Lost Lake: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries) by Slouka Mark

Author:Slouka, Mark [Slouka, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307789693
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

the minnow trap—a sketch

Sometimes after dinner in the weeks after my grandfather died my father and I would walk through the long last light to the brook thick with olive duckweed except by the rock and the crotch of a sunken branch where the current had gently separated the vegetable skin and the water showed dark as a beer bottle; the minnow trap would bounce against my legs, first one end, then the other, then double time, spinning on the yellow cord I tried to hold away from my body. There were always little pieces of muck in the mesh, fern bits delicate as window frost, others like clumps of unwashed elfin hair. Slick and brown as mud in water, they dried emerald green.

The tree against the end of the pool lay pale against the gloom, hard and pocked as an old bone. It had toppled long before I was born. The roots had disappeared, but the crater in the earth where they’d once levered up was still there, so close to the main water it caught the overflow of every good rain and stayed half full for weeks, stagnant, dimpled with larvae.

“Go ahead,” my father would say, “take it over,” and I’d jump from the soft bank onto the slick and polished trunk, sneakered and sure, and walk out over that apparent earth, false as the rolling meadows of cloud seen from a plane. My father would wander a few feet up along the water and light a cigarette, watching the current wrap around a car-sized boulder, a branch trembling as though pulled from underneath, the quick swirl of a fish against roots exposed along the far shore … I’d hear the sure snap of the match but I’d never see it, watching my feet negotiate the raised nubs where limbs had been, the circular whorls where rot had tried to set in, further and further out until I reached the iron ring he’d screwed into the wood that August, chest-deep in water, cursing when he dropped the bit, then putting in the other he’d left on the trunk as a backup, holding it for a minute between his lips saying, “Don’t ever do this, this is a very stupid thing to do, you could cut yourself real bad this way,” then trying to keep his footing while leaning into the hand drill, fighting the stubborn wood until it was done.

He’d be standing there on the bank, not watching, the cigarette appearing with each slow draw as he brought it to his mouth, then dropping to his side.

“Okay,” I’d say.

“All right, now throw it well out,” he’d answer, his voice suddenly turning my way through the dark, spanning the void. “Let the rope loose so it can settle down on the rocks.” I’d lob the trap upstream, listening to the crisp sound of the mesh hitting the water, then reading its descent through the cord in my hands, the bumping progress in the gloom as it neared my feet.

“Didn’t catch,” I’d say.

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