"Is it Salty?"
Monday, July 14Ð
9:41 a.m.-
Mowing. Cloudy. Caleb is still asleep. EZ came with when I got up but stayed beside the door of the sleeper for her favorite uncle to get up. It's a pleasure waking to full daylight and see for real what night had concealed. Overgrown grass and fully leafed forest dark and secret. Boiled water for coffee, moved the park bench out by the fire and sat waiting for sense to wake up.
The mower started on the eighth pull after ten months of disuse. (What do 6.5 hp mowers give landowners that my 3.5 does not?) I push it through thigh-high weeds and laid-over grass too tall to support itself. The governor revs the rpm's when high grass bogs it down.
No dew this morning. Rain's party announcement.
A stack of two vanilla and two chocolate Mrs. Flinch's!" double duplex cookies I set in the middle of the road last night--put there out of intolerance to eat more detestable filth--are still there this morning, apparently just as repulsive to varmints or raccoons.
9:49-
Through the windows of the sleeper I see arms in the air putting on a shirt. EZ hears movement inside and rushes to the door, looks back at me, then sits--tail swinging--where sounds of awakeness she hears stirring. The door squeals open and Caleb steps down. He welcomes EZ's attention then tells her to "go back" so he can receive the smart mind he depends on rejoining him, so not to appear dumb.
Always ready for something to do--being an ambitious eighteen-year-old--Caleb asked for something to do. I invited him to put up the eaves troughs and downspout with the rain barrel around it to catch what rain might be developing in the west. Then he swept the cabin roof littered with sticks and leaves that would clog the gutters and downspout.
Caleb took over mowing and thunder boomed overhead. Then rain started so I took off my shirt and shorts and shoes and raked in briefs as Caleb, in swim trunks, mowed and slurped watery Dew.
10:55-
Heading for Tamarack Lake for a swim. Raindrops splotting big against the windshield.
God, what a wonderful feeling to dive off the tip of the dock into water that is more like thick air, the same temperature but with more strenuous resistance. A sociable sensuous massage. The bar of soap smelled good lathering the sweat off. Removed the trunks since no one else was around to see my nudity--Caleb and EZ don't count. Caleb saw my disrobing, looked at my butt when I wasn't looking, more out of horror and regret for society than voyeuristic intention, picked up a rock and tossed it toward my rump as I dove back into the lake to rinse it all free.
I swam around blithely and watched the shore where EZ leaned over the dock surveying small sunfish. Caleb took up the bar of soap and submerged it into his trunks discreetly from the top and worked it around lower down private parts as I taunted him to "take 'em off and do it right. No one's out here to see, least of all care."
I picked up my trunks from the dock and turned toward deeper water to put them back on, giving him some space to respond to my incitement. He put down the bar of soap, hesitated, peeled the shorts down, turning sideways in modesty as I unexpectedly turned around. I saw what was happening and turned again and paddled toward deep water and he, relieved, sudsed himself up and dove deep and safe.
EZ took our coaxing and stepped off the dock. The water is high and the dock is low to it, a perfect opportunity for her to "C'mon in." But dogs are supposed to leap off docks angled up, so their rears land first and their heads hit later. But EZ has never done that before and doesn't know the routine. She pawed air with her left foot, leaned over, lost balance because of our friendly coaxing, and splashed under. She surfaced snorting, looking resentfully right at me for egging her on.
Rain pounding.
1:35 p.m.-
Axel and Pepper have come for a visit. He saw us there, turned around, and returned quickly.
"You want a beer?"
We said "sure" and took Old Milwaukees for later.
Pepper, part blue heeler and other hound, patrolled the yard and brought a stick back for someone to throw. ("Jes' tell 'er it's firewood and she'll leave you alone.")
Axel is a friendly guy, living a life knowing what he needs to to survive. Pepper has been run over by trucks, twice, and despite chronic trouble with fluid in the ear--"Peh'per! Stop digging in your ear"--is still healthy at age 11 (Axel's mother disputes his age claim for her, claiming she ought'a know she's 10, born on January 6.)
I am not accustomed to receiving visitors this flagrantly, so squat by the fire and feed it minuscule twigs. Caleb is uncomfortable too, what to do, and stands arms folded, listening to Axel tell us about how Snodgrass's alfalfa has gotten real big since the 4th what with all this rain. EZ moves against his leg and gets petted and scratched with fond affection from a man holding beer.
"She's got pretty good teeth for an old dog. She must not be a stick chaser. Yeah. Cotton pickin' got rained out today. Put in a culvert this morning. Bad mosquitoes."
I want to make fun of a buffoon. Not to his face, but here on paper. Degrade a fool, find fault with him and sully his silly trifling life so outside of propriety's rules. But, I like the guy who is who he is and knows more than I do when it's what he needs to know. Who am I?
Pepper scratches her ear. Axel doesn't see.
2:00.-
Caleb is raking. EZ is laying, scraping flies off her face. A dozen brats are waiting to be smoked, slowly over cool heat.
Have already had a full-featured time of it in only half-a-day ... arrived at dusk last night.
