Lake

Felicia Olivera

They floated on an aluminum Kvichak at the south end of the Great Salt Lake. Maver stood on deck in the glow of Ramos’ cigarette. He stared up at a torn horizon, a dark line of mountains. It was six-thirty a.m. Maver had lived in the shadow of the mountains his entire life, but today they were different. Today, for all he could tell, he might have been looking at the volcanoes of Bali from the Indian Ocean, a place he had never been before. Maver shook his head and pulled the frozen collar of his jacket up around his neck before he looked again. The view was the same and he had seen it a hundred times.

Two weeks ago, Maver’s father got lost in the park a block from his own home. Maver had found him there, confused and hungry. So this is what it’s like, Maver thought. In an instant, he recognized the slip in the mundane. But Maver’s misperceived view in the early morning light was different from his father’s increasing disorientation. What was happening to Maver, he suspected, was Ramos’ fault. Ramos was the traveler; Ramos told stories; Ramos infected the familiar with the mystery of the world.

They had been on the water for five hours, chasing slicks of brine shrimp egg in the dark, and this was their first break. Ramos knew the pace now, after five weeks. Maver didn’t have to say anything for him to know it was a good time to take a few minutes to smoke and look around. They had been taking coordinates by radio transmission from Dave who was in the spotter plane, searching for the streaks of egg with hi-tech night-vision goggles. Even now, with the first spill of light behind the mountains, Maver and Ramos would need spot lights to continue the work before them. They had boomed up a streak of brine shrimp egg into a frothy circle about a hundred yards in diameter. For the next several hours, they would vacuum the egg into enormous, mesh bags.

Ramos took a long drag that cast a glow on his face. Even in the dark, sunken in the shadow of their own sockets, Ramos’s eyes flashed blue. He had blond, insistent wavy hair and a strong jaw-line. Maver could not understand the absolutely Nordic features of a guy called Ramos.
"You mean to tell me there’s no Spanish blood in you?” Maver said.
“Probably.” Ramos smoked with the cigarette centered and bobbing in his mouth, as he spoke, and his hands dug down in his coat pockets. “Way back, though.”
“Where’s your family from?”
“Minnesota. Both sides. Believe me, everyone in my family, as far back as I know, looks like me.”
“Ramos.”
“It’s confusing for everyone.”
Ramos had appeared at the beginning of the season, fresh from the South Pacific where he had spent two months in tropical waters after almost a year of fishing in Alaska. He had heard about the brine-shrimping operations from some Alaska locals who regularly came down to Utah after they had made their bankload of herring money or spent their bankload of salmon money. For Ramos, it was not so much an issue of money, he said. He was a fisherman, and fishing for eggs was too weird to pass up.

Nevertheless, it was the kind of day they could make a lot of cash: cold and calm after two days of stormy weather. The egg rose to the surface of the lake in thick streaks, and already Maver and Ramos had pulled in almost four thousand pounds of unrefined brine shrimp egg. Refined, this might come to one or two thousand pounds of prime Artemia cysts, as the brine shrimp egg was known, and the stuff was selling for $25 a pound on the open market. Fish and shrimp farms in Asia and South America paid high prices for the Artemia because it was live food with a long shelf life. Years after it had been pulled from the lake, the cysts could be hatched and fed to new crops of fish or shrimp. Of course, the fishermen made only a tiny percentage of the sales price. If they brought in nothing, they got nothing. But when the conditions were good, they could make a few thousand dollars a day. No one else was denying they were in it for the money. For Maver, it was essential.
“What about you,” Ramos said, “your family all from here?”
“Mostly. My lot are homebodies.”
“Yeah,” Ramos said nodding, as if letting it sink in.
“You running from something?”
“No.” Ramos put out his cigarette and shoved his hands back into his coat pockets. “I just like to move on when a place gets regular.”

Maver felt drunk on the cold air and movement of his body after two days of doing close to nothing. Usually, during the stormy days, he went back to Salt Lake City to see his parents. It got so that his mother especially had come to expect him whenever the weather turned bad.

The last time Maver had gone home, his father hadn’t recognized him at all. Maver had stood in the doorway, not yet inside the house, when his mother began listing his father’s misdeeds: he had wandered out and been lost twice; he had stuffed the couch cushions into the refrigerator; he had yelled at a group of young children walking past the front yard. Maver could see, looking into the house, the back of his father’s head. He watched TV from the couch, in full earshot of Maver’s mother, and never acknowledged either of them. Maver went in and sat down next to his father.
“How you doing, Dad?” he said.
His dad stayed focused on the television. He was only sixty, twice Maver’s age, but his shoulders slumped forward, giving him a weak, old-man look. Day by day, Maver’s father became someone else: the same body and mannerisms and voice with an imported, unpredictable mind.
“It’s bad weather,” Maver said, “I’m home for a few days.” His father turned to Maver and squeezed his left eye shut and squinted at him from the other.
“I never said you could have it,” his father said.
“Have what, dad?”

