Surface Tension (4 page)

I reel him in and hold him up. He's a really small small-mouth bass. He probably doesn't weigh more than a few ounces. He's gobbling up the air and his little eyes are bugging out. I look him right in the eye and say, “Hey, buddy. How's life in the fishpond?”

He doesn't say anything, but he kicks his slippery little
fish body once to try and break free. At least he's not a sun-fish with those razor-sharp fins. A few of those have gotten me before.

I say, “Tell some of those big guys to come jump on my hook and I'll let you go, okay?”

He doesn't agree, but I pull the hook out of his lip and throw him back anyway.

I cast my lure again and catch another little one, about the same size as the first one. It could even be the same one, but I doubt it. I think I would recognize him.

This is kind of boring. I go over and sit under the oak tree and look out at the lake. From up here I can see almost the whole lake, or maybe just half of it, all the way down to the power station. There are these dark clouds over the power station and a flash of lightning. It's so far away, though, I can't hear anything. I can just see it, like a strobe light twenty miles away.

I stand up and cast again toward the center of the pond, where an old tree trunk is sticking out of the water. I think I heard once that the big fish like to hide in the shadows.

Crap, I think I got my lure caught in the tree. I pull on it and jiggle it, but the lure is stuck. That's my favorite lure—it cost me like nine bucks. I was going to go out and catch a huge fish in the lake with that thing.

I yank hard on the fishing rod, but it just bends like crazy. I don't want to go in the water with the snapping turtles, but I also don't want to lose my best lure.

I don't know what to do. Who cares—what have I got to lose? I take off my shoes and shirt and climb over the stone wall with the fishing line in my hand. The pond isn't deep— it only comes up to my knees—but the muck underneath the
water is really gross. I wish I'd kept my shoes on. It feels like I'm stepping in a hundred years of wet leaves and decomposed fish bodies. I pull my foot out and take another step, and a bunch of bubbles come out. That smells really nasty, plus my leg is covered in black muck.

I take another step and my leg slips deeper this time. I've got to make it all the way over there to the tree stump. This isn't fun. It should be easy to find, though, because I've got the line to guide me.

The muck gushes and bubbles up some more nastiness. I'm just going to keep going, but the water is getting deeper. This isn't good. It's up to my hips now.

This reminds me of that song about the boa constrictor from elementary school. I hum the melody while I move so it's not quite as gross. I keep moving across the pond, but I really don't like the feeling of this. Something just brushed up against my leg.

I get to the tree and follow the line down under the water. I can't feel where it's caught. The line is wrapped around a branch, and then it goes down into the blackness. I can't see anything at all in the water because of all the silt and stuff I kicked up when I was walking. I squat down a little and reach down, following the line. It's tighter than a guitar string, and I can't reach the lure. It must be deeper than I thought.

I know what happened. The lure is supposed to swim like a minnow when you reel it in. It probably dove down into the muck and got hooked around a deeper branch. That sucks. I probably set it in there pretty good when I was yanking on it too. Well, what am I going to do?

I guess I could try to go underwater and see if there's any
way to untangle it. I think that's really the only way to do it. I just don't want to get bitten on the face by one of those snapping turtles, that's all.

I slide in up to my neck and follow the line with my hand. It's too far under there. Crap.

I take three big breaths and go underwater. I open my eyes, but there's nothing but brown water and millions of bits of leaves in front of my face. I close my eyes. Okay, where is it? Is that it? It sort of feels like it. It's smooth, but there's no hooks.

Something swims by my face and I reach my hand up to brush it away. I didn't get it. I put my feet down into the mud to try and push myself up and out of the water, but they sink into the mud up to my ankles. I twist my body upward so I can at least get my head above water, but my feet slip a little farther into the mud. I reach down with my hand to the log to try and push myself out of the mud. My hand brushes something slippery. What is that? Is that a piranha? It's biting me. Ow. I pull my legs out of the mud somehow and come up for air. I pull my hand out. A damn snapping turtle is hooked on to my finger, and my finger is all bloody. Shit! I shake my hand and the thing lets go.

