The Pond

Elliott ran from Laurie like a colt from a lariat, and in the breeze of his passing I smelled lavender. Laurie was huffing along behind, her rolling pin raised high, floured and white like a pennant. “Ellie, you fuck,” she muttered when she thought she was alone. I was crouched in the wicker, watching like a cat. Her big thrombotic legs, sluiced and oiled, rattled like gelatin as she stomped back the way she’d come. I took a deep breath. When I heard the door to Laurie’s cabin slam, I pushed myself out of the hedge. I stood with my hands on my hips, looking down the road.

There was one road out of the Valley, a gravel path more like a walking trail. This time of year, with all the rain, it was washed in places and pitted like the surface of the moon. To either side ran a culvert full of stale water which reflected the pale trout bellies of the leaves above and the hydrangeas in bloom. The road was hooded by tall trees which bent, revealing and obscuring the grey plaited clouds with their riffling boughs. Standing crosshatched in shadow with the evening coming down and the hidden insects buzzing, you could feel the breeze kicked up like an old dog, and the lacey wingbeat of a thrush overhead. Standing on the roadside with the smell of lavender still hung drying on the air, and the sun like a cutlass gashing through the overstory, I could close my eyes, peering through that curtain of pink veinous tissue, listening for the rabbit in the heather, or the chipmunk on the stone. I could carefully attend to the growth of my fingernails, the smarting of yesterday’s rugburn, the slow dilation of my pores. I could stumble upon a new calculus of birdsong and white heat. I could sink very low, and stroke the shining backs of beetles, and relish in the unimpressive, the bystanding. I could see and unsee. I could look and be unlooked for.

So it was with summer.

I went down the road, my bare feet burning on the hot gravel. Ellie had been barefoot too, so I figured he couldn’t have run so far. The road curved as it made to leave the Valley, looping around a small pond overridden with marigold and pickerel. Butterflies stole across the smooth surface, and dragonflies lit on the bulrush. The pond was effusive with sunlight, the shine of it like a carousel mirror. Along the bank grew thick swaths of switchgrass. On summer evenings, there was no greater joy than to lie on the bank and watch the tips of the grasses sway. The moon would play fox in its cloudy warren, and the sun, a detracted hunter, would dip its head and slink over the horizon. All this observed from a bed of down, with the toads piping in the reeds and an evening’s cold coming on.

Ellie sat on the edge of the pond, his feet in the water, his hands tucked in his pockets. He had the lank posture of a coat draped over a chair. I could see the protruding bole of his spine through his sweat-sheer white t-shirt. He didn’t look at me as I approached, though I dribbled gravel coming off the road. His eyes, as my mother might say, were on the curtains, not the players. On the bank beside him was a white napkin wrapping something round and bulbous. When I was within a yard or so, he pulled his hand from his pocket and spread the napkin wide, revealing a golden biscuit. He nipped a piece with his finger and held it delicately before his nose. “Come here, girl,” he said, turning the biscuit in his fingers. The sound of his voice froze me midstride. For a moment I felt like running, attaining distance from the scene. I felt the need to defy all things under the sun. It was the clipped, offhand way that Ellie spoke to me. It raised my hackles, the inertia behind his voice, as if the words had been forming, snowballing for hours. And yet despite these apprehensions I stood transfixed, for he had spoken to me, and I had listened. In a heat to break the mold, in the capillary shadow of tall grasses, I walked delicately to stand at Ellie’s side.

He handed me the biscuit, then broke another piece from the whole and gave me a quick look. There was a kind of relief in his expression, as if he’d smacked a mosquito and been reimbursed with a smear of his own blood. He kicked his feet through the silt at the pond’s edge and we both looked out over the water. Or rather, he looked out and I watched him looking. His black hair was smeared back, matte with dried sweat and salt. The nape of his neck was red as a cherry. His skin on the whole was very pale, unbefitting a boy in summer. This was strange, for as far as I could tell he spent nearly every waking moment out of doors. And yet he did not wear the world on his skin, as most boys do. His skin was pearlescent, even waxy. To look at him, you felt a surge of protectiveness, near panic. You wanted to get him safely out of the sun, for fear of his melting.

“You ever caught a fish with your hands?” Ellie asked. He pulled his feet free of the water and deftly spun to his stomach, head leaning just slightly over the water. He peered into the pond for a long, elegiac moment, his nose nearly brushing the water. What he saw there brought to heel the rush of his boyhood, laid him low to ponder some infinitesimal verity. What he saw I could only guess. Maybe himself. I stood hexed at his side, too fearful to move. There was a certain horror in watching him grapple with wisdom. He couldn’t grasp it, not with hands still slippery with youth.

When the moment passed, Ellie shook his head and crinkled his nose. He had a tossed about look, a spurned appeal. He peered up at me, and his eyes were slightly red around the edges. He patted the grass at his side, and I lay down beside him. I too gazed into the water just off the bank, but saw only an impression of myself, sinewy in the late-day shadow. I peered through my reflection and saw the silt of the pond and the small aquatics that grew from the loam. Little fish moved smooth as whispers, their prismatic scales flashing. They maneuvered in complex geometries which belied the simplicity of their forms. I saw a small freshwater snail on a smooth stone, ensconced in its shell, the asynchronous revolving of its eyestalks.

“Why would you catch a fish with your hands?” I asked Ellie. I looked sidelong at his reflection beside my own. I felt the sudden urge to stir our two reflections together, to tangle us into one mess of shadow and light.

Ellie leaned slightly away from the water, still twirling the sliver of biscuit in his fingers. “Because it’s hard. It’s a challenge. Because I want to.”

Three reasons. I nodded, satisfied. “How is it done?”

He raised himself to his elbows. “We bait ‘em in with these biscuits. When they’re close enough to cuddle, we drag ‘em out.”

