Solemnly we filed in, taking our places among the pines. From the shadows we stared at her darkened window, remembering. Everything was black. We spoke in whispers. “Remember how she used to piss off Mrs. Ishman?” we said. We thought, Bobby, don’t try so hard—if you pretend you ‘re not interested, you’ll have her eating out of the palm of your hand.“How about the way she argued with Zufall?”Jimmy, your teeth aren’t that bad—is that why you never smile? You have a nice smile.“Remember the time she called Mrs. Stockdale a bitch? Man, she had balls.” We stared at her window as though the light might come on at any moment, as though she might appear. Doug, you have to work harder on your grades. You have to get into college. Do you need any help studying?“Remember the time she was cheering without any tights on?”You should learn how to dance, John. It’s easy. Want me to teach you ?“What a body.” The shadows sighed. “What a shame.”
You have such beautiful hair, Jimmy. You ‘re going to get taller. By next year at this time, the girls are going to be chasing you like a hawk. Her clear blue eyes were still gazing into ours, holding us hostage, verifying the truth of every word she said. Her beautiful face was still resting on her hands as we rubbed her back, the warm, soft, living heat of her.
The whispering desisted. The moment of silence was long and true. The air was empty, except for the scent of burning leaves, the sound of crickets. No Bob Prince. It was over. We began to stir, our tribute paid, our obligation fulfilled, feeling a little ennobled, a little restless.
The light came on. Carol’s mother appeared in her window, looking around the room as if she’d never seen it before. “Ladies and gentlemen, it is now showtime,” Wonderling whispered, and at that moment we hated him. Carol’s mother came toward the window and we crabbed back farther into the shadows. Absently she raised a hand to her ear, looking around again with a frown, then to her other ear, taking off her earrings. She placed them on the dresser, straightened the tilted mirror, then began to unbutton her blouse. The look on her face was as though she were trying to recognize a song, a song that no one else could hear. We watched, uncomfortable with the hollow thumping in our chests. A pinecone dropped with a soft plump that jolted through us like a shot. We watched Carol’s mother step out of her slacks.
We watched. Not watching was no more of an option than speaking. We watched until she was naked, until every inch of her aging flesh had been revealed in all its faded splendor, and she stood bewildered, looking around the room again, perhaps for her nightgown, perhaps for nothing at all. Carol’s father came in, a look of relief on his face, and we watched him gather up his wife’s clothes, put his arm around her shoulder, and guide her toward the doorway. There he paused, looking around the room again. Spotting something, he came back, crossing our field of vision; when he returned he was carrying a doll that appeared to be quite old, a well-worn, well-loved doll with yellow hair. Putting his arm around his wife again, he led her out of the room. We watched him reach back and flick off the light with a nervous glance toward the window.
We watched the dark of the house again, in silence, until our erections and galloping blood, our shame, had finally subsided enough to allow us the freedom to leave.
They arrested Blinky Mumford a month later, but it wasn’t the closure we needed. It was anticlimactic. We never suspected him; furthermore, we never really believed he did it. One of the school janitors, Blinky Mumford was sullen and ill-tempered, with a facial tic that animated his scowl. He had no family and was often seen walking up and down Main Street muttering to himself. The story was that he’d been left in Hartsgrove when he was six by one of the orphan trains that used to stop on the south side in the early years of the century, but no one had taken him in. As with the other candidates we’d inventoried and dismissed, a crime like this was beyond him—too important, too notable. Despite his conviction, we were never convinced. They found what they said were strands of her hair in his battered old wreck of a Ford, and the key piece of evidence was a pair of panties found hidden in the janitors’ closet near Blinky’s buckets, brooms, and mops. Her father identified them as Carol’s.
We wondered how he could possibly have been so sure, so Bruner came up with a theory: skid marks are like fingerprints, he hypothesized, no two exactly alike.
Not much is left now. The old high school on the hill came tumbling down, and a whole generation of kids has graduated from the new school out by the new interstate, neither of which is new anymore. Les Chitester built a new place too, the Colonial Eagle Interchange Hotel Restaurant, not far from the new school, and our old hangout by Potters Creek was razed, a hardware store built in its place. For over thirty-five years, its motto has been “Buy by the Bridge.” Even Memorial Park was buried, all the towering elms and oaks along the banks of the creeks cut down and burned, victims of Hartsgrove’s flood control project.
We scattered. The teachers are gone too, retired and died, most of them. A few years after we left, Zufall quit teaching to become a carpenter. That didn’t surprise us; we figured he must have wanted a manlier profession, something more in line with his athletic sensibilities.
And Blinky Mumford? He faded away in his cell, a self-proclaimed innocent man.
We still gather in Hartsgrove now and then for reunions and funerals. Tomorrow we’re burying Nosker’s mother. We’ll be next in line. Unlike Carol, we’re waiting our turn. Thanks to Carol, we know how to die.
