Stuart Little Sails the Great Lakes
by John Salter
Lake Michigan, 1972
When Nils was in the second grade, his small private school started a program in which his class, and the third graders, would be taken to the Chicago YMCA every Friday afternoon to spend some time in the pool. Nils was excited at the prospect of learning how to swim, saw himself knifing into the water, perfectly at home there, one step closer to being like Bud and Sandy on Flipper, his favorite television show. But his first day at the YMCA would be his last. The girls went with Miss Wentworth to change, and the boys followed Mr. Prentiss into the men’s locker room. Nils suddenly found himself eye-level with dozens of shadowy adult groins, countless rubbery appendages that seemed to be swinging at him, coiling and striking, bobbing and thudding against his head under a soundtrack of laughter and echoes in the hot misty air. He was too shaken up to relax and spent the entire hour shivering on the edge of the pool with his feet dangling in the water, dreading the return trip through the locker room. His classmates, shrieking and splashing away, seemed immune to the horror. At home, Nils announced that he would no longer be going to the YMCA. When pressed for a reason, he simply lied. “I almost drowned and there was nobody to help me.” His father flew into a rage and headed for the telephone to raise hell, but Nils stopped him. “It wasn’t really their fault,” he said, not wanting to see his teachers get into trouble. “It was just way too many people and kids. It was so crowded.”
His father had always been wary of bodies of water. A childhood friend had drowned in a Kansas farm pond and he’d never really gotten over it. Nils understood this, thus the nature of his lie. A solution emerged. Nils would simply leave school after lunch every Friday until the YMCA program was over. On the phone to the principal, his mother alluded to some sort of weekly appointment, hinting vaguely at psychoanalysis. The school didn’t object. Nils was a good student, both in behavior and academics.
So every Friday, while the other kids were loading into the vans, Nils waited out front for his mother to come up the sidewalk pushing his little brother in a stroller. They lived within walking distance of the school, located near the north shore of Lake Michigan, in a neighborhood going through what his father called an evolution. A block from the school they were likely to come across a couple winos passed out on the sidewalk, sometimes with vomit venturing from their mouths over the concrete in a manner that reminded Nils of cartoon dialogue balloons. Then there were a few long blocks of retail space under tall buildings, an office furniture company, a shoe store, some restaurants and bars with dark interiors and gruff-looking men loitering in the doorways.
Their stately three story apartment building at one time would have been a desirable address. The kitchen had a spacious pantry, and secreted behind it, what his sister claimed had been the tiny bedroom of an indentured servant. The living room featured a huge three-sided window jutting from the building, looking down on the street at the perennial commerce, the United Nations of pedestrian traffic below. Some nights they were treated to the glow of structures burning in the distance, fire engines rushing past. “Insurance arson,” his father said. Then: “I hope we aren’t next.”
His mother had an interest in thrift stores and rummage sales so one Friday they went right instead of left and wound up at a church. A huge sale was taking place in the cavernous basement, on long tables. It seemed to be mostly clothes, boring, but there was an occasional oasis of household goods, electronics, books, toys. Nils found a grimy doll to occupy his little brother, who was straining to leave the stroller. Then, in the distance, over a cordillera of winter coats, he saw the silhouette of a sailboat, with a great keel, a low cabin, and two yellow sails flowing smartly from the mast. At first he thought it was a painting of a sailboat on the wall behind the coats, but as he drew closer, he could see that it was, in fact, an actual sailboat on top of the pile. He pushed his way through the great throng of people, maddeningly unmoving as they lifted and examined shirts, shook boxes containing jigsaw puzzles, turned strange utensils in their hands. Like some jungle explorer, Nils would sight the sailboat, getting his bearings, before ducking and bumping his way against knees and thighs, getting closer. Just as he reached the table with the sailboat, an elderly man picked it up. The man turned it this way and that, tugged at the mast, inspected the keel. Nils was devastated. How could the man not want to keep it? But then his wife snatched it from him. “We have no use for this,” she said, dropping it to the table. Nils grabbed it up, pressed it against his chest, and went to find his mother.
Nils was thinking of Stuart Little from the moment he first held the boat. He was enamored of the book and the character. If it was possible to wear out an image by staring at it, he must have come close gazing at the cover, that illustration of Stuart Little paddling a birch bark canoe. His mother had read him the book before he learned to read, and his desire to read it himself had pushed him to work harder in school and now he had read it himself, several times. He had no problem with the idea of a human family having a child who happened to be the size and shape of a mouse. Nils hoped to find his own version of Stuart Little in the apartment. Along a wall in the hallway he had discovered what could only be a mouse doorway, a hole in the molding by the floor. It wasn’t a half-circle like the mouse doorways in cartoons, but it was there, nonetheless. To test his theory he had placed a peanut in the doorway and in the morning it was gone, a thrilling development. His father said that it was likely they had mice, since the building was so old. “If we can have cockroaches, we can have mice.” They did have cockroaches, not swarms of them, but in the mornings they had to knock their shoes on the floor to shake out any roaches hiding inside. His parents were reluctant to complain to the landlord because they feared the insecticide he used could give them all cancer. Nils sometimes pressed his ear to the wall above the mouse doorway and thought he heard scratching sounds, tiny feet running past. He taped a large piece of butcher paper to the wall, and with a ruler, began to map out this world, the different levels, connected by staircases. He drew a library with bookshelves and chairs and tables. He drew a park with small trees and benches. He had a toy police car with working lights and siren, which could go by itself. When it bumped into something, it backed up and went forward in another direction. Sometimes he parked the car by the mouse doorway at night at a jaunty angle and lay in bed hoping to hear the siren and catch the mice in the act of driving through the apartment, perhaps to gather food.
