by Daniel Mills
Samuel reddens and retreats down the ledge. He turns his back on the others, faces the boarded-up cottage. The windows are shut, the doors padlocked.
Behind him Jason and Nick line up at the edge of the dam. He hears them, their breathing. Jason counting down from three. “One.”
They jump. Samuel glances behind him, sees Jason fall with his back curved in upon itself and hands thrust out even as Nick steps forward timidly and drops from the ledge feet-first.
The air rushes up toward Nick, unbalancing him as he falls and flipping him onto his back. His tee shirt inflates, rides up, revealing his chest: the breasts like lumps of dough, the lines of yellow bruising near the waistband of his trunks. He strikes the water and plunges toward the bottom. Samuel’s reflection unravels with the impact, shattered in the whorl of rising bubbles.
Jason breaches the water. He is some distance from the dam and making for the lake’s center. His strokes are perfect: he cleaves the water like a boat’s prow, the long wake rippling behind him.
Samuel waits. Nick does not resurface.
The water re-knits itself, becoming smooth as glass. Samuel’s face floats within it, a perfect image: the lines round his mouth, the lips wide as he yells for help. His throat yawns before him, black with the shadow from a dying eddy.
His voice is broken, shrill, but it is enough. Jason hears him and turns round. He swims back toward the dam, shouting to Samuel as he draws near. He urges Samuel to jump in, to help, but Samuel can’t. His legs refuse to move, his eyes to close.
Jason dives, surfaces. There are weeds in his hair, water streaming down his face.
“Where is he?” he demands. “Can you see him?”
But the lake is a mirror, obscuring all but Samuel’s own pinched face, the tongue flapping uselessly against the dark of his throat. Jason swears and forces himself under again—longer this time though he comes up gasping, alone. He treads water briefly, breathing hard. Two deep breaths and he submerges himself for a third time, disappearing behind Samuel’s reflection.
At last he resurfaces, Nick’s head lolling on his shoulder. The other boy is limp in his arms, pressed close to his chest as he holds him up, kicking them both toward shore.
Samuel runs to meet them. He sheds his paralysis and sprints along the dam, forgetting his earlier caution. His bare feet sting as they slap the concrete.
Jason reaches the rocks near the end of the dam and pulls himself from the water. He drags himself forward with one hand then turns to haul up Nick behind him.
There is blood in the boy’s scalp and his tee shirt hangs loosely from his neck. His exposed chest appears soft, rubbery, white but for the bruises at his waist. They form a mottled line, purple and yellow, which disappears into his underwear.
Samuel sees them first, then Jason.
They look at each other, look away.
Jason takes Nick’s wrist in hand and listens for the pulse. He cradles the boy’s neck between his legs and leans forward, covering Nick’s lips with his mouth.
He breathes in, out.
Nick startles and coughs. Jason exhales heavily, falling back. The strength drains from Samuel’s legs, and he drops to his knees.
The coughing subsides. Nick’s eyelids flutter and open.
His eyes are bulging, wild and white.
Samuel tells no one what happened that day. Jason, too, is silent but only because Samuel begs him not to tell. His fear still eats at him, his shame or something more.
Fall comes and school, eighth grade. Nick disappears from their lives, and it is winter, January, when Samuel sees him again.
Early morning: sun coming up, gray smudges on thick cloud cover. Samuel sits in his mother’s car at the end of the driveway, waiting for the school bus.
The morning is cold, below zero. The heat vents rattle. Samuel’s head rests against the window, his breath misting on the pane.
Through that fog he watches the red pickup truck come barreling down the road, driving too quickly for the ice on the roads. Nick’s father. Samuel recognizes the black glasses, the pale hands on the wheel, and then the truck is past them.
A face at the rear windshield: Nick. He is as pale as his father and his mouth is open, a black circle.
The years pass and Samuel is seventeen, a senior in high school. In the spring he gets his license and takes to driving the lake-roads at night, circling it round and round.
