All the Places to Hide
Thomas Benz
_As they zoom along, bundles of hay are scattered in the adjacent field, as if forming some message that can only be seen from the air. A “V” of geese, amid the broad expanse of sky, keeps threatening to lose its pattern before aligning again. Dev likes the itinerant feeling of passing through the postage stamp hamlets, absorbing their slow rhythms and passages, as if he could slowly make his way back into the past. Occasionally he sees a row of smoldering fires, with so much drifting smoke it obscures whole blocks off the main drag, a detail he remembers from all those years he came up here with his father. Those memories have been dormant a long time but now seem to amass and gather strength like the threatening edge of a storm.
“Any withdrawal symptoms yet?” Dev says, only glancing over, lest he miss the turn.
“So far so good,” Jilly says, stretching languorously like a cat. “As long as somebody doesn’t shoot us.” She closes her eyes and curls herself into the contour of the bucket seat, trying to catch the angle of light. Her knees are tucked up against her burgundy sweater so that to follow the rippled seam of her jeans is as stirring as the bank and plunge of a roller coaster.
“People don’t even use locks up here,” Dev says, rehashing one of his standard arguments for life in the country. “It’s safer than a police station in Chicago.”
Jilly is a city girl--dance clubs, avant-garde theatre, cappuccino every morning-- and Dev has had to gently cajole her for weeks to make the trip. He can’t escape the sense that they’re moving more and more toward some tricky romantic fault line, the cracks of which have already begun to appear. It doesn’t help that the radio stations keep announcing strange territory with their gospel invocations and livestock reports, then fading under a hail of static as if they were gradually leaving the earth’s atmosphere.
They turn onto the short narrow clay road when he spots the Kingfisher’s Resort Sign, behind which cottages are arranged in a cluster, a sort of compound. High-backed wood chairs painted green overlook the water, with a T shaped pier and stacked kindling and a ring of stones for a fire. They hear the light slap of a retracted screen door from one of the far units and two small boys, seemingly propelled, are charging undeterred up a steep slope, as if their lives depended on it. Even 30 yards away, there is also the hollow pop of waves against the log posts at the shoreline, and the clank of rigging flung against a mast. Dev has not been up here for seven years since his father died and it is as if he expects the old man will reappear out of the woods from one of his long circuits.
“Nice view,” Jilly says, with a widening of her eyes, which is her signal that the enterprise has possibilities but the jury is still out.
Bells jangle when we enter the office and with a smile that appears compromised by apprehension, Lois Malden motions to us with her index finger that she’ll only be a minute. She’s on the phone but turned toward a sliding glass door that leads to her cluttered living room, which carries a faint smell of bacon. He remembers her as having been heavy but she seems to have lost a few pounds, even though she’s wearing a bulky sweatshirt. The office doubles as a gift shop and has the usual assortment of cheap souvenirs, most with the bird logo. Mounted bluegills are arranged behind the counter in a display, tilted almost straight up as if in a weird choreography.
Lois hangs up and greets them warmly before her face shifts into a more neutral gear. “Listen, I’m real sorry but we having a little trouble getting your cabin cleared.”
“Oh, well, we could go have breakfast maybe…” Dev gamely responds. She had been kind when he had called about the reservation saying his father had always been a favorite customer of hers, even recalling an episode when he had gone into town to get candles when some accident had blown the power out.
“I have to be honest with you. This is a very unique situation. Like only the second time in 20 years. The people are refusing to leave. They’re saying there’s some misunderstanding about how long they were supposed to stay but I don’t know. It might be some kind of domestic dispute. I’m really just mortified by this.” Jilly looks up from the moccasins she has been examining and sends him a telepathic message which he cannot interpret precisely but whose main import is “what now?” Dev suddenly feels like he’s been blindsided like when some nut cuts you off with inches to spare amid the grind of his diurnal commute. He recovers a little to say “well, we don’t really have to get in there until nightfall.”
“Is there a chance you would consider staying at another resort at least for tonight?” Lois asks gingerly. “ I’ll give you a $50 gift certificate. The peninsula is packed because of the festival but I think I can wangle you a room over at Mariners.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I can work something out with these folks. I’m something of a negotiator by trade,” Dev says. This is an oblique reference to his nascent career in auto title loans, where his boss tells him he must be part banker and part therapist.
“I don’t advise that you go down there. The woman is all right but you just never know. If you do, it’s at your own risk. I don’t need any lawsuits if you know what I mean,” angling her head toward a couple kids playing hide and seek behind an armoire.
Dev tells Lois they’re going to step outside to talk about it. Jilly is already leaning against a corral type fence, one foot on the lower bar watching the boats, when he comes out. She does not seem angry but her eyes have gone a little unfocused, her attention no longer on the nuances of the trees but moving inward with the situation to some uncharted territory. Dev feels as if there has been a sudden shift in the barometric pressure.
“Jilly, this is just a snag,” he says knowing that if this trip doesn’t go well, he’ll have to kidnap her to get her up here again. They have been dating eight months and he’s crazy about her but the bridge to this part of him, the whole idea of needing the wilderness once in a while, has always been rickety at best.
