The Benjamin Report

Lakewater

Perhaps for dinner. Something with cheese. Wine maybe? Fancy people always have that, I hear. Wine and cheese and laughter with a smirk of irony on the rocks. I bet there’s some around here. Maybe in the cellar. I wondered if it’s secret. They’d do that. I’d do that. I wouldn’t want anybody snooping around in the places I never go but like to keep. Hidden by plaster. Me, the unlikely little gumshoe mucking up the place.

Aunty’s voice I could hear through the thickness of the empty air. A little bark too, either Sammy or Marlowe. Probably Sammy, I think Marlowe is too old to attempt a squeal like that. I didn’t want to leave. Not yet. I had just gotten in for the first time. It took me a few days of moseying about like an infant. Finding just the right crack in just the right corner and squeezing in like those cheeky beetles braving the crevices between slabs of damp wood.

She could be looking for me. I hope not worried. I told her I’d be out but not where I’d be, just a walk not too far about the woods. Not much you could do, I suppose. But the neighbor’s estate was so close that you could see it through the splinters of padded forest.

They were never there, the neighbors. They bought it a year ago but haven’t shown up since. I don’t think they’ve ever shown up. But in all the time since their purchase they’ve mown over Cassie’s home and constructed a chateau of stucco and spit over her hospice and garden. The quiet of the wilderness was no place for an old woman patterned through by dementia anyways. I’ve always held a murderous stone in my gut when I heard she passed. She never had kids, but she had her home, almost til the end.

I started venturing to this place a few months after it finished construction. I’d go deeper with every visit, taking my time to temper the naughtiness I was feeling. It was a rush when I found a way in. A whole magazine of party and wealth cloaked in dust and bloodless air.

I heard Aunty’s call again. Family was coming today, there was to be a small gathering. I should at least show up if only for formality’s sake. I left through the front door.

Apparently, Aunty and Uncle were planning on selling the home. It was supposed to go to me and my brother Ben. But after he moved to Los Angeles and mom and dad were killed, it was hard to justify the whole inheritance thing. Tough decisions I suppose. Keeping things in the family was always ideal, but the days when tradition was the master of things had closed years ago. People sell all the time.

My crazier Uncle made quite the racket about it. He wanted a piece. Aunty made it clear though that all their inheritance was to be split between me and Ben. I heard my name a lot in their quarrel, I suppose because Ben’s name was always a controversy. There was a hush whenever it was brought up, accompanied by hung heads and at least one unfunny joke that unfailingly cut so slightly into our skins.

Why should he get anything? He left. He wasted his last inheritance. He probably doesn’t even remember us. This. The ice cream on Sundays. The squeak of fresh cheese curds. Fireworks on the lawn and the hope that the cops wouldn’t see it. The Jimmy Buffett on rides home from church. The Packers. The Motown Miracle and the collective death to our hearts come the dreaded post-season. The carrying of me on his shoulders through apple orchards and festive parking lots. The promises. The ones we kept and the ones we wanted to keep. And the everydays, the wilting of drunken joys and pains. The holding on.

The whispers, like a beer in your hand, are emptied out in seconds, though the stains remain.

I couldn’t stand hearing them. I felt their thickness congealing the air. I looked at Marlowe hoping for distraction. His poor puppy eyes told me everything I already knew. I agree, aren’t we all tired?

As dusk was slithering upon the horizon, I decided to visit the neighbors again. The door was open. I don’t remember leaving it that way. It was clear what had happened when I entered the manor’s lounge.

A black bear had invited himself in. He brought with him tears in the couch, scratches on the wooden floor, and finally a life in the air. The wearied traveler, after exhausting himself with his carnage, had settled in for a nap on the ornate rug. A tapestry of flavors ripped from the local indigenous tribe, though clearly an import from Chicago.

I wanted to lay next to him, to feel his fur and the vibrations of his heartbeat. That wasn’t the thing to do though. I left him to his nature. This house needed a resident, now it has its humble fill.

As the years passed and my family trembled, that image of the bear stuck with me. I told Aunty about it and she laughed.

“Bears. They wander, they eat, they sleep. I wish I could be that smart.” She told me.

I repeated this mantra at her funeral, then at Uncle’s funeral. Even at the crazier Uncle’s funeral, where most of the guests were Christian and angry. I liked it. I wanted a tattoo of it right on my heart. That’s the place I think Aunty retired after she died. I could feel it. I really could.

Ben visited a week ago. We went to Green Bay and danced with the cheeseheads. A little flurry of our childhood charm always seems to possess us when we meet.

There was no home for us in Minocqua anymore. Aunty and Uncle had their lovely abode destroyed by developers from Chicago. A place is just a place anyways. Together they reside with the dirt of the north woods. There’s a charm in the forest for them. I buried it, so I know.

The island city wasn’t what it used to be. It’s not my mama’s home. It’s not the place she always wanted to take me to. Whenever she talked of it I could feel her sadness. I wanted to see the lakeshores like she did in her youth. I wanted to feel it like her.

Before she died, she made me promise to spread her ashes in the little lake she swam in as a kid. So I did. I did it for her. The tears that poured out of me joined with her in that final moment.

When she met the cold water, I couldn’t help but come with. She always wanted me to swim with her in the lake. I was always afraid to, yet here we are now. Adrift and sworn away, my heart is with the lake. My heart is with this home all chipped like battered stone.