We Live in Water

BEING A GOOD FATHER CAN BE MURDER

1958

Oren Dessens leaned forward as he drove, perched on the wheel, cigarette in the corner of his mouth, open can of beer between his knees. He'd come apart before, a couple three times, maybe more, depending on how you counted. The way Katie figured—every fistfight and whore, every poker game and long drunk—he was always coming apart, but Oren didn't think it was fair to count like his ex-wife did. Up to him, he'd only count those times he was in real danger of not coming back. Like that morning on the carrier. "Dad?"

He'd technically been at war the whole nine months he was out, but he'd been in danger only that one time, a month before the end, a beautiful dawn in open water, up for a smoke, alone as a man could feel, the planes huddled at one end of the gray flight deck like birds, wings up. The rest of the world, in every direction, seemed like bands of varying blue except for a thin gray line where the sea and sky met, and then a single smoking plane fell out of nowhere—no Japanese carrier or base anywhere nearby—just a lost Zip fall­ing out of that deep blue like a single raindrop, twisting for the deck, coming so close Oren could see the red suns on the wings before the thing dropped harmlessly off the stern—an osprey going for a fish. "Dad?"

But no matter how you^igured trouble, there was no doubt this time. He was in some shit. And not like that morning on deck. This time he was the lost plane, spiraling and smoking. Oren downshifted. The Merc's cockeyed

headlight beams met and crossed ahead. On either side the dark trees leaned over the narrow road, and the headlights made it seem like a pine tunnel. Wasn't much farther, Oren thought. Flett would be there already, fixing things. He hoped.

"Dad?"

Oren glanced at the kid, whose feet dangled over the edge of the bench seat and the scratchy Indian blanket he'd put there to keep the springs from popping through the torn upholstery. Michael was four, middle of three kids, only boy, and the only kid Oren got in the divorce. It had been his lawyer's advice: If he didn't want to pay so much, he needed to take a kid. So he got the boy. "Yeah?"

The kid's head was tilted to the side. "Do we live in water?"

Oren dragged his cigarette. "What?"

"Do we live in water?"

"What do you mean?"

"Do we live in water?"

"I don't...I don't know what you mean."

"I mean do we live in water?"

"You mean like in the rain or some­thing? In the ocean?"

The boy stared at him.

"I don't...." Oren took a pull on the beer. "Do you mean can we live in water?"

"No. Do we live in water?"

The clearing had snuck up on Oren, and he slowed, came into the cross of narrow country roads, nothing but dark walls of trees in four directions and Flett's roadhouse in the center of this clearing, the big one-story, low-slung building with no windows and a stumpy sign that read two bridges. A single lightbulb pointed back at the sign, night bugs frantic in the dim light. Oren pulled the Merc into the parking lot, with the cackle of rubber tires on gravel.

He took a breath. "Listen. I gotta'run in this place for a minute."

There were five other cars parked out­side, including Flett's Chevy and that bitch of a red Cadillac Ralph Bannen drove. Okay. Flett must be in there trying to smooth things with Bannen, working out some kind of arrangement. Earlier that day Oren and the kid had driven out to Flett's new house overlooking the lake, and while the kid hung out in the basement, Oren had explained to Flett how bad he'd messed up, how he'd been nailing this guy's whore of a wife and how once on a drunk she happened to mention her husband had a safe in the house. Oren guessed right off the wife's birth date as the combination. He'd only taken a little money, but the guy appar­ently counted every night and hit it out of the wife that Oren had been over. The whole time Oren told this story, Flett just stared, until he finally said, What guy, Oren? And when Oren told him Ralph Bannen, Flett just shook his head. Ban­nen ran book and women at half the

clubs in the panhandle, including Two Bridges. After yelling at him, Flett had suggested that he'd go alone to the road-house, talk to Bannen and then have Oren come down after he fixed things up. So Oren sat at Flett's house for an hour while the boy played in the base­ment. And now here they were.

Oren dragged his smoke and stared at the kid again—blond like his mother, round-faced, big floppy eyelashes. He looked so much like her, Oren wondered how he could like the kid so much.

"Sit tight," Oren said. "I gotta see this man. Don't get out of the car. You hear?"

