The Banks of Certain Rivers

by Harrison, Jon

  “Girls!” he shouted. “Auxiliary gym! Ten minutes! See you there!” He clapped his hands again—one, two, three times—and ran off.

  Most of the team followed Mr. Hammil in a gossipy shuffle, and I hung back to wait for a chance to chat with Cassie while she loaded the cooler back into her car. Amy Vandekemp stayed behind too, looking like she wanted to have a word with me as well. But I wanted to talk to Cassie alone, so I started to suggest to Amy how beneficial weight training might be for a developing runner like herself. Before I really had a chance to say anything, though, a cloud came over us from the other side of the parking lot: a sudden aggression, a barking shout, from the group of boys whom I’d mostly forgotten. They’d circled up around a scuffling pair, or maybe it was three of them; in any event, their lusty chant of “Fight! Fight! Fight!” showed they’d obviously forgotten about me too.

  “Guys!” I shouted, taking off in a run toward the little mob scene. “Hey! Hey!” It took a couple long seconds to cross the lot, and the circle parted for my entry just as one of the kids—a chubby, freckled little punk—lifted himself from the adversary he’d been pinning to the pavement. The freckled kid merged into the bunch, and I held up my hands. “Let’s cool it down,” I said, turning to see them all, keeping my voice level. “Bring it down a notch. Okay?” They were all underclassmen, and I didn’t recognize a single one. Their expressions ranged between frustration at interrupted bloodlust to worry that they were somehow in serious trouble. None of them seemed very eager to talk.

  “So?” I asked. “What’s going on?” I knew about scuffles; they weren’t in any trouble. I’d make them think they were, at least for a little bit, then send them off with a warning.

  One of them started to speak, but stopped. “What’s that?” I asked. Nothing. “Nobody wants to tell me what’s up?” They mostly stared at their shoes, except for the one on the ground: he looked up at me, panting, all spindly limbs and pimples with a torn shirt and a dusty scrape on his forehead. I took a step forward, grabbed him by his shirt, and hoisted him up to his feet. He twitched like he wanted to scurry away, but I kept him in place with my hands on a pair of bony shoulders that lifted and dropped as he worked to catch his breath.

  “Guys,” I tried again, “I need to know what—”

  “Tater’s a pussy, that’s what,” came a sneering, unidentifiable voice from the circle, followed by sneering laughter: they were all laughing. And with this, the kid I held fast with my hands—presumably Tater, the pussy in question—began to shake with fury before spastically windmilling his arms as he sought to escape my grasp. Watch the elbow. Watch the elbow! I didn’t let go quickly enough, but I watched the whole time, and even though I ducked to the side….

  Pow.

  That’s what I recall. Like dreams and real life, potential energy becomes kinetic. Order is followed by chaos. And if anybody should understand how one crumbles into the other, it’s me.

  From: xc.coach.kaz@gmail.com

  To:w.kazenzakis@gmail.com

  Sent: September 7, 12:43 pm

  Subject:gchat

  _____________________________

  Wendy -

  So, fourth period lunch, and I’m hiding out in the gym office because Beth Coolidge thinks somehow I’m willing to volunteer to construct a homecoming float for her this year. I’m not, so I’m avoiding her by concealing myself in this office with no computer. Negative side: it stinks in here. Positive side: I’m getting good practice typing on the phone with my thumb.

  If I can sneak out to the practice fields after seventh period this afternoon without Coolidge seeing me, I’m home free.

  A story for you: the district computer guy was fixing something in my room today and he asked me if I knew about the chat thing built into gmail. He opened it so I could check it out, and I nearly (no joke) fell out of my chair when the contact list popped up with your name at the top. Your status was “offline,” but still, it was a big surprise to see you there.

  -Neil

  CHAPTER TWO

  Feet pound behind me, more than one pair; all cuckoos and stars have fluttered away. The foot sound is accompanied by Cassie Jennings’ voice. “Mr. K!” she calls. “Mr. K!”

