“God, we’re already running out of summer.”
“I guess it is pretty early for dusk, isn’t it?”
* * * * * * *
John Denton sat on the back of his pickup truck and looked out over the Fish Pond he’d been going to since he was a kid. He took a lazy sip from the bottle he’d been resting on his thigh and turned to his best friend, Sal Johnson.
“Sure doesn’t seem like we’ve been out here enough for summer to be coming to an end, does it?” He turned to look in the cooler behind him, shook his head, then tossed his empty bottle in.
Sal concurred: “No shit.”
His bottle got tossed into the cooler, too, and shattered against the other empty bottles.
“Jesus, Sallie, you don’t gotta chuck it in there like that!”
The two boys had been making trips to the Fish Pond for five summers now, always just the two of them, but never to fish. In fact, neither boy had ever fished the Fish Pond; John called it that because that’s what his dad had called it the first time he took him there, and Sal had picked it up from John and his dad. It was the first place the two of them had had a beer – with John’s dad, in fact – and in those five summers since Mr. Denton had died, this had become their summer rite. They’d drive out when they could, throw back a few beers and enjoy the weather and the quiet. Every empty bottle went in the cooler, and stayed there until the end of the summer.
That first summer, their first one without John’s dad, the cooler had overflowed by mid-August. The second one, when Sal was still scared from his own car accident, the cooler was barely half-full. What they had determined in the three since was that a good summer left the cooler filled just to the top.
It had become their way of continuing to share a drink with Mr. Denton. The first time he let them drink with him, they were only 15, having just finished their first year of high school. “Boys,” he told them, “a lot of parents would kill me for this. But you don’t have to be scared of this stuff. Just respect it – don’t have too much, don’t have too little, and don’t let it make your decisions for you.”
He’d died in the fall, just a few months later. He wasn’t an alcoholic, really – he’d just had too much on the wrong night. His reaction time was a little slower than usual, but on a wet road that was all it took. John had inherited the truck, and the following summer, the boys didn’t know how to do anything but what they were used to. That was the summer after their sophomore year of high school, and here they were now, having just finished their sophomore year of college.
“You know Johnny, I sure do miss your old man.” Sal cracked open Beer #3 on the edge of the tailgate.
“I know man, I do too.” John looked at his friend, and knew that his father meant almost as much to Sal as he did to him. He gave Sal a pat on the back.
“When I’m away – for school, you know? – I think about this place a lot. I know I’ll have to get the hell out of this town eventually… and this’ll be the place I miss the most.”
“This damn town of ours, man,” John said with a sigh, “sometimes I feel like I’ll never leave.” He saw the sidelong glance Sal gave him. “But you’re right – we’ve gotta leave sometime”
“C’mon John, who are you kidding? You’re already out. You go to school 1,200 miles away from here!” Sal would’ve been angry, but they’d already had this conversation at length the summer before. It’d almost ended in a fight, but a wolf had come and scared the hell out of both of them before they had a chance to throw any punches.
“Sallie, I just don’t see why you feel so trapped when you continue to point out that I – and note: I’m nothing special – have already managed to ‘escape.’”
Sal continued to retread their past conversation. “Johnny, who was the last kid to get out of this county? Dan Thomas had a shot, but he got his prom date pregnant and now he lives one town over. Then you’ve got George Chavez – he was a bright kid – and his dad made him stay home from college to carry on the family business of cutting fucking lumber for a living. Fantastic. And then – oh, wait, that’s everyone!”
John actually was getting angry. “What the hell is your point, Sal?”
“My point is, my best friend gets a shot, and he talks about never being able to escape. Never being able to escape. How do you think that makes me feel? I drive to school everyday – and then I drive right back home and see all the same screw-ups we went to high school with. I’ve seen the Thomas kid, and he’s cute as hell, but I don’t particularly want to have my own goddamn kid in this town, to perpetuate this vicious fucking cycle we’ve got going…”
“You know what Sallie? My best friend lives here, my dad died here, and my whole fucking life has taken place in this truck, in front of this pond! So forgive me for not seeing the bigger, better world that’s right in front of my face!”
John opened up his third beer, and they each let the conversation fade out. It was a skill they’d quickly learned.
There was a full moon, so John and Sal stayed out a little later than they might have otherwise. John kept blankets and matches in his truck. It had long since been decided that, for the sake of masculinity, matches were the first move.