The boy stared at him expectantly, as if waiting for the answer to a question, and that's when Oren remembered the boy had asked one. "Look, I don't know what you were talking about before. Michael," he said. "Do you mean can we breathe in water?"

"No," the boy said, as plainly as if he were asking for a sandwich. "Do. We. Live. In water?"

Oren pulled smoke again. And then he surprised himself by laughing.

The numbers clicked to a stop, the tank full, and Michael replaced the nozzle and screwed the gas cap back onto the rental. He craved a cigarette. It was all he could do not to go into the convenience store and buy a pack. Two years and still...maybe he'd just feel this need forever. He started the car and pulled back onto the highway, shocks hunching up on the blacktop. It was more developed out here than he'd imagined, businesses all along this stretch, the grubby outskirts of a resort community: tavern, little grocery, machine shop, Western-boot store, sawmill, wrecking yard and a couple of nicer mobile-home parks. From the news story, he'd imagined it as more

remote than this, forested and dark, not a civilized string of small businesses.

Locals called the area Two Bridges, this unincorporated strip of businesses connecting the northern and eastern shores of the lake, overgrown with res­taurants and tourist stores—and on the busiest corners, the place Michael had come to see, the oldest thing in the area, Two Bridges Resort.

The resort comprised three newer buildings: a Western-themed restaurant and lounge in front with faux wagon-wheel windows, a general store that sold driftwood and Indian art, and the hotel out back, a big eight-story Vegas-style tn-sided structure with a sign promising lake views!

Michael got out of the car, grabbed his briefcase and walked down a side­walk past the restaurant, between land­scaped strips of grass, toward the front door of the hotel. The desk clerk showed him into an office overlooking the hotel lobby, on a mezzanine directly above the front desk. A few minutes later a woman came into the room, mid-30s, short and plump with dark hair and a round bosom, and introduced herself as Ellie Flett. It was the woman he'd talked to on the phone. "You're the law­yer from San Francisco who wanted to talk about his father?"

"Yes." He offered his hand. "Michael Pierce." And it occurred to him that he hadn't really thought about where to start or, for that matter, where to go once he'd started. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a news story that a clip service had found for him in the Spokane newspaper, just over the border from the lake, a story published four years ear­lier: "Historic Two Bridges Resort to Expand." The story was about the con­struction project, but it referred to the resort's history as a roadhouse and home for gambling and prostitution before this side of the lake was developed. As he handed the story over, Michael saw that his hand was shaking.

Ellie Flett didn't seem to notice. She took the story and pointed over his shoulder to the same story, laminated and framed on the wall behind him with a handful of other clippings. Michael didn't expect this to be so hard.

"My mother died two years ago," he said. "She raised my sisters and me. We never knew our father. It was something we never talked about. There were no pictures, nothing. She remarried when I was 10. A good man, my stepfather. Shane Pierce," he added, explaining his last name. And as true as all of this was, it seemed like something other than the point of this visit, and he rubbed his brow, confused by the disconnect he felt from this seemingly intimate informa­tion. "After my mother died, my sister found this (continued on page 112)

WATER

(continued from page 90)

note in her things." Michael handed her a faded slip of yellow paper cov­ered in small printed letters, as if a shy child had written the note.

"Katie, Sorry I couldn I take the boy after all. I got in some trouble. Just like you said. He's a good boy. Tell him I said so. You tell him it's okay he can do anything he wants.

Oreti.

I'll come back when I can."

Ellie didn't look up from the note. "This was your father?"

"Oren Dessens," Michael said. She showed no reaction to the name.

Ellie turned the page over. Stamped in light blue ink on the other side of the narrow strip of paper were the words Tiro Bridges and, running down the left-hand column, the numbers one to 15.

"This is a betting slip," Ellie said. One corner of her mouth went up. "I used to see these around the house when I was a kid."

She stared at the slip like an old family picture. And then she laughed. "Back in the old days, before all the money flooded into the valley, they used to take sports betting out here. Games were written on a chalkboard, and these numbers corresponded to each game on the board." Ellie smiled at the memory and then looked down at the betting slip. "77/ come back," she read.

"'When I can.'" Michael finished. He felt uncomfortable and glanced up at her.

"I guess he didn't come back," she said.

"No," Michael said. There was some other part to all of this, something about his own divorce, but Michael didn't know how to tell that part. "I was surprised about my father saying he couldn't take me after all," he said instead. "My mother never mentioned my living with him. Shane, my step­father, said the only thing my mother ever said about Oren was that he was a gambler and a drunk who took off for good when I was four. She heard he put out on a ship, and she figured he died of syphilis somewhere."

Ellie was staring at him in a way that made Michael feel exposed.

"But," Michael said, "naturally, when I found the story about this place...." He didn't finish and wondered, natu­rally... what? Did he expect to find his lather here?

Ellie looked back at the betting slip. "Look, f've got a meeting. A conven-

tion we're trying to get. But...do you want to talk to my dad?"

"Your dad?"

"Tim Flett. He bought the place in the 1950s from the original owner, probably about the time you're talking about. He's not in the best of health, but his mind is still sharp. Maybe he remembers your father."

They made an appointment to meet again in an hour. Michael left her office, took an elevator to the eighth floor of the hotel and stood in the hallway, looking out. From the top floor, he could see the lake in the distance and the two highways part­ing at a 90-degree angle from each other, skirting the shores of the lake and disappearing into a blur of com­mercial development.

Again, it wasn't the way he'd pic­tured it, and it seemed odd to him that he'd pictured anything at all. Maybe it was Oren's note: / got into some trouble. Or the news story, which made refer­ence to the dark history of the place: the Western toughs, the gamblers and hookers. But he imagined other things, too: headlights and Indian blankets, a bright shimmering wall.

On the top floor, Michael found he had cell phone coverage again, and he listened to a new message from Tracy: "I know you're in Idaho. I just wanted to tell you that I'm leaving Megan's Bab\-Sitters Club books on the built-in in the living room." And then she paused. "She's worried about having something to read when she comes to your house." The words your house were a kick to Michael's stomach. Tracy felt it too. On the message, she became clipped. "I hope you find what you're looking for, Michael."

He pressed the button to delete the message, but as her voice faded, Tracy said, "Oh, and one more...," but she was gone. He tried to call her and got no answer.

He met Ellie in the lobby. "You can ride with me," she said and started for the front door before he could answer. She wore a soft black leather coat, and as he followed her out to the parking lot Michael shifted uneasily. .After the years of cheating on Tracy, maybe it was just muscle memory with him, the guilt.

"This whole area is different than it was 30 years ago," Ellie said as they drove away from the resort. "There were only two cabins on this side

of the lake when I was born. Now they're like tract homes. Secondaries a mile from the lake go for $400,000. Our little crop-duster airport is full of private jets." She said a couple of minor celebrities' names conspira-torially, the same ones Michael had read about in his research, almost as if the names themselves had become tourist attractions.

They drove away from the cross­roads, down the southbound four-lane highway, past an Indian casino, its park­ing lot jammed with cars. "This side of the lake was all forest back then." she said. "It was the untamed side." Michael thought about telling her that that was how he'd pictured it. But what would be the point? "My dad tells some pretty wild stories," she said. "Crazy how much can change in 30 years."

He'd had that thought recentlv too—how far removed he felt from a father who fought in World War II and gambled at roadhouses. "1 remem­ber driving from Tahoe one time," Michael said, "and going through the Donner Pass and thinking that just a few generations before, it was impass­able, turned people into animals. And now I can just...drive through it. Like any stretch of highway."

They drove a few more miles and then cut along an access road winding down a hillside above the shoreline. Ellie drove slowly past cute signs with nautical themes and stacked mailboxes above clusters of cabins and A-frames.

"My dad built the first cabin on this side, in 1955,' Ellie said. She turned off the road, and they came around a huge boulder to the back of a modest, wood-frame building with windows facing the lake and stairs down to the rocky shore. Michael had the strange sensation of seeing what he'd imagined. "Thank you for doing this," he said.

Ellie turned off the car and stared at the house. "That time of my father's life fascinates me," she said. "It's hard to reconcile the stories he tells with the sweet, silly man he is now." She opened her door and paused. "Oh. Before we go in...there's something you should know about my dad. It can be jarring if you're not prepared for it."

