I paddle back to the middle of the lake and jig some more, this time shipping the paddle, bobbing the rod in my hands, letting the canoe move with the wind. It’s late evening now and the wind picks up, running north and west. The canoe pushes with the wind, and I hope for one of the rare bigmouth that feed in the open spaces late in the evening. I cast out into the hole between algae fields, jig and reel, and cast again.
I’m watching the tip of my rod, focused on the last eyelet, waiting for that hit on the rubber worm when the stern of the canoe clunks against something solid and the boat tips and I overcorrect and slip and fall into the bottom. I lie there for a second and hear someone laughing at me. When I sit up, I see it’s the girl. She still has her soccer-player headbands on and her phone in her hand. She says, “You actually just about went in.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I was letting the canoe drift.” I lean and grab the side of the dock. Hold myself there. “I was jigging for bass.”
“Bass?” she says.
“Yeah.” I pull myself onto the dock and stand up. “Bass.” I hold out my hands. My hands are dirty and reek of fish.
The girl tilts her head. Makes a face. “I don’t like bass.”
“No?”
“No, I actually hate them.”
“Why?”
She shrugs. Doesn’t explain.
We stand there. She looks at her phone.
I say, “I’m Travis.”
She’s still looking at her phone. “Natalie,” she says. She squints, looking at something on her screen, and the scar under her eye shivers.
With her looking down like that, I can check her out some more. So I do. She’s strong, good shoulders, good quads. I can tell she works out. Plays a sport. And she still has that loose, cutout T-shirt on. I like that. Right now I can see the lacy top of one side of her pink bra. If the shirt was a little looser I could see the rest.
She adjusts her collar. “Are you staring at my fucking breasts?”
“No.”
She turns off her phone. Looks right at me. “You weren’t staring at them?”
“I don’t know. Maybe?”
Natalie looks me up and down. I don’t have my shirt on, and I look at my stomach and see a green line going across below my ribs, a mark from the dry algae on the bottom of the canoe. I must have smeared it on myself when I flipped the canoe over before I put it in the water. I rub at it with the tips of my fingers but it just smears wider.
Natalie giggles.
I want to ask her why she swam in her clothes the other night, why she was swimming in circles. But I don’t. Instead, I say, “Do you want to go out in the canoe with me?”
“No,” she says. She looks at her house, then back at me. She’s facing the last rays of sunlight and I see that her eyes have flecks of yellow and orange in the green, like shards of campfire.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” she says. “I really have to go.” She looks at something on her phone. Presses a few buttons with her thumbs. “I should go now.”
“Okay.”
“And you should probably paddle back. I don’t think my stepdad would like you boating up to his dock and just—” She stops talking. She’s looking behind me.
I turn around. My canoe’s drifted away. The wind must have shifted, and it pulled the canoe out 30 or 40 feet from the dock. “I better…” I look at Natalie, back at the canoe. I take two steps and dive in, breaststroking under the water to try and reach the canoe in one effort, hoping to impress her. I come up, turn the canoe around, sidestroke it back to the dock. But when I get there and pull myself out of the water, Natalie’s already walking away, almost to the shore.
I say, “See you later?”
She puts her hand up and waves, but doesn’t look back. I watch her walk to the stone steps at the start of the hill, watch her jog up the cut steps on the hillside, the muscles in her legs flexing, her butt tightening with each step. She gets to the top of the steps and passes the two stone lions at the back end of the yard. Then I can’t see her anymore.
I shiver.
I don’t feel like fishing now. I get back in my canoe and paddle across the lake, beach the canoe on the gravel, and drag it up by my tent. I pull out my gear and the one bass, then flip the canoe, slide my gear and the paddles underneath, and go up to the house to cook the fish. I cook it in Krusteaz pancake mix and butter the way I learned to cook fish at the wilderness experience for troubled teens. I eat the bass with a few Ritz crackers and a glass of whole milk, and after I finish eating and washing my dishes, I walk back down to my tent.
Creature’s left another page.
The Pervert’s Guide to Russian Princesses
Princess #11 (First Draft)
Oh, Anna of Kashin, I want to flip your 14th-century royal robes over your head and smell your stomach and the deep creases underneath your breasts. I’ve heard you only bathe once a month, and your skin holds a heavy odor. Please, don’t ever bathe again. I want more of your scent.
As a young woman, you were taught the strict virtues of humility and obedience, but I don’t need you to be obedient to me. You can do what you want with me, anything, and I’ll help you too. I’ll take your wig off and pick the lice from your scalp.
You were married by nine, and survived a fire in the year 1295, when you were 10 years old. Maybe the halo in all of the paintings is the glowing remnant of that fire, and when I kiss you, my lips glow too, as if the halo is uranium, our love a cancer spreading through our bodies.
I will call you by your name of silence, the name you chose for yourself: Evfrosiniya. I will whisper that name in your ear as we hide together in a wardrobe. The Mongol hordes who tortured your sons will not find us. We’ll be naked, with fur coats hanging above us. I’ll pull one down and cover our bodies in fur. You’ll scooch back into me, your bare back pressed to my chest, and I’ll smell once more the oil on your skin as I hold you cradled against me.