The trip started after work at 4:30 on Sunday. Caleb was to meet me at my house. He got there early to organize stuff and be ready when I got home. He called me at work but I refused to pick up because we were closed and I was accounting the day's take and organizing paper work for the boss, and never pick up the phone after-hours unless line 2 is blinking, indicating it's an insider--like a friend or a child--trying to attract my attention.
I called the house a few minutes later, wondering if he was there yet and had started in on packing, and to tell him that everything on the bottom fridge shelf and half of the middle one was to go into the cooler.
He answered.
"Did you try to call here a couple of minutes ago?" I asked.
"Yes, you said to call you at work just after 4:00."
"Why didn't you dial line 2?"
"You didn't say to."
I got home at 4:35 and he packed the car while I tried to force two homemade blocks of ice, thirty-six cans of beer and Mountain Dew, and other essentials into the biggest Coleman I own. I succeeded only after pulling out the smallest Coleman I own from inside it (to keep dry goods dry), dumping everything free-style in a jam-packed arrangement.
We left the house at 5:15, a reasonable hour to avoid driving at dusk when deer crowd the highway.
A quick stop to drop his car at a repair shop along the way. Then my son asked to stop at a "grocery store or something for bagels and cigars and whatever else."
"How about a convenience store on the outskirts of town?"
"Well, I was thinking like, Trig's so I can buy bagels."
"Why didn't you do all that when you had time earlier, so we could get out of town before sundown?"
So we drove to Trig's with a tightly-stuffed car and left EZ crowded in her space back there and went inside air-conditioned spaces with tourists and country music festival fans bullying.
Thankful after all that he'd needed to stop at a real store I picked up from the deli a pound of "apple-smoked turkey" and "apple-steeped ham" and a half-pound of sliced mild cheddar. Then hurried to the bread section and grabbed up a loaf of fluffy, morally-depraved, seventy-nine cent lost-leader white bread and met up with Caleb at the side-entrance quick lane.
EZ panted in the open-windowed car. I pulled ahead against traffic into the shade of the building and we built big sandwiches--without condiments or sauce--and "oo'd" and "ah'd" over the flavors of big meaty sensations sliding down our gullets.
8:08 p.m.-
A few miles into a detour, getting restless after 2-1/2 hours of sitting, Caleb said something louder than usual about going to "The Woods."
EZ barked.
I looked into the rearview mirror and Caleb turned toward me. Did she understand that word?
Of course she did. He tried out other similar words--"shoulds," "coulds," "woulds," and she did not react. His contrived sentence, "she woulds as she coulds when the bad-mooded hoods withstood stopping rare wood goods from entering maidenhoods woods," didn't excite her. So he said under his breath too quietly for me to discern, "going to The Woods."
"Roooo-roooo-roooo," she hollered from the outfield behind the pillow black garbage bag.
The detour, named "detour" because it forced us outside of familiar spaces, pulled us through corduroy farmland and along narrow country roads hushed with summer sun laying low across the grain. We were beneficiaries. And we really didn't have to be "there" anytime soon, so we enjoyed it and each other, admiring the new terrain.
But I'll be damned to understand why a farmer a half-mile ahead directed his irrigation sprayers directly across the highway. (Did the farmer know his equipment was out of control, advancing its way across our detour route?) It gave us a great show of golden sun washing the air above the roadway, and rainy passage beneath.
Close by a lake. Docks on the left and houses on the right. Old people scurrying to dip buckets in the water, staggering back across pavement to freshen their flowers. Through pine trees and 25 mph zones which I absent-mindedly disrespected because of being distracted by EZ's barking at turtles running.
A gorgeous chamber of commerce photo at every turn. Far out of our usual route, how can it be? Caleb and I said "wow" a lot.
On to gravel at dusk.
A big owl silhouettes the sky on a crossroads signpost, raises weighty wings and flaps away.
The Store lights wink in the darkness below the sky two miles distant.
Then we turn north and EZ barks, and blue evening dusk shows insubstantial clouds in the north.
High clearing grass. Red's Shed still red and the cages I surrounded maples in two years ago bright in the car's highbeams. We're here.
Played rounds of Rummikub and Yahtzee before enduring a night of mosquitoes and sleep-talking and snoring in Red's Shed. We'd been cautious getting into the sleeper, careful not to let in swarms of bugs that, at midnight, were still humming cruelly at our backs as we ran. I got in first, preparing the sleeping bags, as Caleb and EZ waited some yardage back. Then they climbed in together. I detected no mosquitoes inside. So I swore the door must've been left unsecured and big mosquitoes were admitting others with a cover charge.
Caleb laid looking up not seeing ceiling, rather imagining revisiting the abandoned--not haunted--farmhouse thirty miles away.
EZ, in her place at the foot of the bed, watched to be sure that we were finally going to be sleepy and settle down for the night. She has gone back on percoset for pain the past two weeks, her tumor is hurting. She's been a good sport about it and minimized the extent of her pain. But, she has been reluctant and skittish about accepting doggie treats at my desk, when all winter she'd snatch them away and go crunch crumbs on her blanket.
I did not know in the darkness of Red's Shed and Caleb's sweet accompaniment in my life that EZ was going to go through hell soon. Stoically, and without a dentist's drill fix to patch up the trouble and return life to fun.
