Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter (39 page)

But none of this really matters. This story is almost over
⁷
and my whole purpose of describing the work we did that spring is to share the fact that at some point over the course of working together and sharing lengthy commutes beginning at five a.m. (in Zach’s stealthy new Ford F-Series; my truck blew a head gasket and more or less bit the dust), I realized that Zach and I had quit conversing like pipsqueak adversaries and become friends. For the first time since childhood I became aware of the deep security I felt having Zach as my brother, going so far as to think that all his efforts for Frank Moretti were somehow part of an endeavor to win the brotherly respect he felt he’d failed to earn in all the years before.

That said, I’ll now relate a particular conversation in early May that found us gazing over an almost surreal landscape of men and machines in fluid motion, crisscrossing one another under the watch of wind turbines whirling in distant fields. Zach and I were sitting at a picnic table near the trailer, shoveling down nearly expired emergency meals left over from the flood.

“A lot of people are taking notice of this project,” Zach said, shouting over metallic cranks and roars (the remedial sound effects of progress, as we saw it then). “Shit. Frank says they’re planning a big conference in a few months with city planners from St. Louis, Cincinnati, Dallas, New York. If things work out here, we’ll be a model for parks around the country.”

“You think you could keep this up for thirty years?” I asked, half choking on the steam.

“Hell yeah. I’m feeling stronger than ever. We should think about starting our own company. I’m serious. I like this business and we could be good at it. You’re a natural-born salesman. You could manage the business end while I take charge of the crews.”

I nodded along, acting like it was an interesting idea, but that I wasn’t sure if it would really work out. Zach played his hand the best he could, changing the topic when he realized I wasn’t in the mood for a hard sell. “I was thinking,” he said. “If you’ve got the time, I know this kid from Iowa City who’s living practically for free in his grandpa’s cabin out in Montana. He’s got it pretty good out there, and it’s just him until October—” Zach paused and looked up. He skipped whatever he was planning to say and took another bite.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Well, I was gonna say I could bring Rachel and you could bring Emily, but I guess you two broke up for good, huh?”

I nodded.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know,” I said, reaching for the napkins before the whole stack blew away. Zach balled up his disposable meal tray and dumped it into the metal can next to him.

“Shit, man. You’ve had a pretty rough go this last year.”

“I know,” I said.

“I liked Emily.”

“Me, too.”

For a while Zach just sat there shaking his head. He probably wanted to say something nasty about Emily but he didn’t. In the end he just kept staring at me and smirking. “What?” I asked.

“Is that from
Boys Town
?”

“Probably,” he said, still smirking as he nodded at the stack of emergency lasagnas. “Let’s split another one, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, even though he was already opening the box. He poured the water pouch over the chemical pack and shoved it back inside. A minute later there was steam pouring out the corners of the box. Zach gave me a look like perhaps we should talk a little more about my troubles. “I’m gonna be all right.”

“I know,” he said, shaking his plastic fork at me, like he wasn’t so sure, but he’d let it go if that’s what I wanted. “What you need to do is to sign up for some business classes. You think you could work on site all day and manage a few business classes at night?”

“I doubt it.”

“Hell yeah you could—” But then he cut himself off, realizing that my attention had drifted and I wasn’t really listening. “Are you really all right?”

“Yeah,” I said, tossing a pebble at the portable toilets near the woods. “I was just thinking about that girl from the Holiday Inn. Do you ever think about that?”

“I try not to, but I think about it. What’s got you thinking about that now?”

“I don’t know. I have to think about something. I always wonder why we didn’t hear anything. She must’ve screamed at least once, but no one heard a thing?”

“I guess she should’ve screamed louder. They say you should yell fire when you’re being raped, ’cause if you yell rape, people run away. These days you try to help someone out, you end up getting sued. It’s a liability helping people.”

“So is screaming,” I said, tossing another pebble at the toilets. “Did you know Nicholas and Missy were both devout Catholics? Did you know he never slept with her, or raped her, or anything like that? He strangled her without even kissing her.”

“That’s fucking beautiful, George.”

“At least he had
some
principles,” I said. “At least he believed in
something
.”

Zach blew off the comment with a backhanded flick of the wrist, shaking his head like he didn’t understand and he didn’t want to understand. “I just can’t believe they haven’t caught him. Little bastard’s probably in Mexico by now, living the life. We should become bounty hunters. We could live the life, too.”

“Maybe,” I said, thinking that maybe I’d fall out of love or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I’d meet another girl and fall as hard for her as I did for Emily. Or maybe I’d never know such desire ever again and I’d be better for it.