Most nights, Jason rides with him, the water-pipe in hand and the windows down, the night-air breaking like waves around them. Jason offers the pipe to Samuel but always he refuses, thinking of his father’s disapproval, and weeks pass in this way before he caves.
Tonight they trade hits from Jason’s water-pipe and park below the dam. “Leave the music on,” Jason says, and Modest Mouse is playing as they climb out, slam the doors.
The car’s headlights shine on the wall of the dam before them, the hemlock-branches through which they climb. They reach the dam and lower themselves down. Stand side-by-side on the ledge, their shadows stretching ahead of them into the water.
The night is clear. The stars are out, the bow of the Milky Way. It joins with its reflection on the water to form an ellipse, an open mouth.
“Well, shit,” Jason say. “That’s really something.”
Samuel is slow to respond. When he does he says it’s like the future that’s waiting for them, ready to swallow them whole. He is thinking of the coming autumn, when Jason will leave for college, but Jason, laughing, tells him he is stoned.
They talk of other things: Boy Scouts and church camp and summers spent swimming at the dam. One morning in particular when they donned goggles and snorkels and swam out to the center of the lake which marked the boundary between two towns. They crossed the border, Samuel remembers, then turned round and swam back to shore.
Jason asks: “You think you still have those snorkels?"
“Sure. Back at the house.”
“What do you say we try them out?”
“Tonight?”
“Yeah.”
“Alright.”
It is after midnight. They walk back to the house and let themselves into the mudroom. The snorkels are in the closet along with two sets of goggles, the lenses gray with dust and spider silk. Samuel hands one set to Jason and takes the other for himself.
Silently, then, they slip outside, drawing the door shut behind them. They return to the dam and strip to their boxer shorts, climb the hemlock. Jason squats down, leaning forward to rinse his snorkel in the lake-water. Samuel follows suit then takes the mouthpiece between his lips. He gags at the taste: mud, mildew, puddled snowmelt.
Jason laughs, his face hidden behind his goggles. Samuel turns from him and looks out toward the lake, its center. His breath moans in the snorkel.
The moon is waning. The stars cut brighter for the ranks of darkened cottages all around, and the Milky Way is on the water, rippling, opening from itself to receive them as they step forward and drop from the edge.
Samuel hits the water. The lake closes over him, colder than he expected. It sloshes over the snorkel-top and fills his mouth so that he comes up coughing, blind where the lake has seeped into his goggles.
He treads water. “Jason?” he manages.
A voice drifts back to him. “Yeah?”
Jason is ten feet away, nearer the shore, where the lake is shallow enough for him to stand. His bare chest is visible where it thrusts from the water with its web of stars.
Samuel says: “Nothing.”
Jason leans forward and submerges his head. He wades along the shore, parting the water before him with his hands.
Samuel empties his goggles and snorkel and begins to swim. The lake-bottom rises out of the blackness as he nears the shallows, the shore.
His toes touch mud and he continues at a walk, wading as Jason did with his goggles submerged in the water. Beyond the glass the lake-bottom appears as a moonscape, lit by stars and cratered where his feet break through it, raising pl
umes of muddy debris.
He rotates his head toward the lake’s center, the line dividing his town from Nick’s. The water is deepest there, he knows, and before him the darkness draws itself into thin bands interspersed with beams of light, stars shining through from above.
All is quiet. Samuel is conscious of no sound save the whistle of air in the snorkel, the slow and even lapping of the lake. The weeds ripple beyond his goggles, the mud blossoming before him at each step. He spreads his arms and brings his hands together, dividing stars from darkness from whirling mud.
The silence is broken.
Samuel hears a heavy splash behind him, as though someone else has fallen from the dam. Panting, grunting. The sounds of frantic swimming.
He spins round, startled. He tears the goggles from his head.
Jason is halfway out of the water, running. He reaches the rocks and scrambles up them, and he must have lost his boxers somehow, because Samuel sees that he is naked, his buttocks showing, white and wiry. He vanishes over the lip of the dam.
