The Forest Side of the Lake

At the intersection, I could turn right and head home. But turning left would take me the long way, around the forest side of the lake. Heck, I don’t know why, but I’ve been thinking about that old trail all day, the clearing, where so many of my formative experiences took place, under the pines’ green canopy. Warm memories. We had some great times over there, for sure, back in the days when summers and legs were long and hot, my old pal Bob and I. Before our voices broke, we’d ride our bikes round there and go fishing where the pines reached down almost to the water. Don’t remember us ever catching much, but we’d stay out there all day, take our lunches, chill out and talk about what we’d be when we grew up. Bob oscillated between movie star and astronaut. I had designs on running for president. Remembering what Bob said brings me a wry smile, all these years later. “Brian, the US is gonna need to be real desperate before they vote you in, buddy.”

“Maybe we are real desperate,” I say aloud, swinging the wheel to the left at the intersection, still not sure why. The twilight’s already coming on and it’ll be all but dark when I get to the old fishing spot. What Bob would have made of present day America, I guess I’ll never know. More than forty summers have warmed that lazy shore since those forays into boyhood fantasy.

Then we got older and started noticing the girls were growing up too. From playmates who could be pretty annoying, they flowered into elusive quarries we suddenly really wanted to spend time with, if we could catch them. One day, me and Bob cycled around there with Jacie and Gina; we’d all promised our moms we’d be back before sundown. Gina’s daddy said if we weren’t, or if there was any funny business, he’d be right round there in his smoky old Chevy, with his shotgun right there on the front bench. He’d only half looked like he was joking.

Gina was the one we were both sweet on, Bob and me. Thing was, that day, Gina rode her bike alongside mine; she did most of the chatting and I was a bit tongue-tied at first. Jacie did the decent thing and rode along with Bob. After a while, he quit looking back over his shoulder at Gina and me, trailing behind; I sensed he was starting to get along OK with Jacie. Seeing her in a new light. Oh, what a painful metamorphosis is pre-adolescence. Ten times worse than the bone-cracking agony as the wolf-man howls his way into devilish four-legged form, beneath the full moon.

What is it that draws us back to such special places, after years and years? Gina moved away when her daddy got a new job in DC. As for Jacie, I don’t know what happened to her. I ended up marrying Margie, whom I hadn’t really noticed until we’d almost finished high school. Maybe I should call Margie and tell her I’m going the long way home. Where’s my cell? Not in my pocket, not on the car seat. Did I leave it at work? I must be getting more forgetful. Never mind. She won’t worry. I’m not going to spend long round there, anyways. Just a fly-by for old times. Right now, Margie will probably be… you know, I can’t really picture what she might be doing right now. This sounds crazy, but I can’t even imagine her face with any clarity. Like I haven’t seen her in years, instead of just this morning when I left for work.

“Have a great day,” she’d said. It’s what she said every day since we married. I always replied the same way, by shooting her a smile that meant, “No chance of that,” and giving her a hug and a kiss. Weird, that memory feels as far back as those days with Bob, chasing the unattainable like Curt in American Graffiti. The mind is a complicated and mysterious thing.

You know, here in the fading light, on this lonely old road where I’d started to see Gina as a scintillating, beautiful creature, pedalling her bike, dark pony tail swinging in the breeze, I could swear I feel like I’m driving my sweet old Buick, my first car. That wide, Bakelite steering wheel felt cold to the touch even on the blazing hottest July afternoon. Got the Buick when I was seventeen. Many’s the time me and Bob drove out to the forest side of the lake with a couple of girls on board. One time, Bob brought his daddy’s pickup and we had a proper campfire right there in the clearing, must have been eight or ten of us, frightening the crap out of one another with spooky, freaky ghost stories. That night, we stayed right on till dawn. It was a wonder none of those girls wound up pregnant. Well, no it wasn’t, because nothing like that ever went down on forest side, but at the time we wanted it to, and now we just wanna remember it like it did.

I guess I’m pretty near the spot now. Looking back across the water, I can’t see the lights of the town, though it’s only around three miles as the old crow flies. Not a glimmer. Lake and forest look just like they must have looked a hundred years back or more. I’m gonna park right here. You know, this place really seems just like it did when all my hair was still black; when I still had some goddamn hair on the top of my head. That old tree, the one that looks like an elderly woman, bent with age. Funny, I’d have sworn they felled that gnarled trunk ten years back. I must have gotten that wrong.

I step out of the Buick and close the door. The solid cream paint gleams in the moonlight. I run my hand over the car’s smooth gloss finish. This has to be a dream. I set out from work in my hybrid Toyota. Now I just parked my first car, then one I sold when I went to college and never saw again. Till now, that is. Wait, what’s that? That smell? It’s wood smoke. Someone’s lit a fire. Maybe people were here today and they forgot to put their fire out. I better go check. Don’t want a forest fire to get started. Not here.

It sure is a beautiful night, tall pines majestic against the deep purple water, mirror to the darkling sky. The smoky smell is stronger now. There are voices, some deep, some higher, with ripples of what sounds like teenagers laughing. Now I’m in the clearing, and there is a campfire, and I can’t believe what else I’m seeing. I blink, shake my head, rub my eyes and open them, and he is still there. He stands and comes toward me, hand outstretched. “Bri! Man, I’ve been waiting so long for you. Come on over and have a beer. Long time, bro!”

Bob Small is around seventeen, by the look of him. Yet, he can’t be. He can’t be seventeen, and he can’t be here. But he is both, and he is Bob. His face is probably the one I know best in the world, aside from my own. Even Margie’s isn’t clear to me any more. I don’t think she is at home. I don’t think she will be worrying about me. I don’t think she lives with me any more. I’m not sure. Nothing seems real tonight, out here on the forest side of the lake.

Bob tosses me a Bud from his ice box. It’s a steel can, like we had back in the seventies. He opens one for himself. I crack mine open and savour the cold beer, smacking my lips.

“Hey Bob,” I say, “it’s good to see ya, buddy, but I sure am confused. “I…

I stop. Bob has sat down on his camping chair, and all the youthful spring looks to have drained out of him. Mid-forties at least. The age he was when…

His eyes look right into mine as I sit down on the other chair, the one I know he put there for me, because he knew I would come. Even though Bob Small had died of a heart attack at age forty-five, nearly twenty years ago, he has made a campfire tonight, here by the lake like he did in the old days, and I have come to join him.

In the firelight, Bob’s face flashes seventeen once more. Then, a moment’s shadow, and the moon reveals a hollow-eyed mask, a bleached skull, bare of skin and flesh. He raises a bony hand and points, and I know what I will see when I turn. Not just the too-far-to-recognise, flickering, fleeting figures of the phantom campfire partygoers, but the real, permanent slate plaque I myself designed and funded, when I lost my best friend, six years on from the millennium’s turn. The simple inscription - BOB SMALL’S SPIRIT WILL FOREVER WARM THE FOREST SIDE OF THE LAKE - had been joined by a more recent postscript - ALONG WITH THAT OF HIS INSEPARABLE BEST FRIEND, BRIAN HURST.

ROBERT GORDON SMALL, 1962-2007

BRIAN FRANCIS HURST, 1963-2023