Ten minutes later we were back to our tractors, digging up what would eventually become the Grand Basin. It was a slow and tedious process. Here and there among the rusty tin cans and glass bottles we’d stumble upon small treasures: an iron sculpture of mating frogs, a perfectly shaped Superman lunch box filled with quarter-sized slugs likely once engaged to cheat 1950s slot machines. Later that day one of our diggers uncovered a pair of decorative shell ear spools and an ancient hoe. As required by law, Frank called the Iowa Archeologi cal Society, whose experts uncovered several additional artifacts, mostly whittled from bison bones (that they eventually traced to the Mill Creek culture, which thrived in Iowa about a thousand years ago, before they migrated upriver and all but vanished).

Caught in the excitement of the discovery, over the next month I spent more than one lunch break strolling the park perimeters with an eye out for evidence of disturbed ground, still clinging to the notion that at some point I’d begin a secret and meticulous excavation of Katie’s time capsule. By then I viewed the fairgrounds as the most ideal burial site, particularly in terms of the childlike wonder it exuded on all who openheartedly entered its premises. Perhaps this wonder and consequentially innocent way of seeing deserves more credit than anything else for my detecting one day, while trekking through the woods not far from the main park entrance, a noticeably irregular and leafless sapling sprouting through the dirt near the base of a walnut tree. On further inspection my hunch was verified; the twiggy youth was actually a steel wire sticking out of the ground, offering no apparent purpose, and fully resistant to being yanked out of place.

While I didn’t expect anything to come of this finding, I nonetheless went through the motions of a minor investigation. This began with having Zach check the utilities survey in Frank’s trailer, which resulted in his assurance that the steel wire in question couldn’t possibly have marked an electrical cable or telephone cable because there were no cables of any kind buried in the fairground woods. Of course this information proved nothing, but it still offered me enough motivation to continue my little quest by returning the next day with a set of excavation tools. During my initial bout of digging I tried to imagine where the steel wire might lead, if not to Katie’s time capsule. But I couldn’t think of anything else I might find, and ended up only advancing my expectations by deciding that I was the only living person Katie had warned of the time capsule’s existence. This allowed me to suppose that whatever letter she’d included in the capsule would somehow connect to me, which in fact it did:

We can all correctly assume that my discovery of this letter was met with cathartic doses of tears and laughter. For a moment while hovering over my ditch in the woods I felt our baffling world had been whittled down to its most affirmative, life-giving functions. But despite Katie’s sparkling prose, handwritten on parchment as perfectly preserved as she’d intended, it turns out that the airtight, leak-proof package in which her letter was housed was buried too deeply to be recovered within the span of a workingman’s lunch hour. This required that I continue my dig the following day, when I found myself marching from one end of the forest to the other still smirking at every word of Katie’s ghostly confessional that lay buried in rich Iowegian earth near the base of a walnut tree at the end of a long steel wire that I was destined to stumble upon once and then never again.

Fifty-two

As I feel myself yielding to a habit of resurrecting every glossy-lipped memory that gives a man the false impression that the lips in question remain forever as willing and pliant, prompting him every few years to write courageous love letters that he will never mail, to addresses unknown, I will only say that this account has failed in its primary purpose: to once and for all rid the author of his pull toward a past that in a mere decade has rendered its real-life characters no more than ghosts, fictions of a mind that would rather believe what could have been than in what was. I leave the reader with a brief and ultimate exchange with Emily Schell. The location was the Iowa State Fairgrounds, the time the 155th anniversary, a mere matter of weeks after our crew had gathered at the mouth of the Grand Basin to witness the gentle unifying flow of red clay waters pouring in from the lagoons and streams that linked our new lake to the Des Moines River, knowing from there we’d tapped into the Mighty Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico and all the great oceans across the globe.

While Zach had joined our crew for another lake-digging assignment in a residential development out in Clive, Frank gave me two weeks off so I could volunteer at the fair and enjoy the crowd’s response to the fruit of our labors. By lottery during the first training day I scored one of the prized jobs at the highly popular state fair beer garden. As expected, a record-setting crowd turned up for the opening day, when it was hard to find a single man without a wife, girlfriend, or child stacked on his shoulders. With an up-close view of the whole scene I swore the heart of the American Midwest was pounding more crudely for those ten blazing days than ever before. Everyone raved that it was the best state fair in memory, with much improved fireworks and music performances, and even an impressive competitive pickle eater from Red Oak who stole the show by bringing a world record to Iowa. But the biggest news of the week related to the freshly established tradition of couples kissing the moment their paddleboats drifted beneath the footbridge over the Grand Basin. While there was little consensus over the exact brand of fortune this act was supposed to bring, soon there was a line a mile long to rent paddleboats, and more than enough TV crews and cheering crowds for the moment one of the mariachis, propped up on the footbridge railing in an attempt to romance the kissing couples beneath him, tumbled head over heels into the basin.