  The boys are all gone, scurried off to who knows where, and suddenly I’m unsure if they were ever there in the first place and what the hell just happened here? Something’s happened, though: the blood on my fingertips when I touch my hand to my face is proof, as is the jab of pain in my mouth and the Tilt-A-Whirl spin that the parking lot takes when I make an effort to get up. I slump back down and remain seated, and turn my gaze back to that dandelion wilting between my feet. Poor guy, is all I can manage to think.

  “What happened? Oh my God, his face.”

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Seriously.” The stars have cleared from my vision, but my upper lip has begun to throb in a way I imagine to be visible, like a hammer-banged thumb in an old cartoon. I check to make sure that my front teeth are still firmly planted in my gums, first with my tongue and then with my fingers. Everything is where it belongs. Cassie and Amy Vandekemp stand over me, and I shoo their hands away when they try to help me to my feet.

  “Come on, Mr. K.,” Amy says. “Stand up.”

  “I’m fine,” I repeat, as if a second time will make it true. I rise, and the girls hold out their hands like they’re expecting me to topple. The world has stopped spinning, but the looks on their faces might be the most unsettling thing of all.

  “Your face is really bleeding.”

  “Who were those losers?”

  “There’s ice in the cooler….”

  We walk back to Cassie’s car, the three of us, and even though I feel perfectly steady on my feet my two star runners look ready to catch me any moment.

  “I mean, girls, come on,” I say thickly through my fattening lip. “I’ve taken shots before. Harder than…it’s nothing.” Their lack of response suggests I’ve only thought this, and not actually managed to speak it out loud. “I’m okay.”

  “Sure,” Cassie says. We’re back at her car, and I take a seat on the rear bumper as she digs through the detritus covering her back seat. “I’ve got a bag somewhere.”

  Amy stands back a bit with her arms crossed, peering over in the direction of the teachers’ parking lot by the school. “Where’s your car, Mr. K.?”

  “Not here. I was running home tonight.” This has been my routine ever since Chris has been old enough to drive: catch a ride to school with him in the mornings, and have an easy, head-clearing run home at the end of the day. It’s only a little more than three miles, and with the good weather I’ve been able to do it every night so far since school started.

  “Can you run with your face like that?” Cassie asks. She hands me a crumply plastic grocery bag with a handful of ice cubes inside. The whole mess is wrapped with now-soggy paper napkins, and when I press it to my face some icy water dribbles down my front and makes me jump.

  “I’ll find a ride,” I say, glancing down at my wet and blood-spotted running shirt.

  “Sorry,” Cassie says, wincing at the sight of the dark mess on my chest, before hesitantly adding: “I could drive you home?” She chews on the concept for a moment, struck by a flash of proto-maturity, before stating it again with a little more resolve. “I’ll drive you home.”

  “Amy has to come,” I say, muffled by the bag, and the two girls look at each other. “Can you get her home after you drop me off?”

  “What do you mean, ‘Amy has to come’?”

  “I mean, it’s a district policy thing. You can’t have a teacher and student alone—”

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever, but there’s bird crap on her shirt.”

  “What?” Amy says, trying to look over her own shoulder.

  “I don’t want bird crap on my car seat!”

  “Cassie,” I say. “Have you noticed the condition of your car’s interior recently?”

  “It’s probably carrying some disease.”

 
; “Shut up, Cassie,” Amy says softly, but her tone more than makes up for any lack of volume. “Seriously. Shut up.” Then Amy Vandekemp does something that actually makes Cassie’s mouth fall open: she takes off her shirt, turns it inside out, and puts it back on again, avian stain and all, before I even have a chance to look away. “Let’s go. I need to stop at my locker on the way out.” Then she takes the passenger seat up front, closing the door behind her with a suitably dramatic slam. I bet her arms are crossed in there too. Cassie looks at me and nods like nothing just happened.

