The Night Swimmers

by Peter Rock

  In the afternoon, I taught a class, trying to help the students with their writing, turning to and leaning on my own mistakes.

  I checked my college mailbox before heading home: there, a pile of paper that I jammed into my pack, along with a copy of Shurtleff’s Audition, forced on me by a Theatre major who was certain it would clarify to me what I’d been saying in class. The book had a note folded into it, a list of page numbers I must read, and a star next to the very short third chapter:

  3

  Consistency

  Consistency is the death of good acting.

  Riding my bike home, I coasted down a long hill, thinking about what I’d told the students that afternoon—I said, “Momentum is everything, in a narrative. If you’ve ever ridden a horse, you know that when they see a hill coming they speed up, right before they reach it, so they can get to the top without straining. So it is with information—exposition, reflection, description, digression—in your storytelling. Something has to happen, to be promised, enough tension and anticipation and expectation, that you and your reader can easily, happily get over these hills of context.”

  The explanation was clear enough, but, as usual, a simplification. There are all manner of horses, all sizes of hills.

  At home, I opened a beer and, standing in the kitchen, pulled the papers from my pack. Amid the memos and junk mail was one hand-addressed envelope, which I opened. Inside, two pieces of paper—one just a scrap, torn along the top, the other whole.

  I read the story through again, then carried it down to my basement room and found the old notebook I needed. There, folded between Burchfield’s fire in the forest and the scrap of birch bark, was the first half of the story, the fragment that I’d found in Mr. Zahn’s house. The paper was torn right at the place where the new fragment began:

  Upstairs again, I found the envelope, fallen under the kitchen table. There was nothing else inside; no explanation, no note; no return address. Yet when I read the postmark—Ephraim, WI 54211—it was as if Mrs. Abel were calling to me.

  - 40 -

  I wrote to my Aunt Dee, who now lives on the peninsula year-round, in my grandparents’ old house on the shore. I told her I might like to visit. She wrote back:

  Good to hear from you. Would love pictures of the amazing new playhouse. Your wife is a woman of many talents! Burying Carrie and the squirrel Sally KQ. I can picture the scene and am sure you could write about it splendidly.

  My book on The Song of Songs is due in three weeks! I don’t know what is next and always have this anxiety which I shouldn’t, because my identity is in Christ and not in writing, but I have this tendency to return to religion!

  I am going to be gone next Friday for ten days if you want to come and stay at my house and experience Door County winter. Yesterday was a big melt, but I doubt that spring is really around the corner!

  Love to you and your great women!

  Dee

  - 41 -

  In Milwaukee, I rented a car and began driving north. It was afternoon, icy and gray. On the passenger seat, books that had been my favorites, so long ago, that I still admire—Cortázar, Wittgenstein, Hemingway—along with the journals of Charles Burchfield, my grandfather’s Hollow Tree, and Shurtleff’s Audition (“Start with the question: What is my relationship to this other character in the scene I am about to do? Facts are never enough, although they will help you begin . . . You must go further, into the realm of the emotions”).

  I checked the dashboard clock and thought of my daughters—at their gymnastics and hip hop dance classes, two time zones away; I wondered if they missed me, if they were thinking of me. Their school was in session, but for me it was Spring Break. And so I’d set out on this trip, explaining to my wife that it was essential that I experience that peninsula in the winter, something I’d never done. Besides, I had research funds to spend.

  My phone, plugged into the car’s stereo, played music I’d first heard over twenty years before, that I favored during that summer of Mrs. Abel. I listened as Lucinda Williams sang and it was as if I were back in the Red Cabin with the rain lashing the slanted, tar-papered roof. The strings swelled; her voice ratcheted up:

  I walked out in a field, the grass was high, it brushed against my legs

  I just stood and looked out at the open space and a farmhouse out a ways

  And I wondered about the people who lived in it

  And I wondered if they were happy and content.

