Breathing Lake Superior

PART I: WATER

That as I said, I say, take, Lord, they’re thine.

I piecemeale pass to Glory bright in them.

I’ joy, may I sweet Flowers for Glory breed,

Whether thou getst them green, or lets them Seed.

—Edward Taylor,

Upon Wedlock, & Death of Children (1692)

Chapter 1

Like many stories we cannot forget, this is a story about belief.

Even before God spoke to him—in the way He summoned Nat Turner in a Virginia cornfield—my stepdad, Cal, always told us that miracle was not a word to be used lightly, if at all. Like the word tragedy, it was not to be spoken or written unless it carried the precise meaning for which it had been intended. In all of human history, he said, few people had ever experienced anything truly miraculous or tragic. Modern culture had abused both words so often, they had long been drained of meaning.

But I know of no other words that fit our set of circumstances these past fourteen months. If not tragic and miraculous, I don’t know what our lives have become.

* * *

We were a normal family once.

Sometimes when my stepsister JJ said this, as we lay submerged in alfalfa, sucking sweet nectar from the purple blossoms amid the honeybees, or while we sat cross-legged, reading books aloud to one another, we both felt like crying. Sometimes we started laughing. And sometimes we didn’t do anything. I just repeated what she said, emphasizing a different word, normal, sometimes, or were, or once, and we would both nod and shrug, because that one sentence was both question and conclusion.

Who really knows what we were or what we are? We’re never really the same from one day to the next. Each hour, we slough off a blizzard of skin cells and hair. Red blood cells die and regenerate. Damaged by storms seen and unseen, our brains erect dikes or boil over, flood new territories. Each time we blink we’re someone different, and our eyes behold a new world.

Not that long ago, though, our family at least seemed normal—normal and as boring as watching a dog shit, JJ always said. Comfortably middle class, three children, two parents, we lived in West Allis, Wisconsin, a working-class suburb of sidewalks, square blocks, and alleys, where the sign that greeted you as you drove into the city announced how many days had passed since anyone working in one of the local factories had accidentally lost a finger or an arm or an eye. (Great, Cal had said, years earlier, when we moved there from a duplex on the south side of Milwaukee, a neighborhood full of Polacks and Germans missing body parts. We’ll probably move in next door to some guy called Lefty.) My sister and I attended West Allis Central High School, hung out at the mall with our friends, cruised with them in noisy cars dragging mufflers that sent sparks down Greenfield Avenue on warm Saturday nights. We wore baggy cargo pants, Abercrombie and Fitch T-shirts, and tennis shoes with air in the heels—whole wardrobes, Cal pointed out, made in Far-East sweatshops by child laborers working for sixty cents a day. We grudgingly went to church with our parents on Sunday mornings and cheered for the Green Bay Packers on our big-screen TV on Sunday afternoons. We shopped at Kmart, Wal-Mart, and Target. We had blended family values up the ass, Cal said. We were a monosodium glutamate–tolerant, TV-watching, traffic-jam-cursing, run-for-the-ringing-telephone family, living the American dream ten blocks from the interstate.

Most evenings, we ate supper together—Mother and Cal, JJ, me, and our little brother, David—sitting around the table quietly scraping our plates with our forks, staring at Sportscenter or The Learning Channel on the kitchen TV. David would eat quickly and then disappear into the living room to continue work on some elaborate construction project he had going, utilizing Legos, TinkerToys, and Lincoln Logs. Look at him, Cal would say, proudly. The next Frank Lloyd Wright. At four years old, David had built a recognizable model of the Eiffel Tower using fettuccine noodles and masking tape. At five, with Legos and TinkerToys, he’d constructed Notre Dame Cathedral (based upon a picture in Cal’s ancient copy of Europe on Five Dollars a Day.)

Because David had been conceived two years after my stepfather’s vasectomy—what Cal euphemistically referred to as his vase-stuck-to-me—Mother often called David her miracle baby. Cal’s vas deferens had been bombed like the bridge over the River Kwai, but somehow a single sperm had crossed the great divide and made its way to the Promised Land. No—it was no miracle, Cal always retorted. The doctor just botched my ball job. Hurt like hell, too. Felt like I got kicked in the nuts for a week. Even so, as the Final Straw, the Last Hurrah, the Grand Finale—nicknames JJ and used to tease him—our half-brother David glowed with the aura of the treasured youngest child, and the only child biologically linked to both parents in our unremarkable family.

