SECONDARY HIGHWAYS latticed bankrupt counties, shuttered berry farms, and cedar trees. Weeds consumed empty gas pumps.
Out here, Wendell’s Korean subcompact felt inadequate. Perfect for parallel parking, but nothing here required such concision. Out here you could afford to be imprecise. You could park in the tall grass if you wanted and nobody would say boo. You could leave it in a field, and in time it would be accepted as part of the landscape.
I’d been offered respect, kindness, loyalty, and warmth—a home—but grew suspicious and selfish, and fled, which is far from noble, I know, but Wendell had fathered a child somewhere and then bolted. We’re from that kind of stock. My dad collected convertibles, DUIs, debt, but was very clear that I’d be solely responsible for bailing myself out of any scrapes. Wendell’s father, my uncle Sandy, felt intellectually overmatched in any argument and usually answered with his knuckles.
Cowardice, like the lakeside cabin where we were headed, was something to which my entire family had year-round access.
***
We turned off the highway and onto the gravelled and signless fire route. The car crept along for ten minutes, then came to a stop beneath big, precarious oaks. We looked upon the cabin, decrepit and listing. The key was on a nail on the underside of the back deck, where it had overwintered for the sixtieth year among the spiderwebs and mouse shit.
Loveless, motherless, we were submerged beneath cartoonish desires to be the men we thought we could be when we were nineteen and twenty-two. But at thirty and thirty-three, we still weren’t. It likely had never been possible. That’d been someone’s joke.
In the cabin, Wendell stoked a fire in the stove. I put a cassette into the old tape deck, because that’s all we had up there. Emmylou Harris sang a Louvin Brothers chestnut and Wendell stared into the flames. We ate stale peanuts and drank coffee mugs full of whisky.
“I just wish I’d had a chance to fall in love with Emmylou Harris,” Wendell said, listening.
“She’s a Yankees fan,” I answered.
“So?”
“So, not perfect.”
“I’d get Derek Jeter’s face tattooed on my back to have her love me.”
“You don’t know. Maybe she’s awful.”
“Listen to her.”
He was right.
But what if it was all performance, a stage persona? That’s nothing to love, I thought. That’s all I’ve ever given out, and it brings nothing back. I’ve shortchanged everyone I’ve ever kissed. But I didn’t tell him that.
“She sounds like the most incredible woman in the world,” I said, and meant it.
***
At midnight, we floated in inky water with stars winking overhead and ribbon-like vegetation winding around our bicycling limbs. The water was warm and the air above was cool and clean, and our toes and asses wiggled free and uncovered, while our cocks dangled like unsheathed hunting knives. The mosquitoes buzzed a beautiful drone. Summer, we called it, but really that was just a name we’d tacked onto the strange place we’d come to, a place where I’d just sabotaged the best love I was likely to know, while Wendell had chosen weed and sleeping late over a life actually worth pursuing.
It was the middle of June and smelled like it. We swam out through the shallow bay and beyond the mouth of it, to the open water, which was colder, and deep, and as dark as sleep. I wanted to find somewhere to float on my back and mimic my own death, my ears submerged, cradled by water, the darkness all around me. Wendell wanted to go to the little island we’d always called the swimming place and jump in the water from its high stones while shouting Tupac lyrics.
There was a cottage around the bend from the swimming place. I never knew who owned it. It was rented out to city people, so every time we’d go up, there’d be a different group staying, barbecuing their burgers, playing their music, shouting at their children. Wendell swam past the swimming place and toward that cottage, its glass face blank.
Down on the rocks near the shore, there glowed a fire. When I lay still in the water, I could hear women there, their laughter spreading out over the water’s surface concentrically, moving over my fevered head.
Wendell hauled himself out onto a rock, a hundred yards away from them, so he could vomit. He hacked and sputtered, then washed his face with lake water and motioned at me to come with him. I slid myself out as soundlessly as possible and stood in the buzzing air next to him. Bare as infants, we walked over the rocks and between the pines and bushes until Wendell stopped behind a tree and leaned over to look at the women.
There were seven of them, in their thirties, I guessed, bright and animated, wine-happy. The fire’s orange light carved their faces into caricatures. Wendell stood totally still, but in my peripheral I could see him breathing deeply. There was a watery, animal scent coming off him. I could feel the heat of his haunches, leaning as we were around the other side of the same pine tree, staring. We didn’t want to alarm them. I was at once glad and sorry that I wasn’t more drunk.
“I wanted to care more than I did,” said one of the women, willowy, angular. The others laughed. “But in the end, you know.”
It was dead easy to sense their vulnerability. We watched them and they had no idea we were there. I defy you not to feel the awful power in such a scenario. It felt like there was heat in our blood, a physical tell of our grotesque wills. The violence we possessed, though if pressed we’d deny it, always. Even at our lowest, it felt so good to be us, and so terrible. We were gifted with everything anyone could ask for, and we asked for more. We were all cock and skin and teeth. They did not know just how afraid they ought to have been. Even accidentally, we could be brutal. Maybe especially accidentally.
The shortest one noticed us first. She stared furiously at the tree behind which we sheltered, and when something resolved itself out of the darkness—Wendell’s face?—she started and said, “Who’s there?”
Some of the others gasped in alarm, and they rose as one. One of them held up the stick she’d been using to poke the fire, brandishing it against us, against the shadows.
We turned and hotfooted it down to the water’s edge, then threw ourselves in, keeping our heads low. I took great gulping breaths and tried to keep my face underwater as long as I possibly could, crawling forward in that perfect, swallowing darkness. We swam. Our line was direct.
If we’d stuck around and spoken to them, I’d have told them that we posed no threat. All the if onlys. I had a life built out of them.
We hauled ourselves onto the land in the lee of the cabin. Once inside, we towelled off with the terry-cloth rags I’d known since childhood, and drank some more to steady our digits, to thin and cool our blood. Then we slept on a pair of decades-old chesterfields, our jeans rolled up and placed beneath our heads for pillows.
In the morning, we woke coffeeless and ate last year’s Raisin Bran for breakfast, dry. We were aware of our own piteousness. Against a cold sky that proffered no clemency, the stove burped a syrupy heat that stretched out minutes and bred in us a disinclination to move.
“Jesus, we’re awful specimens,” I said to Wendell.
Even absent indictments, there’d been crimes.
Sometime in the night I had dreamed that the willowy one had followed us and, upon finding us, smirked a large, victorious smile, as she’d confirmed for herself all that she’d suspected. We protested, claimed to be victims of our public educations, of our grandmothers’ attitudes, of things deep within the structures and biases that supported us. Hazards we could not swerve. Of course, we wished to be innocent, which is distinct from blameless. We wished it so fervently that we believed we were. We felt as though Emmylou had let us down. Emmylou had been our defence—inadequate, silly, convenient, heartfelt.
Wendell and I sipped from mugs of warm water. His: Swedish country aesthetic; mine: Big Hug Mug, browned, burnt sienna lettering. We inventoried all we felt was wrong with our lives, produced a list of complaints so mundane it bored us to name them. We talked about what had happened the night before.
“I think they knew it was in good fun,” Wendell said.
“I don’t believe that you believe that,” I said.
“We could be good men,” he said.
We had a pretty good laugh about that.