Authors: Ty Roth
“What’s this?” Shelly asked.
“Got it during study hall. It reminded me of you and Johnson’s Island when we were kids. Remember?”
The article reported that two nights previous, a band of Ottawa had stormed a small beach on North Bass, planted the flag of the Ottawa Nation, and set up a headquarters in an abandoned farmhouse. A spokesman for the tribe, identified only by the name Neolin, placed calls to reporters at the Ogontz newspaper, Cleveland’s
Plain Dealer,
the Toledo
Blade,
and the
Columbus Dispatch
. He announced the Ottawa plan to resettle peacefully in their ancient fishing village on North Bass and to return to what he called the Way. Neolin referred to the reverse exodus as “a rejection of modernity and of America’s depraved culture of excess and greed” and as an attempt “to reunite the scattered sovereign nation of the Ottawa.” Finally, Neolin expressed the naïve hope that the Ottawa efforts would be met in a spirit of respect and reparation by the state of Ohio, but, if necessary, the settlers were willing “to pursue any measure in their demand for justice, cultural independence, and repossession of the Ottawa Nation’s homeland.”
When Shelly lifted her eyes from the newsprint, it was as though she had been born again, and I actually thought that she was speaking in tongues. It was, rather, an unrelated string of words in the Ottawa language—which she had learned during her childhood fascination with the tribe—that was pouring out of her, rhapsodically, and in euphoric recognition of what she was convinced was to be her new life’s purpose.
Shelly rose to her feet and announced in a trancelike tone, “I’m going.”
“Going where?” Gordon asked incredulously. “To North Bass? Don’t get mixed up in that shit, Shell. Sounds to me like those Ottawa are digging trenches for a battle they can’t win. You have better ways to waste your time.”
“That’s just it, Gordon. I don’t. And I’m tired of wasting my time. This might be my chance to do something that actually matters. I don’t care if it takes all summer. I’m going.”
“Christ, I didn’t show you the damn article actually believing you’d want to join the revolution. I just thought you’d get a kick out of it.”
“Come with me, Gordon. It will be like when we were kids but for real.”
“Me? Don’t think so. As soon as school is out, I’m heading to Europe with my agent and my mother.
Manfred
is now available in over fifteen foreign languages. My agent wants me to do a few meet-and-greets and sign a few autographs, and I plan to check out some of those foreign tongues for myself.” He actually winked at me. “Besides, my editor is really on my ass about the next novel. Nope. I pick my battles more carefully than that. This one isn’t mine. I’ll see you around.” With a brief wave of his hand, Gordon was gone.
One more Gordonian boot to the belly.
Shelly turned to me. “What about you, John? You want to come?”
I had thought that I would do anything for her, would follow her anywhere. But, let’s face it, I was a chickenshit. “No. I’m, you know, not much for causes.”
I’m not sure why I wasn’t instantly and forever dead to her after that.
I hadn’t told Shelly, but I had recently gone digital. Over
the winter, during my poverty-imposed house arrest, I had opened free accounts on several social networking websites popular with teenagers and college kids, and I’d begun posting some old poems and short stories. Positive feedback from online “friends” had motivated me to construct my own Web page. The number of hits I was receiving was steady, so I needed time to write and update my site. I was hoping to begin advertising soon and turn the page into something profitable. I knew it wouldn’t be much, if anything, but I hoped to contribute something to the family income.
“No problem,” she said stiffly before leaving me to finish the edit.
To reach the one paved road on North Bass, promised by the GPS app on Gordon’s phone, we first had to make our way across a wet weed-strewn mufflehead-infested field. Mufflehead is the locally applied nickname for a nonstinging, mosquitolike insect that plagues the lake region every June. We were still in our clothes and dress shoes from the wake. I carried Shelly in both hands, while Gordon walked with the boom box on his shoulder like an eighties “beat boy,” searching for a flat slab of concrete and a clean piece of cardboard. After only a few steps, our socks were dew drenched, our feet were soaking wet, and our ears, eyes, and noses were filled with insects. The faux-leather uppers of my Shoe Warehouse loafers were becoming unglued and beginning to separate from their soles. And although it was still too dark to identify species, every few footsteps sent an unhappily roused critter scurrying or slithering out of our path.
