The Dark Lake Read Online Free PDF Page A

purse amidst the clutter. I didn’t have to go back in there.
    No one followed me out. I was glad, because I didn't want to explain myself. They always had some sort of insipid answer like, ‘work through your issues.’ Did they think I hadn't done that a thousand times?
    No this wasn't ‘issues,’ not an emotional trauma. The nightmares . The dreams of Krishna and the water. The freezing water. I needed to talk to … maybe not Krishna, but one of them, any one of them.
    If I could just talk to one of them.
    It was such a surreal drive home, as if I were in another town, not my hometown, not Oshkosh. The streets were strange, and I made a wrong turn. How could that happen in the town I'd been driving around and around in, complaining about the restrictive boundaries of, for—well—since I started driving at age sixteen. I was too tired to do the math, and besides I was never good at math.
    I couldn't find the street. It was supposed to be only two or three blocks. A right on Bowen, three blocks and then a left on New York Avenue, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw, for just a moment, Gay riding her bike, headphones on, hands free, arms waving, dancing wildly in the air, jammin' and swinging to bubblegum pop.
    Okay, I recognized this road, but there was no way I could be way out here, unless I'd driven at least twenty minutes longer than I thought I had, and in the completely wrong direction. I was out by the carp ponds where we used to get stoned and stare at the lake.
    ***
    "This lake is named after an Indian tribe, you know. I think that calls for a peace pipe." Gay fills the bowl after deseeding the bag by throwing those seeds right onto the floor of my little blue Chevette. The fire lights her eyes and cheeks as she sucks in off of that peace pipe. It’s Krishna's pipe. We have been using that thing so long I don't think we would know how to smoke a different one. It is wooden, red like Krishna's room, all the red clothes that hang from her walls, and the red bedspread with silver and gold etchings, and glittery embroidery of elephants and palaces. Not like the embroidery in my house of darling hot pads and little farms with ducks.
    "It's not a tribe. It's a chief," I say, blowing slowly and meditatively through my pursed lips. I hand it ceremoniously to Krishna. We had a whole bag of pot. We were ok ay for several days, but who thought about several days.
    "No. You're both wrong ." Gay and I look at her as if we had no idea what she was talking about. We didn't. "It's a chief and a tribe."
    And then , after what seemed like an eternal pause, and from out of nowhere, I hear my own voice—sounding very far away—say, "Wouldn't that make us both right?"
    We all three stare out at the dark lake.
    Then, for no reason, all three of us burst out laughing at the same time.
    ***
    I pulled up right to the old, white lighthouse and parked. I hadn't been out here in such a long time. There was no one else out here. Once, in the middle of winter, Gay and I went off the road into a ditch and were stuck at a 45-degree angle in a snow bank. I think only one car drove by in the time it took us to smoke an entire half-ounce. It wasn't until we were completely out of pot that we got out and walked the half-mile in the knee-deep, bright, afternoon snow to knock on some unwilling stranger's door.
    The images were seeping into my brain. The rusted piece of old metal, the shell of my car. And what was that inside it? It was too dark to tell in the picture in the newspaper that I had stared at for that one transfixed second.
    The car door slam echoed in the dark behind me as I wandered to the edge of the lake. The lighthouse glowed white and eerie from the grass-covered, rocky edge up the way. It loomed closer and closer until I climbed the weed-covered, stone steps that led to the dead, locked door.
    "Why did you get out of your car and walk around?” Miriam took off her glasses when she said this. She only took those