by Steve Berman
“What a joke.” I said.
Brody shrugged. “What do you expect? The cops are useless. If they want to burn your ass, they’ll follow you around twenty-four seven. If not, you can burn the whole damn town down, and they can’t be bothered.”
“It’s the last night of the fair,” I said. “Demolition derby always gets a little crazy. People get drunk and stupid. They’re probably busy dealing with that.”
“Too bad for Mickey,” Brody said.
“They fought him once, they’ll fight him again. I just have to find another way to get the cops here.”
“How are you going to do that?”
I shrugged. “Stuckey’s is a cop bar. I have to believe my boss will know someone who’ll listen.”
“You’d do that?”
“It’s worth a shot.” I looked at him. “I won’t bring your name into it. I know you don’t want to get into trouble.”
Brody reached out and took my hand. “It might be fun, getting into trouble with you. I am a bad boy, after all.”
I blushed because he probably had read one of Jacksie’s texts to me. And I blushed because his grip felt so warm. I wondered if his fingers could feel my pulse race. “Trust me. I’m an expert at rehabilitating all kinds of lost causes.”
Breakwater in the Summer Dark
L Lark
Part I
Though Cody Simmer does not believe in the monster of Oxwater Lake, he is the fifth to see it and the first to photograph it—an out-of-focus cell phone shot that shows the beast’s back breaking through a layer of summer-thick algae. This happens during his morning row with the kids from Blue Bear cabin. Afterwards they clutch each other on the lake’s bank, pink-faced and screaming, “Did you see it, Cody? Did you see it? Did you see it?”
“No,” he’d replies, pocketing the phone and tying the rowboat to the dock without another word.
*
Cody Simmer is nineteen years old and he is afraid of the dark. He is also afraid of large dogs, old elevators, and the noises that ricochet through his apartment’s stairwell at night.
But darkness is the worst. This is why his heart does not slow until well into the afternoon, when he forces himself to gather his laundry and drag it across the camp to the employee facilities. He is not scared of the lake because of the monster, he tells himself. He is scared because the water is deep and black.
Cody has been away from Oxwater for too long to be able to cope with mysteries.
Harris Webb is sitting cross-legged on top of the camp’s only washing machine, reading a paperback copy of The Phantom Tollbooth. With his teeth buried in the skin of his lower lip, Harris’s expression is ambiguous. He does not move when Cody drags his laundry basket into the room, and shoves three loads’ worth of clothes into the empty machine. Harris licks his finger, turns a page, and stares at the text as if it were revealing some devastating secret about the universe.
Cody starts a wash cycle. The stillness of the room is put to rest by the tidal whirr of the water pumps and the sound of a quarter tumbling against the machine’s walls. Only then does Harris acknowledge Cody with a nod and an impassive smile.
Cody hates when people smile at him, hates the obligation to smile back. He hopes Harris has finally given up trying to talk about what happened last summer.
“My parents said they’re not letting anyone swim or go boating in the lake until the monster is dead,” Harris says. The vibration of the washing machine makes his voice sound as if he is speaking through spinning fan blades.
“That’s crazy. There’s no monster.”
“Heather Cromley says you saw it this morning.”
“Heather Cromley is eight years old.”
“She said you took a picture.”
Cody’s phone remains silent in his pocket. There is no reception at Oxwater, but occasionally he manages to pick up Wi-Fi from the general store two miles down the road. He’s avoided even that indulgence for some time now, unable to cope with the reminder that his friends are enjoying their last summer before college in places where buildings have a thirteenth floor and no one carries acorns in their pocket to ward off ghosts.
Harris unfolds his legs and drops one down against the face of the washing machine. He is composed of more protruding angles and lines than he had been last year.
“I don’t know what I saw,” Cody says. “And it happened too fast. I didn’t get a picture.”
Harris dog-ears his page and tilts his head. The light slanting in from the window casts his face in silhouette, and Cody has to draw it from memory. Harris has a mouth like a frog, wide and jutting, and eyes that approach every object with the same tremulous concern. Harris is eighteen, one year younger than Cody, but his frame is slight and Cody often confuses him for a camper if he has his back turned.
