Summerlong (25 page)

On the sixth morning, just before the break of day, Don packs a picnic lunch and canteens of water in his backpack, along with a pocketknife, a small first-aid kit, some bug spray, some sunscreen, and a whistle. Once the children wake up and have breakfast, he helps them dress for a hike. Long pants, long sleeves, socks, well-laced shoes, and hats: despite the protests that they are overbundled for summertime, Don dresses them so no skin shows at all. The deer flies and ticks are thick that time of year, and you cannot hike through the woods with bare skin, especially not at the end of a summer that has been so warm. Often, by August, the bugs are dying off, but not this year. This year, they swarm at you once you are out of the wide expanse of windy shoreline. The mosquitoes in the thickets are as big as bats.

There is, across the highway from the Merrick place, a large parcel of land, maybe two hundred acres, all of that also owned by the Merricks, through which a series of hiking trails moves along the ledge of the Little Marais River. This is where they will hike today.

In the woods, on the uphill, Wendy and Bryan trudge behind Don after the first hour and soon they are tired and thirsty, and although it is not yet ten, Don leads them to a spot on the ridge he had found the summer before, while hiking alone, and they take shade under the birches and pines.

“Look,” Don says, pointing down the trail toward the waterfall, the white rush of it still intense from the rains of early summer. “We can swim near those falls later. There is a trail down to it.”

The image of Claire swimming in the falls with Charlie, nude, flares up in his brain in a way he cannot shake.

“Are there sharks?” Wendy asks. She has an obsession with
sharks ever since Don had let her watch some of Shark Week on cable months ago.

“No! Freshwater, dummy,” Bryan says.

“And blueberries,” Don says, squatting down to show the children the blueberry plants in fully ripened splendor. He picks three berries and pops them into his mouth.

“I want one,” Wendy says. “Wait!”

“Plenty for everyone,” Don says, and he savors the berries, the tart sweetness of them, makes a point of looking at the falls and listening to the rustle of pine needles as he eats them, the full sensory experience of the north woods. You give your children something like this, you feel like a hero. How many kids would grow up and never experience anything so beautiful and pristine and real? The air seems to be even clearer up on the ridge, and like a drowning man suddenly saved, he begins to take in great gulps of it, filling his lungs.

But it does not change anything. He wants it to, so badly, but it doesn’t.

Lunch is served. The children’s collective mood, bolstered by food and rest and the sheer beauty of their perch, rises. Would they remember their father this way? The way he is on a small handful of days of the year, the leader of an expedition to a place still and beautiful? Or, more likely, will they remember him in a state of half misery, a sad, shambling man with a clipboard and boxes of real estate flyers, a man muttering out of anger as he pays the bills in his study or muttering out of boredom as he washes what feels like an endless, infinite stack of dishes.

Now, a dull roar comes from behind him, a snort of some kind, a harrumph. Before he turns to look, already Don Lowry knows he will see a bear. How many bears, he wonders, as the musky smell, a dank mix of dead fish and damp earth, hits him. He looks. Three bears: a mother and two cubs. The children begin to whimper behind him. Don watches as the two cubs step ahead of their mother, and despite her throaty moan, ignore her and make for the berries.

The bear, the mother, stands, sniffs the air, and then goes back on four paws. Don stands less than six feet from the cubs. “Bryan,” Don says calmly. “Take Wendy and begin to back away. Go the way we came, go back away. I will stay here.”

Don has the idea that he can protect his kids if he stands his ground.

“Go on,” Don says. “You kids start going back. You go first.”

“Come on,” Bryan hisses at his sister. “Come on!” The bear, agitated, begins to pace. Don readies himself to act as a human shield should the bear charge. It will kill him, of course, that bear, but his children might be spared.

He waits for a long time like that, standing still enough to be the wall between the bear and his children. The cubs continue to fall on the berries.
On the berries they fell. Fell they did, on the berries.
This is how Don’s mind works in those tense moments. He simply runs that sentence in his head as long as he can and hopes to keep the fear from his heart, his lungs, his scent.

