seven ways to blue lake

(for Gwen)

Seven Ways To Blue Lake by Sherry Cassells

There are three easy ways to Blue Lake, four in the summer, five if you count flight, six in your head, a wishful seventh.

They say to live a carefully constructed life, they don’t say it makes for a smoother decline but that’s what they’re getting at, financial stability and other diligences, pay attention to your eyes, your teeth. I chipped one of my final molars last night, it’s a sword now, I taste blood and rot. These bodily betrayals are ghastly. I rebalance my remaining stock while awaiting the next catastrophe. 

I have not lived a careful life but its debris is what I hang on to, the scars provide the traction I need to get back to Blue Lake. 

Normal is not a word that gets much air around here. Look at us lined up outside our rooms like recycling, scrap metal and flesh, everybody trying to remember their own Blue Lake.

Our lakes had aptronymic names – they were named after themselves – Blue Lake, Round Lake, Pickerel Lake, Elbow Lake, Cold Lake, Catastrophe Lake, the green blob of Monster Lake like it shimmied out from under some giant’s bed, Pen Lake so close to the prison it stuck. There used to be a Duck Lake until Max Smart switched out the D for an F and Fuck Lake entered calmly into our vocabulary and culture, we thought nothing of a three year old saying it, if they said we had shit weather at Fuck Lake they would be punished for the adjective alone.

Blue Lake was not a tourist town, we rarely got new people, just the odd family and that’s a multifunctional word. Blue Lake was a prison town. Cain Sweet and his mother Iris moved to a shack on Fuck Lake so they could be close to their recently incarcerated.

Our fathers were guards, we begged for stories but their grim mouths were firm, we wanted details but they were sworn to silence and that’s what we got. When someone was on nights a black square went up on their door like a mourning wreath and the kids played elsewhere. Our mothers were housewives who packed last meal lunches and said goodbye to their husbands every day like it was for good. When they came home there was a period of reattachment, I don’t know how else to put it, we allowed them an hour of alcoholic adjustment before banging back into their lives.

Letters to Blue Lake were addressed in the fashion of Santa, The North Pole. Cain never got used to the fuck in Fuck Lake. I found that hilarious, after I left the first time I wrote him regularly, on the envelopes I put Cain, Fuck Lake.

I am here by default, I am not so old as the others, I have a bad hip and am waiting for appropriate accommodations, I can’t manage stairs.

When the bell tolls around here they wheel for whom down the hallways, ceremoniously, you can see their outline beneath the sheets and their name on the headboard, yesterday it was my doommate Timothée, he’d been amputated to death, and already this morning there’s somebody new, he’s out cold, I asked Guy his name and he said dunno, just initials, don’t think he’ll be very good company, Ed.

Cain’s mother drove the white pickup through town, we all watched, she was very young, she seemed such a girl to us, her clenched jaw and trembling eyes, we all knew they’d rented Shelby’s shack on Fuck Lake. Some people went to lend a hand, I took my bike and by the time I got there my dad was up on the roof, Mr. Sheeran was hunched over the stairs, Uncle Arn tucked beneath the house like the witch in The Wizard of Oz, somebody gurgled pressure’s good from the mouth of a well. Our mothers floated around inside, they brought bed sheets and towels, casseroles and cutlery. They laughed, bewildered, they said Iris must have had Cain when she was 12.

I could see the kid in the kitchen window, it took a minute to catch his panicked eye in all the reflections, we didn’t actually wave but put our hands up in unison, his left my right, like the Marx brothers. Next second he twitched out the front door, sailed over Mr. Sheeran, I jerked my head in the direction of the forest and we careened through its giant birch trees to the golden ledge of Canadian Shield, we were best friends before we spoke a word, this would become our adolescent perch, overlooking the enormous marsh of Fuck Lake.

A while ago I had a guy in the next bed who did not talk but sang, you could tell he’d been terrifically handsome, his Asian bones were outstanding in their architecture, dark liquid eyes, his name was Mr. Song. He used to annoy the hell out of people who were trying to watch TV so I’d walk him to the end of the hall where he sang Johnny Mathis mostly, some Elvis, to his own reflection, shall I stay...

Cain’s mother taught us to dance to this sort of music, songs like Something Stupid, Moon River, Dream A Little Dream. 

Winter afternoons we’d part the furniture; summer nights, the stars. 

It would be untrue to say I hadn’t been in love with Iris Sweet. 

As Song crooned, I pressed my palm to my stomach and swayed with my paper thin version of her, she eventually opened a bakery and flower shop in downtown Blue Lake, she called it Sweet Iris, she arranged leftover flowers into astonishing things she wore in her hair and pinned to the damp pocket above my unquiet heart.

