"Out on the Lake" by Steve Chang
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We were drinking in his garage to commemorate Buddy’s shipping out to Iraq when we decided to hit the lake. It was before dawn and we’d been acting like it was any old night, playing ’89 Tecmo Bowl on retro Nintendo, but really we were drinking our way into a deep unfestivity.
While we’d been commuting to classes in L.A. and Fullerton, worrying about finals and our futures, Buddy had decided to become a Marine. We’d laughed about it then, how huge his thighs would look in those tiny PT shorts, how he told us to call him Robin, the Boy Wonder. He seemed OK.
Then, after boot camp when he stopped home for a week before SOI training, he wouldn’t pick up his phone. We felt, of course, the distance growing between us. What we wouldn’t notice was how quickly the weeks could pass, how a semester could go by in a blur.
I knew the day he got back. I told Terry and Shenway that I’d driven by on my way to the 605, spotted his garage door flipped open again, his blue privacy tarp pulled across the view, swaying stiffly, and stopped in for a visit. They asked what his deal was, and I told them he was worrying about the war. By then, we’d all seen news of it: sand-colored troops and armored convoys, tracer fire crisscrossing a night-vision-green sky, red arrows curving across a satellite map of Iraq. Any story about war is the biggest story. Bring it up and focus fades from all other concerns. They believed me.
Now here he was, a Rifleman, in high spirits again, chuckling about how he’d soon be shooting sand and humping camels. He told us all he did in boot camp was run. He said, “But who the hell runs in a desert?” We passed the second controller back and forth between us, its black cord tethered to the console, as he won game after game, his Bo Jackson running circles around our defenders. We traded looks as we passed it.
“Hey, Buddy,” I said. “You want to get out of here?”
“Why?” He broke into his big laugh and got to his feet. Backlit by high bulbs, his mass was towering and shadowed. “Can’t wait to get out of this shithole, huh?”
I looked to the others for support, but Terry was intently wiping his glasses. And Shenway, right then, needed a long sip of beer more than breath. Behind the can, his eyes darted like guppies. “Whatever you want, Buddy,” I said. “It’s your night.”
He was already digging through a pile of cardboard stacked in the corner by the parking meter propped against the yellow insulation. “My night?” he said. “It’s my world.” He stood again, holding a grip of fishing rods. “You don’t tell me where to go. I tell you.”
On our way out, I hung back on the driveway while Shenway passed, carrying a cooler of beers, and then Terry, shooting me a look. I didn’t care what he thought. I waited for Buddy to turn off the fans and lights and when he passed through the tarp, I asked, “You OK?”
He had his hand on the short length of rope that dangled from the door. After a moment he said, “I never taught you how to fish, did I?”
“Not yet,” I said.
“Just do what I do. It’s not that hard.” He tugged sharply and the garage door clattered down into a wall.
Buddy’s folks had shotguns in the bedroom and a Chevy Silverado in the driveway. His great-granddad had purchased lots back when only white folk could, when what would become our city was just ranches and coyotes. The rest of us had come in the 80’s. Me, I had a covered tissue box in my mom’s Corolla. Around here, a family like his was getting to be an anomaly, is what I’m saying.
All this must’ve played a part in why he’d join the Corps, why he talked like he was putting us on some real Americana the whole drive down to Irvine. All the way there, he hyped the lake—how his dad had taken him on birthdays, how the trout were as long as his arm. I caught Terry in the rearview lifting an eyebrow. Who cares? I thought. This was Buddy. In 8th grade he’d thrown a football 70 yards without trying. Our PE teacher Mr. Monson had lifted his shades to track its flight. On the spot he called Buddy to the sidelines and asked him to QB for intramurals. Pushing back his sandy bangs, Buddy had laughed and said, “For what?” Up until then I didn’t know you could say things like that, but instinctively I knew what he was refusing: not the position but the whole theatrical farce of the sport. All this running in the sun, a bunch of sweaty boys in rumpled shirts, chasing and grabbing: what were we trying to prove, and to whom? Buddy trotted back onto the field, punching his hand for the ball, and, This, I thought, is what I have to become.
