Beneath the Lake Page 2

  The reading, the warmth of the bunk, the dark afternoon sky, the hissing wind and rumbling waves… eventually the combination lulls him to sleep.

  He dreams of nothing.

  Raymond wakes untold minutes or hours later, not feeling rested or afraid, only irritable that he is still the only one in the camper. If any of his family returned, they decided not to wake him. The view through the window is as gloomy as before, but the rain seems to have softened and the wind, while still gusting, is no longer strong enough to rock the camper. He dares himself to go out and look for them, but he does not trust his sense of the storm. The waves continue rumbling from center lake to beach rim in a constant, staggered formation, a cauldron of raw natural energy expending itself in all directions.

  And then he sees them, down there in the water, and it is enough to make him disbelieve his own eyes. First there is Leonard, and not far away the blonde hair and bright green one-piece swimsuit that belong to Colt. They are diving through the waves, moving away from the beach. Raymond shouts, ‘Hey!’ as if to warn them, but of course there is no way they can hear him from inside.

  Dad is chest-deep and hurling himself parallel to a pair of waves that threaten to overtake him. Only at the last moment does his father curl against the swell, arms churning as if to claim someone from drowning as the wave bears him up and shoves him toward the beach. Ten feet he rides it, twenty, more… his father is laughing, braying like a fool, and finally Raymond understands.

  They are not panicking. They are not trying to save anyone. They are playing like big kids in the deep end of the pool. Raymond has been in here for hours, worrying, and they are out there having fun?

  Raymond has never heard the term ‘body surfing’ but he grasps the concept now. One after another they take turns wading out, dodging rollers, pointing and waving each other on before replicating the move his dad made. They look like seals, all noses and bellies, until the waves break down and leave them tumbling in the sand, and one by one they leap up to do it again.

  Mom is a little ways down the beach, closer to the point, waist-deep between swells. She steels herself, then points her hands and dives into a monster, vanishing for a five count, then pops up again, hair flying, and Raymond can almost hear her laughter from up here. He’s not used to seeing his mother throw herself into dangerous situations, and it is disturbing.

  They left him out, as if they have discovered a magic they want only for themselves. They didn’t think to invite him down, or decided he was too small. He knows he is pouting, acting like a baby, but still. He stays, watching them splash and dive and ride their way back in. Over and over, a seemingly endless cycle.

  Off to the right, within shouting distance of his own family, another has decided to enter the fray. Raymond recognizes them vaguely, a mother and father and their teen son, the parents heftier than his own, the son taller than Leonard but skinny, frail looking, all ribs and boney chest. They have been camped a few hundred feet down the point and seem poorer than his own family, who are not wealthy by Raymond’s own knowledge of such things (his father is always reminding them how hard he works to afford things like the used Aqua Cat, the rebuilt mini bike and the camper that Uncle Gaspar found for them at a wholesale auction). But this other family doesn’t have any such recreational vehicles, used or not. They don’t even have a propane grill.

  What they have is one humongous, ugly green canvas tent, a sagging beast that took them most of a day (and a lot of cussing and yelling at each other) to set up. A few ratty lawn chairs, and a rusted-out white Chevy truck that looked like something out of an after-school special reminding kids of the dangers of hitchhiking. Raymond had seen very little of the family, except for a few passing glances on his way to the outhouses half a mile down the dirt road. The wife in her wide flappy orange-flowered swimsuit with a tutu or ballerina thing around the waist, her ankles thick as the roll of toilet paper she carried in one hand. She’s wearing the same kind of beach outfit down there now, knee-deep in the surf, petrified.

  The dad has a beer-wagon belly, thick arms, moss-like hair on his back, and he too is a mass of white flesh everywhere but for his face, which is lobster-red. He’s not so much surfing as trying to batter the waves into submission, it seems. He might be laughing but it looks like he is yelling, roaring each time he flops into the center of another roller.

  Though the sky seems a shade lighter now, silvery gray with cracks of sun, the water itself has darkened beyond gray-blue, as if the lake is not ready to give up the storm just yet. The strangest thing is how much darker it is in the shallows, where the water should be lighter brown. Way out past the bay the blue seems held back by a border, some kind of barrier unaffected by the rolling waves.

  Raymond’s unsettled gaze is drawn back to the teen son from the other family, who has hacked his way farther out than any of them. He bobs vertically for a moment, cupping his mouth to the lake, and Raymond wonders if he is drinking it. But then the boy glazes over, suddenly tired, and the word ‘drowning’ floats through Raymond’s mind once more.

  Another crooked wave rises up behind the boy, and he springs to life. His skinny white arms wind around and around as his legs chop into the wave. Somehow the narrow length of him turns into a ski and he shoots forward, spine arched, riding the gray edge faster and faster, until the last possible moment. Just when it seems the wave is about to throw him against the cliff wall, his body jack-knifes and crumbles into a pile of limbs, slapping him to the beach.