They lit a fire a few yards up from the waterline and laid and watched moonlight walk over the smooth surface of the pond. When they’d had nights like this with Mr. Denton, he’d tell them stories about his own years at the high school that they had all three attended. Now that they were out of high school, they had their own; as a result, the late nights in the few summers since graduation tended to fill the cooler up a little faster than usual.
“You know I saw Jennifer Healy last week?” Sal was usually the first one to speak.
“Oh yeah? How’s she doing?” John was never sure how to handle conversations about people that Sal knew well but he didn’t, mostly because there weren’t very many people like that. Jennifer was a special case though, as she had been the object of Sal’s affection for at least half of high school – in vain, of course.
“She’s still dating that bastard who played quarterback for Johnson…”
The same summer that Sal had finally decided to ask Jennifer out to the homecoming dance, she’d started dating the star quarterback at Johnson High, in the next town over. Being a defensive end, he vowed revenge for the last game of the season – at Johnson. Sal’s team lost, missed the playoffs, and the wounds never healed. There are two sure-fire ways to kill a boy’s enthusiasm for life: one is to steal his woman, and the other is to steal his postseason. Sal had both stolen in the same season by the same guy.
“Really…?”
“Yeah…” Sal sighed. “I guess they’re getting really serious. I only ran into her for a few seconds at the grocery store, but it was long enough for her to tell me about how they are looking for a house together. And shopping for rings…” He was talking to himself now. “I’ll never know what she sees in that son of a bitch!”
There was a moment of quiet that lasted a beat longer than it should have, and Sal had to look over to see if John was still awake.
“Sallie,” John started, slowly, “I never told you this, but I spent a night out here with her once.”
Sal snapped up. “You better be josh’n me, boy…”
“It wasn’t like that. It was- I can’t really explain it.”
“I think you better fucking try.”
“I will, don’t worry. Sit back down.” John drew in his breath, but it wasn’t because of Sallie. It was because he was going to tell a story that he realized he should have told a long time ago – maybe to Sallie, maybe to someone else. But instead of ever telling it, he’d just tried to avoid thinking about it. And, realistically, the only person he’d ever tell it to was Sal – who he’d avoided for obvious reasons.
“Sallie, she told me that he hits her…”
“What? Who? The asshole from Johnson?” Sal let the words escape with more pity than anger. It wasn’t often that he had to consider actual emotions towards girls. They were usually just something to be liked, or afraid of. If they were liked, it was usually because of their looks… and if feared, usually for similar reasons. But faced with this new fact he understood that he actually cared for Jennifer Healy.
John’s voice wasn’t much above a whisper. “Yeah, Sallie, the asshole from Johnson.”
The fire crackled and the moonlight continued its stroll across the pond.
“I was driving out here one night. It was senior year, and I think you were on a recruiting trip. Jennifer was walking on along
There was no rule that the Fish Pond was male only. In fact, the other reason matches came before blankets was because blankets were generally agreed upon as being kept in the truck for nights with girls. But John and Sal never brought girls with them when they were together – the Fish Pond was always about them and John’s father. And because they were never there together with girls, there always remained over the proceedings an unwritten rule that what happened at the Pond with girls wasn’t discussed at the Pond. It could be saved for another time.
“So we got here, and popped down the tailgate, and sat. The whole time we were in the truck together had been silent, and it looked like this would too. I wasn’t in a particularly talkative mood, after all – you know how I am when I come here alone.”
Sal nodded.
John continued. “So we’re sitting there, it’s getting dark, and neither of us has said anything. I’m not even drinking because I don’t know if she’s cool. All of a sudden, she turns to me and asks if I know who she’s dating. And I say, ‘Yeah, sure I do.’ And she asks what I think of him, and I tell her I dunno, that pretty much all I know about the guy is that he plays quarterback for Johnson, and seeing how they’re our rivals, he’s pretty much a son of a bitch on principle. And then she says, all matter-of-factly, ‘You know he hits me.’”
John stopped for a second to check on Sal, but Sal was listening intently; John realized there wasn’t anything he could do besides keep talking.
“So I have no idea what to say, but now she’s quiet, and I open my mouth to talk, turn, and look at her – and see that she’s talking to the water. She isn’t talking to me. I guess that was a relief but, to be honest, I didn’t know why she had to come to the Fish Pond to do it.”
“Maybe for the same reason we do.”
John should maybe have checked on his friend again, and seen that his expression had changed from a few moments before, but he didn’t.