Sometimes at supper, Cal would mute the television to ask JJ and me what we were doing in school. JJ and I would take turns muttering a few things, hoping to get by with brief generalities. He’d ask for elaboration, and we’d mutter a few more things, and then the TV volume would return and everyone would go back to their pork chops or their tuna casserole. We’d learned to keep our explanations vague to help avoid the almost certain lecture from Cal that would come if we took his request seriously.

In the spring of my sophomore year, I got into trouble for a research paper I’d written in my Honors English class, The Heavy Metal Guitar Solo as Male Masturbatory Fantasy. My stepsister had sketched the cover page for me, a beautiful colored-pencil drawing of a honey-haired heavy-metal rocker playing electric guitar, the neck of the guitar shaped like a man’s erect penis. A series of musical notes spewed from this erection like a geyser.

When my turn came to read the paper aloud in class, I had read only the title and the opening line, Male rock guitarists have traditionally carried their instruments slung low so that the wooden neck of the guitar projects from their pelvis like an erect penis, when Mr. Kleefish, my English teacher, interrupted and sent me to the principal, someone who knew me only as JJ’s stepbrother. (JJ herself had spent considerable time in the principal’s office over the years for what Mother called her independent nature.) Fortunately for me, the principal had two sons in a local rock band. She smiled at me and said while she could not condone the repeated use of words such as penis, erection, and ejaculation in a high school English paper, she believed the paper was insightful and, undoubtedly, true. Really made me think, she’d said. Nevertheless, the principal supported Mr. Kleefish, to a degree, by requesting that I write a different paper, one more befitting an audience of students my own age.

At supper that night, when Cal asked how school had gone, I pulled the essay out of my backpack and began reading. I wasn’t allowed to read beyond the opening line at the dinner table, either.

John! Mother interrupted. Is that any way for a young man to talk?

What? said JJ, coming to my defense. ‘Penis?’ He can’t say ‘penis’ in his own house? It’s an anatomical fact. Boys have penises.

Beanis! David, who was five then, yelled gleefully. Beanis, beanis, beanis!

David, please, Mother said, looking to Cal for support. Cal shrugged. Mother’s right, he said. He winked at David.

About what? JJ asked.

Cal shrugged. About whatever she just said.

You weren’t even listening!

Darling, I was listening, Cal said. He winked at me. Use a different word, John. Use schlong, or schwanz, or tricky Dickie.

I laughed.

That is so bogus! JJ said. "Your paper kicks ass, Johnny. The principal always sticks up for the teachers, even when they’re wrong. It makes me sick."

When I was a kid, Cal said, we wrote essays about the Founding Fathers, about the US Constitution, about how a bill becomes a law, that sort of thing. I got so bored I thought my eyes would melt out of my face. At least your teacher’s trying to make the subject more interesting. You can’t blame her for that.

So he shouldn’t have to rewrite it, JJ said.

Not in an ideal world, Cal said. Does this look like a perfect world to you?

But John’s essay is great! JJ said. Even the principal said so.

Darling, that’s how life works. Even a smart kid like your brother has to take it in the shorts on occasion. Best get used to it.

JJ glared at him, then jumped out of her chair and stormed up the stairs to her bedroom, her long hair flying over her shoulders. She slammed the door.

Mother pursed her lips and shook her head slowly. Cal shrugged his shoulders at her. What? he asked. What’d I say? Why’s she so sensitive?

She’s fifteen, Mother said.

Cal looked at me and rolled his eyes.

