by Steve Amick
He started small, breaking off just a thumb-sized crumb of a brick of C-4. Molding it into a ball, he waded into the water and felt around at the base of the first piling till he found a knothole and shoved it in, jamming the det cord in and unwinding it as he walked back to the bunker and attached it to the hell box mounted there.
“Clear,” he said to the corporal, who repeated it back, and Roger flipped the safety and then the toggle and boom, there appeared, fanned out from the lip of the trough, a display of long shreddy toothpicks and a dark patch of dirt where the water had splashed.
He walked back over to the trench and acted like he was inspecting the damage. The results were about par with what he remembered from the same amount of C-4 in the old days. Maybe a little more powerful, but more or less the same. But he wasn’t really checking the damage, he was checking himself, timing his pulse rate with his watch. He stood with his back to the bunker so the corporal wouldn’t see his fingers at his wrist and maybe tell Landry.
But the pulse rate wasn’t bad. He felt pretty calm, actually. Maybe he’d built this whole thing up in his mind for nothing. Sure, he hated loud noises when they took him by surprise, but maybe he was okay in a situation like this, when he knew each blast was coming. What the hell, he thought, and decided to try the other stuff, the Semtex. Being unfamiliar with it, he decided to use a smallish piece of flat Detasheet and see what it did and then work up from there. On the next piling, feeling around underwater, he found a splintering crack in the wood and slid the Semtex sheet about halfway in, then humped it back up out of the ditch and started back for the bunker, trailing the det cord.
He wasn’t quite back to the bunker, just as far as the top step leading down inside, when the det cord felt snagged, caught short. It wasn’t going to reach to attach to the hell box. He turned and squinted back and saw it was still coiled up way back at the trench, caught on a piece of wooden debris from the last blast. He gave the cord a tug. Rather than straightening, the whole charge pulled loose of the piling, up out of the water in a short hop, moving only maybe a meter closer than his initial placement, landing up on dry land. There was a hard blow to his chest, and then to his back and elbows and back of his head as the world tipped fast and turned white, which he soon realized was more of a light blue, really, and finally, he realized—though this took him considerably longer—that he was looking at the heavens.
The rest was gone. Just sky and a roar and nothing else until ceiling tile. Perforated institutional ceiling tile.
THE GOOD THING WAS, there’d been no breaks, no external injuries, no flying debris lodging anywhere on his body. The blow had been only concussive, knocking him to the ground with sound waves. The bad thing was it was still a big enough blast to severely diminish his hearing. It felt like he was underwater or in the hull of a ship. The Camp Grayling medics told him the loss might be temporary, or it might not be.
He was still trying to understand what had happened. He hadn’t even plugged into the hell box yet, had he? So he’d jiggled the thing loose—big deal. The old C-4, the claymore mines, wouldn’t have done that at all. He could have stamped on them, dropped them from a roof. Back in Nam, they’d shaved off pieces for a slow-burning cookfire, the stuff was so stable.
Landry, who’d been yanked back from the Au Sable and didn’t look real thrilled not to be fishing, gave him some material to read while he lay in the cot, basics of Semtex and some of the newer innovations. Semtex, it turned out, was cheaper for a reason: it wasn’t definitively any more powerful than military C-4, but it was more unstable. You couldn’t throw it around or flop it onto the ground like you were landing a perch. Well, you learn something new every day, he thought. Though lessons like this one, he could do without.
Landry made him stay in the camp hospital ward for one night, under observation, before he would let him go. They had to write notes for him, holding up their questions on a dry eraser board.
The next day, Landry offered to drive him home, but Roger refused. Landry then asked, with a series of dialing pantomimes, if he could call someone to come get him and for a second, Roger thought of Janey—she could probably even make it look official, part of her job—but no, he didn’t want to trouble her. Besides, he’d have to leave his truck here and come back for it later, so forget that.
He took the graveyard quiet home with him, that white noise still in his ears all the way down to Weneshkeen.
