Powers, Richard - Orfeo

Awful names ring out onshore, words from the forbidden list. Peter’s mother starts to cry. Her husband tells her to grow up. The Elsfest threatens to go the way of world affairs. Peter searches the lake for help. His hundred cousins are hammering out the rules for a game of tackle water polo. His mother sits wrapped in her French towel, sobbing. His father sucks a cigarette through the cup of his hand. Peter glances at brother Paul, who glares back a warning shot. Paul has never been so popular as he is today, and he will not let this party end. On the far side of the raft, little sister Susan, already addicted to giddiness, spins herself silly in her inner tube.

The music dies. His mother combs the beach, gathering up her things and crushing them into her beach bag. Peter slips from his seat on the slime-slick ladder and starts to breaststroke back to the beach. But a voice from behind hooks him.

Hey, licorice stick. C’mere a sec.

Cousin Kate, sleek and shiny as any marine mammal, splits him with a smile. Her challenge unfolds as it has a hundred times already in Peter’s private theater. But she doesn’t wait for a response, just paddles around to the hidden cove on the raft’s deep side. Peter follows, helpless in her wake. The great adventure of his life is beginning at last, and the tune unfolds just as he has practiced it.

He draws near to where she floats, her hand on the raft.

Licorice stick. You like me?

He nods, and she plunges through the water onto him. Her legs wrap around his chest, pulling him down. Her clasping weight swamps him, and they go under. In the green cloud, her coiled body inches over his. Her tongue probes his mouth, filling him with the taste of lake. A thigh whacks his groin. Pain shoots up his whole length, and with it, a filament of sharpest pleasure. He paws her slippery skin and snags a fallen strap. She pushes away, back toward air. A foot catches his face on their scramble upward, and his nose fills up with water. He tastes the murk of whatever comes after life. Liquid goes down his windpipe, and he starts to drown.

Rising, he rams a slimy mass. He comes up underneath the raft. The green-smeared oil cans bang him. His head pounds with the need to breathe. He jerks sideways, frantic for an opening, but tangles on the seaweed-coated anchor chain.

At last he snaps free. He surfaces, coughing up algae, grappling on the raft’s edge and sucking air. Nearby, a pair of California cousins laugh at this, the most hilarious thing they’ve seen all day.

His vision clears. He looks around for Cousin Kate. She’s leagues away, bobbing in the waves and singing at full voice for an admiring crowd. Come smoke a Coca-Cola, drink ketchup cigarettes. See Lillian Russell wrestle with a box of Oysterettes!

His mother stands calling at the water’s edge. Petey! Are you okay?

A California cousin shouts, Only his hairdresser knows for sure .

Peter waves; he’s fine. More green water issues from his lungs. The air fills with shrieks that pass for laughter. He thinks he might be dead, still thumping against the underside of the raft. His father looms up onshore and blasts his metal lifeguard whistle. Everybody out for a head count. Chop-chop .

Sister Susan doesn’t hear. She’s trying to force every part of her inner tube underwater at the same time. Brother Paul, enjoying a brief reign as king of the raft, yells back, Five more minutes!

Not five minutes. Now! You don’t bargain with your father.

In fact, every exchange with the man since their infancy has been a haggle. A couple of nervous aunts rise from their beach blankets and count their kids. Another calls her daughters from the lake. There’s a general summoning, and the whole surly group, crushed again by adult whim, readies to swim in.

Then, on some invisible cue — a shift in the wind, a cloud across the sun — the group will changes to won’t. The ringleaders detect a fatal softness in the adult demand. Coming! they call falsetto, half compromise, half jeer. They swim back to the raft, across a moat too wide for any beer-addled old man to ford. Karl Els blows the whistle again — two violent blasts for no one.

One of the Pittsburgh lieutenants snarls, He’s gonna swim out and drag us all back one-handed?

Kate’s mountainous brother Doug sniggers from his roost on the edge of the float. A line of dark hair runs from the dimple of his sternum all the way to his navel. The fur gives him dominion over the whole raft. Let him try. His grin declares the whole great span of human events to be Howdy Doody time.

Karl Els calls his sons by name. Paul studies the landlocked man, and Peter studies Paul. Too many seconds click off for life ever to come right again. Even if they submit now, the weakest imaginable punishment will be terrible.

His father’s shame reddens Peter. A bankrupt government of one, mocked by a lake full of children. . One short swim to shore and Peter might still rescue the man, help him pretend that nothing has changed in the order of things.

A sneer from Paul freezes him. Kate, too, holds Peter with a look, threatening bottomless contempt if he surrenders and promising prizes if he stays true. Everything alive wants his loyalty.

Treading water, Peter eyes his father. He wants to tell the man: It’s nothing. A summer game. Patterns on the air — over before you know it. Queasiness engulfs him. How easy it would be, to kick out into the center of the lake until he can’t kick anymore. But Peter can only bob, weightless, between this rebel raft and the imperial shore. The music in his head, that Shaker tune of his green practicing, scatters into noise. He will dog-paddle in place, a lone child, waving his stick arms and kicking his feeble legs until strength fails him and he goes down.

The day fragments into frozen shards. His father, beet-red, staggers, sheds the cigarette and beer. He plunges into the lake. But he doesn’t swim. There’s rushing, shouting, confusion. Uncles in the water, dragging the thrashing bulk back onto land. His crushed father, clutching his chest, propped against a cabin, ashen and sneering at the wisdom of crowds. That crowd, on the beach, like statues, heads bowed. Too late, Peter swims in, as hard as he can. But he hangs back from the pallid man, terrified, and soon they have his father in a car and heading to a doctor.

Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you’re free. But a few measures more, and the cloak of time closes back around you.

The fatal heart attack followed an hour later, in a rural clinic where the lone GP with his shelves full of gauze bandages, tongue depressors, and rubbing alcohol was helpless to do anything but put Karl Els in an ambulance for Potsdam. He died in transit, miles from anywhere, still blowing his lifeguard’s whistle, leaving behind a son convinced he’d helped to kill him.

In middle age, Peter Els would spend years writing an opera, the story of an ecstatic rebellion gone wrong. For years, the piece seemed to him like a prophecy of End Time. Not until the age of seventy, an old man burying his dog, did he recognize it, at last, as childhood memory.

Crumb: “Music is a system of proportions in the service of a spiritual impulse.” My spirit’s impulse just happened to be criminal.

Els brushes off the dirt, goes inside, and looks for something to play for his dog’s funeral. He lands on Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder : five songs lasting twenty-five minutes. Fidelio used to go nuts with the cycle, back in her puppyhood. At the very first measures of the first song she’d start crooning, the way she did when Els took her to the park on a fall night under the full moon.