“Well – whatever her reason – after a bit of silence, she started talking again. And she said ‘He hits me, but he doesn’t mean it. It’s only when he gets really worked up, or has too much to drink – and, let’s be honest, I probably deserve it?’ That last part, Sallie, was a question. And she was still talking to the water, but I look back now and I know that she needed someone to answer it for her. But the water couldn’t and I didn’t.”
Sal turned to John this time. “What do you think you should have said?”
John sighed and didn’t try to act like he hadn’t considered this many times before. “You know Sallie, I really have no idea. I mean, I know that the answer to the question was, ‘No, Jennifer, you don’t deserve that. No one does, least of all you.’ So maybe I should have said that. But I could tell by the way she was talking that that answer wouldn’t have satisfied her. It was kind of like how I used to come out here, after my dad died, and ask if it was my fault that he drove himself home that night. I know what answer any reasonable person would have given me. And I also know that I wasn’t asking it because I didn’t know the answer. I was asking it because I thought that maybe someone could give me an answer that would change what happened – and no one could have given me that.”
John was quiet after that, to give Sal time to respond. But Sal didn’t. He knew, as he had for a few years now, that he couldn’t understand that time in John’s life. He’d never lost a friend or family member – let alone a father – and though it hurt him that he couldn’t understand better, he knew that John didn’t begrudge him for it, on any level. But it did mean that, at times like this, when he desperately wanted to say “I know what you mean,” he couldn’t.
When enough time had passed, he simply asked if Jennifer had said anything else.
“Not really,” John started, “at least not about that. She started talking to me, instead of the water, and we talked a little bit about school and jobs and stuff, and then, well…”
John did look at Sal this time, and braced himself, “Well, then she asked if I’d ever swam in the Fish Pond, and I said ‘Yeah, from time to time.’ And then she asked if I wanted to, and I told her I wasn’t sure if I was in the mood, and then she took off her shirt and took off her pants, and – you know – persuaded me to do the same. And we swam for awhile.” He couldn’t help but grin at Sal when he thought about it.
“Oh screw you!” Sal threw his now-empty bottle #3 at John, and said, bitterly, “I guess I’m at least glad one of us got to see that.”
The two boys both laughed at this thought of younger life.
“You know, there is one last thing I have to say Sal…”
“What?! Don’t tell me you guys…”
“No, no, I told you man, it ain’t like that. After we swam, we just laid out for awhile and dried off. And she asks me if I ever sleep out here. Tells me that she saw the blankets in the back of the truck. So I tell her sure, sometimes, and she asks if I want to tonight, and I say ok.
“When it started getting cold, we got the blankets out, and lay in the back of my truck. We just lay there, watching the stars, until we both fell asleep. But I woke up a few hours later, in the middle of the night. I don’t know what woke me up; I just got a start, I guess. Anyways, when I woke up, she was wrapped around me, pressed about as tight as she could be. And I could feel – I’m telling you Sallie, I could just feel this – that she felt more alone than anyone I’ve ever met.
“I fell back asleep, and when I woke up, she had gotten up and was sitting down by the pond. I rolled up the blankets, and took her home. And I don’t think I’ve said more than five words to her since.”
“Jesus.” Sal was left to think about what he actually felt for Jennifer. At this point, it really didn’t make much difference. He’d moved on; she was, apparently, engaged, or about to be – though, he supposed, her happiness was debatable. But he’d never realized before what the repercussions of liking a girl – really liking a girl – could be. Because as he sat in the back of John’s truck, he understood that he hadn’t just been infatuated with Jennifer.
* * * * * * *
John and Sal kept talking that night, though they didn’t start again for awhile. They talked about their schools, about work, about what they wanted after school. They drank more, and as they did, they talked about more appropriate topics: happenings in bars, episodes on the road late at night, and, of course, sexual conquests. They let the fire burn itself down and realized, as they always did, that that their eyelids seemed to droop lower at the same pace. They slept next to their fire on the shore of the Fish Pond. They’d done it many times before, and would many times in the future. And as each of the past times had been, and the future times would be, this time felt more vital and important than all that had come before it.
* * * * * * *
Sal woke up first, and he walked down to the edge of the pond to splash some water on his face. He sat back to admire how grey the water looked in the mornings. He couldn’t recall having any dreams during the night, but he was sure that he must’ve, because he’d fallen sleep thinking about Jennifer Healy and her asshole boyfriend, and woke up thinking about the same things.
