Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter

by Michael J. White

  “How big was it?” Mrs. Schell asked, pretending her question was forensically relevant and nothing more. I held my hands out the width of my shoulders. She turned to Mr. Schell only long enough to roll her eyes. “You’re exaggerating. We’ve got trout streams in Tennessee, you know.”

  “Then you know that trout usually get bigger in streams than in lakes, and either way a five-pound brownie is an absolute hog. When it came splashing out of the lake, I practically fell out of the tree.”

  Mrs. Schell turned to the windows and smiled, really smiling, like she’d seen her fair share of brown trout take to the air and there was no greater thrill. When she turned back and nodded for me to continue, her smile hadn’t entirely left her. “She fought it for a long time,” I said. “I don’t know exactly, but almost ten minutes, I think. I was giving her instructions and Emily was cheering her on. Katie kept cursing the fish, calling him names. She couldn’t figure out why he kept hiding under the canoe.”

  “What names did she call it?” Mrs. Schell asked.

  “Little bugger. Little bastard.”

  Mrs. Schell covered her mouth and turned away again, chuckling this time. Mr. Schell couldn’t believe it. He stared at her as he might’ve stared at an exotic bird let loose in his kitchen, flapping wildly. She laughed herself to a few eye-swelling tears, then leaned on her elbows and wiped her cheeks. She didn’t look up again until she’d composed herself, when I started to get the feeling she’d been training herself to ignore me, and simply focus on the story.

  “It was a long fight,” I went on. “Part of the reason it took so long was because at one point Katie accidentally opened the reel. I could see it spinning backward, which meant her fish was running away with the line. But she’d hooked him good, and I thought she’d still catch him if she could get the line taut again.”

  Mrs. Schell leaned forward, only slightly, but enough to let me know she wanted the story to continue forever, like the story was keeping Katie alive. But I couldn’t stretch it out because Mr. Schell was losing his patience. He knew the ending and was acting wary of the possibility that I’d change it, that I was inventing as I went along. His chin jutted out again and he tilted his head down so that his pupils were aimed up in preemptive warning. I kept going, just the same as before.

  “By then Emily had made her way around the shore and was standing next to me. We kept telling Katie to sit down and hold the pole up high. That’s when her fish broke the surface, wiggling in the air and trying to throw the hook out. After he splashed back down Katie put a hand on the spool to stop it from letting out more line. She started reeling in again, as fast as she could. When we saw a bunch of splashes on the far side of the canoe, we knew she had it close. She leaned over to pull it in by the line.”

  Mrs. Schell raised her hands, frantically interrupting. “You didn’t have a net?” she shouted.

  “I didn’t think we’d need it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, raising my voice. “I just didn’t.” Which is when I realized it wasn’t just the anchor that was the big mistake, it was the net. Mrs. Schell saw that I recognized her point and nodded for me to continue. “So like I said, there were a few splashes, then at some point Katie let go of the line and jumped back. Maybe she thought the fish would bite her or something, but as soon as she jumped back the canoe tipped one way and then the other way. That’s when she fell in.”

  Mr. Schell turned toward the backyard and his barbecue pit, looking like he wanted to crawl inside it and close the lid so he wouldn’t have to hear any more. Mrs. Schell held herself perfectly still, except for her quivering chin. When she lost it a few seconds later, Mr. Schell started searching the ceiling and mumbling under his breath, likely advising himself to hold it together for a few more minutes, then let go. Mrs. Schell covered her face with two flat hands. Her shoulders bowed inward and heaved. I didn’t know how to adjust my tone without crying so I just kept on with the confidence of a journalist who’d already told the story a thousand times.

  “Emily dove in with her shoes on and everything. The canoe had drifted a ways, so it took us a couple of minutes to get out there. Maybe two minutes. I don’t know if Emily ever saw her underwater, but I didn’t.”

  “When did she take it off?” Mr. Schell demanded. “When did she toss the life jacket?”