I grew up wanting to be a writer, and Cal had a lot to do with that. Back before any of us children were born, he had been working on his PhD in American literature. He had completed everything but his dissertation, which was to be a book-length study of the poetry of Edward Taylor. A Calvinist minister and poet in Puritan New England who served his congregation in Westfield, Connecticut, for over fifty years, until his death in 1729, Taylor secretly wrote hundreds of poems which went unpublished and unknown until someone discovered them in storage at the Yale University Library in the 1930s. Taylor had fathered fourteen children—he needed a vase-stuck-to-me, Cal noted—but five of his first eight children had died in infancy. When Cal married his first wife—JJ’s mother, who died of pancreatic cancer when JJ was three years old—he quit work on his dissertation and took a full-time job teaching English at Waukesha County Technical College. Cal never went back to finish his degree, but his passion for early American literature and Taylor’s poetry stayed with him.

At the technical college, Cal occasionally got to teach American literature, and he would sometimes read to us from the thick worn anthology he used while he prepared for his classes. Mostly, though, he taught writing courses, multiple sections of what he called English grammar for semiliterates. In the evenings, watching Cal grade his students’ essays was like seeing a man read a long, poorly written letter filled with bad news. He’d sit at the kitchen table, a rumpled stack of papers before him, half as high as the label on his bottle of beer, and he’d shake his head, he’d groan, he’d grimace.

Think! he would yell suddenly. "Does that point make any sense at all? You couldn’t win an argument with a tree!

In your thoughtful opinion, marijuana should be legalized, because it doesn’t give you a hangover like alcohol does? His head would fall back and he’d stare at the ceiling in disbelief. Did the moron train stop and unload every passenger into my beginning argumentation class? Of course, when he came to an essay that met his standards, his face beamed. A thesis sentence! he’d announce. Evidence in support of assertions! The English language used with conciseness and precision! He’d kiss the paper, give it an A, and drain the remaining beer from his bottle.

The ordeal of grading papers aside, Cal loved teaching. He loved an audience and a good argument, but he also believed in the value of what he did. Yes, he taught English to future mechanics, welders, and plumbers who would possibly never read another book in their lives, and who would one day earn far more money than Cal while unclogging his drain or repairing his automobile, but he took his job seriously. They’ll still have to read the newspaper, he’d say. And they’ll have to write estimates. They can do it with style and precision.

In addition to his love for the English language used well, Cal had other passions.

One of them was his obsession with Black music and musicians. He had a collection of record albums that numbered in the hundreds: Lead Belly, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Mahalia Jackson, Elmore James, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Louis Armstrong, and his favorite, Duke Ellington. Sometimes in the summer he’d clear the kitchen floor after supper on a Saturday night. He’d set up his old stereo turntable—he detested CDs, preferring, he said, the authentic sound of music being made, which could be heard only on vinyl records—he’d open a quart bottle of St. Ides Malt Liquor, and then he’d put on Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, the Temps, sometimes my favorite, Little Richard. He’d turn the volume up and grab Mother in his arms, and they’d dance on the kitchen floor. David would sit on the kitchen counter, clapping his hands, spilling a bottle of root beer down his chin. Sometimes JJ and I would join Mom and Cal on the dance floor, spinning together and sweating, holding hands, knocking knees, laughing, singing the chorus of na nas during the Land of a Thousand Dances, or shouting womp bomp alu bomp a womp bam boom! between verses of Tutti Frutti.

Sometimes Cal would take David up on his shoulders and hop around the room, David’s sticky hands locked under Cal’s chin, giggling and drooling into Cal’s hair, and the two of them would laugh so hard the tears would roll down their faces. Perhaps because David’s conception had been so unexpected—a surprise gift is more treasured than an expected one—Cal took David everywhere, fed him meals in his high chair as a baby, held him on his lap to eat as David grew older, and insisted that David sit beside him at dinner as a toddler and beyond. By the time he was five, David knew the words to several R&B songs by heart. Cal would stand him on the kitchen table, and with his mop of blond hair flopping, David would clap his hands and dance, singing his own version of the lyrics in his tiny voice.

When our family dances ended and the cool night air drifted in through the open windows, Cal would collapse into his chair with David on his lap. He’d open his shirt and button David right in against his skin while he read the newspaper or watched late-night TV. David would fall asleep there, and Cal would hold him buttoned against his chest, David’s fluffy hair up under Cal’s chin, until he and Mother went upstairs to bed.

