The Lake Effect

Colors wrapped around the lake like a child’s painting, red and orange and brown and gold, with specks of green giving summer one last nod.

“Last trip ‘til spring, you think?” Shane asked his father from the bed of the truck as he loosened ties around the edge of Gray Thunder. Not the twelve-foot aluminum skiff’s registered name—it did not have one, just a number—but still what Shane and Mack had been calling it since before Shane was tall enough to help with the ties.

“If I can’t talk you into ice fishing this year, then yeah, I suppose,” Mack answered.

Shane shrugged. “I might be able to get away once or twice. No promises—that spot opens at work, that’ll be a big deal. And Kayla’s signed up for a little bit of everything this year.”

Mack shook his head. “Just let her be a kid,” he muttered, maybe for Shane’s ears, maybe not, but Shane ignored it. He also thought Kayla was over-committed, but Dana had a vision for their daughter, and Shane picked his battles.

Working with the slick coordination of a lifetime of routine, they had the boat off the truck and in the water and were pushing off in a handful of minutes. Here at the south end, the lake was narrow, and the sharp bend it took a few hundred yards out made it seem short. Once around that bend, it widened and lengthened and became the ideal place to have the quiet, nearly wordless conversations that Shane and Mack always had, and that always left Shane feeling better than when they had started, whether he knew he had been feeling bad or not.

They baited hooks and readied nets. A few other boats sped by, closer to the ever-receding shore. After a while, even those became little more than an insectile buzz, and the shore was just this side of a memory. They cut the motor and dropped anchor and cast lines. A perfect, clear day, unseasonably warm, and surely the last of its kind for the year.

“You’ll be with us at Thanksgiving,” Mack said.

“Yep,” Shane agreed. Last year, they spent the bulk of Thanksgiving with Dana’s family. They always alternated holidays, would continue to so until it stopped making sense.

Another timeless gap before Mack spoke again.

“You say a spot’s opening at work? More money?”

“Of course.” Shane smiled. A lot more money, and no one else was more qualified for the spot. If it opened. If Marcus actually retired.

“Will it make things better?”

The wrong answer was a flat affirmation. Mack was not asking if Shane would get a nicer car or put more money towards Kayla’s college fund. That was not the question at all.

“Eventually,” Shane said.

“Well, then, I hope it works out.”

The sun marched towards the top of the sky. A bird called out but received no answer. The water was calm and flat, barely whispering against the hull, except when one of the men leaned over to check a line, or pull a soda out of the cooler, and made the boat bob nervously. Shane took off his windbreaker and tied it around his waist. It was almost impossible to believe that most of the lake would ever be frozen enough for ice fishing, but it would be. It always was.

“Here we go,” Mack grunted, bracing his feet against the inside of the hull. “Grab the net.” Shane did as he was told and crept towards his father, no quick movements, no big movements. He eased down into a loaded squat an arm’s length away from the old man, ready to pounce. Mack reeled back gently, firmly. In no hurry, the fish knew who was in charge. Shane had never really mastered this peculiar serenity—he always pulled too hard, too fast, and all of his catches were due either to Mack’s calming guidance or just plain luck. He watched his father’s face as he always did, with the persistent belief that just watching the man intently enough would impart the secret knowledge. “Come on,” Mack said. Shane knew without asking that he was talking to the fish. Mack gritted his teeth. His face was red, but his eyes remained calm and focused. His feet pushed and he leaned back, reeling and reeling. “Ready on the net,” he said, eyes never leaving the line. “God bless America!” Mack pulled, flipping a fat bass into the air. Shane slipped the net under it smoothly and followed Mack’s line back into the boat and then into the bucket between the boat’s two seats.

“Well, there’s my dinner,” Mack said, smiling as he worked the hook out of the fish’s mouth and covered the bucket.

Mack reset his line and they took bets on how big the creature actually was—Mack was always under and Shane was always over—before settling back down into the hushed rhythm of the lake. A light breeze swept in, though not enough to warrant re-donning the windbreaker, and soon, Shane realized that the sounds of boat motors from the shore had faded entirely into the wind.

“Did your mother tell you she’s taking a class up there at the junior college?” Mack said after some time.

“No, she didn’t.” Shane smiled at the thought. His mother had never had enough time to do anything that she had wanted. It was nice to see her doing something for herself.

“Photography,” Mack said, recasting a line. “Who knew there was so much to it?”

“Is she enjoying it?”

“Sure,” Mack said, and they fell silent again.

The breeze picked up, enough to push small waves against the skiff, not quite enough to rock it. Shane untied his windbreaker from around his waist and pulled it over his head. In the seconds it took him to push his head through, a dark bank of clouds had glided in to the north, centered precisely on their bow.

