by Dennis Bock
“You a smart boy?”
I nodded. “But I’m not very good with my hands.”
“Hold this.” He handed me a trowel. “Make so.” He started smoothing plaster along the north wall of the deep end. I watched him for a minute. He started whistling. Then he stopped and turned to me. “Ja?”
I stooped over, took some plaster onto my trowel and stepped up to the nearest wall. I remembered what Monika had said about him rubbing off on me. But he was my mother’s brother. What harm? How would you want him to treat the both of you in his country? my mother had asked us in the car on the way to the airport to pick them up.
“You watch too much TV,” he said.
I was spreading the plaster in broad arcs. I stopped and turned around. “The Olympics are important,” I said. “It’s the Family of Nations.”
“Okay,” he said, “get lost.”
On a Saturday into the fourth week of the visit—during which not an ounce of rain had fallen from the sky—my mother told us that she’d had enough. We were going to Kelso, she said. We were going to find water. We were going to bathe in clean cool water.
The artificial lake is the main attraction at the Kelso Conservation Area. There are two beaches on the south shore, divided by a grassy hill on top of which sits a parking lot and, on the opposite slope, the outfitters where my father and I had, on a couple of occasions, rented a sailboat. No matter how hard the sun comes down on you there, no matter which shore you stand on, you can always hear the traffic going by on the 401 just beyond the poplar and spruce trees on the north hill. There are rainbow in the lake, too, but I’d never caught anything other than rock bass and sunfish, though I’d always wanted to catch a trout. That Saturday I brought my fishing rod along with me, just in case.
After we got organized in the parking lot, unloaded the picnic baskets and towels and umbrella and magazines and my fishing rod, the six of us walked down the wooden stairs to the beach like three distinct couples. Monika, her large floppy sunhat flapping like a bird, walked a step ahead of her husband. He looked sullen. He hadn’t spoken in the car the whole way up. My mother seemed nervous. She swung the picnic basket about grandly from hand to hand, distracting attention from something. I thought maybe she was thinking about her brother. Then I wondered if it was the memory of last summer that was bothering her, if she was worried about my father. If this trip to water would trigger the memory of his mother’s drowning. But my father joked with Ruby and me as we walked down the wooden stairs. On the way here he’d worn a pair of black sunglasses. Ruby said he looked like a gangster. Halfway down the stairs he turned around to us, his rolled-up towel hidden clumsily under his baggy summer shirt like a bag of money, and said in a terrible Italian accent, “Meester Capone wantsa you to doa littlea favore fora la Familia,” and Ruby laughed and jumped up for his glasses like a little barking dog. I carried the rod and tackle and the second lunch basket. We’d all changed into our bathing suits at home.
We found an empty stretch of sand at the far end of the first beach, close to an old man and woman. Someone’s grandparents, I imagined. But they were alone. No kids. No grandchildren. Their loose skin covered their bodies like a translucent wrap. My father and I smoothed out the hot sand with our bare feet. We laid out our towels side by side, six in a row like the stained-glass windows of a church. We peeled off our street clothes, settled down, and waited to get hot enough to go in. I sat down beside Monika. Ruby went down to the water and waded in up to her knees to check the temperature.
Monika’s legs stretched out beside me. She was wearing a bikini. Her long brown hair shone in the sun. My mother always wore a one-piece. No mothers on the beach wore bikinis. No other women had long hair. Monika had never had a baby. Her stomach was flat and her legs were still slender. She was twirling a lock of hair between two fingers, eyes closed. Her right knee was raised slightly in the air, her breasts pulling apart from the centre of her chest in a way that made me want to keep looking.
“Have you caught fish in here?” she said without opening her eyes.
“Some,” I said. I saw my uncle watching me over the rim of his sunglasses. I turned away and faced the lake.
