I see pictures, all herky jerky, like a slide show. Long thin Rob sitting in his yellow boat, waiting on the water. I am stepping in. A fat woman in a pink tank top running along the rust red bank. Breathless, she says to us, pointing, "He went under and he's not coming up." Puffy pink. Her face painted white with fear. Home is where you want to hang yourself, not your hat, on the bathroom door, next to your sandy wet towel and swim suit. It's where you sit on half of your landlord's old striped living room set, among the beer boxes from Colorado microbreweries, staring at your white plaster walls, and you try to forget everything about your first full day in a new apartment. You set out framed pictures of the past, of happy smiling times, and you want to pretend that nothing happened. You want to talk to your parents long distance on the telephone and tell them that you were never swimming at Horsetooth Reservoir. You want to tell them that, in fact, you were playing horseshoes with your best friend Rob and nobody died. Picture a kayak banana floating, gliding across the water. Rob is fluid motion. Fast. Angry red uprooted rocks of Satanka Cove. Flip, flop. Flip, flop. My legs pumping. Sandals slapping rock. A rhythm beats. Horsetooth. Horseshoe. Rob and I diving together, diving into the sinister green. His yellow boat empty, upside down on the red rocks. He is diving. I am diving down, haunted white, wishing I could feel the slippery cold porpoise flesh. Sputtering at the surface. Diving again. "Right fucking there, man!" the stocky stranger says to me. "We thought he was just playing around." And it is cold and dark on the muddy bottom.
Oxbow. Weight bearing. A piece of history carved from time. The Kansas river, near my hometown of Lawrence, flooded in 1852 and changed its course, leaving Lakeview, a lazy bend in the river, frozen in time and preserved. It is an oxbow lake, clearly defined but abandoned like a weed-choked two-lane highway shadowing an interstate artery. During our high school years, my best friend Rob and I spent many evenings and weekends on the lake fishing and hiking in the forest. In August of 1993, the beginning of my third year of college, I moved into a cabin on the lake and stayed for two years. It felt like home to me, a place where I could recreate myself after my younger brother, Matt, was killed in an automobile accident a year-and-a-half earlier. He died in Indiana while I was driving my blue Subaru station wagon across Utah, and I'm not sure I've ever felt so far from home as I did when that call came at 3:00 in the morning, turning my dreams to nightmares. Sinister green is the color of death row eyes. Mass murderer. Deep-swamp smothering eyes. Not the green I miss of my brother's eyes. I am diving again. A blue bikini yells, "You have to get a buddy! Does everyone have a buddy?" Rob is diving too. All of us diving, diving. And it's been at least fifteen minutes. Counting the slip slide of his life. Thump thump. I am dog-paddling, struggling to breathe. Bump bump. My heart is a thief in the green, stealing my breath away. When the big trees have been stripped bare and the sky takes on the cold color of Winter, life returns to Lakeview. Bald Eagles nest in the big cottonwoods and feed on fish from the lake. I have sat on an old stone chimney hidden in the trees on the banks of the lake, listening to the pulse of their wings beating the air, the pulse of life swaying above me in the stubborn Kansas winds.
Bottom feeders. Mud dwellers. A largemouth bass or a crappie will usually
jump out of the water when it is hooked, or at least it will come close
to the surface and give you a peek. But the fish I hooked one day in a
canoe with Rob took my lure and dove to the muddy bottom. That's usually
what a catfish or a carp will do. They'll play with you down there, wrap
you around a tree stump or a rock and snap your line. They are tricksters,
fighters. I tried to reel him in but he was pulling the canoe around like
a big dog walking its owner. Certain that my line would break any second,
Rob and I paddled to the bank and beached the canoe. We exchanged anxious
looks as I stepped out of the aluminum boat, played with the drag, and
began to reel the lake beast in, my Shimano graphite reel whining from
the strain. Rob was down at the edge of the water waiting, and I pulled,
hoping the eight-pound test would hold. And then we watched something appear
from the deep green, an ungodly thing, a great scaly white carp that must
have weighed twenty-five pounds. It was the sickly pallid white of something
that had never left the lake bottom, had never seen sunlight, until that
moment. Rob grabbed the line and pulled the huge fish up onto the bank.
