Echo Lake

by Letitia Trent

  When he asked them to get in the car and show him where the next gas station was, they both agreed, arguing about who knew how to get there better. Before they went to the store, though, Frank told them he needed to stop back at his house, he had to get something important. They agreed; it was an adventure, one they’d tell their parents about when they got home.

  He knew the dilapidated trailer from his own childhood. His uncle, James, had lived there, and when he had died, the house had gone to James’ sister, Frank’s mother, who had stayed there off and on when she got tired of his father’s drinking. It was close to the lake, but far enough in the woods that it was hard to find if you didn’t already know how to get there; the woods around Echo Lake still had mystery, despite all of the houses that had sprung up around them. The old driveway to it had long been grown over, and the trees sloped over it, hiding it from view. But he knew the markers by heart.

  It was the kind of place where even the loudest screaming would go unnoticed.

  He kept them for as long as he could stand it. They became sluggish. They were dirty and started to smell. The way they flinched when he came in didn’t thrill him; it simply reminded him that yet again, he’d gotten himself into a predicament that could only end in getting rid of them. And that was the hard part.

  He hated doing it every time. The joy was in getting and keeping, not in disposal. But he was starting to worry, and they were so tired, so unhappy. Nothing like the children he’d met that day after school. He brought a wheelbarrow, bound their hands and feet, and covered their eyes. They cried, weakly, but he was not worried: there was nobody around for miles.

  He could not stand to hit them or hurt them in a violent way: he held the children’s heads under the water until they stopped moving. He bound them both together, weighted them with a cement brick, and rowed them out in the canoe he kept tied up to a tree by the shore.

  He looked out across the lake, which shone dully in the heat. He was drenched in sweat, sick to his stomach, and wanted nothing more than to get rid of them.

  He had never done this before, had never left them in the lake. He had usually taken them home, back to Arkansas, where the nearby Ozark mountains were deserted enough to hide most anything. But he didn’t want to drive all that way with them; what if he got pulled over? What if he panicked and revealed he was hiding something and they made him open up the trunk? He’d only done this twice before, and each time, the drive back had been hellish. It was safer just to be done with them here.

  He had to row a while before the lake was deep enough to drop them in. He was far from houses, far from other shores, and it was early in the morning—the sun was just slipping up and the sky gray. He threw the block in first, and when it hung heavy, he slipped the bodies over the edge of the water. They dissappeared, bubbles rushing up for a few moments until the water was still again.

  His uncle had died here. He’d been found shot, floating in the water. Frank sometimes wondered if he had been killed for being something like Frank was: a monster, the kind of person who deserved to be shot in the head.

  Frank waited a while, watching the sun come up. It didn’t seem fair that the children, who had done nothing, would not be able to see the sunrise. It didn’t seem fair that he was still here, alive, when they were gone, their parents knowing nothing of where they were, hoping they might come back home when they were, for certain now, past hope.

  As though responding to his thoughts, he felt his boat rock; the water was rippling, sending him back to the shore. He saw the mist on the water more clearly now, the sun visible above the mountains. It was greenish and heavy, a sickly-looking dampness.

  His mother had not let him swim in the water here and would shout when he waded out farther than his knees.

  It’s not safe here, she said. It’s dirty. Sometimes it’s even poison. You heard about the mist?

  He had not.

  It rises up and makes you sick. Possesses you like. That’s the old story, and I don’t doubt it.

  His boat rocked so vigorously that he started to row back, afraid it would send him crashing back to the shore. He shouldn’t be out here, visible to any passerby, anyway.

  He rowed back, tied up the boat, and washed up the room where he’d kept the children.

  Maybe, he thought, I’ll stop soon. Maybe I should burn down this place and make it harder for me to come back here. This was the place he always went when he felt the need coming on. It was part of the need. If he destroyed it, maybe the need would diminish.

  But he wasn’t ready yet. He washed his hands in the sink and got in his car and drove back to Fort Smith, where his wife waited and asked him how his weekend had been and how many fish he had caught and thrown back.

  2

  Levi had not slept well since Frannie’s death.

  He had not known her well, though in a small town it was impossible not to know everyone in passing. He had sold her candy bars during his senior year in high school when he had to sell a box of a hundred to raise money for the senior trip to Dallas. He remembered her in particular because she had bought half of the box. At that time, she’d been a well-preserved forty or so. She wore her hair long and straight, in the style of the time, and had traded her cat’s eye glasses for the large, colorful, plastic frames that everybody wore in the 70’s. He had known her then only as the last member of the Collins family and one of the few single women of her age. She had no children, which was rare, and he’d heard rumors about her his entire life. She was a lesbian. She was barren. She had multiple boyfriends up in the city, who she visited over the weekend. But you can’t believe everything people say about other people.

  Frannie’s death kept him awake at night. He had nightmares about it. In the dreams, he saw her death in detail—the dark slice in her throat, the blood pouring down on her flowered nightdress, the sounds she made as she woke and clutched at her throat and how the blood came out in gushes with her heartbeat, first sluggish and then streaming when she tried to scream and couldn’t.