After an hour of sleeplessness because of the whine, I took patience to see Caleb's bare back spotted with sucking bugs, assuming they would be satiated at his expense and leave me alone. But no. Others joined the party.
2:30-
Caleb has put the brats on the grate. Twelve, precooked from home; one has a rectangular knife wound in its side, from snatching it back from the coals. EZ is snoozing. Caleb walks around the side of the cabin to pee. She picks up her head and scans the yard, doesn't see him, gets up troubled, missing his presence, and trots to the east end of the cabin. She hurries to the woodpile, around it, then to the west side of the cabin and disappears, returning in a moment at ease, Caleb at her heels. She has been devotedly attentive to him, constantly checking to see where he is, like a favorite uncle. She favors him when we're together. Caleb feels bad about it, but I don't. It's the way it is, who he and she are together.
We make a list of stuff we want to do while here. Too many random "for-sures," and, "we should do this's," floating around without regulation. Caleb gets the Woods log notebook and jots down what we can remember.
Cut downed deadwood for fire
Hike to North Pool and north field
Play badminton
Play folf (Frisbee golf)
Mow and trim swimming hole bank
Go driving under the full moon to abandoned farmhouse and Summit Trail
Nap in the bliss of a sunny afternoon [I like his style]
Play Yahtzee and Monopoly.
Dig out the old stump in the yard.
Rain came again late afternoon. We played Monopoly and drank beer beside the open panel. I negotiated lopsided deals to my favor and Caleb learned quickly to scoff at my offers and remind me, when I tendered a bargain, that it wasn't my turn to do so. Then, perceiving it maybe a good deal for him, he'd alter his disdain and invite me to continue detailing my proposal.
"Okay," he says as I hand over the dice. "If I give
you Pennsylvania I would need more than St. James. I would need St. James
and ... Boardwalk." We have a good laugh.
He rethinks. "I'd need St. James and Electric Company." He reconsiders his offer and quickly says, "no."
"I might've gone for that," I say.
"Would you give me St. James and Indiana?"
"I might consider Electric Company. It's easy money when I land on it. You don't have to do anything, make improvements, fix plumbing, patch the roof, or hire maid staff to change sheets."
"I know what's going on," Caleb asserts. "Pennsylvania for St. James, Electric Company, and fifty-bucks."
"I give you fifty dollars?!" "Yeah, yeah."
"No-no. You give me fifty dollars."
"I'm not giving you fifty dollars."
"Then there's no deal."
Caleb is learning fast to keep a straight face against an opponent who knows bad deals or good deals are mostly moot, only who keeps the straightest face, shaming his victim into believing what seems unreasonable must actually be reasonable because no one is smirking fiendishly or apologizing for being a big prick. Poker faced bargaining, pretending the Emperor--as everyone can plainly see--actually does have on fine clothing. A son who trusts his Daddy in important things is on his own learning to bluster and bluff nonetheless just for fun, learning for some day when bluffing for real will debase some gracious people.
6:45-
Wanting to play Frisbee at the new bridge, we drive there over awfully muddy roads under thick misty skies. Much different weather than last year when we played; it's not the same as back then and nothing will be the same as before, ever. One of us gets out of the car, steps into sloppy mud, and farts a long meticulously-tuned alto C pitch. Caleb ignores it and leans on the bridge concrete with the heavy unruly red Frisbee brought from home, and a brand new Frisbee--the mate to a blue one bought in town earlier so we'll be evenly matched at Folf. Caleb flips me the red one, the yellow one, then climbs onto the bridge side, balancing to pee off the height, arcing a stream twenty-five feet out and down into the stream. (He knows what he is doing and I am jealous of his squanderous youth for that.)
No traffic. We have the place to ourselves, a condition away from the weekend and well-appreciated.
No air moving, but anyway the toy, entry-level yellow Frisbee ends up in the ditch across the "river," as Caleb calls it, rainwater trickling down-slope toward the real river.
"You gonna' remove your shoes?" I ask.
"Hope I don't git bit by a snake," he says, lifting a foot high.
"F'n-A," he retorts. "Maybe I should walk down the road and go in at that driveway down there and go--"
"Sure, walk through a whole lot more swamp along the way. I mean, it's my fault. You oughta' be forcing me--"
"Yeah. Why don't you go out there?"
"Because you're young and a son, and I can push you around."
He wants to argue with some of Daddy's last statement but instead swishes away a cloud of cigar smoke, lowers his gaze toward the Center of Cut Grass blades, and steps down into the fraidy-cat muck.
"I'll go with you," I say. "We'll both go."
"Okay," he says quickly retreating, one foot held high by his waist. "It feels neat on the feet. You'll like it, Daddy."
I untie my shoes and leave them in wet grass and, holding hands for mutual assurance, we recover the Frisbee.
So then we play catch for awhile until distracted by astonishing amounts of water held inside the road-grader ridges alongside the ditch. They look solid. But step onto one and it instantly dissolves into brown oozy pools, like watery diarrhea squishing through our bare toes.
"Wonder what that would taste like?" Caleb wonders aloud.
My job as Dad is
to provoke him. "I'll record it for you."
