Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work (10 page)

In this day's letter she admitted to Julie she was maybe not so interested in people. She was thinking about what she had seen happen to Franklin. She could not remember feeling anything when Franklin disappeared. She wanted to tell someone what she had seen now almost as badly as she had the afternoon she saw it happen, which was so long ago it seemed as if she had imagined the whole thing. She was afraid, she realized, that someone would find out she had been the first one to see him go under and that she could have run faster along the path, that she had stopped when she saw Dennis—this boy she saw almost every day, who was unremarkable (Julie agreed) in all ways. Then people would know what she was really like. Sometimes when she closed her eyes, she wrote, she was afraid everyone would vanish, even Julie, and she would be alone next to the lake where her grandparents and great grandparents had lived. Julie had said before
she left that Katie should not think too much before she wrote and never rewrite anything. If she just wrote down what she was thinking as it came out, then it would be as if they were still together talking. Maybe so. The letters seemed to create the shadow of a parallel life. She wondered, though, if Julie would stop reading her letters, if she would just start stacking them in a box.

The warm sun made her feel like one of the summer people who walked by the shore with ice cream dripping down their wrists. No one talked of Franklin anymore; it was as if he had never existed. This was a relief but also strange, as if she expected to see him appear around the corner at school or from behind a sheet on the clothesline. He was still there, she felt, watching how she took every step and breath for granted, as if she deserved this life.

After helping her mother, she walked down to the public landing. Young kids ran up to their knees in the lake and stopped as thunder crashed. It was sunny, but a storm was coming. Mothers of the kids looked up as gray clouds inching across the sky flowed into the valley. The sailboats out on the lake lost the wind. The sailors sat upright, not speaking, staring across the glassy surface, the sails flopping lazily back and forth. Katie stayed even after the mothers packed up the kids and took them home.

Thunderheads rolled up over the hay fields and burst out into the open blue sky above the lake. Within minutes, rain sheeted across the water, moving in a line toward her with the wind, which brushed through the oak and birch and pine. Lightning streaked to some point on the far shore, followed by an echoing boom traveling down the valley. Katie ran from the beach to the porch of her house as rivers formed along the roadside and rushed down toward the lakefront. The sky had emptied a bucket, and then it stopped. She stood on the porch and looked through the rising steam at the clearing sky where a faint mist appeared before the blue, and the light shimmered off the still-soaked oak leaves and grass, creating spots in her vision when she looked away.

Dennis stayed the night. The music thumped above in her brother's room until their mother made them turn it off at eleven. Later, Katie heard her brother's feet creaking down the stairs to the kitchen and back up again. Katie slept with just a sheet and her underwear it was so hot, and even though the window was open, no breeze came in off the lake. With the sheet pulled off, the air didn't move against her skin. On a night like this it would be almost dawn before the lake cooled the air, and until then sweat glistened her face and neck and finally, late, a breeze did lift the curtains, the center of the white drapes rising into potbellies. As her bedroom door pulled open, the bellies rose up and lost
their balance. The cool air pricked her skin and lips, and there stood Dennis in his white T-shirt, skinny arms dangling and jaw loose. She closed her eyes and held them closed against the urge to see what he would do before he did it. At school she saw him strutting in the hall as if he weighed two hundred pounds. He stood above her now, the electricity of his eyes raising tiny hairs on her arms and neck. He worked for his father, a carpenter, during the summer and some weekends, and even from across the room she could feel the calluses on his hands and the way his lower lip protruded when his mouth hung open, most of the time, and the way his eyes, set close together, always seemed surprised and afraid of being reprimanded. Yet he stood across the room moving an inch at a time over the two-hundred-year-old pine boards, trying not to wake her. The square-head nails creaked as the breeze brushed over her skin, over her hips and eyelashes. Without warning (she had imagined him approaching forever, never arriving) he was there, breathing unsteadily, his hands poised just above her stomach like heavy air. He rested them lightly over her stomach and ribs. She opened her eyes a crack and saw him kneeling over her with his eyes closed and head bent, like her mother waiting for the sacrament on Sundays, only his hands were turned down.

He left quickly. By the time she looked around, there was no sign of him. His footsteps were less careful in their retreat, shuffling across the floor overhead.
The weight of his body pressed into the springs of the bed in her brother's room.

In the morning she lay on top of the covers until she heard her mother and father downstairs. Her two oldest brothers drove off and finally Dennis and Jamie trundled down the steps. The screen door slammed behind them. Rising, she felt heavy, her head pressed in. Her mother was too busy at the sink to turn around; her father was doing inventory at the store. The boys sat down on the porch railing, facing each other, and Dennis swung his legs.

“It takes an hour?” her brother said, continuing some conversation, but Dennis didn't answer. He pulled on his lip with his teeth, as if thinking about it, and Katie knew both what they were talking about and the answer to the question. It took a half hour to drive to Vaughn on the other side of the lake. But they had no car.

“Hey,” Dennis said, suddenly speaking to her. She just stared back.

Dennis swung his legs to the other side of the railing, stood on the edge, and leapt off. He was gone. Her brother waved before turning on her.

“What are you doing here?”

“It's my house, too.”

He seemed resigned, staring at the porch floor. Every boy his age was obsessed with getting around the lake to Vaughn. She didn't understand why. She had been there, as they all had, in the car with their mother.
There were more people there, more cars, a row of stores.