  “Amy and I will take you home,” she says, smiling like it was her plan all along.

  On the old highway north of town, past the scrub grass and summer houses on the Lake Michigan shoreline, a sharp turn inland marks the southern end of the Olsson Dune Orchard complex. In 1924 my wife’s paternal grandfather, a very tall Dane named Nils Olsson, bought eighty-nine lakefront acres bounded by the Little Jib River to the north and the highway to the sawmill to the south, where he grew sweet cherries for nearly forty years before turning it over to my father-in-law, Dick, in the early sixties. Dick was the youngest (and tallest) of the three Olsson sons, and the only one interested in taking over the farm; he ran it—profitably, I should add—right up until the heart attack that killed him. That was nine years ago. Since then, the working part of the farm has been leased out to some small-time operators; it’s still mostly cherries, but a couple of guys from Chicago have started making some almost-palatable wines from a vineyard they put in on the southeast corner of the property not long after Dick passed away.

  A couple guys from Chicago. They all seem to be coming up from Chicago lately, buying old houses, fixing things up, tearing things down. Building condos and tee shirt shops. There are deals to be had, and vineyards to be put in. A lot of my friends—self-identified “locals” all—feign anger at the changes, resentment toward the new development and remodeling projects. I don’t mind it so much. I know they don’t either. It’s easy enough to knock the tourists, but things have really been looking up in town; shops and restaurants are busy and the people who own them are doing well. People who own property are doing very well. Let them fix up the town, I say. Look at how much better off we are than everyone else downstate. This place—the pinky finger of the mitten-shaped peninsula I call home—is one bright spot in a generally dismal state economy. Let them come up and remodel all they want.

  Besides, on the tip of that little finger, we’ve got the orchard. They can build all around us, but my wife’s family’s orchard is just one of those immutable things that will always be.

  Rolling along over the Old Sawmill Highway, the interior of Cassie’s car goes dark as we veer eastward away from the lake and the trees along the road close over us. Textbooks with shattered bindings mingle with crumpled papers down around my feet, and on the seat next to my backpack (Amy grabbed it for me when she went in to get her things) there’s a polyester work uniform of some sort wadded up in a pile. I’m thinking up a million different explanations for why the engraved nametag on top of the clothes says “CARRIE” instead of “CASSIE,” but I don’t ask why, because asking would mean having to listen to an answer, and my head hurts enough already.

  The girls have been thankfully quiet for the duration of the ride, as if they sense the headache blossoming in my frontal lobes. Amy has the window open, which is fine, welcome even, and they’ve mercifully kept the stereo off. I tell Cassie to slow down as we approach my driveway, and direct her to make the turn. The jolt as the car comes off the pavement onto gravel makes me smack my face with the ice bag, sending a new trickle of cold down my front and a zing of pain up through my teeth.

  I’ll be fine. I will.

  As we roll up the drive, I smile—reflexively, if painfully—when I see Lauren Downey’s brand-new Prius parked in front of my mother-in-law’s garage. I didn’t think she worked on Fridays, but, as the most senior of Carol’s in-home caregivers, she can call her own shots, scheduling-wise.

  “Nice car, Mr. K.,” Cassie says, nodding to the bright red Toyota.

  “Not mine. My place is over there. Keep going past these trees.”

  We roll through the leafy shade into a clearing with my house at the center. It’s low and gray, single-storied and tidy with white trim and a deck that wraps from the front to the back where I sit many evenings to watch the sun drop behind the dunes. My home. I’m perplexed for a moment by the sight of a large, shrink-wrapped dark object strapped to a wooden shipping pallet in front of my garage door; as Cassie rolls to a halt in front of it I realize it’s the new fireplace I ordered back in May. On the plastic wrapping, in coarse block letters, someone has scrawled:

  N. KAZENZAKIS, PORT MANITOU, MI.

  This was supposed to have been delivered while I was home so I’d have some help bringing it inside, but what the hell, I’ve waited long enough. At least it’s finally here.

