This is the Part Where You Laugh (4 page)

Saturday. I go down to the middle school to see if anyone's playing on the outdoor courts, but the courts are empty. I dribble and shoot, do three sets of jump lunges and calf plyometrics to help build my vertical, and picture dunking while I do the sets.

Lots of guys who are 5'9" can dunk—and some guys, Nate Robinson for example, can throw down at that height—so it's annoying that I still can't. I'm close, and that's good. I can grab the rim now, and if I go up hard, I can slide the ball across the top of the rim. But mostly I get rim-checked on the front edge. Part of my problem is that I can't quite palm the ball, so I promise myself I'll do grip strength on my Gripmaster before I go to sleep.

On the way home from the school, I see a sign tacked to three consecutive telephone poles. I stop and dribble in place while I read the sign. It says:

LOST DOG

MINIATURE TERRIER—NAMED MILO

LAST SEEN NEAR AYRES LAKE

CALL (541) 521-3574

I guess I should feel bad, because I'm pretty sure I know what happened to that dog, but I don't. People lose dogs all the time, and usually to nothing as exciting as South American crocodiles. I lost a dog once, and it was messed up, and I was really sad for a while, but then I thought about it and realized that losing is all there is in life sometimes. Sometimes we just lose and lose and lose and there's nothing we can do about it, so I guess I'd rather be eaten by a crocodile than get dog leukemia or have old-age dog hip problems or some shit like that. At least this dog got to go out fighting for his life.

I walk down to the lake and look at the water. It's greener lately. More algae. I haven't seen or heard anything since I released the caimans, and I'm just guessing they ate that dog, but I'm pretty sure. I read online that they need warm water and warm weather year-round, that they don't live this far north even in captivity, so I know that they might not survive for too long. But it's hot now, hot every day, and they have a chance to do well, at least for the summer, and this summer's all I need: a couple of evenings in the boat with Grandma, a few stories, something for Grandma to hear about, something interesting for her neighbors to tell her this last year.

We keep a canoe locked up near my tent. I undo the combination lock, take the chain off, flip the canoe over, pull fistfuls of clump grass to wipe out the spiderwebs. Then I go up to the porch to grab paddles, tackle, and my fishing pole from the trunk by the back door. Grandpa left half a bag of Doritos out on the picnic table next to his pipe, and I grab the chips too.

I strip off my shirt and throw it in the bottom of the canoe before dragging the boat to the water. I don't want to sweat through my shirt right before dark, before the day cools off.

I slide the bow of the canoe into the water, then the rest of the hull, weighting the stern on the shore rocks. I put my left foot in and kick off, easing over the shelf into the deep. That's my favorite moment of canoeing, the moment when the boat is floating for the first time and the whole thing rocks back and forth to find its center of balance. I like to wait and see how far the canoe will drift in a line, where the wind is blowing, and what'll happen if I don't paddle. It reminds me of that feeling I'd get when I was a kid and my mom was passed out and it was nighttime, and I knew she wasn't waking up for a long time. I'd sneak out of the motel room, down the hall to the stairwell, and out the front lobby. Then I'd walk down 7th Street, past the women in short skirts and fishnet stockings, the men drinking 40s out of paper bags. I knew some of them, and sometimes they'd wave at me or give me a look like I wasn't supposed to be out after dark.

I'd go in the 7-Eleven and wait until the clerk wasn't watching me. I'd walk up and down those aisles until I could slide something in my pocket and walk to the door without anyone seeing me. Then I'd be back out on the street, cruising along in the dark, more traffic at night, with the smells of car exhaust, motor oil, Subway, and Taco Bell mixing together in the night's air.

This evening, the lake is still, no wind, and the canoe cuts straight and slow across the deep. I paddle out to the center, looking across to the east side, to the long lawns behind the big houses, the wooden gazebos, and the plank-board docks that run 50 feet out into the water. Five of them have small sailboats tied to their moorings, but nobody else is out on the lake with me.

I eat handfuls of Doritos and wash them down with water.

I tie a rubber worm on and jig for smallmouth. Every once in a while, I paddle and watch the tip shiver with the weight of the canoe's movement. I paddle north, where the algae fields aren't as thick, where everything stays less boggy. It's an hour before I catch a fish, and the bass I do catch isn't big. It fights hard, but it's medium-smallish when I bring it in. I pull the hook with needle-nose pliers, hit the fish on the gunnel, and throw it in the bottom of the canoe to fillet and eat when I get back home. Breaded, that fish might make half of a meal.

