unexpectedly calls out, “Hey!” and then again, “Hey!” his voice comes echoing so weirdly and insistently that, for a quick panicked moment, remembering my great-Aunt Isabelle’s drowning, I half suspect malevolent aquatic weeds have somehow again reached from the bottom and wrapped themselves, tentacle-like, around the young swimmer’s ankles.
Treading water, a jolt of fear shooting down my spine, I turn as though pinioned on an invisible tangent running through and beyond the earth’s core; the boy smiles back at me impishly, seeming pleased to discover his rebounding voice holds such power to draw me. He calls again, adding, in all innocence as the echo dies: “It’s like we’re in an underground cavern or something, isn’t it Dad?”
After swimming a briefly energetic victory circle exiting upon the big side of the lake, we climb from the water and sit resting on the slightly concave facet of a boulder set adjacent to the bridge. I visually measure the length between the swimming beach now open before us and the opposing shore. Even accounting for, and downsizing, my childhood appraisal of the distance, I know it is too far for me to duplicate my father’s feat of swimming there and back.
A motorboat starts up and approaches from behind us, put-putting slowly, the noise, condensing and so amplifying as it comes under the bridge. A middle-aged man holds the tiller steering the boat, which includes also a woman and younger girl, presumably his wife and daughter. I smile at them, at the prospect of a family enjoying themselves, out for a Sunday excursion together. They wave at us in unison as they pass not ten feet away and as we wave in return I notice the furtive glance the girl gives my boy and the slight, reciprocal upward nod of his head; he catches me watching and looks ahead, suddenly extending his arm to point.
“”Why don’t we swim out to the raft?” His voice and gesture project a masking, careless indifference while he blushes.
“I don’t know.” Though nearly mimicking his air of nonchalance, my voice conveys a true and entrenched disinterest.
In silence we watch the boat, accelerating now, spreading its wake, sending the nearer waves rolling under the raft’s tilting, bobbing barrels. As we watch the high-floating deck bob and rock and begin settling down with the surface motion, I consider attempting to say I understand. Before he was born, before I ever even laid eyes on the boy’s mother, I had come here with a young woman in the early hours before dawn and swum with her naked amid spectral mists, lying afterwards stretched out with her face-down on the raft, feeling tired and happy as the sun reddened the water and sky all around us. But how did one relate such a thing and not spoil it?
“I don’t know,” I say again, reconsidering the question. “You really want to swim to the raft?”
Watching the boy’s profile, I track the course of a droplet descending haltingly the soft fuzz of his cheek; at the same time I see as if superimposed a ghost image of the girl’s profile following that long ago swim. Finally, I turn my head and concentrate instead on the present.
“Maybe we could save it for next time?”
I half expect a sulking response, but surprisingly the boy merely nods and continues looking out towards the raft and beyond.
“Dad?”
“Yes, boy?”
“Why did you and Mom split up?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask your mother?”
The boy reaches for and picks up a pebble, throwing it out into the water.
“I did.”
“And?”
“She said to ask you.”
He smiles, half turns, and I wonder if he has just made a joke.
“Actually,” he continues, quite seriously, “she said she looked at you one morning and realized she no longer knew who you were.”
“Oh?”
“I’m sorry, Dad. I don’t mean to hurt you.”
I smile and touch a finger to the round edge of his shoulder, yet he still looks away.
“Dad, how is that possible? How can you just suddenly not know someone like that?”
“I don’t know. It happens. Hell, I’ve looked at myself some mornings and thought the same thing.”
To change the mood, I tell him about the small villages of East Rushford and Kellogsville lying beneath the extending waters, relating the all-but-forgotten story of people flooded from their homes upon completion of the Caneadea Gorge Dam back in the roaring, confident, pre-collapse year 1927.
“There was a movie made about it,” I tell him, slyly pausing and looking briefly away. “A scary movie called, fittingly enough, ‘Ghost Lake’—where the displaced and drowned residents come up out of the water after dark to haunt the still-living. It was filmed here on location, half a dozen years ago.”
“That’s cool.”
I watch him still watching the water, extending his gaze after the boat and beyond, toward the far crescent end of the lake. But the dammed far deep lies behind a distant outcrop of trees. Somewhere out there a buoy marks the rocky summit of a submerged hill, where at about the age of my boy now, I looked down from a boat to see under the rippled surface its looming dark, threatening presence.
“There’s a truer ghost story,” I say, “of sorts.”
Having cast the words out, I let them float quietly away. The metaphor is hardly accidental, for I see myself, the too-absent father, as a fisherman of sorts, angling to engage an elusive, nearly inaccessible son. At the same time it is important to respect the lost valley extending before us unseen. Making it a personal story, I realize, would seem too self-referential. Still, before I floated so dangerously near that rocky summit, I’d never considered the submerged world underneath; now as an adult, I explore it in my dreams.
“Truer? Of sorts?”
The slight upturn of the boy’s mouth registers mild amusement, even as the quick glance of his eyes betrays a deeper if furtive interest.
“You knew—didn’t you?—your great-grandfather worked to help build the dam here?”
“No!”
“It’s true, the summer before your grandfather was born. During a pour he watched a man lose his balance and fall from a scaffold.”
“What happened?”
“The man’s still there… here… buried in the concrete.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Not a bit.”
The boy lets out a low appreciative whistle; looking off again at the motorboat becoming ever more diminutive, he seems entranced by a vision projected on a continuing trajectory towards the distant, unseen dam. For awhile more we sit in silence considering what else might have happened that long ago summer before my father was born. Then, as if in telepathic agreement, we rise as one to descend off the rock and swim racing each other back under the bridge.
As the car climbs the hill returning the way we have come, the boy finally looks towards me.
“Can we go see the dam?”
“Sure.”
I shrug, as if I didn’t care one way or the other.
“Really?”
“There’s time. Why not?”
Glancing his way just before we reenter the woods, I glimpse a remnant of lake glittering beyond the bobbing sphere of his head.
Feeling agreeably tired and numb, welcoming the wood’s flickering shadow, I retrain my eyes on the road, imagining for one perfect moment we are sharing a thought in the quiet.
So it seems a particularly deliberate and personal affront when the boy disrupts the connection, deftly moving his thumbs over, all the while concentrating upon, the phone cradled in his lap.
There appears suddenly such a wide gulf between us, I despair of ever understanding what he or his world are about—until, surprisingly, he tells me:
“I just let Mom know we’re still at the lake… searching for ghosts.”
*********
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