  The music also took me back to my adobe house in Mount Pleasant, after that summer; there, I had been so lonely that I had raised loneliness to the highest of attributes, completely necessary if one were to do anything worthwhile, or become someone, to become world in oneself, to draw another person to you and have them not be disappointed.

  I drifted back further, to the drive east with my ex-girlfriend, a hundred cassette tapes on the floorboards at our feet (Again, I am not good enough to write about you, I said in one of the letters. I never did you justice when you were around and now you’re so far away!). I drove, just south of Green Bay, with Two Rivers and Manitowoc and Sheboygan behind me. An oncoming car’s headlights blinded me for a moment, and then my vision returned.

  This girlfriend wrote me not long ago, by email:

  Don’t worry. Your letters are safe, now; they’re under my desk at home.

  I responded:

  I’m relieved. Though I’ve been remembering things, since I read them—like one time in Livingston when there was some kind of fair/circus in town and you got really wigged out at night that a clown was running alongside the house.

  I have NO MEMORY of the clown. My memory is ridiculous—sometimes I think it’s having kids that did it to me, that makes it impossible to remember. PLEASE elaborate.

  Anyway, it was just early on when we’d moved into the house and there was some kind of traveling carnival that we decided not to attend, but then later, much later, you either couldn’t sleep or had a bad dream and woke up quite upset and worried about the possibility of a clown or clowns being outside the window or running back and forth along the house. That’s all I remember. I was thinking, “Whoa!” but was kind of excited, too, about this possibility, though you were quite beset and seriously distraught. Maybe, I wonder now, you weren’t all the way awake? I don’t really remember what we said or did the next morning, but I think things went back to normal. I do remember you being really upset about the clown thing, though. Sorry if I was not more understanding or sympathetic.

  Wow I have no memory of that at all!! But thank you. Don’t worry, if you wrote about us, and I read it, I’d probably think it was about someone who was not me. But now I am more like you were then I think. You’d be amazed how much true stuff I put in Mad Men without anyone noticing. Nothing much about you, though.

  Nothing much?

  You’d have to watch closely.

  What did you mean “But now I am more like you were then I think.”

  Ha. I meant that at the time I was wilder, messier. I was full of lust and dissatisfaction and questions. I always had this image of fire consuming everything I tried to write. Like the break-fire from Young Men and Fire. Now I am better at working and discovering my work, I am more thoughtful and solitary, more open to the world and closed to myself.

  Ah, it is me, now, who is more like you were then.

  - 42 -

  I stopped at a McDonald’s in Sturgeon Bay to use the restroom, to drink a chocolate shake and eat a Filet-O-Fish. Sitting under those fluorescent lights, after hours in the darkness, staring through the windshield, I felt exposed.

  A group of teenagers was shouting, carrying on behind me; there were old men drinking coffee, eating French fries; a young couple was trying to quiet their baby.

  I was only an hour or so away, now. I didn’t know if it would be better to show up in the middle of the night, to surprise Mrs. Abel (would she b
e surprised?) or sleep somewhere, wait until morning. I closed my eyes and I was swimming, slicing through the dark water, and she was beside me, to the left, her pale arm, her sharp white hand in the moonlight; and then, somehow, she was off to the right, we had crossed without realizing it, come close without touching. We were off again, silent in the night, finding a rhythm, our arms moving in unison, disappearing beneath the surface, out into the moonlight, then disappearing again.

  Eyes open again, I returned to McDonald’s. Hamburglar, Ronald McDonald, Grimace, Mayor McCheese—are there a weirder assortment of friends, anywhere? Around me, the people had all switched out. A new group of teenagers, a family of four, two old ladies with apple pies, both exclaiming about how hot they were.

  It was then that I realized I’d been expecting Mrs. Abel to be as I remembered her, though twenty years had passed and she’d be in her sixties, beyond middle age.

  I am now the same age as she was, that summer.

