Lost Lake: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Mark Slouka

  the minnow trap—a sketch

  Sometimes after dinner in the weeks after my grandfather died my father and I would walk through the long last light to the brook thick with olive duckweed except by the rock and the crotch of a sunken branch where the current had gently separated the vegetable skin and the water showed dark as a beer bottle; the minnow trap would bounce against my legs, first one end, then the other, then double time, spinning on the yellow cord I tried to hold away from my body. There were always little pieces of muck in the mesh, fern bits delicate as window frost, others like clumps of unwashed elfin hair. Slick and brown as mud in water, they dried emerald green.

  The tree against the end of the pool lay pale against the gloom, hard and pocked as an old bone. It had toppled long before I was born. The roots had disappeared, but the crater in the earth where they’d once levered up was still there, so close to the main water it caught the overflow of every good rain and stayed half full for weeks, stagnant, dimpled with larvae.

  “Go ahead,” my father would say, “take it over,” and I’d jump from the soft bank onto the slick and polished trunk, sneakered and sure, and walk out over that apparent earth, false as the rolling meadows of cloud seen from a plane. My father would wander a few feet up along the water and light a cigarette, watching the current wrap around a car-sized boulder, a branch trembling as though pulled from underneath, the quick swirl of a fish against roots exposed along the far shore … I’d hear the sure snap of the match but I’d never see it, watching my feet negotiate the raised nubs where limbs had been, the circular whorls where rot had tried to set in, further and further out until I reached the iron ring he’d screwed into the wood that August, chest-deep in water, cursing when he dropped the bit, then putting in the other he’d left on the trunk as a backup, holding it for a minute between his lips saying, “Don’t ever do this, this is a very stupid thing to do, you could cut yourself real bad this way,” then trying to keep his footing while leaning into the hand drill, fighting the stubborn wood until it was done.

  He’d be standing there on the bank, not watching, the cigarette appearing with each slow draw as he brought it to his mouth, then dropping to his side.

  “Okay,” I’d say.

  “All right, now throw it well out,” he’d answer, his voice suddenly turning my way through the dark, spanning the void. “Let the rope loose so it can settle down on the rocks.” I’d lob the trap upstream, listening to the crisp sound of the mesh hitting the water, then reading its descent through the cord in my hands, the bumping progress in the gloom as it neared my feet.

  “Didn’t catch,” I’d say.

  “Did you remember to put the rock in?”

  “Sure.”

  “Try it again.”

  We’d walk up the sloping grass together, my father always a step ahead, thinking, his left hand in his pocket, me pushing hard through the sopping, knee-high grass. On the stone porch, unaware, he’d always flick the inch-long butt of the cigarette with his right hand. It would rise and fall in a small clean arc like a stricken star, over the wooden rail and down into the close, wet grass.

  In the morning the air would be like damp wool, the trunks of trees near the water black with wet, growing like props out of the mist along the ground. A woodpecker—a muffled hammering—a splash somewhere, and I’d be working the knot, listening through the rope to the trembling of small bodies already strengthening to a sort of agitated hum as the trap lifted off the rocks, and then it would touch the surface and I’d pull it up into the air, the small mesh bottom a layer of tiny flipping fish like a shimmering mat of silver, quick with life.

  I’d carry them back to the metal bucket on the bank. Picking through the mass, I’d find fingerling bass an inch and a half long, perfect miniatures; tiny black crawfish frantically snapping their mermaid tails; small yellow and green perch, pretty as Christmas ornaments; a dozen leeches lengthening over the screen, raising their front ends as though to mark their direction; baby bullhead catfish with velvety skin and tiny whiskers, small as a finger. These last were my favorites. Their dorsal fins were still too small and flexible to really stick you and you could pick them up with three fingers like some narrow pastry and look right into their faces. I liked their flat little mouths, their creamy bellies, their bulgy eyes and pouty expressions. If you held them like that for a while they’d open their mouths and croak like tiny frogs, throaty and brave.