It was Buddy’s world and we were lucky to be in it. If he wanted to go fishing, we went fishing. It wasn’t that hard.
Out on the lake Buddy took us to his spots along the banks, talking about air temperatures and lures, and stringing our poles. We were all in better moods out there, on vacation from ourselves. With Buddy back in charge, we settled in, and the sun burped up into the sky, blazing hot and hazy.
We almost lost the mood for a moment when Shenway said, “Hey, Buddy. Can I ask about Iraq now?”
Without looking his way, Buddy yanked the cord on the motor and said, “Why, you want to go?”
The boat picked up speed. I cut in: “Look.” I scooped up a handful of the lake and let it trickle between my fingers. “It’s slippery. You know how nasty that is? This water’s like a million years old.”
Buddy yelled, “All water is a million years old.” He laughed. Only he knew what I was up to, how to talk in sleight-of-hand. We got the others arguing. Terry muttered, “That’s impossible,” and Shenway peered into the deep to say, “You mean dinosaurs swam in this?”
We switched to trolling, our rods locked in along the back, and with the motor droning I could finally drift away. I stopped listening and focused on Buddy, how while he locked eyes with Terry and Shenway to chat, still he was guiding us, his hand on the tiller. This would be a good day, I thought, and that’s what mattered. That Buddy would look back, think fondly of us together, of the hum of motion and the sloshing of lakewater, and take with him the voices of his friends.
With all the drowsy beers and driving, it wasn’t long before I fell asleep. I heard the sounds of the motor dwindling and in a moment I was darting through the murk, all sleek and flashing. I could hardly be seen. I flitted past towering weeds, and in and out through wavy shadows. I didn’t know what I was, only that my body was responsive. When I wanted to propel myself forward, I willed it to happen and it did.
A dream like that lingers. I woke to Buddy shaking my arm. I had the impression I’d been caught. The lake was lapping away, the shorelines distant. We were stopped. In the absence of sound, a spotlight had been switched on. Then he was yelling about our rods in the back: “You got something there! Bring it in!”
I staggered across the rocking boat and heard Terry mutter, “Of course it would be you.” I took up the rod and yanked at the fish. I spun the reel, herky-jerky. When I tugged, the fish tugged too. I sensed the force of its will. When I let it swim it only slipped further away. I had the feeling I was struggling against my own mind.
Only Buddy had any knowhow about the outdoors, so it had been OK, his baiting our hooks and tying our knots. Reeling in a fish seemed different. Any real man should be able to do it. I turned to him, and he took the rod from my hands. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’ll show you.” I flashed, ashamed. The others were on me—“Figures,” said Terry, and Shenway said, “Soft”—but what could I do? Sometimes you have to take it. I shook my head and agreed. I glanced at the others, in case they had more shitty things to say, but no. The focus had all shifted to Buddy.
He worked the fish smoothly, pulling back on the rod and spinning up the slack, so wholly in his element: an Eagle Scout on the pages of Boys’ Life. I stepped away as the others crowded him, yelling. His muscles tensed under his drab olive T-shirt, stretched tight across his back. In another world, I could’ve hidden in his shadow forever. I touched my own arms as if they were his.
I’d been working out too, comparing my body to photos from Muscle & Fitness that I’d cut out and stashed under my mattress. I’d check them while I stood in front of the mirror, holding one or another beside me. Only in reflection could they be scientific. If I’d looked at them in bed, they would’ve been something else. I thought I was coming along OK, my body growing bigger and stronger, but the others weren’t treating me any differently yet. I’d started to suspect they never would, that nobody would, that no matter how I looked, I’d never be seen the way I wanted.
“What did I tell you?” Buddy was saying. “Here he is.” He had the fish finning alongside the boat now, a dark green and silver blur. He reached in to scoop it and—I swear—it slipped into his fingers willingly, as if returning to him. It knew what it had to do. It didn’t even flop when he dropped it in the cooler.