After a few minutes, he heard John stir behind him: “Dammit, I think I slept on a beer bottle last night!”
John wandered down to the water, repeated the morning ritual, and sat down next to him. Sal was looking straight forward, and, he thought, maybe speaking to the water too. “You know, Johnny, I spent the night out here with a girl once, too…”
“Well, frankly Sallie, I’ve spent a lot of ‘em that way. I just don’t always tell you. But I had always hoped you kept pace…”
“No, Johnny, I mean like, with a girl that’s important to us.”
John looked over at him. “And who would that be?”
Sal was still looking forward and still wasn’t sure who he was talking to. “Your sister.”
John’s expression didn’t change, but his voice did. “Kelly? Are you serious? I mean, besides being my sister, she’s three years younger than us…”
“Well, to quote a friend, ‘it ain’t like that.’”
John’s eyes were smaller than usual: “Do tell.” It was a challenge.
“Well, do you remember when you disappeared for a few days, junior year? When you went to stay with your aunt and didn’t tell anyone?”
“Yeah, I remember that.”
“Well, I was worried sick about you, and so was she. I was worried for a while that you might have drowned yourself in the pond, to be honest, but I could tell that you hadn’t been here and I was pretty sure that you wouldn’t off yourself here. But it made me wonder if there were any other places like the pond. And so-“
John interrupted, “What do you mean, ‘like the pond?’”
“You know - places that you and your family know about that no one else does. You guys have been around here forever. No one else knows about this place but you.”
“I’ve honestly never thought about that before,” John said, “but I guess you’re right. That’s kind of cool, now that I think about it.”
“Yeah, I know.” Sal was jealous. “Anyways – so I went to your house the second day you were gone, and your sister was home, and I asked her, ‘are there any other places like the pond that your brother might have disappeared to?’ I was about to start listing the few other places that I could think of, but she stopped me and asked me what pond I was talking about. And I said, ‘you know, the Fish Pond.’ She had no idea what I was talking about, so I had to explain. I told her that it was the place that your dad used to take us during the summers. And I could see pretty plainly, after telling her that, that she had never been to the Fish Pond.”
John was a little bewildered. “Well yeah, Sallie, she had never been because it was me and my dad’s place.” This had always been completely clear to John. He was a little upset.
“Well, I’ll tell ya Johnny, I’m no dummy, and I started real quick-like to piece this all together. I told her it wasn’t much, and made like I had to leave – and then she asked me if I could take her to the Fish Pond. And I was ready to tell her no, I couldn’t, that I thought it was your job to do that, but… well, but…”
“What is it, Sal?”
“Well, I had never really thought a whole lot about what your dad’s death meant, outside of what it meant to you and me. But when I looked her in the eye, ready to tell her that I couldn’t bring her out here, I could see that she just wanted to see her daddy one more time.”
John let Sallie’s words lead him back to that time, and he understood that he had never really let himself find out what the passing of their father meant to his sister. They had spent time together coming to terms with it, with their mother; those times hadn’t really involved much talking. He knew of his own relationship to his father and how paramount it was in his own life. He’d always assumed that that relationship, for his sister, was with his mother. But even if that was true – if his mother had passed instead, how would he feel?
Sal kept talking without any consideration for John’s thoughts.
“We drove out here that same evening. When we pulled up, she asked me to stay in the truck. I didn’t know how long she’d be, so when she got out, I turned the engine off. I watched her for a minute or two – she just walked down to the pond, and slowly around it – but then I started to feel like I was invading her privacy or something. So I put my head back and closed my eyes and tried to figure out where the hell you could be. She must have been out there awhile, because eventually I fell asleep.
“I woke up because she opened the door to the truck. It was dark, but other than that, I had no idea what time it was. She asked me if we ever slept out there by the pond, and I told her that we did. She asked if we could and I said sure.”
He looked over at John but he was still staring at the water and not even close to making a sound. Sal hadn’t expected this. He hadn’t expected John to get mad, at least not once he got a little ways into the story – but he hadn’t expected absolute silence, either. “You ok Johnny?”
“Yeah, Sal,” John whispered, “I’m ok.” It was the truth, but it was also the most that he could say. “You can keep going, if there’s more.”
