Simple Machines

by Morris, Ian;

  The water between St. Raphael and the mainland looks close enough to swim—though I’d recommend against trying. Of course, even as I say this I’m remembering that Grey and I swam the channel once, when we were twelve. I think we did it only so we didn’t have to live our lives wondering if we could. We’d tied life vests to our ankles by the straps so we wouldn’t drown and set out at noon, when the sun would keep us warm. At least that’s what we thought.

  When we actually put our plan into action we were in trouble almost from the start. The life vests acted as a drag, and the water froze us more than the sun kept us warm. Eventually we crawled onto the beach so exhausted that we slept in the sand until late afternoon. Still we could have called the stunt a success if we’d remembered to bring ferry money. As it was we had to beg Pete to let us ride back for free, which he did. Then he went straight to the newspaper office to rat us out to Mr. Reed, who told my father, on the reasoning that Ernst Zimmermann would have been madder if he found out from anyone else. Which might have been true, though he whacked me pretty good just the same.

  Right now, I didn’t know what time it was. My watch broke the week before and I hadn’t bought another because I figured Pop would get me one for graduation. It was early enough that the adults figured to still be sucking the liquor off their ice cubes, though it had been a long day for them, too, their tempers and the sun making for a hot one all around.

  Dolores had found out at breakfast that Callie wasn’t going down to the university because of Grey. She was already pissed off because Ray was out of town, which meant that she and Callie’s natural dad would be attending the ceremony, each of them alone, which was sure to get some people talking. The Reeds were not content either. They were parents of the sort who would let their children learn from their mistakes (Grey being, to this point, much more eager than his little brother Todd to acquire knowledge in this way), but the possibility that Grey might miss out on college altogether was more than they were willing to sit around and watch. Yet the Reeds and Dolores stood smiling as we had filed down the rows to the tune of “We May Never Pass This Way Again.”

  I fished a wilted Marlboro out of a pack I’d worn in the waistband of my shorts all day. (It was bad that we smoked so much. I don’t anymore, but I won’t chastise my younger self for his foolishness. I really never had a chance. Pop smoked four packs a day. Ma used to smoke and still may, as far as I knew. I even remember Aunt Berthe, the family saint, walking around the Chicago house with daughter Hilde on her hip and a Pall Mall hanging from her lower lip.) The music from the bonfire was louder now, but I couldn’t make out the song, only the throbbing bass. I gawked up at the smudge of the Milky Way from horizon to horizon. Orion was gone until fall, leaving behind a less familiar sky. For all the nights I spent looking at the constellations, I could not tell stories from the stars, like the ancient people did. Maybe television was to blame. Instead I looked for movement, a shooting star or satellite or the hovering lights that each time promised to be a UFO but always turned out instead to be an airliner. Then a voice behind me yelled, “Don’t do it!” I started and turned toward the silhouette of a girl against the rising red tint of the bonfire on the crest of the dunes. “Did I scare you?” she said.

  It was Ashley Sitwell.

  “No.”

  “Yeah, I did. Thinking about ending it all?”

  “Not until now.”

  “Funny.”

  Ashley was a senior the year before and went to school in California. She was a swimmer with a swimmer’s body: broad, boxy shoulders, narrow hips, a solid, square ass, knotty blond hair with a chlorine-green tint—not bad looking, if you looked at her a certain way. And once, at a boat party, I’d looked at her just that way. For that act of imagination I’d had to take her to prom. Afterward we’d skipped the all-night party at the Marina Hotel (I think because her father owned the place and she didn’t want him to see his daughter fishing below the limit) and parked her Gremlin down by the lake. Before Ashley, I’d been with three other girls, but it had never been like that. Maybe owing to the fact that I didn’t like her very much, and I was pretty sure she felt that way about me, I could let my curiosity about the endless possibilities of position and stamina take over. We became a regular secret thing.

  “When did you row over?” I asked her.

  “Just now. Got another of those?”

  “One.” I held out the pack and we sat down on the trunk.

  Ashley studied the parenthesis-shaped cigarette that she pulled from the pack and coaxed the filter to her lips. She snatched the half-smoked cigarette from my fingers, used it to light hers, then she kept mine and handed the bent one back.

  “I didn’t want a whole one anyway,” she said. This wasn’t like her. The Ashley of the previous summer was vain, but basically shy, the kind of girl who only wore new white sneakers like the ones she had on after they’d gotten scuffed a bit around home and were less likely to attract attention.

  “What’d you come out here for?”

  “Old time’s sake,” Ashley said. “I’m back for the summer. Thought you might want to go steady.”

  I glanced past her shoulder.

  “Have to ask Grey first?”

  “Like hell,” I said.

  She inhaled the smoke of the cigarette through clenched teeth like you do when you’re trying to hide the pain of a wound. “Grey’s not going down to school.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Smoke signals,” she said, trying to blow rings that collapsed on each other and disintegrated in the still night air. “I think that Grey’s the kind of person people tell stories about.”

  “I bet he’d agree with you.”