“Did you hear about any weather today?” he asked. Mack kept track of these things, even on days that he did not go out.

“Not today.” Mack faced south, hunched over one of his lines.

Shane shrugged. Sometimes a cloud was just a cloud. He settled back into his seat, checked his lines. Light as feathers. He shook his head. He would never have the gift.

Movement near the bow caught his eye—the anchor line unwinding like a hunting snake, slow and steady.

“Are we moving?”

“What?” Mack called over a sudden gust of wind.

“I said, are we moving?”

Mack looked up and caught sight of the slithering anchor line.

“Something got the line?” Mack asked.

“Nah, it’s...look at it. Too even.”

Mack’s eyes followed the line over the side and into the water.

“It’s straight up and down,” Mack said.

Shane noted the tags on the line. “It’s at a hundred and ninety,” he said.

“Well, that can’t be. There’s not a spot out here deeper than eighty-five.”

“I’m just telling you what I see,” Shane said.

“Then there’s an undertow,” Mack said. The wind pressed hard now, not just gusts anymore, but steady and strong. “Let’s up-anchor. We don’t need to be this far out anyway.”

The clouds that had been skulking in the distance were now nearly on top of them.

“Sure about that weather?” Shane asked, immediately wanting to take it back, glad that the wind ate his words before they got to Mack. No sooner had he wished the words back then the clouds dropped from the sky, plunging them into a thick, cold mist.

The wind stopped all at once.

“Get the anchor, Shane,” Mack said, pulling in his lines. “It’s time to go.”

Shane nodded and leaned past his father, reaching for the sneaking rope. His hand landed on nothing but hull.

“Throw it,” Shane said. “It’s pulled back.”

Mack leaned forward, shirt pulling out of his pants, reaching. Then he froze, nearly on his hands and knees, one arm stretched out in front of him. He made a noise that might have been words but Shane could not tell from where he stood. Shane leaned forward, almost losing balance, catching himself on Mack’s back. Mack’s impossibly thin and frail back. Shane remembered when Mack was the biggest man in the world.

“It’s gone,” Mack said.

“No, it just slid towards—” Shane stopped. Mack’s eyes were going, but the anchor line was gone. “Okay, something on the bottom got it and it snapped up here. We’ll deal with it when we get in.”

“Yeah.” Mack nodded, and rocked back up and into a crouch. “Sure.” But his eyes were still looking forward, past the bow. “Shane—tell me what you see over there. In the water.”

Shane squinted into the mist. It was thicker than he had realized—there was no visibility more than five feet off the hull, but he did not need five feet to see the thing bobbing in the water just off starboard: a small, red ball cap—no logo—with fraying edges and a tear just big enough to get a finger through on the crown.

“Looks like a kid’s hat,” Shane said.

Mack held out his arm, hand open, towards Shane, eyes still on the hat. “Net.” Mack was a stickler for leaving nature as it was found, but they needed to go. Weather was coming—weather was here.

“We’ll never find who it belongs to,” Shane said.

“Net,” Mack said again.

Shane found the net where he had left it and slipped it into Mack’s blind grip. Mack dipped it out into the water, brought it up carefully under the little hat, then pulled it back in. He laid it on the floor of the boat, where it collapsed and pooled around his catch. He reached down and plucked the hat up, using his thumb and forefingers as if he did not want to touch it. He brought it close to his face, tilted his head.

“There’s no way.”

“What?” Shane asked.

Mack turned the hat over, growing less shy about touching it with every movement. He dropped it into his lap, crown down, and stared, eyes widening.

“Dad, what is it?”

Mack’s head rocked from side to side.

“There’s no way,” he said again.

“Can I see?” Shane held out his hand.

Mack raised his eyes, still straining wide, to look at his son. There was a fleeting second, Shane could have sworn, when there was no recognition in those eyes. Mack nodded and picked up the hat with one hand on either side of the bill and passed it to Shane, crown down. Shane brought it close to his face, peered into it. There was a square of fabric inside the sweatband—hand sewn, uneven stitching. In green, bleeding felt tip, three words: Property of Maxwell.

Shane grinned. His mother called Mack, Maxwell when she was angry with him.

“What are the odds?”

Mack’s head rocked again. “It’s my hat. Your grandmother gave me that hat for my sixth birthday. We couldn’t afford a real team hat. She bought me that. She never got around to stitching my name in it. Always working. She sewed in that tag, though, and I just wrote my name in with a felt tip that I snuck from school.”

“Dad, that’s not possible. It’s a coincidence.”

“That tear.” Mack pointed to the hole in the crown. “I caught it on a tree branch taking a shortcut home from school.”

“Dad—”

A hard, hollow knock aftward jerked both of their heads up, hat forgotten. Near the stern, close against the hull, a shiny gold spire. Shane leaned over until he was close enough to snatch the thing out of the water.

