by Mark Slouka
ACCLAIM FOR MARK SLOUKA’S
lost lake
“Dazzling.… A work of extraordinary intelligence and sensitivity.”
—St. Petersburg Times
“Suggestive prose that builds to considerable power.”
—Men’s Journal
“Remarkable by any measure, but all the more considering that this is Slouka’s debut.… On nearly every page sentences approach the lyricism and rigor of observation of an Elizabeth Bishop poem.”
—The Boston Book Review
“Sensual, elegiac nature writing and complex, full- bodied stories.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“[Lost Lake] shows us how rich a life can be if one can feel, listen, observe and understand.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Slouka flashes forward and back in time with astonishing alacrity and skill.”
—The Oregonian
MARK SLOUKA
lost lake
Mark Slouka’s story “The Woodcarver’s Tale” won a National Magazine Award in Fiction for Harper’s in 1995. He is a graduate of Columbia University and has taught at Harvard and the University of California at San Diego. He currently teaches at Columbia and lives in New York City with his wife and children.
ALSO BY MARK SLOUKA
God’s Fool
War of the Worlds
Copyright © 1998 by Mark Slouka
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1998.
“The Exile” was originally published in Epoch, “Feather and Bone,” “The Shape of Water,” and “The Woodcarver’s Tale” were originally published in Harper’s, and “Jumping Johnny” was originally published in Story.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries
and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Although Lost Lake exists, the names, characters, and incidents in the work are the product of the author’s imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or people, living
or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Slouka, Mark.
Lost Lake / by Mark Slouka.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78969-3
1. New York (State)—Social life and customs—Fiction.
2. Czech Americans—New York (State)—Fiction.
3. Immigrants—New York (State)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.L697L67 1998
813′.54—dc21 97-49471
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
With special thanks to Colin Harrison, Sloan Harris, and Jordan Pavlin,
who understood both tale and teller.
For my wife, Leslie, my son, Zack, and my daughter,
Maya, with whom I’m never lost
And for my parents, Zdenek and Olga Slouka,
who long ago cast the lines I tend
contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Dedication
The Shape of Water
Genesis
Portrait—A Sketch
Feather and Bone
The Woodcarver’s Tale
The Minnow Trap—A Sketch
Jumping Johnny
The Exile
Night—A Sketch
The Lotus Eaters
Equinox
The Offering—A Sketch
the shape of water
Some say the soul tempered by fire—tortured true—is the better for the trial. Perhaps it is so. But I was born between the wars. My adventures were of the survivable kind, my tragedies ambiguous and undramatic, observed as much as felt. What formed me were anecdotes—often inconclusive, generally unheroic—connected to a particular forty acres of water. An unexceptional place. I did not choose it. And yet, if I could ever open myself, I suspect I’d find its coves there, its sleeping silt, its placental water smooth with algae … and the faces of those I’d known, revealed as clearly as if mine had been that lake of legend said to reflect the hidden heart.
I. Dream
I don’t remember much: a small yellow fire burning on a flat rock, spongy ground that leaked warm as pee into my sneakers, a crushed circle of cattails, an old kerosene lantern throwing huge shadows out over the lake … I remember other men, shapes, appearing by the shoreline, then gone; my father sitting hunched on an overturned bucket; the huge night crowding in on our little circle and the lake glass-black and still and hardly like water at all. I remember the way sky met sky at the opposite shore, and I remember being afraid of that near horizon—windowless, blank, unmoored in a night of troubling doubled stars.
And I remember my father dragging a huge fish smelling of mud and vegetable rot up into the lamplight. It had scales like silver dollars and a round, ugly mouth that kept kissing at the air and I remember watching it flop heavily in the crushed reeds, leaping in and out of the shadows like a thing accustomed to the earth, thumping the damp grass. But most of all I remember my father down on the ground struggling to take out the hook, holding the great glancing body pinned under the space between his knee and foot, its head flat with his right hand, working with the thumb and forefinger of his left—and the hook not coming out. I remember the broad bend of his back beneath his shirt, the rolled sleeves, the shine of sweat in the dark hair on his arms. He held the flashlight in his mouth, trying to see where the hook had bitten into the dark red gills, raspy and stiff as combs, his hand starting to shake from the strain, and then suddenly he looked up—he was turned half around from me—and I saw the beam leap up over the reeds and disappear into the sky as he let his hands find their own way around steel and flesh and then the barb was free and he had the fish in his arms like a child and had slipped it into the water and the water closed over it like a door.
When we shone the light down, there was nothing there—just the beam disappearing in green water as into some bottomless well and tiny motes of dust, myriad and fine.