  “You’re jealous.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I wouldn’t envy him if I were you. Grey was always going to stay. Now he’s got an excuse.” She flicked the cigarette toward the lake, pushed my knees together, and moved much closer. “Anyway, why should you care? You’re getting out of here. That’s all that counts.”

  She tried to kiss me, but I ducked. “I got to ask you something if you promise not to make fun of me.”

  “What?” she said. She was laughing already. Then she saw that I wasn’t kidding and tried to stop herself, which only made her laugh more.

  “Forget it.”

  “No, really,” she said, pinching my cheek, “Ask. I’m sorry. You’re so serious.”

  “Is it hard? I mean is it, you know, difficult?”

  “Is what hard?”

  “College.”

  She stared at me for a second and laughed square in my face. “You’re scared.”

  “I am not.”

  She pushed the hair out of my eyes like I was a little kid or something. “No, it’s not hard. I mean it’s hard to get good grades, if that’s what you want to do, but that’s Stanford. You’re going to a state school. You’re the scholarship boy.”

  “Cut it out.”

  “I’ll tell you what your problem is.”

  “What’s my problem?”

  “Your problem is you feel guilty,” she said. “You feel guilty because something good happened to you and you don’t think you deserve it. You’re better than these people. We both are. I didn’t know that either until I went away, but I do now.” She traced her finger down my chest. “Now, come on. Don’t you like me?”

  “Yeah, I like you,” I said and pushed her hand away.

  She got up and knocked the sand off her jeans. “I’ll tell you what you should be afraid of,” she said. “You should be scared that you’ll never find any place better than here.”

  Walking back toward the music, we approached the bonfire, which threw flames fifty feet in the air, geysers of sparks streaming skyward. Above the roar of the fire, a Led Zeppelin tune throbbed from ruined boom box speakers. The kids were dancing around, stomping the sand, clapping their hands to their mouths like Indians
. I looked for Grey and found him, sitting cross-legged, beating on a rubber trash can like a tom-tom.

  “Where you been?” he said.

  “Out by the water.”

  “Ashley find you?”

  “Yeah.”

  He laughed.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Where’s Callie at?”

  Grey nodded at a circle of girls near the fire, passing a stack of snapshots. Callie stood with her back to us, craning to look at each picture in the flickering light of the fire.

  “There’s beer over in that tub,” Grey said, pointing back toward the dunes where a single kid squatted on a boulder. I walked over and saw that it was Alvin Deere, perched on a rock taking in the whole crazy scene, the fire reflecting on his glasses.

  “Man,” I told him, “you look like an album cover.”

  This didn’t please Alvin. He stared for a long time before he said, “You splitting soon?”

  “Nah,” I said, “I came over to get a beer.”

  I looked back toward the fire. Grey was hunched over his drums and Callie was lost in photographic memories, Ashley was lurking, and I figured if I stayed I was only going to get more of what I had already got.

  “Okay.” Alvin hopped off his rock and walked me through the shadowy dunes to an aluminum canoe already half in the water. “I came over with Warren”—Warren being his stepbrother, or cousin, I was never sure which—“but he don’t want to leave,” he said.

  Alvin did all of the rowing. In fourth grade, Grey and I went over to Alvin’s house after school. It was the first time I ever rode on the school bus. The bus was for the reservation kids. We drank Tang and played Major Matt Mason, making an alien landscape of Mrs. Deere’s plastic-covered davenport and lime green shag. We went back two, three days a week and blasted around the hostile voids, until the visors broke off all the space helmets and the wires broke in the legs of the action figures so that they would not hold a pose.

  “When you leaving?” he asked, when we were far enough away from the fire and the music that I could hear the sound of his voice.

  “End of August.”

  “So like three months and you’ll be going back the way you came.”

  “I guess.”

  “Yeah, well. Was only a matter of time, hey.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means you’re not from the island. You got no right to stay.”

  “My dad came with me. He’s not leaving.”

  “I wasn’t talking about him. Nobody said he’s going anywhere. You go with that Sitwell girl?”

  “What’d she tell you?”

  “Nothing. I don’t talk to her. She’s trouble.”

  “Preaching to the choir.”

  “Let’s hope you hear it.”

  “Hey, Alvin, remember when we used to play Major Matt Masons?”

  He took a long time to answer. “Yeah, I remember.”

  “How come we don’t hang out anymore.”

  “Major Matt Mason is pussy.”

  “No, I mean—”

  “Dude,” he said, “I know what you meant.”

  3

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  This is how everything happened: In the seventh grade, I wrote a report for Mrs. Furst’s Social Studies class about the ferry that travels between Bayview and the island of St. Raphael. The paper won an award from the Chamber of Commerce. They gave me a plaque and a twenty-dollar us savings bond. I got my facts from a book I found in the library by G. Harris Montgomery called A History of the Bayview Ferry. Everything I wrote in the paper I took from that book except for the couple of dozen words I didn’t use. I put my own words in their place. Like when the book said:

  Prior to 1933 there was no scheduled ferry service between the mainland and St. Raphael. It was up to anyone wishing to travel to the islands to provide their own craft or to pay an enterprising fisherman to transport him.