And now he was back home, sitting out on the porch on the cane rocker like an old man in Grandma Oshka’s bathrobe, staring out at the lake, hearing nothing more than he would have heard a hundred years ago—less maybe. It sounded like a distant wind blowing in his ear, like the shush of water over rocks, his own pulse a steady thwump-thwump in his ear like a night bird taking flight. It actually made the lake look different, this lack of ruckus.
And because of this, there was no car door slam, no creak of leather, no footsteps on the porch. Because of this, the familiar white cardboard pie box with the vonBushberger’s logo and the telltale C, for cherry, scrawled in red marker across it, and above it, the broad jaw and sad, wide, cockeyed smile of Janey as she came up the front steps, were the first signs he saw that he was no longer alone.
EPILOGUE:
SUMAC DAYS
THOUGH THE SEARCH for Reverend Gene had officially been called off, Reenie Huff had a few more ideas where to look and a way to proceed that would at least qualify as beneficial exercise. The boys had been too bullish and stumble-footed, she decided, out there with their huge boats, churning up the water. That was no way to find the man. Since the body hadn’t turned up onshore or inland, through the Ninny John, chances were he’d gone out past the point of surf, out in the deeper calm where a body could float in pretty much any direction, willy-nilly, not just get pushed back to shore where it went in. She had no fish sonar nor apparatus with which to drag the depths, for heaven’s sake—all that heavy gear the men had been using—but she had a feeling that might not be necessary. Gene was a spiritual man, light and heavenward-reaching, and she could almost picture him out there, still bobbing along. Just below the surface, perhaps, but buoyant, his corporal remnant resisting the descent.
And those boys with their speedboats and testosterone, their drive to produce results, could easily have chopped up the water so badly, no one could see a thing. They’d meant well, but still, she wasn’t convinced that if he was actually out there, he couldn’t still be found.
Rowing, was the way. She had her single—her lightweight ocean shell—that could glide along the surface in a manner far more subtle and surgical. It might not cover great areas at great speed, but it could be done with infinitely more care. This approach was a bit needle-in-the-haystack, surely, but at least she could look out at the lake when the winter finally came and know that she’d done her level best not to forget this man who’d lived among them and served them and deserved to be reclaimed by someone not a stranger—someone who knew who he was.
She had a rope and some Styrofoam buoys, tucked down in the hull at her feet, in case she found him. At her age, she was probably too frail to tow him back, but she’d at least be able to mark him better and point the authorities to the right spot. Bear Eckenrod had also lent her a portable GPS so she could pinpoint the spot, though she wasn’t certain she could work the gizmo, if it came down to it. He’d apologized for not being able to help more, but he had a lot on his plate. The whole village was getting ready for the Sumac Days festivities. They needed to move on.
She put in at the Edgewater Road access, down past the old Lasco place, so she wouldn’t have to struggle around the lighthouse rubble they were still trying to pull out of the channel. Getting beyond the surf, out into the calm, was the real workout, but once she was out there, it was a whole different, glassine world. Midday, the wind did little more than ripple and play twinkling tricks of light.
She was out a fair distance, the access road now a tiny paper cut in the gray-green haze that was the trees, when s
he brought it hard to port and headed south, parallel to the coastline. She would go till she could just make out a floating colon mark : on the horizon, which would be the black-and-white stripes of the next lighthouse, the behemoth Big Sable, then she would turn around and put in, and later in the week maybe try going north, maybe as far as Point Betsie, on the next day she had no appointments scheduled at the Planned Parenthood clinic in her garage.
A submerged log got her excited for a moment, before she realized what it was. Then a waterlogged makeshift anchor buoy: two battered milk jugs and a hank of sawed-off rope. But at least it was some indication of the quality of observation possible from her low line of sight, angled below the refraction of sunlight. She might have missed this detritus were she up in one of those big cabin cruisers or patrol boats, as all the volunteers and the Coast Guard had been. The clumsy clods . . . Frankly, she wondered if they’d all been a little too keen on coming off as heroes, after seeing the hoopla that surrounded Janey Struska’s rescue of those kids. They probably all imagined themselves on TV, having their own brush with fame, getting the glory and the credit, and didn’t stop to consider the prudent way to go about this task.
