Laura Kasischke - The Raising

“Is this safe?” Craig’s father asked the Belizean man, who shrugged his bony shoulders.

The director said, “I’ve done it myself a million times. Never even been nipped.”

There was, Craig realized now, something sinister about the director.

(Was it possible that the irises of his eyes had no pupils?)

Craig looked away from him, swallowed, put on his snorkeling mask, and stood, but his father reached out and took him by the arm. “Whoa, wait a second there, son,” he said.

“Let him go!” the director shouted. “The boy wants to swim with the sharks!”

It was then that Craig understood what was going on, that the director had cast him in a role: impetuous, spoiled, foolhardy boy.

The sharks rose closer to the surface of the water again, their shadows made of flesh circling over and around one another, and Craig instinctively took a step back, into his father’s arms.

“Forget it, son,” his father said. “You don’t need to do this. I won’t let you do this.”

Craig turned around, and the Belizean man was looking at him with an expression that was impossible to read.

“Let’s go,” his father said, and the Belizean man started the boat, and Craig sat back down and took his flippers off.

Back at the resort, he drank rum punch by the side of the pool until everyone else had gone to bed, and got so drunk that the stars seemed to be blowing around in the completely windless black air over him, like moths or silvery ashes. He got up to replenish his punch only to find that someone had locked up the tiki bar, so he stood with his empty plastic cup under the stars and listened to the calm, distant pounding of the surf against its barriers. He tilted his head back and tried to drink the very last drops from his empty cup, lost his balance in the sand, and fell on his ass with a soft thud, and then he sat there for a few minutes and laughed at himself, held up the plastic cup to the stars the way the director had raised his beer bottle to him back on the boat. “Been nice knowin’ ya!” he shouted, and waited for an echo.

It didn’t come.

The tropical air was like cotton, soaking up his voice.

Craig shouted again, looking around to see if anyone was there to hear him, and saw then, at the edge of the boat dock, a light. He stood up, leaving the plastic cup on the sand, and stumbled toward it.

It was a kid. Maybe Craig’s age. He had a flashlight at his feet and a net. He cast the net off the end of the dock, and Craig stood behind him, watching it float loosely in the clear water and then sink under, and then the kid pulled it out, heavy with thrashing small silver-dollar-size fish, which the kid dumped into the bottom of the boat in which the Belizean man had taken them to the sharks that afternoon.

“Hey,” Craig said, feeling suddenly much drunker in the hallucinatory darkness. The boy was so completely ignoring him that Craig felt as if he might be dreaming the boy, or that the boy was dreaming him.

The boy cast his net back out into the water, although there was still a fish in it, caught in the strings, wriggling.

“What are you doing?” Craig asked, and then the kid turned to look at him. His dark skin made his eyes even brighter in the light shining up from the flashlight at his feet.

“Fishing,” he said.

“Yeah,” Craig said. “I guess so.”

The kid turned back to the net, which was sinking into the water again, and the two of them were silent for what seemed like a long time before the kid said, “My father said you wouldn’t swim with the sharks.” He was looking at his net instead of at Craig. “Even after your own father stopped the winds for you.”

Craig snorted with laughter, and began to walk backward, his legs feeling as if they were made of that wiggling fish stuff in the kid’s net, and also the bloody, inert muscle of stuff the kid’s father had tossed by the handfuls into the Caribbean. As best he could, he trotted away on those weak legs, laughing and snorting, back to the hut, where he dropped into bed and a waveful of stars and ocean closed over him. He slept like death. When he woke up, his father had already packed, and they left the resort without saying good-bye to the director.

It was back at home that Craig began to carry the cement block with him. He was so tired every morning from carrying it, and facing carrying it again all day, and utterly unable to articulate to his mother what was wrong and why he could hardly hold his head up at the breakfast table.

She assumed, of course, that he was on drugs, and she would scowl at him when he woke from the naps that lasted all day on the weekends and stretched from after school to dinner during the week. She sent him to a shrink, who prescribed some pills Craig never took because of the warning that he couldn’t get a hard-on if he took them, but after a couple of months, the cement block simply lifted, on its own, returning now and then with a change in seasons but disappearing after he got used to the rain, or the snow, or the falling leaves, or the first brilliant days of summer. He hoped this wasn’t the beginning of that again—here at school, in October, during midterm week.

Friday night Godwin Honors Hall was loud, and drunk, and full of good cheer. Girls—even the homely ones he’d never seen wearing anything but sweat pants—had gotten dressed up in short skirts and high heels and lipstick. Guys were stocking their dorm refrigerators with Michelob and Corona, and competing iPod playlists were blaring from speakers aimed toward open windows and into the courtyard.

Craig had woken up in the late afternoon with a hangover, and hadn’t even realized that everyone was back from their weeklong absence, and that the beer was already flowing, until he stepped out into the hallway, headed for the shower with a towel wrapped around his waist, and walked right into the party.

Perry was there, leaning against the wall, holding a beer. He and some chick were comparing answers to an essay exam. The girl had buggy eyes but great calves and ankles. She and Perry were so absorbed in the shared vocabulary of their exam that neither one said hi when he passed them and said, “Hey.”

When he came back out of the bathroom, he had to push his half-naked way through a crowd of guys in glasses who were silently nodding their heads to some bad old rock ’n’ roll blaring from one of their rooms. One of them slapped him on his bare back, and Craig turned fast, ready to punch the asshole, until he realized the guy was just drunk, and happy. Perry was still in the hallway, and he and the buggy-eyed girl were still arguing the finer points of their comparisons and contrasts, and Craig was relieved to close the door to his room behind him. He was in no mood for a party. He was in the mood for some extra-potent stuff with Lucas, and maybe a trip to Pizza Bob’s, he thought, and it wasn’t until he was bent over, picking his jeans up off the floor, that he noticed a pair of long legs stretched out on his bed.

“Hey, Craig.”

“Jesus Christ,” Craig said. “How did you get in here?”

“I walked in the door.”

Craig let the jeans slip out of his hand, back onto the floor, and stood up straight, hitching the towel tighter around his waist and looking at Josie Reilly, who was lying on his bed with her black hair spread out on his pillow, holding his Maxim magazine open in front of her but looking at him, not it. She was wearing a little skirt with orange flowers on it, and her legs and feet were bare.

“Um, Josie, can I ask what you’re doing here?”

“Reading your dirty magazine.”

“Oh,” Craig said. “Okay. Well, I’m going to get dressed now.”

“Okay,” Josie said without taking her eyes off him.