But his father had turned back to the television and wouldn’t talk to him again.
It had happened gradually–odd lapses in recognition that seemed harmless enough. In the summer, Maver worked a regular five-day week and visited his parents for a half a day on the weekend. He noticed it from time to time. His father would ask what day it was or he’d call Maver by his mother’s name Sandra, or he’d call him Luke, the name of the family dog that had been dead eight years. Now that Maver spent weeks at a time on the lake without seeing his parents, he realized how quickly his father was changing.

They weren’t a close family in the talking sense, but they were consistent. They kept track of one another and they stayed out of each other’s way. During that last visit, Maver’s mother had given Maver the brochure from the home. It was an antiseptic-looking place in Draper, about twenty minutes out of town. They advertised newly remodeled units, healthy meals and mountain views. It cost a lot of money. The description said they had the best resident-to-staff ratio in the valley.
“He needs it,” Maver’s mother said. Matter-of-fact. It wasn’t much of a conversation and they conducted it all right there, at the kitchen table, in front of Maver’s father as if he wasn’t there.

When the storm had come in three days ago, Maver called his mother and told her he was staying on the lake. He said that they hadn’t predicted the storm and he needed to be on hand when the weather broke. Then he stayed out on the spit, in the trailer with Ramos and SJ and Stevie. He felt a cool, expansive relief. Each day, one or two of them drove to Ogden to rent movies and pick up food and beer. He did some reading; they played some cards; they talked some shit. Ramos had had a lot of adventures. The others knew how to make adventures of what they had.
“What are you going to do with it?” Stevie asked Ramos.
“You know,” Ramos said. “Go somewhere. What about you?”
“New truck,” Stevie said, “a fucking Ford 250. I’ve already picked it out. It’s silver.” He looked proud of himself. He had started working on the lake the previous year and could not believe how much money he was making.
“SJ’s going to get married with his money,” Stevie said. He pushed SJ on the shoulder. “Right, dude?”
“That’s right.” SJ pushed Stevie back and they fell to wrestling on the floor. “At least I’ve got a girlfriend to marry. You’d be lucky to spend fifty bucks to take a girl to dinner!”
Ramos turned to Maver. “What about you?”
Maver smiled and raised a shoulder.
“This is my job,” he said. “I live off this until that paving job starts in the spring.”
“Everyone says this is a good season, though,” Ramos said. “You’ll probably make a lot more than usual.”
“I hope so, man.” Maver seemed to be thinking about something far away.
Then quickly, he let it go. “But it’s not going to happen as long as we’re holed up like this.”

Perhaps this too, the night awake on the water after two idle days, accounted for the fact that Maver was experiencing memories made from stories that Ramos had told him. He said nothing to Ramos this morning when the first outline of the snow-covered Wasatch Mountains appeared to him as if it were a volcano on the island of Bali. He savored it for that moment, before the lines regained their specificity. Then they became the peaks he had always known: Lone, Twin, Olympus. He was back.
“You ever try eating this stuff?” Ramos said, running the pump. It vacuumed the egg off the surface of the water and into washing-machine-sized, tightly woven mesh bags. Maver stood over the metal frame that held the bag in place. He watched the egg pour in while water oozed from the sides of the mesh bag onto his rubber boots. It was good egg. Not mixed up with a lot of hatched brine shrimp or debris. The streak was pink and looked like a granular oil slick on the surface of the water. Later, Maver would look at it under a microscope to gauge its quality.
“Sure, I have,” Maver said. “But never on purpose.”
Every day Maver battled the residue of brine shrimp egg he found on his clothes and food and books. On days off, the heavy, salty smell of it followed him to his car and back into the city.
Ramos put a gloved hand into the bag and let the egg run off it. “That’s the thing about fishing, it’s supposed to be subsistence. You’re supposed to be fishing for food.”
“It pays great–that’s subsistence. And it’s food, too–for fish and shrimp.”
“In some cultures, stranger things are delicacies.”
“Name them.”
“Roasted jungle rat. Raw monkey brain. Pickled sea cucumber.”
“What’s that?”
“Sort of a big sea slug that excretes goop.”
Maver thought about it. With his glove, he scraped at some dried egg on the seam of his fishing jacket.
“It’s not really fishing, though, is it?” he said. “We don’t fish for fish, we vacuum egg. We’re more like egg-suckers than fishermen.”
Ramos smiled and peered into the bag. “Maybe it will make us better egg-suckers.”
“Is that what you think?”
Ramos shrugged in the faint light. At times, Maver wanted to dislike him for having experienced so much. Maver had never traveled much himself and every experience Ramos described happened in a different place. But Maver couldn’t deny that he liked hearing the stories. Ramos told them plainly. He wasn’t showing off, he was talking about his life.
“So you eat what you’re after,” said Maver. “Is it supposed to help you think like your prey?”
“Do you think it’s superstitious?”
“We are talking about egg, Ramos. Fifty of them fit on the head of a pin.”
“It’s a gesture. A sign that we respect this system and our part in it and the egg’s part.”
Maver lay down on his stomach and tightened up the boom to keep the streak of egg gathered up inside. Ramos held the pump steady. Then Maver got up and used a rake to move the egg towards the funnel at the mouth of the vacuum. From the pump to the bag, the stuff looked like syrup and smelled like brine.
“Two questions,” Maver said.
“Shoot.”
“Have you eaten any?”
“No.”
“Who’s the gesture for?”
“For yourself.”
“OK.” Maver put his head down then and they went about their work while daylight finally spilled over the Wasatch. It was coldest in the morning light just before the sun was up. The moisture in Maver’s breath stung his face as he worked the pump and secured the bags.