  I spared them all. I’d show off my haul and after breakfast my father and I would dump the bucket in the brook. We could have used them for bait, stuck them on number 8 hooks set just below the fin or through the lips for casting, but I had not yet learned the art of killing my sympathies, and my father, suddenly that summer, had lost the will to teach me.

  jumping johnny

  Who among us hasn’t noticed it, the strange doubling of forms and faces—the echo in the world? The waves in rock, the veins in leaves, the ghostly flowerings of frost. As though god, deep in his labors, had suddenly run out of ideas, or, perhaps, surprised by the loneliness of his creation, had set out, in the eleventh hour, to stitch the world together: the sound of wind to the sound of water, the ruffling of field to the ruffling of fur, the memories of the living to the hopes of the dead. A familiar universe. A sea of small recognitions. A vast brotherhood of thoughts and things. This is what he dreamed.

  It was too late. It didn’t work. We misread intention as accident, correspondence as coincidence. Only rarely, wandering through this world, did we feel that someone was trying to tell us something.

  It had been years since we’d talked, a lifetime, maybe more, since I’d buried my nose in his shirt as he carried me, still wrapped in blankets, from my small, wooden room through the graying woods to the car. It had never been easy. On the day they brought me home, as he hovered over me, studying my belly with its little umbilical tail, my red shriveled legs, still bent to the womb, my wavering little bud with its downy sack, I happily peed in his face.

  Forty-one years later I was shown into a hospital room where he lay surrounded by machines, and didn’t recognize him at first. Holding the coat and the small bag my wife had packed for the trip, I stood just inside the doorway, looking at the tubes coming out from under the sheet. From the hallway behind me came a man’s voice: “Why don’t you tell him then? Say …” followed by laughter and a young woman recounting something I couldn’t make out. I watched the respirator breathe, jerking his chest up, then collapsing it as under some invisible weight. A young man with a stethoscope around his neck came into the room and began checking the monitors. “Are you the son?”

  I nodded. I was the son.

  “Your dad’s looking better. He was convulsing when they brought him in last night.” He glanced at his clipboard, though he didn’t need to. “Seems he was down almost seven minutes before the paramedics got to him.”

  My father started to gargle, then choke; an alarm went off from one of the machines by his side. Slipping on a pair of plastic gloves, the man removed my father’s mask, swept his mouth with a finger the way one might clean out the bottom of a cup, vacuumed around his tongue with a small suction tube, then replaced the mask. The machine went silent. The breathing resumed.

  “Why are his arms and legs tied down?” I asked.

  “For his own good,” the man said, not unkindly. “Without some restraint, he’d yank everything in sight.” He left.

  I looked at my father, his face swollen under the respirator mask, his eyes staring at the ceiling like a drowned man looking toward the sun. Seven minutes. I remembered the lake: him slipping under the surface, disappearing like a big white fish into the gloom, gone a minute, a minute and a half, two minutes, showing off, always coming up twice as far out as we expected. We’d cheer and he’d start the long swim back to the dock. A few wisps of hair had fallen over his forehead. I brushed them back, tucking them under his head. Skin like damp velvet. “To jsu ja,” I said, in Czech. “It’s me.” His eyes blinked. A look of terri
fied incomprehension passed over his face, and was gone. “I’m here now,” I said. “Try to get some sleep.” Turning to go, I noticed the sheet had slipped off his body, exposing his cock sleeping on his thigh. A tube ran from it to a bag hooked to the bed. I covered him from the eyes of strangers and picked up my things.

  It was dark when I left the hospital. I could feel the air—cold for mid-October—move through my shirt. I breathed it in, held it a long time, then let it out and started walking: down the shuttered streets to Lafayette and Fourth, past the steel mills looming big and dark over the river like castles abandoned to plague, then up along the row houses to the three-story apartment building he’d learned to call his home.

