The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories (21 page)

I get up to buy wrapping paper in a cheerful store. The magnetic stripe on the credit card doesn't work.

I rouse my wife. It is time to collect the children again. The sun blazes at an odd angle. It is fall. We have started a new season. There is a light that almost fills the car.

LAST COTTAGE

W
e 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 remaining cottage on the lake; they possess the only waterfront property that has not been commercially developed. 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 of 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 kept 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 too. The nights were very warm and still. The Larsons exchanged a few inaudible remarks. Their shoulders were rubbing.

Once they 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; 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. 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 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
oust 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 Larsons' 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 couldn't be bribed into doing shoddy work, as no one outside of Chicago can be bribed in this way. 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 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 grass, 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 with 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 to
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 climbed inside the boat, under the covering. Every year, they play inside the boat. We do not know what they do in there. We presume they play make-believe games. 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 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; 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; 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 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 cottage, 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 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—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 themselves symbolized as sucking fish, disgusting bottom-dwellers left for dead on their beach.

Robert Larson moved slowly back up the sand, his hands in his pockets. He entered the cottage.
He looked at his wife and shrugged. Then Penny shrugged. Then Robert Larson shrugged again. Then he said, “Nature down here is funky,” and he clicked his tongue and sat down.

The children, these fine and very sweet and well-mannered twins, were glancing back and forth between their parents, very forlorn and very anxious. Larson looked at his wife, and Penny looked at him. Larson nodded. The children darted through the screen door and ran to the beachfront again. They plunged into the water and seized the fish in large quantities, held them against their bodies, and threw them at one another. They lobbed them in various ways—like footballs, like hand grenades. They kissed them and pretended to fall in love with them, then they threw them back into the water, jilted. They rode on top of the big ones like dolphins. They pitched them onto the beach; some of the carp were more than five feet long, and by working together, the children were able to drag them onto the sand. The twins then began making forts and castles with them. We held our mouths.

We might have kept holding our mouths had Larson not sped out of the driveway. We turned to
see him go. He drove quickly, but the stop signs slowed him. He had his arm out the window. He spat tobacco onto the road. He had his music on loudly—a local radio channel, country western, not from the Chicago towers but from those in Kankakee. He turned into the Cat rental facility on the north end of Route 176, went inside, and according to Davis, the manager, rented a small skid steer loader for one half day at a holiday rate of 175 dollars. Davis also covered the cost of delivery, which would take place later that afternoon, as there was no demand for skid steers at that time. Repelling open or clandestine bribes is one thing; facilitating the enemy is really something entirely different. We sometimes look at Davis and wonder what Slocum Lake would feel like without him.