“Well,” Harris says, turning his eyes down to examine his hands. Cody had once felt one of Harris’s hangnails snag in the hairs at the base of his neck, but he hasn’t thought about that for nine months, and he is not going to start dwelling on that now. “Maybe next time.”
There’s not going to be a next time, Cody thinks, because there is no monster, but he feels his throat constrict because he is not entirely sure can believe the lie.
*
Camp Oxwater has been nestled between the base of the Pocono Mountains and the dark expanse of Oxwater Lake for thirty years. The air is thick with the scent of pine sap. Cody can feel it coating his lungs. At night, mosquitoes hum outside his cabin. He imagines breathing them in and the way they would become trapped inside his body, struggling against the muck.
Darcy Webb, Harris’s mother, had been the maid of honor at his parents’ wedding. As a result of this, Cody has spent every summer at Camp Oxwater since the age of eight.
As for Harris, Cody has begun to suspect that he has never left these grounds, even for school. The gulfs in his practical knowledge are frighteningly wide, and three months of each year in Cody’s childhood have been spent chasing after Harris to keep him from wedging knives into electrical sockets or tossing rocks at wasp’s nests.
This is why Cody does not understand Harris’s statement when the boy approaches him the following day.
“Elasmosaurus platyurus,” said Harris.
“God bless you.”
Cody is the leader of Blue Bear cabin; Harris, Red Rabbit. These children are between eight and ten, Oxwater’s youngest campers. Cody knows he has been burdened with this responsibility because of his outward projection of unending patience. Harris—well, he suspects Harris might have trouble communicating with anyone who walked the path of puberty.
Today, Blue Bear and Red Rabbit are scheduled for an arts and crafts activity together. This means that Cody and Harris will proceed to make eighteen macaroni pictures while the campers chase each other throughout the cafeteria, yelping and belching and killing insects in staggering numbers.
“No, Elasmosaurus platyurus,” Harris repeats, adding the last bit of dried pasta to what appears to be a giant alien scaling the side of the Empire State Building. “Otherwise known as a plesiosaurus. Estimated to have gone extinct over sixty-five million years ago. It’s the same dinosaur they suspect the Loch Ness monster to be.”
“You’re joking.”
“You’ve claimed many times I have no sense of humor.”
Cody closes his eyes and thinks of eating Italian ice in Central Park…and of Cynthia Harper, who might finally hook up with him now that she is moving to Boston in the fall. He thinks of how wonderful it will be to sleep in his parent’s eighth-floor apartment, where the risk of being eaten by a coyote in the night is negligible enough to ignore.
“Cody…”
“I heard you. I’ve just chosen not to let this conversation proceed.”
Harris stares at him for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Cody tries and tries not to think of the way Harris’s mouth had been dry and warm, the way their teeth had clicked together, and the way Harris’s neck had smel
led of pine and insect repellent and campfire smoke.
*
That week the monster is sighted for the sixth, seventh, and eighth time, though never more than a curved spine breaching the water’s surface or the glimpse of an elongated neck in the distance. At night, Cody stares at the mass of gray skin captured by his cell phone camera with his finger hovering over the delete button.
It could have been anything, really, he tells himself. Anything.
But the campers are no longer allowed within forty feet of Oxwater Lake, and yesterday a news van arrived at the camp’s entrance. Harris met them at the gate, waving violently, and gave the reporter an enthusiastic tour, ending at Oxwater Lake. Cody had been there when they’d arrived, surrounded by Blue Bear kids who’d begged to go watch the newscast.
“My research has led me to believe that the monster may in fact be the last living species of dinosaur, making it a discovery of great scientific importance,” Harris says to the cameras. Both the children and reporters stare at him as if he were the sole source of stability in a rapidly tipping world.
“If I am correct, we have little to worry about. They have never been known to consume human prey and subsist primarily on small fish and cephalopods.”