  “I told the police it must’ve happened after she fell in. But they didn’t believe me and kept insisting she’d taken it off sometime before that. I didn’t know what else to tell them. I still don’t understand it. All I could figure was that her fish took off with the pole, and maybe she unbuckled herself to go after it. That was only a guess. We couldn’t see her from the shore, and when we swam out to the canoe, the first thing I noticed was two life jackets floating away.”

  Mr. Schell tilted his head back again and gnashed his teeth and flared his nostrils. (It seemed he’d become an expert at these ill-tempered gestures, recasting himself as impulsive and unpredictable, qualities that I consider a greater threat than size and muscle.) I swore he was using every ounce of restraint not to upend the table and charge. “Emily told us!” he shouted. “None of you wore your life jackets because of the heat! You ditched them from the start!”

  It was the worst time to lose my nerve, but while caught between summoning a response and attempting to understand Emily’s lies I ended up shoving backward in my chair, banging against the countertop and yelping in surprise. Mr. Schell jumped to his feet, slamming his knuckles down on the table and leaning forward so the hanging candle lamp shone white on his face.

  “You actually believe your own bullshit, don’t you? She was never wearing a life jacket. You thought you were such a hotshot with a canoe she wouldn’t need one. ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME, BOIY?! WHEN WILL YOU BE READY FOR THE TRUTH?!”

  “I was ready for the truth when I rang the doorbell,” I said, tapping a source of previously unknown equanimity. “Either the jacket was defective, or Katie unbuckled it after she fell in. But I’ve already explained everything I came to explain.”

  Mr. Schell smiled big and toothy, refusing such an ending, tempting me to stand up and meet him eye to eye. Mrs. Schell covered her splotchy cheeks and forehead, every once in a while shaking her hands out as though begging for something she couldn’t put into words. And that’s when I closed my eyes and my lips fell open and my chest expanded and my whole body rose. In the next couple of seconds I summoned such a colossal pillar of breath that I felt it sucking in from a collective sigh at the center of the room, as if I were breathing not only for myself but for all of us, all the Schell family and all of mine, our ancestors, too. When I opened my eyes again—in all likelihood I’d only blinked—Mrs. Schell was reaching for her husband’s clenched fist, pressing her head to his knuckles and wetting them with her tears. His boyish eyes were still bulging, deliberating between courageous revenge and confused retreat as I rose to my feet, moving with such deliberate gentility that there was no doubt I was only standing up to leave. I pushed my chair back under the table and turned around, half expecting Mr. Schell to now draw his antique pistol and shoot me in the back. But he didn’t, and soon I was past the hallway and out the front door, crossing over a moonlit lawn glistening with melted snow.

  After I stepped into my truck and started the engine, I surprised myself by pausing before driving away. I looked up at the Schell house and thought about all the times I’d waited like a chimp on the front porch. I thought about Katie’s schoolbooks in her closet that had already lost a good deal of their value and might never get resold. I thought about all those corny stenciled T-shirts in the storage room downstairs. After a while I realized I was mostly staring at my own reflection in the dining room windows, absorbed in a brief meditation that might’ve been broken with the filmic sight of Mr. Schell stepping into the window frame and aiming and firing. Of course that didn’t happen, but I imagined it would and had to laugh at myself as I drove away, knowing perfectly well that Mr. Sch
ell was sitting at the kitchen table huddled around his wife.

  Fifty-one

  I realize now that in the course of my mission to accurately record the final act of my first romantic relationship, I’ve neglected several significant coinciding events, such as the surprise I received one frozen February morning when I woke to find Zach at the kitchen table, already several cups of coffee ahead of me, slopping through a bowl of oatmeal as he described the incredible new sickness he felt blowing all his bartending money the same night he made it, especially since his dear Rachel wasn’t the type to wait at the end of the bar for the last hour of his shift like a common-law, good-for-nothing tramp. Of course Frank had been more than happy to loan him a few pairs of padded overalls, “so long as he gave them a good workout,” which it turned out he did. Even during the most trying weeks of our endless winter, Zach took an enthusiastic interest in learning all the tricks of the Moretti trade, which included becoming fluent in veteran jargon, and never complaining, and lending a hand wherever he could. (This is not to suggest he didn’t find his place as the joker on the crew, only now he considered his sophomoric high jinks as essential to our esprit de corps, usually presenting them in combination with the ritual one-hitters he passed around before our r ush-hour ride home.)

