Tim O’Brien - Northern Lights

Hooking in a last long sweep, the stream opened into a lake completely surrounded by pine. A beaver dam spanned the mouth of the creek. It was all quiet.

Harvey crawled on to the bank, waited for him, then they walked along the forest edge to a rocky beach. Harvey helped him out of the rucksack, pushed it underwater and weighted it with a rock.

‘What do you think, brother? Didn’t I say it was nice?’

‘It’s fine. It is. Didn’t know there was a lake out here.’

‘Nobody knows. Farther out there are hundreds of them. This one’s not even on the maps. Dad and I named it Lake Peri. With an i , the old way. What do you think?’

‘Spectacular,’ Perry said.

‘Come on. Let’s swim then.’

They swam until midday. The lake water was cold and clean. The sun got hot and the mosquitoes, were back, breeding after the rain. Perry stayed close to shore, but Harvey twice swam to the far side, disappeared into the woods and came back. He drew up the rucksack and popped open two cans of beer.

‘Not so bad, is it?’

‘No. It’s great. Really.’

Harvey nodded. ‘I knew it. You only have to try it, that’s all. You should have come when we were kids. You know?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Dad would have liked it.’

‘I know.’

‘He was always a little … I don’t know, a little sad when you didn’t want to come. I don’t know. You know how he was.’

‘Sure.’

‘Anyhow.’ Harvey smiled.

‘Sure. It is fine. I like it.’

‘I knew you would.’ Harvey went out to swim again and Perry sat with his beer and watched. Later they ate cold meat and apples and had another beer. It was all right. Harvey seemed happy, tall and very lean and strong, and the air was good. Perry enjoyed it. For once, everything aside, he felt some sibling fusion. It was all right. It was a fine day and a fine lake.

They sat together with their beers and looked down on the beaver dam. Perry felt a little sleepy.

‘What do you think of that Addie?’ Harvey finally said. ‘She’s some super wench, isn’t she?’

‘You like her.’

‘Yes. She doesn’t have to say a word.’ Harvey lazily held up his can and the sun glittered off the wet aluminium.

‘I know.’

Harvey closed his eyes. For a while he was quiet, toying with the empty can. The sun was very hot. ‘You didn’t have anything … You and Addie?’

‘No.’ Too bad, he thought. Some rotten luck.

‘I was just asking.’

‘No. She’s pretty young.’

‘I know,’ Harvey said. ‘You can never be sure, though. She likes you. She’s always talking about going off to the badlands with you.’

‘Dumb talk is all. Don’t know where she gets that stuff.’

‘She’s something, all right, isn’t she?’ Harvey said. He seemed relieved. ‘So maybe I’ll take her to Africa with me.’

‘Sure.’

‘Is she truly Indian?’

‘I’ve heard that,’ Perry said. ‘She’s always giving a different story. I guess she could be a quarter or half blood. You can’t get a straight answer out of her.’

‘Some fine half-breed,’ Harvey said.

‘For sure.’

Harvey smiled, his eyes still closed. ‘You’re a good man, brother. Did I ever tell you that? Sometimes I forget we’re brothers, you know? It’s a strange thing.’

‘I know.’

‘We’re a little different, aren’t we?’

‘A little. Not so much as I used to think.’

‘Right,’ Harvey said. ‘Exactly. Anyhow, I just wanted to ask because you can’t ever be sure.’ He stretched in the sun. ‘I wonder if I can get her to go to Africa with me.’

‘Sure, no problem. Flash your funny eye at her.’

‘You’re a good man.’ He got up. ‘Maybe you should come to Africa with us.’

‘Maybe so. We’ll fish for alligators.’

‘Kill Zulus.’

‘Only in good cause. For truth and justice.’

‘Should we swim?’

‘Why not?’

‘Let’s swim in the stream.’

Harvey dived into the deep water behind the beaver dam. Perry waded in, feeling the way with his hands. The water was very cold and hard. The bottom was littered with the slime of the forest. He lay back and floated against the mud dam. Then he turned on to his belly and swam hard upstream, following Harvey, finally rolling on to his back and letting the current carry him back towards the dam. He opened his eyes and had the sensation of great speed, the grotesque pines sweeping overhead, a single blackbird splatting wings high.