THE MATRIX
I was in a drugstore last year, and I saw these little blue birds made of glass, and I had to take one. I picked it up and looked on the bottom and it was marked $39.99. Only three inches tall and it was worth $40. I couldn’t believe it. So I stuck it in my pocket.
An employee walked up and said, “Excuse me, young man, but could you please empty out your pockets?” He was kind of tall and thin. Maybe 10 years older than me.
We were near the door, by the front displays, and I hesitated. I wish I hadn’t. I should’ve kept walking and made him make the difficult decision to stop me physically, but I froze and he put his hand on my shoulder and gave me that smile that really isn’t a smile.
When people put their hands on me, it makes my jaw tighten like someone’s ratcheting a bolt on the side of my face. I can feel all of my teeth pressing together, top and bottom, getting tighter and tighter, and some of my teeth don’t seem to fit right. I didn’t like the way this man was looking at me, and I tried to calm myself down and breathe, staring at two longer hairs just under his eye that he missed while shaving. I tried not to hit him.
When I did make a move, it wasn’t a punch. It was more of a shove, two-handed. I popped him with two open hands and he was jolted off his feet.
He fell into a perfume display—no, through a perfume display—and the table broke and the bottles popped up into the air like in that movie The Matrix. I swear I could see the bottles just sparkling and hanging there for a second before they fell and exploded on the linoleum floor. The man tried to stand up, but the table had split in half and the tablecloth was folded around him, so standing only made things worse. He slipped again and went down hard, and then I noticed that there were other people all around us, none of them doing anything but just standing and staring at him and at me, and then I realized that I’d better run. So I did. I ran.
OF MONSTERS AND MEN
Grandpa says, “Something’s out there.”
“Where?” I say.
“In the lake.” He points with his cer
eal spoon.
I look where he’s pointing. Make a serious face. “What kind of a something?”
He taps his spoon on the table. Says, “The lake monster kind.”
I smile when he says that. “A lake monster?”
“You don’t believe me?” He points his spoon at me.
I pour a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and grab a dry handful. Eat the yellow pieces out of my hand. “No. I don’t believe in lake monsters.”
Grandpa says, “It’s not just me that thinks so. Our neighbor Rosa Nash came over last night and said she saw something weird too. She says something came up out of the water and ate a goose the other evening.”
I pour milk over my cereal. Take a big bite. “A goose?”
“A huge goose. One of those big, fat white ones. She said the monster drug it, the goose, screaming and squawking to its death.”
“All right,” I say, “and you saw this monster eat a goose too?”
“No, I didn’t. But I saw it eat something else. I saw the monster take down a blue heron in the shallows near the boggy end. I was walking the south-side trail the other morning, and I looked out at this perfect blue heron standing there in a foot of water when all of a sudden something ripped it off its feet.” Grandpa claps his hands together. “And I’m not talking about any kind of fish or bird either, because this thing took the heron out into deep water and dragged it down just like Rosa Nash described with the goose. All I saw was a flash of the monster’s tail.”
“The monster has a tail now?”
“You go ahead and laugh,” Grandpa says, “but this thing has a big monster tail.” He takes a bite of cereal and chews. I can hear him breathing through his nose as he eats, chewing so hard it sounds like someone raking through gravel.
I say, “It could be a northern pike or something. I’ve caught some big fish out there.”
“No,” Grandpa says, “fish don’t have monster tails.” He takes another big bite of cereal and stares at me as he chews. He swallows and says, “I think you know the difference between a monster and a pike, right?”
I say, “Come on, Grandpa, a monster?” I drink my milk and stand up to clear my bowl.
He follows me into the kitchen. “One more thing: I’m not sure if it’s safe for you to sleep out there anymore.”
“In my tent?”
“Well, if there’s a monster in the lake, I’m not sure it’s a good idea to be sleeping right on the shore.”
“I made a promise to myself: 100 nights straight. No matter what. And ‘no matter what’ means no matter what. Monsters included.” I smile when I say “monsters.”
Grandpa clunks his bowl down into the sink. “This is not a joke, Travis. I’ll talk to your grandma about it.”
I fill my cereal bowl with water from the tap and watch the milky cloud swirl in the bottom. Then I drink the white water. I say, “I’m gonna shoot some hoops now.”
OSPREY’S HUNT
While I shoot, I start to think about things, so after 100 makes, I go back inside and leave my basketball by the front door. In the guest room, I lift the throw pillow, unzip it, and pull out my jar. I put the jar in the bottom of my backpack next to my water bottle. Yell, “Grandpa, I’ll be back.”
Grandpa’s watching MLB TV when I walk by. He doesn’t say anything.
I bike down Coburg to the 126 overpass. Check the cages there. The dugouts. Walk back on each of the deer paths through the ivy. Find a man sleeping with a cardboard sign on his chest that says,
WAR VET—MONEY OR FOOD?
ANYTHING HELPS
He doesn’t wake up as I step past him. I find an empty tent where the trail stops, the tent door next to a pile of garbage: fast-food containers, half a T-shirt with a brown smear on it, a bike tire, two wine bottles, a green Coleman propane tank.