I wrestle myself out of the pond as fast as I can, jump over the stone wall, and run over to my shoes and pull them on with my one good hand. I wrap my shirt around my finger and run home across the field and down the dirt road, past the silo and the cow barn and the farmhouse. I'm crying, but I don't want to be. It doesn't even hurt that much, but I'm scared.

I find Mom reading down by the lake, and she takes a look at me and stands right up. “What happened?”

I must look like a real mess the way I'm all covered in
leaves and crap. I don't want to sound like a baby, so I just say, “I got bit.”

“By what?”

“I don't know. A turtle.”

“Let me see.” She leads me down to the water and washes off my hand in the lake. The blood and leaves drift off in the clear lake water.

The cut isn't that big. Just about as wide as a penny. I want to tell her the whole story, but I know how stupid it's going to sound.

I'm going to have to make up something to not make myself seem so stupid. A turtle jumped out and bit my finger. I caught a turtle with my fishing pole.

I just realized I forgot my fishing pole up at the pond and my lure is still stuck. I'll have to cut the line. That's the worst part.

I got a tetanus shot and two butterfly stitches, and the doctor gave me a lecture about how snapping turtles can actually break your finger off if they're big enough. I guess it was only a little one that got me, but it didn't feel like it was little.

I walk back up to the farm to get my fishing pole. There's a sign out front of the farmhouse I didn't see before. It says Free Kittens. I've always wanted a kitten.

I step up onto the porch and look through the screen door. There's a girl looking back at me from the kitchen table. She's a few years younger than me, and she's looking at me like I might be an ax murderer standing on her porch.

I didn't even know that there was a girl who lived here. I've never seen her before. She comes to the screen door, but she doesn't open it.

“Can I help you?”

I say, “I saw the sign about the kittens.”

She nods through the screen. I can't really see her face, but she's got long black hair that's braided and swung over her shoulder, and she's wearing big, round red glasses.

She looks me over for a little while longer and then opens the screen door and lets me in. The inside of the farmhouse is dark and full of old wood, and it smells weird.

A cat runs under the couch and then another chases it. I see two more sitting at the top of the stairs and another in the kitchen eating from a cereal bowl. I think the smell is from all the cats.

She walks toward the kitchen and I follow her. I'm not sure what she's doing, but I think I'm supposed to follow her. It'll be really awkward if she's just going to the bathroom right now.

She opens a door on the other side of the kitchen and motions for me to come and look in. It looks like a closet from across the room, and it is, but it doesn't have food or a vacuum cleaner in it. The only thing in the closet is a cardboard box on a shelf, filled with kittens.

There's a mother cat too, and she looks up at me. She's lying on her side with the kittens scrambling around her, trying to get food. The mother cat looks really tired and annoyed at me for watching her nurse. I feel embarrassed, so I take a step back.

I try and count the kittens, but they're moving around too much. There are a lot of them, that's all that I can tell. There's one lying off to the side, not even really trying to get food. It's the littlest one and it's almost all black except for one little white mitten on the front paw.

His eyes are closed and there's all this junk in them that looks like cement holding them closed. I want to pick him up and give him some milk or something.

I say, “What's wrong with that one?”

The girl says, “He's the runt.”

All of the runt's brothers and sisters have their eyes wide open and are climbing all over him, getting food, but the runt isn't doing anything. He's just lying there.

I say, “Is he okay?”

“He's the runt. He probably won't make it.”

I almost feel like crying when she says that. She doesn't seem like she even cares about the runt at all. I want to reach into the cardboard box and pick him up and take him home with me. I want to do that so bad.

It's like she can read my mind, because she says, “You can have him if you want. They're free. You can take him in a week.”

I can imagine what it would be like to take a kitten home. It would be the best. I could carry him around in my jacket pocket, and he would sleep on my lap and purr when I pet him. It would be so cute.