“They’ll be slippery,” I said.

“Of course they’ll be slippery. You think I haven’t thought of that?” Ellie reached behind him, into the back pocket of his jeans. He unfolded a dark red handkerchief, tattered with use. “I tie this to my hand to give me grip.” He demonstrated, wrapping one of the handkerchiefs around his left hand several times. As he wrapped, I noticed a set of embroidered initials on the fabric, but they spun away too fast for me to read them. After three tight loops, he tied the fabric off to itself and showed me what he’d made.

“That might work,” I said.

“Of course it’ll work!” he said. “I tried it yesterday, almost caught a bass. It was heavier than I thought, though, and I lost it.”

“That’s a shame,” I said. The sarcasm was unintended. I don’t believe I was even of an age yet to mean two things at once. Yet Ellie threw me a wounded look, a look full of dispirit. I realized that what he wanted was beyond my means to give him, my capacity for awe overruled by a chronic disinterest in anything I couldn’t hear, see, feel. He turned away from me, and I felt a subtle shift in his attention. He was no longer trying to impress me. He was trying to keep from crying. In a gush of pity, I wanted to touch him. I flexed my fingers and at that mere movement he cringed, dodged away. He shot up to his knees and I did the same, less gracefully. He held the biscuit firmly in his palm, then hurled it hard across the water. He threw the morsel with a certain angst, a bleary vehemence. He was angry, but not with me. The biscuit settled, soaked, garnered weight. We both watched the crumb crest the soft clear ripples it had elicited on impact. Something rushed from the reeds, a thrush. The sky was purpling, the wind staggered through the pines, its passage a rasp like the sea.

“How long does it take?” I asked Ellie, trying to reconnect.

“Shh,” he said, his eyes on the pond. His knees were black with dirt, his elbows too. The grasses around us hissed. Wordlessly we watched the rising and falling of the bait. It was a minute or more before it vanished. One moment it was there, the next it wasn’t. Ellie smiled slightly and nodded at me. I realized I was still grasping the crumb he’d given me. “Throw it closer to the bank,” he said. I tossed the crumb, and we shuffled back further from the bank to keep our shadows off the water. Again, the waiting. In the sleepy come-on of evening we huddled, our shoulders scraping. The morsel was snatched away, this time with a violence. Ellie almost clapped, so satisfied was he with our progress. He took another piece of biscuit and settled again on his stomach. Like a lizard he slithered through the grass to peer once more over the pond’s lip. I tried to follow, but he held up his hand and shooed me back. With delicious care he placed the last crumb only inches from the bank, where it hovered in the still, translucent water. He raised his kerchief-wrapped hand and set it high like a trap, his elbow a loaded spring.

His hand snapped downward with incredible speed, meeting the water with a galumphing splash, the spray of it in my face. There was a struggle. Ellie was keeled over, his torso half over the bank. I rushed to kneel beside him, holding his legs firmly to keep him from slipping further. The splashing was an unrelenting, fervent rain. Ellie yanked hard and I saw that in his hands he held a fish, a large fish with green scales and a wide gulping mouth. Its lithe warm body squirming, green against the red of the kerchief, water flung to shine elastic in the air. Its eyes were the wet black of rain-filled potholes, and when they found me I stumbled backwards, lost my grip on Ellie’s legs. Those eyes were ill-befitting a creature of the genus, they were a slack net capable of engrossing anything. When I let go of Ellie’s legs, he slipped further over the bank, such that his hair dangled in the water. Hastily I snatched his ankles. There was a smack, a curse, squelch. Ellie leapt up as though scalded.

The fish was gone. Ellie peeled his wet red kerchief, mumbling quietly to himself. As he unwound the fabric, I again caught a glimpse of the embroidered initials. ABH in gold thread. Ellie threw the kerchief away and looked at me. His hair hung lank in his seething eyes. “I slipped,” he said. “Where were you?”

“You told me to stay back,” I said.

Ellie wiped the hair from his eyes, reached down and took up what was left of the biscuit, shoved it into his mouth. He chewed quickly. “Foot and a half at least. Gum’d eat his other leg if I showed him.”

“I saw it. I can tell him all about it.”

“He won’t believe you. You’re a kid.” He stood up and stretched. He smelled of fish, but underneath there was still a lilting note of lavender. Evening dusted the wood line, and the shadows were near crimson. The birdsongs had changed; they were sorrier. Somewhere distant a bull lowed.

“Laurie’ll kill you when you go back,” I said flatly.

“Let her try. I may not go back, besides.”

“How come?” I asked.

Ellie shrugged, shouldering some new weight, testing its pressure. “I’m sick to death of this Valley.”

I frowned and said nothing.

“I’m through with plucking chickens and mending fences. I want to see those mountains, the ones Gum’s got pinned up in the garage. What about the ocean? I want to see that too. I want to go swimming in water that don’t stink you up for days.”

“Well,” I said. “You can do what you want, can’t you?”

“Yeah, I suppose I can.” He squinted his eyes. “Suppose I can, and more besides.” He peered through me, in the way a deer might peer through the trees, transfixed by something further along, something dangerous. Relegated to his periphery, upwind, I crept closer.

He stood in a venue of potential, a room of doors. His selection was slow, he had one key. Whichever door he chose would take him someplace I couldn’t follow, and so I lay in wait, my resentments rising. At last, I felt I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Why don’t you just go to hell!” I shouted. He was grounded immediately, shaking his head, dazed. His eyes were wide as he recognized me, recognized the tears in my eyes, the quivering of my lips. But before he could speak and so wrestle me to his will, I was bolting back up to the road, back the way I had come. I returned to the Valley, dust rising behind me. My feet stung; my lungs burned. I didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, until the smell of lavender had forsaken the air.