He sat beside me this morning in church in much the same pose he always takes, slouching with his leg up against a hymnal, face down while he pushes back his cuticles with the edge of a dime. But I knew it was a pose designed to hide–maybe from me, or from himself, maybe even from God. This morning he was in church–I mean really there–even though we'd tugged him along for all the Sundays of his life.

Maybe it's a wonder it's taken this long. At eighteen, he's already a man.

Most anywhere south of here people would say most of the weather we've had this week is still winter. Early June isn't summer at all on the lakeshore. People wear jackets and keep their sweatshirt hoods up around their ears at the state park where Brad works. Damp gray haze lies so heavy along the shore that in the morning water beads on picnic tables all over the park, even though there may have been no rain. Sometimes a whole week of workdays can pass and you can't paint a thing with that kind of moisture. By calendar and climate, early June around here is really late spring. When the sun comes, it's a joy.

Brad was working in the booth at the park entrance Friday morning, maybe the first sunny day in two weeks of gloom. I know the job. Lots of things have changed around that park in the last twenty years–there's nature tours now, a new visitor center with wildlife displays, and the beach is finally coming back after too many years of high water. But some things haven't changed from when I worked my way through college down at the park twenty years ago. Somebody has to sell entrance stickers and register the campers. It was Brad's turn in the booth.

He told me he was outside when that Chevy van came through, an old wreck tugging a rack of Alumicraft canoes. He'd just grabbed a handful of camper receipts from the little box at the exit. There hadn't been much traffic into the park that morning, even though the blessed sun burned through the haze and likely pulled the soft blue-green from the long row of cedars I helped plant years ago down the road to the campground.

Brad let that conversion van into the park and the beach, sold them a daily sticker–two bucks. That was his part. All of it.

Ten kids from that van went out with two social workers, and four of them, delinquent kids from the city, went down, drowned in heavy surf not more than fifty feet off the beach. They made it out quite a ways, I guess, but two of them swamped and dumped, and four kids died. Two of those bodies were recovered that afternoon, and two stayed out, like ghosts floating in the swells.

I didn't know exactly what it was that Cecil told Brad until Brad himself told me last night on the beach. We live on the lake. Friday night I heard the front door slap shut, and when his cycle never popped, I assumed he went out to the water by himself.

Last night he took off again in silence, so I gave him fifteen minutes, and then went out myself and walked north towards the park because I realized he was probably looking for that last body. The moon raised a sparkling triangle over whatever little waves hadn't yet bedded down for the night, and lights from the cottages down the beach stood in perfect order like a line of troops.

I found him about a quarter-mile down on the Sprigsby's dock, staring out toward the moon, his arm wound around a guy wire holding the runabout up above the water. The thin chill in the breeze off the lake kept your face cool and wet. "It's cold as April,” I said, coming up from behind him.

"You out here?" he said, as if he hoped it might be someone else.

I walked past him over the planks and stood at the end looking out toward a necklace of lights from some ship. "I used to dream of someday standing here and seeing Michigan," I told him. "Just once in my life, I'd like to see land way beyond the blue." I turned towards him because I wanted to hear him say something, anything at all. "I think maybe if we'd get up on the roof of our place some night when things are really clear–maybe in a tree or something. Take some binocs along. Maybe we could pick something out." He shrugged his shoulders. "Ninety miles. Too much curve in the earth," he said. "You couldn't see over there even if it was crystal clear."

"Top of the power plant maybe?" I said.

He pulled the zipper of his jacket all the way up beneath his chin. "You could figure it out–how high you'd have to be."

"When I was a kid I used to think you could see it when you'd see these long lines on the horizon, like sand dunes–"

"Probably fog banks," he said.

I turned back to the horizon. The barge lights hadn't moved. "It's only a dream," I told him.

Somewhere down the beach a heavy bass from a party beat through the stillness of Saturday night.

He shifted awkwardly. "They found another one today."

"Where'd it come up?"

"Fifteen miles down," he said, pointing down the shoreline towards the lights from Port Jefferson. "It gets battered up, I guess. You wouldn't think it would, not rolling in the water.

"So one of them's out there yet," I said. "It could turn up miles from here." We hadn't really talked much about what happened. Brad doesn't really talk much at all to us anymore. Ann says since he's turned sixteen his only mode is silence, interrupted by an occasional grunt.

"Guess so," he said.

I didn't know then exactly what was going on. I didn't know what Cecil had told him. He's young. Eighteen is too young for all of that, but I guess you think that way when it's your own you're worried about. "You blaming yourself somehow, Brad?" I said.

"Somebody's got to take it," he said. "Four of them dead. It's somebody's fault. I sold them a sticker. I let them in."

Copyright 2001 by James Calvin Schaap

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