Barnum Lake, Patrick Sean Lee [english novels to read txt] 📗

Chapter Thirty-three
Barnum Lake

I awoke before dawn on Saturday morning, February 1st, to a litany of wind outside my window. The shadows of the naked elm tree branches coursed back and forth across the dead grass in the fractured haze of the moon like ghosts, unsure of what direction to take to leave this life. Although my bedroom was comfortably warm, I lay beneath the covers sweating as though I’d been asleep in an attic in mid-summer. As I blinked my eyes I tried to recall what manner of nightmare had visited me to turn my bedclothes into sopping washrags, but nothing came. I had awakened as though what I was looking out at was my first-ever vision. I suspected the sweating had something to do with Carol—haunting my sleeping subconscious—and so I prayed.
“God, if you refuse to answer me, at least don’t torture me in my dreams.” I couldn’t bring myself to thank Him for another day of life or even ask His blessing on this new one. I lay there for a long while staring out at the silver-gray sky, devoid of texture, wondering if I should get up and change into something dry. A sudden shriek of wind hit my window and more eerie shadows whisked past. I threw the covers aside, jumped onto the rug, and stripped the sheets. The wind continued to howl. I undressed, throwing my clothes into a pile at the foot of the bed, crawled on top of the first blanket and then pulled the others over me thinking I’d fall back asleep until dawn arrived to chase the gale away.

It was 3:00 A.M.

I awakened to the sound of voices. Outside my room—the stairwell off the back door to the kitchen. I blinked and glanced over at the clock on my nightstand. Nine o’clock. The voices became clearer as the shades of my deep sleep began to evaporate. They belonged to Jimmy and Mickey, laughing, calling back to someone on the main floor. My Mom. Yes. I could hear her muted voice, something she had been saying to them when I opened my eyes. “…drag him out of bed! Goddam kid. Nobody should sleep this late.”
“You betcha’, Mrs. Morley! We’ll each grab a leg,” I heard Jimmy say as the door to the basement opened with a hurried creak.
“Hey, wake up in there, you lazy good-for-nothin’,” Mick yelled. They entered my bedroom, awash with bright sunlight now. I glanced out the window and noticed a sky, light blue and cheerful. Both of them stopped at the end of my bed. They were dressed in blue jeans and sweaters, more appropriate for an early Spring day than the dead of Winter.
“C’mon, get up,” Jimmy said, “we’re headed up to Barnum Lake. We’re gonna’ do a little skatin. Mick’s gonna’ show us how to do a figure eight, kinda’ like what Inky tried to do on his belly!”
Mickey thought that was a great joke and pulled his sweater and shirt up to his chest. I looked over at his stomach and cringed.
“Pretty cool, huh?” he said.

It was not. A long purplish line with dots on either side where the stitches had been threaded, wound from just below his breast bone down to the top of his jeans.

“Whoa! That’s ugly. How’s it feel?” I asked him sitting up. “Turn on the light so I can see it better.” Jimmy darted around Mick to hit the switch on the wall, raking his index finger across Mick’s back as he did.
“SWISH! The steel cuts quick and deep!” he joked.
I pushed the covers aside and crawled to the end of the bed to have a close look at the scar. “That is…wow! Did Rosie, you know, put salve or something on it? I’ll bet she did. You two have been like Mutt and Jeff ever since you got back to school. How’d it feel to have her fingers massaging your stomach?” I laughed.
“Eat your heart out! She has hands that move like clouds. She’s an Egyptian princess!” Mickey said rolling his eyes and stroking his belly. “Hey, let’s move it. Get some clothes on, for gosh sakes! You always sleep half-naked?”
I looked down at myself. Well, no, not all that often. Only after…I felt my forehead, my arms, my own stomach. Dry as a bone, and thankfully normal. I peered over the end of the bed where I’d thrown the wet nightclothes several hours ago. Mickey had one boot planted on the pajama top.
“That was one weird night,” I said almost underbreath.
“Huh? What was weird? What happened?” Jimmy asked.
“Uh…nothing I guess. Think it was all just a dream…nothing. Okay, let’s go! Throw me those pants over on the chair. I want to see Mick light up the lake! What’s the temperature outside, anyway? You guys are dressed like it’s summer.”
“I dunno’. In the high twenties, I guess. Sun’s real warm, though. It’s perfect,” Jimmy replied throwing my jeans at me. “Where’s your skates?”
“I’m not sure…out in the garage somewhere, I think.” I pulled on my engineer’s boots and tied the laces in record time. “Ok, let’s get out of here.”

The night had been spooky; a strange, otherworldly fever, perhaps, that had hit me suddenly, then vanished just as quickly . Hopping up the steps I still felt the clamminess of my pajamas, and shuddered at the figures that had whizzed by my window in the wind. Jimmy, Mickey and me ran to the garage and conducted another of our frustrating searches through the mountain of junk. We found the skates, and then lit out of the yard, down the street. The sun was warm, and by the time we'd arrive at the lake in half an hour, I figured we’d be skating through slush. That was okay, though. At least we wouldn’t have to shovel snow or put up with TweedleChilds and TweedleYoung.

