Afloat

by Jennifer McCartney

  ‘I bet Dad would have loved something like that.’

  ‘Funerals are for the living,’ I told her.

  Flags lowered, expensive gravestones, eulogies, tears, wakes, pilgrimages, candles, the flowers are only for us, the ones left behind. They’ve already set sail.

  Anna took my hand in the hours before her father’s funeral service; I kept wondering why Michael hadn’t returned from his boarding trip to Lake Tahoe. Her face looked older than I remembered – her pores large, her face damaged from the sun. She had her hair clipped back with some kind of coconut shell and as she collected our water glasses from the table, scrubbed my countertops and organized my pills, I thought the tears were for her father.

  ‘Did Michael say he’d be back for the burial? Is he flying into Minneapolis-St. Paul?’

  Anna wiped her eyes with a dishrag and sat across from me.

  ‘I’m going to take care of you, Mom,’ she told me.

  I had one of Alan’s unwashed socks in my pocket. My index finger poking through the hole in the heel, I was thinking of how his foot used to be inside it.

  ‘Where is he?’ I wanted to know.

  Anna told me at last.

  ‘Michael left me for her. For his student, I mean. Back in California.’

  Then she really began to cry.

  ‘Things weren’t supposed to turn out this way,’ she said to me.

  And I knew exactly what she meant. It had been many years since we had shared anything like we did in that moment.

  Checking the hands of the Virgin Mary, he is late and I think of a beach to relax myself. An open sky with clouds like scales. A sky empty of Rapid Weather Patterns and government helicopters and rockets and other man-made entities riding the air currents alone above me. A lake where, suspended in water, you can move in circles and never get to the end because there isn’t one and you can start over and over again and you can always return to the place you’ve just left. It is twenty after six and I can’t remember taking my blue pills.

  I’m certain he will come. There are stories he wants to hear.

  The sound of the doorbell comes, finally – the tone echoing in my head so I wonder if I ever heard it at all.

  I answer the call.

  Mackinac

  A tree is burning. I can smell wood smoke through the rain as I open the door, along with the electric odor of ozone and wet leaves. Water clatters continuously from the roof and eaves, while lightning cracks its eerie fluorescence over the two figures on my doorstep. The rain is heavy, disorienting. I can’t tell who the second figure is, I was expecting only one.

  ‘Rummy?’

  The figure on the left waves her slender fingers at me.

  ‘Hi, Bell. Nice fucking night for a memorial service.’

  ‘Brenna wanted to come too!’ Rummy shouts.

  She is wearing pink rubber boots. Her presence is sharp, irritating, and not what tonight is meant for. Rummy and I discussed how it should be done, the two of us. Bryce is at Dickweed’s birthday party tonight.

  ‘Great,’ I say.

  ‘Have you got the hat?’ he asks.

  I hold up the plastic bag from Mackinac Mart. The three of us are dressed in identical yellow rain suits – the hood with an extended brim that looks like a duckbill, which Velvet made us purchase from The Island Sweat Shop. Moving quickly towards the bike racks, not speaking, I imagine we are ducklings in a too big pond, the storm come to wash us all away.

  There are two weeks left until the Tippecanoe closes for the season. The entire island is slowing down, getting colder. With fewer tourists there are fewer carriages, and the sidewalks have long expanses with no people on them at all. The bike rental shops close down, one by one. Seagulls huddle against the wind. Hotels lower their prices. The Tippecanoe offers soups made from acorn squash and cranberries, pumpkin and maple syrup. Some hotels are already empty, the water pipes drained in preparation for the Michigan winter. Each morning more suitcases and bicycles line the dock, workers throwing bits of their breakfast to the gulls, waiting to return home. Today, on Velvet’s instructions, Bryce spent three hours polishing the canoe bar with Tecumseh’s All American Wood Protector. With its large windows, the restaurant has become draughty and uncomfortable; the cold weather version of our uniforms is a knitted black vest to wear over our tuxedo shirts. I imagine what Trainer’s comments would have been.

  Rummy pointed out the vests were made in Burma.

  ‘We have a trade embargo with Burma,’ he explained.

