THE LAKE AND THE RIVER
By
Benjamin Kensey
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PUBLISHED BY:
The Lake And The River
Copyright © 2011 by Benjamin Kensey
own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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THE LAKE AND THE RIVER
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The sound of car doors slamming outside pulled Ricky from the world of zombies. He turned over the paperback and yawned. Two men got out of the car. The younger, in checked shirt and jeans and about thirty, went for the gas pump. The older man came into the store.
“It’s chilly today,” the man said closing the door behind him.
Ricky nodded.
“Just gonna look at the maps.”
Ricky watched him head to a large spin rack of state maps. He guessed he was about sixty. He leaned on a stick, a yard of shine with angry black knots along its length. When he lifted his Red Sox cap a little to scratch his head, Ricky saw he was bald. After a few moments, he went over to the trash fiction.
“Think it’s gonna rain later,” he called across to Ricky. Ricky had his eye on a small security TV screen under the counter.
“That’s what they said,” he called back.
“Yeah, I can smell it.”
“You guys heading to the lake?”
The man came clopping across the floor with his stick and leant heavily on the counter.
“We are. It’ll always be the river to me, though.”
Ricky laughed. “My old man told me about the river. Before the dam.”
“Well, I’m an old man too. I’d fish that river from dawn to dusk. Didn’t know what tired meant. There were days those trout would roll, just gentle like, and it would take your breath away.”
The door to the store opened and the younger man walked in. He handed Ricky his credit card.
“You wanna get anything, dad?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“I’ll take these too,” the young man said, grabbing a couple of chocolate bars.
“You two father and son?” Ricky said. He swiped the card.
“Yep,” the older guy said. “We been coming up here for years.”
“You got a cabin?”
“Uh huh. Long before Charlie here was born, when it was still a river, we used to come up in my father’s Oldsmobile.”
Ricky offered his hand. “Pleasure to meet you. Ricky Parfitt.”
“What a friendly young man we have here, Charlie,” the old guy said to his son. “I’m Daniel.”
Ricky shook hands with the son and looked out to the car. “How’s your Toyota?”
“You know, she pulls a little to the left. Gotta get that seen to when we get back to Boston. What you got?”
“Ah, just a Fiat. Present off my dad for not screwing up my SAT. How’s the mileage?”
“Never enough at these prices,” Charlie said. “Dad, you sure you don’t need anything?”
“No, I’m fine.” The old guy scratched his chin. He had a dusting of a white beard, something lazy, in wild patches across his face, regrowth after a big forest burn. He offered his hand again to Ricky. “It was a pleasure to meet you, son.”
“Likewise, Sir. You guys have fun at the lake. I hear they’re biting.”
“Not when they see my son coming. You enjoy your new car, Ricky. Did you get into college?”
“Yes, I did. I’ll be down in Boston in the Fall.”
“That’s grand. Everyone’s gotta have plans for the future, don’t they? Truckers gotta keep trucking.”
The son held the door for the father and they left. Ricky listened to the light tap tap as the father struggled across to the car. The car pulled out onto the road. He saw the father turn in his seat and wave. Ricky barely lifted his arm to wave back. He felt stupid. He picked up They Came For Blood and lost himself in the pages again.
***
The bear watched her cubs at the water’s edge. They rolled over each other, breakers that crashed with squeals and cries. The mother bear growled something and came over to her cubs. She looked out on the water.
A boat slid by. On it were two men. Deep inside, in the place where she had learned how to be a mother, there was recognition there, something of the familiar. The boat turned towards the shore. It was too close. Danger.
She groaned again at her cubs and shoved them towards the woods. One fell and complained loudly. The three animals became part once again of the green and brown. The bear looked back at the water, through thickening foliage and birch trunks. She trotted after her charges, a notable limp in her front right leg.
***
The boat was nothing special to look at, but she had outlived its mother. A former lifeboat of a steamer on one of the Great Lakes, she got to feel water on her belly still while the steamer was long gone.
Two men sat in her now, fishing. She lay low in the water, sluggish, a struggle for the small motor to push through the endless chain of waves that the stiff westerlies pushed her way.
In the cold below, a drowned world that was beneath the waves years before she arrived on the lake. On clear days, when the light was right, the top of a tree might be glimpsed. One of the men sitting in her now knew of these treetops.
Charlie as a boy would wade into the lake that had swallowed the river. Caught between play and fear, his toes reaching out yet drawn inwards at the same time, he would feel for them, the ghostly hands from the deep. When he touched one, the terror grew, fueled by his imagination, expanding like an inflatable raft, his mind filling and jabbing his skull from the inside. He bolted to shore and lay laughing in the sand with friends. They’d escaped. This time.
Further down, where feet couldn’t reach, houses, simple abodes, crumbled with time and pressure. Windows were stoved in. The corners of a newspaper page peeked out from the mud on the floor of a bar. An auto mechanic’s workshop, stilled by the weight of the lake. On its concrete forecourt, an old gas pump, its clock hand showing two gallons forever. Nearby, on the floor, in the sand, a glint of gold, something dropped from a boat years before.