  When he woke up from a dream, he would stumble into his kitchen for a glass of water and, out of habit, an ibuprofen, though he didn’t usually have a headache. It seemed he should take something for the dreams, which were like a pain, and ibuprofen seemed harmless enough for him to take without worrying about addiction (he was afraid of addiction, of anything that might take the place of God in his heart). After he had placed the pill bottle back in the cabinet and washed the glass and dried it and placed it back in the cabinet, he would crawl back into bed and pray until the images went away.

  He remembered the first night he’d dreamed of her death, though he had not known it was hers that he had dreamed of at the time. He remembered it well because it was the night she’d been killed, before he’d heard of her death at all. That night had been the worst—he’d woke with the images of her death fresh on his mind, as though he’d been there. He distinctly remembered the feeling of blood streaming onto the thin skin of his wrist, how warm and thick it had been. That night he’d run to the bathroom to vomit in the toilet. After he’d stripped off his soiled pajamas and scrubbed the toilet clean, he stepped into the shower and stood under the hot water, letting it beat against his back, for at least a half hour before he was tired and clean enough to crawl back into bed and sleep. He woke the the morning after that with a genuine headache, and so the habit of ibuprofen began.

  When he heard the news of her death later that day, he didn’t tell anyone about the dream. Maybe it was a message from God. Maybe it was Satan, trying to make him believe he had some special powers, trying to temp him. He had been raised to believe that psychic abilities were real and were from Satan, not God, who did not allow anyone to have sight into the future. It could be a coincidence, too. So he had not spoken of his dream.

  •

  The morning of the all-church meeting, the day after Emily’s visit, he took two ibuprofen, his headache real and insistent. He did not complete his usual routine. Each morning
he usually did calisthenics—the same set of exercises that his father had taught him as a child, when his abundant energy had found nothing to tame it (he was hopeless at sports and they lived out in the country, away from easy access to roads or sidewalks for biking). He did five sets of 15 jumping jacks with 25 push ups, sit-ups, and squats between. After his regimen, he took a shower, and after wiping himself down (careful attention to the webby skin between his fingers and toes as well as behind his ears) and drying the shower (the wet was how scum grew, how the tiles turned black and had to be scrubbed clean and the little flecks of dirt chipped off and got into the bathwater), he would dress and comb his hair and brush and floss his teeth.

  That morning, though, he broke his usual pattern. The dream was different this time. In it, he was not merely viewing Frannie’s death; he was participating in it. His hand sawed her throat. His shoes were splattered with blood, and he saw himself coming home and placing something in his garage. Instead of doing calisthenics, he went to the yellow toolbox in his garage and opened it. Inside, a woman’s hairnet was hardened in a knot, stained black.

  He took the hairnet in his hands and brought it inside. He set it on the table, but he couldn’t stand to look at it, so he went upstairs.. He hurriedly brushed his teeth and dressed. He combed his hair down with water and looked at his face.

  Everything was changed now. It was all over, this good life he had created.

  When he sat down to write his message, visions of the woman’s blood came before him, so bright and present that he couldn’t look at the neat rows of words without seeing the gash in her throat.

  Eventually, though, he managed to write something. It was mostly action that he expected from the meeting anyway. Action that the whole town (or at least the people who were coming tonight) could partake in was what was needed. Words didn’t have the impact that actions did, especially not here. So all he had to do was provide words that would motivate them, make them fearful enough to move, make them act. Levi couldn’t get everyone to come. There were the hill people, those who didn’t even come down to take their children to school or find wives and husbands outside of their close-knit clans. And there were those who went to other churches, like the Southern Baptist church on the other side of Heartshorne or even the Methodist all the way in Keno. Some, of course, didn’t go to church at all, for whatever reason, be it disbelief or backsliding or shame, and he couldn’t reach them. But he’d heard that more people were coming than ever before—nonbelievers and believers alike, all concerned about what was happening to the town.

  Heartshorne wasn’t what it had once been. The homecoming parade used to be the highlight of the year—young women were crowned princesses and placed on floats, and the Homecoming Queen wore thick makeup that dripped from her face in the heat, but she’d smile anyway, waving at people in the crowd who she had known since childhood, people who loved to see one of their own elevated, even if it was only on the back of a pick-up truck. People rode horses and held up the American flag along with the Oklahoma flag and flags of the local tribes; the Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles. A marching band would follow up the rear, wearing their heavy wool outfits and stomping in the horses’ excrement, not minding the heat or the crap on their shoes because everybody was there to watch them play, and so they played. Those days had ended slowly and gradually, twenty years in the making. Levi didn’t understand quite why it had changed, but he imagined it had something to do with young people moving away. If high school students got through their high school years without getting pregant or dropping out, they usually left—it only made sense, the jobs being elsewhere and life being sleepy and unchanging from year to year.