The route to the Ottawa campsite would take us past the
airstrip (all the inhabited islands had a similar runway for small planes; it was the only way to get to or from some of the islands during the winter months once the lake froze and the private boats and commercial ferries were dry-docked) before dead-ending on the north coast of the island near what had been the short-lived self-proclaimed sovereign outpost of the Ottawa Nation. The so-called paved road, however, was more of a dirt path covered in loose stones, stones that must have been suffering from some form of island claustrophobia, since so many were making a mad attempt to join our journey and to escape their exile by stowing away in our shoes.
Even at such an early hour, with the sun still low on the horizon, I began to sweat profusely, adding to my increasingly “aromatic” condition. It was the dawning of one of those oppressively humid nearly tropical summer days around the lake. Incredibly, Gordon didn’t appear to be the least bit daunted by the swampy climate. However, due to the heat and exhaustion, we walked at a sluggish pace, and Gordon’s limp grew slightly more pronounced. His face showed the beginnings of a beard, one of those rugged shadow-beards that some lucky guys are able to grow. I, on the other hand, have “summer” facial hair. You know, “summer here, summer there.” I could have plucked my boyish beard rather than shave it.
Since the beginning of our odyssey, I’d had the feeling that Gordon was keeping something from me. I knew we were going to spread Shelly’s ashes, but I sensed that there was something more that he wasn’t telling me. So as we walked, I pried. “Shelly only gave me the CD. I didn’t know why until
you told me. What
exactly
are we supposed to do? We just play her song and scatter her ashes?”
Gordon sighed, dispirited by the necessity of expending energy in speech, then said, “She wants us to spread half her ashes on the water and half on some beach near the Ottawa camp, all while playing that stupid song she likes—
liked
.” He paused. “I’m just glad nobody has to hear—or, better yet,
see
—us playing it. I mean, Christ, ‘Shiny Happy People’?”
In unrehearsed synchronization, we said, “So Shelly,” and laughed.
“What about the DVD?” I asked.
“Don’t know. Like I told you last night, she never mentioned it to me.”
We continued in silence, taking our left turn toward the airstrip, lost in contemplation of Shelly, and growing weary of our task.
“Gordon?”
“Yeah, Keats.”
“Shelly had an abortion.”
I don’t know what inspired me to share it or if it counted as a violation of my promise to Shelly never to tell him, but it just came out. Maybe, unsatisfied that Gordon had yet to come fully clean, I was hoping for a little tit for tat. You know, quid pro quo.
Gordon stopped dead in his progress, set the boom box on the ground, and turned his head toward me. “She what?”
“She was pregnant and had an abortion,” I said.
“No shit. I didn’t know she had it in her,” he said. The comment was so full of double entendre that I chose to ignore it, but the tone of his voice lacked something. The
sarcasm was hollow, and the usual appreciation of his own wit was missing.
I’m not sure how to characterize his facial expression while he grappled with the hurtful fact that Shelly had shared such an intimate secret with me but not him: Was it surprise? Disbelief? Anger? Jealousy?
“When was this?” Gordon finally asked.
“About a year and a half ago. December of your junior year.”
Gordon winced. “Why didn’t she … Why didn’t you tell me?”
“She asked me not to. I thought that, maybe, you …”
“Got her pregnant?” Gordon gave voice to my unfinished thought.
“Did you?”
“No, Keats. I didn’t. Why would you even think that?”
“I don’t know. It’s just that … when she first saw me in her room at the clinic, I’m pretty sure that she was hoping I was you.”
“Clinic? What clinic?”
“At Planned Parenthood. She volunteered there.”
His expression betrayed that he had had no clue that Shelly had worked there.
“So? What does that even mean, ‘she was hoping I was you’? Are you jealous that Shelly and I were so close? Is that it?”
“No. That’s not it,” I said, hoping to slow the momentum of his fast-rising anger.
“Shelly and I go back a lot further than you and her and that stupid
Beacon,
Keats.”
He was venting; I’m pretty sure that he knew he was being stupid, but it was like he couldn’t help himself. I thought that, perhaps for the first time, he was wrapping his brain around the fact of Shelly’s death, and the anger over the senselessness of the whole thing was finally blowing the top off the volcano of his typically cool surface. Violently he grabbed two handfuls of my shirt and lifted me to the very tips of my toes. I quickly positioned Shelly between us as a buffer, and for an instant, I thought he was going to reveal something, but he abruptly let go of me with a halfhearted push.