Later, Harris flops unto the ground next to him uninvited, hair green from the reflection of sunlight on the grass. Cody expects him to speak, but Harris presses his cheek against the soil and inhales. Cody watches his ribs expand and contract, but he’s not looking anywhere else, not ever again. Around them, the babble of the children is constant and steady.
Cody misses his early summers at Oxwater—wading shin-deep in the frog ponds and plucking bees from Harris’s shoulders. Those days are gone now and must remain gone. Maybe he should write a letter to his parents, complain about the prehistoric animal rearing up out of the black water, ask to go back to New York, and then maybe Cynthia will let him fuck her, and that will forever dispel the memory of wanting to reach across his sleeping bag and move Harris’s hair out of his ears.
“I’m so happy,” Harris said finally, and knowing Cody will not respond, adds, “About the monster.”
“You’re crazy.”
“No,” Harris says, into the earth. “I’m just not afraid.”
*
Cody cannot trust his own memories of The Incident last year. They are uncomfortable but not unpleasant. He wants so badly to wince and cringe and retch dryly into the camp’s portable toilets, but he can’t.
It had happened like this: Harris was chopping vegetables in the mess hall, Cody watching over him. Harris’s cooking privileges had recently been reinstated after a two-year period of forced abstinence following an incident known as The Great Oxwater Kitchen Fire. Now they were alone and Cody was eyeing the knife because Harris’s fingers seemed too relaxed to hold a pencil. The knife tipped and wobbled over the cutting board, but it was impossible to tell the moment Harris actually cut himself.
“Cody,” Harris said. He was holding the wrist of his right hand. There was a slim cut on his index finger, but his expression seemed to register no pain. He eyed the wound skeptically, as if he had never considered this issue to be within the realm of possibility.
“Idiot,” Cody said, but didn’t mean it. He fetched the first aid kit from the Blue Bear cabin and bandaged Harris’s finger. Blood did not bother him. Next year, he would graduate from high school and study biology at Columbia, then medical school, and then he would never see Harris or his bleeding finger again.
“This next year is my last,” he said, without being sure why.
“Yes,” Harris continued, watching Cody’s hands over his own.
“What are you going to do, Harris? You can’t stay here forever.”
Harris blinked. Cody watched the words DOES NOT COMPUTE flash across Harris’s eyes.
“This is my home.”
Cody taped the gauze in place and drew back, but Harris’s eyes did not leave the place where their hands had been joined.
“Why don’t you go to school? You’re smart, sometimes. You can get a job. You can do anything you want.”
“Anything I want,” Harris repeated, his voice flat. His attention shifted to the half-sliced tomato on the countertop. “I like it here.”
Cody sighed, picked up the discarded knife, and began slicing.
“I do too, but this isn’t real life.”
By now, Cody knew that he was Harris’s only link to the world beyond. Every year Cody brought pictures and playbills, Japanese candy, American comic books, cell phones, and MP3 players, and loved the way Harris’s eyes widened in dumbfounded amazement.
“I like it when you’re here,” Harris said, disregarding Cody’s second statement. He reached out and dabbed up an eyelash from Cody’s cheek.
Cody’s hand froze mid-motion.
“I like you,” Harris said again, his bandaged finger scratching Cody’s forearm. After a moment, he pressed the digit into the soft crook of Cody’s elbow and left it there. Cody watched his arm lean into Harris’s touch, until the pressure of his finger on Cody’s veins was too much and his fingertips went slack.
The knife clattered to the countertop. Harris moved closer, and their knees knocked together. It was painful. Cody wanted to move away, but didn’t. A group of older campers approached the mess hall and then continued along the path toward Oxwater Lake. When their voices faded, Harris took another step forward.
“Harris,” Cody said. “I don’t know…what—”
Perhaps it was because Harris had never had any friends aside from Cody, or that he’d never experienced the awkward humiliation of grade school. Maybe he was just so socially crippled that he didn’t know to be nervous. Harris reached out, took Cody by the collar, and pulled him in. In the end, Cody could not know who closed the distance between them, only that Harris tasted like honey graham crackers.
