Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [5]
I didn’t notice at first and can’t tell for certain which summer the wild rice that grew in the shallows between islands disappeared along with the lily pads and the giant frogs that bellowed so hilariously at night. Perhaps it was the same summer that aluminum and fiberglass boats began to outnumber old Chubby’s cedar-strips on the lake. Once I got older, my cedar-strip boat didn’t seem so long and lean. The five-and-a-half-horsepower engine at the back was slow, but it only served to remind me not to be in such a hurry: important things are to be seen and experienced all around.
In 1979, my second business failed. I threw everything I owned into the back of my Boston Cream Cutlass and left Washington, D.C., for Lovesick Lake. An artist friend of mine, Charles Young, or Cy, as we knew him, who was in similar straights, joined me for the first few weeks. Willy joined us too for a brief time. I would write all day and burn my creations in the fireplace at night—offering, if you will, the sacrifice of my efforts as good medicine to the spirits that permeate Clovelly Island. Besides, the stuff wasn’t any good.
Cy painted big canvases of clouds and water and rocks. Willy busied himself doing chores, and helped himself to any of the dozens of books from our makeshift library. Willy helped us rig a water hose over a picture window, and Cy photographed the distorted lake country landscape through the moving water, took portraits of some of us, and painted from those bizarre and distorted images. The effect was startling, with floating eyeballs, swirling coutryside, and remnants of reality.
At night we sat in my cedar-strip boat, drank Gold Tassel Rye or Labatt’s Blue, and watched the sun fall and the giant galaxy emerge within our well-oiled reach. We turned slowly beneath the triangles of Shedir and Epsilon. We were Shedirians, Epsilonians, emigrants yearning to return home. In August, the northern lights hummed a strange and dissonant refrain. We still maintain that we could hear those lights, though experts disagree. One night, we were tracking a satellite through the firmament when suddenly it made a perfect right-angle turn and disappeared into purple blue-blackness. No one has yet explained that phenomenon satisfactorily.
When we got bored, we would drive to the nearby town to meet girls or invite friends from the local campsite by the locks for a weekend of Murder in the Dark. You put pieces of paper in a hat. One says Detective, one says Murderer, all others say Victim. Whoever draws Detective is sequestered in a well-lit room with something to read. The person who draws the Murderer card keeps that information secret. Then the lights are turned out. The murderer then gets to kill as many victims as possible (usually by simply whispering “you’re dead” in the dark) until someone stumbles over a body and must call the Detective in. The Detective then interviews the survivors and makes a determination as to who the killer is. It’s a fun parlor game if you have a big house. On a dark and forested island, it becomes something else again.
I complained to the local boys at the campsite on the mainland once about an Esso gasoline sign—certainly illegal—that had been erected on a publicly owned island about a half-mile across the lake from Clovelly. The government maintains these uninhabited islands to preserve the natural beauty of the area, so there’s a ban against this kind of commercialization. And this beast was three stories tall, made of wood, with the circular metallic Esso logo in the middle. Very few boats had traveled the main channel that year, and my beef was that they were really only advertising to one man—me!
So, late one night there was a knock at the back door on