“Look at that water. Doesn’t it just make you feel like a different person almost?” The afternoon sun is shimmering on the lake in dagger-like beams, serrated by the flows, and even though it’s bright enough to hurt your eyes, he can barely make himself look away.
“If you say so,” she says with a smile that doesn’t hold much conviction.
“Jill, I’m just going to take a walk over and just sort of scout the thing out. They probably just need to see somebody’s here already.” Dev thinks this should be easy compared to the folks he has had to mollify at the prospect of losing their vehicles. He prides himself on being able to keep a predicament under control, although he hates having to bring that up here, that sense of being a priest at a funeral.
“OK but try not to get wounded,” Jill says, taking out her cell phone and turning it to get better contrast. “There probably isn’t so much as a first aid kit for a hundred miles.”
Dev suggests that she ride up to Barlow’s, just a couple miles down the main road for some hamburgers. It seems like the kind of diversion his father would have created, and through some knack for the right word, made to look easy. Dev gives her a rougher hug than he intends but can feel her acquiesce. He points south like the statue of an explorer when she swings slowly by him over the crushed stone and vanishes around the pines.
On the way past the resort’s diner, The Bird’s Eye, he tries to take in all the simple images of the place before this encounter, perhaps to stave off visions of some hostage crisis. There are hanging nets, a sprawled line of kayaks, assorted carts and wheelbarrows, propane tanks, a rectangle of buoys, and the “Aquapatio,” an irregular area of slate next to the beach with the usual hodgepodge of umbrella tables. A small propeller plane emerges along the tree line, seeming as slow as a tractor, tipping its wings back and forth. Wind chimes with different sized fish are crashing into each other making a tinkling noise, that transfer of motion into sound, as if you needed some other evidence of the wind. A cardboard hand written notice on the pier reads:
PLEASE OBEY 100 FOOT RULE—NO WAKE SPEED.
Sitting out by the water with a book, a guy with a bent baseball cap Dev associates with a motorcycle parked near the bar entrance is teasing a small boy about sharks in the water as he jumps into a boat with a woman who yells, almost falling out. The hull creates a huge wake as they throttle out too fast, their voices drowned by the engine. Dev wants to debunk this false scare but the boy, who has found some kind of strainer on the sand, wants to believe there are sharks right there prowling beneath the surface. “Sharks,” he says to himself. “Big ones.” Dev gets a flashback of his father waving to him from a skiff, as Dev sometimes didn’t like to go out when it was choppy, preferring the solidity of land. It seemed like his father would wave for a long time like he was on a float at the Thanksgiving parade.
On a poster by the quay, Dev reads that Fish-o-rama, entering its 10th year with tagged denizens of the deep worth thousands of dollars, is in full swing. There are sponsors for the higher priced ones like Sunset View Country Club or Seven Lakes Realty and the grand prize one for $10,000 from last year was never caught. A water-skiing troupe called the Seawings is also featured, with two of them just ascending off a ramp, their arms extended for flight. They are a longstanding tradition up here that Dev’s father had first taken him to see.
Dev figures he’ll take on his familiar role of mediator, and will surely offer the $50 gift certificate to the couple, mention it as a kind of afterthought. Cottage #14, the one he and his father always got, has a modest porch overlooking the beach just as he remembers it, just big enough to convey a certain air of basking serenity. There’s some kind of Buddhist fountain at the edge of the lawn near the sand, a figure sitting on a lotus, with palms up and an eerily vacant stare toward the opposite shore. A small cabin of Dev’s own one day often seems not so much a luxury as an imperative to self preservation, a way to reach back and retrieve something he couldn’t even name. It will never be enough for him to rent a place for a weekend twice a year. He has started checking out the ads in the paper for property, surreptitious as an affair, but knows if he were to broach this to Jilly too soon, she would go into shock.
Breathing erratically and trying to keep his head clear, Dev presses the doorbell next to the giant thermometer. After a tense half minute, the door swings back revealing a stocky, unshaven man of average height who has the dazed look of someone who has not slept well. He is wearing khakis and an oversized T-shirt that says, “Don’t worry, be happy” over a face with an insincere smile. He booms “can I help you?” as if he competing with engine noise that simply isn’t there, his expression lodged somewhere between curiosity and annoyance. Dev instinctively sizes him up as someone who may be several degrees off kilter but not dangerous, though his assessments at work on this have not always been foolproof.
“Yeah, hello. Just wanted to ask you about the place here. In from Illinois a little while ago. Guess we must be early.”
“Well, hi. Craig Triplett. Call me Craig. C’mon in…“Illinois. Hell of a state.”
“Right, you can say that again.”
“God I’m sorry about all this… Long story.”
“Yeah, I know how it is sometimes.” This is the exact line he has used with the hundreds of customers with demolished credit he talks to month after month. He portrays himself as the man in the middle, catching hell from both sides which isn’t far from the truth.
“We are interlopers—I admit it-- but maybe we can work something out,” Craig says, already padding into the living room.