We talk about the Pirates. They won two more titles in the seventies but haven’t come close since; it’s beginning to look as though they never will. We complain about the state of baseball, the small-market quandary, convinced the sport will never be the same. We don’t complain about our own aging bodies, however, which will never be the same again either. We don’t ogle and leer at the pretty girls like we used to, because we’re mature now—unlike Carol, we got to grow up. At least that’s what we tell ourselves. The truth is, ogling and leering would only be mocking our own aging bodies. The truth is, we miss it, everything about it; we miss our young, healthy selves, the dependable, Eveready erections of our youths.
Sooner or later, as if to atone, we set aside the Pirates, put to rest the small talk, and Carol Siebenrock arises from the grave. We speak of her reverently, honoring her. We never speak of our adolescent indiscretions, the nights we spent on our bellies in the black shadows of her yard, the primordial thrill we felt at the sight of her lush, naked flesh.
But in our minds she is naked. In our minds she will always be naked.
She is naked even as she sits in a classroom a lifetime ago, raising her hand, sunlight streaming through the window, touching her with grace and radiance. Where is our place in this picture? Where is our place in this world? We maintain our innocence. We blow away any trace of guilt, like blowing dust off the top of a locked box, but the dust swirls and swirls in the sunlight, swirls and swirls, refusing to disperse and disappear. And so we talk about the Pirates. We talk about Carol as if we never loved her. And always it ends up the same. “Who do you suppose really killed her?” we always say, never looking ourselves in the eye.
Last Cottage
Christopher Merkner
FROM The Cincinnati Review
WE KNOW THE LARSONS. They come to Slocum Lake each summer. We would like them to stop, but they do not stop. For fifteen years they have come to Slocum Lake to stay at their place on the waterfront. They own the only cottage remaining on the lake: they possess the only waterfront property that has not been developed commercially. Here, in Slocum Lake, we could use that development. We desperately wish they would sell. Instead, they bring their children and teach them the ways of traditional summertime Slocum Lake living. It’s very depressing, it’s very outmoded, and our tolerance is pressed.
In June someone paid to have someone electrocute Slocum Lake, to stun and then kill some of the fish. It wasn’t terribly expensive. A collection was taken. The more expensive part of the process involved gathering the dead fish and corralling them into the part o
f the lake that runs about twenty yards out from the Larsons’ beachfront and approximately fifty yards across. The expensive part, actually, was installing the concealed netted cage that would keep the dead fish where we wanted them—mysteriously pent up against the Larsons’ beach.
The Larsons always arrive on one of the first days of July. They roll in at nighttime. We presume they are sheepish people. It is possible their drive down from the north of Wisconsin is longer than we know it to be, because perhaps their children make them stop frequently. We don’t exactly know. We know they arrive late at night, as a general annual rule. We know they carry their children into the cottage, put them in their respective bunk beds, knock off the bedroom lights, lock up, and walk down to the beachfront.
This year they arrived this way again. When they walked down to the beachfront, they held hands. Their hot truck engine was still ticking in their gravel drive. Locusts were scorching the ears of the trees on their property, the only native trees remaining on the waterfront, inglorious poplars. Summer had come very early to Slocum Lake. The locusts had hatched early also. The nights were very warm and still. The Larsons exchanged a few inaudible remarks. Their shoulders were rubbing.
Once they had reached the waterfront, they turned to face one another, held one another, and kissed. They kissed for quite some time. They have kissed before, in years previous, and they usually stop kissing and go into the water together. This year they did not go into the water. They dropped onto their knees and continued kissing. Then Robert Larson took his shirt off, and we thought this signaled a move they might make toward the water. We were wrong. Robert embraced his wife very hard. Then he slipped his wife’s shirt over her head.
They were kissing with great force, it seemed, and it seemed they would not stop kissing. Then they stopped kissing. We thought this was it. Instead of rising from his knees, however, Robert lowered himself onto his back. His wife, Penny Larson, laughed and put herself on top of him. It was dark, and we believe they then made love in this position. We watched it, thinking they would go swimming after, but instead they only made docile, unremarkable love, gathered their clothes, and ran naked back toward their cottage. They were laughing, but when they stepped onto the porch, they stopped laughing and were very quiet as they slipped in through their screen door. They never turned on any house lights. They simply vanished into the dark of their little dwarfish cottage that everyone on Slocum Lake wanted to blow up.
We would not want to hurt the Larsons. We certainly would not want to hurt children. The Larsons are good people with good intentions. They leave their home in northernmost Wisconsin and head south just as everyone in Illinois not affiliated with Slocum Lake and its general and perpetual state of impoverishment goes north to summer on the largely virgin beachwater up there. No doubt the Larsons know exactly what it feels like to have strange people perching on your property, behaving as though it were their own just because they had purchased it from you. We actually feel for the Larsons as people.
We feel for them enough, in any case, that we try not to be awkward about our determination to ouster them. We believe confronting them would be awkward and, in the end, because it would likely change nothing, needless. Instead, we have for years determined to be chilly and unwelcoming. We believed this would be enough. Then they had the children, and we could see the future we imagined—fiscal and otherwise—being denied us.
