Morning Thanks

Garrison Keillor once said we'd all be better off if we all started the day by giving thanks for just one thing. I'll try.

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

The Voice of the Body--a story (ii)


Second segment of an old story about fathers and sons. Dad tries to talk to Brad about the deaths that happened at work. 
________________________ 

I didn't know exactly what it was that Cecil told Brad until Brad himself told me last night on the beach. We live on the lake. Friday night I heard the front door slap shut, and when his cycle never popped, I assumed he went out to the water by himself.

Last night he took off again in silence, so I gave him fifteen minutes, and then went out myself and walked north towards the park because I realized he was probably looking for that last body. The moon raised a sparkling triangle over whatever little waves hadn't yet bedded down for the night, and lights from the cottages down the beach stood in perfect order like a line of troops.

I found him about a quarter-mile down on the Sprigsby's dock, staring out toward the moon, his arm wound around a guy wire holding the runabout up above the water. The thin chill in the breeze off the lake kept your face cool and wet. "It's cold as April," I said, coming up from behind him.

"You out here?" he said, as if he hoped it might be someone else.

I walked past him over the planks and stood at the end looking out toward a necklace of lights from some ship. "I used to dream of someday standing here and seeing Michigan," I told him. "Just once in my life, I'd like to see land way beyond the blue." I turned towards him because I wanted to hear him say something, anything at all. "I think maybe if we'd get up on the roof of our place some night when things are really clear--maybe in a tree or something. Take some binocs along. Maybe we could pick something out." He shrugged his shoulders. "Ninety miles. Too much curve in the earth," he said. "You couldn't see over there even if it was crystal clear."

"Top of the power plant maybe?" I said.

He pulled the zipper of his jacket all the way up beneath his chin. "You could figure it out--how high you'd have to be."

"When I was a kid I used to think you could see it when you'd see these long lines on the horizon, like sand dunes--"

"Probably fog banks," he said.

I turned back to the horizon. The barge lights hadn't moved. "It's only a dream," I told him.

Somewhere down the beach a heavy bass from a party beat through the stillness of Saturday night.

"One of them's out there yet," I said. "It could turn up miles from here."

We hadn't really talked much about what happened. Brad doesn't really talk much at all to us anymore. Ann says since he's turned sixteen his only mode is silence, interrupted by an occasional grunt.

"Guess so," he said.

"Where'd the one come up today?"

"Fifteen miles down," he said, pointing down the shoreline towards the lights from Port Jefferson. "It gets battered up, I guess. You wouldn't think it would, not rolling in the water. Besides, it's so cold this time of year. You'd think a body wouldn't look that bad at all."

I didn't know then what exactly what was going on. I didn't know what Cecil had told him. He's young. Eighteen is too young for all of that, but I guess you think that way when it's your own you're worried about. "You blaming yourself somehow, Brad?" I said.

"Somebody's got to take it," he said. "Four of them dead. It's somebody's fault. I sold them a sticker. I let them in."

I tried to laugh just to lighten things. "You're taking the whole weight of the world on your shoulders," I told him. "You'll strain something if you try to do that."

"Cecil told me it was my fault." I couldn't believe it. "What do you mean?"

"He said I should have known better. I was born here, he told me. I should have known you can't take a canoe out into those waves--that's what he said."

I know Cecil's a fine man, an old war horse from Korea who worked himself up to Park Director by sweat and loyalty and a powerful love for the lakeshore. He gave me a job years ago, and when I asked him about Brad last summer, he never hesitated.

"Cecil said that?" I said.

He twanged the guy wires as if they were the strings of a bass viola. "He's full of crap," Brad said. "It's not my job to be a lifeguard. I only sold them a sticker. He can't blame me."

Sprigsbys have a canopy on that deck, so they don't keep a tarp over the boat. We know them well. For some reason, Brad swung himself inside and sat down behind the driver's seat.

"We all need to blame somebody," I told him.

"It wasn't my fault."

"He doesn't blame you either."

"You should have seen his eyes," Brad said. "You ever see Cecil mad?"

"I used to work for him myself."

"He was mad. He read me out down at the booth, comes limping down from the office like he does, and just about tears my throat out."

"He didn't mean it," I said.

"The heck he didn't."

I know why Cecil did it. I know Cecil. He comes into the bank two or three times a week, deposits the take from the stickers and registrations. He's a fine man, but a dozen TV cameras all over the beach and all those reporters poking mikes at him, asking him how on earth four kids could drown in a well-maintained state park, and I can see him standing there speechless, a man who works with his hands but never was a talker. Besides that, right there at his feet are the bodies of two boys drowned in his park.

"It wasn't my fault at all, and he had no right to chew my butt the way he did," Brad said.

I turned around and walked to the side of the boat. "Then why do you think it is?" I said.

"I don't," he said. "I ain't a lifeguard."

"You said that already," I told him.

"That jerk social worker shouldn't have let them put those canoes in. You can't canoe in waves that high, not in Lake Michigan. What kind of stupidity is that anyway?--geez."

"He didn't know."

"He should've."

"You talk to him at all?"

"I sold him the sticker is all. Don't even remember him. Long hair, I think. A beard. He said the guys kept their rooms clean. 'Which way is the beach?' he says. 'These

guys got a day off for keeping their rooms clean.' He says it for them, looking around toward the back seat, you know--not for me."

"That's all you remember?"

"Shoot, and I'm going, 'I don't even keep my room clean.’”

"So he didn't know anything?" I said.

"Guy with half a brain could see you can't canoe when the water's up. That don't take any smarts."

"So it's his fault?" I said.

"Guy like that doesn't know the lake. They shouldn't send anybody down here who doesn't

know the lake."

"Who's they?" I said.

"The guy's boss. I don't know. Whoever sent him down to the park. How am I supposed to know? It's just not my fault."

He sat with his elbows on his legs, toying with a ski rope, his broad shoulders--like his mother's family--squared, his thick arms packed into the jacket. At fourteen he stopped wearing my shirts because his chest didn't get into them anymore, but big as he is, he's not strong enough to carry those dead boys.

"You been looking for that body, haven't you?" I told him. "You were out last night and you're out again tonight because you want to find it."

"Can't a guy take a walk on the lake?" he said.

"No law against it," I told him. It was early. It couldn't have been much past eight. I figured I could help him somehow, maybe I had to. "Do the lights work on the Farmall?" I said. "You used it when you were seining smelt, didn't you?"

"They work," he said.

"Maybe we ought to take a ride," I told him.

He turned around on his seat, looked right at me.

"You never know," I said.

He shook his head. "I looked half the morning. Cecil put me on the tractor and sent me up and down the beach, one end of the park to the other. He says we just as soon not have people bumping into that thing by surprise."

"You had enough?" I asked.

He looked down at his watch. "It's Saturday night," I told him. "You haven't been home this early in years."
________________ 

Tomorrow: Father and son go out together, looking for the body.

No comments: