The Banks of Certain Rivers

by Harrison, Jon

  The third summer we came up, the summer before Michael and I entered high school, our explorations expanded. Teddy had turned eighteen and wanted less to do with his two little brothers; he’d made some friends his age in Port Manitou and wasn’t around very much. As it was, we were pretty good at getting into trouble on our own. Michael and I explored Little Jib River, sending branches floating off in its current toward the great lake, or ambushing each other from hiding spots along its banks. Our father at some point informed us that “Jib” was a shortening of the tribal name “Ojibwa,” and we spooked ourselves by imagining we were being spied upon through the cedar woods by hidden native eyes.

  Not far from where the river disgorged its roiled waters into Lake Michigan, Michael and I discovered a cinderblock pump house half-buried in a dune up the shore. A corner of its corrugated metal roof was missing and it was filled with rusted iron pipes and valves. Inside, someone had scrawled the word ‘PUSSY’ on the wall with the end of a charred stick. Aside from confusing us somewhat, the graffiti gave a daring credibility to the space that our fourteen year-old selves loved. The pump house became our base of operations.

  One day, in the second week of our stay that year, Mike and I were running past the cottage when our mother called to us from up on the deck.

  “Boys! Mrs. Olsson has some linens for us. Can you pop over and get them for me?”

  We said sure; the Olssons’ house was more than a mile away, and Mike and I had never made the trip over the dunes and through their orchard by ourselves. It would be an adventure. My brother and I took off at a run, making a race of it. I left Mike in the dust. I remember how the cherry trees, arranged in perfectly straight rows, smelled like summer, and how I swung my arms and shouted taunts at my brother. Mike’s a slowpoke. Mike sucks. I came through a pine woods and out into a large, mowed field. I ran, laughing, shouting “Mike sucks!” over and over while grasshoppers sprang forth from the cropped stubble ahead of me.

  Then I stopped in my tracks.

  A girl, my age, stood with a soccer ball at her feet next to a red pole barn at the far edge of the field. She wore blue athletic shorts and a baggy yellow tee shirt, and had knobby knees, short dark hair and a splatter of freckles over the tops of her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. She stood there, staring at me, and I stared back. Mike ran up, panting, and stopped to stare at her too. The three of us looked at each other, saying nothing, before Mike finally elbowed me and we continued on around the barn to the Olssons’ house.

  “Who was that?” Michael asked in a low voice as we slipped away from the girl’s stare.

  “No idea,” I whispered back.

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  We climbed the front steps of the farmhouse, and Carol Olsson greeted us at the door. She loaded Mike’s arms with a pile of folded sheets and mine with a cardboard box.

  “There’s stuff for the kitchen in there,” she told me before sending us off. “Be careful with it now, some of it’s glass.”

  We nodded and thanked her, and started back. We passed the pole barn slowly this time, peering around the corner. Now the girl kicked the ball into the wall of the barn. She stopped it with her foot when it bounced back, and kicked it again. She didn’t seem to look at us as we continued by.

  “Hey,” she called without looking up. We froze. “Do you guys play soccer?”

  “I do!” Mike said, his voice maybe an octave higher than usual. He dropped the sheets to the grass and ran over to her, and she passed him the ball. “I’m going to play varsity next year.” He dribbled the ball around her, showing off, before passing it back. He was really good at soccer. I was not.

  “What grade will you be?” the girl asked him.

  “Freshman. What about you?”

  “Same.”

  The girl tapped the ball to me, and I—still holding a box of clanking kitchen utensils—kicked it with about as much finesse as I would have used to put my foot through a rotten pumpkin. The ball sailed over my brother’s head and off into the pine trees.

  “Nice one, jerkoff,” Mike said, and my face went hot. He started after the ball, and the girl walked over to me.

  “What about you?” she asked. I was glad she didn’t call me jerkoff too.

  “Me? I don’t really play soccer. Not like my brother does, anyway. He goes to the camps and everything.”

  “I used to go to the camps. This is the first summer I haven’t. But I mean what grade will you be in?”

  “Oh!” My face went hotter. I clutched the cardboard box against my chest. “Ninth also.”

  “Are you guys twins?”

  “No. He’s five months older.”

  She cocked her head. “How does that work?”

  “I’m adopted.”

  “You guys look so alike, though.”

  “A lot of people say that.”

  “Well if you don’t do soccer, what do you do?”

  “I….” I was flustered by the sudden change in subject. Maybe she sensed my discomfort, but I was grateful she didn’t press. I wasn’t so good at explaining it. “I run track. But I don’t know if I’m going to do it next year.”

  “You should. Because I run too.” She smiled, and I held the box tighter. “Four hundred and eight hundred.”

  “I’m more of a long distance guy,” I said. Mike dribbled the ball back to us across the field, and nudged it to over the girl with the side of his foot.

  “Way to go, you totally got it stuck in a prickle bush,” he said. He held out his arms to show us the scratches covering them.

  “Aw, did Super Soccer Guy get all scratched up in the bushes?” the girl said. Now Mike’s face flushed.

  “I think we need to get back,” he said, gathering up the tangle of linens from the ground and looking away so she wouldn’t see his red cheeks.

