Read More: A brief Q&A with Scott Nadelson
Scrubbing toilets in the woods sounded better than scrubbing toilets in town, so he filled out the application, checking the box as usual to indicate that yes, he’d been convicted of a felony. That usually led to a form rejection, or no response at all, though once or twice it was followed by prying questions from a curious HR staffer who wanted to know what he’d done. This time, in a section of the application that read, “Additional Information You’d Like Us to Know,” he listed his offenses—non-violent, drug-related—and his time served, and added that he’d been clean and finished with parole for more than a year. After a week, he got a call from the resort manager, who asked him a few hurried questions and then said he knew how hard it was to re-enter. He’d once served two years at Eastern and believed in second chances—even if most people blew them. He’d give Matt a shot, but if he fucked up once, he’d be gone.
It wasn’t much of a resort: a dozen cabins at the south end of the lake, along with a little lodge that served diner-style breakfast and dinner, where guests could rent rowboats and canoes. The manager was also the primary line cook, and he spent most of his time in the kitchen, flipping burgers and omelets and pulling onion rings out of the deep fryer. There were a handful of other employees: three college kids who ran the food counter and boat rentals, a woman who drove up from Millburg to change sheets and vacuum the cabins, a fishing guide who charged thirty bucks an hour to show people where to cast for stocked rainbows and the few native brownies.
Matt’s title was maintenance supervisor, but he supervised only himself. His duties required him to be up before dawn, getting the shared bathrooms ready while most guests were still asleep. Then for a few hours he’d attend to propane stoves that weren’t working or oarlocks that had come loose, and usually he was free by noon. “Too much open time,” the manager told him. “That’s when people get themselves in trouble.”
What trouble could he get into out here? He paddled one of the canoes to the far end of the lake, lay back and let himself drift. Nothing but trees on this side, a dense slope of Douglas fir and mountain hemlock coming right down to the water. They gave him a sliver of shade even in the middle of the day, and he decided he could be content indefinitely watching ripples the surfacing trout made, listening to ospreys crying overhead, catching sight of a curious mink poking a head out of an elderberry thicket to glance at him before slipping into the frigid water. He didn’t even need to fish, though maybe later in the season he’d save up enough to buy a rod and reel. The place quieted down after hunting season ended, the manager told him, but they were close enough to ski lifts to stay open through the winter. He’d go down to just a couple of employees then, and if Matt didn’t fuck up, he’d be welcome to stay.
He always offered it as a challenge, as if he were daring Matt to ruin the opportunity. But Matt didn’t know how he would if he wanted to. He could stop doing his job, he supposed, or try to break into the cash register, but he had no interest in the few hundred bucks he’d find inside. He was making a decent amount and spending almost nothing. He had his own cabin to sleep in, and once a week he’d drive down to Millburg to fill a cooler with sandwich meat and cheese so he didn’t have to eat the manager’s greasy food for every meal. On his day off he’d hike one of the trails leading up into the hills until his legs burned, and then he’d take a boat onto the water just as the sun set and the bats came out, fluttering over him to pick off bugs swarming above the surface. The nighthawks followed, swooping past his head until the sky filled with more stars than he’d ever seen.
The only time he dealt with police was when he came upon a dead stag someone tried to poach a month before hunting season and called in to make a report. The stag lay half-submerged at the south end of the lake, its head perfectly preserved in the clear water, a hole in its rear end where it must have bled out now full of flies and larva. The sight of it made him queasy, filled his dreams with flashes of angry bared teeth, loud shoes chasing him down an empty nighttime street, and he avoided that cove for a few weeks afterward. Still, it was the most peaceful summer of his life.
The woman showed up when the huckleberry leaves started to get their first hint of color. The college kids were gone by then, and Matt ran the counter after he finished with the bathrooms. He didn’t see her arrive, but she had no car, so someone must have dropped her here. It was too far from everything for her to have walked in, and she didn’t have a backpack, just a big silver duffel slung over one shoulder when she stepped into the lodge and asked for a cabin. What would she have done if they were full? Matt had no idea. But they weren’t, and after running her card, he handed her the key to number 7.
Most of their guests were families or couples. Sometimes a pair of friends fishing together, the occasional solo angler or hunter. There’d been one older woman on her own earlier in the summer, the type to insinuate herself into other people’s conversations; she liked to inform everyone about which berries were edible, which mushrooms they should avoid. Clearly someone invested in being an outdoors enthusiast, never without hiking boots and poles and binoculars, a water bladder she sucked at like a nursing baby.