  I let myself in, threw my bag and coat on the sofa, and closed the door. A half-empty glass stood on the coffee table; a fountain pen lay uncapped across a blank piece of paper on the desk. I walked to the bathroom, pissed—loudly, aiming for the water—then ran the faucets, listening to the pipes cry in the walls. In the kitchen I rummaged around in the cupboards, filled mostly with paper plates and cups and plastic silverware, and made myself some toast and tea. I sat down at the white Formica table. Something—a picture, a memory—so faint it seemed from another life (a man, a table, no more), moved like a warm wind, momentarily loosening the hard knot in my chest, and was gone. I sat there a moment. And then I left.

  Just past the laundry room, at the end of a hallway lit by a bulb stuck in the plaster ceiling, I found the communal basement: a long cellar, partitioned along both sides into individual cells of chicken wire and two-by-fours. In the third cage on the left I recognized what remained of my legacy: 150 cubic feet of toys and tools and cartons packed around a core of steamer trunks still bearing the stickers marking my parents’ departure for the new world. For years he’d been asking me to go through it, to take what I wanted and dump the rest. “You’ve got to help me with this,” he’d say on the phone. “I’m not a goddamned museum. If you want it, take it.” I looked at my watch. It was just after two.

  I don’t know how it is that things come to carry the weight they do, how the sticks still carved and the photographs and the cracked and moldering plastic toys come to seem the very fingerprints of our lives, as though we were, each and every one of us, no more than spirits in a material world, visible only by the things we’ve gathered and broken and touched. I only know that it’s so. I’d made it through the phone call, the deserted terminal, the hospital itself. I’d made it past his face, his skin, his hands. The Jumping Johnny stopped me cold.

  I found him in the first trunk, pressed between a layer of children’s clothes and a crumbling mass of firstgrade parchment: leaf tracings and orange pumpkins and a headless turkey with waxy brown and orange feathers still smelling of crayon. The red paint of his pants had faded and one of his legs was splintered and cracked, but the satisfied U of his smile with its little umlaut nostrils was still dark and clear, and I pulled on the partly opened ring attached to the hinge at his back and his arms began waving frantically as though triggered once again by something living deep beneath the ice. And suddenly my chest began to ache and Johnny’s smile blurred and swam and I realized, almost to my surprise, that I was crying.

  It opened quickly, as memories will, a small window of happiness, pure as ether: my father—in one of those spasms of easy creativity he seemed to resist throughout his life—jigsawing a rough little man out of a piece of stained plywood he’d found in the barn; the two of us (I was no more than seven), fat with coats and hats upon hats, lying side by side on the deck chairs we’d dragged onto the ice, hamming it up, pretending to tan; my father suddenly leaping up as Johnny began to wave, running madly across the ice—or wanting to run, dreaming of running—but instead slipping, flailing, falling, or bouncing, rather, first left, then backward like some rubber mannequin, cursing, laughing—I can hear him still—finally diving belly-down on the ice, sliding swaddled and friction-free into home, closer, then right past the little man now seemingly intent on nothing more than trying to flag him down.

  Everyone has theirs, I suppose. More than all the others, more than the ones we planned and prepared, I remembered that day: my father’s sudden, inexplicable happiness, the two of us on our knees, dropping the hook with the stiffening minnow down the coffee can—sized hole we’d chopped into the ice with a chisel, then peering down into the gloom. (And suddenly, sitting there in that cellar of things, I felt it again, a warm rush of happiness like a shot of hard drink on a cold night, then gone.) I looked at the Jumping Johnny on my lap. An icy fog had kept moving out of the forests all that morning, erasing the shoreline, then gradually penciling it in again, and one by one we laid the perch that Johnny caught for us on the ice next to him (their barred yellow sides the only bit of color in all that frozen world), and my father, clowning on the ice, made me laugh so hard I snorted hot chocolate from my nose. He was scared of nothing that day. He was my father and my friend and he had biceps like big navel oranges when he rolled up his shirt and he was scared of nothing.

