Lakewood

This lake was a universe, and we would take a green boat with a flat bottom out onto its surface and disappear over a horizon, but it is only nine hundred feet from one side to the other and you can swim across it if you want to.

With our grandfather’s binoculars and from the safety of our parents’ back yard we looked into the forest along the opposite shore. There were deer, we thought; we could see them in every rustled branch. And birds scattered into the air over the waves, out from hidden places in the underbrush. But it’s not a forest because in less than five minutes you can walk from the place the trees meet the water to an interstate highway. There can’t be deer because they would die before ever reaching the woods.

One time, I woke up when it was still dark to take the green flat-bottomed boat out, me with my dad. The day before, we had gone to the supermarket and I had picked out a spinning lure that flashed silver in the water when I reeled it in. We packed snacks and I wore a little bucket hat and the biggest thing I caught was my dad’s hand, hours later, when I felt a tug and yelled “I got one!” and yanked back on my reel and jabbed him with the hook he had been trying to bait for me. 

One time, we, my little brother and I, woke up early to excavate for fossils in the pit of orange clay we had uncovered where my dad had built a bulkhead which overlooked the lake, but the air was rotten, and bloated white things were floating in the water, infinity of them, so many that a toad could have hopped from the steps my dad had built, down from the bulkhead into the water, from dead thing to dead thing until it reached the far-away forest. We heard that, three houses down, a neighbor had saved a giant catfish and was keeping it alive in a bathtub filled with lake water and aquarium air pumps. We took the green flat-bottomed boat out onto the lake and looked for things that were still alive.

One time, there were rumors of an alligator in the lake, but we never found it.

One time, my little brother and I were excavating for construction materials in the pit of orange clay when, over the forest and below the thick sky, a hundred-mile-wide, thousand-mile-tall river flowed towards us; machine-gun rain pelted the surface of the lake and we knew we would drown if it caught us, so we ran, and we laughed while we ran, and we made it to our parents’ patio before the rain got there and then it roared around us but could not get us.

This lake, though, wasn’t a lake. There was a strip mall parking lot, not hidden by the trees that were supposed to keep it from view. There was a cheap office building. Everything that was alive here was brought here, and everything here is small.