Lost Lake: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Mark Slouka

  feather and bone

  I was three, no more, when I spotted for the first time the paleness of his shirt moving like some small, disembodied ghost against the darkening trees. Even now, the image remains, fixed in the scent of moldering wood: a man standing on a stone porch at dusk, his left hand crossed below his chest, smoking a pipe. It’s June. Unaware of us approaching through the darkness under the trees, he stares ahead into the gathering night as though the past itself were inscribed there, as though the dip and weave of swallows in the last light were scrolling his fate in the disembodied air. From the path below, holding my father’s hand, I see him above us. Fireflies rise around him in slow, languid gusts like sparks from some missing fire.

  It’s been nearly twenty years now since I last saw Rheinhold Černý, since my feet, barefoot or sneakered, negotiated the footpath to the cabin on the hill. From where it left the hardpack to where it opened into the meadow, that path was as familiar to me as my own mother’s face. I could have run it blind, stutter-stepping through the marshy grass, swinging wide around the poison ivy, hitting the plank over the brook—right, left, right—then up and over the boulder with its little opaque windows of mica before leaping the strange, jointed root on the second turn past the shed … as though my feet, hitting earth and stone and wood, had stamped by some alchemy of correspondence each and every feature into the soil of my heart.

  It would be Mrs. Černý I saw first, standing in the garden wearing an oddly formal dress and a wide straw hat, pulling blooms past their prime, loosening soil with a spade. She’d turn or straighten when I called from the bottom of the meadow, then walk up with me through the uncut grass into the chill shade of the cottage where she’d pour mint tea with honey and ply me with pieces of jahodový táč—strawberry tart—that left crisp flakes of pastry on my lips and chin. The cottage itself, always dark despite the cut flowers still blooming on the windowsills and tables, smelled of smoke and stone, wool blankets and sweet tobacco, and I’d linger happily, dangling my feet off the rough oak bench by the dining-room table. We didn’t talk and didn’t need to. I’d sit and eat and she’d busy herself in the living room or the kitchen, coring a piece of fruit or sweeping the crumbs off the counter into an open palm with quick, expert movements I found strangely reassuring. Nearly sixty at the time, she still carried about her an old-world sense of style and reserve, of unthinking diplomacy and tact.

  We both knew, of course, that it wasn’t the honeyed tea or the jahodový táč that brought me dashing down the path every Saturday morning, and just about the time I’d begin to fidget and peer out the living-room window, she’d be standing by the back door, calling, “Rheinholde, mladý Mostovský je tady”—young Mostovsky is here—and soon after that I’d spot him (momentarily caught in the frame of the kitchen window like some forest spirit escaping its own portrait) walking through the knee-high bracken. Spare and tall, inescapably patrician in his grass-stained khakis and small, frameless glasses (despite the weeds caught in the straps of his sandals and the dirt caked on his hands), he’d first wash his arms to the elbows in the basin by the door, then carefully brush the dry dirt off his soles with a few strokes of a stiff-combed brush that hung from a nail above the bench. Only when these things were done would he look in.

  “Vítáme vás,” he’d say, never smiling despite the absurd formality of the greeting. “I see you’ve fortified yourself well for the rigors of the day. Truly a chip off the old block, eh?” he’d add to his wife. “His father, too, is always prepared.” Mrs. Černý, answering from the kitchen, would mumble something inaudible, to which he’d chuckle, then beckon me through the doorway with a sweep of his arm like a coachman in a medieval fairy tale. “Půjdeme?” he’d ask. Shall we?

  The teasing, mild enough and diluted still further by a very real affection, meant little to me then. If it ever made me uncomfortable, if I ever sensed a touch of condescension beneath the banter, I assume I accepted it as somehow justified, given my own family’s flailings and failures, or ignored it by virtue of the mercenary single vision of childhood. Rheinhold Černý, you see, built or brought or showed me things, week in and week out, and for this, more than anything else, I loved him.