We still gravitated together on odd weekends while Buddy was in Iraq, but without him to call the shots we found ourselves adrift. In nightclubs in Orange County we held our rattling drinks against our chests. We talked to girls aimlessly, almost angrily, as if fighting them. With his hair mown into bristles and dyed freshly blond, Shenway would talk loudly by the bar about whether raccoons were cuter than dogs, whether French food was better than Italian—topics he’d learned from Maxim or FHM—and when a girl would pass by, he’d ask her to settle the argument. This hardly ever worked, but when it did, it would fall on Terry to play the droll contrarian.
As for me, I would fall silent and eventually wander off to work my way through the crowds of shimmering people, disco-balled with colored scales, and think of that day on the lake, of hooks on strings, of catching on the muddy bottom, of shifting shadows and swaying weeds.
While I drove us home they would replay and review—what they should’ve said, and, worse, what Buddy would’ve done—and I’d start to feel that I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere, that now I had no way to go back. I’d have to follow this path to its end, as my life blew by beyond the windows, a passenger in my own body.
In the years since, I’ve learned a few things. For starters, Irvine Lake isn’t a lake. It’s a reservoir. The trout I hooked was a bass.
I’ve figured out other things too, things that would be obvious to anyone but me, like how those friends weren’t really my friends. They were Buddy’s. And going our own ways would feel like nothing.
Shenway has moved to Lake Havasu City, where he rents out jet skis and parties with college kids. He’s gelled his hair into electric blond spikes and looped his neck with strands of silver and purple Mardi Gras beads. He looks how he used to sound to me in those nightclubs: loud and unconvincing. In his photos it is always Spring Break.
Terry’s gone on to work logistics for UPS. He drives only Audi A4’s. He poses with them often, but his photos reveal he never drives them far. They’re all taken in his driveway, or on his street. I wonder, not unkindly, by whom.
As for Buddy, all I know is captured in a photo he sent—a real photo, not on Facebook—only to me. It arrived without a letter or anything written on the back. It’s of him in Fallujah. He stands, feet apart, on a truck bed, lightly cradling an M4 angled toward the dirt. With all his gear on, he looks strong. Maybe bulky is a better word. Under his utility cover, his face is grim and stricken by shadow, the softer bits blasted away by the sun. What this photo seems to convey is that what we wanted, and whether we wanted it, none of that mattered. There is no why. This is the way of the world.
There was a day, not long after Buddy had gotten his orders, when I visited alone.
In the past I’d have stopped by whenever I wanted, but lately I’d gotten the feeling I needed a reason. I planned to bring him back some tapes I’d borrowed: Batman, Rambo, and Bloodsport. I thought the visit might be awkward, but I could be an adult. In any case, I figured, the tapes were his. If he no longer wanted to be friends, I could at least say Hi and Thank you. I owed him that much.
I thought I’d lift that tarp and the let the sunlight flood in on him hitting push-ups, shining his boots, or listening to his folks’ old vinyl collection. Were these things that soldiers did? That’s what he’d become after our time apart: a soldier, with bigger concerns than his friends. I thought he’d simply lost interest in us. I didn’t think I’d lift the tarp and find him lying on the couch in desert camo, his clunky boots crossed at the ankles on an armrest, that he’d lift a fifth of Jim in greeting. It shook and the brown slash in it wobbled back and forth.
“Here for the party?” he said.
In the heat, the garage smelled worse than I remembered. Musty. “Just bringing back some tapes,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’m shipping out soon.”
He swung his legs off the couch and started tidying, dragging a giant Hefty bag, clinking and clanking, around the room. It had a murky aquarium dimness that the sunlight filtering through the tarp only intensified. The TV played a muted rerun of I Love Lucy.
“When are you leaving?” I said, and when he didn’t answer I wondered if I should simply go. He moved with purpose, his sleeves rolled up into tight, crisp bands. Despite the drinking he looked put-together, unlike this garage, with its slumping piles of rotten Boys’ Lifes and National Geographics, with its busted electronics dumped against the walls, where we’d spent so many nights. He filled his Hefty bag with crushed cans and wads of fast food wrappers while ignoring all that mess in the background, the blown-out tennis rackets, wooden-handled and clunky, and the stars-and-stripes roller skates that likely hadn’t been worn since the 70’s—things I understand now to be not trash but his inheritance. Only then did I consider he might be ashamed of how he lived. I called out across the room, “Damn, you look sharp in that uniform.”