  After only a few months, everyone agreed that Zach had found his calling, especially in view of his intense pride in his ability to operate every piece of machinery on the site, including breakers, crawlers, excavators, dozers, augers with big ripper buckets, and skid loaders with hydraulic tiltrotators. He even gained such a reputation for innovative time-saving suggestions that Frank decided to introduce him to the political nuances of the process by requiring his attendance at all meetings with the state overseers. By the end of April we’d already finished most of the preliminary work to reconnect two lagoons, thus restoring the original free-flowing water system and putting to rest a great deal of concern over the timetable for our part of the project; at one point we made more progress in ten days than Frank thought we could in three weeks. As for myself, I passed most of those days in the former landfill, rocking around in a caged tractor, trying to convince myself I was digging up a glorious past when in fact I was only taking out the trash.

  But none of this really matters. This story is almost over7 and my whole purpose of describing the work we did that spring is to share the fact that at some point over the course of working together and sharing lengthy commutes beginning at five a.m. (in Zach’s stealthy new Ford F-Series; my truck blew a head gasket and more or less bit the dust), I realized that Zach and I had quit conversing like pipsqueak adversaries and become friends. For the first time since childhood I became aware of the deep security I felt having Zach as my brother, going so far as to think that all his efforts for Frank Moretti were somehow part of an endeavor to win the brotherly respect he felt he’d failed to earn in all the years before.

  That said, I’ll now relate a particular conversation in early May that found us gazing over an almost surreal landscape of men and machines in fluid motion, crisscrossing one another under the watch of wind turbines whirling in distant fields. Zach and I were sitting at a picnic table near the trailer, shoveling down nearly expired emergency meals left over from the flood.

  “A lot of people are taking notice of this project,” Zach said, shouting over metallic cranks and roars (the remedial sound effects of progress, as we saw it then). “Shit. Frank says they’re planning a big conference in a few months with city planners from St. Louis, Cincinnati, Dallas, New York. If things work out here, we’ll be a model for parks around the country.”

  “You think you could keep this up for thirty years?” I asked, half choking on the steam.

  “Hell yeah. I’m feeling stronger than ever. We should think about starting our own company. I’m serious. I like this business and we could be good at it. You’re a natural-born salesman. You could manage the business end while I take charge of the crews.”

  I nodded along, acting like it was an interesting idea, but that I wasn’t sure if it would really work out. Zach played his hand the best he could, changing the topic when he realized I wasn’t in the mood for a hard sell. “I was thinking,” he said. “If you’ve got the time, I know this kid from Iowa City who’s living practically for free in his grandpa’s cabin out in Montana. He’s got it pretty good out there, and it’s just him until October—” Zach paused and looked up. He skipped whatever he was planning to say and took another bite.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Well, I was gonna say I could bring Rachel and you could bring Emily, but I guess you two broke up for good, huh?”

  I nodded.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, reaching for the napkins before the whole stack blew away. Zach balled up his disposable meal tray and dumped it into the metal can next to him.

  “Shit, man. You’ve had a pretty rough go this last year.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I liked Emily.”

  “Me, too.”

  For a while Zach just sat there shaking his head. He probably wanted to say something nasty about Emily but he didn’t. In the end he just kept staring at me and smirking. “What?” I asked.

  “He ain’t heavy, mister. He’s my brother.”

  “Is that from Boys Town?”

  “Probably,” he said, still smirking as he nodded at the stack of emergency lasagnas. “Let’s split another one, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, even though he was already opening the box. He poured the water pouch over the chemical pack and shoved it back inside. A minute later there was steam pouring out the corners of the box. Zach gave me a look like perhaps we should talk a little more about my troubles. “I’m gonna be all right.”