This comment makes Devon start sweating because there may really be no middle ground and his ace in the hole gift certificate now seems paltry and hapless. The cabin’s interior has that stripped down wood plainness that had seemed so other worldly as a kid. There’s a hanging rug with a tiger crouched over some slain animal, maybe a wildebeest, with hunters, one on an elephant carriage in the background. Even though it’s not much past noon, Craig offers him one of the indigenous beers. Dev sits down with it on one of the dilapidated easy chairs, whose cushions had probably lost their bounce when men were walking on the moon.
“My wife Ava is off exploring with Diver somewhere. The dog. Always just loved the water. He thinks he’s part dolphin,” Triplett says, grinning at his own allusion. Then he goes into his pitch about how they had the place reserved for five days when Ava’s aunt died the day they were supposed to arrive. He describes how even before that, Ava started crying because things kept mounting up and she had to cancel her pottery class. “You know what that woman said? She said, Craig, I can’t fit my life into my life…”
“I never heard it put that way but I think I see what she means,” Dev says, again in a reprise of his manner on the loans. He knows he has to listen before he tells him that this is just not going to go his way. He wants to be open to Craig and yet not sink too deep, the way he does at work, when everything is already a fait accompli.
“But just being up here has been so terrific, has washed so many bad things away. Just erased them almost…”
“It is great up here, isn’t it?” Dev says, in a plaintive tone, glad for even that slender reed of agreement.
“There’s something about this place that’s changing everything. Like yesterday. We caught a tagged fish and not just one of those ‘get a free jersey at the Outfitters Shop.’…Tagged for a thousand.” Craig’s bloodshot eyes almost seemed to leap out of their sockets when he said this, in a grotesque display of emphasis.
“Hey, congratulations.”
“Just think of the depths out there, the great mystery. Imagine all the fish going down a couple hundred feet, all the places they have to hide…Tell me things aren’t turning around,” Triplett almost shouted, swigging the last of his own beer. He is a very different man from Dev’s father but something in the practiced way he tosses the can into a basket by a floorlamp, brings him back again. Dev remembers an incident one year when his father broke up a dispute between two men in adjacent cabins who were at odds over a fishing rod that had disappeared. He had walked over and without hesitation, issued a seamless lie about how he had mistaken it for his own the day before and that it had slipped out of his hand in the deepest part of the lake where there was no hope of retrieving it. He apologized and laid a fifty dollar bill on a picnic table, securing it with a stone he’d picked up from the beach. The two men had gone silent with that and peace had reigned for the rest of their stay.
Tripplett and Dev amble out on the deck, the boards palpably giving under their weight and adumbrating their movement with a pleasant cavernous sound. Triplett seems to have dropped his guard, as if Dev was an old highschool friend he is entertaining in his rustic vacation house. Once in a while, he takes a deep breath, as to convey the lake air has subtle restorative powers. Dev keeps wanting to tell him that this is maybe the turning point for him and Jilly too and that they have a contract. He wants to tell him that he used to drive up to this very cabin as a kid and Jilly wouldn’t have come just to get a room next to a string of identical ones that smell like disinfectant, and that his whole future with her may be on the line. He wants to say that it almost feels like his father is still around there somewhere, casting a line or throwing a rope onto the jetty. But he cannot get those words formed into coherent phrases. Maybe it is the alcohol kicking in on an empty stomach but all Dev can say at that moment is, “I’m going to buy a small place up here pretty soon. It doesn’t make sense but I just can’t get it out of my system.”
“That’s wonderful,” Triplett says, his face brightening in what seems an authentic gesture of support before going flat again. “We’d love to but just can’t swing it right now.”
Ava comes back, startled for a second at Dev’s unfamiliar face, even though he’s doing his best to look relaxed, his semaphore that there’s no imminent gunplay. Craig says, “Hey honey. Did you spot any Kingfishers?” She is a bit sheepish with Dev suddenly there. “I think I did but he flew off so fast it’s hard to be sure,” she says with a flash of appreciation.
She’s smaller than Jilly, hair a little unkempt, wearing a dress which he wouldn’t expect in the semi-wilderness. “Some of those trees up the path, it’s like they’re on fire,” she says, trying to find them again out the window but since they’re blocked from view, trails off.
“Amazing. We’re on the cusp of it right here. The fields being harvested. The air different, the wind from a different direction. This is what it’s all about,” Craig says. When Dev has no counter for this, Ava says, “We’re really sorry about this,” her voice carrying an amalgam of regret and embarrassment. She darts a look at Craig whose face seems to tell her that he’s already told him the whole story. Craig seems to sense that any more of their life story will tip the emotional scales from pathos to maudlin, and changes the subject.
“Hey, look at that,” Craig says, jumping out of his chair for a better vantage. There are speedboats bouncing along the surface of the inlet, carrying a long row of skiers with a pyramid of their comrades wavering atop them. This is one of the Seawings practices. An excited announcer’s voice is projecting across the lake quite a distance but Dev can’t hear more than a word here or there. He feels that familiar sense of being sent a signal which he does not have the equipment to decipher. Just then, a whole section on the left side of them breaks off and disappears into the surf.
“I guess they need a little work,” Craig says.
