Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter (16 page)

“I heard that,” I said. “But her freckles are pretty intense, and I think she’s too tall for me.”

“Tall is good. Isn’t she one of the volleyball captains?”

“Yeah, but she always gets injured, and not during the games, either. Last year she tripped over a dishwasher door and broke her wrist. She’s a serious hazard.”

Mr. Schell chuckled as he stared absentmindedly around the yard. When he asked about our senior skip day, I told him I’d won some money playing horseshoes. (The last time I played horseshoes was probably in sixth grade, but horseshoes seemed the kind of subject a Wakonda Country Club member out of the loop of manly entertainment might enjoy.) While I wasn’t sure how to interpret his attempt to match me with Mel Gerbeck, I figured it was no more than small talk when he insisted I join him for juice and doughnuts instead of waiting on the porch like a Roto-Rooter salesman. As we passed through the front hallway I overheard Mrs. Schell drawing near the high point of an upstairs lecture related to our skip day and its effect on Emily’s ultimate GPA. Mr. Schell led me to the kitchen, which was sparkling white with lavender napkins that matched the many curtains on its many windows. We sat at a big oak table where he slid me a box of sprinkled doughnuts. He was cutting his and eating it with a fork. The doughnuts turned out to be disappointingly dry.

“Pardon the mess,” he said, nodding at the Schell’s Shirtworks boxes stacked up beside the door to the garage. “I like to hand-deliver orders for my most important customers. Of course it drives Maureen batty, because I could just as easily leave them in the trunk. But when I bring them inside, at least I feel like I’m treating my product with respect.”

“That makes sense,” I said, trying my best to swallow my doughnut, the whole time thinking that this man needs a man. (I’ve since come to the conclusion that Mr. Schell was a regular guy once, before he was contained under the feminine authority of a barely legal actress, an anarchistic girl-woman eighth grader, and a castrating wife with tennis legs so sharp he was lucky to wake up with his feet still attached to his legs. Despite the fact that he’d run several T-shirt competitors into the ground, which implied some amount of backbone, I imagined that in private he mostly tiptoed around his wife, whose browbeating nature very likely extended to sex.) Within a minute or two we’d already run out of conversation and were both relieved at the sound of Katie trouncing down the steps. She was gripping the railing with one hand and two crutches with the other. I guessed her symptoms were now advancing from moderate to moderate-severe.

“You’re late,” she said, sighing in colossal disappointment. “The fish already ate breakfast without us.”

“I’ve been down here since seven o’clock.”

“
No te creo, amigo.
I’ve been up since six-forty.”

When Katie hit the last step her neck twisted in a way that suggested her head was becoming an increasing heavy load. She swerved her way to her father and hugged him around the neck. I noticed a new charm in the way she surfed her stilted muscles, grooving like a karaoke singer who couldn’t hear how off-key she really was. Maybe she’d learned something from our driving lessons over the winter at the icy Valley West parking lot, when I’d taught her to turn into the spins and ride them out. Her dad offered her the other half of his doughnut, but Katie just made a face. She swung her way over to the chair nearest the windows.

“What are you girls doing about church?” Mr. Schell asked.

“Mom said we can go to the short Mass at five o’clock at the hospital.”

Mr. Schell scratched his chin, acting like he’d never heard of any short Mass at any hospital. “You were born in that hospital. Maybe you should go to the
long
Mass.”

“There
is
no long Mass. They’re all short ’cause there’s no singing. Singing wakes up all the patients.”

Mr. Schell threw me an amused look of suspicion. Katie started paging through the comics, washing her hands of the matter. Emily came down a minute later tugging on her right ear. The way she winced at the assaulting brightness said all there was to say about the argument she’d just had with her mother.
“Bonjour,”
she said, hard-heartedly, like we were all in trouble now that she was in trouble. “Katie. Dad.
George
.”

The way she said my name betrayed nothing but promised absolutely everything. While sitting next to Mr. Schell, I lost all sense of how much eye contact was considered normal. It was a rare pleasure to catch her just out of bed, still groggy, but I tried not to stare.

“Good morning,” Mr. Schell and I said, in tandem.

“Buenos días,”
Katie said.

“If there’s no more doughnuts I’m going back to sleep.”

“You can sleep once your line’s in the water. Katie and I have big ambitions.”

“By noon the fish will get too hot and hide way down deep,” Katie said. “When they get hot, they won’t eat a thing.”

“Hope you’re ready for a whole day of this sort of information. Last night Katie bought about five fishing magazines. I wouldn’t be surprised if she read them cover to cover.”

“Not true,” Katie argued. “I read one article and it was in a
conservation
magazine, not a
fishing
magazine.”

Emily picked at a few sprinkles at the bottom of the box. “I hope you’ve got weighters and floaties and all that stuff. We’re not exactly outdoorspeople around here.”

“We’re set,” I said, thinking Mr. Schell would be embarrassed by the comment, like he was just another coquette in their domestic rendition of
Little Women
. But he was entangled in a stare-down with the second half of his doughnut, seeming to have a talent for hearing only whatever pleased him, at least on Sunday mornings. Maybe he was devising a plan to calm his wife. Emily lowered her head to drink from the kitchen faucet. I loved watching her drink from the faucet and I wanted to kiss her and drink from the faucet at the same time.

Mr. Schell brought his plate to the sink and placed his hand on Emily’s shoulder. He spoke softly. “I think Katie’s right. You’d better be off.”

“Isn’t Katie always right?”

“She’s hovering around ninety-nine percent.”

Katie folded the comics and bowed. While she was standing up, her hand slipped from her crutch and she fell hard against the table, sending a mug with her name in big block letters banging to the floor. Orange juice spread across the surface, soaking napkins and place mats. A split second later, while hopping up to block a stream of orange juice from spilling onto the floor, I smacked a knee against the chair next to me. This offered a perfect opportunity to divert the attention from Katie’s blossoming embarrassment. I started hopping around and hollering, “Oooh! Aaah! Oww!” doing my best to convince everyone I’d seriously damaged myself. Mr. Schell and Emily surged forward with mirrored expressions of uncertain worry. As they lowered me to the suspect chair their eyes darted back and forth between my squeezing grimace, the spilled orange juice, the broken cup, and my naked unmarked legs, trying to piece it all together.

I howled a few more times to work out the imagined pain. “Is there a funny bone in the knee?” I shouted. “Oooh! Ahhh! I think I nailed it!”

“Okay, okay,” Emily said, attempting to appear calm. I’d clearly convinced her and Mr. Schell that I was the one who’d knocked over the orange juice. It was a much greater performance than I’d intended.

“Don’t worry about the mess,” Mr. Schell said, running a hand over his scalp as he headed for the sink.

“That was my favorite cup!” Katie shouted, trying to suppress the laughter that inevitably escaped in a burst of pandemic snorting glee. “What
was
that! Barn dance hip-hop? George! Oh my God! Did you take
lessons
for that!”

“He’s hurt,” Emily said, then grew suddenly unsure. She stepped in front of me and stared into my face to make up her mind.

“I think it’s acute,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” Emily asked, increasingly leery.

“You know, the sort of pain that hits hard at first, but then wears off a couple of minutes later?”

“Katie,”
Mr. Schell called out, in warning, looking fearful of an impending lawsuit. Katie couldn’t help herself. She looked away, but kept huffing and puffing until her face was streaked with tears. Emily picked up the broken cup pieces as Mr. Schell wiped the floor, both of them acting as though a quick disposal of evidence was the best way to dismiss their own embarrassment and alleviate my pain.

A few minutes later everyone accepted that I was officially healed. Mr. Schell asked me to get his girls back in time for the five-o’clock Mass. I told him not to worry, that I had lawn-mowing and garage-hosing duties later that afternoon. I couldn’t believe that after all that commotion Mrs. Schell hadn’t made an appearance. But then, as we were heading out the front door, her voice came streaming through the intercom speakers in the kitchen, living room, and front hall.

“SUNSCREEN!” she shouted, as if it were her final deathbed directive.

Nineteen

Out at Saylorville we marched along a mushy trail swamped with mosquitoes and biting flies further roused by our footsteps and Katie’s crutches. We stomped over broken reeds and decayed logs, wooden planks thrown over mud pits. Katie was cursing from the start, aiming most of her frustrations at the Eagle Scout and his miniature wooden hut where we’d signed our agreement for the canoe rental. She couldn’t slap at the pests biting at her hardworking arms, which were still grassy and slender, not nearly as muscular as I would’ve imagined. We found our canoe next to the rack lying upside down in the mud.

“Hurry up,” Katie said. “Flip it over. The big ones are waiting.”

I tripped on an anchor half-buried in the muck and fell to my hands. “The boat,” Emily said. “She wants you to flip
the boat
.”

On first sighting the canoe, I imagined Nicholas Parsons resting peacefully beneath it, sinking slowly into the mush that would leave a perfect imprint of his body. As soon as I stepped near it he’d leap at me with bloody eyes and a parasite-patrolled scalp, beads of sweat running down his cheeks like crude oil tears. I turned it over. A thousand crickets dashed in all directions.

Emily took one look and decided to fish off the shore. It wasn’t a bad idea anyway. I gave her one of the rods and a small plastic case with a few jigs and surface lures. She wished us luck and set off on her own. I dragged the canoe to the edge of the lake, waiting for Katie to find her seat before shoving us into the water. She snapped into her life jacket and got her paddle wet for three or four strokes before I told her to relax and enjoy the ride. The trail had obviously worn her out, and I knew she would’ve kept paddling if I didn’t say anything.

“You ever flip one of these things?” she asked, gripping the sides.

“Only once. But Zach was standing on the bow practicing crane kicks like the Karate Kid.”

“That Eagle Scout sure was something. Sitting in a hut with a fake chimney. What an idiot.” She put her sunglasses on and searched from one side of the lake to the other. There were a few groups at the beach on the far side, but only one other canoe on the lake. “Where’re all the other fishermen?”

“It’s no motors for a month. They’re probably all out at Gray’s Lake.”

“Perfect,” she said. “Crank it up, why don’t you?”

I dug my paddle in, swiftly pulling us around the bend. We dropped anchor at a cove where a set of willow trees stretched over the water and shaded the surface. I handed Katie a rod equipped with a push-button reel I thought she’d find easier to cast than the spinning reels Emily and I were using. She still had difficulties, though, exacerbated by the stiffness in her arms that often resulted in the lure helicoptering and entangling itself around the tip of the pole. Other times she’d hurl it so hard and release it so late that the lure splashed wildly a few feet from the canoe. After six or seven tries she calmed down and managed a clean cast. With Zach’s new reel I found I could cast almost double the distance. I aimed parallel to the shoreline, knowing I was covering hot spots the entire way back.

After ten minutes of quiet casting, Katie issued orders to move where the big fish were swimming deep. I paddled us out to the middle, thinking it was a good idea to do a little jigging where Katie could simply drop her lure and wait for a bite. I’d forgotten seat pads and a net and considered I’d be better prepared when I returned next weekend alone with Emily. We’d lay a camping pad across the bottom of the canoe and then sleep on the lake, floating wherever the wind directed us, kissing for hours. She wasn’t far away, plopped down on a long flat boulder, digging into the tackle box. From the few times we’d been fishing, I knew she liked to change lures often, which meant her line wasn’t in the water very much.

“How many have you got so far?” she shouted, knowing Katie would’ve made a big ruckus if we’d landed one. Her voice carried lightly over the lake.

“How many have
you
caught?” Katie shouted back. “And dead floaters don’t count!”

Emily waved us off and went back to tying her lure. I looked around for the other fisherman, but he’d apparently disappeared into one of the coves. While Katie was pulling some weeds off her lure, I told her she was the only cartoonist I knew. She’d promised I could read her graphic novella a few months before, but then reneged, insisting it was still under construction.

“A book at fourteen,” I said. “It’s a little ridiculous, even for you. You’re making the rest of us look like deadbeats.”

“Anyone stuck in a wheelchair can draw enough pictures to fill a book. Eventually I want to write screenplays. If Emily’s going to make it big, she’s gonna need a good script, something written just for her.”

Katie tried to cast but the reel jammed when the line was only halfway out. This meant that her jig couldn’t reach the bottom, the only depth at which it was probable to attract fish. But by this time Katie was more interested in conversation. Instead of annoying her with all the problems she wasn’t even aware of, I pressed her for movie plots.