Bannen slapped him like he was a damn woman. Oren Dessens spun and fell against the craps table, cheek sting­ing. He scurried backward beneath the table and against the scratchy cedar wall. He put his hands up as Bannen stalked toward him. "Wait. wait. Just listen to me—¦—"

"Oh. He wants me to listen." Ban­nen spoke over his shoulder to nervous hacks of laughter. The place was nearly empty, just the handful of Bannen's

usual ass-sniffers, tough guys as long as they were together. It was dark, all the lights shut off except the one behind the bar. Bannen's thick jaw was clenched, and his white hair had come out of its straight furrows and was falling down in his eyes. "You believe this guy? Steals from me and now he wants me to listen to him. You believe this son of a bitch?" Oren looked up at Flett, standing beside the craps table, his shoulders turned a few degrees. He was finger­ing some chips and staring at his shoes. Oren had foolishly believed Flett could run interference for him, plead his case to Ralph Bannen. Now Oren saw there was no way Flett could do that. And he didn't really blame him. Flett was in no position to get him a deal. He owned the roadhouse, but it was Bannen who ran book out of it and who paid off the sher­iff, Bannen who brought the whores up from Wallace and who muscled the guys who couldn't pay. Oren had thought he was pleading his case to the house by going to Flett, but Bannen had always been the house. And it was Bannen's ex-whore wife he'd banged and Bannen's safe he'd broken into. He remembered something that Flett always said: Only three kinds of trouble out here—money,

women and Ralph Bannen. And he man­aged to hit em all with this.

He started to pull himself up against the cedar wall and felt a sharp kick to his side that lifted him and dropped him to the floor again. A cowboy boot. Oren thought it might have split his ribs. When he could open his eyes, he looked up to the pinched face of Rutledge. Rut-ledge, who he'd run down to Lewiston not three weeks ago to fish steelhead. Jesus. This was bad. The guys, five of them including Bannen and Klett, stood circled around him, a pack of dogs. Oren wheezed.

"So what do I do?" Bannen asked. He looked around the circle, grim male faces with shadowy evening beards, eyes darkened by the dim lights in this room. "What about you, Timmy? What would you do with a guy like this?"

Tim Flett was Oren's age, 33, their birthdays just two months apart. Oren wondered why this would come to him now, maybe because it was the only thing. Otherwise they couldn't be more different. Tim Flett was a local, grew up in his daddy's sawmill and lived a mile from where he was born. Oren was a roamer, from Mon­tana originally, who'd skipped along

the Highline alter the war. then down into the Idaho panhandle and into Washington. Tim was a settler, took the money he'd inherited from his old man, bought this roadhouse and built his home on the lake. Oren couldn't settle for anything, even a perfectly good girl like Katie. Always scratch­ing for money, losing jobs, chasing trouble, Oren wondered if he could've been a guy like Tim Flett, living above the surface instead of always below.

"Shoot, Ralph. I don't know," Flett said. He was a pretty big guy himself, with short red hair curled tight on top and cheeks and neck that were always scarlet. But he wasn't big like Bannen, whose chest heaved in and out as he breathed.

"No. Come on, Tim my. Tell me." Ban­nen looked around. "This is your place. What would you do to a guy who dicks your wife so he can steal from you? "

Oren didn't dare correct him. Ban-nen's wife had been one of the sweeter whores Bannen ran before he took her out of commission, and getting her had always been the point. The safe was an afterthought. No, he'd taken only a little of Bannen's money, but he'd had every last bit of the man's wife.

Flett made eye contact with Oren and then looked away. "Since he came in on his own, I'd just hit him around some," Flett said quietly, "maybe break some­thing." He looked at Oren again and seemed to want him to know this was the best he could possibly do. "And then he's gotta get so far outta town that not only do you never sec him again, you never hear his name again."

So that was the play. It was, Oren saw, as much defense as Flett could offer on his behalf. And at that moment, sucking air through the pain of broken ribs, his face burning, staring up at Ralph Ban­nen, Oren was grateful for it.

"I don't know," Bannen said way too quickly, and Oren went cold. "1 don't think that'll do it for me, Tim my. I know this piece of shit is your friend, but that just...just don't do it for me."