The sailboat was a toy but seemed like more than a toy. That is, there was a seaworthiness to it not found on regular toys. The sails were adjustable, and the keel was weighted. His father looked it over when he came home from work. “Rich children play with boats like this. They race them in ponds in city parks. Rich white children in their white clothes, while their Black nannies watch over them.” His father wasn’t wrong; there was a chapter in Stuart Little where people raced model sailboats in Central Park. There wasn’t anything about Black nannies or white clothes, though. Nils was worried his father was about to issue some kind of edict forbidding him from owning the sailboat, the same way he was no longer allowed to watch Johnny Quest after an episode in which jungle natives were referred to as heathen savages. His father had sent an angry letter to the network. But now his father only shook his head and handed the boat back to him. There were many scratches and scrapes around the hull, as if the boat had gotten a lot of use, maybe crashing into rocks. There was not much detail inside the cabin, but the cockpit looked real, with a tiller that actually moved the rudder. The plastic seats around the tiller were molded to look like cushions. It was not hard to imagine a mouse or mouse-shaped boy like Stuart Little perched on the cushion, steering the boat with the tiller. His mother sat across from him at the table, watching him through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “It isn’t only rich children who played with boats like that,” she said. “My brother David had a boat like that. His was made from wood, though. He built it from a kit over the winter when we lived in Newman Grove, Nebraska. The paint he used smelled up the whole house. I believe it had lead in it. We weren’t even close to being rich.” Nils nodded. He often had the sense that what his parents said was about more than a single thing but he couldn’t do much with this theory. He smelled his boat. Thought it bore the faint scent of the sea even though he’d never been to the sea.
After only a few weeks, the school abruptly ended the Friday afternoon YMCA program. No reason was given but Nils could not help but imagine it had something to do with that locker room, all those naked men, the horrible dark thatches, which still haunted him. He felt some kind of vindication but was saddened to have to return to full Fridays. He had grown fond of his time with his mother, of seeing how she lived during the day when his father was at work and his older sister was at school. His mother seemed lighter, if that was possible, more cheerful without so many people making demands of her. She bought him things on the way home without much deliberation, like the sailboat, or endless rolls of masking tape he used to build robots from coffee cans and Quaker Oats containers. In those hours before everyone came home, she liked to sit at the table with an Agatha Christie novel and her coffee and cigarettes, or take a nap on the couch while he kept his little brother occupied.
The school attempted to make up for losing the YMCA by having various outings on Friday afternoons. They went to the top of the John Hancock tower and Nils felt the swooning vertigo, the terror of looking down at the city far below. They went to the Museum of Science and Industry. On a cool April day they went to Lake Michigan, only a few blocks away as the crow flew. Nils had asked Miss Wentworth if he could bring the sailboat along and she’d said yes. He had already written a story about the sailboat, along with a picture, so she was familiar with it. The night before, Nils used a rag and can of Pledge to shine up the boat until the hull was glossy. He wanted to show it off to Miss Wentworth. Much of what he did in class was geared toward getting her to compliment him, or even just to smile. He was locked in shyness much of the time and had to speak through accomplishment, his neat penmanship, his mastery of spelling, his wildly imaginative stories. Some of the more outgoing boys could often make Miss Wentworth laugh but Nils liked to believe his form of communication was longer lasting.
A rank odor greeted them when they spilled out of the vans. There were dead fish strewn about on the sand as far as Nils could see. Mr. Prentiss and Miss Wentworth huddled in conference for a few moments. Nils watched Mr. Prentiss shrug. They gathered the kids and Miss Wentworth waved her hand. “You may have noticed all the dead fish. We don’t know why this happened but we think it might be from pollution. We’re going to try to find out for you. But for now, let’s enjoy being here. We have sunshine and the lake looks pretty.”
Nils made a beeline for the water, stepping around fish, which were looking up at the sky though dull eyes. He thought this was the kind of thing they’d be investigating on Flipper, tracking down the cause of all these dead fish, setting things right. He walked along the edge of the water where it was lapping gently over the sand. He knew Lake Michigan was big, how it occupied a hand-sized space in the atlas at home, but he was amazed at how it seemed to go on forever. He took off his shoes and socks and rolled up his jeans. They’d been told they could wade but not past their knees. This was becoming a bad idea because most of the kids were in the water, ignoring the rules, splashing each other, starting to roughhouse. Marty Z threw Sean B and Sean B was completely soaked. Everyone was getting wet and there were no towels, and it was still cool out. Mr. Prentiss looked exasperated. Nils sensed the plug was going to be pulled so he hurried a little farther out. He set the boat in the water, smoothed out the sails. Gave it a push. It looked smart, a little foam collecting around the bow. “That would make such a nice picture,” a voice said. “Too bad we don’t have a camera.”
It was Miss Wentworth. She had joined him. She was holding her sandals. Nils nodded.
A moment later the sail bulged and the boat turned and started heading into the lake, and fast. Nils started after it but froze, remembering his father’s admonition that lakes were full of deep pits a person could drop into and never be seen again. In seconds it was out of reach. Nils watched, hoping the wind would shift or drop, that the waves would bring it back. The boat started to become hard to see in the chop. But when he squinted, he could make out Stuart Little in the cockpit, he really could, Stuart with one hand on the tiller, wearing a sailor’s cap. Stuart waved. Nils waved back. “Well,” Miss Wentworth said. She squeezed his shoulder. “I think a boat is probably happier in the water than in an apartment. Don’t you?”
His mother said they would keep their eyes open for another sailboat, but Nils understood that no, there would never be another sailboat like that at a rummage sale or thrift store. But while he was saddened to lose it, he also liked to lay in bed with his eyes closed and picture the sailboat moving across Lake Michigan, steady and true, Stuart Little calling it a night and crawling into the snug little cabin and falling asleep to the rhythmic lifting and falling of the boat. He used up many pages in the spiral-bound notebooks his mother bought him, trying to draw Stuart’s journey. But in time, he thought about the boat less and less, and Stuart Little the book remained on the shelf.