The stream carried him down. He heard Harvey call. The sky was a blur and he was moving fast. Suddenly, as though it had been shot into veins by a needle, he felt fear. He fought the stream, righting himself, trying to stand. There was no bottom. The stream twisted him and he lost sense of proportion and distance, and he pushed towards the mud bed but it wasn’t there, and suddenly in a lush blur he was thinking again, coloured images, and he heard Harvey call, and lazily he called back and his lungs were as hot as white fire, filling like a balloon, and he was tumbling and thinking calmly that only a moment before the day had been fine, everything was calm and fine, then he felt arms surrounding him, straightening him, and sunlight flooded and blanched the images, and he was bobbing in the stream. Harvey holding him high, saying, ‘Drop-off, I called out to you.’

Perry blinked, staring into Harvey’s dull dead eye.

‘I called out. It’s a drop-off.’

He felt no terror. Harvey’s arms were strong and buoyed him high and the current raced all around.

‘All right?’ Harvey’s marble eye rolled. A shark eye. ‘You’re all right?’

He felt no terror but he was angry. He pushed away, and Harvey reluctantly released him, hovering close by. ‘You’re okay? Take it easy.’

Fighting back, Perry rolled on to his back. He was sick but he reached back and swam, kicked, thrashed for the bank. He smelled the hard water inside him.

He waded out, sat down, put on his glasses.

‘You all right?’

Perry nodded, not looking up.

‘You hear me call out? I did call out.’

‘I heard you. I’m all right. I would have been okay.’

It was so fast he didn’t remember it. He lay back. Harvey chuckled and shrugged.

‘I can swim,’ Perry insisted. ‘I was all right.’

‘You’re some great fish, all right.’

They rested awhile. Then without talking they dressed and followed the creek to a footbridge, got on to a path that carried them to Pliney’s Pond and from there to the house.

Harvey did not talk about the near-drowning, and Perry pretended it hadn’t happened. He convinced himself it hadn’t. That evening Harvey drove into town to see Addie and Perry stayed up late watching the driveway, and he fell asleep thinking coloured thoughts: Addie, Grace, the beady-eyed creature and the cold water rushing through him.

He stuck to his rigours. He exercised. He ate cottage cheese and eggs. He went to bed early, arose early, worked enough to satisfy his conscience, took care to be kind to Grace.

In September school started and Grace resumed the teacher’s routine: seven a.m. mornings, lipstick and makeup, talk of her new kids, bright talk that showed interest and concern and affection. He drove her in each morning, dropped her off, had coffee, then watched the leaves change through his Mainstreet window. He did not see much of Addie. Most evenings, Harvey would take the car and Perry felt no great desire to ask questions.

He began paying attention to things. He took short walks into the surrounding woods, sometimes alone and sometimes with Grace or Harvey. He looked for colours and connections. It was hard to tell where it started.

Unwinding towards the simple past, he was searching in a vague way for the first elements. Complexity to elementals, a backward tracing. It was not easy. He did not have the old man’s extraordinary sense of the past or future. That had been one of the problems. He preferred warmth to cold, and from one of those early memories he recognized a lingering sense of great warmth loss, as if yanked sleeping from a bed, or as if something warm had been pulled from him. He did not know where it started. It may have started with the elements. He knew them from college, ninety-two chemical elements. He saw them around him, or imagined them. The elements of matter, the red tinge in the soil, the ore country periphery. Chlorophyll in the leaves being beaten away by September, revealing other pigments, autumn coming, and he tucked it away as knowledge to spring on Harvey. And the alchemist’s elements: fire, water, air and earth. And the great anatomical humours, the cardinal humours that flowed like north woods tides: cold blood, phlegm, yellow bile and melancholy sacs of black bile. Black bile struck him as important. He learned of it somewhere. He pricked open capsules of cellulose and inspected the pulp. He opened bulbs of honeysuckle and smelled the grease. Inside himself, he suspected, he would sometimes find a sac of black bile, and he would prick it open and smell it, too, rub his nose in it. He exercised, took the walks, listened to Harvey, kept his eyes open.