“You know what? Fuck you, Keats.” He didn’t look my way; instead, with his hands on his hips, he studied the bluing sky over the runway, searching. “Just … fuck you,” he repeated, but less angrily this time.
Gordon picked up the boom box, and we resumed the march. Geisha-girl-like, I trailed at a safe distance.
When he reached the road running parallel to the runway, he stopped and waited for me to catch up to him. I wasn’t sure what he was going to do. I admit, I was nervous.
He turned his head to face me, smiled big, and said, “I knew all along. Shelly told me.”
But he was slipping. I could tell he was lying.
He acted as if he’d been screwing with me the entire time, but I knew he hadn’t been. He was simply attempting to remain my superior regarding all things Shelly.
“Had you going, though, didn’t I?” he said through a put-on smile. “But it wasn’t mine, Keats. The baby. It wasn’t mine.” The smile was gone and his tone was earnest. “We weren’t like that, Shelly and me. I suppose there were times
when she wanted to be, but I couldn’t think of her in that way. She damn well may be the only girl I never did see in that way, but I didn’t.”
With that he turned north and resumed walking.
After a few steps, I asked, “No one will be there, right?”
“Be where?”
“The place. The beach where …” I couldn’t say it.
“Yeah. It’s been, what? Over a week? There might be police tape or something roping it off, but there shouldn’t be any people there.”
“What about press?”
“Hell,” Gordon said, “they’re long gone. Shelly and the Ottawa rebellion are yesterday’s news.”
“I guess you’re right. I hope you’re right; otherwise, we’ll have a tough time finishing this thing.”
“Oh, we’re going to finish it,” Gordon said. “You can count on that.”
Just more than a year before her drowning, on the day after Gordon shared with her the news of the Ottawa occupation, and the Saturday before Mother’s Day, Shelly’s least favorite day of the year, Shelly set sail in
Ariel
for the Ottawa camp on North Bass. With a steady headwind blowing from the west, she was forced to tack aggressively throughout the nearly four-hour sail. Wearing a life jacket, a cardinal-red flotation jacket, foul-weather bibs, and with her sockless feet snug inside a pair of old leather Top-Siders, Shelly arrived off the coast dripping wet, fatigued, sore to the bone, and, for the first time in months, relatively optimistic.
Shelly shared this and the story that follows on the last night I saw her. She damn near glowed in the telling, simultaneously enraptured by the memory of having experienced it and devastated by the knowledge of the impossibility of living it again.
* * *
In the late eighteen hundreds, the Ottawa were one of the most powerful tribes on the islands and along the southern shore of Lake Erie, but they were forcibly resettled by the United States government to the Oklahoma Territory. Shelly’s obsession with the tribe began with a third-grade History Day project and continued until she died, as one of the two casualties in what I like to call the Ottawa Massacre. Backed by the expert testimony of a cartographer, who maintained that North Bass actually lay in Canadian waters, the chief of the present-day Ottawa tribe had recently claimed ancestral property rights and fishing rights to the island. Everyone involved, however, suspected that his actual motivation was to construct an island casino to match the one already flourishing in the northeastern corner of their current home state.
From a good one hundred yards offshore, Shelly spotted several men moving about the property that the Ottawa had reclaimed, thus far unopposed. The men were all shirtless and wore blue jeans and work boots. Shelly was unsure of their purpose, but intermittent clangs of metal led her to believe that they were engaged in fortifying their position or in improving their living quarters.
As she drew closer, blended voices began to reach her. She couldn’t yet differentiate one from another, but she could discern a surprising lack of worry in their combined tone.
Fewer than fifty feet from shore, she remained undetected.
To her surprise, Shelly saw that the metallic clanging was not caused by labor but by horseshoes finding their mark. Laughter and playful banter rang from the improvised horseshoe pits, and the smell of barbecuing meat wafted on the breeze and nauseated her vegan sensibilities. Except for a few scattered rifles leaning against trees, the scene looked more like a picnic than a territorial takeover.