  Raymond tenses, convinced the boy just broke his neck.

  But the kid unfolds and rises again, excited and shouting. His mother looks frightened as the boy stomps along the beach, bends over, takes two fistfuls of wet sand and begins slinging it at the surf before charging back in.

  The mother slips and falls as if pulled under by the current, some kind of undertow – though Raymond has never felt such a thing here. Several waves ride over the spot she was standing in and she does not come up once they have passed. If she doesn’t know how to swim, she’s in big trouble.

  Somehow Raymond knows they all are.

  The father tromps back out, spitting water and hitching up his cut-off jeans, which are now laden with dark sand that runs off in syrupy streams, and he seems to be coughing or choking. He staggers, legs cutting into the almost black shelves, slapping around like a man who has lost his hat or gone blind.

  The head-banging teen son points to where his mother vanished, jabbing with his finger, and Raymond is almost certain the boy is laughing.

  At last the mother pops up out of the water, on her feet and closer to shore, swept back to her original knee-deep position. She stands tiredly, shoulders slumped and head down. She doesn’t move as the waves slop against her hips and up to her chest where – Raymond can see this clearly and is shocked by her lack of awareness, then ashamed to notice it at all – one of her breasts has flopped out.

  Her husband, who seems only curious as he trudges over to her, leans in close as if trying to recognize her, and then slaps her across the side of the head so hard the woman reels sideways, stumbling in a circle to right herself. She does not look up or cry out or run away. Her shoulders slump once more, and Raymond is glad that her hair obscures her face. He doesn’t want to see her expression, or the blood that must be leaking from her nose.

  With no further exchange or provocation, the husband socks her again, this time with what appears to be a closed fist.

  Raymond looks away, a sick thrill and equally repulsive hot shame making his entire body quiver with a new kind of fear. His own family are staring at this other development in dumbstruck confusion.

  The teen son hops and surges toward his father, and Raymond assumes the kid is about to grab the big man, shove him away from the poor woman. But the son does not defend his mother or attack his father.

  Lashing out like a boxer, the boy punches his mother in the stomach.

  The husband seems unaware of the violence his son just perpetrated, or t
hat his son is there at all. He reaches for his wife’s neck as she folds over, catches her, raises her upright once more. He slaps her twice and then his meaty fingers are sinking into her windpipe. He is soon strangling her with both hands, and behind them, leaping around like a joker in some deranged king’s court, the son screams at the sky.

  Raymond is hiccuping his way through tears and unshackled terror by the time his own father collides with the fat man, shoving the son down in the process. Leonard is not far behind, and even Colt looks ready to fight, to defend this poor woman.

  The dark water churns, and their limbs splash and claw through the shrinking waves. The lake is so dark now, he can’t see their arms and legs beneath the black surface. The lake appears to be cutting them in sections, swallowing them.

  The top of someone’s head bobs up, only to be submerged again.

  Raymond’s dad slams a forearm down on the other dad’s collarbone, again at the base of his neck. The murderous hands release the wife, who falls face first into the lake and does not attempt to get up.

  The teen son leaps onto Warren’s back, but Leonard is there, yanking the kid by the legs, dragging him away from the mess before the kid can get a good grip.

  Colt screams at all of them. Raymond’s mom screams at Colt, telling her, he imagines, to get away, get back.

  Chaos reigns. Bodies swarm and crash. Another rogue wave moving almost sideways douses the two men, and just when Raymond is prepared for all of them to clash in a frenzy, the melee ends.

  All three of them, the mother, father and teen son, are rolling in the water. They look like drowning victims Raymond has seen on TV. His dad drags the huge man up to the beach. Leonard follows suit with the teen son. Colette and Mom work to pull the mother by the legs into the shallows.

  Because the camper is set back from the cliff’s edge, Raymond’s view does not extend to the first ten or twenty feet of beach directly below, nor to the hill and cutaway path his mother led him up a few hours ago. The last thing he sees is his father bending over one of the bodies, as if preparing to attempt mouth-to-mouth, then Colt’s wet blonde hair running away, down toward the point. At last, all of the legs, shapes, people, his family and the other, are out of sight. Gone.

  Raymond sits, stunned, crying. For a long while he cannot move. His young imagination is flooded with horrible possibilities and outcomes, working to fill the void they have left in the wake of their violence.

  The winds taper off. The sun breaks through the clouds. The rain thins and slides away, leaving only a sunset mist. The churning lake becomes a pattern of smaller swells, the gray fading to a welcome deep blue.

  It’s over now.

