The pair of bald eagles that winter here even have enough water to fish, and they plummet through the floating flocks and ignite an explosion of alarmed waterfowl. At first, I thought the opening in the ice was where the artesian spring welled up. But then, paddling my board on calm evenings when the sun dropped below the mountains and the lake glassed off, I noticed that twigs, lost fishing bobbers, errant soccer balls, tended to drift toward the spot and congregate like trash in the Pacific Gyre. If the spring flowed up here, I would think that flotsam would be gently pushed away. That’s when I decided that it was harder for ice to form because there was a subtle current drawing down — into some sort of limestone drain.
The lake was full of mysteries.
That morning after seeing the scene on the water, I dug the paddle in, pivoted the board, and paddled back toward the east end of the lake. I was in thick fog. But as I passed the hazard buoys that mark the rocks near the bridge, I was close enough to see the man sleeping. He lay curled on his side, with only the back of his head and thick mat of long hair outside his sleeping bag. He had been there for months. He had a little camp, a ten-tin kerosene stove, a rolling trash bin on wheels, a heap of clothing and tarps. I paddled in quietly, slowed, bumped a chunk of granite, hopped off, reached down for a rock the size of a softball, and bashed the back of the man’s head. He jerked, groaned, writhed, I swung again, harder, and he was still. Blood seeped onto the rocks.
Moving very fast, as if I’d done this a hundred times, I unbuckled a cam strap between two D rings on the front of my board and ran it through two rusted ten-pound barbell weights he had leaning against a cooler, and I tied them off. I set the weights on the back of the board, looped a clove hitch around the man’s neck, and dragged him into the water. I towed him out to the spot I figured had the Vanishing Point — I could tell where it was because there was a little island of floating trash — and I just shoved the weights off the end of the board with my paddle.
Down he went. I thought, What the hell, and paddled back to the bridge and used one of his old pots to wash down the rocks. Then I paddled home.
The next morning, I was out on the water even earlier, and wherever I paddled the lake trailed me with a faint wake of pulsing pink and blue. I am no hero. Definitely no hero. But I felt appreciated and... loved, I guess. I had done a good thing and gotten rid of a bad man.
Well. In the following days I watched for the body to resurface, because I hear they can do that, even with weight, but there was nothing. And so in the next months, as summer turned to fall — the autumn fog is the thickest, though darkness is the only cover I really need — I felt renewed, energized... purposeful. One cool morning in September I saw a man who came down at dawn some days to fish. He always brought his dog, a black Lab mix. I always waved at him but he never waved back. I got the sense he thought I was scaring his fish, how stupid. So that morning I was paddling easily by and I saw his dog grab a catfish out of the bucket and the man yelled and beat the poor thing without mercy. He used a stick. I will never forget the yelps of pain. And on the water, again, was this suffusion of light and moving shadows which flowed into the figure of a man striking a dog. It’s incredible to know what you are supposed to do. To know with certainty. To be told by this... this spirit of the lake. This angel, I guess.
It was early, it was foggy, so I landed up the shore, out of sight behind an outcrop of willows, and I beached the board on the rocks, picked one up, and snuck up behind the man and beaned him. Now I always carried rusted old barbell weights on the front of my board under my life vest. I got them at yard sales. I strapped them to his neck, as before, towed him out to the Vanishing Point, and sent him down.
And again, I felt completely at home with my world. How novel. I breathed in huge drafts of air that smelled like water, mineral and clean — and the air seemed to be the grateful, intimate outbreath of the lake. Inhale, exhale.
We weren’t often home at the same time, but when we were, Kara began to look at me with a wary expression, almost afraid, which stung. She started sleeping in the guest room. Angry, I guess, for my increasing absence. Sometimes I would catch her near me, nostrils flared, as if she were snagging a bad smell, and I realized it was me. She thought I was unappetizing, maybe disgusting. I tried to talk to her but I opened my mouth and had no words. I could feel myself wanting to weep. So I turned on my heels and went out the door... to you know where. Where I can fully breathe. Where I am always accepted with open arms.
One morning, Ted and I were having coffee on my porch and he said that there was a curious missing persons case in District One — which is here. He said they’d found a camp chair, a fishing rod, and a barking dog just across the lake, but no man. Curious. The man had a history of mental illness and so their best hunch was that he’d wandered off, maybe hitched a ride out of town.
“What happened to the dog?” I said.
“He got adopted by my corporal, Ricardo. A great dog. He loves fish, go figure.”
“Go figure.”
We watched mist curl on the water like smoke. “I don’t see the homeless guy under the bridge anymore,” I said. “The one who used to beat his partner.”
“Yeah, he left too. Probably moved down to the Platte. Good riddance.”
Good riddance.
“Got more coffee?” he said.
In October Kara left. She moved in with an old friend of mine.
I know we have been more and more distant lately, and that it was I, mostly, who stepped away. But damn it hurts. I can’t stop thinking about the two of them together. Imagining them in bed is bad — especially her straddling him, I don’t know why — but even more horrible is picturing them strolling down Tennyson with ice-cream cones, hand in hand, and the way she tilts her face up to his and looks so happy — it kills me. Sometimes it is so painful I don’t know how I will get through the next five minutes. I miss her terribly. The worn old song is surely true — you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. The What Ifs and If Onlys and Maybe Ifs circle so relentlessly in my head they have incised a groove I am afraid I shall never escape.
So I can’t sleep. Not a chance. So now I go out with the board at all times of night. Someone snipped the wire at the base of the streetlight on the bike path near my launch spot so if there is no moon it is very very dark. I wear black workout tights, a black nylon shirt, the board is navy blue so we are blended. Before I launch I sit on the granite block and breathe the scents which I know as intimately as any on earth. It calms me. I study the water. Body of water. Maybe there will be a faint spreading glow, a pulse almost like a heartbeat, and maybe in the flush there will be a moving image. I hope so. I pray so. I am listening hard, and I hear the scuffing cadence of footfall, a night runner who I’m guessing can’t sleep either.
Is the runner good or bad? I don’t know yet. Tonight one pulse of light will be enough.
