Peter Geye: Wintering

For a year after he was elected, Charlie fought fair. Or at least out in the open. He and Harry shouted at each other across the church basement, where the town meetings were held in those days, and I was there for many of them. Charlie and his accomplices wore hundred-dollar suits and silk ties, while Harry and a few others sat there in flannel shirts with contrary views. Charlie loved trotting out phrases like “eminent domain” and “the good of the people” and was always talking about jobs. But Harry — whose name had always meant more than Charlie’s, despite his office and money — wouldn’t budge. And he found allies.

So Charlie reared back. For years he tried to gain the upper hand, buying friends as fast as he made enemies. He was as deft at one as he was at the other, and at times it looked like he and his Republican cronies would have their way with the wilderness. But they never did. Not then. Not ever.

—

The summer of ’63, when Gus and his father weren’t out hoisting mostly empty gill nets, they were in the fish house, building their canoes. Harry told Gus he wanted to teach him one true thing before he got out of this place, and the canoes were it. Most nights, after fishing all day and dinner at the Traveler’s Hotel, the two of them would put a Bill Monroe record on the turntable and settle into their gentle and quiet labor. It was during those hours that Gus learned about Harry’s own father’s genius with boats, for every lesson — every word — had its root in something Odd had once said. Odd being Harry’s father.

Gus recalled those hours as some of the best of his life. But he also recalled being anxious for their nights in the fish house to end, so he could steal away to meet Cindy Aas at Eddie Riverfish’s house.

She was Charlie’s only daughter, Gus’s age and in the same high school class, and her shine for him was as unexpected and unlikely as snow in August. He’d known her his whole life, of course, and all that time they’d been strict opposites if not outright enemies. A cheerleader and homecoming queen and mediocre student, she liked to drink and smoke. The sort of girl mothers warned their sons about. Gus was quiet, a straight-A student, a letterman on the cross-country ski team, a member of the Chess Club. Those differences would have been enough to lock them in opposite circles, even without the rift between their fathers, and their grandfathers, too.

What they had in common was music. Cindy played the piano at church when her mother wasn’t able to, and in the high school band she was first flute. Gus played the guitar in band and could strum any instrument with strings. Those old crones in the church basement used to whisper about the sounds the two of them could make together, but in all their lives Cindy and Gus had hardly spoken to each other.

After graduation that summer, Gus found himself sitting next to her on the deck out back of Eddie’s house. It was late enough that the party, stoked all night by beer and marijuana, was finally petering out. Cindy didn’t say much. Maybe she didn’t say anything, but he remembered her looking up at him and kissing him, as though they’d been going steady for years. And he remembered the great whorling in his gut. And not being able to push her away even though he knew he should.

There in my kitchen, he wasn’t comfortable talking about this, even so many years after the offense.

They spent the whole summer sneaking around. Swimming in the cove on the hottest nights, fooling with each other in her friend’s basement, driving up to Long Finger Lake with a fifth of vodka and a pack of Pall Malls. She was showing Gus things he’d never seen before, and he loved it. He could still hear the songs on the radio, still remember how her hair gleamed with the moonlight behind it.

It would be months before Gus learned she was ordered into his life. He admitted that that fact complicated the story. But he still felt with absolute certainty that, on those nights up at Long Finger Lake, she was there because she wanted to be, never mind that unexpected wrinkle.

It was on such a night at Long Finger Lake that she told Gus about his mother and her father. They passed a bottle back and forth, toyed with the radio dial between long kisses, talked about friends and music. After a lull in the conversation, Cindy said, “My dad’s screwing your mom.” Then she laughed, her eyes wide and wild. “Isn’t it scandalous ?”

Before he could answer she reached across the car seat and unzipped his jeans.

He wasn’t sure he believed her. Not at first. For all the fun they were having, she was moody and prone to lying. But because of their intimacy — and because intimacy can make the blind see, if not the reverse — he did choose to believe, for the rest of the evening, that what was happening between them was at least as important as whatever his mother and Charlie Aas might be up to. Which is not to say that he wasn’t curious. So he started investigating.

He had no idea, though, what he was looking for. His parents had never seemed happy, much less in love. He couldn’t recall a single kiss, or a tender word, ever passing between them. As for his own experiences in affairs of the heart, that summer with Cindy was his initiation.

Still, he saw changes at home. Lisbet became glib with Harry, almost mocking. She bought new dresses. Started smoking again. Listened to loud music and spent countless hours on the telephone in hushed conversations with a friend in Chicago. And she started painting again. Feverishly, and sometimes all night long.

And his father? He became more obsessed than ever with his maps. He’d hunker down at the kitchen table with a pot of coffee and his books and pore over them as if the world itself could not impart the truths hidden within those pages. For him this was, Gus thought, a strange posture, to sit anywhere with such focus for so long, especially at their kitchen table, and Harry now reminded him of a wounded animal. Which it turns out he was.

They didn’t talk much that season, father and son, but when they did — out tending the nets, or bent over their canoes in the fish house — Harry started telling Gus his war stories. The Hürtgen Forest. The Ardennes. Surprisingly, they had little to do with the men he fought beside or against, or the carnage he saw, though he told of these things, too. What he remembered most was how cold those nights were. Even worse, he said, than he’d grown up with in Gunflint. Gus was of course entranced. He listened with unwavering attention, though he was convinced even then that he didn’t truly understand what he was being told, much less why. Any hours he spent alone were given over to questions of what it meant to be a man, and if he was one. Wondering if he had to go to war himself in order to cross that threshold. No doubt he’d have the chance if he wanted it. Maybe even if he didn’t, given what JFK was calling the communist threat in Vietnam. He’d heard it was hotter than Hades in the jungles over there.

—

Things with Cindy came to a head near the end of summer, after Gus overheard his mother on the phone one night. He’d been out with Cindy, half drunk and full of lust. Lisbet was sitting by the fire, drinking a glass of wine, unaware that he’d just come in.

“I guess all the Aases are slumming it this summer,” she said, then listened for a moment to what her friend was saying. She took another pull of wine, nodded emphatically, and said, “Yes, of course. But that little trollop will flat wreck Gus. He’s no match for her.” It was only then she noticed Gus, staring at her from across the room. She only smiled and turned back to her conversation.

Cindy didn’t wreck him, even if she was supposed to.

They spent their last night together waiting out a thunderstorm in the fish house. It would be the first and only time they made love, a detail that sent Gus to blushing as he told me. When they finished she lay beneath him, her mouth on his shoulder. He remembered her hand in his hair, the sweat pooled in her belly, how she’d bitten him after he said he loved her, hard, right on the shoulder blade, enough to draw blood.