  While my own father was off in the one-room shed that had once served as a ham radio station, typing on the old Underwood with the broken e and c keys, Černý was pointing to the blood-red crest of a woodpecker as long as my arm, pounding fist-sized holes in the side of a rotting oak, or showing me, through an opening he’d cut in the shoreline thickets, a pickerel and its shadow in the sunlit flat by the swamp. A luna moth, ghostly and pale, that he’d trapped against the screen at night, an old coffee tin with a half-dozen turtle eggs wrapped in moss, a barred feather, perfect and huge, that he’d found in the garden—every week it was something new.

  The pain of returning to the city every Sunday night from September to June would be lessened, time and again, by the wonders in the trunk of the car or on the seat next to me, wonders a quiet six-year-old well down the first-grade pecking order could ride, like a pet panther, into the hearts of all the Sherrys and Susies and Samanthas for the short space of each week’s show-and-tell, eclipsing utterly the urban Lotharios reduced to peddling their fathers’ collections of watermarked three-cent stamps. Sometimes, indeed, my contributions required an advance call or two—as much for courtesy as clearance—to prepare teachers for, say, a small colony of paper wasps buzzing inside a gallon jar, or a milk snake in a box with a sliding glass lid, or an outraged baby heron—given to both fish puree delivered through a paper straw and to rhythmic and unremitting shrieking—standing one-legged at the bottom of a parrot cage.

  Distracted by their own lives as they may have been, my parents were nonetheless quick to recognize the power and status these things conferred, and rarely stood in my way. Whatever their feelings for Černý (and I was alert enough to pick up, even at that age, their growing resentment of the man—of his brusqueness, his patrician airs, his position in the émigré community), they couldn’t help but appreciate (at least partly because they may have suspected, in their weaker moments, that Černý’s condescension was not entirely unjustified) his kindness to me. In a world without grandfathers, Černý had, with a certain amount of rough grace, stepped into the role, and if relations with the middle generation were a bit strained, well, that was not unusual, even among real families. Our apartment on the fifteenth floor above Sixty-third Road in Queens soon took on a strangely animate cast—feathered, furred, and antlered—and my father, burying whatever jealousy he may have felt for my benefit, simply stepped, like a rejected suitor, back into the shadows. My mother, though temperamentally more cautious, less quick to concede, eventually followed suit.

  They would have done well to pay attention. I can say this now, of course, because time, like an inverted telescope, shows clearly what was once too close, what proximity (and love) kept hid. Eye to the lens, fully thirty-five years and more since those summer afternoons I spent in his company, I see again the square-fingered strength of his hands, the veins in his pale wrists where they emerged from his shirt always rolled one button up, the way he would peel his rimless glasses from his face to wipe the sweat or grime with a clean handkerchief. I remember the comfort of his silence, his old-man’s smell of tobacco and cologne, the nod of approval I’d receive for understanding something he’d shown me, or applying it well. The burst of tart on my lips, the smell of orange mushrooms (laid out to dry in the sun like battalions of finger-sized soldiers), the stench of the mud where the goldenbloom grew … all these I remember. All these I see.

  But the landscape now reaches easily from sun to dark, skirting depths I never knew: Černý’s descriptions—always precise, analytical—of nature’s horrors; his chuckle on finding the oddly human head of the mantis he had kept for months in a tabletop cage (the cat had apparently moved the lid) staring up from the living-room carpet like some ghastly green mint. Or the particular look in his eyes—detachment, perhaps—th
at morning we watched a mud-dauber wasp, iridescent and thin, battling for its life in a spider web under the eave of the outhouse. Wrenching, thrashing, buzzing furiously, it tried to bring its abdomen around, but found itself bound in coil after coil of gossamer silk. Something about the drawn-out desperation of the thing moved me, I recall, and I thought of bringing a stick down through the web to set it free, but one glance at Černý put the thought from my mind. We watched the wasp disappear, bit by bit, leg by leg, until all that was left was the buzzing, and then even this grew muffled and the spider, straddling his trussed and broken feast, delivered the fatal sting.

  I am aware, of course, that none of this troubled me then, that I felt nothing but love for this man—for his gruffness, his strength, his way with the world—and saw nothing but love returned. I am aware, too, of how easily the past is shaped by our fantasies and fears. I have heard, finally, those who say the past, like any distorting medium, like water, bends whatever enters it, and that the truth or lie of the broken oar is something we can never know.