There were a lot of people swimming, splashing around on inflatable mattresses and dinghies. I got up and walked alone along the edge of the water but I couldn’t get Monika out of my head. I wondered if Günter had seen what I was thinking. I watched the red and green sailboats out on the lake, their white hulls pulled up on the wind, shining against the water. They picked up speed and skimmed across the small lake, lowered because of the drought, and then, trapped, tacked back against the wind. I tried thinking about sailing, about the fishing I would do later that afternoon, about gymnastics. I tried to think about the Olympics. But Monika kept coming back to me. I entered the shade of the woods and leaned my back against an elm and looked for Monika’s pink skin in the crowd in the distance. I waited under an overhanging branch hoping, impossibly, that she’d come to me. I hoped she’d leave my uncle and join me. I put my hand down the front of my bathing suit and conjured the sight of Monika in the lawn chair, her long legs crossed like I thought only movie stars crossed their legs, the glass of wine hanging low to the ground before she raised it to her red lips. I closed my eyes and saw her on the beach in her bikini, her breasts pulling away from her, one towards me, the other off on its own, its hard dark eye staring down a lucky admirer. I cleaned my hands on the grass at the base of the elm, then moved out from the shade of the trees. The warmth of the sun spread over my back. In the distance I saw my aunt take my sister by the hand and lead her over the sand to the water. They both bellyflopped once they were up to their thighs, still holding hands, and came up a moment later in a white froth. I was still trembling. My underarms were drenched. Everybody was in the water except my uncle and me. My father called when he saw me and waved for me to come in. Uncle Günter sat watching all alone up on the beach, his sunglasses pulled up over his face. I wondered if he knew what I’d just done.
After lunch I took my fishing rod and tackle to the other end of the lake and fished the small stream that fed the reservoir. From there I could see the two beaches stretching out over the opposite shoreline, the hill rising between them like a broad nose. With my hands I dug up some worms, put them in the small plastic container I kept in my tackle box, and slid the first worm along a size-fourteen hook. I threw it out into a pool and let the worm sink to the bottom. I caught a trout for the first time in my life. Slick and spotted, he was beautiful. I killed him with my penknife and dropped him into a plastic bag. He wasn’t a prize, but he was big enough to keep. In an hour I caught three more pan-size rainbows. Before leaving the stream I rinsed the blood off the fish. I carried the plastic bag in my left hand as I walked back to the beach. It thumped against my thigh with every step. By the time I got back a little puddle of blood had formed in the heavier corner of the bag.
When I held it up for everyone to see, Ruby made silly noises and plugged her nose. My mother peered down over the lip of stretched plastic. I told my father what I’d used, what part of the stream I’d fished, how each fish had hit. With a finger under the gill, I scooped up the biggest trout and held him in the air. Monika leaned on an elbow. I described how I’d moved each one to the top of the pool and enticed them to jump by lifting the tip of the rod against the sky. The old couple listened to my story from the next set of beach towels. My mother emptied out what was left in the cooler, a bit more egg salad and some juice, and laid out the trout side by side. I looked at the grandparents again after she closed the lid. The man was rubbing lotion onto his wife’s shoulders. I watched how he warmed the cream in his large hands before spreading it over her skin. She faced the water. Her head moving gently with his rubbing motion. That’s when I saw the numbers tattooed like dark crawling ants into the loose white skin of his forearm.
My mother sat in the shade of the umbrella. She was flipping
through a magazine with Ruby, the one she always had lying around, Pattern & Design, pointing out the dresses and sweaters she wanted to make for her for the fall. Monika was still in the sun. She was working on the last of the wine from lunch. After the fish went into the icebox she’d stretched out on her back. There was a line of sweat in the slight crease of her abdomen.
“The wind’s good, Peter,” my father said. “What do you say?”
I grabbed my shirt and we started for the stairwell. But my heart sank when I heard Günter’s rushed footsteps coming up behind us in the parking lot. I wanted my father to say that there wouldn’t be enough room in the sailboat, which wouldn’t have been stretching the truth that much. But I knew he wouldn’t. Maybe he thought Uncle Günter was coming around. Maybe he was coming out of the brooding that had possessed him since he arrived because they were leaving soon. Maybe he was making it up to us.
