Fiction | Robert G. Penner

It was very hot and Derek lay on the beach with his eyes closed. There was no point in opening them because there was nothing to see. Just the flat horizon of Lake Winnipeg and a sky that was neither blue nor gray. The smoke from all the forest fires raging across the North had produced a new color for the sky to be. Not a color at all, really, something else. Something unmodulated and static. 

Jasmine was complaining to Lana about the conditions at work, which seemed to be the usual topic of conversation for the nurses. It was pleasant to listen to the rise and fall of their voices. Too difficult to distinguish one word from the next. The content from the sound. The conversation was a concentration of movement in the air. Like the wind in the aspens. The cries of the seagulls. The laughter and screams of the kids. The cars on the distant/not-distant highway. Waves of soft noise washed over Derek.  Waves that had traveled a great distance. 

Waves from the sun.

From the other side of the universe.

From a radio station across the border. 

Radio Free Bismarck: endless subliminal hiss: cheap liquor, cheap tobacco, cheap shoes, cheap cars. 

Derek fell asleep.

Jasmine woke him.

“Could you go get the kids, hon?” she said. “They’re a little far out.”

He blinked his eyes a few times against the post-sleep glare and everything returned to the normal color, the new color.

“The kids?” he asked.

Jasmine had two: Lily and Zoe. Lana had Mackenzie. Lily and Mackenzie were the same size. Zoe was small.

“They’re too far out,” said Jasmine.

Derek scanned the beach. 

There were people drinking beer and listening to country music nearby. Next to the path from the parking lot and the cottages where the rich people spent their summers. Lily had rolled her eyes when they walked past the beer-drinkers.

In the other direction were a few scattered families brave enough to face the mid-July heat. 

The lake was so shallow and the slope so gentle you had to walk out for ages before you could swim comfortably. A couple of people were dragging their feet through ankle-deep water along the beach. Much farther out was a cluster of three little heads Derek assumed to be the girls. Beyond them was a yellow-and-green object floating on the water. A pinpoint of intense color. An inflatable toy. A raft. A sea monster with a flat bottom, high sides, and a head like a horse. The beer-drinkers had brought it. The hell-raisers. It had been floating, unused, in an inch of water, and must have been drawn slowly out into the lake by minute changes in air pressure. By nothing you could call a breeze. Infinitesimal changes. Inch by inch. Foot by foot. Unobserved. 

“Sure,” said Derek and stood up.

“Thanks, babe,” said Jasmine. 

•

Under the water was soft sand that oozed between your toes, and then pebbles with seaweed, and then hard packed sand that stretched on and on forever in gentle undulations. The water was warm as blood and as thick. The waves were more substantial than they looked from the beach. They rose and fell like the lake was breathing. The hot air was its exhalation. When he had been walking a while and the water was up to his thighs and the girls still looked far away, Derek felt a quiver of anxiety.

“Hey,” he shouted and waved his arm. “Hey! Come back in! Not so far!” 

He could not tell if they were looking at him. 

He imagined the water up to Zoe’s chin. He imagined her losing her footing. Swallowing water. Panicking. He imagined her fear.

They seem OK, he thought. They look fine. They are fine. 

“Come back in!” he shouted.

“Are those your kids?” a man asked, and Derek glanced back.

The man was middle-aged. He had a big head sunk into broad shoulders, into his hairy chest. Bald, bronzed pate. Iron gray curls around his ears. Hint of a mullet. 

“Girlfriend’s,” said Derek. He was puzzled where the man had come from. He must have been walking right behind Derek since he first stepped into the lake.

“They shouldn’t be out that far,” said the man.

“No,” said Derek. “They shouldn’t.”

“I thought they were my friend Kristi’s,” said the man. “I hoped they were. We can’t find them. Kristi’s kids. They were playing on that floatie and now we can’t find them. Nobody has seen them.”

The yellow-and-green sea monster looked even farther out on the lake than it had when Derek began to walk.  He imagined children sleeping in it. Drifting further and further away. Drifting out of reach. 

They stared at it.

“How’s your swimming?” Derek asked the man. He grunted.

They started plowing through the water together. Soon the water was up to Derek’s waist.

“Come back in!” they shouted at the girls. “Come back in!”

The man fell over and struggled to get back to his feet.

Zoe was making her way back, but the older girls stayed where they were. 

Seeing Zoe’s face turned towards him calmed Derek down.