Of course I have faults and perhaps the biggest is that I find no shame in them. Some of the people here write their memoirs according to prompts into books their daughters supply so that when they are dead their children will be able to resolve arguments – look! it says right here! it was March 15th! – but what I do with my memories is say them. Out loud. I talk to myself. The television watchers shush me so I talk into hallways if it’s too early for bed, otherwise in bed I talk to the sky.

I know I seem crazy but this has nothing to do with mental decline. 

Last night when Timothée died, I don’t want to get spooky or anything, but the moment he died the northern lights went mad. Guy was right. This new person is no company at all but at least he doesn’t – he can’t – protest when I talk all night. They call him CS; I call him Lewis. I love stories. I spent a year studying journalism. In the sunlit library of my dreams I read, unaware that I am reciting episodes from my own life as I sleep. This morning when I woke up Lewis was looking at me, almost through me, I put up my hand in not exactly a wave but similar, I didn’t think he could move but up went his hand to match mine – just like the Marx brothers in that old movie – what’s it called?

What was that old movie? I said it out loud. The Marx brothers one with the mirror scene? And then I got it. Duck Soup! It was Duck Soup!

His mouth churned, he was trying to say something, I leaned closer.

Fuck Soup he said.

I am not the fainting type. I prefer to think I fell back to sleep. When I awoke he was gone, perhaps he had never existed, there are entire gulps of life that are false like that. 

At first, me and Max Smart tried to find out who Cain’s father was and what he had done. Max telephoned The Pen pretending to be a lawyer, he asked about Mr. Sweet but there was no Mr. Sweet. We did not know until then that there was a small wing – I pictured it broken – for women offenders. He was told there was a Mrs. Sweet and that’s where we left it. We were embarrassed and confused, our curiosity reduced to shame, we pretended it didn’t happen so perfectly, so entirely, that it didn’t. 

The next time I saw Max he said, I wonder what he did.

What who did?

Cain’s father.

That’s the kind of gulp I mean.

The second time I left Blue Lake it was for love but not in the usual way, not to follow it, but to leave it. 

 I was home from university for the summer and across the continent of their white kitchen table I saw that Iris loved me, Cain saw it, too, he said I better get out of town. I could have kept it quiet forever, but upon reciprocation my soul bulged with it, there were outbreaks, fevered nights and stammering days, dancing with her was exquisite and awful, when I left in the fall it was for good, thus began my lesser life.

Where’d he go? I asked Guy. Where’d Lewis go?

Who?

CS. Where’d he go?

He came out of it. Sat up and said he wanted to make a phone call normal as can be.

Is he gone?

Not yet. Said his ride will be here in the morning.

I found him at the end of the hall sitting in front of the window, he saw me coming in the reflection, I stood at his side and we spoke into one another’s ghosts.

I’m going back, his ghost said.

Mine whispered, to Blue Lake?

Yeah. I’m going back.

He waited until the morning. Cain. Cain waited until the morning to ask about my life since Blue Lake so I gave him the approximate slideshow, as if I were not a man but a series of postures. I showed him my years in grizzly scenes of failure, episodic decline, dingy apartments, unpleasant rooms, black eyes, missing teeth, all my lovelorn days in one gulp and a fascinating change came over him, one by one his features were crowded out, his face emptied, and he started to cry.

Cain, man, listen, don’t worry. It’s over, dude. It’s done. I’m okay now.

He said in spit and snot and blood and bone that it was his fault.

We couldn’t tell you.

Tell me what?

The misery took him, he tried to fight it, he wanted to speak, but it took his mouth. I stood him up and held him. I hummed the anthem of our youth, Come Saturday Morning, and patted his back, like burping a baby but for words.

We just wanted to visit her, our mom in The Pen, they wouldn’t let us so we stole money, we stole a truck, we drove all night, we knew we’d get caught but we didn’t care, they were going to put us in separate foster homes so we didn’t care, we wanted to see her, she killed him to save us, she killed our father to save us, we saw the for rent sign and figured we’d give it a go, Iris was only 16, she was my sister, she was masquerading as my mother, she was only two years older than me, she was just a kid, we never dreamed we’d get away with it out there on Fuck Lake, we couldn’t tell you.

The air came out of me in a shhhhhhh and he obliged, he was quiet, he sat down. I hadn’t realized we had been revolving until we stopped. I was dizzy. Something spiraled down the hallway toward me. 

She looked like her name in the wild purple wind. 

Iris. 

The seventh way to Blue Lake.