My father put down the deposit and left his driver’s licence with the man at the desk. We got number 45, a blue two-man Laser. Although I knew there’d be no problem with three people, I wanted the man at the desk to say that one of us would have to sit it out. New regulations on crowding. Even if it was me. But he only nodded his head and smiled. He helped my uncle and my father lift the boat off the racks. They carried it over the gravel driveway and nosed it into the lake. I followed behind with the life jackets and tossed them into the cockpit.
“Let’s see if we can break the sound barrier today,” my father said once we got started. We began slowly, cutting through the water, tacking our way out of the shallow bay. There were other boats in the middle of the lake, small, no other blue ones except ours, different colours cutting across the water like coloured shark fins. As we made our way to tap into the stream of wind that swept across the middle of the lake, I noticed that Günter wasn’t comfortable out here. In the sailboat or on the water, I couldn’t tell. But I knew right off that he didn’t know anything about sailing. He hadn’t come swimming with the rest of us, either. But he followed my father’s instructions without questioning—where to sit, how to move with the boat. He tried to show interest by asking after the boat’s mechanics, pointing to the jib and boom and knocking his knuckles against the top of the centreboard. I wondered why he was out with us.
Once we got to the middle of the lake I saw he needed to sit quietly for a moment and get his bearings. My father was at the tiller, the mainsheet in his left hand. I was at the bow. I knew how to sail, but it was my father’s passion and I never insisted on taking over the reins. Anything to do with water my father loved and I wondered at how terrible it was that it should kill his mother the way it had. He’d offered me the tiller a couple of times before we got out to open water, but I was happy to sit up at the bow and watch him work the boat. He was relaxed and smiling, talking loudly against the wind. He’d told me stories about winning this and that cup when he was young and sailed competitively for big prizes on lakes with wonderful names like Ammersee and Konigsee, the mysterious mountain lakes of Bavaria, close to Austria and Italy. He’d told me stories of the great yachtsmen he’d met at the Rome Olympics, where he’d finished fifth in the Dragon class.
He pulled us in as close to shore as we could get without crossing the buoys that marked off the swimmers’ area to make a pass by Monika, Ruby, and my mother. We waved when they saw us, and Ruby stood and jumped up and down and cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled something I couldn’t make out. Monika hoisted her glass above her head and held it there like the Statue of Liberty. We jumped over some small water as we veered full and by out to the middle of the lake. I dragged my hand under the waves, watching my fingers turn pale yellow and then dark like a fish. My hair blew around my face. I looked over my shoulder and saw Günter was smiling now. I heard the ghost of their voices in the wind. The hard German consonants snapping back and forth between them. The gold-medal count, the empty pool, my uncle and Monika—it was all forgotten now with the feeling of water spraying up against my face. I waved to another Laser skipping by off our port side. A red-and-yellow sun stitched into its sail. The air was hot, even with the wind on us and the misting spray coming up off the bow.
As we approached the end of the lake where I’d caught my fish, I pointed to the cove to show my father and he suddenly, unexpectedly tacked to starboard and I went over the side. I didn’t have my life preserver on. I saw the yellow-black rocks come up quick against me. I was about to call out, “Trout heaven, full steam ahead!” but my mouth was spreading with lake water and I was sinking. The thought of my grandmother washed over my eyes. Pulled under by the weight of her wedding dress, she must have seen the same things I was seeing now, I thought. The weeds and rocks, a lone fish startled by this underwater intrusion. But before I had time to sink deeper a large scaly hand descended from above and grabbed me by my right arm and pulled me back into air. I breathed. It pulled me up and laid me across the side of the boat. The sail dropped. I started hacking up skunky water from my lungs and spitting up over the edge of the boat. I turned and saw my uncle looking over me, his entire upper body black with water, his hair dripping. My father was still holding fast the tiller, though we were barely moving now. His face was white and stiff with the same look of terror he’d worn the day his mother disappeared into Sturgeon Lake. Saved by my uncle, I thought. The plasterer.