“You guys OK?” Derek shouted. He couldn’t hear Zoe’s response.

“You guys OK?” he asked when she was closer and she nodded.

“It’s too far out,” he said. “You guys are too far out. Your moms are worried.”

“Way too fucking far!” the man shouted. 

Zoe took Derek’s hand and stared at the man.

Lily and Mackenzie were making their way in.

“Not so far out!” Derek shouted at them. “Play closer to shore where we can see you!”

“Gotta call the helicopters,” said the man.

“What?” said Derek.

“You’re going to have to call the helicopters,” said the man, “when you get back to the beach.”

“OK,” said Derek. “There’s helicopters?”

The man was already plunging ahead. 

“Why was that man swearing at me?” asked Zoe.

“He’s worried,” said Derek. “He’s looking for some missing kids. He’s just worried.”

They turned and started walking back to the beach. It looked very far away. It was nice to feel Zoe’s small hand in his, but it made him feel guilty about the other children. The man’s friend’s children.

When they were almost at the beach there was a young woman playing with three small children on a sandbar. The oldest wasn’t quite Zoe’s age. Derek was sure they hadn’t been there when he set out.

“Easy to laugh at him, but he was kind of heroic, you know?”

“Are you Kristi?” Derek asked and the woman looked up.

“Yes,” she said.

“There’s a guy out there who thinks your kids have drowned,” Derek said.

“These are my children,” Kristi said. “Right here.”

Derek shrugged apologetically.

“Which guy?” Kristi said.

Zoe was still holding his hand, so Derek twisted awkwardly and pointed. The man was well past Lily and Mackenzie now. His big head looked quite small. The water was up to his chest and he was using his arms to propel himself towards the yellow-and-green sea monster.

“Oh my God,” said Kristi. “That’s my dad’s friend Joe.” She paused and then said: “He’s such a drunk.” 

“I’ll catch up, Zoe,” Derek said. “I have to go stop Joe from swimming out to sea.”

He started walking back out. Waving and whistling. Lily and Mackenzie stopped.

“Joe!” he shouted. “Joe!”

Lily and Mackenzie stared at him. 

“Joe!” he shouted. 

Joe turned around.

“They found the kids!” Derek shouted. “The kids are safe!”

Zoe was waiting for him at the sandbar. She took his hand again. Kristi didn’t look up but one of the kids did. Fat cheeks and blue eyes. Brown skin and sun-bleached hair. A drowned child, thought Derek. This is what a drowned child looks like, he thought. Before it is drowned.

“Gotta call the helicopters,” Derek said to Zoe as they walked away and she laughed.

“Gotta call the helicopters when we get back to the beach!” he said.

“Gotta call the helicopters!” she said. 

They kept the joke going for the rest of the afternoon.

•

 Jasmine asked Derek to drive home even though it was her car and he was pleased. It was the new Mazda. The CX-5. The kids were in the back with their headphones on. Lots of people driving back to the city on the pockmarked highway. Lots of people driving out. The telephone poles tick-tick-ticking by with the miles. Gray and weather stained. Derek wondered how long the telephone poles had been standing there. Who put them up and how much they got paid to do so. Paid by the hour. He wondered how long it took. And how long it would be before the cables hanging between them stopped transmitting conversations. He wondered what the last communiqué would be. A recipe. News of a death. Two grandmothers reminiscing about seed catalogs. Someone at a pay phone in Brokenhead calling for a tow truck. A robot spreading disinformation to the old folks in their cottages and farmhouses.

 “Hey, so I was thinking,” he said to Jasmine.

“What’s that?” her cheeks and nose were flushed from the sun and her forehead dusted with sand.

“That guy,” he said: “Joe.”

“What about him?” Jasmine looked out the window.

“Easy to laugh at him, but he was kind of heroic, you know?”

 Jasmine said nothing.

“I mean, you know, he was wrong about the situation, entirely, but even so, he was out there trying to get things done, trying to get a handle on everything, trying to save lives, trying to cope. Heroic.”

“Guys like that,” said Jasmine and it sounded like a sigh. 

“Guys like what?”

“Guys like that,” she said without looking at Derek. “He wasn’t the one trying to cope. It was that mom who was trying to cope. That guy was so drunk he fell down three times before he got to you. No one else was trying to save those kids because everyone else knew where the kids were. I was just worried I’d have to go out there and save his drunk ass from drowning.”

“Huh,” said Derek. “Three times?”