  There were no other cars on the road. A sign flashed in my headlights. Distances to Egg Harbor, Fish Creek, Ephraim, Sister Bay. I was getting closer, drawing nearer. Stars fanned across the black sky.

  At Jacksonport, I turned left onto County V, the last leg of my childhood journeys between Utah and Wisconsin. These same highways, traveling with my whole family in the station wagon, heading north up the peninsula with a soundtrack of Styx, Barry Manilow, Kansas, Billy Joel, KISS, and Foreigner.

  The lake stretched out below me in the moonlight as I descended the hill south of Ephraim: so frozen white and foreign, no boats on it at all. I followed the road that curved along the wide harbor. I didn’t see another car, another person. Wilson’s, the ice cream place, was shuttered. No boats tied to the piers, and walls of snow drifted up along the docks at the yacht harbor, Anderson’s Dock. All the posts, out on the docks, glowed white, thickened by layers of ice.

  Our road had been narrowed, two widths of a snowplow’s blade, drifts high on either side. I passed my grandparents’ driveway with its new gray sign, brestin, for my Aunt Dee. The driveway was plowed but I drove right past it.

  The road wasn’t plowed all the way to the end, since it turns from public to private just before our driveway. There, I got out, pulled on a parka and mittens, and began to walk, trying to stay on the corrugated snowmobile tracks, where the snow was less slippery.

  The bamboo shades of the Red Cabin were down; behind them, I knew, were the bikes and the garden tools, the lawnmower, the beach chairs. The snow was not so deep, under the trees, and softer. My footsteps made no sound. Past my parents’ cabin; through the windows, the picnic table was visible, and the grill, all the lawn and deck furniture brought inside, stacked up high. Past the canoe and rowboat, stashed beneath the deck.

  The lake was so silent, glowing, the moon almost full. I looked out past our raft, resting on the shore, to the long smooth stretch of ice, the dark shape of Horseshoe Island far away.

  I stepped onto the ice, walking on water. I felt the cold air rising around me, a seeping, a frozen wind coming from below. Far away by Eagle Bluff, below the silhouette of the tower, ice shoves—places the wind and current had slid the plates across and crashed them against each other—rose up jagged on the horizon. I walked out farther, deeper. I imagined the raft’s anchor below me, remembered the stories of settlers caught on ice floes, drifting from Egg Harbor to the Little Sister Islands, miles and miles.

  When I turned, our shoreline looked different to me. Whiter, the houses shuttered and dark, but it was more that I was used to seeing them while swimming, from the level of the water. I kneeled down, my face close to the ice with its cold shining up, and then it all felt more familiar to me. Scrabbling to my feet, I kept on down the shoreline, closer. The Wests’ place, the Phillips’, the Zimdars’.

  No candlelight flickered in the windows of Mrs. Abel’s house. No smoke twisted from the chimney. No face looked out, watching my approach.

  I climbed over the ice on shore, past where the pieces of her pier were stacked. The rough doors into the space beneath her house were locked, snow drifted against them. I took the padlock in my hand, felt its cold weight through my mitten as I shook it. And then I crawled up the icy slope along the side of her cabin, around to the back where all the snow was chewed up and frozen in ridges.

  The footprints of boots, the prints of animals. The door was wide open.

  I had no flashlight, only the lighted screen of my phone.

  There were candles atop the piano, the windowsill; I walked around the room, touching each wick, as if they might be warm, recently extinguished. No. A thick layer of dust rested everywhere, the smell of mold and mice, snow blown across the floor.

  The table from Mr. Zahn’s house, with the carved lions, was not there.

  In the kitchen, I jerked open cupboards and slapped them shut, yanked at drawers so their contents spilled onto the floor—matchbooks, more mousetraps, pencils, decks of cards.

  Back in the main room, I lit one candle, then another. I rolled the dusty rug aside, I unlocked the trap door and lifted it open. The darkness seeped upward, into the room. I descended into that cold blackness; once I was there, gently slapping along the walls, my eyes gradually adjusting as light filtered down, I had no idea what I hoped to find. The snorkels and fins and masks were all gone, the nails and hooks empty.