That was when Oren moved. He moved like he moved in poker, not think­ing about it until he did it, the way he never looked at his cards until it was his bet, because if he had no idea what he had. then no one else would be able to read him. He jumped, grabbed hold of the leg of the craps table and pulled it over between him and Bannen. And then he had to find a spot through the semicir­cle. Flett. of course. It was the only play, and Flett seemed to know it. Oren hit his friend full in the chest with his shoulder and the man gave, stumbled backward into a blackjack table behind him. Rut-ledge grabbed for him, but Oren spun and was out the door. It was cold outside. He'd come out the back door, opposite side of the parking lot. and he ran as fast and as low as he could into the trees. At first he couldn't tell if anyone was behind

him, but then he could hear voices and the crunch of brush.

They were chasing him. Oren ran like an animal, scrambling and darting, almost on all fours. The air burned his lungs. He tripped over something and scratched himself, but he barely slowed. Tree limbs swatted at him. It was so dark in these woods that when his eyes finally adjusted he found it nearly impossible to believe he hadn't run full into a tree. They were thick all around him, and he moved like a kid running through a crowd of—oh shit.

Oren came to a stop, panting.

Goddamn it! He looked back over his shoulder. Michael was in the car. Bring­ing a four-year-old to Two Bridges— what was he thinking? He wasn't, that's what. He could've easily taken the kid to Katie's for the night. Earlier in the evening they'd been at Flett's house, and Flett had even suggested leaving

Michael there, in the basement with the aquarium. He should've done that. "You see how much he loves them fish," Flett had said. "He'll be fine."

Maybe Flett would find the kid and take him home. Even Bannen, asshole that he was, wouldn't take out adult busi­ness on a kid. Would he? Oren needed to keep moving. Make his way south to the highway, to Hayden. Maybe boost a car.

He began running again, but the adrenaline was fading and his broken rib cut him with each inhale. He saw a crease in the hillside and could hear water trickling. He ran down and found an old logging road hacked into the forest, two lines of faint tire tracks. Where the road crossed the creek, they'd put in a culvert, a round section of corrugated no bigger than a man could crawl through. Oren dropped down to the creek bed, just above the waterline, and ducked into it. There was just a trickle of water. He

could slay here till morning. He thought about his escape and felt a sort of pride. It seemed big to him, epic, the kind of story men would repeat through the ages. He'd nailed Bannen's wife and gotten away with it. That kind of story attached itself to a man forever. That is, if anyone ever found out about it. It was black dark. Oren closed his eyes.

He pictured the boy sitting in the car again. "Don't move," he had told the kid when he went inside to straighten things out. And the kid wouldn't move. He'd only had Michael for three months, since the divorce went final, but he was a good kid. He did what he was told, and most of the time he sat in the apart­ment Oren rented in Coeur d'Alene. staring out at the traffic on the street like it was a damn television. Shit, the kid might sit in that car forever. What was the crazy question he'd asked on the way out here from Flett's house? Water. Oren laughed to himself as he crouched in the culvert, icy creek flowing around the rubber of his boots.

What if Flett didn't find the boy in tin-car? What if they spent all night look­ing for Oren? Michael would sit there all night. It was cold out here. What if Michael came looking for him? He pic­tured Bannen grabbing his kid, and Oren felt something hot rise in his throat.

He couldn't stop his thoughts, which were like another broken rib.

They'd never expect him to go back. He told himself this, but it was stupid justification.

He wasn't going back because it was the smart play.

He was going back because of the boy.

Son of a bitch, this makes no sense, Oren thought, as he edged himself out of the culvert, thinking of that Japanese-plane again and the way it just fell out of the sky.

lqq?

Tim Flett lay like a stranded whale on a massive brown leather couch in a room overlooking the lake, watching a big-screen television that had been planted in front of the fireplace mantel. It was hard to see where the couch ended and where the old widower began. He was, as his daughter Ellie had explained outside, a mess—the result of runaway diabetes and a strep infection that had almost killed him. He was missing his left leg to the knee, his right foot and parts of three fingers on his left hand, and he was wearing an eye patch over his left eye beneath thick glasses. But that was not to say there wasn't a lot of Tim Flett: massive, great foothills of haunches ris­ing into a rolling stomach covered with big gray sweats and bare arms dimpled and pinched beneath gray sheets of skin, rising to the thick red folds of his neck and chest. He breathed like two men snoring. His hair was red, short and

curly, and it was hard to tell it from the mottled skin on his neck and head. He looked up from the TV and smiled.