“I bet that doesn’t happen in the show. They’re probably just horsing around,” Ava says, in her soft, unusual pitch.
“It better not happen too much or it’s back to selling minnows at the bait shop,” Craig says, watching the fallen skiers regroup.
Dev hears the chirping of the phone from his jacket pocket. It is playing a few bars from “Take Five” which seemed a good idea when he bought it but now makes him cringe every time it goes off. Craig and Ava peer at each other a little nonplussed. Dev excuses himself and finds that it isn’t a call but a text message, Jilly’s often preferred method of communication. Indulging her affinity for furtive messages, she tells him that she and Lois got worried at the length of his absence and there was now a cop there for backup. Reading this, for an instant he thinks he can feel the floor move slightly, as if the peninsula itself were hardly more than a floating bridge. This is the way events take on a life of their own, he thinks, with their own rambling, chaotic momentum.
From the adjacent room, he sends a return message, “Situation fine. For God’s sake, don’t call in the national guard.” Thirty seconds after he punches the buttons to transmit this, there’s a knock at the door and it’s a state trooper, the kind with the round hat nearly the circumference of a sombrero. Once inside, he seems businesslike but his boots and holstered gun seem to have a separate presence. Craig doesn’t hide his disappointment, saying he had hoped they could work things out on their own. “It’s not complicated. It’s not the Middle East over here,” he says in a sardonic tone. Officer Cammack patiently explains that their reservation expired yesterday and that they have to check out. “It’s all in the ledger back there sir,” he says, in an admirably modulated tone.
After a long silence in which emotions seem to swish around the living room like disturbed ghosts, Craig says, “Please understand that I don’t mean any disrespect but how about we flip a coin. Officer, you can sort of be like the referee. You can call it.” Craig produces a quarter from his pocket and Dev, being caught off guard just stands there considering the proposition. But Cammack, perhaps unwilling to create an opening for more confusion, raises his voice a little. “I’m afraid you folks are just going to have to start getting your things.” Craig stares at the head on the coin, George Washington’s homely beaked profile, for a couple of beats and then in a tone laced with resignation says, “I guess we’ll be heading out then. Not a problem.”
For some reason Dev recalls the last year the family was up there. One night he had had too much of the Cutty Sark whiskey he liked when Dev’s mother had gone to bed early, but still wanted to go out in the boat. Their marriage must have been pretty well shot by then. He rowed unsteadily out singing “Harvest moon” though the moon had turned its face away and could be found nowhere among the stars. Once he had settled on a spot about fifty yards out, he began to pretend that the inner tube that always lay in the stern was attacking him. It had the shape of a porpoise and under the dull glow of the dock lights, Dev watched this mock struggle, his father flailing and grabbing an oar to fend the beast off, yelling in a slightly hoarse tone for Dev to call the Coast Guard. Then, whether it was an intentional urge to take the performance a notch further or the effect of the booze, he fell out of the skiff. For a long second, Dev was seized with the thought that he could drown in that condition but just as quickly he was upright, shaking his head in chest high water and pulling the vessel in. Upon reaching the gravelly beach, with some unfamiliar sense of exhaustion, he said, “I gave it my best shot, buddy,” before they trailed quietly back to their beds.
Dev suddenly wants to plead with them to stay as if the place were now filled with too much yin or yang, rendered uninhabitable with the sodden atmosphere of discontent. He knows what it’s like to want good memories to blot out the other ones, to cover them over so that it is like certain things never happened at all. But Craig is in full retreat now, practically magnanimous as he spots Dev’s dismay and says, “Don’t feel bad. We still have that fish, don’t we Av?.. Hey, don’t worry about it. Just a little bad timing.”
Dev can’t look at either of them just then and as he sometimes does at the office, he searches for some object to fix upon, which in this case is the set of wind chimes now hanging completely still, until he can form some kind of reassurance. He can’t help but feel his father would have found some other path where everyone somehow came away happy but it’s too late for that.
“Maybe you’ll get Mr. Ten Thousand Bucks next year. He’s still out there somewhere,” Dev says, sweeping his hand in a wide arc, though it is of course impossible to know that for sure.
“You bet,” Craig says, turning back for a second, not quite achieving a smile, as he heads toward the bedroom.
Jilly gives Dev an ardent, enveloping hug as they meet on the incline, releasing herself around him as if to be carried away. “No luck on another cabin but I guess we don’t need one,” she says, relieved. As the Tripletts depart, with the patrolman monitoring them casually, arms folded from the dirt lot above, it is somehow not far from the pathetic scene of someone being led away in handcuffs. What occupies their grasp is an array of suitcases, not the efficient modern stacked kind you see in airports, but more like ones found in an attic.
Half way up the hill, Triplett calls out, “Hey, I hope you get to buy that cottage you want and I know this is crazy, but give us a call sometime. No hard feelings. We’re in the book.” He flashes the thumbs up sign like a bomber pilot getting ready for take-off. Ava is looking out at the lake and playing with Diver and even laughing as he jumps up to lick her face. “Yes, you’ll love it up here,” she says, almost inaudibly. Jilly turns to Dev perplexed, her face blank but concealing a dozen hard questions. This is the kind of look, and its obscure solutions, on which the whole trip home and everything beyond seem precariously balanced. Perhaps it is a water mirage, but for a moment far out, it appears that a small sailboat has capsized and there isn’t a thing he can do about it, nothing at all except scan the flickering currents and watch for signs of life.