It was nothing like kissing Cynthia Harper…or any of the girls from high school, drunk and eager and sloppy. It was not pleasant at first. In fact, it hurt. Harris’s teeth scraped across the dry skin of his lower lip, and Cody was sure the sharp edge of the bandage had nicked his cheek.
Harris drew back, as if he had only just realized what was happening, but this time Cody was sure he was the one who lurched forward, recapturing Harris’s mouth mid-word. He’d never thought about Harris like this, never, even when they’d spent hours a day swimming naked in the canals that lead to Oxwater Lake, but now that it was happening, it seemed natural.
Cody and Harris, together. Like they’d always been.
“No,” Cody said, although he wasn’t sure why, since this felt good, and Harris’s fingers had moved to his lower back and were pressing in with a force that was more than enough to remind Cody that he was not making out with a girl. “Stop.”
Harris did, and pulled back, his mouth wet and downturned. He did not speak, but inhaled as if about to begin a sentence. Cody waited, realizing his hands were still bobbing in the air where he had once been clutching Harris’s ribs, but he couldn’t drop them now without breaking the terrible stillness that stood between what had just happened and its backlash, crouched and ready in the future.
He was unable to suppress the sigh of relief that escaped his mouth when Harris turned away.
“I should have figured,” the other boy muttered, “Sorry.”
He did not have the chance to respond, and three days later, he was on a train to Manhattan, where he could forget about Harris’s warmth beneath the cold shadows of Fifth Avenue.
*
The next day the newscasters are back because the remains of an eight-foot gar washed up on the shore of Lake Oxwater, and the wounds on its side look exactly like they were made by row after row of giant teeth. Cody only gets to see the fish because Harris wakes him up by tapping frantically on the glass of his cabin at six in the morning.
Cody hates waking up before sunrise. Pre-morning darkness is the worst; in the city, they have gurgling late-night buses, and sirens, and taxi
s vying for parking space, but here, there is nothing but Harris’s arrhythmic breathing.
“You have to see—I just want you to see, so that you…” Harris says, beckoning Cody along. “I want you to believe me.”
Cody is struck with a rush of misplaced sympathy, but he’s not about to let Harris know that, especially not when he’s running on four hours of sleep and he’s supposed to take Blue Bear hiking up Mount Oxwater in two hours. The thought of the altitude makes him dizzy. Cody is not entirely afraid of heights, but he used to dream of the mountains, bending forward toward the camp, impossibly large.
Cody smells the fish before he sees it. He feels his stomach seize, but Harris seems unperturbed, so he is too embarrassed to voice his discomfort.
The fish is tipped on its side, mouth open. The rising sun hits its scales at an angle, and Cody is temporarily blinded. He stumbles and reaches out to grasp Harris by the forearm. Harris does not pull away, but continues walking, oblivious.
“Anything could have done that,” Cody whispers. He hasn’t yet let go of Harris’s arm, but the movement would be too obvious now. They remain connected, watching two men in lab coats haul the fish unto a hospital stretcher. The mattress sags under its weight; Cody had not seen the chunk missing from its torso until now.
“They say it was bitten by something much bigger than it is,” Harris says, and bends his elbow so that Cody’s finger slides into the crook and stays there. Harris does not seem to notice. His eyes are exuberant. “It’s amazing.”
This time, Cody does not argue.
*
Cody masturbates unenthusiastically, thighs sore from the day’s earlier hike up the mountain. Then he sleeps. Next to him, his uncharged cell phone sits on the nightstand.
He dreams. At first, about New York City, feeling claustrophobic beneath the shadows that fall on his back and shoulders. He dreams about Cynthia Harper’s tits, and the frozen lemonade kiosks in Central Park, and then about Lake Oxwater.
In the dream, he is stumbling down the fishing pier with Harris’s hand clutching the back of his shirt. He dreams about Harris pressing into him over the black water, Harris’s breath warm on the skin behind Cody’s ear. The other boy’s face is dark. The shadows beneath his brow and chin seem too heavy. Cody leans in, searching for a hint of reflected light in Harris’s eyes, but finds none. It’s so unsettling that it makes the moment Harris lurches forward and pushes his mouth against Cody’s seem mundane in comparison.