  I climbed back up, lowered the trap door, locked it, and rolled the rug back over the top. Then I went up the ladder, into the sleeping loft, shone the light of my phone into that empty space—the mattress torn along one end by mice, bare springs catching the candlelight. Crawling upward, I lay down on the mattress, pulled a dusty old blanket around me.

  I rested there with my eyes closed and felt the silence, pressing on me from every direction. The frozen waves, the forests of trees standing tall and cold, the empty rooms of the cabins along the shore, the ice stretching to the islands and beyond.

  - 43 -

  That summer, swimming: out to Horseshoe Island, around it; we followed the curve of Nicolet Bay and further south, through all the dark boats moored offshore of Fish Creek. Pirate Island, Adventure Island, Little Strawberry. My body has never been able to go further than it could, that summer. The flat black water, the moonlight, the waves and weather, the edges of storms. Below, around, invisible: the smallmouth bass, the perch, the carp and catfish and bullhead, the trout, the whitefish. The sturgeon hovering even deeper, perhaps, straight out of the Pleistocene with their shovel noses, their smooth skin, not a bone in their body, all cartilage, and their bodies longer than mine, stretched out as I was, swimming across the surface above them, swimming with Mrs. Abel.

  North, past Little Sister and Sister Bay, then the Sister Islands. We swam distances through the darkness while everyone onshore slept in their houses. The two of us swam and the lakebed rose and fell beneath us, the currents and stars all around us. She swam ahead, and I tried to keep up, and I did not wish to be left behind.

  Part of my pleasure of swimming in open water, especially at night, is that it makes me afraid. It frightens me. The unknown depths beneath me, the black current and all its dwellers, its undiscovered creatures. Swimming, I envisioned serpents, and I wondered about the St. Lawrence Seaway, whether a whale might slip through, might evolve to breathe fresh water.

  Just the other day, I was walking through the playroom, where my daughters have various hammocks and trapezes suspended by chains. My eight-year-old, Ida, was sitting on a small, round trampoline, reading a book I’d never seen before, The Mysterious Monsters of Loch Ness.

  “I think it actually lives there,” she said. “There is proof, but there’s not much of it. The problem is that there’s more people that don’t believe than people that do. And this book is old, so they’ve probably found out more since then.”

  When my older daughter went upstairs to play with her sister, I picked up the book: here in these pages, the old, familiar p
hotos, the hypotheses (the Loch Ness Monster could either be descendants of the Plesiosaurs or else they must be some totally unknown creature) and appeals to reason (“In the twenties a scientist said he had seen a carcass of a recently dead Coelacanth and received scorn very similar to that placed upon Nessie witnesses”) and the propositions: “The more you study the Loch and the case for its animals being real, the more real they seem. This seems to be true of most phenomena that are eventually understood, whereas the further you investigate a myth, the less real it becomes.”

  I have always had an affinity with ghosts, lingering from the past as they do, unfinished with what they left behind. That said, the three mysteries that obsessed me throughout my childhood were UFOs, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness Monster. I believed; I wanted to believe; I lay awake, trembling at the possibilities, taut with fear and excitement. I collected magazines with titles like UFOs: No Hoax and Cryptozoology, clipped out photographs and articles, kept them all in file folders, to display and convince. One reason I preferred the Loch Ness Monster was because it lived in Scotland and was safely bounded by water, unable to burst into my life, into my nighttime bedroom, as aliens or Bigfoot might.

  Once, in fourth grade, I gave a presentation on these topics. A smart classmate, Jennifer Durham, sharply questioned my assertion that an organism as large as a dinosaur could survive by eating nothing but the skin of its teeth. I found my source and quoted the scientist: “If the creature has been able to survive, it is only by the skin of its teeth.”