  “See you,” the girl said. She went back to kicking her ball.

  Michael tried to smooth out the stack of sheets as we crossed the field. When we got back into the pines, he asked: “So, what’s her name?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Why didn’t you ask?”

  “Why didn’t you ask? And why did you have to go and call me jerkoff, Super Soccer Guy?”

  “Shut up. I’m sorry.”

  “All right.”

  A week passed without us seeing the girl again. We didn’t talk about her, Mike and I, but we did keep asking if there was anything else our mom needed from the Olssons. After making the tenth or maybe the twentieth query on this, our sixteen year-old sister finally called us on it.

  “They just want an excuse to go see Wendy Olsson,” Kathleen crowed from a folding deck chair, sneering from behind her trashy paperback.

  “We do not!” I managed, while Michael simultaneously exclaimed: “You know her name?”

  “You’re busted,” our sister said.

  We were busted. And now that she had a name, it seemed that we could discuss her openly between ourselves. We’d walk along the beach, trying to top each other, Wendy-this and Wendy-that. Mike liked to remind me that Wendy loved soccer, and I’d remind him she ran as well. Despite these two facts being pretty much the only concrete things we knew about her—aside from her freckles, dark hair and bony knees—we did everything short of outwardly professing our love for her.

  One night, a bonfire night, we were astonished to see that Wendy Olsson herself had accompanied her parents over to the beach house. She took a seat in the sand down next to Kathleen and proceeded to completely ignore us. The two of them sat together most of the night as Mike and I lurked around the fire, and when she left she didn’t even say goodbye to us.

  After, while we got ready for bed, our sister poked her head into our room. “Way to go, dolts,” she said. “I mean, hello? She was there, waiting, for like two hours. You could have done something more than stare. Are you guys idiots?”

  We returned to our plotting, spending long strategy ses
sions in the pump house up the beach. Teddy could buy beer then (the drinking age had not yet been raised to 21), and we’d sometimes pilfer a can from the stash in his room to choke down over our planning. They always seemed to affect me more than Michael, and he’d often mention how red my face would turn over our scheming. And how we schemed. Should one of us ask her to take a walk? Did we dare try to kiss her? Michael said he wanted to try to bring Wendy to the pump house to ‘do it;’ I said no way, that wouldn’t be classy at all. In truth, I’d had the same idea, even if I wasn’t entirely clear on all the mechanics involved if I were to try to ‘do it’ myself. Those things could be figured out when I came to them.

  The next time Wendy showed up, a week or so later, we made more of an effort. We grabbed badminton racquets from the back closet in the cottage, and the three of us swatted a shuttlecock through the settling dusk by the lakeside. Wendy, laughing, lobbed the bird out into the water, and Michael, ever eager to please, rolled up the legs of his jeans to wade out and fetch it.

  “So are you going to run next year or not?” she asked me as my brother tiptoed into the water.

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “I haven’t decided.”

  “You should make a list of pros and cons. That’s what my mom always has me do when I can’t decide something. Is there something about track you really don’t like?”

  I pondered it. “Not that I can think of.”

  “Are you any good? Do you win races?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. I won a couple races last year.”

  She smiled. “Sounds like a pretty easy choice to me.”

  I figured this exchange—and the smile that completed it—had given me an edge in the unspoken battle with my brother. I decided I’d wait for darkness to fall and take a seat next to Wendy by the fire. When the time was right (and her father wasn’t paying attention) I’d ask her if she’d like to go for a walk. I didn’t make any plan for after that. I didn’t want to assume anything; really I just wanted to talk to her more. But my plans were crushed when, as I came back from fetching a sweatshirt for Kathleen, I saw Mike lean down to say something into Wendy’s ear. She shrugged and nodded, then hopped up and followed him as he sauntered away along the water’s edge.

  My throat went tight as I watched them go, and I looked down and pawed at the sand with my foot. Teddy saw it. Kathleen saw it. The adults, laughing among themselves up on the deck, saw nothing. My sister patted at a spot on the blanket next to her.

  “Come here, kid,” she said, showing some uncharacteristic sympathy. I sank down next to her and let my head droop. “Just because she went off with him doesn’t mean anything, okay? Someone’s really going to think you’re a catch someday.”

  Her kindness, even if sincere, did little to elevate my mood, and I kept looking over my shoulder down the beach. Nothing. My only consolation was that they’d gone opposite the direction of Little Jib River and the pump house; at least my refuge wouldn’t be sullied by the thought of the two of them in there doing whatever it was they’d gone off to do. I looked down the beach again and again, and Teddy punched my arm and let me sneak a couple swallows of his beer.

  My father was shoveling sand over the fire by the time I finally gave up waiting for them to come back. I went inside alone, got myself ready for bed, turned out the light and climbed into my bunk. I waited for what seemed like a very long time before I heard the creaking old floorboards in the hall and the squeak of our bedroom door. I listened as Mike got into his bed below me, and let another minute pass before I brought myself to speak.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “Well what?”

  I swallowed. “Did you do it?”

  “No.”

  “Did you kiss her?”

  “No. I didn’t kiss her.”