  And now he was scared. And I couldn’t help him. He’d caught me, covered me, drawn me out of danger a thousand times, but when his turn came, when his heart seized and cramped and he fell, following his own falling drink past the counter and the table legs to the carpeted bottom where his own glasses with the thick dark frames already waited among the chards like strange black coral, I wasn’t there to pull him up. And now, trapped on the other side of a canyon full of dials and tubes, I couldn’t reach him. All I could do was watch him drown, or keep myself busy going through an old cellar at the end of the world, sifting memory from trash.

  There is some salvation in this: even in the worst of times, there is the next moment, the next thing. The clock ticks, the stomach grumbles. This is what happened next. I put aside the Jumping Johnny and scooped up a double handful of clothes and papers and old magazines: my own thirty-year-old shirts and pants and jackets, smaller than the ones my son was wearing now; my parents’ letters, packed and densely scripted, still in their Luftpost envelopes; the dog-eared issue of Life magazine commemorating JFK’s assassination. And there, underneath a toolbox, I found Graumont and Mansel’s Encyclopedia of Knots for Boys. I’d gotten it for Christmas the year I turned eight. I lifted it out and opened at random to the bowline, then the blood knot, then the hangman’s noose—and suddenly I could feel the tumblers falling, and again the image I’d been pursuing like a grail since I’d left the hospital—a man sitting at a table, at dusk—lifted my heart and was gone. But not entirely.

  Here is what I remembered: autumn dusk and the hissing of damp wood in the fireplace and the smell of dill and onions coming from the kitchen and my father, already on his third drink, sitting next to me at the dining-room table overlooking the lake, trying to help me through the bowline and the clinch knot—up comes the rabbit, then down into his burrow—the water just outside the window so close that when the wind moved the leaves, the room, like a houseboat, seemed to drift anchorless along the shore. And suddenly my father, halfway through the hangman’s noose, complaining of something stuck in his throat but already reaching for his coat and walking out the door, my mother instinctively calling out from the kitchen, “Co je?”—What’s wrong? “Dinner’s almost ready”—then coming to the table, glancing at the open book, the looped rope in my hands and saying quietly, “C’mon, help me set the table.”

  I didn’t ask. I put the Graumont and Mansel on the end table by the soft gray couch on which my father slept at night, and then a few days later moved it to the bookshelf in my room. And that was that. An only child, you see, I was accustomed to the ghosts that could send my mother to the bedroom, weeping, or my father out to the chopping block for an afternoon or more, and I knew enough to stay out of their way. In our home, the past was always present, a landscape as familiar—more familiar, in some ways—than the one through which I ran and played. Born in New York, the immigrants’ son, I knew the low sky and the slate-red roofs of Brno and Prague long
before I saw them, heard the silence of fields, cultivated since Rome, long before I stumbled in their furrows, smelled the smell of courtyards at dusk—the wet-sand smell of lumber and coal—long before I leaned out of actual windows, a foreigner smoking a cigarette, recalling a place I’d never seen.

  And so, when I realized that my book of knots had somehow stirred what needed to be left alone—some memory of home, or war—I put the book away. It would be fully fifteen years before I found the puzzle piece, in the shape of a letter my mother had written to a friend, that completed the picture. My father was just sixteen when, in the so-called Fuehrerhaus in Munich, Chamberlain and Daladier tossed Czechoslovakia to the Germans like a piece of meat to a pursuing dog; barely twenty when German troops poured into Bohemia and Moravia; not yet twenty-one when, newly married, a cub reporter for Lidové Noviny, he was forced to cover the public executions at a small, shady square off the town’s center once known for its farmers’ markets, now given to a different harvest.

  He never quite got over it, said my mother, years later, who, hardly twenty at the time, got to meet him at the door that first evening, got to hold him, breathing in the slight, lingering smell of his vomit, got to feel him shake and heave in her arms like a frightened child. Sometimes, she said, the process took two and three and four minutes, the victim lurching and thrashing as in some mad, antic dance, the small crowd, mostly women, some with young children in their arms or on their shoulders, laughing and pointing …