He drops the yellow
Frisbee, leans down, places both hands at convenient balance angle in the
mud, lowers his red head, actually puckers his lips and sticks out his tongue
and slurps up a mouthful. Then rejects most of the mouthful, but for more
than he wanted, slishing around between his teeth.
He rises, two shitty brown hands reacting unconsciously to this act.
"Is it salty?"
"No taste,"
he garbles.
EZ, trotting away in disgust, turns her head to confirm his gross act, sees that he's actually done what he set out to do, and runs down the road and into the shrubs.
10:35-
"No, not fifty.
Twenty-five," I amend.
"Houses cost
half?! To sell?" he argues.
"Yeah."
Caleb lunges for the Monopoly rules, sure that I'm lying, trying to cheat him, having to sell yellow-gold residences to pay me for his slothful time spent in Pacific's hotels. He tried to mortgage the deeds with houses still on them. I gently tutored him that deeds cannot be mortgaged until the dwellings are condemned. He flips to page 3, reads, then wrathfully razes a fistful of green plastic houses and a red hotel, sits back in his white plastic chair to innovate a different strategy while I go outside to pee.
"Got a deal," he states confidently when I return.
"Did you pay off your houses--"
"--naw, just calm down and wait to hear my offer."
He picks up his trio of light blue properties: Oriental-Connecticut-Vermont, exhibits them facing front in a colorful high-to-low arrangement, sweeping a flattened hand across their front for emphasis like he's learned from watching professional Home Shopping Ladies. Squared, edges perfectly aligned, his hand leans them closer to me so I will be sure to notice the conscientious care his realty location has been given.
There is betrayal in his irresolute movements. He is struggling to portray confidence in the face of defeat.
"I'll give you these three properties with all the houses on them for ..." (His eyes dart like a novice television weatherman who doesn't realize the eyes watching him at home can see duplicity in distress, and the audience begins to suspect that tomorrow's family reunion will have a few softball-sized hailstones bouncing off baby skulls as strollers are rushed toward SUVs of great compromise.)
"No. It's ..."
"No?"
"It's ... too easy."
"Whatta' ya mean, 'too easy!"
"I mean, you're getting screwed."
"I KNOW! IT'S THE END OF THE GAME. I'M GONNA LOSE. I THINK IT'D BE FUN FOR ME TO GO AROUND AND LAND ON EVERYTHING SO YOU CAN HAVE ALL THE PROPERTIES!" His hands describe a perfectly illogical argument, palms up for emphasis, confessing disastrous unhappiness.
He picks up the cheap deeds again, showing them again, disheveled and out of alignment. "Five twenty-five."
"Why did you pick those up?" I ask.
"They looked pretty."
"No. Too easy."
I make him his deal.
"Good," he says, holding up his Community Chest Get Out Of Jail Free card to show I missed one of his assets. "Oh, and three dollars," he pulls out of hiding under the gameboard.
11:45-
"She looked around, didn't see me, I was hiding. So she sort of looked around to see who else was there. Scott and Kari (a 24-year-old married couple) were hiding in that little space behind the water heater. Scott shouted and Kari ran from the kitchen to hide and Scott followed her in there and bashed his head on the cupboard door. So I was the only one else, except Kinsey. Chelsea was in the bathroom, luckily, when this happened," Caleb explained in high, farcical humor.
He is retelling a vacation incident with his mother and Mumpgas (who goes easily by other names depending on the mood and immediate disposition of persons immediate--"asshole" works easily for some, if they're stepchildren or ex-husbands or authorities investigating arson), the pyromaniacal husband she sleeps with. It happened last week in the resort cabin her parents have owned since the 1940s. All of the naughty people being confronted by this bully--who told them at 10:30 to "GO TO BED!", are adults, including new family friends from Cabin four.
"Mom and him wanted to go to bed early and we wanted to stay up and keep playing cards. This is the funniest part. I was behind the overstuffed chair and Mom said 'who else is out here?' and Kinsey pointed at me behind the chair. So Mom is up here at the door. She looks over. I peek up and wave and say, 'hi, Mom.'
"The whole time she talked to me I stayed crouched down behind the chair. She addressed three or four or five questions to me and the whole time I answered them in this cowering position, peering above the chair. And finally she asked, 'do you even know what time it is!?' And ... then I thought she was done yelling. She went back in the room but didn't shut the door, so I thought 'what's goin' on?'
"About fifteen seconds later she came back and shouted 'one-thirty!,' and slammed the door.
"Next night she told us--all ten of us--to go to bed and she sat in the chair until everybody did."
Caleb is good humored about the whole scene, having the chance to share it with a sympathetic Dad who is glad to be free, as he to will be in six weeks, of his mother's dictatorial instability.
Tuesday--
9:35 a.m.-
EZ yipped, standing in the clearing. I got out a plastic bowl and crushed up a percoset and dumped in a half-can of bacon and veal-flavored Mighty Dog.
Caleb tells of a loud crash he heard in the night, somewhere in the north woods.
"Tree falling over," I say, as he thinks about my answer and places twigs on the fire he's building.
"Is that just what you want to believe?"
"Ask me in another hour when I've had coffee and waked."
We went into town where people waited to prove that life is all right, even with a cancerous dog. We bought more cans of dogfood from the grocery and descended to Robinson Park to give her another dose of narcotics.