Moving against the sky above this dead town, the boat, an osprey gliding with purpose. It moves off and is tied up. The men get out, one helping the other, and laugh. The boat nuzzles against the post of the boardwalk, nestles against the green slime, pushed onto it relentlessly. Tap tap tap.
***
“Do you want to hear the specials?” Rudy held his arms behind his back. It made him look more like a ‘proper’ waiter.
“Charlie, we know what we want, don’t we?” the older of the two men said. The other ordered chicken wings and fries, with a pitcher of local beer.
Rudy yelled his order through the hatch and stood near the bar. The Angler’s Halt was almost deserted. The season was early and it was only seven o’clock. Around the walls, cheap prints of Scottish fly fishing scenes, a time when men were men and salmon leapt high. Fake angling trophies hogged the shelf space above them. Years before, one authentic touch had hung from the ceiling: a century old Newfoundland fishing net. When bits of it began to fall into the diners’ soup, it was hauled off to be blasted in a plastic goo that held it taut, no more a living fishing memento now than the stuffed sea bass above the fireplace.
Rudy took the beer to the table and poured.
“Quiet tonight, Rudy,” the old guy said, reading his name tag.
“Oh, she’s still early, Sir. We’ll get a few regulars in later, for the bar.”
“I don’t recognize you. Were you here last summer?”
“No, Sir, I wasn’t. Came in the spring. Perhaps you’re thinking of Gavin. Tall guy.” Rudy held his palm flat a few inches above his own head.
“That’s the fella. What happened to him now?”
“He left to get married. His wife is from out west, Arizona I think. They moved out there.”
“Well, I’ll be. Gavin all married and gone away.”
Rudy smiled. He’d only met Gavin twice as their stays at The Angler’s Halt overlapped. “I’ll be over with your meals shortly.”
He checked on the other occupied table, then returned to the bar. Every now and then, he peeked over at the father and son. The father was ill, that much was obvious. He wore his baseball cap at an odd angle. He kept his light sailing jacket on, even though it was warm tonight. It was open. Rudy could see he was skinny. His collar bone poked out from his unbuttoned shirt. He took a pile of menus from the bar top.
“You guys just get in?” he said as he passed nearby.
“This afternoon,” the son said.
Daniel turned with difficulty to face Rudy. “We drove up from Boston.”
“Ah, nice. You go fishing?” He came around the front of the table, so the old guy could face forwards.
“We were out on the water today, just an hour or so, getting back into it. We’ll be out there first thing tomorrow.”
“Catch anything?”
The old guy laughed. “Fat chance. We just fed them for an hour.” He jerked his thumb at his son. “This guy is a fish repellant. Always has been.” He turned to see if he was getting a reaction. The son drank his beer.
“We think we saw a bear,” the old man said. The son scoffed contempt. “Charlie, I’m telling you!”
“Yeah, could be,” Rudy said. “They’ll come down for a drink. Never been out there myself.”
“No? That surprises me. You’re born here, raised to it I would have thought.”
“What can I tell you? Never seen the attraction. You guys staying at the lodge?”
“No, we got a place. We’re about a mile from the pumping station. You know, in 1969, the government paid us eight thousand dollars for our cabin.”
Rudy took a chair from an adjoining table and sat on it back-to-front. “Right, when they made the dam.”
“That’s it. Those bloodsucking bastards. We all got compensation, well that’s what they called it. Some smart sons of bitches came up from Boston, had all these pretty maps, you know, they could tell you where the water would rise to. Our cabin was going to be seventeen feet under the water. My father was livid. Broke my poor mother’s heart, it did.”
The son poured himself another glass of beer. He was listening.
“It was just weekend cabins, wasn’t it? For the Boston folk?” Rudy said.
“No, not back then. There wasn’t much here, just a hamlet really, but they were real homes, Rudy. A bar, gas station.”
“You don’t say.”
“We came up here this week for a bit of, well, man to man time,” the old guy said, turning to his son. “I told my son here I had a few, I guess you’d call them confessions to make.”
“Oh?” Rudy said, raising his eyebrows.
“My father got some help and, well, we moved that cabin up the slope before the lake filled out.” The old man laughed loud.
“What’s that?” his son said.
“How were they to know, hey? They paid us for the cabin and the land. Well, they weren’t to know we went back a week before the dam opened and we dragged that cabin, every pane of glass, piece of china and quilt. Just left the outhouse. Took three horses two hours, we took it forty feet higher.”
Rudy jumped up, laughing. “That’s just fantastic. Wait till I tell Jeff. He’ll love that.”
“You know, that’s called defrauding the government,” the son said. He didn’t seem upset any.
“Yeah, I know,” the old guy replied. “So what? Bloodsucking bastards.” He took a long slug from his glass and cracked a big beer moustache smile.
Rudy gave the old guy a light slap on the shoulder. “You fellas call me over if you need anything.” He left the two in peace as the evening wore on and the bar and restaurant gradually filled up.
The two ordered another pitcher of beer and moved up to the bar. They spent the evening talking. It didn’t look to Rudy as if they were cracking too many jokes. When they rose to leave, he walked over.
