Surface Tension (2 page)

We all walk back to the cottage together, the three of us,
right next to each other, like three ears of corn. This is my favorite place in the world.

Mom and Dad and I are hiking up the creek to the waterfall. The rocks are as big as bowling balls, but they also seem smaller than last year. Or maybe I'm taller. I can stand on one and then hop to the next. The creek is pretty dry right now, just enough water to keep our feet wet, not gushing like it was that one year. I hope this doesn't mean the waterfall is dry too.

I wanted to go barefoot, but Mom made me put my shoes on in case there's broken glass in the creek bed. The stones are sharp here too, because they haven't been worn down by the lake yet. The walls of the creek are all shale, which is like a really thin rock you can break in your hand, but it's sharp as a razor when you break it.

There's just a little stream of water going by, filtering into a little pool. We step closer and I hear a plop like somebody dropping a round stone into the water. I must have scared a frog.

I see him. I see his little eyes sticking out of the water.

Dad kneels down on the stones and cups both of his hands and inches them out over the water. His hands are so
slow that the frog doesn't move, even though the hands are getting closer and closer to his head.

Dad brings his hands together quick and cups the water underneath the frog, but the frog is slippery and strong and dives down deep to a safe place in the muck.

“Damn.”

We keep walking. A little dog on a backyard chain barks at us until we're out of sight, and the creek walls rise up around us as we walk deeper into the wild. The road noises fade out, and all I can hear is the grasshoppers buzzing in the grass and the breeze in the upper branches.

This spot is my favorite right here, this little mossy spot where the water comes down the side of the gorge and drips like a leaky faucet. I reach up and pull a piece of shale out of the wall, and a huge clump higher up falls out too.

The gorge walls grow higher around us and we're in the shade now. The walls are twenty feet high and growing with every step.

Dad is a few steps in front of me, and he stops short and investigates something on the ground. He's blocking me, but I can tell it's something cool, because Mom is walking away from it with her hand covering her face. I can't see it yet, but I can smell something horrible. Dad has his shirt pulled up over his nose like a bandit.

I walk up next to him. It's something dead, but I can't tell what it is. It's about as big as a fox, but it could be a cat. There's not any fur that I can see, only a swirling clump of maggots on the flesh where the fur should be.

The maggots move like they're one creature, but I can see them individually. Eating through the body like it's an ice cream sundae.

Mom and Dad start walking up the gorge. I'll catch up with them.

I feel like I might throw up from the maggots and the smell of rotting flesh, but it's also really awesome. I pick up a stick and poke at it, just to see what happens. The maggots don't care; they just keep on eating.

Mom yells at me to leave it alone, and I drop the stick and start walking after them up the gorge.

Once we get far enough from the smell, Mom opens up the backpack and gives us each a rectangle of Hershey's chocolate. I put it on my tongue and let it melt.

There must be a car in the gorge up ahead. I keep seeing pieces of it, rusted metal parts decaying in the middle of the creek bed, like they got washed downstream. The walls of the gorge must be fifty feet high now, but there's a road up there somewhere. I wonder how the car got down here. Nobody could have driven it. Maybe it got washed down the waterfall.

I imagine some old gangsters with tommy guns pushing it off the road and watching it slide down the gorge wall. I bet when we find the car, we'll find a dead body in the trunk with bullet holes in it.

We walk up the creek bed, through the S turns, and I see the car in the weeds off to the right. I walk over to check it out.

There are no doors or windows, and even the steering wheel is gone. The seats are just wire springs, and the trunk doesn't have bullet holes, it's just rusty. It's just a busted-up old skeleton of a car. It's not that exciting.

Mom and Dad kept walking while I was stopped looking
at the car. I hurry across the stones to catch up with them. I can just start to hear the waterfall now. I think I can hear the sound of water against stones.

We turn the corner, but we're not there yet. The water is getting louder and I can almost feel it now. I can almost feel the mist and the spray, but I know I'm just imagining it.