12:15 p.m.-
Caleb and EZ are walking to the river. I am toting the lawnmower in the open hatch of the car. We're going to see what it looks like, cut ferns and grass and whatever brush has grown up in two years.
EZ is far ahead. Caleb, walking fast, slides by the passenger side as I glide by.
Daisies and brown-eyed Susans pass past too, and succulent summer grasses fold down under the car.
EZ and Caleb head for the river as I cut a 20-inch wide path through chest-high growth, retracing four passes to mow the long stuff that laid down and didn't rise back up high enough for the blade to slice. Caleb mows the swimming bank, bringing civility back from inherent naturalness. Surprisingly few insects, at least compared to last year in June when the deerflies sent us screaming through the woods.
1:25-
To the lake for a swim. A grandmother is sitting on the bench reading while two polite boys, nine and twelve, are leaving the lake, beckoned by Grandma's holler, "That's enough fun for today."
We stand on the dock. EZ patrols for fish. I dive. Caleb dives. EZ trots to shallow water and swims out to circle and sneeze with the guys. Frisbee glides. A speedboat pulls tubers around and around the small lake.
EZ returns to the dock, hurrying to and fro along the edge, leaning out far and pawing her left foot trying to nab a sunfish.
Wednesday, July 16--
10:20-
EZ ambled out of the sleeper and over to the firepit where I was sitting. "Jesus Christ," I said when I got a look at her eye.
She is distressed, left eye showing rapid bulging since yesterday morning as the tumor grows. I've been fearful what her condition would be this morning and have planned to find a veterinarian in Sandstone, Hinkley, or Pine City and have her euthanized. Then bury her body in the swimming hole bank.
I walk to the road to brood. It's happened too fast. I smoothed over the food in her tote so we could see if it was disturbed. She hasn't eaten. I feel bad for Caleb though. It's going to be hard on him too, losing her who's been a big part of my life with him for the past six years.
EZ joins me on the road. Intriguing how hindered she is visually in this misery but still walks with a slight wag in her tail. She explores the ditch, stepping cautiously, seeing through only one eye, then comes over to me, crouched down to talk tenderness to her.
Noon-
Still sitting, the three of us. EZ is laying by the old wood-peckered oak. Lost in dismal thoughts. Nothing to say. We took a trip to the store to look up Vets in the phone book. Deborah Cox, DVM has offices in Askov and Hinkley. A receptionist answered my call to Askov. "She likes to do it at the end of the day when everybody is gone. It'll cost between $35-50 depending upon how much sedation the patient requires."
"Do you take out of state checks?"
"Yes, we will do that."
"Can I take her for burial on our site?"
"You can take the dog, though I don't know what the law is about burial. But what they don't know is all right with us."
We sat in melancholy for an hour, brooding, worrying. Her not eating can not go on.
"Let's go cut some popple."
We struggled through underbrush and bugs tormenting not finding any to cut, so out to the road where walking was easier. Found a couple large popples but if they fell toward the road would've wrecked a section of Herb's fence. Or, if they fell any other direction, had no space to gain downward momentum before hanging up on neighbors. So, I cut a few saplings, then moved inside the forest hot, steamy, air unmoving, where a big one leaned right.
I still think of the chainsaw blade as new as it was when it was new five years ago. I've sharpened it at times with a hand file but was reminded back home how friendly a for-real sharp chainsaw chain can be when I borrowed a friend's saw. I sweated and pushed and see-sawed the chain deeper into the cut as Cabe and EZ waited back in the brush.
The saw shaved dust, not big wood chips, despite my honing it with the file just before coming out. The tree finally let go and leaned seventy-degrees east and cinched against an oak. I took two others.
To the lake for a swim.
The bar of soap I forgot on the dock yesterday is gone. The Ziplock is there though, right where I left it. Three children are swimming and roughnecking with floating toys, and a toddler with inflatable orange arm bands is sobbing beside a grandmother on the dock. Grandmother is not patient, either because the outing has gone on too long, she doesn't like grandchildren, or water (it showered over her persistently), or sunshine ("too god'amn hot"), or lilypads with long slimy stems coated with thick layers of clear aquatic muck, thrown, hurled, and smeared in her hair. And swagged in her glasses, hanging, swinging, leaving nasty wet smears on her smock.
She doesn't like heavy wet Pampers either, and overlooks the bowel movement squashing up out of the toddler's waistband who bawls resolutely.
Caleb and I like slick, lovely wet jellyfish ooze and swim out to pick some and toss it at each other. EZ comes along, paddling courageously through the artillery, left eye milky white.
"JEE-ZUS CHRIST!" mutters Grandmother, red pedal-pushers soaked, grunting up from the dock. The thirteen-year-old girl is scattering cheese puffs in the lake on the other side of the dock "for the poor hungry fish-eez to eat."
Everybody goes to help cast fluorescent tubes of food on the shallow water, EZ too. Grandmother tips back her head and munches a handful. The dock sways to that side. Grandmother grabs at Toddler too late. Toddler shrieks, but I don't know why. The shit oozing from her waistband gets washed away and EZ steps off into the 12-inch deep water to slurp up the chunks.
Grandmother takes Toddler to the car. Caleb and I and the other children go back to play.