The Coast Guard even scrambled a helicopter when Janey first radioed it in. Would they have done that, Reenie wondered, before she’d gotten such notice for the lighthouse recovery? Maybe not. But they responded right away; flew low out in front of the bootlegger’s place, shining their spotlights down into the chop. One Coast Guard fellow reportedly thought he saw something in the beam of his light, a hand reaching up. Maybe. Reenie wasn’t convinced. She wondered how they could be sure what they were looking at, stirring up the water like they must have been, those big blades turning the lake into a churning washing machine and the spotlights shattering the crests into a million silvery mirror shards. They dropped a man down with his frogman getup but he saw no further sign of anything.
She was out for about a half-hour when something happened. If she told you about it, she’d say she was too focused on the water; on what was under the surface; scanning for anything that could be the Reverend. Or that her eyes were playing tricks on her. But truthfully, she’d grown distracted. She’d started watching her wake two points on port quarter, hypnotized by it a little; the silver ripple that paralleled the distant shore.
Snapping out of it, she turned to see she was startlingly close to another vessel—a three-masted square-rigger, anchored directly between her and the sun, looming suddenly like a pirate ship from a dream. The rigging shimmered silvery lances of sunlight in her direction and she had to squint and shield her eyes. She was coming alongside, about two points off the other’s starboard bow. She thought of the Bermuda Triangle back in the seventies—whole ships supposedly vanishing without warning—and imagined the process reversed. She thought of the wild talk of late, of unexplained lights over the water. She thought of the dive camp schooner, but that should be anchored more to the north and would certainly be wrapping things up for the summer, this close to Sumac Days and with Roger Drinkwater unable to help right now. Diving would be out for a while, due to the condition of his ears. She thought, fantastically, of a secret scheme in which Gene Reecher was able to live out his retirement on this beautiful old yacht, cashing in on his own insurance policy and whooping it up, way out in Lake Michigan, with moonlight and twenty-year-old Scotch and his favorite old jazz records and none of those fools back home any the wiser.
She thought of all these things in a second of shimmering white sunlight and the time it took for the rigging to clang against the mast, loud and lonesome and real; a knell. And then she thought of her age and her stubbornness and the fact that, if she were honest about it, she sometimes let her principles rule over common sense and that she was perhaps getting a little too old for such shenanigans. The truth was, she probably hadn’t been paying enough attention and almost plowed right into another vessel. The truth was, this was a task for a younger person whose mind might not be clouded by the light-headedness of low blood sugar.
“Ahoy!” a man called from the deck. A dark silhouette, one hand in the rigging, the other waggling in the white sun.
“Ahoy,” she said quietly, in her librarian voice, and as she drew closer, into the shadowy lee of the ship, it shielded the sun and she was then able to make out colors and details of the man standing high above her. He wore a baggy Ball State sweatshirt and long khaki shorts and had a pair of binoculars slung from his neck. His cap was less baseball and more aviator, the bill squashed and arced into a frown. Wisps of gray and rust poked out around the ears. She guessed he was in his fifties. He stood motionless, looking down at her, grinning around the stub of a cigar.
He removed the cigar, becoming conspicuously gap-toothed. “What is that—a kayak?”
She was a bit preoccupied. She’d rapidly gotten in too close and was now trying to retract her starboard oar before it scraped against his hull. “It’s an ocean shell,” she said, struggling to hold herself at arm’s length from the boat. “For rowing?”
He jabbed the cigar back into his grin, nodding, then removed it again. “You sure it’s not a kayak?”
The man was a bit of a fool. She said, “I would admit it, I assure you, were it so.” Was he possibly pulling her leg or did he really not understand the difference between oars and paddles? She glanced up again to see if he looked like a fool. It was hard to say.
He shrugged as if to allow that she was welcome to her opinions. “Looks pretty kayak-y.” He had a sort of Hoosier accent, she thought. She wondered what he was doing way out here. He seemed to be alone or at least without family or friends. Generally, the bigger the vessel, the more crowded. But not in this case.