A sharp wail echoes off the cliffs above the river and Don tenses his muscles. Wendy . . . Oh shit, Wendy. He has no choice but to go to her. So Don turns and walks away from the bear and feels the bear trotting toward him—he cannot run or he will lead the angry, frightened, or whatever the fuck it is bear right back to the kids.

“Is Wendy okay?” Don yells.

Silence.

“Bee sting,” Bryan says.

“Is her face swollen?” Don calls. The bear inches toward him, now three feet from him, maybe less. The bear stands again.

“No,” Wendy says. “Daddy, where is the bear?”

“Bryan, you guys calmly begin walking home.”

The bear’s rotten breath blows in Don’s face. He winces.

“The way we came,” Don says. And then, once he thinks the kids are safely away, Don begins to inch his way toward the cubs.

“You can kill me,” he whispers to the bear.

The bear seems to be calmed by the whispering.

“Yeah,” Don says, “please kill me.”

The bear sniffs at the air again.

“Me. Not them. Me. You can kill me, but not them.”

The bear weighs the offer, goes at the blueberries alongside her cubs. Don begins to back away. If he wanted to be killed, right there, in a way that could only be described as accidental, he could do it. He could harass the cubs. He could charge them, now that the kids were safely away, out of sight. Bryan could lead them home. He could run to the road and call 911 and by then it would be too late. And what a blameless way to go:
Many years ago, in the dizzyingly hot summer of 2012, on a blueberry-covered ridge above a waterfall in northern Minnesota, our father died while saving us from a bear.

“Kill me, you fucking bears,” Don whispers. “Go ahead.”

The bears continue to eat the berries. Every so often, the mother bear looks over her shoulder at Don, but then she goes back to eating.

“Go ahead, I want to die,” Don whispers, and the mother bear turns to him and grunts and snorts in a way that seems to say, “No. You don’t.” But Don has no time to process that, because he hears another scream.

“Daddy!” He hears Wendy’s scream echoing up the rocks of the river. “Daddy! Help!”

It is earlier on this day, back in Grinnell, where the weather is not as clear or as crisp and the meteor showers of the North Shore are never visible, that Gill Gulliver awakes from sad dreams two hours before dawn. He has pissed the bed, goddamnit, and stands shivering beside it and suddenly thinks of how ashamed he will be if anyone ever sees him like that, ever sees him in such a state, half naked, pissed on by his own self. Instead of pressing his Help button
and turning on the lights, he dresses, which he still can sometimes do, and wears his khakis and his sweatshirt and socks and the slip-on loafers that do not need lacing. He knows his own name and he says it to himself.

He goes to the window. In what is mostly a misty, humid darkness, he sees lights, a small band of dying fireflies that he has never seen before, not from that window, and he opens the window because something in his brain, some stray synapse, fires and says he should try and touch one of the fireflies, and he slides open the window farther than it could ever open in the past when he has tried to open it. The alarms that are supposed to sound do not sound.

He reaches out and catches in his loose fist a firefly and feels it dissolve in his fist and his hand feels strong when he does it. He reaches up and catches another one and again it seems to dissolve in his hand, this time the other hand, and now he is feeling drawn to the warmth of the night, and the noninstitutional air and he boosts himself out into it, that air. He goes out the window and begins to walk to the simultaneously familiar and foreign lights of downtown.

As he walks, he lectures. Why does he lecture? Because his students are flanking him—not just his recent students, but decades’ worth of them, all of them young and beautiful, the women and the men, all of them hanging on his every word as he turns and says to them: “And it is not fair to give
Gatsby
the label of a novel of socioeconomic or political or cultural conditions. It is not fair to call it a novel that serves to both mythicize and criticize the American dream as it stood in the raging days of early American capitalism, of Wall Street and wealth run amok. This is not the novel Fitzgerald wrote! Fitzgerald wrote a novel of a young man finding his literary calling, and finding too that the world was not a safe place for a sensitive young person, an easily wounded, easily influenced young person! Not without writing.
Not without language and the power of observation and the power to remain outside all of the ugliness. Yes? Are you following me?”