Two years ago, facing this reality, someone who did not identify himself vandalized the Larson’s boat launch. Last year, we decided as a community to vandalize their roof. We tore large holes in their shingles with hammers late at night, in February. We believed the water damage from spring runoff would give them pause. They came in early July, studied the damage, left to stay at a hotel, and simply had someone come and rebuild the roof and interior. It was Bernie Benson they hired to do it, and he could not be bribed to do shoddy work, as no one outside of Chicago can be bribed in this way, and their roof is now better than any roof of ours and their interior looks like a catalog image.
The Larsons could not be heard at their windows, so we retired: we returned just after dawn. The children were awake. They are darling children, twins, towheaded beauties. They ate breakfast in their pajamas, careful not to wake their parents. They poked each other without laughing, covering their mouths with their hands, and spoke about their dreams for their vacation. They are good children, and we decided on the dead fish because it would impact them directly. We knew the Larsons would not like their children impacted. We did not want to harm children, and yet the stakes were very high. We believed we could impact the children without devastating them.
The sun had risen over the buildings on the eastern shore, and it was already blasting the buildings on the western shore. The insects had moved from the water to the grasses, because the water was warmer than the air temperature. The insects were horrific biting savages. You never get used to that. Time waiting in such conditions is not terribly pleasant. You look at your watch a lot.
Even in their central air conditioning, installed the year of the children’s arrival, the twins had become a little restless. They had already dressed for swimming—at the age of four years, these remarkable, delightful twins had dressed all by themselves. Then they slipped out of the cottage, careful not let the screen door slam. They ran to the boat, which was still hitched to the Larsons’ car. They pulled back the protective covering and went down inside the boat, under the covering. We do not know what they do in there. We presume they play make-believe games. Every year they play inside the boat. We think it is peculiar that children from so far north play with boats the way that children from down here do. We often think that, for children and adults from the north, boats are just like old wallpaper.
They were laughing and giggling in the boat for the better part of an hour. Eventually they slid out from under the covering, hopped off the boat, and returned to the cottage. They were inflating their flotation toys just as their parents emerged from their bedroom and sat down beside them on the renovated floor. The Larsons kissed their children on their heads and their hands and petted their hair, and you could see the sort of bliss in the eyes of the Larsons we desired very determinedly to remove.
Shortly thereafter, the children at last received approval to go down to the beachfront, and Robert and Penny stood up to watch their children run from the porch of their cottage down to their sandy beach. The children ran as quickly as four-year-olds can run, shoeless and in minimal swimming wear: both were topless, and the girl’s bottoms were nearly obscene, and the boy wore only a baggy pair of briefs. We recognize that the Larsons felt they were alone on their property, and we believe, had they realized the public dimension of their daily events, they likely would have dressed their children differently. Certainly they would have exercised greater restraint in letting their children run down to the beach and plunge half nude into the infested water. We know the Larsons well enough to grasp that they are not reckless, thoughtless types. Like many people from Wisconsin, actually, they are prudent and wry. They remind us of our grandparents.
The Larson children tumbled face-first into the water. For approximately two minutes they rolled and played in innocence. They laughed and splashed and spread themselves lengthwise in the water. Then the boy screamed. Then the girl screamed. The two of them burst into a series of unpleasant sounds.
The Larsons sprinted from the cottage. They were pained. Their robes were encumbrances. The situation was tense, mortal. We had never seen Robert Larson move so swiftly. He shed his robe as he neared the water; Penny Larson’s leg gave out, just at that moment, and she slipped, bent awkwardly, slid several feet, then lifted herself, clutching her knee, and continued running, hopping toward the children. Robert by then had hoisted them from the water. Penny took the girl. Penny and Robert exchanged only a few words in agitation, but we heard what we needed Robert to say: The beach is covered in dead fish.
Indeed. We waited. They walked quickly to the cottag
e, the twins in their arms. They went inside. There was very little to be heard. We believed we could see Robert pacing, if briefly, before emerging again and walking down to the water, where he kicked the fish with his sandaled foot. He covered his mouth and nose with his hand. The fish smelled even worse once you realized what you were smelling. Robert then shielded his eyes with his other hand and surveyed the water. From that vantage, dead fish carcasses spread out for what must have seemed miles. We’d paid good money for this.
There had been a fair bit of talk about the way to kill the fish. Plenty of the lake’s sportsmen felt the need for careful electronic culling, separating the game fish—bass, bluegill, catfish—from those fish whose role in the lake seemed, by sportsmen standards, unclear. The mayor’s office and Parks and Recreation, who in the end were footing the largest portion of the bill, contended that such careful culling would require an exorbitant amount of additional cash, and that it was cheaper to restock the game fish than to cull them and restore them once the electrocution was completed. Poets and local liberal activists like myself argued that the impact would be lessened if we merely blitzed the Larsons and their children with dead fish of all types; rather, we argued, if the fish were carefully selected—bottom-dwellers, suckers, waterway leeches all of the same genus—there would be no mistaking the message we were trying to send. It would be difficult, in other words, for the Larsons not to recognize a careful plan at work and to see them selves symbolized as sucking fish, disgusting bottom-dwellers left for dead on their beach.
Harlan Coben Page 40