Samuel goes after him. He thrashes a path through the shallows and bolts up the wet rocks. He falls once, twice, cutting open his foot. He reaches the dam and vaults over the edge, swinging himself down from the hemlock.
Jason is in the car. The passenger-side door is open and he has draped himself in a red gingham picnic blanket. He holds the pipe between his teeth with the lighter in one hand and the other hand cupped round, trying to coax a spark.
“It’s nothing,” he says, mumbling. “Freaked myself out, that’s all.”
“All? You scared me.”
“Thought I saw something. In the water.”
“What did you see?”
Jason shakes his head, will say nothing more.
Samuel retrieves their clothes from the dam. When he returns to the car, he finds Jason seated with eyes closed and pipe lit, smoke curling up from his open mouth.
Samuel starts the car, pulls out. Jason dresses himself in the dark while Samuel averts his gaze, watching the road unfold in the glare of the high-beams.
Jason’s breathing is unnaturally loud to him. Samuel turns on the radio.
Jason’s house. Jason crosses the lawn with his hands in his pockets and mounts the steps to the screened-in porch. Samuel watches. The headlights strike through the screens, making shadows like nets which close over him, catching Jason as he turns, waves, disappears inside.
The separation happens slowly, by degrees. On Friday, Samuel calls Jason’s house and speaks to his mother. She tells him Jason is out. “Lauren came by and picked him up.”
Lauren? The name means nothing to him. Samuel spends the night in bed with his headphones on and his face to the ceiling, the fan-blades going around.
The weekend passes with no word from Jason. Sunday night, Samuel goes out walking. His footfalls carry him up hill to the lake, the dam—and that’s where he sees them, seated together on the ledge. Jason with his back bent forward, his head in his hands. The girl beside him with her arm extended, hand spread across his back. She is speaking to him softly, almost whispering. Jason’s shoulders shake.
Samuel skulks back to the house, says nothing of what he saw. In school the boys continue to greet each other, passing in the hallway, but Jason takes to spending the weekends with Lauren and weeknights, too, once summer arrives.
In the autumn Jason leaves for college on a baseball scholarship and Samuel goes to work for his uncle, who owns a contracting business. He sees Jason around the holidays, but only then, and soon they lose touch altogether.
Samuel is twenty-one, twenty-two. Sometimes, at night, he remembers the lake as it was on that night in May with the stars in its folds and the Milky Way on its surface, yawning, joining its reflection to receive him as he fell.
In dreams he stands on the dam, cold concrete between his toes. He hears his own breathing, strained and whistling, and Nick’s face is in the water below. It shimmers in place, floating on the dark that whirls up from beneath.
The image stays with him on waking, a trapped melody. One night, late, he staggers out of bed and tiptoes downstairs to his father’s office. He digs the address book out of the desk and flips through it until he finds Nick’s number.
He takes down the phone and dials the number. He raises the receiver to his ear and waits for a ringing from the other side. He has no idea what he will say, how he will begin.
Four beeps in sequence. A woman’s recorded voice.
The number has been disconnected.
2012. Samuel is a manager in his uncle’s contracting business, a youth pastor in his father’s church. He teaches Sunday School, arranges field trips to the lake in summertime. He lives alone. His apartment is in the next town but he drives up to the lake on Sundays for dinner with his parents. From them he learns that Jason is engaged. His mother says: “He’s coming home for the wedding. They’re getting married at the lake.”
He doesn’t expect an invitation, doesn’t receive one. At dusk on the night of the wedding he cruises round the lake at twenty miles per hour, watching for signs. He spies one, slows. Jason + Amanda, it says, the words in green letters on a yellow background. An arrow points up a driveway to a big house on the water, rented for the occasion.
A tent has been erected on the lawn, tables laid with champagne flutes and electric candles. The wedding, it seems, is over, but the dancing continues, men and women whirling together beneath strings of Christmas lights. They are beautiful, achingly so, wearing their best clothes and dancing, pairing off to music he can’t hear and always the lake behind them, its awful stillness. The water is calm, un-rippled. Purple with the reflection of a sky that isn’t there, not really, and he thinks of his childhood, the years since high school. The surface of his life and the memories it hides. The bruises at Nick’s waist. His father’s black glasses.