When they felt sunlight directly upon them, they stopped again and turned their fronts towards the heat.
“I was on a river in Chile,” Ramos said. It was the beginning of a story, Maver knew, that was also part of their conversation. He leaned against the aluminum hull and closed his eyes to the sun. Ramos continued. “There were seven of us on two rafts. We were in a long canyon when the river flash-flooded. At first we didn’t know what was going on. We pulled over in an eddy and tied up, but there was nowhere to go but down the canyon and through the rapids. The river was rising every minute and the eddy was washing out. The guy at the oars of my boat was a quiet Chilean guy. The other boat went first and flipped almost immediately. Just before he untied the boat from the bank, our oarsman took off his life jacket, held on to the bow line and submerged himself in the river. Then he got out, put on his life jacket and got behind the oars. ‘Me uno con el rio,’ he said, which means, ‘Be one with the river.’ At that moment, I knew we were going to be OK. And we were. Everyone was, although the people on the boat that flipped were banged up and traumatized. But our boat made it through. We scooped up the others as we went by.”

In the moment without conversation, after Ramos finished his story, motors buzzed in the air on the lake and in the sky around them. Maver, feeling it warm by degrees, did not know if the motors had been there all along and he simply had not noticed them, or if, like birds, they were responding to the new day, increasing their activity and showing their pleasure as it arrived.
“Ramos.” Maver still had his eyes closed.
“Yes.”
“What if I told you I had to make a lot of money this season?”
He could feel Ramos looking at him, and he opened his eyes.
“I’d ask you why.”
“If things get bad,” Maver said, “if they really slow down, ask me again about eating some egg.”
The pictures flooded Maver’s mind. Ramos told a story and Maver looked out at the land he knew, or closed his eyes to it. He had only traveled outside of Utah a few times. Maver had always believed, with little need for comparison, that this was the best place in the world. It was only recently that he’d begun to feel like this. He couldn’t explain it to himself. Part of it, he knew, was his father, but it wasn’t just that. It made no sense, but he felt as if the absolute regularity of his life rendered it completely out of his control.

In the afternoon, a grebe got caught in the pump and Maver had to disassemble the hose. He pulled out the twisted body and flung it back into the water, away from the egg streak. At the moment of this action, the arc of his arm and the sight of the bird’s body in the air, Maver experienced the sensation of being on the deck of a fishing boat in the Bering Sea, having just untangled the bird from a net full of cod. It was only when he saw the impact of the bird on the clear, shallow water of the lake and not the gray waves he imagined thrashing in the Bering Sea that Maver recovered his place.
Later in the day, in the dusky light, Maver caught a glimpse at the lights of a formation of airplanes lined up to land. And for a few seconds, he experienced a sensation that could best be described as loneliness. As if he were somewhere unfamiliar, waiting to be somewhere else.
“Do you ever experience déjà vu?” he asked Ramos.
“Sure.”
“How about when you know you’ve never been to the place that you’re déjà-ing.”
“I think it would be vu-ing. And that’s what it is–feeling like you’re doing something again when you’ve never done it before.”
“Maybe I’m talking about something else. False memories.”
They had pulled in nine bags so far and now would have to decide whether to continue in the dark, or bring the bags in to the warehouse.
“I mean, I’ve done this before,” Maver said, gesturing around him.
“Yeah.”
“But what I’m remembering is not this.” He went up to turn on the lights and Ramos looked up from the pump and watched him go.
“So what are you remembering?”
“A different life,” Maver said, coming back to the deck.
“Like a past life?”
“I don’t know,” Maver said. He stood at the railing and looked down into the circle formed by the boom and the dirty residue that remained from the big streak of egg. “Like a life that never happened,” he said.

