The boy stands with his feet neatly together, his arms by his side. His head is lowered slightly, chin pointing down toward his chest, as if he is studying something in or just above the surface of the water, thirty feet beyond the end of the jetty.
The man takes a step onto the wooden surface.
His wife arrives, the baby now mewling in her arms, and he holds his hand up to forestall another shout from her.
‘Scott, sweetie,’ she says instead, with commendable evenness. ‘What are you doing?’
The man is starting to relax, a little. Their son's whereabouts are now known, after all. Even if he fell, he can swim. But other parts of the man's soul, held closer to his core, are twisted up and clamping tighter with each second that passes. Why is Scott not responding? Why is he just standing there?
The low panic the man feels has little to do with questions even such as these, however. It is merely present, in his guts, as if that soft breeze followed him down off the deck and through the woods, and has now grabbed his stomach like a fist, squeezing harder and harder. He thinks he can smell something now, too, as if a bubble of gas has come up to the surface of the water, releasing something dark and rich and sweet. He takes another step down the jetty.
‘Scott,’ he says, firmly. ‘It's okay if you want to look in the lake. But take a step back, yeah?’
The man is relieved when his son does just that.
The boy takes a pace backward, and finally turns. He does this in several small steps, as if confused to find himself where he is, and taking ostensive care.
There is something wrong with the boy's face.
It takes his father a moment to realize that it's not physical, rather that the expression on it is one he has never seen there before. A kind of confusion, of utter dislocation. ‘Scott – what's wrong?’
The boy's face clears, and he looks up at his father.
‘Daddy?’ he says, as if very surprised. ‘Why…’
‘Yes, of course, it's Daddy,’ the man says. He starts to walk slowly toward Scott, the hairs rising on the back of his neck, though the temperature around the lake seems to have jumped twenty degrees. ‘Look, I don't know what—’
But then the boy's mouth slowly opens, as he stares past or through his father, back toward the end of the jetty, at the woods. The look is so direct that his mother turns to glance back that way too, not knowing what to expect.
‘No,’ the boy says. ‘No.’
The first time he says it quietly. The second time is far louder. His expression changes again, too, in a way both parents will remember for the rest of their lives, turning in a moment from a face they know better than their own to a mask of dismay and heartbreak that is horrifying to see on a child.
‘What's …’
And then he shouts. ‘Run, Daddy. Run!’
The man starts to run toward him. He can hear his wife running too. But the boy topples sideways before they can get to him, falling awkwardly over the deck and flipping with slow grace down into the water.
The man is on the jetty in the last of the afternoon light. He stands with his child in his arms.
The police are there. A young one, and an older one, soon followed by many more. Four hours later the coroner will tell the police, and then the parents, that it was not the fall into the water, nor to the deck, nor even anything before that, that did it.
The boy just died.
It would be convenient if one could redesign the past, change a few things here and there, like certain acts of outrageous stupidity, but if one could do that, the past would always be in motion.
Richard Brautigan
An Unfortunate Woman
Ted came and found me a little after seven. I was behind the bar, assisting with a backlog of beer orders for the patrons out on deck while they waited to be seated. The Pelican's seasonal drinks station is tiny, an area in front of an opening in the wall through to the outside, and Mazy and I were moving around it with the grace of two old farts trying to reverse mobile homes into the same parking space. There's barely room for one, let alone two, but though Mazy is cute and cool and has as many piercings and tattoos as any young person could wish for, she's a little slow when it comes to grinding out margaritas and cold Budweisers and Diet Cokes, extra ice, no lime. I don't know what it is about the ocean, and sand, but it makes people want margaritas. Even in Oregon, in September.
‘Can't get hold of the little asshole,’ Ted muttered. His face was red and hot, and thinning grey hair was sticking to his pate, though the air conditioning was working just fine. ‘You mind?’
‘No problem,’ I said.
I finished the order I was on and then headed through the main area of the restaurant, where old John Prine songs played quietly in the background and the ocean looked grey and cool through the big windows and it felt like Marion Beach always does.
The day had been unusually warm for the season but cut with a breeze from the southeast, and most of the patrons were hazy-eyed rather than bedraggled. Now that the sun was down the air had grown heavy, however, and I'd been glad to be waiting tables instead of hanging tough in front of the pizza oven, which is where I was now headed.
The oven is a relatively new addition at the Pelican, just installed when I started there nine months ago. It had controversially replaced a prime block of seating where customers had been accustomed to sitting themselves in front of seafood for nearly thirty years, and I knew Ted still lost sleep trying to calculate whether the cost of a wood-fired oven and the associated loss of twelve covers (multiplied by two or three sittings, on a good night) would soon, or ever, be outstripped by gains accruing from the fact you can sell a pizza to any child in America, whereas they can be notoriously picky with fish. His wife thought he'd got it wrong but she believed that about everything he did, so while he respected her opinion he wasn't prepared to take it as the final word. Ted is a decent guy but how he's managed to stay afloat in the restaurant business for so long is a mystery. A rambling shack overhanging the shallow and reedy water of a creek that wanders out to the sea – and tricked up inside with dusty nets, plastic buoys, and far more than one wooden representation of the seabird from which it takes its name – the Pelican has now bypassed fashion so conclusively as to become one of those places you go back to because you went there when you were a kid, or when the kids were young or, well, just because you do. And, to be fair, the food is actually pretty good.
I could have done the pizza math for Ted but it was not my place to do so. It wasn't my place to make the damned things, either, but over the last five months I'd sometimes wound up covering the station when Kyle, the official thin-base supremo, didn't make it in for the evening shift. Kyle is twenty-two and shacked up with Becki, the owner's youngest daughter (of five), a girl who went to a barely accredited college down in California to learn some strain of