Jason’s voice. Thought I saw something. In the water.
Samuel backs out into the road. He straightens the wheel and depresses the gas pedal, anxious to be away. Thirty-five, forty. He rounds the northwest corner of the lake just as a pickup truck pulls out from a side-street, cutting him off.
He slams the brakes. Taps the horn as he approaches, but the truck does not increase its speed. Twenty miles per hour. He is ten feet from the other vehicle, less. The tailgate flaps up, down—groaning, broken—and the truck itself is filthy and decrepit.
Samuel strains his eyes. He leans into the glow of his headlights but cannot discern the color of the pickup for the layers of rust and mud. The license plate is similarly indistinct, a gray rectangle, while the truck’s rear windshield is fogged over, opaque but for a swath where someone has wiped it clear from inside.
Samuel glimpses movement in the cabin, the flutter of something white. He flashes his high-beams. Glimpses a face at the window, a boy.
The child’s eyes are black, or appear so, as is the mouth that drops open, crying out, screaming for help while the tailgate bangs up and down.
Samuel brakes, hard. His car shudders, screeches. Stops.
The truck drives away.
Samuel’s mouth is dry. His hands shake as he fumbles for the stick-switch, his brights. He sees it again: that face at the window, an open mouth. Screaming even as the truck vanishes beyond the cone of his headlights, leaving the empty road, the windblown trees. The leaves and the patterns they make like ripples in water.
He stomps down on the accelerator. The engine responds, pushing up toward forty. The lake drops away to his left, the north shore visible through a lattice of birch-branch and pine, and again the pickup is before him.
The tailgate falls open, releasing a cloud of dust from the truck-bed. It rears up before him, white and fine where his headlights strike through, illuminating the interior of the cabin. The driver’s head is visible, a shimmering in the truck’s rear-view, but only for a moment before it is gone, eclipsed by a hand at the back windshield: a child’s hand, the fingers spread.
Samuel slows, his bumper five fee
t from the truck’s tailgate.
He turns on his high-beams, flooding the pickup’s interior, revealing the dark stains on the dashboard and headrests, the mold sprouting from the upholstery. The cabin swims with damp, trapped breath whirling like smoke before the light.
The hand vanishes, reappears.
It feebly thumps the glass.
The truck accelerates. The chassis shakes as the driver up-shifts, shedding flecks of paint or rust which spatter Samuel’s windshield and skitter away into the night.
Samuel speeds up to maintain his distance, punching his horn all the while. He flashes his brights, but the truck will not slow, will not pull over, and together they follow the road as it curves to the south, away from the lake, dark trees yielding to fences and farm-fields.
He presses down the gas pedal. The speedometer jumps to fifty-five, sixty, bringing him within two car-lengths of the truck. The road ahead of them is clear. He jerks the wheel sharply to the left and pulls into the other lane. He continues to accelerate, draws level with the cabin.
The driver-side door is rusted out, sealed over. The window is misted with breath, smeared with fingerprints. The windshield, too, is completely obscured, though the truck continues to accelerate, pushing seventy as they approach the straightaway.
Samuel rolls down his window. He shouts across the seat, but the other driver pays no heed. With the window down, Samuel hears a thudding from the truck and sees the boy’s face at the window. There are bruises about the mouth and neck but the features are familiar, somehow, the eyes, though in this moment, he cannot be sure if it is Nick’s face, or Jason’s, or his own—and then the road is sliding out from under him.
He hits the ditch. Flips, keeps rolling. Tumbles end-over-end through the hay-fields. The airbag explodes from the steering column and he hears a sound like waters churning, sees the stars come rushing toward him: the Milky Way, its open jaws.
He survives. A young woman, driving behind him, witnesses the accident and phones for help. Later, in her statement, she says that Samuel was driving erratically: changing lanes, shouting out his window. She doesn’t mention a second vehicle.