But this woman wore jeans and flip-flops and a black tank top, and she looked around at the big Doug firs as if they might fall on her at any moment. She was older than Matt, probably by a decade, which would make her about thirty-five. Slender. Dark-haired. Attractive, if a little haggard. She booked the cabin for two nights but on the second morning asked if she could extend her stay for another three. She didn’t rent a boat or walk the trails, not even the easy one that circled the lake. She just sat at the edge of the water near the lodge, occasionally tossing a pebble in and watching the ripples, sunning herself for an hour or two, though by now the sun’s angle wasn’t high enough to give her much of a tan, and then disappeared into her cabin. At dinner time, she ordered a burger and fries, ate half, and wrapped the rest in a napkin before Matt could offer to box it for her.
Her presence bothered the manager more than it did Matt. “What’s she doing up here anyway?” he asked after she left the lodge. “She don’t fish, she don’t paddle, she don’t even walk.”
“Just enjoying the scenery, I guess,” Matt said, though they’d both seen enough to know she was running from something. And also, that this was what the manager meant by trouble. The kind that was like a trail full of roots and rocks: easy enough to navigate if you paid careful attention to your feet, but also dangerous enough to make you stumble if you let your eyes drift too high.
On his day off, when Matt saw her sitting on the dock, bare feet a few inches above the icy water, he couldn’t help himself. “You seen the spring yet?” he asked her. “Feeds this whole thing. And the river, too.”
She was nervous getting into the canoe, as if she might flip it with her tiny bit of weight. Then she hugged the life vest close around her chest as he eased away from the dock. The manager watched them through the kitchen window, Matt was sure of it, though he didn’t turn around to check. There was no wind, the water glassy except at the edge, where a pair of mergansers dipped heads looking for minnows.
“This is the best time to be here,” he said. “Fewer people, but it’s still warm. In the summer, it’s full of little kids shouting all the time. You can hear them from one end of the lake to the other.”
“How deep is it?” she asked. Her voice always sounded sweeter than he expected, less hard than her face.
“Twenty feet, probably. Gets up to forty at the south end.”
“You live here all year?”
“Winter’s magic,” he said, and didn’t think it was a lie just because he hadn’t experienced it for himself yet, just saw pictures in the lodge and heard the manager describe it.
“I don’t think I could handle it,” she said. “Being so isolated like that.”
“Town’s only twenty miles.”
“Still. I like being around lots of people.”
“Except now,” he ventured.
“Yeah. Now it’s okay.”
They came to the northeast corner of the lake, where huge old cedars overhung the water. There was an inlet that looked like a creek, a few small rapids to mark the spring. “Hang onto the sides,” he said. “It gets a tiny big rough. Just for a second. But it’s worth it.”
He paddled hard, three strokes on each side to beat the current and pop up over the rapids. He expected the woman to shriek a little, but she stayed silent, hunched forward with hands tight on the aluminum rails even when they were past the bumps and floating again. It was a hundred yards back into the cove where the spring bubbled up from beneath the pumice, a blue pool of near-freezing water surrounded by vine maple, the lodge completely blocked from view by leaves, needles, massive trunks. Earlier in the season, hundreds of blue butterflies danced over the wild currants dangling from the banks, but now there were just two or three that hadn’t yet migrated.
“It’s incredible,” she said but didn’t yet turn to face him.
“If you need a ride,” he said. “When you’re ready to leave, I mean. I’ve got a truck.”
“I wish I could stay all winter.”
“They might give you deal,” he said. “If you booked long-term.”
“I bet this is even more beautiful with snow all around.”
“Believe me,” he said, picturing a photo hanging in the lodge.
“But this isn’t—” she started and then trailed off.
“Not enough company?”
“Hidden enough,” she said.
“You do need a ride, then.”
“Somewhere far.”
“I can take you.”
She turned to him then. Her fitted jeans and silky tank top that made no sense in the woods, the painted toenails, expensive sunglasses propped on her forehead. She wouldn’t look any better than she did right here, against the green of the maple leaves, the huckleberries going red, the blue water and black pumice. But he didn’t think she’d look much worse anywhere else, either.
“It’d take a few days, at least,” she said. “To go and come back. Your boss would let you?”
He pictured the manager, with his fleshy arms and grease in his beard, all his warnings about what would happen if Matt fucked up. But not everyone was cut out to give up living out of caution. Matt had lasted three months, which was half the time he’d spent in lockup. It was plenty, he decided.
“He’ll let me,” he said. “No question.”
Subscribers can read all our publications by logging in. |
___________________________________
Scott Nadelson is the author of nine books, most recently the novel Trust Me and the story collection While It Lasts, winner of the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, STORY, Five Points, and the Best American Short Stories.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Scott Nadelson