But that seems like a long time ago, now. I can’t speak for JJ—her name is Jennifer Joy, a name she despises (call me Jennifer Ambivalence, Jennifer Rage, Jennifer Despair, she says, "but never Jennifer Joy"), so we call her JJ—cannot narrate the images that pass behind her eyes when she closes them to remember the moment our lives changed, the point when our family stopped seeming remotely like anyone else’s, and Cal moved us to a farm in northern Wisconsin he named New Eden, six miles south of Lake Superior, a hundred miles or more from anywhere worth being. It was a time when Cal fell into a darkness he thought was light; a time when temptation crawled inside JJ and me like the bud of some mysterious, irresistible flower, waiting to bloom; a time when Mother, the anchor we’d always counted on to keep Cal tethered through the most maniacal of his storms, drifted away from all of us.

And I only, as Job said in the Bible, escaped to tell thee.

The moment our lives changed is like a vision through antique glass: clear enough to be known, but too distorted to be known well. It’s the kind of glass you find in old houses, full of bubbles and other imperfections, like new ice on a pond. You lay on the black ice, hold your breath to keep from clouding your view, and you can see bubbles and other things—dead fish, weeds, bugs, sometimes—frozen right into it, as if the water’s slow movement from liquid to solid had surprised them. The glass in some of the windows of our house in New Eden looks like this, with bubbles and slices and other opaque imperfections, and when the sun hits certain parts just right, the windows cast little rainbows against the wall. Granted, you can’t see through those windows very well, but I’ve learned that deceptive clarity is usually less preferable than a more opaque, functionless beauty.

Some windows are manufactured so well, with double panes and argon gas sealed inside, sometimes it doesn’t appear as if you’re looking through anything at all. One night at a party during my sophomore year, I saw a drunken high schooler run through a glass patio door. He fell screaming on the concrete, trailing ribbons of skin and blood. But that’s not even the greatest danger. Looking out their beautifully clean windows, people think they can see the real world without actually letting any of its trouble inside. That’s the illusion that traps everyone sooner or later. Because trouble gets in, regardless.

Ours arrived on the third of July, 1999. We were all looking forward to fireworks the next evening, to writing our names in the air with sparklers, blowing up Coke cans with firecrackers, and sending bottle rockets whistling over neighbors’ houses—celebrating the Declaration of Independence American-style, with lots of noise and flash and just enough chance to blow your fingers off to make it interesting. I’d built a special model rocket—the Mercury Atlas, thirty-three inches tall—to launch in celebration of the holiday, a long two-stage rocket that held five C6-5 engines. David had helped me paint it silver, and we were excited because we’d never launched anything with so many engines of that size. We figured if it got up into the wind, it might drift as far as Lake Michigan before parachuting down again. We planned to put a note inside with our name and address on it, so that whoever found it might write to us, or mail it back.

I’d been building and launching model rockets for many years, and a number of my best models hung at 45-degree angles from my bedroom ceiling, suspended by fishing line. I’d painted the ceiling a glossy black and pasted dozens of self-stick, glow-in-the-dark stars on it, carefully arranged in familiar constellations—the Big Dipper, Orion, Gemini, the Pleiades—so that at night, with the window shades down, when I opened my eyes in bed, it looked almost as if I were sleeping in space.

Sometimes, if JJ got mad at me for something, or she wanted to get a rise out of me, she would sneak into my room and rearrange my stars. She’d spell the name of a girl I liked or, if she were angry at me, she’d cuss me out. I’d walk in and look up, and my ceiling would say something like, John loves Amber, or Kiss my ass, and I’d have to take the stars down and put up the constellations again. To retaliate, David and I might tie her underwear to a long piece of kite string and hang it out her second-floor window or draw smiley faces on the cups of her 32B bras with colored chalk.

The day our lives changed started out as an ordinary summer day. While Cal was teaching summer school and Mom worked at a factory assembling lawn mower engines, JJ and I stayed home with David, who had just turned six. The only air conditioner in our house, which looked like everyone else’s house (they were squeezed together in straight lines like dominoes ready to fall, JJ always said), was a clattering, leaking Sears model hanging from Mother and Cal’s bedroom window. The rest of the house felt like a steam bath. Condensation dripped from the toilet tanks, the spigots, even from the cold-water pipes in the basement, where we sometimes went for relief. Lime deposits sprouted from the basement’s rock and mortar walls, and salamanders, shiny and wet-black as patent leather shoes, gathered in dark corners and near the floor drain behind Mother’s washing machine. Upstairs, on the most humid days, you sweat just standing still.