  I clamber out of the backseat as soon as the car stops and hold the sopping ice bag away from me, letting it drip on the ground as I grab my pack. Cassie leans over to talk through Amy’s open window.

  “You can just throw that back in on the floor,” she says. “I’ll take care of it later.”

  “I’ll put it in my trash,” I say. It’s possible that the introduction of moisture could encourage the growth of some horrible life form in there. “Thanks for the ride.”

  The girls drive off, the sound of gravel beneath tires giving way to the sawing drone of insects and a far-off lawnmower. I drop my pack and the ice bag to the ground next to the pallet, and lean my hip into the fireplace to gauge its weight for moving. The substantial mass does not budge.

  My house seems dark and stuffy inside, and I leave the front door open behind me to encourage the circulation of fresh air. It smells of sawdust and new construction, plaster and cool stone, the evidence of my perpetual remodeling project. A knotty oak floor laid down last spring. An empty slate hearth Chris and I built last winter. How we’ll manage to shoehorn the fireplace in there I’m not sure, but I’ll worry about it later.

  Back at the altar of my bathroom mirror my lip doesn’t look as bad as I’d imagined it would. A little swollen, fuller than usual, but pushed out from beneath by my tongue the split in my flesh looks nothing more than superficial. I draw my bloody running shirt over my head and drop it into the sink under cold running water, and bring my hands to the sides of my face, blinking as I press my fingertips in circles against my temples. Here I am. Aside from a fattened lip, I haven’t at all changed since this morning, the last time I looked over myself. Complexion and nose: faux-Greek and stately. Eyes: green as they’ve always been. Hair is still short, still no less gray and still suitably dense. My shirtless torso is neither bulky, nor scrawny, nor fat, just like the rest of me. A lifetime of running has been pretty good for that.

  At thirty-nine years old, I could be seeing something much worse, I suppose.

  I grab a clean shirt and change into some jeans, and down a couple Advil with a big glass of water in the kitchen (the one part of our home that feels decidedly complete) before walking across the field to check on my mother-in-law and catch Lauren before she takes off for the day. It’s still breezy and warm outside, but the dry leaves whirling on the old concrete barn slab—now a basketball court for my son—say summer is just about finished.

  I let myself into Carol’s house through the garage. Lauren’s working on something in the laundry room, and she barely glances up when I say hello.

  “Are you home early?” she asks, and when she finally looks to me for a reply, she lets out a tiny shriek. “Oh God, Neil, what happened to you?” Lauren covers her mouth with her hand, maybe in shock, or maybe because she’s trying to conceal laughter. She reaches for my face, and I jump back.

  “Don’t touch it!”

  “Don’t be a baby. Come on, stand still. I’m not going to hurt you! Big baby.” She manipulates my lip, smirking the whole time, and it’s not so bad. She is a Registered Nurse, after all. A p
rofessional. “Oh, you’re fine. Put ice on it when you’re back at your house.” She takes my hand. “Really, what happened? Let’s go show Carol.”

  “Broke up a fight. Nothing. Stupid. Which Carol do we have today?”

  “Fairly lucid Carol. But it’s about 1964.”

  My seventy-six year-old mother-in-law was in fine shape and mentally sharp right up until two winters ago when she slipped on some ice on New Year’s Day and broke her left shoulder blade. The fracture itself shouldn’t have been such a problem, but the infection she picked up in the hospital sure was, and the pneumonia that settled into her lungs after that really was. She’s been on so many different medications since then I can’t even keep track; some make her weak, while others leave her confused or just not there. Most of the time she’s hardly the same person anymore. There are glimmers of clarity once in a while; we wait for them and encourage them, and when they’re slow in coming the revenue trickling in each year from the orchard is enough to pay the nurses who come and keep her going until she perks back up again.

  It’s a shame, her decline, because she was a lot of fun and we always got along well. I really loved her. I mean, of course I still do. But it’s different now.