“Yup,” said Jasmine.

“That drunk, eh?”

“Yup,” she said and closed her eyes. “That drunk.”

“Guys like that,” she said—each word freighted with disgust. 

She was asleep by the time the bush had turned into orderly fields of wheat and canola.

Derek didn’t mind having a woman smarter than him. He preferred it that way. Always had. The only problem was the woman couldn’t mind it either. Couldn’t mind that Derek wasn’t smarter. That had sometimes been a problem. But Jasmine didn’t seem to care one way or the other. 

She asked him for investment advice once, and he had looked so horrified she laughed.

“But you’re a financial advisor,” she said. “At a bank.”

“I’m just a salesman,” he said. “All I do is tell the people what the emails tell me to tell them. I’m nothing but interface. As soon as they can get a logarithm to make people feel as comfortable as I make them feel, I’ll be out of a job.”

She had laughed again.

“Sorry I’m not smarter,” he said and grinned. “Sorry I don’t know shit. Sorry I don’t know things.”

“But you do know things,” she had said. “You know how to make a person feel good about themselves.” 

•

By the time they got to the outskirts of Winnipeg the traffic was bad. They were putting in a new bridge over the floodway and the cars were crawling along, jeweled insects on a desert of asphalt and concrete. There was no water in the floodway. A uniformity of dry mud and dry grass. A valley of dry bones, thought Derek but he didn’t know why. He didn’t know what the words meant or where he had heard them. The working guys in their hard hats and safety bibs looked like they were cooking in the heat. It was coming up out of the ground in waves. The sky pressing down on them like a weight. Flattening them out. Distorting them.

He glanced in the mirror. Zoe was asleep, but Lily was still staring at her iPad.

“Hey Lily,” he said.

“Lily.”

He didn’t want to wake anyone.

“Lily,” he said. She looked up, slid the earphones around her neck.

“Sushi for supper?” he asked.

“Oh, yay!” she said.

“Can you make the order? At that place you guys like? Make sure you get something for everyone,” Derek dug out his wallet. “Something everyone likes.”

“So, California roll for you?”

He tossed her his wallet.

“Yeah,” he said. “California roll for me, smart ass. And spicy tuna. Use the Visa.”

Lily popped her headphones back on and started scrolling through a menu on her phone. 

The sunlight poured through the windows and through the cool, canned air of the car. When he inhaled Derek imagined he was sucking the sunlight into his chest. Blowing it out when he exhaled. He had a brief vision of a vast, glittering expanse of water seen from a great height. The same sunlight that was pouring into the car was crashing onto that water. Shattering against it. Hammering it flat. He closed his eyes and saw the small, spread-eagled bodies of children floating across Lake Winnipeg: bumping into each other, drifting together, a tangle of arms and legs and floating hair like worms, Kristi’s children, many children, dozens and dozens, a tangled raft of drowned children with open eyes, open mouths, bobbing along in a mess of empty milk cartons, dead fish, plastic bottles. The sunlight pouring into their open eyes. Their open mouths. Pouring into the milk cartons and the plastic bottles. Pouring into the car. Pouring into his eyes. His mouth. His lungs.  

“Derek?” Lily said.

“What’s that?” said Derek.

“What about drinks? Can I order drinks? Cokes for me and Zoe? And matcha ice cream?”

“Sure, kiddo,” said Derek. “Sure. Order whatever you’d like. It’s only money.”

He turned on the radio. Toggled through the stations until he found some classic rock. Led Zep. The sea was red, sang the man, and the sky was gray. Derek sang along under his breath. Making up words. Humming. Making do with just the vowels. The traffic inched along. He could just smell the tar from the roadworks. He remembered roofing in the summers to pay for school. The sun on his bare back. Breeze in his hair. Bronze skin streaked with black. Gold hair on thick forearms. Listening to the same music on the same stations. The same bands. Feeling like the king of the world in his tower. Up on my ziggurat, Derek thought. The shingled roofs around him stretching on and on. Out into the prairies. The cars shimmering on the perimeter highway in their endless circulations. The wheat fields beyond in their relentless grids. The city always growing. The suburbs expanding. Always expanding. The concrete spreading. Stretched. Stretched thin over the earth like a new skin. Batter in a crepe pan. It was too hot out, he thought. The tar would never set. Would always be sticky. Would always be moving. Always alive. Always melting. Evaporating. Turning into air. It was too hot. It was never going to cure.