"Hiya, sweetheart," he said to his daughter.

Ellie introduced Michael, who looked around the cabin's main room. Three big windows looked out on the bay. The walls were cut from halved logs, and the room was rustic, like a small lodge, with stuffed fish and family pictures compet­ing for wall space. Next to the couch was a big solid-looking portable toilet and on the other side of it a dormitory refrig­erator. Ellie and Michael sat in matching recliners across from him.

"Forgive my appearance," Tim Flett said. "I'm donatin mv bodv to sciencp. One

piece at a time."

Ellie smiled, and Michael wondered how many times she'd heard that joke.

"Did the nurse come by this after­noon, Dad?"

"She's a nurse?" Tim Flett asked, look­ing at Michael for a reaction. "Well, that explains it. I thought she was just a really clean hooker."

When Flett was done laughing and there was a lull, Michael reached in his briefcase for the news story and the betting slip. Ellie watched him. "Dad," she said, leaning forward. "Michael is trying to find out about his father." And then she told the story: how Michael's mother had died a year earlier, that he was the middle of three kids, even his father's name. "Did you know this man, Oren Dessens?"

Tim Flett's eyes shot to Michael's. And the hand with the missing fingers seemed to rise on its own accord to rub the big man's jaw. "You're Oren's boy?" He looked past Michael, out the win­dow to the lake. And then his eyes fell on Michael's face again and seemed to search it for something. "Christ. Oren Uessens's boy."

Michael rose and handed him the bet­ting slip. Flett took it with his good hand, which shook with the effort. "I ain't seen one of these in...." He trailed off, turned it over and read the note. "Jesus," he said. He looked at Michael again, and his night crawler of a bottom lip quivered. "Oren Dessens's boy. Jesus."

"I'm trying to find out what hap­pened to him," Michael said, and at that moment he felt a charge of adrenaline. It was so odd to be in a room with a man who'd known his father. "Do you know...," Michael asked, "what hap­pened to him?"

Flett looked up, his eyes bleary. "Not really," he answered after a long pause. "Not after he left here. There was some trouble the night he wrote this." His skin reddened. "Oren took some money from this woman and her husband. He came out here to have me straighten it out, but the guy he owed the money to was a hard guy." He looked at Ellie. "I ever tell you about Ralph Bannen, honey?"

Ellie shook her head. "I don't think so."

"Big old guy. Bigger'n me, even. His back looked like a damn barn. Last time I saw your dad," Flett said, "was that night. Bannen wasn't the kind of guy you could stay in town if you'd screwed him." Flett stared out at the lake. "He run your dad off."

"This guy my father owed money to," Michael said, "is he still alive?"

"Ralph?" Flett frowned. "No. Bannen's wife fixed him with his own baseball bat not long after, maybe six months. SOB bled to death. Took him all night to die. He'd been pounding on her for years. She only did two years for clubbing him, even though she hit him four times and didn't call nobody for hours."

"And my father. You don't know where he went?"

Flett was staring out at the lake, smil­ing, and at first Michael didn't think he'd heard the question. But he cleared his throat and answered. "Said he was going to Seattle to catch a boat. Mer­chant Marine."

Flett looked at Michael, held his eyes and then looked away again. "Your father used to talk about the places he saw in the Navy. Different islands. Australia and I don't know. Samoa. I'd never been nowhere but Washington and Montana, so your dad might as well have been talking about Mars. But after he left, 1 always pictured him living on one of them

islands, sleeping with the dark girls and cheating the locals at poker."

Michael kepi asking questions— What kind of man was his f a t h e r ? What did he like to do? Were there any other friends he could suggest looking up?—but Flett's answers got shorter and shorter: He was a good man. He played cards. No friends. Finally he stopped answer­ing altogether, just shrugged. Then he looked over at Ellie and gestured at the toilet next to his couch. "I need to use this. Gimme a minute."

Ellie offered to show Michael around. The)' walked outside and down the exterior wooden staircase, the rail badly in need of stain. The water lapped silently

against the riprap, and a dock lifted and fell slightly.

"I'm sorry he couldn't help you more," Ellie said.

"It's okay," Michael said. "At least he knew him."

"What will you do now?"

"I guess I'll go to Seattle, see if they keep Merchant Marine records there."