And when he asks this, he looks about himself and sees that they are gone. All the students have left him, except for one, except for—no, she was no student. She is John Manetti’s wife, Ruth, his first lover at Grinnell. Fifty, maybe older, she never would tell him exactly, but she is a generation his senior, and she is there, brushing her dark hair in the window of the house on Broad Street where he used to sneak in to see her, back in the days when he used to love her. He has aged, but she has not, has she? He looks up at the window on the third floor and she waves down to him. This is her husband’s study. He knows it well. They have made love on his desk, knocking a stack of papers to the floor. She had never loved her husband; she moaned this confession into his ear one day, on that desk. She loved to fuck on that desk, as if somehow she was sabotaging something, taking some power back that wasn’t hers to take. She worried that she had wasted her life, she told him that too. Afterward, picking up the papers and the books, she had cried.

“Tell him,” Gill had said.

And she did. Gill believed that she had told her husband, told him that she loved another man, a younger man, and that she was leaving him. And Gill had promised her they’d leave Grinnell, just as soon as he could get another job, but then Gill fell in love with someone else, Kathy, someone his own age who could give him a child, only one it turned out, but a child nonetheless, a son, and Ruth rarely spoke to him again. He never loved Kathy the way he loved Ruth, with that sucking, aching need one must love with if it is to last.

He looks up at Ruth, brushing her hair in the window. He will have to tell her he was wrong. He has made mistakes.

He moves through the dark to Ruth Manetti.

The key, as it has been for many years, is under the flowerpot
on the porch. He finds the house dark. He grapples for the lights, labors up the three flights of stairs, and finds the study dark. “Ruth?” he says, entering the attic room. It has been so long. His tongue grows thick with the anticipation of pleasure. When the lights switch on, he finds the room empty. He has come from somewhere else. His confusion is a thick honey in his mind.

He wanders through the room, and browses the shelves, fingers the volumes, disorganized and chaotically shelved, until he finds
Gatsby,
and he pulls the slim novel down, a hardcover edition, an anniversary edition from Scribner’s, and a key falls from the book. Its pages have been hollowed out to make a place to hide things and hidden here there is a key.

Who would destroy such sacred pages so they might hide a key inside a book?

A small skeleton key: he sees the locked drawer of the handsome desk and he unlocks it and there he finds a gun. Does Ruth’s husband have a gun? He might kill Gill with it; he must be considering it, if he knows about them.

Gill pockets the gun.

He repeats his name to himself. He doesn’t know so many things. How old is he now? When did he see Ruth last? Is her husband even alive? He wants to stay in this space where he knows who he is and what he is doing and he puts the gun in his hand and walks back to the streets and then across the campus to his home, the home he had made for himself, for his wife and child, when everything with Ruth was over.

In the backyard, there is his study. He goes out to it. He reaches for the door and finds it locked just as the motion lights come on near the pool. He knows then the spare key is always in the small shed that houses the pool’s filtering system and pump and he goes there and finds his ring of spares under a five-gallon bucket.

He lets himself inside his beloved study—a
think shack
his old friend Merrick had called it. Where is Merrick? Where has he been? France again, maybe? Gill shivers a bit with confusion and
some guilt, because he knows his wife is inside asleep with their young son, Charlie, and that he should go upstairs to the bed and find Kathy and make love to her. His attention on her has waned. He works too much. He feels worthless when he is not working. Does he have to teach tomorrow? He has no idea. He needs to check his calendar.

This does not feel like his study. It is too empty—the shelves thin with books, the file cabinets free of unruly stacks, the large desk bare, the floor free of the boxes and papers.

Where has all his work gone? Has someone done away with it?

There is, on the desk, a stack of yellow legal pads and an Iowa Hawkeyes coffee mug full of sharpened pencils. While he still has clarity—he is oddly cognizant of his current state of awareness—he writes a note: It begins, “Charlie, there is no—” He stops writing. Puts an X through those words. Then writes, in larger script now: “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired. —GG
.
”

But the pool. So inviting. So calm. How many hours of his life has he stared at it, thinking, unable to write, his mind awash in a kind of aimless longing for anything different. How often has he wondered about his life and thought,
Really, this is it, this is what comes next forever?