Lake Ontario, 1978
Six years later, Nils was almost thirteen, living in Rochester, New York. He was smoking a cigarette on the corner of Lake Avenue and Birr Street, waiting for Magnus to show up. They were going to take the city bus up to Lake Ontario. Nils had been shocked to learn that Magnus had lived in Rochester since birth but had never actually been to the lake. He’d driven by it, but had never walked on the beach or reached down to run his hand through the water. It seemed incongruous.
They were supposed to meet a couple girls at the lake. A few nights earlier, walking around a carnival at St. Joseph’s, Nils and Magnus had run into the girls, who giggled a lot and whispered to each other every time their paths crossed. Before long, they were all walking together, and soon they’d broken into couples, Nils and Gina, Magnus and Tina. The girls weren’t from their neighborhood, and that was part of the draw for Nils, that idea of the exotic. They stopped at a shooting gallery, and, standing back watching others try, Nils noticed that the rifle had an odd trajectory; the bb would invariably veer left. He paid for a turn and aimed slightly to the right of the target and easily won a stuffed giraffe for Gina. When they had to leave, Nils tried to get her telephone number but she refused. “My dad would ground me for a month if a boy called the house.” Nils persisted, and they agreed to all meet at the lake the next Saturday. There was a little park right off Lake Avenue, Gina said. And a pier. They would meet at the pier, like in some romantic movie.
Pretty soon, Magnus appeared. They were not sure of the bus schedule so they started walking, looking back now and then to see if the bus was coming. Nils had a few dollars, and a pack of Marlboros, and a joint. Magnus had Newports and an M-80 firecracker he was hoping to impress the girls with. He’d stolen it from his father’s toolbox in the garage. His father had been saving it since the 1960s, when M-80s were banned. “Man, he’s going to know it was you,” Nils said.
“I know.”
“Won’t he beat your ass?”
“That’s okay. I’ve known for a long time I was going to take the M-80. So the beating has always existed. It was just a matter of when.”
“That’s either really deep or really stupid.”
Magnus turned the M-80 in his hands. It was stubby like a battery, with a thick fuse coming out the side. He shoved it back into his pocket. “Guess what?”
“What.”
“I’ve got my swim trunks on underneath.”
“Are you crazy? The water will be freezing.”
“I know. I just want to jump in and out. I want to be able to say I swam in Lake Ontario.”
“I get that,” Nils said. “But still.”
The bus appeared. They ran ahead to the next corner and boarded. There weren’t many people on the bus. Nils pressed his forehead against the cool glass and watched the neighborhoods change, the houses get bigger and farther apart as they rolled up Lake Avenue. He felt a little uneasy leaving their home territory. He had not told his parents where he was bound. “Going to hang out with Magnus,” was all he’d said. Which was true, but if they knew he was going all the way up to the lake, they would have flipped out, imagining all sorts of danger. They had no idea where he went when he went out the door. Weeks earlier he’d gone downtown with his friend Mark and they’d gotten lost and wound up getting into a fight with two Puerto Rican boys. It wasn’t much of a fight. Nobody’s heart seemed to be in it, and it was very cold out and the sidewalk was covered in dirty slush. It was just enough of a fight that everyone could walk away feeling like they’d done what was expected of them.
They reached the lake and the park was right there as Gina had described. That seemed to be a good sign. If she’d told the truth about that, maybe she was telling the truth about meeting them. Magnus was like a small kid, taking off running for the water as soon as he was off the bus. Nils followed, scanning for any sign of the girls. There were not many people at the park. A young couple making out on a bench, an old Italian man in a fedora strolling with his hands clasped behind his back. Nils caught up to Magnus. “You were right, this is fucking cold.”
Nils reached down and dipped his hand into the water. “Goddamn.” He dried his hand on his jeans and lighted a Marlboro. “No sign of the girls.”
“Tina and Gina. Think those are their real names? The way they rhyme like that?”
It hadn’t occurred to Nils that they weren’t. Now it seemed possible, maybe even likely. Were they having a good laugh about it? Telling their friends how they got two guys to waste their Saturday? “I don’t know.”
“Well,” Magnus said. “Even if they were just fucking with us, I’m glad we came. This lake is huge. I can’t even see the other side.”
“Listen. This isn’t even the biggest of the Great Lakes.”
“No way.”
“We lived in Chicago when I was a little kid. Lake Michigan was even bigger than this.”
“Damn, son. Did you ever swim in it?”
“I waded around in it some.” Nils pointed at the concrete pier jutting into the lake. “Let’s check that out.”
“Okay, but I’m going swimming before we leave.”
They walked out on the pier. When they got to the end, Nils leaned over the rail and watched the water beating against the concrete. The concrete was chipped and stained. Cold and hard, like everything in the city, he thought. The lake was supposed to be part of nature but it didn’t seem like nature. It seemed like a feature of the city, manmade, put there for some industrial reason. He wondered how far he would have to walk along the shore before it began to feel like nature, with trees and animals.
They started back to the park. The girls were nowhere to be seen. The park had a junky little playground with monkey bars and a swing set. Several men were hanging around, joking and jostling, men with big mustaches, wearing leather jackets and German military caps with shiny black visors. “Leathermen,” Magnus said. He lowered his voice. “Gays.”
They sat on a bench facing the playground. One of the leathermen took off his jacket and started doing pullups on the monkey bars, showing off for his friends. The veins in his muscular forearms seemed ready to explode. “Goddamn,” Magnus said.
“If you’re going to be gay,” Nils said, “you probably need to be tough.”