“Any withdrawal symptoms yet?” Dev says, only glancing over, lest he miss the turn.
“So far so good,” Jilly says, stretching languorously like a cat. “As long as somebody doesn’t shoot us.” She closes her eyes and curls herself into the contour of the bucket seat, trying to catch the angle of light. Her knees are tucked up against her burgundy sweater so that to follow the rippled seam of her jeans is as stirring as the bank and plunge of a roller coaster.
“People don’t even use locks up here,” Dev says, rehashing one of his standard arguments for life in the country. “It’s safer than a police station in Chicago.”
Jilly is a city girl--dance clubs, avant-garde theatre, cappuccino every morning-- and Dev has had to gently cajole her for weeks to make the trip. He can’t escape the sense that they’re moving more and more toward some tricky romantic fault line, the cracks of which have already begun to appear. It doesn’t help that the radio stations keep announcing strange territory with their gospel invocations and livestock reports, then fading under a hail of static as if they were gradually leaving the earth’s atmosphere.
They turn onto the short narrow clay road when he spots the Kingfisher’s Resort Sign, behind which cottages are arranged in a cluster, a sort of compound. High-backed wood chairs painted green overlook the water, with a T shaped pier and stacked kindling and a ring of stones for a fire. They hear the light slap of a retracted screen door from one of the far units and two small boys, seemingly propelled, are charging undeterred up a steep slope, as if their lives depended on it. Even 30 yards away, there is also the hollow pop of waves against the log posts at the shoreline, and the clank of rigging flung against a mast. Dev has not been up here for seven years since his father died and it is as if he expects the old man will reappear out of the woods from one of his long circuits.
“Nice view,” Jilly says, with a widening of her eyes, which is her signal that the enterprise has possibilities but the jury is still out.
Bells jangle when we enter the office and with a smile that appears compromised by apprehension, Lois Malden motions to us with her index finger that she’ll only be a minute. She’s on the phone but turned toward a sliding glass door that leads to her cluttered living room, which carries a faint smell of bacon. He remembers her as having been heavy but she seems to have lost a few pounds, even though she’s wearing a bulky sweatshirt. The office doubles as a gift shop and has the usual assortment of cheap souvenirs, most with the bird logo. Mounted bluegills are arranged behind the counter in a display, tilted almost straight up as if in a weird choreography.
Lois hangs up and greets them warmly before her face shifts into a more neutral gear. “Listen, I’m real sorry but we having a little trouble getting your cabin cleared.”
“Oh, well, we could go have breakfast maybe…” Dev gamely responds. She had been kind when he had called about the reservation saying his father had always been a favorite customer of hers, even recalling an episode when he had gone into town to get candles when some accident had blown the power out.
“I have to be honest with you. This is a very unique situation. Like only the second time in 20 years. The people are refusing to leave. They’re saying there’s some misunderstanding about how long they were supposed to stay but I don’t know. It might be some kind of domestic dispute. I’m really just mortified by this.” Jilly looks up from the moccasins she has been examining and sends him a telepathic message which he cannot interpret precisely but whose main import is “what now?” Dev suddenly feels like he’s been blindsided like when some nut cuts you off with inches to spare amid the grind of his diurnal commute. He recovers a little to say “well, we don’t really have to get in there until nightfall.”
“Is there a chance you would consider staying at another resort at least for tonight?” Lois asks gingerly. “ I’ll give you a $50 gift certificate. The peninsula is packed because of the festival but I think I can wangle you a room over at Mariners.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I can work something out with these folks. I’m something of a negotiator by trade,” Dev says. This is an oblique reference to his nascent career in auto title loans, where his boss tells him he must be part banker and part therapist.
“I don’t advise that you go down there. The woman is all right but you just never know. If you do, it’s at your own risk. I don’t need any lawsuits if you know what I mean,” angling her head toward a couple kids playing hide and seek behind an armoire.
Dev tells Lois they’re going to step outside to talk about it. Jilly is already leaning against a corral type fence, one foot on the lower bar watching the boats, when he comes out. She does not seem angry but her eyes have gone a little unfocused, her attention no longer on the nuances of the trees but moving inward with the situation to some uncharted territory. Dev feels as if there has been a sudden shift in the barometric pressure.
“Jilly, this is just a snag,” he says knowing that if this trip doesn’t go well, he’ll have to kidnap her to get her up here again. They have been dating eight months and he’s crazy about her but the bridge to this part of him, the whole idea of needing the wilderness once in a while, has always been rickety at best.
“Look at that water. Doesn’t it just make you feel like a different person almost?” The afternoon sun is shimmering on the lake in dagger-like beams, serrated by the flows, and even though it’s bright enough to hurt your eyes, he can barely make himself look away.
“If you say so,” she says with a smile that doesn’t hold much conviction.