  We have two weeks, but tonight is when it ends. I’m already nostalgic in anticipation of what I’m about to lose.

  As we begin our journey to the Crack in the Island, the rain falls with more intensity, the severity of the storm increasing as the wet sky descends, smacking rooftops, drenching leaves and pavement. Thunder explodes from the dark space between each tree trunk, the sound vibrating up through my handlebars, and I imagine with each crack of electricity that lightning has struck the metal of my bike, and my heart has stopped.

  I try holding my breath, to get closer to death, and I hope that Rummy’s backpack contains all the things we discussed.

  In single file we follow Rummy, his one headlight spotlighting the rain and giving him an odd appearance, glowing, as if he isn’t really there. When he takes the corner into the State Park, he disappears altogether and in the darkness I miss the sharp turn, veering into the trees. Brenna waits as I turn around. With difficulty I return to the path, boots sinking in the muddy undergrowth, branches sliding across my body.

  ‘I brought a zebra!’ she yells, or that’s what it sounds like.

  I can’t hear properly over the storm. ‘A what?’

  ‘How’s your mother by the way?’ she asks as I mount my bike.

  She speaks clearly this time, and shaking my head I begin to pedal away, towards the real purpose of our wet evening.

  Last night, I went to the dock after my shift and someone had stuck chewing gum on the listening part of the telephone.

  My mother asked me what I would like to eat.

  ‘Your first meal back,’ she said. ‘What would you like? Potato salad?’

  I told her corn on the cob would be nice, but she said it was out of season. Later when my mother hung up the phone for her nap, my father said he’d been doing all the cooking anyway.

  ‘She needs her energy to get well,’ he said.

  The gum softened and stuck to my ear, the smell of mint making me nauseous.

  ‘Your Aunt Lydia’s back from Rome again, by the way. She’s brought you a clock.’

  Before hanging up the phone my father promised corn, if only from the freezer.

  On Garrison Road the pavement is covered in water and where the ground dips we ride through dark puddles pelted with rain, our tires spraying plumes behind us. My thigh muscles begin to cramp, and I’m sure we’ve gone in the wrong direction. Rummy missed a turn, the path we are looking for is unmarked, a small dirt trail. Turning back, we pass the entrance to Saint Anne’s cemetery for the second time, the stone archway black with rain. ‘ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES PROHIBITED’, a sign reads.

  I wondered about the cemetery as a possible location, but Bryce told me it was haunted – photographs taken at night were developed with mist and distortions among the grave markers. ‘The Post Cemetery is worse,’ he warned, ‘the ghost of a young soldier killed in the War of 1812 walks behind the white picket fence after dark, holding his lost lover’s handkerchief in his fist.’

  I accused him of lying, and he shrugged.

  ‘Whatever you want to believe,’ he said.

  The long grassy field of the airport opens before us, the wind hurling itself across the wide runways and I wonder if Velvet’s orchid shipment will be late tomorrow. Soon the forest consumes us again, dark and blurred with water. My fingers burn numb on the handlebars, the wet collar of my sweatshirt cold beneath my rain jacket. The trail becomes narrow, covered in dark leaves. The trees are close, branches arcing above the
pathway as if this ancient spirit forest will arrange itself behind us, leaving no escape. The light ahead stops moving and I brake lightly, sliding on wet leaves under my wheels.

  ‘Is that it?’ Rummy asks.

  He angles the handlebars of his bike, shining the headlight into the forest. Through the rain and wet undergrowth are four slender elm trees, their trunks white in the light. Between the elms is a dark crevice, splitting the rocky ground as the land rises away from us. The Crack in the Island.

  ‘That’s it?’ Brenna asks. ‘I thought it’d be bigger.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ Rummy says.

  Unwrapping the Mackinac Mart bag from around my right handlebar, we leave our bikes on the trail; except for the gods and ghosts we are the only ones here tonight. We ascend a muddy incline, following along the crack into the dark. The rain echoes inside the forest, sounding as if we’re inside a cathedral. Long streams of water plummet from the canopy above, and Rummy takes a flashlight from his backpack. Standing above the dark limestone fracture, it looks as if it descends for miles. Too narrow to climb down into, it is barely wide enough for an arm, but I can understand why people come here to search it out. It looks as if it breathes, a part of the forest’s ecosystem.