Tiny, gold trophy man kicking a tiny, gold trophy football.

Maxwell “Mack” Lawson—MVP

“That’s mine.” Mack sprung to his full height and leapt towards Shane and snatched the trophy, much more certain than he had been about the hat. The boat rocked wildly. Mack stared with narrowing eyes at the small, gold man. “What’s going on?”

Another thump behind Shane. He peered over the side. A pair of fuzzy dice, twirling around each other in the dark water on their shared string. Shane pulled them out without thinking and set them at Mack’s feet. Mack picked them up and held them at eye level, mouth agape.

“My first car. Me and your Uncle Eddie pulled it from the junkyard. Spent a whole year on it. Shared it. I always took these off the mirror when it was Eddie’s turn.”

This time, the sound was off the port bow. Mack put the dice in his lap, reached over the side, and came up with a bouquet wrapped in white lace in one hand, and a pair of tiny blue shoes in the other. He stood and something came over his face then, as he held up the flowers and the shoes. A glow, a reflection of the mist, maybe, but a glow all the same, and his eyes, always pensive, now shown with a mad light.

“Shane.” He did not speak his son’s name, but breathed it. “Shane. Do you know what these are?”

Shane was pretty sure he did know what his father was holding, but could not formulate an answer. It could be nothing else, but it made no sense. In a moment, the air throbbed with the thumps and thuds of the hull pushing through the crowded water. There was a helmet. There, a table saw, dipping up and down with impossible lightness. A pair of motorcycle boots. A rack of fishing rods, upright in the water with the same disdain for the laws of physics as the table saw. A dartboard with a perfect game lodged into its cork. A record player, spinning silently.

Nearby, a dog barked.

“We have to be near shore. Or another boat,” Shane said.

Another dog barked. Another. The chaos of dogs barking over each other filled the air, a chorus over the drumbeat of floatsam.

“We’re not near shore,” Mack said, staring at the water, turning in circles where he stood, taking all of it in. “Not even close.”

All at once, the barking stopped. From the stern came the sound of water being moved, as if before the bow of another boat. Shane focused hard on the spot in the mist where the sound seemed to be originating, and after a moment, a shadow appeared, something not much bigger than the skiff. He stood to get the motor started, but it was gone now, too, just a naked transom where it had been a few seconds earlier. He braced himself. It did not actually matter what this looming shadow was, because there was nowhere to go.

Another boat—a bay boat, with a person-shaped shadow standing at the bow, and a dog-shaped shadow at the person-shape’s side. It pulled parallel to Shane and Mack, was nearly on top of them before Shane could make out anything but shapes. It stopped dead, without the splash of an anchor, without a word from the man on the bow.

He was tall—a head taller than Shane—but average build. He was dressed for the mist’s weather—boots, jeans, jacket, cap. Nothing out of place. He raised his head and fixed his stare on Shane. No, not out of place, but there was a coldness in his eyes, something physical that crawled deep into Shane’s mind and sang to it with the howl of a bitter wind over a barren shore. And there was something wrong with the dog-shape pacing at the man’s back, behind its own murky shroud—too big at the top, where its head was. Shane was sure it would jump the distance between the boats and rip out his throat.

Without any movement on deck that Shane could see, a plank out slid from the bay boat, landing in the middle of the skiff between Mack and Shane. The man looked away from Shane, and at Mack. Mack, flowers and shoes still in his hands, nodded and stepped onto the plank.

“Dad, what are you doing?”

Mack took one step forward, and another, and another, and was across the plank before Shane could make himself move.

“Dad, who is this guy? Dad!” Shane reached for his father and stepped on the plank. Something that felt like a baseball bat drove into Shane’s stomach. He landed hard across the seats and the bucket. He scrambled to get upright again, but Mack was already stepping off the plank and onto the bay boat.

“Dad! What are you doing?” Shane stepped onto the plank again. Again, he was driven back by the unseen force to his gut. By the time he recovered, Mack was looking at him from the deck of the bay boat. The plank had disappeared.

“Dad?”

A layer of mist wove between Shane and Mack.

“Daddy, where’re you going?”

Mack smiled and lifted the hand holding the tiny blue shoes. Another sheet of mist slipped between them. Another. The long howl of a dog split the silence and soon more joined the refrain. The shape of the man on the bay boat’s bow turned his back towards Shane. And then the bay boat was gone.

Shane felt a familiar unsteadiness. The skiff was moving now, and the mist thinning, burning away as he drifted out of it, the sounds of speed boats and laughter filling the air of the bright, cloudless day around him.

At the stern, the motor winked in the sunlight. At the bow, the anchor line showed eighty-five feet, and Mack lay staring into the pristine sky with lifeless eyes.