  “Did you do anything?”

  “Just shut up about it, okay? We didn’t do anything. She went home like three hours ago.”

  Three hours? I sat up. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “I took a walk on the beach. That’s all.”

  I thought about this, and even felt a little guilty for the way my spirits were lifting. “Did you guys talk about anything?” There was a long, long silence. “Mike?”

  “She doesn’t like soccer players,” Michael finally said from below. His voice was muffled, like he was talking into his pillow. “She said she likes runners better.”

  And for nothing more than this, I decided to keep running.

  From: xc.coach.kaz@gmail.com

  To:w.kazenzakis@gmail.com

  Sent: September 8, 1:50 pm

  Subject:One Letter

  _____________________________

  It’s funny, out of all the things of yours that I’ve saved, letters and pictures and everything else, the one thing I wish I had most of all is that first letter you wrote me before ninth grade telling me I had better do track again. I’d already decided by that point I was going to run, I even signed up for cross country, but then that letter came and it was like “Well, I guess I really am doing it now.” I never told you this, but I threw it out! I was so terrified of Mike finding it and making a big deal that I kept it under my mattress for a while, but even that was too radioactive for me, so I tore the letter and envelope into little pieces and pitched it.

  Did your mom give you my address after we’d left that summer? I can’t believe it would have been your dad.

  Tonight I’m going to have dinner with Alan and Kris. Like we used to do, like we did so many times, but different. Obviously different. So many dinners, when Chris got a little bigger, and you didn’t feel so bad about leaving him with a sitter. We weren’t seeing Lee and Sherry so much, and the Massie girls did tag-team babysitting in our own home—no driving necessary, no definite time to return—and we could eat, drink, and drink more. God, we had fun. I think of that night we ended up sleeping in their basement. There are maybe three times I remember you really being drunk and that was one of them: we were two hundred yards from our house but you couldn’t manage even to walk the little path in the dark. Usually I was the one to take it a little too far but you were on that night, *on*, so why go home? You wanted to soak in the hot tub, you wanted more margaritas, you tried to kiss Alan, you called the margaritas “trouble.” Thank goodness the kids were back at our house. Kristin called the kids to tell them to lay out sleeping bags and pop another movie in the VCR, and when she hung up the phone you shouted: “Mix us up some more trouble!” And we did. God, that night we did. Captain Alan barked “Here we go!” with his finger on the blender button, and away we went. We were soaking in trouble.

  In the morning you covered your face with your hands and groaned for me to close the blinds. They were closed already. Kristin and Alan laughed from upstairs, and I laughed and walked home to find the kids slumbering together in a knot on the inflatable mattress on the living room floor. I made them breakfast, waffles in our wedding-gift iron, and when Kris called to check in I heard you retching in the background. We decided you could use a little space for your recovery. I took the Chris and the girls to the beach for the day, and the whole time our son was under the impression you had the flu. An easy enough deception. When we got home late that afternoon, and Chris found you green on the couch with a wet washcloth on your forehead, he knelt at your side and asked if he could make you some soup. You laughed and laughed.

  My nights are measured now. I caromed down that path, bouncing off everything, so many times after you were gone, certainly more than three times, and finally I reined myself in. Things came apart, but I pulled myself together. Captain Alan would let me know, I think, if I started down that trail again. I trust him to watch out for me, and he does.

  Things don’t get out of control anymore. I promise.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  By the time I make it home, I’m ready to declare my run a success. The proverbial slate has been wiped, and I’m pleasantly tired out. I down a few big glasses of water at the kitchen sink, and find a ver
y gourmet-looking sandwich that Chris has made waiting on our little breakfast table. The sticky note reading ‘TRY THIS DAD’—comically adhered to the sandwich itself—leaves no worry that I’m going to consume something not intended for me.

  Chris’s fabrication is pretty good. There’s arugula, dried cherries and some pungent melted cheese in a sliced baguette, all stuff from the farmers’ market, I’m guessing. I remain standing to eat it out of the concern that my post-run legs will stiffen up if I have a seat.

  Over the table, on the corkboard on our kitchen wall, there’s a picture of my father and Dick Olsson. They’re laughing in the picture, probably over the fact that they’ve swapped hats: my father’s Greek fisherman’s cap is too tight on Dick’s head, and Dick’s safety-orange hunting hat is so big that it’s nearly covering my father’s eyes. This was Wendy’s favorite picture of her dad; she always said she didn’t really know of any others where he was smiling. I’d have to say it’s one of my favorites too.

  My father, a diminutive, prematurely balding, wisecracking hippy economics professor who had been part of the 1968 protests in Chicago, and Dick Olsson, a towering autodidact who could persuasively argue that Nixon had received a bum deal and kept a portrait of Ronald Reagan over his workbench, formed a most unlikely friendship. Even after all of us kids went to college, before Wendy and I were married and my parents had retired and moved to Florida, my mother and father would still come up to visit the Olssons a couple times a year. The four of them even took a cruise through the Caribbean back when I was in school; by all accounts it was a fantastic time. Carol and my mother always got along well, but it was the peculiar friendship between Theodore Kazenzakis and Dick Olsson that really cemented things.