“Well, we got the stuff out from the back of the truck and lay down. I was still pretty tired.” Sal was continuing reluctantly, not sure what all of this meant to his friend. “I couldn’t really think of anything to say, and because Kelly seemed like she expected something, I just asked her again if she had any idea where else you might have gone off to. She said she didn’t… and then she completely broke down crying.”
“Poor girl… I never thought about the fact that dad hadn’t taken her out there before…” John was genuinely disappointed in his father for the first time since he’d passed.
“That’s the thing though,” Sal was quick to remark, “I said to her, ‘I’m sure he would have brought you out here if he had more time.’ And she says, ‘Oh, Sallie, that’s not it. I don’t know where John is and I can’t stand it. I hope he’s not gone for good. I can’t imagine losing him, too. And I already know… well, I already know that I’ll never get to know a part of John without dad around!’”
“Huh.” It was all John could get out.
“Johnny, she didn’t want to come to the Fish Pond to see your dad, she wanted to come to see you…”
“And you guys spent the night here…?”
“Yeah, she asked if we could – she said she wanted to sleep out here the way you and I would have. We didn’t even use the blankets. I built a fire, just like we would have. And we didn’t say anything else. We just laid there until we fell asleep. When I woke up, she was sitting by the water, and when she heard me wake up, she announced that she was ready to go. So we did. And she didn’t say anything on the way home, either. But when I dropped her off, she turned to me, and said thanks, and told me to keep looking. I went home to clean up a bit before doing just that, but by that time, you’d made it to your aunt’s house and Kelly called me to tell me where you were.”
“Man, I guess what this teaches me,” John said with building momentum, “is that I don’t talk to my sister very much.”
The boys both chuckled but they also both knew that this wasn’t much of a joke. Sal had seen the effect that his father’s passing had had on John’s relationship with his sister and mother. He didn’t talk to either of them too much – actually, to be more clear, none of them talked to each other much at all anymore. His mother worked and his sister went to school and played soccer and John felt that he had the most legitimate excuse in actually being away at school. But they all just used those things as excuses.
John sat stoically by the water for a few moments, but realized he’d feel better if he got up and moved around. He made sure the fire was done smoldering, cleaned up the truck a bit – and then leaned up against it with his head down. He’d had three whole years to show his sister and mother that he could be the new man of the house, and failed to even try; now that he was in college he figured that it wasn’t his responsibility anymore. It wasn’t his home anymore. But he knew, deep down, that it always would be. This was what he couldn’t say to Sal but couldn’t deny to himself.
* * * * * * *
John and Sal climbed into the truck and sat.
They always did this – sat in silence for a few minutes before turning the engine over – but this was longer than usual. And unlike most times, it was punctuated with talk.
“I love you Johnny.”
“I love you Sallie.”
They’d said that before, but rarely, and with increasing rarity as the years since John’s father’s death had passed. In fact, its meaning had changed in those intervening years. At first, it was an expression of mutual dependency: John desperately needed someone who understood him after his father died, and Sal desperately needed his best friend, as he had never been one to support himself. In the future, it would be a statement of mutual respect; a recognition of the fact that they learned most of life’s lessons together.
But this day was the tipping point.
Both men knew that implicit in their words was a last note of desperation – desperation in the face of the complications that had hidden under the surface before they shared these stories, but respect for the way they each tried to understand them. In the same way that Sal had shown Kelly the exact part of John that he himself had been unable to, John had made sure that Jennifer knew that she didn’t have to be alone. And the uncanny similarity was that it wasn’t that simple – Kelly and John had nevertheless failed to talk, and Jennifer was about to be engaged to her abusive boyfriend. And this profound sense of dissatisfaction, jointly discovered and jointly faced, was the constitution of what John and Sal felt for each other.
These sentiments managed to remain unspoken, and soon the engine turned over and they began their trip home. It was customary that they did not talk during this drive, but rather listen to the radio over a backbeat of clattering beer bottles.
* * * * * * *
When they got back to his house, John Denton climbed out of the truck that him and his friend Sal Johnson had for several years driven to the Fish Pond. When he turned to close the door, he looked through the cab and caught Sal’s eye. It was only for a second. Sal grabbed his pack from the back of his truck, and started his walk home. It would take him through the heart of the town that he was so tired of, to the other side where his parents lived. John watched him walk a few steps before turning to the closed front door of his own parents’ home. He noticed his sister’s face in a quick movement of curtains, and a few seconds later, her whole body appeared in the front door. She smiled a sad smile, as she always did. John grabbed his pack, and began his own walk home.
