Hush, Now

Summer vacation was so full of life there was no room for spirit. I was three weeks into my last. While our peers partied every night, my friends and I planted bombs on hillsides and laughed when they misfired; we tormented the golfers that would never quit playing on the ratty course behind my house; we bored holes through our eyes with the cathode rays from our computers, all in a careless drapery of shouts, taunts, and donkey laughter.

Some time in late July, we decided to go camping up at Lost Lake. Actually, it was our parents' suggestion at first; they claimed they wanted just one uninterrupted night of sleep. Our late, loud circles of chatter were too much for them. "History repeating itself," one of my surrogate Mothers once complained, darting a look at the bottle of baby wipes she kept to clean our soda spills.

My cousin Benj's jeep was piled high with Mountain Dew and sleeping bags. "Everybody ready?" he asked, sliding into gear and dusting out our driveway. Our tongues started flapping. There were no girls, so we could talk about them. That's where we started, at least; our guttural conversation, shouted over the wind blowing through open windows, drifted from there. With four minds, there are always at least two that are working on entirely separate tracks from the one on which the current speaker is running. I lost count of how many things I wanted to say that I forgot because Benj, or Gary, or Aron wedged their words into the cracks first.

We came to the campground on a road wide enough for just one vehicle. Had I been standing at the lake, I might have heard the jeep from a mile away; from a quarter-mile, I might have caught the wordless mumbling of our filtered shouts and guffaws. Right on the corner where pavement melted into dirt, I might have pulled out worthless snatches of whatever we had come to by that time: probably back to girls. And when the engine cranked its last and the doors sprung open it must have been like unmuting a television: I wouldn't blame someone for slamming the doors back in our faces just to shut us up.

It was mid-afternoon and hot. We stayed in the cabin where we could see the lake from one of the windows. Gary, you could tell him because he had a visible tan, had brought his trunks, but he was the only one. Aron said that we would feel cooler psychosomatically, just by looking at the floating chunks of sunlight on the rippling water.

Staring at anything for long enough will do two things: the image of that thing will be seemingly etched on the backsides of your eyelids, and you will start to see pictures in the chaos traced in so peculiar a clarity that they can't possibly be your imagination. Then you blink, and your brain compares the image in your eyes to that of the world and remembers that nothing except chance gives an artist his skill, so nothing except chance paints a face in the clouds.

I blinked several times at the surface of the lake. There, assembled from the white hot layers of light, was a face with one eye. There was no perspective; it wasn't stretched out and staring at the sky. Its single, piercing pupil -- the black spot of a solitary loon -- seemed flat and vertical, staring in our window. My fingers opened and closed along the coffee-stained table.