Ellie was staring at him. "Can I ask you something? You said you've been looking for your father the last four months."

"Yes."

"But you said your mother died a year ago. So what happened four months ago?"

Michael looked down and smiled. "My wife and I split."

After a moment Ellie said, "I'm sorry."

Michael shrugged. That was such an odd phrase—My wife and I split—so matter-of-fact and impermanent, making it sound no different than My wife and I joined a soflball learn. So what was the truth? That he threw his life away? That he self-destructed and threw away the whole goddamn thing? That his daugh­ter was worried about having books to read at his house? Michael stared at his hands. "A hole opened up."

"What?" she asked.

He was surprised that he'd spoken. "Nothing." he said. But he finished the thought: A hole opened up and he had to know what was inside it. So he picked and picked until the hole was huge and then everything sort of...fell in—him, his wife, his kid and this fragile life they'd built at the edge of the hole. And that's why he was here, because he'd begun wondering if maybe his father hadn't fallen into the same hole.

Chop rolled over ilie surface of the lake.

Michael looked down the shoreline at nodding docks, at ski boats rising and falling against log pilings. "It's nice up here," he said.

"It's quiet," she said, as if it were the same thing.

They went back into the house through the basement and were start-

ing up the steps when something caught Michael's eye in a room just off the stairs. He pushed open the door to a small bedroom. An empty fish tank ran the length of one wall, a big aquarium eight feet long, like a coffin. The water had been drained, and all that was in the tank was a wire brush, a pump, some fake seaweed and a little ceramic turtle. Michael stood at the door a moment and then stepped into the room, empty except for a bed, a dresser and this wall-length fish tank. He reached up and put his hand against the cold glass.

"This was my room when I was a kid," Ellie said, looking around.

"There were lights," Michael said qui­etly, his hand against the glass.

"In the tank? Yeah."

"Blue lights," he said.

"My dad put the tank in before I was born. He loved fish." She laughed. "I always thought the lights made the fish look like ghosts, but I didn't have the heart to tell him how much this tank scared me. You must have had one too."

A faint current seemed to connect Michael to the glass, a dying memory dis­solving in the very moment he remem­bered it, like a dream he awakened to, trying to recount it in the morning as it faded (fish gliding iyi blue...).

Then it was gone, whatever it had been—daydream, memory, trick of the mind—and Michael Pierce let his hand fall from the glass. He remem­bered Tracy saying in her message that Megan had left some books on a shelf, and at that moment he wanted to go home and run his hand over the spines of those little books.

"No," he said to Ellie. "I didn't have one of these."

They went back upstairs, to where Tim Flett was working the remote control, running through channels on the televi­sion. He didn't look up.

Michael put his card on the little end table next to the old man. "Before I for­get, if you remember anything else about my father, maybe you could call me."

Flett seemed changed, hardened somehow. "I said he put out on a boat in Seattle."

"No, I just mean if anything else comes to you-----"

Tim Flett's eyes shot from the TV to Michael to the window. "I told you." he said sharply. "He put out on a goddamn boat!"

"Dad!" Ellie scolded. And then to Michael, "I'm sorry. He must be tired."

"It's okay, Michael said. He looked back at Flett. It was as if the old man were finished, as if he couldn't even bear to look at Michael anymore. And even though Michael had a hundred more questions, he had his answer. He followed Flett's eyes to the window and beyond to the dark, still lake. Michael thought, Whole worlds exist beneath the surface. And maybe you can't see them, but you know they are there.

They rode silently toward Flett's house. Bannen drove his Caddv alone in the front seat. Oren sat in back, trying not to breathe too deeply. Sitting on either side of him were Rutledge and the other man. Baker, he barely knew.

The road to Flett's cabin was hardly more than tire tracks in the trees. They came to the house, lights on, casting white tips on the surface of the lake.

Oren had run into the three men on his way back to the roadhouse, step­ping out of the trees with his hands up, pleading with them, explaining that his kid was in the car. Bannen told him Flett had already taken his kid back to the lake house, and it came to Oren that he could've just stayed in the woods. They hit him around a little more and then dragged him back to the car.

Baker and Rutledge pulled Oren out of the car by the arms. His head hung to his chest.

Flett came out of the house, looking con­cerned. He wouldn't meet Oren's eyes.