“Jill, I’m just going to take a walk over and just sort of scout the thing out. They probably just need to see somebody’s here already.” Dev thinks this should be easy compared to the folks he has had to mollify at the prospect of losing their vehicles. He prides himself on being able to keep a predicament under control, although he hates having to bring that up here, that sense of being a priest at a funeral.
“OK but try not to get wounded,” Jill says, taking out her cell phone and turning it to get better contrast. “There probably isn’t so much as a first aid kit for a hundred miles.”
Dev suggests that she ride up to Barlow’s, just a couple miles down the main road for some hamburgers. It seems like the kind of diversion his father would have created, and through some knack for the right word, made to look easy. Dev gives her a rougher hug than he intends but can feel her acquiesce. He points south like the statue of an explorer when she swings slowly by him over the crushed stone and vanishes around the pines.
On the way past the resort’s diner, The Bird’s Eye, he tries to take in all the simple images of the place before this encounter, perhaps to stave off visions of some hostage crisis. There are hanging nets, a sprawled line of kayaks, assorted carts and wheelbarrows, propane tanks, a rectangle of buoys, and the “Aquapatio,” an irregular area of slate next to the beach with the usual hodgepodge of umbrella tables. A small propeller plane emerges along the tree line, seeming as slow as a tractor, tipping its wings back and forth. Wind chimes with different sized fish are crashing into each other making a tinkling noise, that transfer of motion into sound, as if you needed some other evidence of the wind. A cardboard hand written notice on the pier reads:
PLEASE OBEY 100 FOOT RULE—NO WAKE SPEED.
Sitting out by the water with a book, a guy with a bent baseball cap Dev associates with a motorcycle parked near the bar entrance is teasing a small boy about sharks in the water as he jumps into a boat with a woman who yells, almost falling out. The hull creates a huge wake as they throttle out too fast, their voices drowned by the engine. Dev wants to debunk this false scare but the boy, who has found some kind of strainer on the sand, wants to believe there are sharks right there prowling beneath the surface. “Sharks,” he says to himself. “Big ones.” Dev gets a flashback of his father waving to him from a skiff, as Dev sometimes didn’t like to go out when it was choppy, preferring the solidity of land. It seemed like his father would wave for a long time like he was on a float at the Thanksgiving parade.
On a poster by the quay, Dev reads that Fish-o-rama, entering its 10th year with tagged denizens of the deep worth thousands of dollars, is in full swing. There are sponsors for the higher priced ones like Sunset View Country Club or Seven Lakes Realty and the grand prize one for $10,000 from last year was never caught. A water-skiing troupe called the Seawings is also featured, with two of them just ascending off a ramp, their arms extended for flight. They are a longstanding tradition up here that Dev’s father had first taken him to see.
Dev figures he’ll take on his familiar role of mediator, and will surely offer the $50 gift certificate to the couple, mention it as a kind of afterthought. Cottage #14, the one he and his father always got, has a modest porch overlooking the beach just as he remembers it, just big enough to convey a certain air of basking serenity. There’s some kind of Buddhist fountain at the edge of the lawn near the sand, a figure sitting on a lotus, with palms up and an eerily vacant stare toward the opposite shore. A small cabin of Dev’s own one day often seems not so much a luxury as an imperative to self preservation, a way to reach back and retrieve something he couldn’t even name. It will never be enough for him to rent a place for a weekend twice a year. He has started checking out the ads in the paper for property, surreptitious as an affair, but knows if he were to broach this to Jilly too soon, she would go into shock.
Breathing erratically and trying to keep his head clear, Dev presses the doorbell next to the giant thermometer. After a tense half minute, the door swings back revealing a stocky, unshaven man of average height who has the dazed look of someone who has not slept well. He is wearing khakis and an oversized T-shirt that says, “Don’t worry, be happy” over a face with an insincere smile. He booms “can I help you?” as if he competing with engine noise that simply isn’t there, his expression lodged somewhere between curiosity and annoyance. Dev instinctively sizes him up as someone who may be several degrees off kilter but not dangerous, though his assessments at work on this have not always been foolproof.
“Yeah, hello. Just wanted to ask you about the place here. In from Illinois a little while ago. Guess we must be early.”
“Well, hi. Craig Triplett. Call me Craig. C’mon in…“Illinois. Hell of a state.”
“Right, you can say that again.”
“God I’m sorry about all this… Long story.”
“Yeah, I know how it is sometimes.” This is the exact line he has used with the hundreds of customers with demolished credit he talks to month after month. He portrays himself as the man in the middle, catching hell from both sides which isn’t far from the truth.
“We are interlopers—I admit it-- but maybe we can work something out,” Craig says, already padding into the living room.
This comment makes Devon start sweating because there may really be no middle ground and his ace in the hole gift certificate now seems paltry and hapless. The cabin’s interior has that stripped down wood plainness that had seemed so other worldly as a kid. There’s a hanging rug with a tiger crouched over some slain animal, maybe a wildebeest, with hunters, one on an elephant carriage in the background. Even though it’s not much past noon, Craig offers him one of the indigenous beers. Dev sits down with it on one of the dilapidated easy chairs, whose cushions had probably lost their bounce when men were walking on the moon.
