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knows where my father’s place is, all the older guides know every house on the lake. He moves his cigarette butt to the corner of his mouth and says he’ll take us there, ten miles, for five dollars; for another five he’ll pick us up two days from now, in the morning. That will give us the rest of the day to drive back to the city. He’s heard of the disappearance, of course, but he doesn’t mention it.
    “A groovy old guy, eh?” David says when we’re outside. He’s enjoying himself, he thinks this is reality: a marginal economy and grizzled elderly men, it’s straight out of Depression photo essays. He spent four years in New York and became political, he was studying something; it was during the sixties, I’m not sure when. My friends’ pasts are vague to me and to each other also, any one of us could have amnesia for years and the others wouldn’t notice.
    When David has backed the car down to the Blue Moon dock we unload our stuff, the packsacks of clothes, the camera equipment, the samsonite case with my career in it, the half dozen Red Caps they got at the motel and the paper bag of food. We scramble into the boat, a battered wood-hulled launch; Evans starts the motor and we churn out slowly. Summer cottages beginning to sprout here, they spread like measles, it must be the paved road.
    David sits in front beside Evans. “Gettin’ many fish?” he asks, folksy, chummy, crafty. “Here and there, here and there,” Evans says, giving no free handouts; then he switches the motor into high gear and I can’t hear any more.
    I wait until we’re into the middle of the lake. At the right moment I look over my shoulder as I always did and there is the village, suddenly distanced and clear, the houses receding and grouping, the white church startling against the dark of the trees. The feeling I expected before but failed to have comes now, homesickness, for a place where I never lived, I’m far enough away; then the village shrinks, optical illusion, and we’re around a point of land, it’s behind us.
    The three of us are together on the back seat, Anna beside me. “This is good,” she says to me, voice shrilling over the engine roar, “it’s good for us to get away from the city”; but when I turn to answer there are tears on her cheek and I wonder why, she’s always so cheerful. Then I realize they aren’t tears, it’s started to drizzle. The raincoats are in our packsacks; I didn’t notice it had clouded over. We won’t be very wet though, with this boat it will only take half an hour; before, with the heavier boats and primitive motors, it took two to three hours depending on the wind. In the city people would say to my mother, “Aren’t you afraid? What if something happened?” They were thinking of the time it would take to get to a doctor.
    I’m cold, I huddle my shoulders up; drops ping onto my skin. The shoreline unrolls and folds together again as we go past; forty miles from here there’s another village, in between there’s nothing but a tangled maze, low hills curving out of the water, bays branching in, peninsulas which turn into islands, islands, necks of land leading to other lakes. On a map or in an aerial photograph the water pattern radiates like a spider, but in a boat you can see only a small part of it, the part you’re in.
    The lake is tricky, the weather shifts, the wind swells up quickly; people drown every year, boats loaded topheavy or drunken fishermen running at high speed into deadheads, old pieces of tree waterlogged and partly decayed, floating under the surface, there are a lot of them left over from the logging and the time they raised the lake level. Because of the convolutions it’s easy to lose the way if you haven’t memorized the landmarks and I watch for them now, dome-shaped hill, point with dead pine, stubble of cut trunks poking up from a shallows, I don’t trust Evans.
    But he’s taken the right turns so far, we’re coming into my territory,