I thank her and say that I'll be back to get him in a week. I walk out onto the porch and look up at the branches and the wind blowing through them. I can't wait until I can bring my kitten home.

We're having dinner at the picnic table at dusk and the mosquitoes are coming out, but so are the fireflies, so it's kind of like the good and the bad of the insect world. The purple martins are swooping around, feeding off the bugs. Purple martins are the best kind of bird because they eat their
weight in mosquitoes every night. That's why everyone has the purple martin birdhouses on the ends of their docks. Also, they're easy to spot because they have a forked tail and they're kind of purple-looking.

We're having chicken off our new grill and macaroni salad, which is all pretty tasty. Dad seems like he's in a good mood, because he's had two beers. I'm trying to figure out when I should ask about the kitten. Maybe when he's on his third beer.

Mom is looking out into the distance, out across the lake. She really loves this place. I think I see a way to get Mom to let me keep a kitten.

“Hey, Mom?”

“What, honey? Want some more macaroni salad?”

“No, thank you. I was just wondering if you ever wanted to bring a piece of the lake back with you. Back home, I mean.”

Mom tilts her head to the side, like she can't quite guess where I'm going with this, but she's a little suspicious. “Hmmm. What do you mean?”

“Well …” I let the anticipation build a little. “If you really wanted to bring a piece of the lake home with you, I'm pretty sure I found a way.”

“What's that?” Dad is already scowling at me. This is not going great, but I've gone too far now to turn back.

“Well, how about, from the farm, we get a kitten?”

Mom says, “No.” Oh shit. That's the last thing I wanted to hear. How about a “Maybe” or an “I'll think about it”?

“Why?”

“I'm not interested in trying to transport a kitten all the way home.”

“Why?”

“Do you even know how to take care of a kitten?”

“No, but I could ask Claire. She has a kitten.”

“Do you even know what they eat or where they sleep?”

“No, but I'll—”

“I am not bringing a kitten into our house.”

“Why?”

“Do I need to remind you?”

“What?”

“Do you remember what happened with the mice?”

I'm alone on the beach looking for a luckystone. I can't believe she said no. I don't understand why. I'll take care of the kitten. I'll be so good to it. She wouldn't even listen to me or let me talk. The mice don't have anything to do with it.

Last year, my best friend, Steve, and I went to the pet store in town and bought a pair of mice. We got a male and a female, because the plan was we were going to breed them and then sell them to our friends at school and make a profit.

Steve said he was sure he could keep them at his house, but his mom said no, and then I wound up with this little cage in my room. It started off with just two mice, but in a week the female was pregnant and had these huge lumps on her sides where the babies were growing. I still thought it was going to be cool, but then she had the babies and they were just these blind, wriggling little pink knuckles. And it smelled so bad. I didn't even want to look at them, they were so disgusting.

They got kind of cute when they were like two weeks old and they could open their eyes and their hair grew in, but when I told all my friends about them at school, nobody
wanted to buy them. No one would even take one of them off my hands for free.

I had to take them back to the pet store. They said they couldn't resell them, but they took them back anyway. I think they used them as food for the snakes.

The worst part was that I didn't even know that the female had gotten pregnant again, and she had another litter of mice while we were driving back to the pet store. My room still smells like mice.

But that doesn't have anything to do with getting a kitten. It's not like I'm going to breed kittens in the house. I just really want one to hold and take care of. It would be so cute.

I have to find a luckystone. If I can find one, my luck will change and my parents will let me have that kitten.

I'm going through the garage, looking for anything that would be fun. The cottage gets boring on a Wednesday when no one else is here. There's the plastic boccie ball set, but no one is here to play with, and anyway, I think a few of the balls cracked when I was dropping them on the driveway.

There's the chemistry set, but I think all the chemicals are probably expired. What else is there to do? Cut up a golf ball and see what's inside it? No, that's boring—it's just rubber. There's the canoe, but it's so heavy there's no way I could carry it.