"We're going! Now!" yells Grandmother, holding Toddler to her breast. We don't hear and keep swimming. The elder boy runs off the dock and lands sitting on his air mattress, circling, stalking younger brother who has come up from the deep with a handful of rocks and starts bouncing them off his sister's inner tube, inside which she is sunning. He misses. He misses ten or twelve times. He dives again and surfaces with a bigger handful and throws it all at once. Sister is hurt in the head and knee and collar bone because of his "fuckin' prick" deed and, being older than he, isn't gonna' take it and splashes toward him leaving her float blowing into the lily pads by stiff wind.
"WE DIDN'T COME HERE TO THROW ROCKS, GOD'AMN IT!" Grandmother screams from the concrete boat landing ramp. "WE CAME HERE TO SWIM, SO GIT OUT HERE RIGHT NOW! PRONTO! QUIT IT! ALL OF YOU, DRY OFF AND GIT UP HERE."
Caleb and I hope she doesn't mean us too and head for the middle of the lake to evade having to account for our absence on shore.
We (EZ came too) treaded water and watched feathery clouds float by up high and stayed low in the water to avoid rocks thrown from the ramp. But anyway, how accurate can a grandmother be while suckling a baby?
The parking lot dust lingered after the Oldsmobile skidded onto the road. Caleb and I dangled our legs off the dock and flinched as fish nibbled our feet, lured in the clear water like carp in an aquarium to snatch away bits of cheap bread. (Boys on vacation backslide horribly, balancing the responsible diet we abide during non-"whatever" times of the year.)
4:45-
The Mart I Disfavor does not completely disappoint game-avid men, though society in general it does, poverty Moms sleeping and dreaming "I worked hard to end up in this house built of pallets?"
We picked up a gamebag of play a few weeks ago. The outer bright label, "7 GAME COMBO," attracted a closer look. Volleyball / Badminton / Horseshoes / Backyard Shuttle Flight / Flying Disk / Checkers / Chess seemed exhaustive to me since I only wanted badminton. But, hey, I like all the extra games too and am sure, with time, and after paying "ONLY $18.88," we could play through each at a leisurely pace. There was an encyclopedic list detailing skillful designs inside and I saw no fine print, other than the conventional disclaimer "MADE IN CHINA." But what is Backyard Shuttle Flight?
Caleb dumps the contents onto the ground. Nothing pours forth but a giggle, from amusement too tightly packed. Like a kid with a stiff X-mas stocking waiting to be mined he eagerly pulls out four rickety rackets wrapped in plastic, then two red and two blue plastic horseshoes. They hit the ground. Then a heavy blue plastic disk he tosses like a Frisbee, but it lands with a "thud" on the grass five feet from his feet.
Horseshoe stakes--red and blue plastic--tumble out, along with a single sheet of rules we'll get to in time, and a bag of badminton birdies with blue and red and yellow and green tips. At the armpit bottom he takes hold of something else, I don't know what, pulls out a small plastic bag with two shuttle-cock-ish birdies, but with large colorfully swirled foam balls for feet.
The badminton/volleyball/backyard shuttle flight net is set up with "New Telescoping Octagon PVC Poles." Ingenious design with metal clippies like those roof rakes are made with for northerners to rid winter roofs of snow.
I whip the high school tennis champ's ass, first game, 15-3. Caleb explains that the sun through the trees was the trouble.
5:22
We start game two with me facing the sun. Not such a big deal, though I am losing by nine points and we are quarreling about where out-of bounds is on his side and mine.
5:25-
Axel drives up. "You wanna' beer?" he shouts getting out of his truck.
"Grab a racket," I say.
"Na, I'd kill myself."
EZ snoozes winking at my side of the court.
My son has learned to swear. All of the best words flow out of him freely at stressful times including the King of all bad words which most teenagers employ impulsively and without foreknowledge. And benignly, so it doesn't mean as much as it will when he gets older and reserves it for more judicious significance. Boys too tire of new toys.
Axel leans on my car chuckling, sipping Old Milwaukee, and yelling "spike it!"
5:29-
"That was overhand," Caleb criticizes.
"So?" I say, clueless to my sin.
He leaves the court, picks the rule book up by the scruff, and self-importantly quotes: "It is a FAULT if the shuttle is served overhand. The shuttle must be struck at a point not higher than the server's waist."
5:32-
"That was out!" I shout.
"What's out?" Caleb shouts.
I gesture my racket at a rock.
"That stick is a lot further than the rock."
"That's within the state. I can still see it," Axel giggles. "Whatta' you guys playin' to? Like a hun'erd?"
I go get ropes. Axel totters twelve paces from the net on each side and ten paces wide from pole to pole and jabs small branches into the grass at the corners as Caleb and I lay down borders of rope and get back to the match.
We finish, agreeing to play the rubber match tomorrow.
Sitting by the fire Axel tells of Cujo, a dog he once had.
"Sittin' by the woodstove, blind as a bat, but he's lookin' right at me. He let out another low growl. He's lookin' right at me," he points straight at me, "and if I didn't know he was blind, ah, I would'a thought he was looking at me. Both eyes are just white!