  Those who stayed became trapped in the everyday march of life from school to work to school again. Jobs no longer paid for much but the basics. They did not have time to organize the rental of dozens of horses or the buying of a genuing tiara for the homecoming queen and princess. Things wound down.

  But why was it different now, when this had been the familar pattern of life from year-to-year in the past? Had young people always wanted to escape, but previously been unable? Did they make elaborate homecoming floats in their garages or front yards and have children and buy boats because there was no other choice? Levi didn’t know: he had never been one of those young people who wished to be somewhere where his life could have been louder and brighter and more distinguished from the lives of others. He had never wanted that regular life of children and family, either. He was content to be who he was right now—somebody responsible for the part of life that really mattered and lived: the spiritual life. But the thought pained him now, the spiritual life. How could he be an example to anyone now?

  He had only wanted to please God

  (That’s why you have to do this tonight, he thought, what you want isn’t what you need, that’s why you have to)

  and to be of service to the public.

  He finished the short speech left a note to himself on the bottom:

  Tell them everything.

  There’s nothing else to do, he said aloud. It’s over, but make it clean. Give it over to God.

  He wondered if this was the last day in his house, his last day free. He wondered why he didn’t go to each room and kiss the floors, why he wasn’t more afraid. He stood up, unsure what to do with himself. He went to the bathroom, where he washed his face for the second time that morning, and then scrubbed his underarms and reapplied deodorant, placed a fresh undershirt under his button-up shirt, and came back down to drink his single cup of coffee before leaving to the church for administrative and visiting duties. He would work up until he could no longer work, until everyone knew and he could no longer be the only person he knew how to be: Pastor Richardson, man of God, shepherd of souls, doer of no harm. Today would be no different than any other day until he told them. Up until the end, they would know him as the man they thought he was, not the man he really was.

  3

  Emily lay next to Jonathan and listened to the soft sound of his breathing and the pound of rain. It was torrential, the kind of rain that she associated with movies about missionaries trapped in tropical climes, the tin on their roofs pinging as if small rocks were pouring from the sky. She didn’t know if her roof leaked: she imagined she would find out soon. But she couldn’t worry about the rain today. It was an accompaniment to his breathing, a sound that lulled and hummed and reminded her she was here, on earth, in her aunt’s home, and happy, not with her throat gaping open like her aunt or a bone-ragged hole in her head like the woman who had died on her lawn. Jonathan didn’t snore, at least he hadn’t yet, but only gave off a constant damp, windy noise, which soothed her instead of annoyed her.

  But how would she feel in five years? It was impossible to know. She didn’t want to allow herself that brief time when most people imagined that everything about their lover was perfect, the only person in the world that they would never grow tired of. It was a silly idea, one she knew only brought unhappiness. But what if? she thought, as she tried to shut her brain up and make it listen to the rain. What if she never grew tired of him, and he never of her, and what if he would stay with her in this big house, cleaning the gutters and keeping raccoons out of the big plastic trash barrel by her mailbox? Would that be happiness, then? Would they live like adults, waking up in the morning to go to places where they were expected and coming home to each night together? It was probably too early to wonder about this. She should enjoy what she had in the moment, she knew, but it was hard for her to allow herself momentary happiness.

  As she listened, the rain stopped almost as suddenly as it had started and the clouds began to clear. She saw the gloom lift slightly, and then a piece of blue. The window brightened, heating the room—that rectangle was filled with sun so sharp and direct that it hurt to look through it, and all she cold see now was light. The sun must have been outside their window directly, hanging like a yellow button in the blue. She sat up, letting the blankets fall from her. Light sl
ashed across her chest, warming her skin. She could see from the window now, the sun angled away beyond the frame. Outside, the trees leaned in, seeming suspended in the heat and mist, each leaf sharp and clearly delineated in the otherwise hazy air.

  It seemed strange that she lived in such a place, a place where the plants overran the things man made to contain them, where the landscape from afar looked impossible, like a 19th century illustration from a fairy-tale, a forest that a maiden or child would have to enter for the story to begin. Emily had taken a class about fairy tales in college, and now she couldn’t help but see all fairy tales as the patterns her professor had put on the chalkboard, each one boiled down to a simple formula: the pattern of abandonment, perseverence, and return, or the one of hierarchy challenged and then hierarchy restored. The world of fairy-tales was one of basic fears, of a parent’s hunger overcoming parental love, of the world not working by the laws that it should, of an undesirable (the crippled, the ugly, the deformed) gaining power and using that power to punish others.

  The night before, Emily had told Jonathan everything she’d learned about her mother from Colleen. She’d told him about the death of James Blackshaw, how he’d probably been killed, how Frannie had caused her family’s exodus from the place they’d lived for several generations This was after she’d asked about the murders, after he’d given her the tarot reading, after she had let him take her to the bedroom and after sex. She had lain naked, red in the heat and from the rub of their skin together, her throat rashed from his cheek where he’d pressed against her throat, her knee throbbing from where she’d slammed it against her night table.