  ‘Tourists are so fucking dumb,’ Brenna says. ‘Why would anyone hike all the way out here for this?’

  ‘At least Trainer won’t be bothered,’ Rummy points out.

  The break in the earth continues, surprisingly straight and even, as if the ground was broken by the descent of a gigantic guillotine, the huge blade withdrawn again into the sky. Further along ferns and grassy clumps edge into the crevice, dirt and undergrowth narrowing the gap.

  By the wet trunk of a fir tree we sit in our yellow raingear to decide how we want to proceed. After setting the flashlight upright in the mud and securing it with soil, Rummy produces the bottle of Belvedere and we drink – I take huge swallows. Brenna drinks after me, then wipes her mouth, but her face is wet anyway.

  ‘I love vodka.’ She tongues the lip of the bottle. ‘No calories.’

  ‘Let’s get on with it,’ Rummy says.

  I reach into the bag, the plastic wet and cold, to find what it is we’ve come to bury. I already know that Trainer’s Cleveland Indians hat is stained, the inside rim yellowed and shiny with forehead grease. I took it from the road where he’d fallen and, still holding it, answered all their questions. There is no blood on it, though I want there to be. Without the blood it’s just his hat. Bryce tried it on a few times, but it’s too big for him.

  I couldn’t keep it in the room with me, even hidden away in the closet – Trainer’s bloody beard brushed against me as I slept and the sounds of his choking came at me from the walls. In one dream he was dressed like the Virgin Mary and waving to me frantically from a lifeboat, his hat missing from his head. I wondered about sending it back to his family with some kind of note, like everything else that’s been shipped off in boxes. But what the fuck would I write?

  Something seemed right about putting a piece of him underground, in a place where he wanted to be.

  Trainer and I discovered the Crack in the Island on the Mackinac map hanging above the employee table. He laughed, while pointing out its location, marked just above the airport.

  ‘Sounds ominous,’ I agreed. ‘Biblical, or something.’

  ‘Sounds like a giant ass,’ Trainer said giggling.

  Rummy has been here before, and we agreed it was appropriate to give Trainer his send-off in the island’s giant crack.

  Brenna takes the hat from me, and smells it. In the narrow light of the flashlight, both she and Rummy appear as shadows, the beam floating upwards and disappearing above our heads.

  ‘Smells like him,’ she says.

  She places the hat before us. From the pocket of her raincoat she pulls out a small wooden zebra and places it inside Trainer’s upturned hat. The zebra’s about three inches high, with a wiry mane and tail. The stripes look hand-painted.

  ‘I’d bought it for him at the toy shop,’ she explains.

  Rummy takes a drink of Belvedere, and says nothing.

  ‘Why?’ I ask.

  She draws her bright yellow legs up to her chest, leaning back against the pine tree.

  ‘He was my friend too,’ she says. ‘He told me about the African resort.’

  A burst of thunder interrupts her, then lightning, and the air feels full. Brenna looks at me. I look at Rummy, but he’s staring down into the ground as he drinks.

  ‘What resort?’ I ask.

  ‘Thanda Private Game Reserve,’ she says. ‘In South Africa. His aunt lives out there and said they were looking for experienced foreign waiters.’

  She pauses, her hood covering her face.

  ‘He was going there in October. So he didn’t have to go home.’

  The light of the flashlight dims suddenly, then returns to full strength.

  ‘A game reserve?’ I say, unbelieving. ‘He didn’t like being outside.’

  ‘It’s a five-star resort,’ she says. ‘The staff get free fucking body massages, rose petal baths, everything. He showed me the website.’

  I look at Brenna, feeling as if I’ve underestimated something this summer.

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Neither did I,’ Rummy says.

  She motions to the tiny wooden animal upturned in his hat.

  ‘He really wanted to see a zebra,’ she says.