Years later, when I asked my father about this, he didn’t remember. He said he’d never gone fishing for carp at night as far as he knew, and this much was true, he’d never cared for fishing much, and anyway, who would the other men be? And where would the carp come from? Our lake had never had carp in it, and no one had heard of any being caught there. And even if he had caught a carp that size, why would he let it go? My parents were Czech immigrants. My mother had been making carp fillets and carp-roe soup for as long as I could remember. Another lake? We hadn’t spent time on any other lake when I was that young—three, four at most—and the few relatives my parents might have let me go night fishing with weren’t due to emigrate for another five years. And there were no cattails on the lake we knew and no extended shore without, on any given night, at least one lamp in a window to break the darkness.
II. Loss
I’m not sure when I first knew about the bottles behind the green half-curtain my mother had hung under the kitchen counter to hide the garbage can. Or when I first knew they were important. I used to go look at them sometimes when nobody was home. My favorite was a clean glass bottle with a red cap and a red label with a picture of a man on an old-fashioned slei
gh pulled by huge black horses. He had red cheeks and a heavy beard and was dressed in a black bristly coat that looked like it had just come off a bear. There were great pines bent with snow and it made me think of Christmas.
It was around this time that the yelling started and my father slammed the door one night and the ceramic Indian by my window fell and broke off a part of his headdress. In the fall I slept under a hill of blankets in a small wooden room like a cave or a den, and when I woke up I could tell it was morning by the jays and the light coming through the two cracks in the wallboard by the door. Sometimes I could see my breath. My father would usually be up by then, and I could hear him slowly crunching the newspaper into loose balls and then the snap and spit of the wood catching and the good, sharp smell of smoke, and I’d leap out of bed and run to the big wicker chair where my pants and shirt and socks were already warming in the heat. He slept alone on the old gray couch by the wall. It had soft worn lumps like the hair on an old poodle. The cushions would be stacked on the table and I’d sit down on the sheets to pull on my socks and sometimes they’d still be warm from when he’d gotten up. The couch was a little short. I never realized the wooden chest—shoved flush against the couch—was anything more than a lamp stand.
“Mama still sleeping?” I’d ask.
“You’re up early,” he’d say from the kitchen. “Why don’t you put a sweatshirt on.”
But that’s not what this is about. This is about the time my father went fishing. I was about eight years old then. I spent a lot of my time elsewhere. A while before dusk my father would walk out on our dock and whistle me in for dinner. He had a good whistle and I could hear him all the way out at the dam. When I heard my mother call instead I got scared. As I ran down the small catch-root path below the orchard I could see the boat was gone. I thought first somebody had taken it or it had floated loose and he was out looking for it. But I knew that wasn’t it.
“Come and eat your dinner,” my mother said, already walking into the cabin.
“Where’s Dad?”
“He’s gone fishing,” she said.
We could see him as we ate dinner, sitting out on the empty float, the boat off the corner, drifting in half circles like a tethered horse. The float was maybe twelve feet square, a painted wood frame with a four-step ladder wired to eight empty oil drums and anchored to the bottom by a cable. As kids we played hide-and-seek between the drums, diving under to catch each other’s legs, splashing water on the spiders that built their webs in the barred gloom beneath the boards. In the summer I’d lie on the hot wood and cup an eye to a crack and watch the bluegill drift up out of the cool green, disappear to the side, then drift back to view, hovering by the barrels.
It scared me to have him sitting out there with the sky turning dark and the insects starting up in the trees. My father could fix things and a friend had talked him into going bow hunting once when I was young, but mostly he sat at the table or up in the shack that used to be the old ham radio station, typing. He’d never gone fishing, never wanted to, hardly ever talked to me about it. With one exception.
It was over dinner. I’d been going on about a bass I’d lost in the cove. “You want to catch something worthwhile, you go out in the deep water,” he said suddenly, sounding almost angry. He pointed with his fork. “It may be boring but you sit it out unless you want to piss around all your life.” My mother had started to argue, in Czech, saying what was the difference, he should let me do what I wanted, it was ridiculous, and what did he know about fishing anyway. I didn’t say anything.
He picked up his plate. “Fine,” he said, as though I’d been saying something. “Suit yourself.”
Just before dark my father sunk a hook into something that snapped the old surf-casting rod he’d found in the shed into a deep C. I saw the tip plunge under water, jerk up, then plunge again. He stood up, fumbling awkwardly at the reel. I saw him glance around as though looking for help, then his arms jerked forward and he started walking, grudgingly following whatever it was he’d hooked down there as it circled the float. My mother stood up suddenly as though to go outside, then slowly sat down again. I stared out into the near dark, watching him do everything wrong, forcing it, holding the butt of the rod jammed to his stomach like a curved spear—so that from a distance it looked as though he were struggling to wrench himself free of this thing, to pull it out of his body—fighting for every foot of line hissing off into the water like it was his birthright, wanting it desperately now when five minutes earlier he’d neither wanted nor expected much of anything at all.
