Haunting the Lake

By Bill Coolidge

About four in the afternoon on a Saturday. It’s an in-between time, drinking beer up and down the beach. Three groups separated from each other: parents, sons and daughters of age and their teenage siblings. That’s me, a younger teenager with five other boys. Trying to find a way to get served a beer from a neighbor or better yet have an older brother or sister sneak one. Not very successful, usually but we liked the game of it. Brothers and sisters are up for the weekend, off from work or summer school. Pabst Blue Ribbon, Blatz, Miller, Carling and Bud. Bottles being passed around. Before aluminum cans.

There are two groups in front of the Crawford cottage. The teenagers sitting on aluminum chairs with green ribbing watching the siblings cavort along the dock. Hoisting longnecked bottles, teasing and laughing. Diving occasionally into the lake to cool off. My best friend Dewey lives here. His parents are inside with the Wengers having a drink around the knotty pine table in the kitchen. Me and Dewey, Bob, Tim, and Jim are caught in-between. Fifty yards from the dock and within viewing of the parents. Like an old dog on a hot summer day, slumbering with one eye open, we’re waiting for some action.

“Did you see that?” A yell went up from the end of the dock. Bob Basso’s brother was out there with Ned and Pam. Sitting on the dock, legs dangling over, only touching water when a motorboat went by and left a big wake.

“Over there!” We run to the shoreline, those on the dock are standing and peering out toward into the lake. Twelve pair of eyes look out into the water, at the raft line. About 100 feet out from shore.

“A body!” Ray, Bob’s older brother, is standing up now, blue plaid bermuda shorts, white t-shirt, tan offsetting the black curly hair like dark angel spaghetti twisting and turning around his chest and armpits. His right arm straight out like a plumbline. I frantically look around, see nothing. I elbow Dewey. “See anything?”

“Naw. It’s just Ray, he probably drank too much.”

“Don’t you see it? There it is!”

I watch the direction of Ray’s pointing but I don’t even see a ripple from the submerging of an arm or leg or head.

“Well’s let’s go out and find it!” Ned, Dewey’s brother is already pushing out a rowboat. Ned has just been accepted into the Coast Guard and is now in training. He arrived Friday night in his show whites. Hair close cropped. He looked proud. Walked tall.

“This is the best thing for Ned. He wasn’t made to be in college. But his father, he is so disappointed. Not having a college son. I’m so proud of him.” Last night when I was in Dewey’s kitchen getting a Hires root beer, I heard Ruth, Dewey’s mother say this to Fleet Wenger, who lives in between Dewey’s cottage and ours. Mrs. Crawford was tearing up. “He’s such a good looking boy.” Mrs. Wenger’s contribution. Both nod their heads in approval, as if taken by an inspirational painting in a museum.

Ned and Rex, my stepbrother, are heading out to the dropoff in the rowboat, right near the raft and in the direction of Ray’s pointing. Ned is on the oars. Rex is sitting on the bow seat and then quickly stands up and dives in, almost capsizing the small aluminum craft.
“What the hell do you think you are doing?” Sputters Ned to Rex but Rex hasn’t broken the surface yet, didn’t hear him.

Rex acts like a turtle, going down and coming up in different places.

“Don’t see anything.” Ned relays this message to crowd standing along the beach.

“Are you sure you saw something Ray?” Ned’s sister Sue asks.

“What, you don’t trust me? God damn it, I saw a body!” Ray leaves us and runs next door to his house. Meanwhile a couple of other guys swim out to join Rex and search around. I’d like to do that, but I’m in the younger crowd. Seen and not heard.

Some of the crowd walks over to Dewey’s. Sits in the chairs. Sue goes in and brings out some Millers. Ray comes running over from his house:
“I’ve called the Sherriff’s department. They’re coming with some scuba divers. They believed me.”

Each summer has a signature event. An event that is remembered and then is used to identify it: “the summer Glen Jurgenson’s Lightning (a sailboat) burned.” Or “the summer those history buffs came with scuba gear and found that old log sled used in winter on the ice, in front of Larry’s Kollmorgen’s house.” Or “that summer Gene (my younger stepbrother) used that pipe to shoot cherry bombs at the sailboats.”

This was to become: “the summer Ray Basso thought he saw the body.”

They came. Right about dusk. Three scuba divers. Three extra tanks. Dark suited, capped, flippers. My dog Rip, an English Setter, had a fit. He was alternately scared and then protective. He’d bark loudly, then retreat to our house and then come running out barking and skid to a stop, sniff and eyeball the divers, and then retreat, about ten feet and bark, retreat another ten feet and then bark. All the way back to our cottage and then repeat the performance.

They gave up about eight o’clock. Pretty much dark out. I stayed right there on the beach with them, skipping dinner. Most of Ray’s crowd, had dwindled down to two or three. None of the parents seemed very concerned, as if they had special and secret information about the source.

“Be back tomorrow.” With that, the Sheriff and his crew packed up the two trucks and left.
“I told you so.” Ruth is shaking her head, stirring something on the stove. I don’t know what she means. No one questions her. I’m eating a late dinner with Dewey. I’m pretty excited, but it’s quiet in the kitchen. The adults all have gone home and the older brothers and sisters have headed across the lake for a party.

They return in the early morning. Three scuba divers. Rip is locked in the house. I wade out past my waist to watch them. Bubbles signifying their underwater presence. Within the hour, they are standing on shore, taking off flippers and tanks. Mrs. Wenger, who wears a housecoat and hair in curlers until noon of each day, has brought out coffee and donuts. They drink and eat silently. Not saying anything about this futile search. Ray Basso is not on the beach. He’s gone to Mass. No more than three or four of us there, Dewey and me. Mrs. Wenger and my dad. He is always up early, unlike most of the other parents.

They walk away, like alien visitors. I don’t even know their names. They keep on their scuba gear until they reach the trucks. As if some special military squad has landed on a rural northern Michigan lake.

“Guess it was no big deal after all.” The Sheriff says to no one in particular. One of the trucks has duals, it rumbles when started. They turn the trucks around and accelerate out the dirt road, dust laying lazily in the air, I can hear the driver shift through the gears and then a bellowing as he floors it on U.S. 27, about a mile away. Rip is let out, he catches their scent on the gravel road, lets out three high pitched barks, then wags his tail and looks at me sheepishly. Both of us knowing, that whatever danger was present has long disappeared.
Each succeeding Memorial Day weekend, the docks are put out. The boat lifts are hauled down from the sideyards and then shoved and pulled into the water. Like the return of the orange breasted robins. Once a year on a Saturday morning, the beach is filled in. Its desolation vanishes as human activity accelerates. Each cottage contributes manpower to the effort until everyone’s lifelines to the water are in place. And then it is free time.

I swim out to the dropoff, with goggles, snorkel and fins on and then I swim down, along the dropoff, Looking around, casually. Not expecting to see too much. Perch and bass are out along this invisible ridge of what I can see and what can not be seen. I’ve heard bodies stay enfleshed for a long time in cold water. I don’t tell anyone that I am still searching, just in case. Just in case a body is down there, maybe slowly being rolled up from the dropoff as the result of a big storm.

Ray Basso did not come up to the lake much the next summer. When he did, he kept to himself. Didn’t hang out with the gang. No one seemed to miss him. He was “a little off.” That’s what the word was up and down the beach. I ask Bob: “What’s Ray doing this summer?”
“He’s found work in a lumberyard. Works alot of Saturdays. Too tired to make the drive up here.”