“No shit. You think they’re coming? I thought Tina liked me. I let my hand bump into her boob two times and she didn’t say anything.”
“If they don’t show up, it could be for a million reasons. It might not have anything to do with liking us or not.”
“I wouldn’t mind having some of that joint now.”
Nils thought about it. He’d been saving the joint to share with the girls, have a little party. Loosen everyone up. But that was as far as he’d gotten in his planning. He had money to buy them snacks or a soda, but there wasn’t a store in sight. He wondered if things were livelier at the lake in the summer. Gina had held his hand at the St. Joseph’s carnival and her hand had been like an energetic living thing, not limp and still, more like a bird in his grip, squeezing, lacing her fingers between his, pressing her thumb into his palm. They’d gotten a lot of mileage out of that hand-holding, enough to mean they might have been ready for the next step, making out a little. Her skin was smooth and slightly tinted like you’d see in certain Italian girls. He really wanted to kiss her and maybe feel her up a bit. He didn’t want any more than that. He hadn’t started puberty yet. Most of them hadn’t but there were a couple guys in his grade who were getting taller week by week, starting to sound croaky. They were sweaty all the time. Nils wasn’t really looking forward to that. He checked his watch. The girls were almost an hour late. He didn’t even know Gina’s last name. “Well, fuck, we might as well.”
“That’s right, why should we suffer?”
Nils took out his Marlboros and dug in the package for the joint. Looked around. It was just them and the leathermen, no cops, no old ladies. He didn’t think the leathermen would give a flying fuck if they smoked the joint. He lighted it, took a long pull, felt the harshness in his throat and chest. Handed it to Magnus, who sucked at it greedily. One of the leathermen noticed and came over. Silently reached out. The back of his hand was hairy. Magnus glanced at Nils before giving the leatherman the joint. The leatherman took a hit. He was wearing mirrored sunglasses and Nils saw his reflection in the lens. He thought he looked much younger than he felt. Maybe it was just the curvature of the lens. “Wicked,” the leatherman said, and gave the joint to Nils. “Thanks, little man.”
The marijuana was not from their usual source, a kid named Charles who lived down the street and drove around in a silver Monte Carlo. This joint came from Whitey, the albino dropout who spent most of his time in a dark garage on Alameda trying to play a bass guitar. Nils thought he stayed in the garage because the light bothered him, like a vampire. If you wanted to buy from Whitey you had to listen to whatever song he was working on at the time. Nils didn’t know where Whitey got his marijuana. He didn’t think it really mattered but this was hitting him harder than normal. His brain seemed to shrink, peeling away from his skull. He felt someone staring at him. It was Magnus. Just staring at him from two feet away, like a dumb infant. Magnus was not a close friend. Magnus was careless and stupid. He’d once gotten caught shoplifting at Wegman’s, which was the easiest place to shoplift from. But Magnus had been at the carnival when they met the girls, so he was a part of it, now. He was still staring, his face all smooth and shiny, a goofy smile on his face. It freaked Nils out. He pushed his shoulder and Magnus fell over on the bench.
Then Nils was in the lake, up to his knees, his sneakers and socks and jeans soaked. He had no recollection of getting into the water. He looked at the shore. The leathermen were gone. Magnus was in the water, too, in his swim trunks and nothing else. Crawling around on his elbows, like a lobster. His white skin was prickled with goosebumps. Nils reached down and cupped his hands and brought water to his mouth. He felt it absorb into every cell in his body, like a dry sponge pushed into a full sink, almost all at once. Something moved in the corner of his eye. A sailboat on the horizon, coming toward them at an angle. He thought it was awfully chilly out for people to be sailing. He stared at it until the midday sun dancing on the water hurt his eyes. He looked away and when he looked back the sailboat was right there, running into his legs. It was a toy. Nils picked it up, drained it of the water that had accumulated in the cabin. The boat was not in great shape. The sails were tattered, the tiller was gone, the hull was cracked. He thought about how it looked like the sailboat he’d owned in Chicago. It looked exactly like that sailboat. The sails were tan instead of yellow but they could have been yellow at one time and just become faded after years in the elements. He wished he remembered more about his old sailboat, some identifying mark. He closed his eyes and saw it again, heading into Lake Michigan, with Miss Wentworth at his side, the hem of her dress floating on the water. It wasn’t impossible. You heard about people finding a note in a bottle that traveled around the world. He couldn’t remember if all the Great Lakes were connected naturally, but he knew at the very least there were canals. He turned the boat in his hands. Looked into the cabin. “Stuart Little,” he whispered. He had not thought about Stuart Little, or the sailboat, in a long time. It felt good to think about them. He thought that his mother would be pleased to see the boat. She would agree that yes, it was possibly the same boat, even if she didn’t completely believe it. They had not been getting along lately. She seemed tense all the time, arguing often with his father, worried about what Nils was up to. She’d accused him of being drunk, being high, of stealing her cigarettes. He was guilty of it all but denied everything. She had cried and said she could bear anything but being lied to. He felt like he had no choice but to lie. Now he remembered walking home from school with her in Chicago, how she would always position herself so that she was between him and the dark doorways. She’d been protecting him from whatever threats might lurk there. He thought the sailboat might remind her of those times, too.
“Let me see that,” Magnus said. He pulled the sailboat from Nils and set it in the water. Monkeyed around with it. Gave it a push and started running. Nils watched him. Magnus clasped his hands to his ears. Nils looked back at the boat in time to see the M-80 fuse sparking in the cabin right before it exploded. It seemed to happen in slow-motion. The hull vanished in the lake and everything else just shattered. Plastic shrapnel strafed his face. Close to shore, Magnus was jumping around, laughing, but Nils couldn’t hear it, he couldn’t hear anything, and he could not find a direction to look that wasn’t unfriendly and gray.