“Goodnight guys, see you in here tomorrow I hope.”
The old guy looked at him a little confused. “Oh, Rudy, yes we’ll be back, you can count on it.”
He watched them leave and get in a cab.
***
Daniel opened his eyes. A clean white light was on the ceiling. It was late, probably ten at least. Within a few seconds, it all came back to him. Why they had come to the cabin, the river, why it was his last time up here. All of it came crashing back. The weight of his present pushed him deep into the mattress. He slipped back on the cape of death and would bear it till sleep slipped it off his shoulders for a few more hours.
His cheeks were wet and he wiped them clumsily with his good hand. The bad dreams had stalked him again, full of those he had wronged, fallen out with. His past in the dark. Margaret had been there too. Crying.
Like a Boston snowfall in October, the wisps of his reverie hit the morning sidewalk and began to vanish. When he joined Charlie on the sun deck, they were no more. Only a feeling remained, an impression of where they’d been, tracks through his mind.
“How did you sleep?” Charlie asked his father. “Do you want more morphine?”
“Not yet. Let me have my mornings clear. That stuff fries my mind. Makes me nauseous.”
“Sure. I got breakfast. You want something. There’s eggs.”
“A little.”
They ate in silence. The sun terrace was Daniel’s favorite part of the cabin. He and Charlie had built it twenty years ago, his son just a boy. The boy and his father, the summer of buzz saws, nails and pink lemonade.
There were two boats out on the lake today, anchored, with lines plumbing the depths. Figures sat on the back of each, smoking, drinking, laughing. A few snatches of chat on the wind.
“Have they caught anything?” he asked his son.
Charlie pulled a face. “Not as far as I can tell.”
“The lake’s low for June,” Daniel said. He looked further north until the trees blocked his view. “Not enough rain.”
Daniel began to kick at a rotting board at his feet. “Christ, this damn place is falling apart. Look at these boards!”
Charlie pulled up the piece of wood his father was toying with and threw it towards the trees. “Don’t worry, we’re going to get this place fixed up after –“
“After? After what? After I’m gone?”
“I’m sorry, dad. I didn’t mean it that way.”
Daniel smirked and waved away his son’s apologies. “Hell, I don’t mind. If there’s one pleasure that dying does bring, it’s to see everyone else treading on egg shells about you.”
“Do you think you’ll feel up to going out today?”
“Let’s see. Maybe.”
Daniel had given the same answer the day before, and the day before that.
“Are you ready for another confession, Charlie?”
Charlie groaned. “I never realized this is why you took me up here.”
Daniel hauled himself forward and put his hand on his son’s arm. “No, that was never my intention. It’s just turned out a bit like that. Don’t take it bad.”
“Go on then, what now? What are we adding to major fraud and illegal hunting?”
“My ass it was illegal hunting! I tell you a story one day and you forgot the fundamental details by the next. That bear attacked me. If I didn’t have your grandfather’s rifle with me, you’d be sitting here talking to yourself today.”
Charlie laughed. “Right, I guess we can forgive you. And you only scratched it, according to you.”
“That’s right. Glancing blow, nothing more. Now, are you going to let me get started on this story before I forget it?”
Charlie leaned back in his chair. He
made a dramatic sweeping gesture with his arm. “The floor is yours, Sir.”
“Now you’ll remember the story of the ring.”
“The ring you bought for mom for your wedding? Of course I remember it, I heard it a million times.”
“And that story was?”
“That you didn’t have the money for a fancy ring, so bought one from her uncle’s jewelers for $17.”
“And?”
“And that she loved it so much that even when the business was doing well a few years later, she refused to have it replaced. It’s a real tear jerker.”
“Wise ass.”
“Have I forgotten anything?”
Daniel showed his yellowing teeth. “Only what actually happened.”
“Oh?”
“I knew I was going to marry your mother after our second date.”
“Right.”
“Listen, with her, it was true. I began saving right then. I didn’t know what for, our wedding, our first house, whatever, I just knew I was saving for the future, our future.
“In the end I decided to propose to her up here. Did you know the dam opened the week I met your mother?”
“Really?”
“Of course, by the time we got up here, the river had already become this godawful lake. Anyway, it was the beginning of September, our last trip up here for the summer. I tell you Charlie, it was perfect. You know those days when you look about you and it pains you that it’s all got to end.”
Charlie brushed something from his face. “Yeah, I know, dad.”
“I had gotten this ring from one of the best places in the city. $350. That was a stack of cash in those days.”
“I guess so.”
“I was shaking like a thief all day, it was there in my pocket, but I couldn’t find the right moment. We were out on the boat. Finally, it gets to about 4 o’clock, the sun is going down over there, behind those trees, so I tell myself, ‘come on, pull yourself together’ and I make a grab for the ring – and out she plops.”
“Plops? You mean –“
“Right in the drink.”
“Oh Jesus, what did mom say?”
“Nothing. She thought I was throwing pebbles into the lake, what did she know?”
“So what did you do? Did you go in after it? That was $350!”
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