I bike past the Kendall Auto Group, over the Ferry Street Bridge. The wraparound. The gravel riverbank. There’s a blue plastic tarp covering someone sleeping. Or not sleeping. There’s no movement. No breathing. I sneak up and pull back the corner of the tarp. It’s two big backpacks lying end to end, the size of a person but not a person. I put the tarp back in place. Fold the edges underneath a backpack.
I push my bike along the river path through Skinner’s Butte Park. See a man carving a walking stick with a sheath knife, ornamenting the wood. He says, “See this tribal shit here, man?”
“Yeah,” I say, “that’s good.” Then I keep going. Keep searching for her. I do this sometimes. Sometimes I just think about it, in the middle of something, and I want to find her right then, I can’t even explain why.
I bike up the slope at the bridge before the rose gardens. Find three people sleeping at the chain-link. All of them too young, in their early thirties or something like that.
I lean my bike against my thigh. Swing my backpack off my shoulders. Get out my water bottle and take a drink. Stare at the river. There are riffles before the bridge, shallows across the water to the north bank, the deepest section only two feet. It’s hot and I think about swimming, but no one swims right here for whatever reason.
I look upriver and down. There are too many places to look, too many places to hide. I put my water bottle back in the bottom of the pack and slide it on, tightening the straps.
I wonder if she’s using a lot. I’m sure she’s using some, but it’s hard to know how much. There have to be times when she doesn’t, when she runs out of money, or she feels guilty, or she tries to quit. Sometimes, when I was little, she’d talk about quitting. She’d say it like she was talking about building a dream house. She’d draw in the air in front of her, and I’d always wonder what she was drawing since it didn’t match up to what she was saying. I’d watch her hands wave around, her fingers draw lines in the air, lines across and lines down, and she’d say, “I wouldn’t even need it anymore. I wouldn’t even think about it.”
One time, when I was 10, she got methadone and quit for three weeks. She seemed okay, her hands a little shaky, but still okay. Then one night she locked herself in the bathroom and she didn’t come out. It got quiet, real quiet, and I had that feeling again where everything tightens up, my shoulders too high, the muscles in my neck clenching, and I knocked on the bathroom door but she didn’t answer me.
“Mom?” I said. “Are you okay?”
Then she wasn’t using methadone anymore, and some days she didn’t come home at all.
I’m thinking about that time and staring over my shoulder at the bridge, but I’m not really staring at anything. I can hear the cars clunking the metal splits, and the low sound of all those cars’ motors running together.
I get on my bike and start pedaling back.
XBOX VS. DVDS
I shoot 200 shots in the driveway on the backboard that Grandpa and I hung when I was 13. I remember how happy I was that Grandpa was willing to put it up with me. He found the set on Craigslist for $45, and we spent a Saturday afternoon measuring and remeasuring, making sure the rim was at 10 feet exactly, sliding the backboard up and down over and over until we were sure and we could draw a mark on the siding. Then we spent 20 minutes making sure everything was level—the rim level in both directions, and the bottom of the backboard level straight across. We kept tilting it and checking, tilting it some more, and Grandpa tapped wood shims in at the bottom, and we kept checking because we wanted it to be perfect. Then we bolted it down with lag screws.
As we worked, I kept telling him, “Thank you. Thank you so much, Grandpa.”
And he kept saying, “It’s fine. Really. Don’t worry about it.”
That was before Grandma was sick, before everything was different, before things weren’t as good between him and me. That was before he started taking whatever Grandma got from the pharmacy.
—
I stand in front of the backboard and shoot 100 right-handed shots, then 100 left-handed shots. I start close and move out, the way I always do.
Then I walk over to Creature’s house and knock on his front door. It
seems like no one’s there, but I keep knocking anyway since I can never really tell. His mom always keeps the blinds down and the house dark. She sleeps about 15 hours a day, eats weird food, and has this thing about exercise videos when she’s not sleeping. Last time I was over there she kicked us off the Xbox so she could do one of her exercise DVDs.
So we gave up the TV then and Creature’s mom got into a really tight outfit and started doing Tae Bo. She’s always in good shape from doing those videos, and she’s young too. She was maybe 16 when she had Creature, so I think she’s still sort of in her prime physically, even if she’s kind of crazy. Anyway, we were eating some cereal at the table and she was exercising right there in front of us, and it was hard not to watch her, so I just kept watching.
Creature reached across the table and smacked me on the side of my head. “What the hell are you looking at?”
I put my head down and took a quick bite.
Creature said, “This is ridiculous. Can you watch any more of this?”
“No,” I said, but his mom was getting sweaty now and her clothes were so tight, and she really wasn’t that old. As long as I forgot that she was Creature’s mom, I could watch her all day long.
BABY DADDY
I knock on Creature’s front door again.
The door opens a crack and his mom’s face appears in the line of light. She looks like she just woke up. “Travis?”
“Oh hey, Mrs. M., is Creature…I mean…is Malik here?”
“No,” she says, and combs her hair with her fingers. Smiles at me.
This is the Part Where You Laugh Page 4