"'Cujo. It's just me,' then he wagged his tail and everything was okay. Puttin' him down was no fun. I cried, like a little bittie baby." He scratches EZ's head.
"One of these days I'm gonna' have to do that to Pepper and I'm not gonna ... I don't know. Goddamn it! I don't know if I can."
He lights a new hand-rolled cigarette. "You wouldn't think a dog could be so much family. You hate to see 'em suffer. I hope she makes it to fifteen."
He turns, lost in thought, wringing his hands unconsciously, staring back at Pepper laying ten feet away.
"I don't think I could shoot her. I'm not gonna hire somebody like Leon to shoot her either. Every so often the arthritis gets her and she can't jump in the truck. Agh," looking down he shakes his head.
"Well, the good saying is 'if you can't shoot your own horse or your own dog, you shouldn't own either one.' And ah, when you got a good dog, that's healthy, it's easy to say that. But they start havin' problems ... God Damnit!
"I don't shoot dogs. That's ah, unless I have to. Or if they're runnin' deer. Now if she took off after a deer," he turns raising his hand, pointing over his shoulder with a thumb, "I'd shoot her." He swipes his arm out to settle the matter complete, "and not even think twice about it. I shot one of my dogs for that. But when it's a member of the family ... It'd be easier to shoot my brother.
"Pepper's ridden in or on every piece of equipment Les Wiedmeyer owns. Except for the D-7, oh, and the Cats. There's no place on the Cats for her. The front-end loader, the backhoe, all three of his trucks. She's ridden in the road grader for Wilma Township and Arna Township, and New Dosey Township.
"A good Goddamn dog."
10:25-
A cow's eyes do not bounce back light from a car's highbeams as a doe-eyed deer's does. They stay dark and domestically dangerous to motorists driving at night. It was a baby cow, and the ivory belly rebounded our headlights and I, driving and not expecting a lithe youthful cow on the road, braked and swerved intricately.
Caleb "mooed" out his window. Cow scampered across our bow kicking up hind hooves, stopping on the left and glaring over it's shit-glazed hip. Night bugs swirled through the headlights.
Abandoned farmhouse, 10:48-
I agreed it could be a stop to consider on our vacation, back when I and he were still home in Wisconsin and the morning sun was friendly everywhere, in joint cracks and joist attic hangers and no darkness was afoot as we sat on my front stoop and EZ was healthy and grinning and no alarms had sounded anywhere for many hours. My mention then about there being a full moon when we went to The Woods was instantly seized by Caleb in regard to the old farm and what a perfect stereotypical journey it would be to go there when wolves would be howling and phantasms would be wantonly wafting through bedrooms.
But when we got to the driveway and I pulled up in through seven-foot high weeds and couldn't see where I was driving anymore because of it, I voiced an opinion that such an agenda was wholly silly despite a son's taunting.
The mosquitoes flew in before I could roll up my window and bit my body painfully.
10:45-
I get out and stand in the grass and swipe millions of bugs off my face while he gets out unsullied by complaint. I hold the rechargeable 1-million candlepower spotlight in my hand and he complains about it.
"I wish you'd brought the dim Maglight instead."
"Did you bring my beer?" I grouse.
"No. Didn't bring mine either," he says in a sneery tone of voice that's intended by thugs to explain everything. "I figured we could make it."
EZ has gone ahead in the dark somewhere and yips hideous hurt in her mouth, not the noise she'd give out if nipped by a wraith. And it stabs me and I hate it and never know when to expect it and wish for all of us that someone would just end it.
"No, no, no. Yes, yes, yes," I say to Caleb who has taken the light and is taking us the wrong way then the right way. But it's dark and my sense of direction is hindered by changed overgrowth.
"F'n-A!" He stumbles, cries out, kicks a cadaver. Then moves on.
"God! These bugs are eating me alive!" says another.
Someone burps.
"Man!" my son says, approaching blood-red trim. He holds his legal cigar up and walks to the house, then in through the door while I stand thirty-feet back in the shelter of stars in the yard.
The spotlight shuts off inside the house. I am alone out there. He is inside. And I have no way to run except wildly through prickers, ricocheting off trees trying to find the car.
The interior of the living room bursts into light. Caleb walks to the door, stands like a schoolmarm, and shines it at my backward eyes, exasperated to have to go roundup tardy schoolboys from the yard.
"You comin' in?"
"If I can see where I'm goin'."
He shines the light
where I must walk and I step up inside. He stands high on the living room
buckle. He shags cigar ashes from his T-shirt, swinging the powerful beam
into the hallway and kitchen without regard for powerful spiritual forces
working amidst us.
"Are we done?
I mean ..."
Nothing is the same.
He goes alone into both bedrooms, shines the light up the scary stairs, walks
back into the main room taking a drag off his cigar. Lavishly bored.
We pause. The voice
of a man reporting a weather forecast drifts into our ears. Grainy and broken.
11:15-
Lightning was noted out the back window of the Honda when Caleb went for a new beer. I speeded up. We turned around after a few miles and we got out into the night to pee in the road and watch storms flash. Both of us hopeful that it would move to where we were.
Caleb performed a handstand on the road.
After midnight-
"Let's go skinny dipping."