I was okay by the time we got back to the beach. I’d sunk. I’d swallowed some water. That was it. My father had come close to seeing his son follow in the watery path of his mother. But Günter had saved my life. On the way home I leaned forward in the back seat of the car with my hand resting on my father’s shoulder the whole way. He’d told my mother, but downplayed the accident. She knew I’d fallen in. I told her I’d had my life jacket on. I owed Günter one. China hadn’t won a single medal so far. But in their culture, I knew my life was his now.
Over the next two days Ruby and I circled the pool as our uncle worked, so expectant that we forgot about the Games entirely. He finished the job two days before my birthday, three days before they were to catch their plane back to Munich. The blue paint he’d finished with needed twenty-four hours to dry. I counted on the clock to the exact minute I could turn on the hose, desperate for water in my own backyard. I was counting on an Indian summer. It was already September. Ruby and I had been back in school three days. My father had said it didn’t make sense filling the pool this time of year. I knew he was right when he told me that, at best, we’d only get a couple of weeks’ use out of it. It wouldn’t be worth the chemicals we’d have to pour in. But I played up the fact that I was turning fourteen in a couple of days. I’d never had a birthday without a swim in the pool. It was a family tradition, I said. But I could tell he wanted to see if all the work Uncle Günter had put in down there had paid off.
I turned on the hose the night before my birthday. The pool was half full by morning. That afternoon we prepared my trout on the barbecue. We’d cleaned them and put them in the freezer the night we got home from the lake, because nobody had felt like cooking. We ate hamburgers along with the fish and, for dessert, an apple crisp with fourteen blue and red candles stuck in the top. I made a wish and blew once as hard as I could. The flames lowered like sails under a hard wind, tipped, and drowned in a lake of brown sugar. But one remained upright. I licked my finger and thumb, prepared to snuff it out, but Günter quickly leaned over the table and blew it down.
After lunch, around mid-afternoon, we staged another mini-Olympics. Ruby and I put our bathing suits on. Our somersaults over the grass that day were as high as they had ever been. Monika called out scores along with my parents while Uncle Günter sat and watched. On my hands I walked from the rock garden to the deck, up onto the diving board, and held the handstand a moment longer. I focused on my thumbs, waited a moment longer, hunched my shoulders, and slid smoothly, finally, into the cold water. The pool reached around my body like a live animal and squeezed me into a tight ball. When I opened my
eyes I saw the faint blue traces of my uncle’s repairs crawling up the sloping sides of the pool like rivers on a map.
I dared Ruby to jump in that day. “You’ll get used to it,” I told her, splashing outwards with an open palm. She stood on the diving board, a game of ours from the summer before, playing it up for the adults as they sat at the picnic table, drinking their coffee and apple schnapps. She took a running jump and arced through the air, hanging against the real sun, my little sister, the future gymnast, and broke the water with a delighted screech. Monika smiled and raised her schnapps over her head. From the water I saw my uncle leave the picnic table.
After dinner we turned on the TV for the first time in two days. So far Canada had only won three bronze and a silver. We were hoping for news of gold. The Games were closing soon. We didn’t have much time. At nine o’clock we settled in the TV room to watch the day’s highlights. Ruby in the beanbag, my mother with her knitting, my father leafing through Wind and Sail. News footage lit up the room. First a shot of an airport, then masked men and a helicopter. Monika was sitting in the rocking chair beside Ruby. Uncle Günter came in from the front porch, where he’d been sitting with his back against a pillar, reading a copy of Stern since dinner. I made a space for him on the couch. I felt the heat come off him when he sat down and his thigh brushed against me.