She turned and went back inside to the kitchen. Her mother said she was a difficult person. She went to the downstairs bathroom and looked in the mirror for outward signs of this trait, and there saw two white globes in her head, and within the white, two green circles, and at their center black dots, clear as pools of oil, reflecting her round face and wide nose.

“Mom,” she said loud enough for him to hear. “Jamie is planning to walk to Vaughn.”

“Good luck.”

Katie sat down at the table.

“Some day,” her mother said, arriving at the table with a box of cereal and a bowl but no milk, “you'll be asking me to take you there.”

“No.”

“Wait and see.”

The train whistled two miles away. In the summer it passed slowly.

Katie helped her mother hang sheets behind the house. It didn't take long before they were done, and her mother went back inside, and Katie walked across the road to the town dock where she sat with her legs dangling in the water. Dennis appeared and walked with both hands in his pockets, hips swaying, down to the edge of the lake where he picked up a stone, looked at it for a moment, and tossed it medium distance into
the water. He picked up another, larger one, and turned it over in his palm before tossing it farther out. The splash threw a small cape of water. He stood with one hip cocked, hands in his pockets again, watching the ripples spread.

When he bent over to squat, his sunburned skin pulled tight around his spine and wiry back muscles. He didn't say anything but just looked out across the lake in the general direction of Vaughn.

“I'm gonna hop that train,” he said.

“To Vaughn?”

“Nah. It goes farther than that. It goes across the whole country.”

She pictured long flat stretches of plains with boxcars inching across, her legs dangling out of the open doorway, swinging in turn to the click-click of the wheels against the track. How long would that take, she wondered? No water in sight. Nothing to drink. Her mouth was dry from the thought.

“I don't know why you want to go,” she said.

He said she should come out with him in his brother's canoe to see the airplane at the bottom of the lake, if she hadn't seen it before, and she hadn't. She'd heard about it, as everyone had. Her mother said there was no such thing at the bottom of the lake, but the story was that thirty years before a seaplane had crashed into the lake and killed all four people aboard.

They found his brother's canoe hidden in the bushes over by the rope swing. The lake, Dennis
explained, was low enough this year so they could see the plane on the bottom. He had seen it himself, just the day before, with his brother.

He pushed them off in the aluminum canoe, and after twenty minutes, he moved sideways in his seat, the paddle across his knees, the skin around his stomach in fine tight folds. He closed his eyes and shrugged one shoulder as water slowly dripped off the blade of the paddle. She couldn't tell if they were there or if he was taking a rest.

“During the week you work for your father?” she said.

“Yep.”

She pictured him stacking boards and cleaning up scrap lumber from early in the morning until dinner.

“I'm supposed to be helping him today.”

“Why aren't you?”

“Didn't feel like it.”

“Isn't he going to be mad?”

“Guess so.”

“What are you going to tell him?”

“Nothing. I'm not going to tell him nothing.”

“So where's the airplane?”

“We're right on top of it. Go ahead. Look down.” He was trying not to be proud of himself.

She didn't want to look down. She didn't expect it to be here, right under them.

“Go ahead, look down,” he said again, and she did because she didn't want him to think she was scared.
There was nothing beneath the flat surface but green, and flecks in the green, drifting in the sunlight.

“Don't you see it?”

Just as he said this she did see an outline, possibly a wing. When she looked harder there may also have been something attached to the wing, and she looked away quickly.

When the canoe drifted out of the sunlight, she saw the full shape of the plane, pale against the dark mud and algae of the bottom. Dennis stood up and dove into the water, his legs kicking down until she had to look away her heart pounded so fast. For a moment she was outside her body, above the lake looking down at herself, a girl she didn't know, sitting alone in a canoe. There were other people on the lake, but in her mind she was looking at a girl in a canoe alone on a lake. It had never seemed odd before to live next to such a large body of water, like a glassy eye peering up out of the earth.

“Almost made it.” He breathed frantically, water spurting out of his mouth and his eyes bulging slightly out of their sockets, as if they were starved for air. His neck stretched, his mouth widening, and he was under again, his long pale limbs pushing against the water like the slow glide of a great blue heron landing on the lake in the hazy dusk. Then she could no longer distinguish his body from the body of the plane. He rose, eyes closed, arms at his sides and legs kicking. His face was blissful and beautiful, as if in sleep. His arms burst
over the gunwale, tilting the canoe so Katie had to lean the other way.

“I saw the cockpit.” He wheezed and coughed, gulping for air. “I saw into the cockpit. Nothing was there. Do you wanna come down and see?”

She shook her head.

“I didn't bring my bathing suit.”

He looked off toward the beach. Maybe someone was there. Someone he'd rather be with. She wasn't about to look. It didn't matter. He might as well go over there.

“How you going to get back in the canoe?”

He shrugged and kept looking across the lake.

“You sure you don't want to come in?”

“I don't have my suit.”

He seemed not to hear.

“How you going to get up?”

“Easy.”

“It doesn't look easy to me. You'll tip the canoe over.”

He pushed off, watching her as he sank back into the water: first his shoulders, then his neck and the back of his head, his chin and finally his eyes, still open, sinking. He was gone. She could not see the blurry outline of his body beneath the water. Without warning, he rose over the high stern and pressed down, the muscles in his arms bulging. He tumbled over the seat and collapsed sideways on the bottom with his rib
cage expanding and contracting, the water rolling off his skin.

For a moment he seemed to stop breathing and hold absolutely still.

She leaned over to touch the knob of his shoulder. It was colder than she expected, like the hard edge of an underwater rock. He lay with the side of his head pressed against the bottom of the canoe.