Back at the cabin but not ready to give up, we decide to return to the lake and swim. Caleb drives and I throw off clothing in the passenger seat, nearly naked as we round past the pine plantation two miles south of the Store. Fully naked as he rises a knoll thirty seconds later.
Moonlight flowed back toward the far shore, pushed back by my eyes. Lightning pulsed, flickering silently in the northeastern sky, towering white moonlit storm clouds. A hundred yards from shore swimming on glass and fretting vaguely that something unseen big and dark would munch off a toe, a foot, a penis or two, since we were swimming naked. Then EZ was in our midst too, white face flashing in lightning.
Thursday, July 17-
Sunlight at 9:10 vibrates the yard by stiff winds blowing the trees. The baby phoebes screech louder than they did on Tuesday when, walking out with my coffee, I open the door and let it slam shut. Beaks jerk up and wide, frantic at the sound, or the shaking.
Caleb is still asleep in Red's Shed at a quarter to eleven. I am antsy to see EZ, whether or not she's worsened and we'll have to kill her today.
I walk to the sleeper and look in the screened window. They are awake. EZ is curled next to Caleb on the bare air mattress. Her eye is not bad, not nearly as bad as yesterday morning.
1:23-
Going swimming!
Stiff breeze flies the Frisbee slightly into the objectionable weeds.
I shout "I'll get it," and swim there not liking it but pretending.
A son or a Dad flips it too hard again. The wind catches it and sails it thirty-feet farther into the lilypads where clear natural glue waits under water to wrap up the Frisbee rescuer and elicit psychological vomiting.
1:33-
EZ yelps, and keeps on yelping, running for safety from the hurt somewhere, and lays down on the dock shivering.
3:10-
Dad kept dictionaries at easy reach wherever he might be in life, like a drunk stashing bottles. He stored a Random House paperback under the seat of his car. A hard-bound Webster's Collegiate he brought to The Woods in the mid-1960's and stuck it on a shelf above the desk. These tomes were mostly to satisfy sudden curiosities, get at the crux, or settle disputes with others who were unsure too. I use The Woods dictionary time-to-time, more expedient than running to the car, but it became frayed and broken of backbone. So I brought it home in December and gave it a lift using the college library's glue and bookbinding tape.
Aberrant. The word surfaced as he proof-read from this book: "Figuring it was only an aberrant breeze, or EZ releasing gas, I returned to my reading." He pronounced it the way my psychology professor did in Human Adjustment class some months ago. It took me a few minutes in April to figure out what word she used while staring so earnestly at me. Sounded like "A bear ent."
"A-bear-ent," Caleb said again when I asked him to re-read the sentence.
I ran to the shelf in the cabin and brought the sword of Truth outside and handed it over to Caleb sitting on the bench by the fire. Finally I'd get an answer to a question I'd forgotten to remember. He opened and searched, then found it. He didn't know anymore than I did how it should be pronounced, just stumbling dumb luck.
"A bear ent," he murmured, raising his shoulder defensively and looking over his arm at me, sensing tempestuous arousal.
"That's "aa-burr-ent," I corrected him. "Where's the accent? On which syllable?"
"The second."
"Oh."
5:30-
Chuck drove in. Axel drove by suspiciously watching who the hell had come. Chuck sprayed himself with Off and opened a beer, gave us one too.
8:28-
Monopoly. With Chuck, who has driven middle-aged cousins to tears over ruthlessness and ambition. That cousin doesn't come around anymore.
He, being a corporate accountant by career and CPA by licensing (including exploding London's derivatives market bare in his spare time) is granted the job of bank-lady. He rummages through the side desk drawers for the corn cob pipe he keeps there in a tin with sweet smelling tobacco. He lights it and puffs smoke around the table, relaxing our anxiety and releasing soothing endorphins to relax us and calm our capitalistic defenses. The oil lamps are lit. But Caleb is edgy and stiff like a death-row convict waiting for the jolt of electricity through his chair.
9:58-
Caleb is loosened, at ease in his world at the table with a Dad and an Uncle. He guzzles his sixth or seventh beer and grins.
"Tell you what I'll do," I say.
He, animated highly and the night will never end, looks down at his deeds and sits back in his chair cross-armed.
He doesn't like the offer and counts out eighteen dollars one at a time, flipping them over the table at me. (The raccoon sunburn does not give him dependable credibility.)
His snake-eyes moves him again.
"That'll be twenty-four dollars," says Chuck.
Caleb peels off a twenty and a five, "keep the change."
Friday, July 18--
10 a.m.-
I brought along a bag of mis-cut keys from home. A couple dozen have fine fish line glued to their tips, an unfinished windchime winter project, something to play with this morning. I have no concrete plans what to do, maybe tie them to a branch outside or from the cabin eaves. I turn it over to Caleb to solve.
I went back to washing
dishes and he sat, pondering the infinity of possibilities. Next thing I know
he's tying each one around an unused bowsaw blade, a great idea, since the
teeth V's will hold each key from slipping sideways. But being tied, once
in place they can't be adjusted. I tie a loop in a fish line and put it over
the point of a tooth. The weight of the key will hold it into the upside down
V wedge but will permit quick easy
adjustment.
That's what he does, holding the tinkling blade.
