Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories (15 page)

Oh, boy! In the back seat, I had broken out into a frenzied sweat. In just a few minutes, we would be there at that one-and-only place where everything happened: Clear Lake! For months, when the snow piled high around the garage and the arctic wind whistled past the blast furnaces, into the open hearth and around the back porch, under the eaves and through the cracks in the window sills, I had lain tossing on my solitary pallet and dreaming of Clear Lake, imagining myself flexing my magnificent split-bamboo casting rod, drifting toward the lily pads, where a huge bronzeback—an evil, legendary small-mouthed bass named Old Jake—waited to meet his doom at my hands.

I would see myself showing my dad how to tie a royal-coachman fly, which I had read about in
Sports Afield.
He would gasp in astonishment. I also astounded my mother in these dreams by demonstrating an encyclopedic grasp of camp cookery. I had practically memorized an article entitled “How to Prepare the Larger Game Fish.” The text began: “A skillful angler knows how to broil landlocked salmon and lake trout in the 25-to-40-pound weight range.…” I had never
seen,
let alone cooked, a salmon or a trout or a pike or anything else—except for little sunfish, perch, bullheads and the wily crappie—but I was ready for them.

We rounded a familiar curve and rolled past a green cemetery dotted with drooping American flags. Steaming,
the Olds slowed to a crawl as we inched past the general store, with a cluster of yellow cane poles leaning against its wooden front amid a pile of zinc washtubs. We had arrived.

“Now, look, you kids stay in the car. HEY, OLLIE!” the old man shouted out of the side window toward the feed store. “HEY, OLLIE, WE'RE HERE!”

Through the rain-spattered windshield, we could see that a few lights were on here and there in the ramshackle white-clapboard buildings overhung with willows and sweeping elm trees that lined the street. A tall figure in overalls strolled across the sidewalk and plunked his size-14 clodhopper on the running board, battered farmers straw hat pushed to the back of his head.

“By God, ya made it.” His Adam's apple, the size of a baseball, bobbed up and down his skinny neck like a yo-yo,

“Yep. We're here, Ollie.”

“How was the trip?”

“Pretty good. Got a bee in the car, though.”

“Back just before ya hit Crystal Lake?”

“That's right.”

“Just before ya come to Henshaw's barn?”

“Yep.”

“Gol durn. That son of a gun's been doin' that all summer. Got me twice.”

Ollie owned six cabins on the shore of Clear Lake, which was rimmed solidly with a thick incrustation of summer shacks—except at the north end, where the lake was swampy and the mosquitoes swarmed.

“I saved the green one for you. She's all set. I emptied out the boat this morning.”

A jolting shot of excitement ripped through me. The boat!
Our
boat, which I would row and anchor and bail out, and hang onto and cast my split-bamboo rod—My split-bamboo rod! I had forgotten for hours that I had left it all back in the garage.

“How's the fishing this year?” asked the old man.

“Well, now, it's a funny thing you asked. They sure were hittin' up to about a week or ten day ago. Guy from Mishawaka stayin' in cabin three got his limit a' walleye every day. But they slacked off ‘bout a week ago. Ain't hittin' now.”

“I guess I shoulda been here last week.” It was always “last week” at Clear Lake.

“They might hit crickets. I got some for sale.”

“I'll be over in the morning to pick some up, Ollie. I got a feeling we're gonna hit em big this year.” The old man never gave up.

We turned off the main highway and drove along the beloved, twisting dirt road—now a river of mud—that led through cornfields and meadows, down toward the magical lake.

“Ollie looks skinnier,” my mother said.

“He's just got new overalls,” my father answered, sluing the Olds around a sharp bend. Night was coming on fast as it does in the Michigan lake country, black and chill. The rain had picked up. In the back seat, I was practically unconscious with excitement as the first cottages
hove into view. Between them and the trees that ringed them was the dark, slate void of the lake.

“She looks high,” my father said. He always pretended to be an expert on everything, including lakes. Already my mother was plucking at pickle jars, Brillo pads, clothespins, rolls of toilet paper and other drifting odds and ends of stuff that she had banked around her in the front seat.

Next to every cottage but one was a parked car pulled up under the trees. Down in the lake, I could make out the pier and the black swinging wedges of Ollie's leaky rowboats. A few yellow lights gleamed from the dark cottages onto the green, wet leaves of the trees.

“Well, there she is.”

Our lights swept over the rear of a starboard-leaning, green-shingled, screen-enclosed cabin. Above the back door, painted on a weathered two-by-four, was the evocative appellation HAVEN OF BLISS. All of Ollie's other cottages had names, too:
BIDE-A-WEE, REST-A-SPELL, DEW DROP INN, NEVA-KARE, SUN-N-FUN.

We inched under the trees. My father switched off the Olds. With a great, gasping shudder, she sank into a deep stupor, her yearly trial by fire half over. The rain was coming down hard now, pounding on the roof of the car and dripping off the trees all around us. I tumbled out of the back door—plunging into mud up to my ankles—and began sloshing my way down through the wet bushes and undergrowth to the lake. Behind me, I could hear my kid brother already whining that the mosquitoes were biting him. There at my feet, lapping
quietly at the rocks, the black water faintly aglow, was Clear Lake.

In the darkness a few feet offshore, I could dimly make out our wooden boat, the waves slapping against its side.

K-thunk … K-thunk … K-splat … Plop … Plop…

One of the most exciting sounds known to man.

