Father and son search for the body.
____________________________
I let him drive. I sat up on the fender, and the lights gave us enough illumination for us to spot a body up on shore or still rolling in shallow water. The air was cool and damp, of course, so I grabbed a couple stocking caps while Brad was getting the tractor out of the shed. I pulled on another sweater and told Ann what we were up to. She'd been reading.
"What are you going to do if you find it?" she said, taking off her glasses.
"I don't think we will," I told her, grabbing Brad's heavy jacket.
"Then why are you looking?"
"I'm going along for the ride," I told her. "He's the one that's looking."
We rode on the slant of the beach edge, six miles down to the mouth of the river, as far as we could go. Some places where the beach is gone, he'd slow down and take the water, the lights bouncing off the surface in a way that made me afraid we'd feel some clunk, then turn and watch a face or an arm or a leg emerge from the track of the big wheel beneath me.
When we got to the Sauk, he stood at the edge of the river, the lights disappearing into the water and the wispy fog. He pushed the gas back to an idle, and stared for a moment, and I knew he was thinking about the river currents out into the lake, about what they might do to that last body, how they might fan its drift miles down the beach, far beyond us, south even to Chicago. I know he was thinking that. I know it.
"That's it," I told him, over the engine noise.
He reached for the gear shift between his legs and swiveled around to back up over the dry sand, and he never said a thing. We went faster back up the beach towards home, our tracks, where they were visible, like a reminder that we'd covered all this ground already and no real goal could be found anyway. I didn't think the Lord would wash him up like that--just for us.
He pulled off the hat I'd given him and stuck it in his pocket, then stood up, keeping both hands on the wheel, his eyes moving back and forth over the beach--going too fast, I thought.
When I used to fish out there with Brad, Ann said she could hear us talk no matter how far out we went, our voices carrying through the open stillness as if there could be no secrets on the lake. That night I wondered what the people thought up and down the beach when they heard us go by, not once but twice, and saw a huddled figure in a stocking cap leaning on the fender of a tractor driven by a boy standing up and staring at the water as if he might find some monumental treasure tossed up by the wash of an evening's gentle waves.
We never spoke during that long ride. But I knew that if I tried to yell over the engine's heavy popping, I'd be heard by the whole world. Every word. So I kept quiet because it seemed to me then that I had something to say that wasn’t meant for a crowd.
Brad needed that body, needed to pull it himself from the maw of the killer lake, as if he were in fact the lifeguard he swore he never was, as if he still could rescue someone already dead for two days. But it wasn't that boy he needed to rescue. I think it was himself.
_____________________
Tomorrow: The next morning, Sunday.
No comments:
Post a Comment