They decided to bring in the bags and get a few hours of sleep at the trailer before going back on the water. Maver worried himself over the egg that sat on the water in the meantime. Every moment they rested was money they could be making.
Maver hardly slept. He felt constricted in his sleeping bag and he could smell and feel the egg in his hair. He dreamt of walking on an island of solid brine shrimp egg and meeting a group of Indians who offered it to him to eat. It was in a tiny crystal bowl in a bed of ice inside a larger crystal bowl on a tray. Like caviar. The Indians looked at him sternly and he could not talk to them to explain that he did not want to eat it. The consequences, it seemed, could be bad. He woke himself up and then could not fall back asleep. SJ and Stevie were still on the lake and Ramos snored lightly in the next bunk.
“Ramos,” Maver said softly. The snoring stopped. Then started again.
“Ramos.”
“What? Am I snoring?” Ramos turned in his bunk.
“If you had to pick one place to live and you could never leave that place for the rest of your life, where would you pick?”
“Um,” Ramos said, and seemed to be thinking about it. After a few moments, the snoring resumed.

SJ and Stevie came in at 3 a.m. and said that the weather was changing. They might as well all sleep until it was light, they said, because the wind was picking up and driving the egg all over the lake and making it difficult to contain. Between 3 and 7 a.m., Maver slept a hard, dreamless sleep.
In the morning, they lingered over coffee and waited for the wind to die down. Stevie claimed to have egg in his eye and they took turns helping him try to get it out.
“You can’t see it,” SJ said to Maver who had a headlamp on and was peering into Stevie’s eye and telling him to look in different directions. “You have to splash it with water.”
Stevie did this a few times, but to no avail.
“It feels like it’s out and then a few minutes later, I’ll notice it again. It’s going to drive me crazy.”
“Maybe it will hatch in there and you’ll have a little brine shrimp swimming around in your eye.”
Stevie stuck his eye directly under the faucet.
“What are you doing?” SJ said.
“I want it to hatch,” Stevie said. “Then we can see it and get it out.”
Eventually, they lost interest in Stevie’s ordeal and sent him to Ogden for bagels. It was a day on which the color of the lake matched that of the sky so perfectly that no horizon line distinguished the beginning of one from the end of the other. Maver and Ramos walked out to the water to smoke and observe the weather.
“It looks like Ireland, or something,” Ramos said.
“I guess you’ve been there, too.”
“No.”
“How do you know what it looks like?”
“It just seems like what it would look like.”
Maver skipped a rock against the waves.
“Where are you going after this?”
“Depends.”
“On what.”
“How much we make.”
“I thought the money doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t. But it will affect what I do next.”
“If you could go anywhere, where would you go?”
“What a question.”
“Why?”
“Because I can go anywhere.”
Maver looked at Ramos and felt a surge of all the jealousy and resentment that he’d tried to conjure up in the five weeks he’d known him. His eyes teared in the wind and he clenched his hands into fists in his coat pockets.
“Good for you,” he said blackly. But the feeling had already passed and now he only stood on the salty, wasted beach looking at Ramos who had heard the bitterness in his voice and stood staring. “Never mind, man,” Maver said, dropping his gaze to the ground.
Ramos said nothing and Maver was happy with that. They stood in comfortable silence, letting the wind and waves direct their separate thoughts.

In the afternoon the wind picked up. It blew all haze from the air and turned it as clear and hard as glass. The sun was painfully bright and the wind thrashed the aluminum trailer. Maver napped between turbulent gusts and dreamt that he was a salesman of egg. He wore a T-shirt that said “Prime Artemia Cysts” and dragged a luggage cart with an enormous bag of egg on it. He pulled his cart through a crowded street in Bangkok where other pedestrians were horrified by his luggage and the confusing words on his T-shirt. Every time he passed a beggar, he scooped a cup of egg from the bag and poured it into the beggar’s cup or hands. Every time, the beggar ate it hungrily.
When he awoke, Maver was disoriented. The trailer was empty and he couldn’t tell if it was night or day. He peeked out the window and saw SJ walking around clenching a cigarette between his teeth and carrying a bucket in each hand. Maver did not believe in paying too much attention to dreams. He was not superstitious and he was not particularly drawn to the unknown. He reminded himself of this. He liked the solid, if seasonal, practicality of his life. He liked the familiarity of things and places that repeated themselves. This is what he told himself, alone in the trailer.