“My wife Ava is off exploring with Diver somewhere. The dog. Always just loved the water. He thinks he’s part dolphin,” Triplett says, grinning at his own allusion. Then he goes into his pitch about how they had the place reserved for five days when Ava’s aunt died the day they were supposed to arrive. He describes how even before that, Ava started crying because things kept mounting up and she had to cancel her pottery class. “You know what that woman said? She said, Craig, I can’t fit my life into my life…”
“I never heard it put that way but I think I see what she means,” Dev says, again in a reprise of his manner on the loans. He knows he has to listen before he tells him that this is just not going to go his way. He wants to be open to Craig and yet not sink too deep, the way he does at work, when everything is already a fait accompli.
“But just being up here has been so terrific, has washed so many bad things away. Just erased them almost…”
“It is great up here, isn’t it?” Dev says, in a plaintive tone, glad for even that slender reed of agreement.
“There’s something about this place that’s changing everything. Like yesterday. We caught a tagged fish and not just one of those ‘get a free jersey at the Outfitters Shop.’…Tagged for a thousand.” Craig’s bloodshot eyes almost seemed to leap out of their sockets when he said this, in a grotesque display of emphasis.
“Hey, congratulations.”
“Just think of the depths out there, the great mystery. Imagine all the fish going down a couple hundred feet, all the places they have to hide…Tell me things aren’t turning around,” Triplett almost shouted, swigging the last of his own beer. He is a very different man from Dev’s father but something in the practiced way he tosses the can into a basket by a floorlamp, brings him back again. Dev remembers an incident one year when his father broke up a dispute between two men in adjacent cabins who were at odds over a fishing rod that had disappeared. He had walked over and without hesitation, issued a seamless lie about how he had mistaken it for his own the day before and that it had slipped out of his hand in the deepest part of the lake where there was no hope of retrieving it. He apologized and laid a fifty dollar bill on a picnic table, securing it with a stone he’d picked up from the beach. The two men had gone silent with that and peace had reigned for the rest of their stay.
Tripplett and Dev amble out on the deck, the boards palpably giving under their weight and adumbrating their movement with a pleasant cavernous sound. Triplett seems to have dropped his guard, as if Dev was an old highschool friend he is entertaining in his rustic vacation house. Once in a while, he takes a deep breath, as to convey the lake air has subtle restorative powers. Dev keeps wanting to tell him that this is maybe the turning point for him and Jilly too and that they have a contract. He wants to tell him that he used to drive up to this very cabin as a kid and Jilly wouldn’t have come just to get a room next to a string of identical ones that smell like disinfectant, and that his whole future with her may be on the line. He wants to say that it almost feels like his father is still around there somewhere, casting a line or throwing a rope onto the jetty. But he cannot get those words formed into coherent phrases. Maybe it is the alcohol kicking in on an empty stomach but all Dev can say at that moment is, “I’m going to buy a small place up here pretty soon. It doesn’t make sense but I just can’t get it out of my system.”
“That’s wonderful,” Triplett says, his face brightening in what seems an authentic gesture of support before going flat again. “We’d love to but just can’t swing it right now.”
Ava comes back, startled for a second at Dev’s unfamiliar face, even though he’s doing his best to look relaxed, his semaphore that there’s no imminent gunplay. Craig says, “Hey honey. Did you spot any Kingfishers?” She is a bit sheepish with Dev suddenly there. “I think I did but he flew off so fast it’s hard to be sure,” she says with a flash of appreciation.
She’s smaller than Jilly, hair a little unkempt, wearing a dress which he wouldn’t expect in the semi-wilderness. “Some of those trees up the path, it’s like they’re on fire,” she says, trying to find them again out the window but since they’re blocked from view, trails off.
“Amazing. We’re on the cusp of it right here. The fields being harvested. The air different, the wind from a different direction. This is what it’s all about,” Craig says. When Dev has no counter for this, Ava says, “We’re really sorry about this,” her voice carrying an amalgam of regret and embarrassment. She darts a look at Craig whose face seems to tell her that he’s already told him the whole story. Craig seems to sense that any more of their life story will tip the emotional scales from pathos to maudlin, and changes the subject.
“Hey, look at that,” Craig says, jumping out of his chair for a better vantage. There are speedboats bouncing along the surface of the inlet, carrying a long row of skiers with a pyramid of their comrades wavering atop them. This is one of the Seawings practices. An excited announcer’s voice is projecting across the lake quite a distance but Dev can’t hear more than a word here or there. He feels that familiar sense of being sent a signal which he does not have the equipment to decipher. Just then, a whole section on the left side of them breaks off and disappears into the surf.
“I guess they need a little work,” Craig says.
“I bet that doesn’t happen in the show. They’re probably just horsing around,” Ava says, in her soft, unusual pitch.
“It better not happen too much or it’s back to selling minnows at the bait shop,” Craig says, watching the fallen skiers regroup.