When Nils was in the second grade, his small private school started a program in which his class, and the third graders, would be taken to the Chicago YMCA every Friday afternoon to spend some time in the pool. Nils was excited at the prospect of learning how to swim, saw himself knifing into the water, perfectly at home there, one step closer to being like Bud and Sandy on Flipper, his favorite television show. But his first day at the YMCA would be his last. The girls went with Miss Wentworth to change, and the boys followed Mr. Prentiss into the men’s locker room. Nils suddenly found himself eye-level with dozens of shadowy adult groins, countless rubbery appendages that seemed to be swinging at him, coiling and striking, bobbing and thudding against his head under a soundtrack of laughter and echoes in the hot misty air. He was too shaken up to relax and spent the entire hour shivering on the edge of the pool with his feet dangling in the water, dreading the return trip through the locker room. His classmates, shrieking and splashing away, seemed immune to the horror. At home, Nils announced that he would no longer be going to the YMCA. When pressed for a reason, he simply lied. “I almost drowned and there was nobody to help me.” His father flew into a rage and headed for the telephone to raise hell, but Nils stopped him. “It wasn’t really their fault,” he said, not wanting to see his teachers get into trouble. “It was just way too many people and kids. It was so crowded.”
His father had always been wary of bodies of water. A childhood friend had drowned in a Kansas farm pond and he’d never really gotten over it. Nils understood this, thus the nature of his lie. A solution emerged. Nils would simply leave school after lunch every Friday until the YMCA program was over. On the phone to the principal, his mother alluded to some sort of weekly appointment, hinting vaguely at psychoanalysis. The school didn’t object. Nils was a good student, both in behavior and academics.
So every Friday, while the other kids were loading into the vans, Nils waited out front for his mother to come up the sidewalk pushing his little brother in a stroller. They lived within walking distance of the school, located near the north shore of Lake Michigan, in a neighborhood going through what his father called an evolution. A block from the school they were likely to come across a couple winos passed out on the sidewalk, sometimes with vomit venturing from their mouths over the concrete in a manner that reminded Nils of cartoon dialogue balloons. Then there were a few long blocks of retail space under tall buildings, an office furniture company, a shoe store, some restaurants and bars with dark interiors and gruff-looking men loitering in the doorways.
Their stately three story apartment building at one time would have been a desirable address. The kitchen had a spacious pantry, and secreted behind it, what his sister claimed had been the tiny bedroom of an indentured servant. The living room featured a huge three-sided window jutting from the building, looking down on the street at the perennial commerce, the United Nations of pedestrian traffic below. Some nights they were treated to the glow of structures burning in the distance, fire engines rushing past. “Insurance arson,” his father said. Then: “I hope we aren’t next.”
His mother had an interest in thrift stores and rummage sales so one Friday they went right instead of left and wound up at a church. A huge sale was taking place in the cavernous basement, on long tables. It seemed to be mostly clothes, boring, but there was an occasional oasis of household goods, electronics, books, toys. Nils found a grimy doll to occupy his little brother, who was straining to leave the stroller. Then, in the distance, over a cordillera of winter coats, he saw the silhouette of a sailboat, with a great keel, a low cabin, and two yellow sails flowing smartly from the mast. At first he thought it was a painting of a sailboat on the wall behind the coats, but as he drew closer, he could see that it was, in fact, an actual sailboat on top of the pile. He pushed his way through the great throng of people, maddeningly unmoving as they lifted and examined shirts, shook boxes containing jigsaw puzzles, turned strange utensils in their hands. Like some jungle explorer, Nils would sight the sailboat, getting his bearings, before ducking and bumping his way against knees and thighs, getting closer. Just as he reached the table with the sailboat, an elderly man picked it up. The man turned it this way and that, tugged at the mast, inspected the keel. Nils was devastated. How could the man not want to keep it? But then his wife snatched it from him. “We have no use for this,” she said, dropping it to the table. Nils grabbed it up, pressed it against his chest, and went to find his mother.
Nils was thinking of Stuart Little from the moment he first held the boat. He was enamored of the book and the character. If it was possible to wear out an image by staring at it, he must have come close gazing at the cover, that illustration of Stuart Little paddling a birch bark canoe. His mother had read him the book before he learned to read, and his desire to read it himself had pushed him to work harder in school and now he had read it himself, several times. He had no problem with the idea of a human family having a child who happened to be the size and shape of a mouse. Nils hoped to find his own version of Stuart Little in the apartment. Along a wall in the hallway he had discovered what could only be a mouse doorway, a hole in the molding by the floor. It wasn’t a half-circle like the mouse doorways in cartoons, but it was there, nonetheless. To test his theory he had placed a peanut in the doorway and in the morning it was gone, a thrilling development. His father said that it was likely they had mice, since the building was so old. “If we can have cockroaches, we can have mice.” They did have cockroaches, not swarms of them, but in the mornings they had to knock their shoes on the floor to shake out any roaches hiding inside. His parents were reluctant to complain to the landlord because they feared the insecticide he used could give them all cancer. Nils sometimes pressed his ear to the wall above the mouse doorway and thought he heard scratching sounds, tiny feet running past. He taped a large piece of butcher paper to the wall, and with a ruler, began to map out this world, the different levels, connected by staircases. He drew a library with bookshelves and chairs and tables. He drew a park with small trees and benches. He had a toy police car with working lights and siren, which could go by itself. When it bumped into something, it backed up and went forward in another direction. Sometimes he parked the car by the mouse doorway at night at a jaunty angle and lay in bed hoping to hear the siren and catch the mice in the act of driving through the apartment, perhaps to gather food.