  He never told me about South Africa. A whole other country, his plan for luxury and escape never mentioned. Sucking water from the end of my cold fingers, I try to remember if he knew about St. Kat’s. If he knew how I craved the decadence of eating steak with expensive wine, to be the sort of woman at the table the waitress usually mocks in the kitchen, only she wouldn’t – I wouldn’t be pretentious. I would understand, because I had been there. I wouldn’t demand that my mashed white truffle potatoes be substituted for green beans, or ask for an extra plate or more garlic sabayon when she was busy. I’d never even taste the wine, just motion for her to pour. I would have an understanding face. I would leave an extravagant tip. I’ve seen too much here to settle for anything less.

  I pick up Brenna’s offering and stroke its tiny wire mane with my finger.

  ‘He’s cute,’ I say.

  Brenna reaches for the bottle. ‘I did my nails to match.’

  She holds out a hand, each of her long fingernails striped with black, then white.

  Rummy places his own contribution into the Indians hat. Trainer’s Spice Girl playing cards. Covered in clear packing tape to protect them from rain, there are only a few cards left. Some were lost on the road as he slipped under the carriage that night. Some he lost earlier, or traded. On the back of each is a figure of a woman, leaning forward, posing and dressed in leopard print and leather.

  ‘What ever happened to his bike?’ I ask.

  ‘They never shipped it,’ Rummy says. ‘Tom sold it to a guy over at the bike shop for ten bucks. He’s gonna get a new wheel for it, straighten the fenders. I took the cards off before he sold it.’

  ‘Did they have the Spice Girls up in Canada?’ Brenna asks him. ‘Their music I mean?’

  Rummy glares at her. ‘Do they not have an education system in Toledo?’

  ‘I went to a Catholic school,’ she says defensively.

  ‘So did I,’ I tell her.

  The vodka makes everything seem important.

  ‘You should know we’ve had running water and electricity in Canada for years now,’ Rummy says to Brenna.

  ‘So you have heard of the Spice Girls then. That’s all I was asking, fuck.’

  More rain falls, and Rummy wants to know if she’s heard from Blue, and she tells him she hasn’t. In a voice uncharacteristically kind, she asks him to forget Blue, and to move on.

  There will later be some debate as to what exactly we were talking about when we first noticed. It’s true that sometimes a presence is felt before it is seen.

  We a
ll look up together.

  Holy shit.

  Standing just yards from our gathering, through the rain and just across the narrow crevice in the ground, is the dark, real form of an animal, larger than anything I’ve ever seen. Its legs are long, three times taller than a horse, its body beginning somewhere up in the darkness. We stare – just four impossibly long and muscular legs, longer in the front than the back. Rummy shines the flashlight silently along its body. The sleek coat is perfect except for a bare patch of pale skin near its neck, as if the hair had been rubbed away or fallen out from disease. Its back rises up into a hump before descending again to meet its elongated head. His face is long, endless, and serene, undisturbed by our light and presence. Rising above him are antlers – huge, bone-colored protrusions like delicate driftwood stretching out and up towards the sky, and it doesn’t seem they can be so big, that his head can hold them up. Enormous, silent, his one wet eye reflects the light, and blinks. The rain falls around us, the tops of the trees bend and there is thunder. He exists here in just one small beam of light. It is monumental, the moment so intense, so drawn out as the three of us sit with legs crossed in front of a hat, a zebra and some playing cards, but somehow something else has come, and I don’t know if I’m breathing.

  ‘It’s a goddamn moose,’ Rummy says, disbelieving.

  A powerful rush of spirit enters into my stomach, and I am positive this feeling of something beginning must be the same perfect appreciation and awe that any one of us, anywhere, must feel when confronted with such an impossible vision. I think of all three of us and the entire world stranded together with a feeling of wanting more, and wanting meaning, and I think of the little boy in the lifeboat with three religions, but here, the island belongs to those who found it first, whose myths brought us here, to the place where the earth never ends.

  He is slow, impossibly slow, as he bends quietly, bringing his elegant face to where the ground is split at his feet. His antlers bow before us, nodding at the ground, and he seems to smell the earth, or taste it, I cannot tell. He rises again. When he turns back into the darkness, I realize what I am about to lose. When the light can’t find him anymore, we are alone again, and it is painful.