Justin Cronin - The Summer Guest

It all seemed like a jolly joke, but by the time we got to the other side, I could tell something was wrong with Pete. His face had gone the white of chalk, and he was breathing in shallow little puffs. I sent the other three ahead to wait while he sat on a big piece of limestone, his rod across his knees.

“It’s the heights. I can’t stand heights.” He looked back the way we’d come and grimaced like he’d seen his death. “Jesus. Is there another way back?”

“Afraid not, unless you call a helicopter.”

Pete put his head in his hands, letting himself take a moment just to breathe; his hands were shaking, and for a second, I actually felt sorry for him. Bill, Mike, and Carl Jr. had already made their way down the embankment to the base of the dam and were looking the water over. In a large party, there was always one, and Pete was the one.

“Mother… fucker.” He gave his head a sharp shake and looked up, squinting into the light. “Did you mean it, about people drowning?”

“Nah. I was just kidding around.”

“Well, very fucking funny. What was that thing where the water went in? Christ, it was sucking like a toilet bowl.”

He was referring to the wide concrete tube that stuck ten feet or so above the surface of the lake on the upstream side. A series of gates, like the open spaces between rungs on a ladder, pulled water down to the bottom of the dam. Only the top gate was open, but with the water so low, it sat right at the surface, water swirling around it in a whirlpool.

“That’s the inlet tower. It used to draw water down to the turbines, though they pulled those out thirty years ago.”

“Listen,” Pete said, “I probably should tell you I don’t know how to do any of this. The only thing I know how to fish for is a can of tuna at Stop and Shop.”

“I kind of guessed.”

“It gets worse. I can’t even swim.”

“Not at all?”

He shook his head hopelessly. “Something about my body mass. I can do the strokes okay, but I sink like a rock.”

I nodded silently. What was there to say?

“I’ll tell you a story,” Pete went on. “At Harvard there’s this idiotic swim test you have to pass to graduate. The family that built the library lost their son on the Titanic, so everybody has to make it across the pool and back just to get their diploma. Like being able to swim would have helped the poor bastard in the middle of the North Atlantic. Know what I did?”

Never mind that this little story was his way of letting me know he’d gone to Harvard. “You cheated?”

“Swimming the thing was out of the question. I actually had a scheme cooked up to have one of my roommates take it for me. But when the last day for the test came, he said he couldn’t do it. Guy’s all lined up with a big Wall Street job, no way he was taking any chances for me. I went down to the pool, and there was this long line, mostly Asian kids shivering in their skimpy little suits, I have no fucking idea why, but all of them waited like me until the last day. When my turn came, I jumped in and just let myself go under. I just sat on the bottom of the pool and waited for somebody to pull me out. Who fucking knows how long I was down there, but it felt like forever. But then, the lifeguard yanked me out. ‘You can’t swim?’ he asks me. ‘Not a stroke,’ I say. For a long time the guy just looked at me. Sixty thousand dollars’ worth of education, and it all comes down to this one guy, what he’s going to do. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Get out of here.’ I couldn’t believe it.”

“Lucky break,” I said.

“Lucky? I should have killed the guy. Want to know what I did next?”

In truth, I could have done without the rest of the story, but I knew there was no stopping it.

“Marched straight down to the law school and signed up for the LSATs. Right on the spot I decided completely out of the blue to be a lawyer. My girlfriend and I had been planning to join the Peace Corps after graduation, thought maybe we’d go teach in Africa or someplace. I wanted to be a writer, too. I’d actually published some short stories in the campus rag.” He laughed miserably. “Can you believe it? Fucking short stories!”

Pete seemed a little young to mourn his life this way, and part of me, the generous part, would have liked to talk him out of this feeling, which was the worst kind of rabbit hole a man could go down on an otherwise promising afternoon. But I saw no chance of this. Streamside speeches on life’s disappointments were a staple of the trade, and I had heard enough of them over the years to learn my limits. It also seemed likely to me that it was the girlfriend he regretted losing most of all. He would misremember her completely, of course; she was the muse of his unlived, better life, and in the nostalgic fantasy he was laying out, she would appear as a figure of pure lost opportunity, as soulfully splendid as the Mona Lisa in a G-string.

“Looks to me like you’re doing okay,” I said, trying to move the day along. “Seems to me it was probably a good decision in the long haul.”

The lie was obvious, and he met it with a quick, correcting frown. “No offense, hombre, but that’s easy for you to say.” He gestured downhill, where the other three men were stringing up their rods. Bill was already wading out into the current. “You don’t work with these assholes.”

I decided not to point out that, technically, I did, at least for today; it was what I was supposed to be doing that very minute, instead of trying to talk Pete out of believing he’d wasted his life by not going to Africa to screw his girlfriend in a grass hut and write his fucking short stories.

“Oh, the hell with it,” Pete said finally. He slapped his knees and rose. “Let’s get this over with.”

But in the morning, Harry Wainwright couldn’t fish. He couldn’t even get out of bed.

Hal found me in the dining room. His father had gone through a bad night, he told me, up for most of it, with Hal and Frances taking shifts. Hal hadn’t actually gone to bed at all, just grabbed a few winks tucked in a chair. We sat together by the big windows overlooking the lake and drank coffee while folks clomped in for breakfast. It was a little before seven; I was already keeping an eye cocked for the moose-canoers, though they usually didn’t come along till at least eight o’clock-way past the time they were likely to see any moose, though the canoers as a group were cheerful vacationers out on a lark, ready to have a good time, moose or no.

“Maybe it was the drive up,” Hal said, buttering a muffin. “Or not eating anything last night at dinner. Hell, maybe it’s just that he’s got cancer, for god’s sake. He doesn’t want to call a doctor, and he doesn’t want to leave.” He paused to chew, using the moment to take a fresh muffin from the basket on the table and pull it into moist halves. “This puts you in something of a bind, I guess.”

I drained my coffee and told him no, that under the circumstances I was happy to wait all day; when Harry was ready to go, I’d be the one to take him. But what we were both thinking was plain enough: that maybe Harry had something else up his sleeve, that a bad night passing into an even worse day was what he’d had in mind all along. My heart went out to Hal. He was a nice guy, every bit as bright as his father, I’m sure, but he’d spent most of his adult life in the shadows, doing more or less what he was doing now: protecting the old man, and reassuring ordinary folks like me that the elephant in the dining room wasn’t going to sit on them anytime soon. I’d have bet big that morning that Hal would have traded any number of silver spoons just to sit and think awhile about what it meant to be the grown son of a dying father.