The sailboat was a toy but seemed like more than a toy. That is, there was a seaworthiness to it not found on regular toys. The sails were adjustable, and the keel was weighted. His father looked it over when he came home from work. “Rich children play with boats like this. They race them in ponds in city parks. Rich white children in their white clothes, while their Black nannies watch over them.” His father wasn’t wrong; there was a chapter in Stuart Little where people raced model sailboats in Central Park. There wasn’t anything about Black nannies or white clothes, though. Nils was worried his father was about to issue some kind of edict forbidding him from owning the sailboat, the same way he was no longer allowed to watch Johnny Quest after an episode in which jungle natives were referred to as heathen savages. His father had sent an angry letter to the network. But now his father only shook his head and handed the boat back to him. There were many scratches and scrapes around the hull, as if the boat had gotten a lot of use, maybe crashing into rocks. There was not much detail inside the cabin, but the cockpit looked real, with a tiller that actually moved the rudder. The plastic seats around the tiller were molded to look like cushions. It was not hard to imagine a mouse or mouse-shaped boy like Stuart Little perched on the cushion, steering the boat with the tiller. His mother sat across from him at the table, watching him through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “It isn’t only rich children who played with boats like that,” she said. “My brother David had a boat like that. His was made from wood, though. He built it from a kit over the winter when we lived in Newman Grove, Nebraska. The paint he used smelled up the whole house. I believe it had lead in it. We weren’t even close to being rich.” Nils nodded. He often had the sense that what his parents said was about more than a single thing but he couldn’t do much with this theory. He smelled his boat. Thought it bore the faint scent of the sea even though he’d never been to the sea.
After only a few weeks, the school abruptly ended the Friday afternoon YMCA program. No reason was given but Nils could not help but imagine it had something to do with that locker room, all those naked men, the horrible dark thatches, which still haunted him. He felt some kind of vindication but was saddened to have to return to full Fridays. He had grown fond of his time with his mother, of seeing how she lived during the day when his father was at work and his older sister was at school. His mother seemed lighter, if that was possible, more cheerful without so many people making demands of her. She bought him things on the way home without much deliberation, like the sailboat, or endless rolls of masking tape he used to build robots from coffee cans and Quaker Oats containers. In those hours before everyone came home, she liked to sit at the table with an Agatha Christie novel and her coffee and cigarettes, or take a nap on the couch while he kept his little brother occupied.
The school attempted to make up for losing the YMCA by having various outings on Friday afternoons. They went to the top of the John Hancock tower and Nils felt the swooning vertigo, the terror of looking down at the city far below. They went to the Museum of Science and Industry. On a cool April day they went to Lake Michigan, only a few blocks away as the crow flew. Nils had asked Miss Wentworth if he could bring the sailboat along and she’d said yes. He had already written a story about the sailboat, along with a picture, so she was familiar with it. The night before, Nils used a rag and can of Pledge to shine up the boat until the hull was glossy. He wanted to show it off to Miss Wentworth. Much of what he did in class was geared toward getting her to compliment him, or even just to smile. He was locked in shyness much of the time and had to speak through accomplishment, his neat penmanship, his mastery of spelling, his wildly imaginative stories. Some of the more outgoing boys could often make Miss Wentworth laugh but Nils liked to believe his form of communication was longer lasting.
A rank odor greeted them when they spilled out of the vans. There were dead fish strewn about on the sand as far as Nils could see. Mr. Prentiss and Miss Wentworth huddled in conference for a few moments. Nils watched Mr. Prentiss shrug. They gathered the kids and Miss Wentworth waved her hand. “You may have noticed all the dead fish. We don’t know why this happened but we think it might be from pollution. We’re going to try to find out for you. But for now, let’s enjoy being here. We have sunshine and the lake looks pretty.”
Nils made a beeline for the water, stepping around fish, which were looking up at the sky though dull eyes. He thought this was the kind of thing they’d be investigating on Flipper, tracking down the cause of all these dead fish, setting things right. He walked along the edge of the water where it was lapping gently over the sand. He knew Lake Michigan was big, how it occupied a hand-sized space in the atlas at home, but he was amazed at how it seemed to go on forever. He took off his shoes and socks and rolled up his jeans. They’d been told they could wade but not past their knees. This was becoming a bad idea because most of the kids were in the water, ignoring the rules, splashing each other, starting to roughhouse. Marty Z threw Sean B and Sean B was completely soaked. Everyone was getting wet and there were no towels, and it was still cool out. Mr. Prentiss looked exasperated. Nils sensed the plug was going to be pulled so he hurried a little farther out. He set the boat in the water, smoothed out the sails. Gave it a push. It looked smart, a little foam collecting around the bow. “That would make such a nice picture,” a voice said. “Too bad we don’t have a camera.”
It was Miss Wentworth. She had joined him. She was holding her sandals. Nils nodded.
A moment later the sail bulged and the boat turned and started heading into the lake, and fast. Nils started after it but froze, remembering his father’s admonition that lakes were full of deep pits a person could drop into and never be seen again. In seconds it was out of reach. Nils watched, hoping the wind would shift or drop, that the waves would bring it back. The boat started to become hard to see in the chop. But when he squinted, he could make out Stuart Little in the cockpit, he really could, Stuart with one hand on the tiller, wearing a sailor’s cap. Stuart waved. Nils waved back. “Well,” Miss Wentworth said. She squeezed his shoulder. “I think a boat is probably happier in the water than in an apartment. Don’t you?”
His mother said they would keep their eyes open for another sailboat, but Nils understood that no, there would never be another sailboat like that at a rummage sale or thrift store. But while he was saddened to lose it, he also liked to lay in bed with his eyes closed and picture the sailboat moving across Lake Michigan, steady and true, Stuart Little calling it a night and crawling into the snug little cabin and falling asleep to the rhythmic lifting and falling of the boat. He used up many pages in the spiral-bound notebooks his mother bought him, trying to draw Stuart’s journey. But in time, he thought about the boat less and less, and Stuart Little the book remained on the shelf.