Dev hears the chirping of the phone from his jacket pocket. It is playing a few bars from “Take Five” which seemed a good idea when he bought it but now makes him cringe every time it goes off. Craig and Ava peer at each other a little nonplussed. Dev excuses himself and finds that it isn’t a call but a text message, Jilly’s often preferred method of communication. Indulging her affinity for furtive messages, she tells him that she and Lois got worried at the length of his absence and there was now a cop there for backup. Reading this, for an instant he thinks he can feel the floor move slightly, as if the peninsula itself were hardly more than a floating bridge. This is the way events take on a life of their own, he thinks, with their own rambling, chaotic momentum.
From the adjacent room, he sends a return message, “Situation fine. For God’s sake, don’t call in the national guard.” Thirty seconds after he punches the buttons to transmit this, there’s a knock at the door and it’s a state trooper, the kind with the round hat nearly the circumference of a sombrero. Once inside, he seems businesslike but his boots and holstered gun seem to have a separate presence. Craig doesn’t hide his disappointment, saying he had hoped they could work things out on their own. “It’s not complicated. It’s not the Middle East over here,” he says in a sardonic tone. Officer Cammack patiently explains that their reservation expired yesterday and that they have to check out. “It’s all in the ledger back there sir,” he says, in an admirably modulated tone.
After a long silence in which emotions seem to swish around the living room like disturbed ghosts, Craig says, “Please understand that I don’t mean any disrespect but how about we flip a coin. Officer, you can sort of be like the referee. You can call it.” Craig produces a quarter from his pocket and Dev, being caught off guard just stands there considering the proposition. But Cammack, perhaps unwilling to create an opening for more confusion, raises his voice a little. “I’m afraid you folks are just going to have to start getting your things.” Craig stares at the head on the coin, George Washington’s homely beaked profile, for a couple of beats and then in a tone laced with resignation says, “I guess we’ll be heading out then. Not a problem.”
For some reason Dev recalls the last year the family was up there. One night he had had too much of the Cutty Sark whiskey he liked when Dev’s mother had gone to bed early, but still wanted to go out in the boat. Their marriage must have been pretty well shot by then. He rowed unsteadily out singing “Harvest moon” though the moon had turned its face away and could be found nowhere among the stars. Once he had settled on a spot about fifty yards out, he began to pretend that the inner tube that always lay in the stern was attacking him. It had the shape of a porpoise and under the dull glow of the dock lights, Dev watched this mock struggle, his father flailing and grabbing an oar to fend the beast off, yelling in a slightly hoarse tone for Dev to call the Coast Guard. Then, whether it was an intentional urge to take the performance a notch further or the effect of the booze, he fell out of the skiff. For a long second, Dev was seized with the thought that he could drown in that condition but just as quickly he was upright, shaking his head in chest high water and pulling the vessel in. Upon reaching the gravelly beach, with some unfamiliar sense of exhaustion, he said, “I gave it my best shot, buddy,” before they trailed quietly back to their beds.
Dev suddenly wants to plead with them to stay as if the place were now filled with too much yin or yang, rendered uninhabitable with the sodden atmosphere of discontent. He knows what it’s like to want good memories to blot out the other ones, to cover them over so that it is like certain things never happened at all. But Craig is in full retreat now, practically magnanimous as he spots Dev’s dismay and says, “Don’t feel bad. We still have that fish, don’t we Av?.. Hey, don’t worry about it. Just a little bad timing.”
Dev can’t look at either of them just then and as he sometimes does at the office, he searches for some object to fix upon, which in this case is the set of wind chimes now hanging completely still, until he can form some kind of reassurance. He can’t help but feel his father would have found some other path where everyone somehow came away happy but it’s too late for that.
“Maybe you’ll get Mr. Ten Thousand Bucks next year. He’s still out there somewhere,” Dev says, sweeping his hand in a wide arc, though it is of course impossible to know that for sure.
“You bet,” Craig says, turning back for a second, not quite achieving a smile, as he heads toward the bedroom.
Jilly gives Dev an ardent, enveloping hug as they meet on the incline, releasing herself around him as if to be carried away. “No luck on another cabin but I guess we don’t need one,” she says, relieved. As the Tripletts depart, with the patrolman monitoring them casually, arms folded from the dirt lot above, it is somehow not far from the pathetic scene of someone being led away in handcuffs. What occupies their grasp is an array of suitcases, not the efficient modern stacked kind you see in airports, but more like ones found in an attic.
Half way up the hill, Triplett calls out, “Hey, I hope you get to buy that cottage you want and I know this is crazy, but give us a call sometime. No hard feelings. We’re in the book.” He flashes the thumbs up sign like a bomber pilot getting ready for take-off. Ava is looking out at the lake and playing with Diver and even laughing as he jumps up to lick her face. “Yes, you’ll love it up here,” she says, almost inaudibly. Jilly turns to Dev perplexed, her face blank but concealing a dozen hard questions. This is the kind of look, and its obscure solutions, on which the whole trip home and everything beyond seem precariously balanced. Perhaps it is a water mirage, but for a moment far out, it appears that a small sailboat has capsized and there isn’t a thing he can do about it, nothing at all except scan the flickering currents and watch for signs of life.