"Where's Michael? ' Oren asked.

"Downstairs," Flett said without look­ing at him. "He's fine."

"Look. I need you to take him home,

Tim," Oren said. "Take him to Katie's. Will you do that for me?"

"Oren," Flett began.

"Come on. I don't want him to see this."

Flett considered the request. He pulled Bannen over to the edge of the house, beneath the porch light, and turned so that his back was to Oren. He spoke quickly, gesturing with his hands. Ban­nen seemed to listen.

"I know I got a beating coming," Oren said quietly to Rutledge and Baker, who held his arms. "But don't let him go too far. I mean...if it starts to look bad-----"

But he didn't finish, and they didn't say anything. Oren took a deep breath, and it felt like another kick in his side. "Christ. Do you sharpen them boots, Rutledge?"

"Sorry, Oren," he said.

Bannen and Flett came back. "You got two minutes with the kid," Bannen said.

Oren. with Baker and Rutledge still on his arms, followed Flett into the house and down the stairs, into the bedroom on the right. And there was

the boy, staring into Flett's giant aquar­ium, tropical fish swimming around in the blue light, a big square-headed whiskered thing probing the glass and a skinny one with streaks of gold and a flitty little yellow one that darted in among the phony rocks. Michael was so close his nose almost touched the glass, and his face was as blue as the fish as he watched them swim the way he watched traffic out the win­dow of Oren's apartment, the way he looked at Oren in the car. the way he looked out at the world. Orcn recalled that the boy had spent an hour down here earlier in the afternoon, before they drove to Two Bridges.

Do ire live in water?

He watched the fish come to the end of its blue world, invisible and impas­sible, turn, go around and turn again as he sensed another wall and another and on and on. It didn't even look like water in there, so clear and blue. And the god­damn fish just swam in his circles, as if he believed that, one of these times, the

glass wouldn't be there and he would just sail off into the open.

Oren put his hand on the kid's shoulder.

Michael turned.

"We ain't like fish, Michael," Oren said. "You can do whatever you want. If that's what you meant."

The kid looked back at the tank.

Oren turned to Flett. His throat felt tight. "Will you take Katie a note?'

Flett nodded and handed him a betting slip and a pen. Oren concen­trated on the note. He wrote care­fully. He signed his name and then thought of one more thing to say. "I'll come back when I can." It gave him a kind of courage. He finished the note and handed it to Flett. who wouldn't meet his eyes.

"Listen," Oren said to Flett. "if this goes bad, I got a boat in Seattle."

"Oren," Flett said, "if there was any­thing I could-----"

"No. Listen to me," Oren said, his voice cracking. "I'm goin' on a boat. Anyone asks. I got a boat in Seattle. Okay?"

Finally Flett nodded.

They moved back up the stairs. Flett and the boy first and him and Baker and Rutledge behind. If he was going to run, this was probably his best bet. But Oren knew he needed to see the boy get in that car first.

Bannen was smoking. Clod, he wanted that cigarette. But Bannen just dropped it when Oren came out. Flett opened the passenger door to the Chevy, and the boy climbed in. He looked out the win­dow at Oren, gave a little wave. Oren's chin quivered, but he felt brave again, as if Bannen couldn't touch him. Oren waved back, the guys standing close to him but not holding his arms, trying to make it seem casual.

He watched Flett's car back up. turn and head down the drive. The hands gripped Oren's arms again, and Ban­nen went to the trunk of his car. When the big man returned with a bat, Oren's head fell to his chest. He strained then, but he knew.

Rutledge and Baker tightened their grip, and Oren's feel scratched at the dirt driveway. He could just see dawn start to break on the foothills above the lake, but Bannen wasn't likely to wait. The first swing took him in the lower back and folded him. Oren lost what­ever breath he'd had and felt some­thing give in his hip. The hands let go of him and he dropped to the ground, pawing for his breath. He closed his eyes and tried to find something to look at in his mind. He came back to that morning on the carrier, the blue sky and the ocean and where they met, that endless line. Everything that isn't sky and water lives for a moment in that little gray band. Above and below it, the blue stretches forever.

BUT THE GUV COUNTFD FVFRV

iT

THATOREN HAD BEEN OVER.

After the years of cheating on Tracy, maybe it was just muscle memory with him, the guilt.