  I am reminded of all these things by a small, perfect skull, hardly larger than my first, which sits on a pile of books on my desk. Rheinhold Černý gave it to me two days before my seventh birthday, and I can remember still, with absolute clarity, the thrill of expectation rising in my chest as he led me by the hand to the compost heap and then—carefully, almost tenderly—began digging in the dirt with a small stick. I remember the bones growing up out of the soil, seeing for the first time the sockets of the maxilla, the rounded ball joint at the base, the perfect and beautiful ferocity of the canines. I remember the way he brushed it clean with an old toothbrush he took from his pocket, the way the skull fit the jaw like a lid on a well-made box—hinged and tight—and I remember him holding it up to me, in front of his face, and opening and closing its jaws in time with his own.

  I look at it now (still held together by the wires he twisted himself that same afternoon almost forty years ago), and I say to those who claim the past is forever unknown to us, I have run my hand the length of the broken oar, and I know what is bent, and I know what is whole. Rheinhold Černý, almost smiling behind his rimless glasses, his hands, hinged at the wrist, dramatically opening and closing the jaws of that long-lost raccoon for the benefit of a little boy stunned with gratitude, is someone I loved like a father. This much is true. And this also is true: in his own particular way, he was a monster beyond reckoning.

  It began, I suppose, the night my father turned the old DeSoto off the blacktop onto the rutted dirt road that ran around the lake. Already sleeping, my face pressed into the crease of the seat, I woke to the sound of the grass in the median swishing against the steel beneath me, and mentally began ticking off each familiar turn and lurch. Thinking I still slept, my parents were quiet. Every now and then I could hear them whisper to each other in the dark, a word or two each, no more.

  “What’s that in the road?” said my mother, suddenly.

  “I don’t know,” said my father.

  By the time he’d eased the car to a stop in the darkness and turned off the motor, I was up and staring bleary-eyed at what appeared to be a dog-sized stone or lump of mud set down at the end of the headlights’ beam. Taking the flashlight from the glove compartment, my father turned off the headlights. It was as though the car around us had suddenly disappeared. Night was everywhere. Insects sawed back and forth in the trees, wild, arrhythmic, an army of elfin woodsmen. “Let’s have a look,” he said.

  It wasn’t until we were ten feet away that we realized the thing was a turtle, its huge, rocklike shell brown with age. It seemed a monster from some other world, accidentally caught in the land of families and electricity and cars. Leeches big as my father’s thumb clung to its scales; its skin, loose and leathery, bulged around its head and legs. It struck at us as we came near, once, twice, hissing with each awkward lunge, then settled back, its gaping mouth pale in the flashlight’s beam. The smell of mud rot and carrion rose in the air.

  My father, squatting ten feet away with the flashlight in one hand and a crooked stick he’d picked off the road in the other, shook his head in wonder. “Ty seš mně obluda”—you are a monster—he said quietly to the turtle hunkered down in the dirt. Then, practicing his newly acquired English: “How are you? What’s up?” The turtle hissed softly. “Fine, thanks,” said my father. “Not much. And you?” He chuckled.

  “Je pozdě, Pavle”—it’s late, Paul—said my mother. “Stop tormenting the poor turtle with your English.”

  “Nothing like this back home, Marie,” my father said, and, squat-stepping forward a few feet, he waved the stick in front of the snapper’s jaws. “Na toto jsme emigrovali.” For this we emigrated. His words were punctuated by a hissing lunge and the clack of jaws. A foot-long piece of my father’s stick lay in the dirt.

  Rather than move the thing, we drove around it, I recall, the car bumping and scraping up and over the shoulder to the soft ground of the meadow, then back onto the dirt. Looking back through the rear window, I saw it sprout its Pleistocene head and clawed legs and begin plodding, heavily, through the redness of the taillights toward the still waters of the lake.

  From that day forth, the snapper filled my child’s need for unseen things to fear; reeking, primitive, it moved, always, somewhere below the surface, lending that border a magic, a resonance, it might never have had without it. Every swirl, every half-glimpsed shadow, every sensed or half-sensed thing moving in the deep-green rooms cut by the shadows of trunk and branch hinted at its presence; hinted, that is, until, on some still afternoon, gentle as a Corot painting, an angler in a rowboat, lulled into disbelief, would start at the sudden apparition risen by his side: ungainly, anachronistic, a griffin on a table.