“Hey, come on! We gotta unload. Everything's getting wet!” my father shouted down through the trees.

I slogged back up the path, splopping and slipping and skidding and cracking my shins against tree stumps. My father and mother were tugging at the tarpaulin that covered the luggage rack on the roof. The rain poured down unrelentingly.

“Where the hell's the flashlight? Don't tell me we forgot the FLASHLIGHT!”

“I thought you brought it,” my mother answered from the dark deluge.

“OH, JESUS CHRIST! WHAT THE HELL
DID
WE BRING?”

“Well, you made up the list.”

“How the hell can your forget the FLASHLIGHT?”

“Well, if you had gotten up when you said you would, you—

“SHUT UP! I don't have no time to argue. This stuff's getting soaked!”

My mother disappeared into the cabin. “The lights aren't working,” she called out into the rain a moment later.

My father didn't even bother to answer that one. If
she had said the roof was gone and there was a moose in the bedroom, it wouldn't have surprised him. He staggered past me, reeling under an enormous cardboard box full of pots, pans, baking powder, rubber ducks and ping-pong paddles.

“Don't just stand around.
Do
something!” he bellowed to everyone within hearing. “DAMN IT, DO I HAVE TO DO
EVERYTHING?'

I grabbed a beach ball from the back seat, waded through the clay and groped my way up the rickety back steps. Inside, the cabin smelled of rotting wood, wet shingles, petrified fish scales and dead squirrels. My father had struck a match, which dimly lit up the worn linoleum and bare boards of the kitchen.

“Why the hell didn't Ollie turn on the juice? That's what I want to know!” he raged, flicking his match around in the dimness.

“Hey, here's a kerosene lantern!” my mother said excitedly. Above the tin sink, on a shelf, stood a dusty glass lamp half full of cloudy yellow oil.

“OUCH! DAMN IT!” The match had burned down to the old man's thumb. Sound of fumbling and scratching and cursing in the darkness. Finally, another match flared.

“Gimme that lousy lamp.”

He lifted off the black, smoky chimney and applied the match to the wick, turning up the knob on the side as he did so. It sputtered and hissed.

“DON'T BREATHE ON THE MATCH!” he yelled.

At last the wick caught hold and a steady blue-yellow flame lit up the primitive kitchen. We rushed out into
the dark and for the next hour lugged wet sacks, bags, blankets, fielders' mitts, all of it, into the kitchen, until at long last the Olds, a ton and a half lighter, shook itself in relief and settled down for a two-week rest

My mother had been sorting it all out as we dragged it in, carrying blankets and bedding into the little wooden cubicles that flanked the kitchen. When it was all indoors, the old man stripped off his soaked shirt and sprawled out on a lumpy blue kitchen chair.

“Well, here we are.” He grinned, water dripping down over his ears. “Boy, am I hungry!”

My mother had already opened a can of Spam. We sat amid the boxes, downing two-inch-thick sandwiches.

“We gotta set the alarm, because we wanna get out real early to fish,” announced the old man between bites.

My kid brother was already asleep in the next room.

“If ya wanna get the big ones, ya gotta get up early!” His eyes gleamed brightly in the glow of the kerosene lamp. “They always bite good after a rain. Yessir!”

But it was all back in the garage—my rod, my reel, my father's tackle box, his bobbers, his Secret Gypsy Fish Bait Oil that he had bought from the mail-order catalog.

“But, Dad, don't you remember I told you.…” I began miserably.

“So how come I found it on top of the car? I wonder who put all that fishing stuff on top of the car? Hmmmm …

I guess somebody must have snuck up and put it on top of the car when you weren't looking.”

Ten minutes later, I lay in the dark, ecstatic with
relief and expectation, huddled under damp blankets and a musty comforter. The rain roared steadily on the roof-as it would for the next two weeks—and drummed metronomically onto the bare wooden floor beside my bed

K-thunk… K-thunk…Plop…Plop…Plop….

The boat called to me from the dark lake. From somewhere out in the woods, something squeaked twice and then was silent My kid brother tossed and whimpered softly from beneath his pillow; and across the room, my father's low, muttering snores thrummed quietly in the night. We were on vacation.

Lustiki! read the marquee in letters three feet high. Must be Lithuanian for lust, I mused, jogging from foot to foot to keep warm in the long line of Manhattan art-film fanciers in front of the East Side's smart new Cinema 69, their ascetic faces flushed in anticipation of another evening of artful montages, elegant pans, gracefully executed dissolves. I glanced at the posters that rimmed the box office. One of them read:

Lesbia herself, bosoms ripe as Indiana cantaloupes, her peasant eyes widely spaced in her magnificent Slavi
face, appeared to be enjoying a transcendental sexual climax with a Viet Cong irregular.

The throng around me looked like a Fellini crowd scene: squat females in leather jackets carrying bull-whips, coveys of razor-thin, trilling creatures of indeterminate sex in velvet jerkins and elf shoes, a few scowling, bearded revolutionaries in full Zapata attire, their denim jackets abristle with
OFF THE PIGS
buttons. The light from the marquee glinted from the polished lenses of hundreds of pairs of rose and blue sunglasses, some as large as dinner plates. A sizable contingent of Shoshone Indians in beaded headbands and fringed deerskin jackets exchanged mystic signs, their voices oddly Bronx-tinged as only
CCNY
braves' can be.