I paddle back to the middle of the lake and jig some more, this time shipping the paddle, bobbing the rod in my hands, letting the canoe move with the wind. It's late evening now and the wind picks up, running north and west. The canoe pushes with the wind, and I hope for one of the rare bigmouth that feed in the open spaces late in the evening. I cast out into the hole between algae fields, jig and reel, and cast again.

I'm watching the tip of my rod, focused on the last eyelet, waiting for that hit on the rubber worm when the stern of the canoe clunks against something solid and the boat tips and I overcorrect and slip and fall into the bottom. I lie there for a second and hear someone laughing at me. When I sit up, I see it's the girl. She still has her soccer-player headbands on and her phone in her hand. She says, “You actually just about went in.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I was letting the canoe drift.” I lean and grab the side of the dock. Hold myself there. “I was jigging for bass.”

“Bass?” she says.

“Yeah.” I pull myself onto the dock and stand up. “Bass.” I hold out my hands. My hands are dirty and reek of fish.

The girl tilts her head. Makes a face. “I don't like bass.”

“No?”

“No, I actually hate them.”

“Why?”

She shrugs. Doesn't explain.

We stand there. She looks at her phone.

I say, “I'm Travis.”

She's still looking at her phone. “Natalie,” she says. She squints, looking at something on her screen, and the scar under her eye shivers.

With her looking down like that, I can check her out some more. So I do. She's strong, good shoulders, good quads. I can tell she works out. Plays a sport. And she still has that loose, cutout T-shirt on. I like that. Right now I can see the lacy top of one side of her pink bra. If the shirt was a little looser I could see the rest.

She adjusts her collar. “Are you staring at my fucking breasts?”

“No.”

She turns off her phone. Looks right at me. “You weren't staring at them?”

“I don't know. Maybe?”

Natalie looks me up and down. I don't have my shirt on, and I look at my stomach and see a green line going across below my ribs, a mark from the dry algae on the bottom of the canoe. I must have smeared it on myself when I flipped the canoe over before I put it in the water. I rub at it with the tips of my fingers but it just smears wider.

Natalie giggles.

I want to ask her why she swam in her clothes the other night, why she was swimming in circles. But I don't. Instead, I say, “Do you want to go out in the canoe with me?”

“No,” she says. She looks at her house, then back at me. She's facing the last rays of sunlight and I see that her eyes have flecks of yellow and orange in the green, like shards of campfire.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I really have to go.” She looks at something on her phone. Presses a few buttons with her thumbs. “I should go now.”

“Okay.”

“And you should probably paddle back. I don't think my stepdad would like you boating up to his dock and just—” She stops talking. She's looking behind me.

I turn around. My canoe's drifted away. The wind must have shifted, and it pulled the canoe out 30 or 40 feet from the dock. “I better…” I look at Natalie, back at the canoe. I take two steps and dive in, breaststroking under the water to try and reach the canoe in one effort, hoping to impress her. I come up, turn the canoe around, sidestroke it back to the dock. But when I get there and pull myself out of the water, Natalie's already walking away, almost to the shore.

I say, “See you later?”

She puts her hand up and waves, but doesn't look back. I watch her walk to the stone steps at the start of the hill, watch her jog up the cut steps on the hillside, the muscles in her legs flexing, her butt tightening with each step. She gets to the top of the steps and passes the two stone lions at the back end of the yard. Then I can't see her anymore.

I shiver.

I don't feel like fishing now. I get back in my canoe and paddle across the lake, beach the canoe on the gravel, and drag it up by my tent. I pull out my gear and the one bass, then flip the canoe, slide my gear and the paddles underneath, and go up to the house to cook the fish. I cook it in Krusteaz pancake mix and butter the way I learned to cook fish at the wilderness experience for troubled teens. I eat the bass with a few Ritz crackers and a glass of whole milk, and after I finish eating and washing my dishes, I walk back down to my tent.

Creature's left another page.

Oh, Anna of Kashin, I want to flip your 14th-century royal robes over your head and smell your stomach and the deep creases underneath your breasts. I've heard you only bathe once a month, and your skin holds a heavy odor. Please, don't ever bathe again. I want more of your scent.

As a young woman, you were taught the strict virtues of humility and obedience, but I don't need you to be obedient to me. You can do what you want with me, anything, and I'll help you too. I'll take your wig off and pick the lice from your scalp.

You were married by nine, and survived a fire in the year 1295, when you were 10 years old. Maybe the halo in all of the paintings is the glowing remnant of that fire, and when I kiss you, my lips glow too, as if the halo is uranium, our love a cancer spreading through our bodies.