She was considering informing him that he should keep a lookout for the body of a drowned man, and wondering if such notice was truly necessary—is that something you’d overlook if you came upon it?—when he produced a small white box, the top an open nest of paper, and held it out in front of him, calling down to her, “Want some fudge? Last piece!”
“Thank you, no.” As if this were a reasonable consideration, her mind automatically ran to the practical for justification: she was all set, food-wise. She had an apple and two PowerBars and some of Roger Drinkwater’s Schmatzna-Gaskiwag® jerky. And what was she supposed to do—climb up to the deck and take a piece? Open her mouth and have him toss it to her as if this were SeaWorld?
Shrugging, he fished out the alleged last piece and stuffed it whole into his mouth, eyes wide, then dropped the box on the deck, slapping his hands together, dusting them off. He spoke with his mouth atrociously full. “Man alive, that’s tasty stuff . . .” This she took as her cue to keep moving, inching the shell along by pulling, hand over hand, along the hull of the yacht. She could still hear him overhead chewing loudly and mumbling mm-mm-mmmmm! and it was sort of, though not entirely, amusing, in a way, and she thought, Who is this simpleton? He seemed familiar and the gulpy, dumb-guy voice he now put on, calling after her as she cleared his stern, seemed like something from TV: “Hey! Kayak lady! Know where I can get me some more fudge?”
Weneshkeen, she was about to say, but felt it would come out funny. It would sound the way the Indians had pronounced it, years ago, as if it were a question or a challenge.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to the following for their assistance, support, advice and benevolence:
Bob & Connie Amick, my parents . . . plus Dr. Ken Abrams, Bruce Amick, Henry Amick, Jack Amick, James H. “Pappy” Amick, The Ann Arbor Public Library, Clark Beavans, Gwen Beavans, Joe David Bellamy, Millicent Bennett, The Benson Ford Research Center, Stan Bidlack, Juliet Cella Blumenthal, Joe Breakey, Fred Chase, Lois Colón, Matt Colón, Nancy Debassige, Mary Beth Doyle, The Elk Rapids District Library, Erik Esckilsen, Archie Ferguson, Deborah Garrison, Matt Garrison, Meilan Goller, Chris Gordon, Eric Grant, Joe Gray, Rich Griffith, Chris Hatin, Oogima Aakiin Ikwe, Roger Jankowski, Eric Kelly, Lauren Kingsley, Christine Kulcheski, Ilana Kurshan, The Lake S
uperior State University Native American Center, Travis Lampe, Joslyn Layne, Arek Majewski, Maria Massey, Greg McIntosh, Michigan Department of Natural Resources, Adrienne Miller, Farah Miller, James Monger, Pamela Narins, Pilar Queen, Jim Roll, Laura Roll, Stephanie Sabatine, David Scott, Richard Scullin, Dick Siegel, Joe Snapp, Jack Spack Jr., Elaine Spiliopoulos, Harold Stusnick, César Valdez, Katie Van Wert, Joe Veltre, Sally Vering, Brandon Wiard, Joe Pete Wilson, Brad Wurfel and Dave Zaret.
Miigwech to all of you.
A Note About the Author
Steve Amick’s short fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Southern Review, The New England Review, Playboy, Story, the anthology The Sound of Writing and on National Public Radio. He has an MFA from George Mason University and has been a college instructor, playwright, copywriter, songwriter and musician. He lives in Michigan, dividing his time between his hometown, Ann Arbor, and a family cottage on a famously clear lake along the northern edge of the Lower Peninsula.
Copyright © 2005 by Steve Amick
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Amick, Steve.
The lake, the river & the other lake / Steve Amick.
p. cm.
1. Identity (Psychology)—Fiction. 2. City and town life—Fiction. 3. Summer resorts—Fiction. 4. Michigan—Fiction.
I. Title: Lake, the river and the other lake. II. Title.
ps3601.m53l35 2005 813'.6—dc22 2004056600
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