  I wrote:

  Before 1933 there was no regular ferry between the mainland and St. Raphael. Anyone wanting to travel to the islands would either have to take his own boat or pay somebody to ride them over.

  I’m sure I understood on some level that using another person’s words for your own purposes is against the laws governing schoolwork. And reading what I wrote for yourself, you’re probably not sure what’s harder to believe: that I didn’t get caught or that the judges at the Chamber of Commerce thought that crap worthy of an award. But I did win, and anyone who wants to know more about the Bayview ferry is free to read either my paper or Mr. Montgomery’s book. All I wrote were the facts as I learned them, and you can’t fake a fact.

  The next year I entered another paper in the State Scholastic Merit Awards, this one about Michel Cabot, the founder of the town of St. Raphael. That won an award, too, this time for a hundred-dollar savings bond, a luncheon in Madison, and a photograph with the governor (a man no taller than me!). Over the years that followed I wrote several more, on topics of local historical interest, the St. Raphael Lutheran Church, the ore trade, and the Battle of Lake Erie, each of them bringing home no worse than an honorable mention. I came to think I had a future in history.

  The big payoff came my junior year when Grey’s father Jack Reed told me about a scholarship the University of Wisconsin was giving for historical papers and further told me that he thought that papers about Indians were the kind of thing that the people who award those scholarships like to read about, so I wrote a paper about the common ancestry of the Ojibwa and Menominee. They made me wait three months, but the news was good.

  “A scholarship!” said Aunt Berthe calling long distance from Chicago. “A scholarship, Karl, isn’t it marvelous.”

  “You honor us all,” said Agnes Reed, Grey’s mother.

  “Do you have to go to college to get the money?” said Pop.

  “Yes, he does,” Jack Reed said, “and you should be grateful for it. Do you have any idea what college costs?” This was a little like asking a Bedouin if he knew the price of a fishing net. Pop had no idea what it cost to go to college and didn’t see why anyone should care.

  Jack, as if to prove the point, ran a story in the Star under my picture: “The young man who knows more than any of us about where we live.” If that is true then what I know about where I live I’ve learned from books or from what other people have told me. I’ve added none of my own work to this history.

  What do I know about where we live? I know what you would know if you opened an atlas, that we live on St. Raphael, the only inhabited island in the Green Islands, which lie at the southwest corner of Lake Superior off the coast of northern Wisconsin. St. Raphael is nine miles long and three miles wide at its widest point. We live there, my father and I, along with 413 other souls, stout, stoic island folk, some of whom you’ll hear about from me, and some of whom you’d have to talk to yourself, if you are inclined.

  In the summer the population triples, when the families who keep their summer homes here crowd onto the ferries, along with the tourists who come for the Indian shows. They bring with them most of the money that is made on St. Raphael and for that reason they are not liked. You have to agree that there’s something dirty about tourist money, even if it’s yours, or you have to agree at least that there’s something sad about passing through a town that is not what it was, just to be shown by tour guides how it used to be.

  Anyone who lives on the peninsula or on the island will tell you that this place isn’t what it once was, though it hasn’t been what it once was since before anyone who lives here was born. Just the same this awareness of decline lives in everyone, which may be why so many of the kids who grow up here leave. White people came here earlier and prospered quicker than anywhere else this far west on the continent, but it was a downhill slide from there.

  As is true elsewhere, the history of our community began with a flood, with the myth of a great and sudden rising of the water that the Ojibwa have recalled for three hundred generations o
f their tribal memory, since before they came to Wisconsin from the east, from Hudson Bay and from the Sault, where Lake Huron meets Superior. There are legends that say the people who lived here before were cannibals and performed human sacrifices in the vale overlooking the harbor where the church stands today, though when the French came they found the natives to be a likable people who were less likely to kill them than were the Huron to the east or the Fox to the south. The French and the Indians lived peacefully together for more than a hundred years and might have forever, if it hadn’t been for the Seven Years War. After that, the British Navy took over with no earthly idea of what to do with the mission and the fur stations. Their warships patrolled the coast, but they rarely ventured inland. The missionaries died off and were not replaced. The Indians and the trappers meanwhile went on living pretty much as they always had.

  Then came the lumbermen, Norwegians and Swedes most of them, and ore miners from Cornwall and Wales, until more people lived on the peninsula in 1845 than live here today. The country was getting civilized and everybody but the rich quit wearing furs. The timber dwindled, the lumbermen went off to fight in the Civil War, the railway that was supposed to run to Bayview was built farther south on a direct line to the deeper water ports at Duluth and Superior, and that pretty much scotched any dream of a metropolis.

  Then came my father and I, sole members of the last wave of immigrants to come to the island. Like others, maybe Pop was looking for a place that looked like the place from where he’d come, a fishing village on the North Sea, but without the trouble he’d left behind. That trouble was his and not mine, but I say “we” just the same because as his son my future was tied to his. My father was an immigrant—leaving a country of exhausted possibilities for one in which possibilities exceeded the reach of the most optimistic imagination. But my father was also a fugitive—driven from his homeland by the scorn of his wife and her family, fleeing the scene of what some said was a capital crime—and so I became a fugitive too, though the crime I am talking about happened before I was born.