I can't wait to turn that next corner and see the waterfall again. My heart is jumping in my chest and I'm running across the rocks.

I get to the last turn. I know that as soon as I get past these trees on the left, I'll be able to see it.

I hop up onto a big boulder and look up at the waterfall. It's not like I remember it. There's not much water this year. In other years, the water would be rampaging down the center of the stones, but now it's just trickling.

I move across the stones, cross the stream, and get up to where the water is bouncing off one of the bigger rocks. I take off my shoes and socks and wade into the shallow water. There's still enough water to dip my head under the falling water, and it feels like a cold, heavy shower on my head.

Dad tells me to climb up the side of the waterfall so he can take my picture. I climb up and raise my arms above my head, like a gymnast after a really sweet dismount. Dad takes the picture.

Even though there's not that much water, I feel happy just being here. I look up at the gorge walls, where the shale is crumbling. Now the gorge is over a hundred feet tall, but the waterfall is always cutting through it at the top, so it's probably only forty feet. I always wonder what else is up there.

There's a few burned logs and a bunch of beer cans next
to us in the woods. Somebody must have camped here recently. I want to do that. Mom opens up the backpack and pulls out a bunch of snacks for us.

I sit down on the ledge, right before the drop-off where the pool at the base of the waterfall gets super deep, and lean back against the rock. It's not comfortable, but I'm not moving either. Under the water, my toes look bigger than they do in real life.

Mom brings me over another rectangle of chocolate and a can of soda. A bunch of minnows are swimming around my feet. One swims between my toes and nibbles. It tickles, but I don't move, and now the minnows are swarming around my toes taking little bites and then swimming away.

They're tickling my feet so much I start laughing. Mom takes pictures of me and the waterfall and my feet and the minnows. This is the best.

We're all sitting at the picnic table finishing our breakfast. Dad made pancakes, and it's just the best thing to be sitting out here and looking out at the lake, eating pancakes. Mom says, “It's so serene.”

Dad says, “Serene. Serene.”

I don't say anything. Mr. Richardson comes over in his Sunday church clothes and asks if we'd mind if he started mowing the lawn. Dad says it's okay, and Mr. Richardson thanks him and says, “Got my kids coming down today to help get this cottage in order. Can't have it looking so rundown.” He gestures over his shoulder at the cottage, which is perfect in every way.

He goes inside, takes off his church suit, puts on his sweatpants and a T-shirt, and starts mowing his whole lawn.

He mows it every Sunday after church. He's like sixty or something. He does it the same way every time. He starts in the corner near the woodpile and mows diagonally across the lawn. He mows around the trees and under the clothesline all the way up to the edge of our property, then pushes the lawn mower all the way back to the edge of his house. It's a big lawn, and if I were him and I owned a big house like he does and my own business, I'd pay someone to mow my lawn. I don't know if he likes doing it or if he's just a cheapskate, but he does it himself every Sunday.

We finish our pancakes and bring everything back inside. Mom washes the dishes in one half of the sink while Dad rinses them and I dry them and put them away. There's only three of us, so we don't really have too many dishes and it doesn't take long. I sit at the kitchen table with my copy of
Animal Farm
and look out the side window.

Mr. Richardson gets finished with the mowing and rolls the lawn mower back into the garage. Mike, the oldest, drives in first. He drives a black pickup with a V-8 engine. He's also got a sweet-ass purple speedboat with a 200-horsepower outboard motor and a girlfriend named Eliza with blond hair, but he doesn't have them with him today.

Mrs. Richardson comes out and gives Mike a hug and then goes back inside. Mr. Richardson shakes Mike's hand like they're business partners, and Mike goes into the garage and gets out the grass collector. The lawn mower doesn't have a bag on it, so the cut grass gets spread across the lawn. Mike rolls over Mr. Richardson's diagonal lines with the grass collector and then empties the grass into a huge pile on the edge of the creek.