Lake Ontario, 1978
Six years later, Nils was almost thirteen, living in Rochester, New York. He was smoking a cigarette on the corner of Lake Avenue and Birr Street, waiting for Magnus to show up. They were going to take the city bus up to Lake Ontario. Nils had been shocked to learn that Magnus had lived in Rochester since birth but had never actually been to the lake. He’d driven by it, but had never walked on the beach or reached down to run his hand through the water. It seemed incongruous.
They were supposed to meet a couple girls at the lake. A few nights earlier, walking around a carnival at St. Joseph’s, Nils and Magnus had run into the girls, who giggled a lot and whispered to each other every time their paths crossed. Before long, they were all walking together, and soon they’d broken into couples, Nils and Gina, Magnus and Tina. The girls weren’t from their neighborhood, and that was part of the draw for Nils, that idea of the exotic. They stopped at a shooting gallery, and, standing back watching others try, Nils noticed that the rifle had an odd trajectory; the bb would invariably veer left. He paid for a turn and aimed slightly to the right of the target and easily won a stuffed giraffe for Gina. When they had to leave, Nils tried to get her telephone number but she refused. “My dad would ground me for a month if a boy called the house.” Nils persisted, and they agreed to all meet at the lake the next Saturday. There was a little park right off Lake Avenue, Gina said. And a pier. They would meet at the pier, like in some romantic movie.
Pretty soon, Magnus appeared. They were not sure of the bus schedule so they started walking, looking back now and then to see if the bus was coming. Nils had a few dollars, and a pack of Marlboros, and a joint. Magnus had Newports and an M-80 firecracker he was hoping to impress the girls with. He’d stolen it from his father’s toolbox in the garage. His father had been saving it since the 1960s, when M-80s were banned. “Man, he’s going to know it was you,” Nils said.
“I know.”
“Won’t he beat your ass?”
“That’s okay. I’ve known for a long time I was going to take the M-80. So the beating has always existed. It was just a matter of when.”
“That’s either really deep or really stupid.”
Magnus turned the M-80 in his hands. It was stubby like a battery, with a thick fuse coming out the side. He shoved it back into his pocket. “Guess what?”
“What.”
“I’ve got my swim trunks on underneath.”
“Are you crazy? The water will be freezing.”
“I know. I just want to jump in and out. I want to be able to say I swam in Lake Ontario.”
“I get that,” Nils said. “But still.”
The bus appeared. They ran ahead to the next corner and boarded. There weren’t many people on the bus. Nils pressed his forehead against the cool glass and watched the neighborhoods change, the houses get bigger and farther apart as they rolled up Lake Avenue. He felt a little uneasy leaving their home territory. He had not told his parents where he was bound. “Going to hang out with Magnus,” was all he’d said. Which was true, but if they knew he was going all the way up to the lake, they would have flipped out, imagining all sorts of danger. They had no idea where he went when he went out the door. Weeks earlier he’d gone downtown with his friend Mark and they’d gotten lost and wound up getting into a fight with two Puerto Rican boys. It wasn’t much of a fight. Nobody’s heart seemed to be in it, and it was very cold out and the sidewalk was covered in dirty slush. It was just enough of a fight that everyone could walk away feeling like they’d done what was expected of them.
They reached the lake and the park was right there as Gina had described. That seemed to be a good sign. If she’d told the truth about that, maybe she was telling the truth about meeting them. Magnus was like a small kid, taking off running for the water as soon as he was off the bus. Nils followed, scanning for any sign of the girls. There were not many people at the park. A young couple making out on a bench, an old Italian man in a fedora strolling with his hands clasped behind his back. Nils caught up to Magnus. “You were right, this is fucking cold.”
Nils reached down and dipped his hand into the water. “Goddamn.” He dried his hand on his jeans and lighted a Marlboro. “No sign of the girls.”
“Tina and Gina. Think those are their real names? The way they rhyme like that?”
It hadn’t occurred to Nils that they weren’t. Now it seemed possible, maybe even likely. Were they having a good laugh about it? Telling their friends how they got two guys to waste their Saturday? “I don’t know.”
“Well,” Magnus said. “Even if they were just fucking with us, I’m glad we came. This lake is huge. I can’t even see the other side.”
“Listen. This isn’t even the biggest of the Great Lakes.”
“No way.”
“We lived in Chicago when I was a little kid. Lake Michigan was even bigger than this.”
“Damn, son. Did you ever swim in it?”
“I waded around in it some.” Nils pointed at the concrete pier jutting into the lake. “Let’s check that out.”
“Okay, but I’m going swimming before we leave.”
They walked out on the pier. When they got to the end, Nils leaned over the rail and watched the water beating against the concrete. The concrete was chipped and stained. Cold and hard, like everything in the city, he thought. The lake was supposed to be part of nature but it didn’t seem like nature. It seemed like a feature of the city, manmade, put there for some industrial reason. He wondered how far he would have to walk along the shore before it began to feel like nature, with trees and animals.
They started back to the park. The girls were nowhere to be seen. The park had a junky little playground with monkey bars and a swing set. Several men were hanging around, joking and jostling, men with big mustaches, wearing leather jackets and German military caps with shiny black visors. “Leathermen,” Magnus said. He lowered his voice. “Gays.”
They sat on a bench facing the playground. One of the leathermen took off his jacket and started doing pullups on the monkey bars, showing off for his friends. The veins in his muscular forearms seemed ready to explode. “Goddamn,” Magnus said.
“If you’re going to be gay,” Nils said, “you probably need to be tough.”