  “I know,” he said, shaking his plastic fork at me, like he wasn’t so sure, but he’d let it go if that’s what I wanted. “What you need to do is to sign up for some business classes. You think you could work on site all day and manage a few business classes at night?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Hell yeah you could—” But then he cut himself off, realizing that my attention had drifted and I wasn’t really listening. “Are you really all right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, tossing a pebble at the portable toilets near the woods. “I was just thinking about that girl from the Holiday Inn. Do you ever think about that?”

  “I try not to, but I think about it. What’s got you thinking about that now?”

  “I don’t know. I have to think about something. I always wonder why we didn’t hear anything. She must’ve screamed at least once, but no one heard a thing?”

  “I guess she should’ve screamed louder. They say you should yell fire when you’re being raped, ’cause if you yell rape, people run away. These days you try to help someone out, you end up getting sued. It’s a liability helping people.”

  “So is screaming,” I said, tossing another pebble at the toilets. “Did you know Nicholas and Missy were both devout Catholics? Did you know he never slept with her, or raped her, or anything like that? He strangled her without even kissing her.”

  “That’s fucking beautiful, George.”

  “At least he had some principles,” I said. “At least he believed in something.”

  Zach blew off the comment with a backhanded flick of the wrist, shaking his head like he didn’t understand and he didn’t want to understand. “I just can’t believe they haven’t caught him. Little bastard’s probably in Mexico by now, living the life. We should become bounty hunters. We could live the life, too.”

  “Maybe,” I said, thinking that maybe I’d fall out of love or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I’d meet another girl and fall as hard for her as I did for Emily. Or maybe I’d never know such desire ever again and I’d be better for it.

  Ten minutes later we were back to our tractors, digging up what would eventually become the Grand Basin. It was a slow and tedious process. Here and there among the r
usty tin cans and glass bottles we’d stumble upon small treasures: an iron sculpture of mating frogs, a perfectly shaped Superman lunch box filled with quarter-sized slugs likely once engaged to cheat 1950s slot machines. Later that day one of our diggers uncovered a pair of decorative shell ear spools and an ancient hoe. As required by law, Frank called the Iowa Archeologi cal Society, whose experts uncovered several additional artifacts, mostly whittled from bison bones (that they eventually traced to the Mill Creek culture, which thrived in Iowa about a thousand years ago, before they migrated upriver and all but vanished).

  Caught in the excitement of the discovery, over the next month I spent more than one lunch break strolling the park perimeters with an eye out for evidence of disturbed ground, still clinging to the notion that at some point I’d begin a secret and meticulous excavation of Katie’s time capsule. By then I viewed the fairgrounds as the most ideal burial site, particularly in terms of the childlike wonder it exuded on all who openheartedly entered its premises. Perhaps this wonder and consequentially innocent way of seeing deserves more credit than anything else for my detecting one day, while trekking through the woods not far from the main park entrance, a noticeably irregular and leafless sapling sprouting through the dirt near the base of a walnut tree. On further inspection my hunch was verified; the twiggy youth was actually a steel wire sticking out of the ground, offering no apparent purpose, and fully resistant to being yanked out of place.

  While I didn’t expect anything to come of this finding, I nonetheless went through the motions of a minor investigation. This began with having Zach check the utilities survey in Frank’s trailer, which resulted in his assurance that the steel wire in question couldn’t possibly have marked an electrical cable or telephone cable because there were no cables of any kind buried in the fairground woods. Of course this information proved nothing, but it still offered me enough motivation to continue my little quest by returning the next day with a set of excavation tools. During my initial bout of digging I tried to imagine where the steel wire might lead, if not to Katie’s time capsule. But I couldn’t think of anything else I might find, and ended up only advancing my expectations by deciding that I was the only living person Katie had warned of the time capsule’s existence. This allowed me to suppose that whatever letter she’d included in the capsule would somehow connect to me, which in fact it did:To the Finder of This Registered and Legally Protected Time Capsule: