My name is Daniel Russell. I dream of dark water.
My first memory of Moon Lake was as a youngster, on a dark night in October of 1968 with a nearly full moon seeming to float on the surface of the water. I remember its glow and the way the shadows of the trees on the sides of the lake reached out for it like chocolate fingers groping for a silver platter.
Me and my dad were parked on a long, narrow bridge that went over the lake. The bridge was made of rusty metal and cables and rotting wood, not to mention a few lost dreams, for the town beneath the water had been flooded and the great lake was supposed to be the new town’s savior. People were expected to come from miles around to picnic on its shores and fish its depths.
They didn’t. At least, not enough of them.
I was fourteen years old when I learned this, or learned some of it. Looking out at the moon on the water, it was obvious how the lake got its name.
We were in our broken-down Buick that had come from a time when cars were big and the American dream lay well within reach for just about anyone white and male and straight who wanted to reach for it. All others, take a number and wait.
We had skipped out on bill collectors two days after we had an interruption in electrical service due to a tardy light bill, as my father called it. Two days in the dark and without heat, with the house soon to be repossessed, a blackened head of cabbage and a quarter jug of curdled milk in the useless refrigerator, Dad got rambling fever, and away we went, tires whistling over concrete.
As we sat parked on the bridge, Dad told me why my mother had left a few months back. Believe me, I had wondered. Dad said it was because she thought me and Dad and the world were holding her down. I guess without us, it was less heavy out there. I suppose when you’re shedding weight, every lost ounce counts.
I had rarely mentioned my mother after she left. I wished to remember a time when she had held me or spoken softly to me or loved me, but if such a memory was in my brain, I couldn’t find it. She was prone to long hours of depression, late-night drunks, and had a somewhat unearthly beauty. Dark hair and eyes, creamy skin, jittery movements like a squirrel on amphetamines. She had a silver star in one of her front teeth. It was a cosmetic procedure she’d asked the dentist to perform. She had a hippie look and a Wall Street mind.
Not long after my mom’s departure, Dad took her remaining clothes, odds and ends of hers, and hauled them to the dump. He kept a pair of her black panties, and that made me a little uncomfortable. He kept them in a drawer by his bed. He told me once, “They smell just like her.”
Some things a child doesn’t need to know.
The day we packed up and left, those panties came with us. I saw Dad put them in his suitcase. We left most of our stuff and traveled light, a suitcase apiece, scrounged from behind Christmas decorations. The luggage was placed in the trunk and in the back seat, along with some refugee clothing. Shirts mostly.
We spent a few nights in motels so cheap that in one of them, roaches moved under the wallpaper in our room with a crackling sound. In another we could hear the next-door neighbor coughing and showering and straining to shit.
We were parked on the bridge that cool night in 1968 because we had no home and no more money for a motel room. Dad said he had read about a job in some newspaper somewhere. He was vague. He was by original choice a librarian but had left that job to make more money, as my mother felt she needed to live in style. She wasn’t crazy about a husband who had what she said was a woman’s job, shuffling books and filing dusty cards and memorizing the Dewey decimal system. She liked to party. Dad liked to complain.
Dad had some math skills and was smart in many ways, had a lot of educational paper that said so. He became an accountant, and I think that things between him and Mother must have been all right for a couple of years, though he hated the work. He missed the smell of old books and chasing down people with overdue items on their library cards.
I know this somewhat from memory, somewhat from my dad, and it’s just possible I made some of it up.
As we sat there on the bridge and the wind whistled around the car, my father patted his fingers on the steering wheel. The big silver ring he wore on his left hand made a snapping noise against it, and the moonlight caught it and made it wink.
Dad said, “Beneath that Moon Lake water is a town called Long Lincoln. It was named after a tall man named Lincoln. How about that?”
I didn’t say anything, because I couldn’t tell if it was really a question. Moonlight was shining through the windshield and it made Dad look like he was coated in shimmering gold paint. The bones in his face appeared sharper than usual, like you could use one of his cheekbones to open a letter. His lips trembled. There were beads of sweat on his forehead, and I remember thinking, Why is he sweating? It’s a cool night.
Leaves were picked off the trees by the sharp fall wind and they flapped through the air, bright in the moonlight, red and yellow, orange and brown. Many came to rest on our windshield and on the bridge, as if they were birds settling to roost. Where they coasted onto the windshield, the moonlight formed a camouflage pattern over Dad’s face.
“Long Lincoln is where I was born. It was where I met your mother. We were in high school. We thought love was enough. We thought a lot of silly things. A few times I came back here, after it was a lake, parked here, looked down, and on days when the sun was bright, I could see buildings, could even read the words POST OFFICE on a building where I had mailed letters to Santa and applied to colleges, sent sweet notes to your grandparents when they were alive. When they died, there was only me and you and your mother. Three against emptiness. Now it’s two. You and me. Jesus, it’s a sad old world.”
I wanted to ask why we were parked on a bridge and why he was telling me these things, most of which he had told me before, and often. But there was something about the way he was talking, something that made me stay silent for longer than I might normally have. Being on the actual bridge he had described to me while living in our home made it stranger and more real to me.
“I loved your mother,” he said. “I want you to know that. Without her, we’re lost. My hands feel damp with the blood of dead hopes.”
He talked like that sometimes. My mother said he read a lot of books. When he worked at the library, they were readily available.
I couldn’t hold it in any longer. “Daddy, you’re scaring me.”
Dad turned away from me, faced forward, and him doing that caused me to do the same. I could see our headlights lying on the bridge, extending outward, leaves still whirling about in the beams, coming to land on the frail bridge.
That bridge was narrow and long, the railing on the side was made of thin, rusting strips of metal, and when we drove onto it, it shook and moaned like a sad old woman about to die.
“Sometimes you have to do what’s best for all involved,” Dad said. “No one should suffer famine and worry, not have love and support at home. Of course, they would first need to have a home.”
He laughed a little when he said that. It sounded like cracking ice. He was acting so strangely it felt as if the interior of the car were colder than the weather demanded.
“Once upon a time, the town down there had people in it. They had jobs and they had homes, and then it was decided by someone that the town should be moved and renamed and that the old town would become a lake. There was a great dam then, so broad at the top you could walk across it. It had a high spillway, and it was pretty up there, and there was water that came from the spillway and ran through the center of town as a creek, rolled by a post office, gas stations, a school, a general store, and so much more. There were trees on either side of the creek and they made much of the town shady, and on the outskirts of the town on both sides there were houses. I lived in one of those houses. I was raised there. Did I already say that?”
“Yes, sir.”
If he heard my reply, I couldn’t tell.
“Money was paid, and the town was evacuated. A new town was built in a different location. But there were some down there that didn’t leave. Can you believe that? They waited there thinking that if they stayed, the water wouldn’t be released. But it was. Gone in a flash, and the remains, along with the bones of those who didn’t leave, are lying down there at the bottom of the wet. I was born there. I grew up there. I met your mother there.”
A theme was developing.
“Danny, I feel like there isn’t any true light or warmth in the universe anymore. You should never have to feel that way. Do you understand?”
I didn’t.
“‘The moon is up. The water is high. Dark souls walk the earth and cry.’ An old poem. I know what it means now.”
Dad shifted the car into drive and inched us forward slightly with a gentle tap on the gas. I was glad we were finally moving on.
“I want you to know how much I love you,” he said.
Before I could say “I love you too,” he punched his foot down hard on the gas, and the car leaped and the bridge shook. He jerked the wheel to the right, and the great big Buick, five payments owed, smashed through the rotting railing and sailed out into space like a rocket ship.
Wet leaves swirled about us, and then the car dipped, and there was the Buick’s shadow, smack-dab in the center of the gleaming reflection of the moon. We went down in what seemed like slow motion, the car lights shining onto the lake, the moon’s reflection a golden bull’s-eye.
When the car struck the water, I took a deep breath. There was a slapping sound as it hit. The headlights glowed briefly, even underwater, but only for a moment, then they snapped off. The windshield caved in, folded like a blanket, and banged up against me. Cold water and the impact of the windshield washed me loose of my seat and towed me away.