I will call you by your name of silence, the name you chose for yourself: Evfrosiniya. I will whisper that name in your ear as we hide together in a wardrobe. The Mongol hordes who tortured your sons will not find us. We'll be naked, with fur coats hanging above us. I'll pull one down and cover our bodies in fur. You'll scooch back into me, your bare back pressed to my chest, and I'll smell once more the oil on your skin as I hold you cradled against me.

I was in a drugstore last year, and I saw these little blue birds made of glass, and I had to take one. I picked it up and looked on the bottom and it was marked $39.99. Only three inches tall and it was worth $40. I couldn't believe it. So I stuck it in my pocket.

An employee walked up and said, “Excuse me, young man, but could you please empty out your pockets?” He was kind of tall and thin. Maybe 10 years older than me.

We were near the door, by the front displays, and I hesitated. I wish I hadn't. I should've kept walking and made him make the difficult decision to stop me physically, but I froze and he put his hand on my shoulder and gave me that smile that really isn't a smile.

When people put their hands on me, it makes my jaw tighten like someone's ratcheting a bolt on the side of my face. I can feel all of my teeth pressing together, top and bottom, getting tighter and tighter, and some of my teeth don't seem to fit right. I didn't like the way this man was looking at me, and I tried to calm myself down and breathe, staring at two longer hairs just under his eye that he missed while shaving. I tried not to hit him.

When I did make a move, it wasn't a punch. It was more of a shove, two-handed. I popped him with two open hands and he was jolted off his feet.

He fell into a perfume display—no,
through
a perfume display—and the table broke and the bottles popped up into the air like in that movie
The Matrix.
I swear I could see the bottles just sparkling and hanging there for a second before they fell and exploded on the linoleum floor. The man tried to stand up, but the table had split in half and the tablecloth was folded around him, so standing only made things worse. He slipped again and went down hard, and then I noticed that there were other people all around us, none of them doing anything but just standing and staring at him and at me, and then I realized that I'd better run. So I did. I ran.

Grandpa says, “Something's out there.”

“Where?” I say.

“In the lake.” He points with his cereal spoon.

I look where he's pointing. Make a serious face. “What kind of a something?”

He taps his spoon on the table. Says, “The lake monster kind.”

I smile when he says that. “A lake monster?”

“You don't believe me?” He points his spoon at me.

I pour a bowl of Cap'n Crunch and grab a dry handful. Eat the yellow pieces out of my hand. “No. I don't believe in lake monsters.”

Grandpa says, “It's not just me that thinks so. Our neighbor Rosa Nash came over last night and said she saw something weird too. She says something came up out of the water and ate a goose the other evening.”

I pour milk over my cereal. Take a big bite. “A goose?”

“A huge goose. One of those big, fat white ones. She said the monster drug it, the goose, screaming and squawking to its death.”

“All right,” I say, “and you saw this monster eat a goose too?”

“No, I didn't. But I saw it eat something else. I saw the monster take down a blue heron in the shallows near the boggy end. I was walking the south-side trail the other morning, and I looked out at this perfect blue heron standing there in a foot of water when all of a sudden something ripped it off its feet.” Grandpa claps his hands together. “And I'm not talking about any kind of fish or bird either, because this thing took the heron out into deep water and dragged it down just like Rosa Nash described with the goose. All I saw was a flash of the monster's tail.”

“The monster has a tail now?”

“You go ahead and laugh,” Grandpa says, “but this thing has a big monster tail.” He takes a bite of cereal and chews. I can hear him breathing through his nose as he eats, chewing so hard it sounds like someone raking through gravel.

I say, “It could be a northern pike or something. I've caught some big fish out there.”

“No,” Grandpa says, “fish don't have monster tails.” He takes another big bite of cereal and stares at me as he chews. He swallows and says, “I think you know the difference between a monster and a pike, right?”

I say, “Come on, Grandpa, a monster?” I drink my milk and stand up to clear my bowl.

He follows me into the kitchen. “One more thing: I'm not sure if it's safe for you to sleep out there anymore.”

“In my tent?”

“Well, if there's a monster in the lake, I'm not sure it's a good idea to be sleeping right on the shore.”

“I made a promise to myself: 100 nights straight. No matter what. And ‘no matter what' means no matter what. Monsters included.” I smile when I say “monsters.”

Grandpa clunks his bowl down into the sink. “This is not a joke, Travis. I'll talk to your grandma about it.”

I fill my cereal bowl with water from the tap and watch the milky cloud swirl in the bottom. Then I drink the white water. I say, “I'm gonna shoot some hoops now.”