.

  “Henry moved to Asheville,” the man says, not looking up, and Michael hurries on.

  Two more blocks, two turns, and Michael finds himself beneath a green marquee that reads Winter Wine Bar in red letters. He’s not in the mood for wine, but it will have to do. He’ll have two glasses, maybe three. No more than a bottle. Enough to keep his hands from shaking, but not so much he can’t drive home.

  Inside, chairs huddle empty around tables that Michael passes on his way to the bar.

  “Welcome to Winter,” the bartender says, any conviction his greeting ever had long since sapped by the tedium of the work he does. He smells like cigarettes and a generous dousing of cologne intended, and failing, to cover up the cigarettes. The man’s handlebar mustache hangs limp, unwaxed, and a white apron covers his shirt, so that he looks more like a 1920s barber than a man tending bar.

  The bartender pulls down a glass. The glass catches the light, and he turns it, inspecting it from every angle. The glass is spotless. Still,
the man tugs a white rag from a hook on the wall and runs the rag over the lip of the glass. The rag leaves fibers on the rim, and the bartender lowers the wineglass, a little hairy now, onto the bar.

  Michael doesn’t need to see a wine menu to know the only thing in here that he’ll be able to afford is the house red. He orders a bottle, then asks for nuts.

  “Nuts?” the bartender says.

  “Peanuts?” Michael says. “Cashews?”

  The bartender holds a wine bottle in one hand, a corkscrew in the other. He threads the cork expertly, without looking, which feels show-offy, gratuitous.

  “Something to munch on?” Michael says. “Pretzels? Chips?” Something for the gut. A barrier against the acidity to come.

  “We have a very pleasant baked brie,” the bartender says. “We also have a cheese plate and a fruit plate. Or there’s the combo plate. That’s both.”

  The cork leaves the bottle with a wet pop. The bartender pours a sip of wine into the rag-furred glass, but Michael waves him on until the wine has nearly reached the rim.

  Michael lifts the glass and brings it to his nose. The smell is pungent, over-oaked, too sweet. Fine, then: Don’t think of it as wine. Think of it as an alcohol-delivery system.

  He wants to sip, but something slows him for a moment, then a moment more. It’s a feeling like when you really have to pee. You’ve unzipped your fly. The toilet’s there. The breeze is on your balls, and sweet relief will soon be yours. Still, you savor the moment, the pressure leading up to the release, the exquisite torture of almost. Michael relishes the suspense, then tips the glass and guzzles it.

  His eyes shut. He’s warm all over. He is loved.

  The bartender looks concerned.

  “Don’t be concerned,” Michael says.

  He sets his glass, empty, on the bar, and the bartender refills it. The bartender glances at his forehead, and Michael taps the bandage. He considers breaking out the English accent again, but it’s too late. The man’s already heard his voice.

  “Snakebite,” Michael says.

  The look on the bartender’s face betrays his disbelief.