He stopped and cocked his head, tuning into an older, higher frequency. “What’d you say?”
I’d hoped to convey kindness, but I’d heard how I sounded.
He crossed the room toward me, a hugeness approaching. “You know what they’re saying about you? Huh? What’d I tell you about talking like that?”
His chest stopped inches from my face. His deep breaths ruffled my hair and I stayed completely still, as if he were a massive animal I had to not spook. He smelled as if he’d been in his uniform, drinking, for days, but I didn’t know what I could do with that knowledge, what he’d let me do. I heard my heart thumping in its hollow, or maybe the heartbeat was his.
I put my hands up, harmless, in surrender. He stood there, waiting—no, deciding, I think. In those days I didn’t yet know the difference. I was as scared as I’d been my whole life, but I stood my ground. I did what I could. I looked past him, past his body, into the TV. I could not-look at him for years if I had to.
“I’m not doing anything wrong.”
“You should know better,” he said.
He snatched the tapes from my hands and I winced as if I’d been slapped. He stepped away, and the moment had passed. I could look at him again, at how well he could tidy, how he stomped in his uniform and boots, shoveling trash into his bag.
If we had stayed kids, we could still be tossing M-80’s at cars that zoomed by too fast, still be heating up dinner at his folks’—fish sticks and buttered corn—and if after he asked, “Want to see something cool?” I could still follow him out back into waist-high seas of grass, through the silver-and-blue rippling of blades in the moonlight. Out there were abandoned wonders to be discovered—a pile of bone-white gas tanks, a wood-paneled dishwasher, a rusted-out Beetle chassis stranded on cinderblocks—the worn-out remains of a world too big to comprehend.
“It’s like I’m living underwater,” he’d say, “with all this sunken old shit. And if I don’t get away, I’ll drown.” And I’d say, “No, this stuff is really cool,” though what I’d mean would be, It’s beautiful.
In the end, what can boys do with beauty?
We held gas tanks to our crotches and mimed pissing for yards. We hugged the dishwasher and struggled like sumo to lift it. We wet the Beetle’s hood with rubbing alcohol and Zippo fluid and lit it on fire to see which colors burned brightest and longest. When we got sleepy, we’d stomp back into the garage and talk, our voices distinct in the dark. I’d curl up on the couch while he played Tecmo Bowl. He would always pick L.A., always play as Bo Jackson. I’d watch him, my cheek pressed against a cool patch of duct-taped cushion. There he’d be, on the screen, trailed by whole teams of defenders. They would dive at his feet, hopeless, one after another.
He asked, “You know why I like him?” He was sitting on the armrest, by my feet, rapt in the TV’s light.
I said, “Nobody can catch him.”
“That’s right.” He clenched his jaw and blinked hard. Then he blinked again, harder.
I asked him, “But what if they did?”
“They won’t,” he said. Then he stopped tapping buttons. On the TV, Bo was swarmed and knocked onto his back. A moment later, Buddy stood. “You should stop talking like that.”
“Like how?” I asked.
He wrapped the cord around his controller and slammed the bundle on the console. “Just do what I do. It’s not that hard.”
That day on the lake, with the fish in the cooler, Buddy tossed us all fresh beers, and the boys were optimistic, laughing, like all good things were yet to come, as long as Buddy was here to show us the way. “How many fish you want?” he yelled. “We’ll turn this one into twelve.”
He steered us across the lake, towards a stand of willows. We trusted him to get us to where we had to go. His hand on the throttle, his bristly hair rippling in the wind, he was so beautiful I had to look away. Instead I would look at my rod and imagine I was him. I would do as he’d do and feel as he’d feel. I would trace the line to where it cut into the murk, that trailing divot in our wake, and laugh away my fear of what it might yet pull from the deep.
Steve Chang is from the San Gabriel Valley, California. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, North American Review, The Southampton Review, Okay Donkey, and elsewhere.