In the evening, Maver and Ramos took the Kvichak out onto the lake to watch the sun go down through the clear, turbulent air. The weather had not changed. White caps rose up from the water, but the sky remained a perfect, unblemished surface. With no chance of finding a streak of egg, the other fishermen stayed off the water. Maver steered the lone Kvichak carefully through the salty waves before turning the boat around to the west and killing the engine. Already the sun had dropped behind Stansbury Island and pushed its urgent light out against the featureless sky. They took beers from the cooler and went out onto the deck. They held onto the railing. The boat rocked and the wind tore through their canvas jackets, but they stood against it and drank in long, thoughtful pulls.
“Remember what we were talking about?” Ramos said. He ducked his head towards Maver and spoke to his ear.
“I don’t know,” Maver said.
“I’m going to do it. I’m going to eat some egg.”
“Don’t do it,” Maver said, “it’ll make you sick.”
“I want to do it.”
“Don’t do it.”
Maver finished his beer and hurled the empty bottle as hard as he could into the air. The wind picked it up and drove it sideways from its trajectory so that it dropped suddenly, close to the boat and into the water. He looked at Ramos who had learned from him never to throw trash into the lake. Ramos held up his beer towards Maver and then drank the last of it. He looked at the bottle and then put it into his pocket.

Maver almost had to yell to be heard above the wind. “I’ll get us some more,” he said. He turned to go back into the cockpit, lifting a foot at the same moment that the boat plunged steeply in the same direction that he’d meant to step. It was like falling through a chute. Maver hardly felt himself slide along the deck. He only registered the sensation of entering the water, that strange first moment of warmth before the water penetrated everything and then the utter cold. He had almost no time to register any of this before he felt himself yanked by the jacket back onto the deck. Only then, grasping the outside rail of the cockpit, dragging himself with Ramos’ help inside, did he fall to shivering.
“Jesus fuck,” he said.
“You better get your clothes off and into something dry,” Ramos said at the wheel. He’d already started the engine.
“I’ve never fallen in before,” Maver said. All he could do was clutch his legs to his chest and shake.
“Come on, man,” Ramos said. “Grab that sleeping bag inside the bench. Get that stuff around you.”
Maver tried to do as he was told. He couldn’t stop looking at the sharp glare of light on the distant water. It looked like an electrocution. He thought of an evening so long ago that he couldn’t be sure of the details. He might have been eight or twelve; he only knew that he was young. His parents had taken him to Antelope Island in the summer and they had all practiced floating in the salty water. He remembered feeling both pleased and embarrassed about his parents, stripped down to their bathing suits, completely different people, in the water with him. They ate a picnic lunch and watched the gulls accumulate in the air around them. Their skin had turned dry and itchy from the salt and Maver as a boy had refused to put on his clothes when it was time to go. His father said they would not leave until Maver got dressed, but still he refused. And so they waited until one will was broken which was of course the boy’s, who had become impatient or cold perhaps in the late afternoon and had finally dressed and allowed his parents to take him home. And what he remembered most was looking back, as they drove over the causeway to return to the city. Looking back at a sunset much like this, more painful than beautiful, and thinking that the day had been ruined somehow and that it was he who had ruined it.
Ramos had turned the boat around and gunned with the waves while yelling at Maver to take off his wet clothes. Maver sat still shivering and intending to do what Ramos told him to do, but he was too cold to move and feeling an urgent regret. Ramos finally stopped the boat and came over to Maver and pulled him to his feet. Ramos was right, Maver knew; he had to get into something dry or he’d go hypothermic.
“Thank you, man,” Maver said, although he struggled against Ramos.

Ramos got his jacket off, but Maver crossed his arms and put his elbows up against him. What he wanted to do was tell Ramos what he had just remembered. He wanted to tell his story, not set in any exotic place, but right here on the same lake he’d just submerged in. He wanted to recount his memory and he wanted Ramos to sit listening and understanding everything beneath the events of it. But he couldn’t say all those words. He was too cold and Ramos too busy struggling to help him. He couldn’t tell the story to Ramos, so he fought him instead.