  Raymond slides down from his bunk, legs weak, stomach sour, and pads his way to the camper door. His feet feel lopsided, and when he looks down he understands why. His right foot is still in his Incredible Hulk sandal, the left is bare. He pauses, hand on the doorknob, thinking about the frightening race up the cliff with his mother, the whirling sand on the point where he lost it. First he will find his sandal, then he will go look for them, feet protected from the sand burrs and sharp sticks.

  That’s what Leonard would do. Right?

  But he can’t bring himself to open the camper door. The knob won’t turn in his hands. The frosted window has turned deep gray, deeper than the lake when the storm was at its worst, and he knows that an unnatural night has fallen on the other side.

  He holds the doorknob, torn between two important needs. One is to find his family, make sure they are safe. The other is to stay inside, hidden from the bad people, the tricky storm, the descending darkness. He remains stuck for a long time, until time itself loses all meaning and his fears take full ownership of their host.

  Eventually, something else opens the door for Raymond Mercer, prying it from his stiff young hands with heart-stopping force.

  Nothing is ever the same after that.

  Invitation

  Summer used to be Ray’s favorite time of year, but this one is beginning to make him wonder if he would be better off spending the remainder of his warm seasons much further north, in Canada or Alaska, a place one imagines the weather or a grizzly bear being the encompassing problem. Where everything is reduced to the moment, make fire or die, his blood or yours, pure survival.

  Existence down here in civilization is not so dire, at least not in his daily dealings, but it is more complicated. He can’t stop feeling depressed by the trivial outpouring of everyone’s status updates, even as he grows numb to the real tragedies playing out across the world. He takes solace in researching a new set of kitchen knives and ordering limited runs of denim from Japan, but his anxiety returns before the packages arrive on his doorstep. Two years shy of his fortieth birthday, Ray has a strong suspicion that he is merely killing time, consuming things, contributing nothing of value, presenting a forgery of the self for his lack of understanding of the man he has in the meantime become.

  These are bitter thoughts, he knows. Bar thoughts, the kind that make a man reach for another drink on another July afternoon, spreading his fuck-me-it’s-Tuesday mood across his usual corner booth in Pescado Rojo, where the air conditioning is strong, the beer cold and it’s just a little easier to keep the bad news chilling in the meat locker of the mind. The Rojo is one of several restaurants his father owns, and one the old tiger has not visited in more than a decade, the last time either of his parents visited Ray here in beautiful Boulder, Colorado, where weed is legal but glaucoma and Birkenstocks have not been cured. At the outdoor patio end of the cantina, sprinklers are misting patrons reluctant to return to the office, the bartender is squeezing his way through a mountain of limes, the psychedelic desert and doom sounds of Calexico permeate the afternoon.

  Not a bad place to work, or pretend to. This corner booth, unofficially recognized by the staff as his office, is a place to show up, and as such it may be the only thing holding him together.

  The first blow came in early May, when Ray lost his primary investor in the business venture that was to be his stand of independence – escape – from the family’s wealth. For going on six years now, Mercer Hospitality, the retail and travel arm of the larger corporation, has been paying Ray ninety thousand per year to consult with the managers and operations personnel at various restaurants, flower shops and a furniture franchise. Ray’s job description has something to do with recommending local and online marketing strategies where he sees potential to increase revenues, and what he has to show for his diligence in this free-range capacity over the past eighteen months is a series of coupon ads in the university daily and a ‘snarky’ culinary blog whose entries leave him feeling almost as fraudulent as his paycheck.

  The weird part is, no one seems to mind he has become a wastrel. Despite the quarterly updates being funneled back to his father via Gaspar Riko, Mercer’s Corp’s head of legal affairs and Warren’s consigliere since both men came home from Vietnam, Ray has not heard from his CEO-father in almost seven years. He clings to his last measure of pride, refusing to petition the family treasury for a seed investment even as he survives on its maintenance.

  The second knock was perhaps less troublesome in the long run, but no less insulting in the short. Ray hadn’t realized that he didn’t love Pam until she announced she had met someone in the Bay Area, was moving in with them in three weeks, this thing she and Ray had shared for the past two years was over, lifeless, they both knew it. He had known their relationship was not meant to last, but he still found it difficult not to take her warm, apologetic and terribly logical severance as a verdict on his value in the scheme of her life, and to females in general.

  ‘I’m so relieved,’ he’d told her during that final dinner. ‘It’s for the best, absolutely, you deserve the right one. We all do,’ and he meant that. After, he walked Pam to her car, hugged and cheek-kissed her goodbye, laughing at one of their old jokes and wishing her all the best. But inside he was twelve again, heart-stomped by Tracy Valdez, who had said only �
��you’re not very mature’ before roller-skating away to take Brian Leiderman’s hand at Wheels Rink before Ray could finish unlacing his skates.