It took almost twenty minutes. He must have had it close, because I saw him drop to one knee and, shifting the rod to his left hand, start reaching for the line. When the hooks finally straightened and the rod snapped straight to the dark sky he lurched back, then dropped to the other knee. For a moment he didn’t move at all. When he put out his hands and fell on all fours like a man kicked in the stomach about to vomit, my mother got up quickly and walked to the kitchen. I went out into the dark. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust. He was sitting up now, perfectly still, the boat still floating obediently on its leash.
I didn’t want to say anything. I sat on the end of the dock watching the bats, knowing he couldn’t see me against the shore. At some point his voice came over the water and it was like he was sitting right next to me. “Go to sleep, kid,” he said. “It’s late.”
He sat out all that night as the boat swung half the clock face in a slow pendulum and back, watching the shore, finally falling asleep on the cool boards, perhaps peering down like a boy into the dark heart of that lake, hoping to glimpse whatever it was that had escaped him.
III. Love
Odwin—I never knew his full name, or whether Odwin was his first or last name—was suddenly just there. I don’t remember him coming to the lake and I don’t remember him leaving. One day there he was in the gray rowboat, anchored in the middle of the cove in a cold June rain, and it seemed to me he’d always been there—I just hadn’t noticed him. And then one day the cove was empty and the boat half swamped with rainwater and rotting in the muck, still tied with a rope at the bow to a post of the wooden dock, but by then it seemed like years since he’d left and I found I didn’t remember much about him at all.
He was married then, to a blonde girl with a pale, pretty face, considerably younger than himself. He’d never held a rod before that afternoon at the Kleins’ when, out of sheer politeness, he asked the old man about the spinning rod standing in the corner by the door. He held it the wrong way, with the reel sticking up into the air instead of hanging down below. Klein showed him how to hold it, how to catch the monofilament on the tip of his index finger—not letting it slip into the crease at the joint—how to flip the bail with his left hand, how to cast overhead and side-arm, releasing the line at just the right moment.
Odwin tried everything, opening and closing the bail, reeling the small, silver-bladed spinner up to the top guide, then letting it fall to the ground, his glass in its little wicker holder on the table next to him, while the three of them, growing restless, began to talk of other things, then drifted back to the kitchen for more drinks, finally returning to the living room filled with the sound of rain on the windows and barred with strange watery shadows moving up the furniture and across the walls. Odwin stood there with the rod. He had an odd, soft smile on his face. He seemed mildly surprised.
“Where could I buy one of these?” he said.
By the next afternoon, Odwin was on the lake. Rumor had it he didn’t row in until well after midnight. From that day on he was unrelenting—twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day. In two weeks he was an expert. Rain meant nothing to him. If he was sick, we’d hear him hacking out on the water and then at some point he wouldn’t be sick anymore. He bought spinning reels, spin-casting reels, bait-casting reels and rods to match, dozens of spools of monofilament of various test strengths for different conditions. And lures—hundreds and hundreds of lures. Jitte
rbugs and Hula-Hoppers with multicolored skirts, Rebels and spinners and Daredevil Spoons, Bottom-Bumpers and Flatfish and plastic worms in every color of the rainbow. He’d fill up one big-belly six-drawer tackle box and start another. And everything would be treated well: every reel lubed and smooth, every knot snugged, every point on every treble hook honed and perfect.
I don’t remember much of any of this. I was only four and a half when he arrived on the lake. All I know I heard from someone else. And all I remember of Odwin is an impossibly tall man with black hair and a long, sad, bony face. But I remember some things. I remember watching him pull up to his dock early one evening. At night he’d bring a portable toilet with him. While there was daylight, though, he’d have to row in. I watched him pull in after eight or ten hours on the water, and when he tried to stand up his body remained in a sitting position. It took him some time to get out of that boat. He had to crawl out on his hands and knees. Once out of the boat he slowly laid out his entire length on the boards. He lay like that for a few minutes, staring up at the sky, then started going about the business of standing up. That’s all I remember.
His wife left in the middle of the second summer. At ten in the morning she put two suitcases into the car and drove away, but not before she’d taken every lure out of every tackle box and thrown them off the front porch into the trees. There were lures everywhere, gaudy and sharp, some in the ferns, some up in the white birches by the wall, others hanging festively off the pine. Great blue-gray nests of monofilament littered the living room, the kitchen, rolled like ghostly tumbleweeds over the stones and under the potted plants … Odwin was out on the boat. He didn’t come in until late that afternoon. By then he was the only one on the lake who didn’t know.