The carp's bulging lips gasped as the short rubbery white spines on its
lips quivered. Huge, white scales, each the size of a quarter, heaved and
spread with every gasp. Neither of us wanted to touch it. We just looked
at it for a while, flopping on the sand, a beastly- white humped fish,
its black pearl eyes wide and shiny, my Mepps #2 Bucktail stuck in his
dorsal fin. I handed Rob my knife, he cut the line and pushed the beast
back into the water where it belonged. Fish finder. Fish finder. Blue
bikini's husband pilots his boat through the water. "There's something
big on the bottom and it's not moving," he says with a mustache. But I
don't believe him. Coyote catfish. The trickster is down there hiding,
wrapping us around his finger. Watching us scatter and dive. Water foul.
Looking up. Legs flailing. Watching us tuck our wings and dive to the muddy
bottom. He's hiding. His green eyes waiting for me. Sweeping my hands and
legs out, splayed like a cheerleader. Feeling nothing but soft, cold mud.
Still hoping, still groping for a hand or a foot in the darkness, something
I can hold on to. Afraid that I will find him.
Density. The forest is thick and green in the spring and early summer
at Lakeview, overcrowded with life. Trees and weeds bend and twist, craning
to find precious sunlight beneath the green canopy. Living there in the
cabin, I often escaped into the forest on sunny, summer afternoons, but
it was difficult to move sometimes in the wet June thickets of cottonwood
saplings and hedge. Blankets of poison ivy, like green tube socks, covered
the feet of giants and here they were allowed to decay where they died,
to return what they had borrowed. I often found myself sitting in a graveyard
full of life, carcasses piled on top of one another, stacked haphazardly
on the forest floor. And sometimes I would discover a long since dead tree
laid out with tiny green saplings sprouting from a lush blanket of moss
along the length of it's wet and rotting body. I could see the whole picture
there, overlapping cycles of life and death. I could see that without ends,
there are no beginnings. A foot! The boyish looking diver with lifeguard
training has grabbed his foot. Thump thumpety thump. I'm feeling the darkness
now. Pictures are failing, mutating. The cold has seeped into my bones
and I'm shivering on the rust red rocks. Hyperventilation. Flash Bulbs.
Polaroids of Matt. They've touched him, two of the others, felt him resting
on the muddy bottom. Deep. The immense weight of water. And I am watching,
trying to remember how to breathe, trying to picture the face of a stranger.
I reach out a hand, pulling Rob to me. We are tired. Helpless. Others too,
and all they can do is grab a cold big toe and tug. Herky jerking. It's
been at least twenty five minutes. Dog-paddling and diving. I am wondering
how long it lasts, that euphoric state of dying. Do you open your eyes
and smile? Can you hear what I'm saying?
In the first colorful weeks of Fall at Lakeview, when the sun sometimes hides behind blankets of gray and cold winds begin to whip, the leaves of the weak and sickly trees blanket the forest floor. Space opens up between trunks and limbs. It becomes easier to move around, easier to escape. As I hiked into the trees on brisk October and November afternoons, underfoot was the crunching of oak, elm, maple, and cottonwood leaves. With every step I took came the sounds of decay, mulching my way through the forest, hoping I would stumble across the old chimney, camouflaged against the background of stone colored leaves and trees. I found it sometimes like a yellowed photograph pinned to my memory, churning the imagination. Who has lived here? Who has died here? What have I missed? I am diving again. Rob too. Both of us into the sinister green. Redemption and beer cans floating by. It's cold on the muddy bottom. My second chance at salvation slipping. But I want to believe that he is a trickster catfish. Clever coyote. I want to see the green of my brother's eyes again. I want to see them standing on the rust red rocks, laughing and pointing at us. Ha! Ha! Suckers! Maybe he will burrow deep into the mud and hide on the muddy bottom. Bottom feeder. Mud dweller. Trickster teaching. I want to pretend that the drowning euphoria lasts forever and that I do not see the rescue diver bring his body up from the muddy bottom, back to the surface, back to reality. Just leave him there, I want to scream. He's already gone. He's already home. Sitting on a striped sofa, staring at my white plaster walls, waiting for the heat to leave and night to come, I realize the intentions of water and the folly of second-chance salvation. Framed pictures remind me of faces that become fuzzy, of smiles and green eyes I refuse to forget. I see more. Rob and I in a kayak. Brothers blurred. Too fast for film. Floating. Flying. Chasing what was taken from us. I can see it captured on the horizon. Fading behind to purples and blues. Fading away, even as we paddle toward the thin line between sky and water, toward reclamation. But still we paddle and swim and fish, to feel the spray in our faces, the embrace of water, and the tug on our toes as they dangle over the side of a yellow boat, dipping cautiously beneath the skin of water.