“No shit. You think they’re coming? I thought Tina liked me. I let my hand bump into her boob two times and she didn’t say anything.”
“If they don’t show up, it could be for a million reasons. It might not have anything to do with liking us or not.”
“I wouldn’t mind having some of that joint now.”
Nils thought about it. He’d been saving the joint to share with the girls, have a little party. Loosen everyone up. But that was as far as he’d gotten in his planning. He had money to buy them snacks or a soda, but there wasn’t a store in sight. He wondered if things were livelier at the lake in the summer. Gina had held his hand at the St. Joseph’s carnival and her hand had been like an energetic living thing, not limp and still, more like a bird in his grip, squeezing, lacing her fingers between his, pressing her thumb into his palm. They’d gotten a lot of mileage out of that hand-holding, enough to mean they might have been ready for the next step, making out a little. Her skin was smooth and slightly tinted like you’d see in certain Italian girls. He really wanted to kiss her and maybe feel her up a bit. He didn’t want any more than that. He hadn’t started puberty yet. Most of them hadn’t but there were a couple guys in his grade who were getting taller week by week, starting to sound croaky. They were sweaty all the time. Nils wasn’t really looking forward to that. He checked his watch. The girls were almost an hour late. He didn’t even know Gina’s last name. “Well, fuck, we might as well.”
“That’s right, why should we suffer?”
Nils took out his Marlboros and dug in the package for the joint. Looked around. It was just them and the leathermen, no cops, no old ladies. He didn’t think the leathermen would give a flying fuck if they smoked the joint. He lighted it, took a long pull, felt the harshness in his throat and chest. Handed it to Magnus, who sucked at it greedily. One of the leathermen noticed and came over. Silently reached out. The back of his hand was hairy. Magnus glanced at Nils before giving the leatherman the joint. The leatherman took a hit. He was wearing mirrored sunglasses and Nils saw his reflection in the lens. He thought he looked much younger than he felt. Maybe it was just the curvature of the lens. “Wicked,” the leatherman said, and gave the joint to Nils. “Thanks, little man.”
The marijuana was not from their usual source, a kid named Charles who lived down the street and drove around in a silver Monte Carlo. This joint came from Whitey, the albino dropout who spent most of his time in a dark garage on Alameda trying to play a bass guitar. Nils thought he stayed in the garage because the light bothered him, like a vampire. If you wanted to buy from Whitey you had to listen to whatever song he was working on at the time. Nils didn’t know where Whitey got his marijuana. He didn’t think it really mattered but this was hitting him harder than normal. His brain seemed to shrink, peeling away from his skull. He felt someone staring at him. It was Magnus. Just staring at him from two feet away, like a dumb infant. Magnus was not a close friend. Magnus was careless and stupid. He’d once gotten caught shoplifting at Wegman’s, which was the easiest place to shoplift from. But Magnus had been at the carnival when they met the girls, so he was a part of it, now. He was still staring, his face all smooth and shiny, a goofy smile on his face. It freaked Nils out. He pushed his shoulder and Magnus fell over on the bench.
Then Nils was in the lake, up to his knees, his sneakers and socks and jeans soaked. He had no recollection of getting into the water. He looked at the shore. The leathermen were gone. Magnus was in the water, too, in his swim trunks and nothing else. Crawling around on his elbows, like a lobster. His white skin was prickled with goosebumps. Nils reached down and cupped his hands and brought water to his mouth. He felt it absorb into every cell in his body, like a dry sponge pushed into a full sink, almost all at once. Something moved in the corner of his eye. A sailboat on the horizon, coming toward them at an angle. He thought it was awfully chilly out for people to be sailing. He stared at it until the midday sun dancing on the water hurt his eyes. He looked away and when he looked back the sailboat was right there, running into his legs. It was a toy. Nils picked it up, drained it of the water that had accumulated in the cabin. The boat was not in great shape. The sails were tattered, the tiller was gone, the hull was cracked. He thought about how it looked like the sailboat he’d owned in Chicago. It looked exactly like that sailboat. The sails were tan instead of yellow but they could have been yellow at one time and just become faded after years in the elements. He wished he remembered more about his old sailboat, some identifying mark. He closed his eyes and saw it again, heading into Lake Michigan, with Miss Wentworth at his side, the hem of her dress floating on the water. It wasn’t impossible. You heard about people finding a note in a bottle that traveled around the world. He couldn’t remember if all the Great Lakes were connected naturally, but he knew at the very least there were canals. He turned the boat in his hands. Looked into the cabin. “Stuart Little,” he whispered. He had not thought about Stuart Little, or the sailboat, in a long time. It felt good to think about them. He thought that his mother would be pleased to see the boat. She would agree that yes, it was possibly the same boat, even if she didn’t completely believe it. They had not been getting along lately. She seemed tense all the time, arguing often with his father, worried about what Nils was up to. She’d accused him of being drunk, being high, of stealing her cigarettes. He was guilty of it all but denied everything. She had cried and said she could bear anything but being lied to. He felt like he had no choice but to lie. Now he remembered walking home from school with her in Chicago, how she would always position herself so that she was between him and the dark doorways. She’d been protecting him from whatever threats might lurk there. He thought the sailboat might remind her of those times, too.
“Let me see that,” Magnus said. He pulled the sailboat from Nils and set it in the water. Monkeyed around with it. Gave it a push and started running. Nils watched him. Magnus clasped his hands to his ears. Nils looked back at the boat in time to see the M-80 fuse sparking in the cabin right before it exploded. It seemed to happen in slow-motion. The hull vanished in the lake and everything else just shattered. Plastic shrapnel strafed his face. Close to shore, Magnus was jumping around, laughing, but Nils couldn’t hear it, he couldn’t hear anything, and he could not find a direction to look that wasn’t unfriendly and gray.