  I see him standing at the end of his dock at dusk, a large salad bowl of crusted bread cradled in the crook of his arm. With his free hand he tosses handfuls of bread, like flakes of light, to a family of swans. They duck and glide around him, wriggling their feathered tails. One rises, flapping, its wings momentarily pinned against the dark water. Getting down on one knee, like a suitor proposing to his spell-locked love, Černý reaches out. Though I can see little else, I see this tableau, as though frozen in time: his body, balanced and sure, the paleness of his extended arm, her neck dipping gently down.

  I remember the swans above all, but Černý’s love was hardly that selective. A practical, rational man for all the years I knew him, he nonetheless had one weakness. No less than half a dozen feeders, some with suet, some with seeds, surrounded his cottage; houses for wrens and grosbeaks and woodpeckers, lovingly built and situated, peeked from under eaves and branches or nestled in the crotches of oaks. A pair of ancient Zeiss binoculars, bulky and strong, were never far from his reach, and his ear, like a trained musician’s, could pick out the slightest change in the twittering, peeping ensemble performing round the clock, it sometimes seemed, for his benefit and his alone.

  Calls, nesting habits, migration patterns and flight characteristics, identifying marks both at rest and on the wing (and all the possible variations thereof), all these he had learned like the irregular verbs of some dying language, until he was able not just to speak it, but understand it, inhabit it. On certain spring mornings, I remember, I would find him standing with his eyes closed in some far corner of the garden, the expression on his hypnotized features—the slight, involuntary movements of his lips and eyes beneath their lids—suggesting a beatitude bordering on rapture. Feeling slightly awkward, I’d wait silently for the spell to pass. He always knew I was there. “Poslouchej, Mostovský” he’d say quietly, his right hand raised like the hand of Adam to some ascendant god. “Poslouchej.” Listen. “To je krása.” That is beauty.

  I wasn’t there when it happened. I didn’t see the swan, pushing eagerly through the shallows to Černý’s dock, suddenly jar, then plunge like a child’s cork beneath the surface. I didn’t see the one wing tearing at the surface, or the boiling water, or the upward gush of bloody
quills, rising out of the dark.

  But I’d seen it before, and accepted it, somehow. During the course of every summer, fully half the ducklings would die, wrenched into oblivion as abruptly as though tapped by the hand of god. And every May, the survivors would be back, paddling the shallows, nesting in the reeds. Life seethed and sank and rose again. More profound than profligate, nature threw its endless battalions into the consuming fire, then drew them forth again. Everywhere it was the same: the frog, I knew, spasmodically kicking its way down the snake’s expanding throat, had left strings of milky pearls in the shallows of the brook; the cottontail, still running in the talloned air, had fathered dozens … “Only waste is wrong,” my father had told me once, and of all his lessons that faltered or failed, that one stayed true.

  But Rheinhold Černý, standing in his rowboat, helplessly plunging a wooden oar into the watery dark where bits of down now seemed to jerk and swim like embers over an open fire, reckoned his world by some other, starker calculus: the creation, like a stuttering watch, had revealed its flaw, and had to be made right. Calmly, he presented his case: the turtles were ugly, served no discernible purpose, regularly killed the waterfowl whose beauty and grace was cherished by every local resident, young and old. He himself had seen them pull down a full-grown swan. Clearly it was time to reduce their numbers, to lend a shaping hand to a situation badly out of control. He himself would do the work, take care of all details. All he asked of his neighbors was their leave to do what, regretfully, needed to be done.

  My father alone tried to protest the plan, to ask questions, though even he, frustrated as always by the older man’s reasoned maturity, his air of seasoned wisdom, his perfectly calibrated condescension, soon found himself helpless. Sitting with my mother on the Černýs’ stone porch one deep summer evening, yellow citronella lamps flickering and a Mozart aria playing from inside the cottage, my father, hunching forward in his wicker chair, tried to raise the subject. Why not wait to see if the depredations continued? he asked. Why not call some expert for advice? Or why not simply pick up a few of the nesting turtles and transport them to another lake?