Like most kids in the neighborhood, we spent those sweltering summer afternoons at the local pool, and that day after lunch, JJ, David, and I put on our swimming suits, grabbed our beach towels, and walked to Rainbow Park, David skipping ahead of us, a Batman towel draped across his shoulders, humming Ray Charles’s Unchain My Heart.

JJ spent the afternoon sunbathing with three of her girlfriends on the balcony that overlooked the diving boards. They rested on their bellies on beach towels spread across the hot concrete, the strings of their bikini tops untied, their long hair pulled up and pinned off their necks. A small boom box rested near their heads. Earlier, the four of them had gone together into the women’s bathroom to get high. Amanda, who had her belly button pierced and a tattoo of Bart Simpson above her left ankle, led the way. I could see the white tip of a joint and a pink disposable lighter poking out of her hand as they passed me. I imagined them standing barefoot on the wet floor in one of the stalls with the door closed, passing the joint around, giggling, and ten minutes later I watched as they returned to their towels, munching popcorn by the handful, the whites of their eyes spoked red.

I stood at the rail beside them, pretending to watch the pool down below, where David splashed and swam somewhere with hundreds of other noisy children. I stole glances at JJ’s friends, at their thin, suntanned legs and shiny ankle bracelets; the creamy, wrinkled whiteness of the bottoms of their feet, the firm arcs of their barely covered bottoms, the narrow strips of colorful fabric that passed between their legs. Perspiration glistened on their backs and necks and beaded in the golden hair on their arms. Sometimes one of them would lift herself to the elbows to light a cigarette, or to reach for the stereo to change CDs, and I would glimpse crescents of white breast flattened against a towel.

Occasionally, one of JJ’s friends would glance over at me, and they would whisper to one another and laugh. They talked about music, their parents, about various boys in school, and once in a while I’d hear JJ refer to me, to Johnny, as she called me. Mostly, though, JJ and her friends talked about the lifeguards, muscular, master-race types who wore mirrored sunglasses and baseball caps and sat in high white ladder chairs with their knees spread apart (as if their balls were the size of coconuts, JJ said, and they needed the room.) They reclined in their chairs like kings, twirling silver whistles by red lanyards looped over the tips of their index fingers. A skinny, bookish, rising junior that fall, and not yet 16, I didn’t merit much consideration from JJ’s friends, who were two years older than me, or from the lifeguards they simultaneously insulted and coveted. Because the lifeguards lusted after JJ and made crude, admiring comments to me about her ass and breasts, they more or less left me alone—didn’t pull my swimming trunks down or hold my head in one of the locker room toilets while the others pissed in my hair, like they did to some boys they didn’t like.

Because of the lifeguards’ reputation and standing, all of the children who swam in the pool were either afraid of them or in awe of them. When a lifeguard blew his whistle to stop a chicken fight or to keep someone from running or to order everyone out of the pool for the lunch or supper break, activity stopped and heads turned. Those shrill whistles could stop time.

And on the afternoon of July 3, 1999, they did.

The piercing, sustained blast of one whistle, then several others, followed by orders to evacuate the pool, shouted through bullhorns, sent children splashing from the water. The urgency in the lifeguard’s amplified voices hung like humidity in the air. This wasn’t simply a playful, half-hearted order to stop a chicken fight. Everyone sensed the difference. JJ and her friends’ heads bobbed up to watch as the pool cleared. The lifeguards jumped down from their chairs and ran—ran!—around the pool to the twelve-foot end directly below us where something—a pair of khaki pants, a deflated pool toy, could be anything, I thought, rested on the bottom along the wall. While one of the lifeguards ran to the beach house, two of the others dove into the pool, one of them still with his hat and sunglasses on, and even before they returned to the surface, holding whatever was on the bottom between them, young girls