Joe shows up next. The middle one. He's just got a little
hatchback with nothing special about it and a girlfriend named Danielle, who's short with black hair and wears glasses. Joe's cool because he plays guitar in a band, but he's much quieter than Mike. He's usually either reading or practicing guitar, but today is a workday, so he gets the ladder out of the garage and pushes it up against the house and starts cleaning out the gutters. Our gutters have little trees growing in them.

Mary, the daughter, shows up last in her little red Volkswagen Beetle. She's got blond hair and blue eyes, but no boyfriend that I've ever seen. She gets a bucket of paint out of the garage and touches up some of the trim around the house.

They take a break for lunch and go inside, and I grab my book and go down to the beach to see if I can hear anything. They're all sitting on the screened-in porch talking and laughing. I can't see them because it's dark in there and sunny out here. Mike and Joe are making fun of Mary.

I just sit and listen to them from over on our little part of the beach. I sit in a folding lawn chair and pretend to read about the pigs.

After a while, the men come outside and I can hear the sound of metal clanging against metal. I guess they got enough work done for today, because Mike and Joe are playing horseshoes and drinking beer. I get up out of my chair and go up behind the woodpile so I can see them better.

There's two railroad spikes in little pits about forty feet apart, and Mike and Joe stand on either side of the one that's farther away from me and throw the horseshoes toward the one that I'm hiding close to. I guess you're supposed to throw the horseshoe and get it around the spike. I think you get a point for getting it close too. You must, because why else would they say “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades”?

Both guys are pretty good. They hit the spike on both of their throws. They walk down toward me and count up their points. They measure the distance between the horseshoes and the spike with another horseshoe. Mike says, “These are dead,” and Joe nods.

I don't know how the scoring works, but I like watching them play. They throw a few more rounds, and I get bored, so I go back to my chair and just listen to the metal bang against metal.

When the boys finish their game, the whole family except Mary goes out to the dock to swim. Mr. Richardson has so much hair on his back he looks like one of those old silverback gorillas. Mike is going bald already, but Joe still has all his hair. They both have almost the same body. Big shoulders, huge abs, and Adam's apples. I wonder if I'm ever going to have one of those. I feel my throat. I don't think I'm going to, because my dad doesn't have one.

Joe stands up on one of the dock's posts and raises his arms and one leg like the Karate Kid, then jumps off in a perfect swan dive that he folds in at the last second, disappearing under the water. He comes up thirty feet away and shakes out his hair.

Mr. Richardson has jumped in too and brought a bar of soap with him. He's going to take a bath in the lake, I guess. Now everybody is doing it. Lathering up their faces and armpits and then passing the soap to the next person. That's pretty weird. I don't know why they don't just take showers. They pull some shampoo from somewhere and take a big family bath with their swimsuits on.

After the bath, they take a boat out and water-ski. They go two at a time, first Mr. and Mrs. Richardson, with Mike
driving the boat. Then Mike and Joe. They're like a water show out there. They cross the wake and go under each other's lines. They hold the handle between their knees and drop a ski whenever they want. I wonder where Mary is. I haven't seen her for a while.

I get up and head back to our cottage. I walk the property line and look over to see if I can get a glimpse of Mary. Nothing. Her car is still here, though, so she must be somewhere. I get back to the cottage and Dad is inspecting the canoe and Mom is getting some chicken ready for dinner.

I don't want to do anything with my family. I want to be out on the boat with the Richardsons. I'd give anything to be a part of their family instead of mine.

Dad and his buddies Roger and Norm are off golfing. I didn't want to go with them because I hate golf. I'd rather just hang out and swim and do whatever. I mean, that's the whole point of having this cottage in the first place, isn't it? It just seems stupid to own this little cottage that's barely even a shack compared to the Richardsons' and then spend half your time out drinking in the sun on some golf course.