As if by fate…

“Hiya, fellas. Long time no see. Where are you going?” Allen sang out from the rear of his driveway as we passed by.
“We’re goin’ to the creek to look for hibernatin’ bears,” Jimmy answered.
“Ve-ry funny. No, really, where are you going?”
We stopped and looked at one another. Should we invite him and find a thin spot in the ice? Nah, he’d probably break through it and sink to the bottom, this time in water over his head, and never come up again. Then his mom would really be pissed at us.
“We’re taking our skates…see ‘em?…down to the pawn shop,” Mickey chirped. “After we collect our money we’re going to buy a crossbow and go looking for those bears. Want to come along?”
Allen thought about that for a minute. “Yes, maybe. There aren’t any bears down here in the city, though, you realize. We can still shoot at cans and trees and such, however. Let me go get my wallet. I’ll contribute—maybe for the arrows. Just wait here!” He dropped whatever he’d been doing and headed for the back door to his house.
“Crap! He believed you, Mick! What a dork! Let’s get outta here. I don’t want that nitwit tagging along,” I said laughing.
“Wait a sec,” Jimmy said. “He’s bringin' his wallet. We’ll get him to buy donuts and hot chocolate!”
“No way. Let’s go,” I answered. And so we took off at a run down the street, skipping across patches of thin, black ice riveted to the gutters, like three clumsy characters in a Laurel and Hardy movie, not quite sure if we were supposed to fall or not. I closed my eyes when we passed in front of Carol’s house, holding onto the back of Mickey’s sweater, imagining she was glued to her front window, waiting for me to flash by in tears. I saw her face—absolutely distraut, beckoning to me with eyes that had burned clear through my soul, and now refused to let me go. How I wanted to stop and run to her and touch her lips again. And then I thought of David, and what he’d said. How foolish I was to risk coming down this street. Even if I’d ripped my eyes out of their sockets, the eyes of my heart would have remained as sharp and penetrating as a hawk’s.
I pushed Carol’s face out of my mind and concentrated on visions of flying across the ice; playing crack the whip with Jimmy in the lead, Mick in the middle tethering me. As we passed by the block of stores on First Avenue and turned north on Knox Court, I squinted up at a sky without even a wisp of a cloud anywhere. The sun heated the asphalt street and sent ghostly tufts of steam rising. Someone’s dog shot out of their front yard, a portion of its frayed rope dangling from its neck. The animal chased us out of its territory with a ferocious amount of barking; a warning not to return. We slowed to a walk two blocks farther up the long incline of the avenue, out of breath and safely beyond the point where we thought Allen could catch sight of us, or the dog would have any remaining interest in our presence. Across the street on the west side sat a tiny brick church with a small spire reaching heavenward, and a black-framed billboard identifying the name of the congregation. “Christ The Savior Lutheran Church”. Below that the sermons for tomorrow’s services were announced.
“9:00 A.M. Jesus Walks On Water”
“5:30 P.M. Searching For Jesus”
“Hey, that’s where Mom thought your family went on Sundays,” I pointed out to Mickey. We stopped briefly and chuckled at the thought. Mickey looked around us on the ground for a rock, but fortunately for the sign there wasn’t even a pebble large enough to bother slinging at it. Anyway, two men were standing on the sidewalk a few feet away from it. We couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the taller of the two, dressed in a black suit and clerical collar, pointed at it, scratching his head. Had Mickey found a decent rock he would have thrown it, that’s for sure, and we would have been off and running again. We shuffled on.
We arrived ten minutes later at the lake. It lay at the bottom of a steep, two hundred yard-long hill dotted with dead-looking elms, and conifers that refused to give up their color to the bleakness of the winter months. Tucked into a depression on the southwest end of the lake near the boundary of the park, Weir Gulch meandered in, two or three feet deep. Just below a thin layer of crystal clear ice we could see the current dropping down the slope to disappear into the lake’s shimmering, frozen covering. Across the surface of the lake small mounds of snow lay piled here and there, marking the efforts of earlier skaters who had cleared it in weeks past. A few hundred yards away, Federal Boulevard rose above the steep bank, alive with traffic at this late hour of the morning. We sat down near the edge beneath a tree and changed into our skates.
“Wonder if Allen put the puzzle together?” I laughed at the thought of him staring down Meade Street, wondering why we’d gone away without him.
Jimmy clinched the last knot of his laces, picked up a dirty scoop of snow from the base of the tree we sat under, and threw it at me. “You're a nasty, nasty boy, Skippy Morley. Was all your idea to run off an’ leave him, ‘specially when he offered to buy us donuts! Ya oughta’ be ashamed of yourself.”
Mickey followed