Dead Low Water
It was September 8th, my birthday, and I was spending it at my family’s rambling old hilltop vacation house on Cape Cod. I got up very early and descended the two flights of back stairs from the attic bedroom that had been mine when I was a child. Arthritis had recently begun troubling my knees, but that morning the pain was minimal. The house was so still it might have been uninhabited. There was no one in the kitchen, and I thought about making myself a cup of coffee. But the house no longer belonged to my branch of the family, and the kitchen had been remodeled. I didn’t want to wake anyone up by rummaging around in the new cabinets, and besides, I had a vague pain in my gut, a touch of indigestion, probably, which coffee would only make worse. The sun was up and the day promised to be warm; it would be another week or so before the autumn chill began to grow teeth. I decided to wake myself up by strolling down to the beach.
It had been a long time since my last visit to the little resort community, and the place had undergone considerable development. On the way I passed several new houses, and wondered who had built them. They were all much fancier than the house on the hill, and one had a swimming pool in its back yard, which seemed ridiculous, since the beach was so close.
As I reached the top of the rough stone steps leading down to the sand, I saw that the little fleet of racing sloops had already been taken to the boat yard for the winter. The outer harbor was empty. But when I looked toward the inner harbor, I saw the bottom and keel of a very large sailing yacht that had capsized. Perhaps she had slipped her mooring during a bad storm, and the outgoing tide had driven her onto the sand-spit that partly barred the inner harbor’s entrance. She looked as if she had been there for a long time; her paint was flaking and there was a ragged hole in her hull.
When I stepped onto the beach, I saw a small boy squatting at the edge of the mucky flats exposed by the low tide. The child was wearing nothing but a baggy pair of bathing trunks which had sagged down, exposing his sharp hip bones and the crack of his skinny ass. He had a plastic pail and shovel, and he was trying to make a castle out of the mud. But the waves lapping gently in over the flats were washing away his construction even as he built it. I approached him and said hello.
When the boy turned, I recognized his round face, brown eyes, and buzz-cut hair from a pastel portrait my parents had commissioned from a local artist, depicting me at the age of about eight. The boy looked puzzled, as if he’d heard a sound, but couldn’t see what had made it. He turned his attention back to his work, starting again farther up from the water’s edge. I reached out to touch his shoulder, but my hand had become invisible, insubstantial, and made no contact. The stink of death and decay from the mud flats suddenly became intolerable, and a swarm of flies took to the air above them. They formed a black cloud that blotted out the sun, and the temperature suddenly dropped. I realized, with some relief, that I was waking from a strange, unpleasant dream, and I reached for the covers which I must have kicked off in my sleep.
But my hand encountered nothing, and the scene didn’t change. The buzzing of the flies grew louder, as if they were coming my way. A bitter wind blew up, and I felt chilled to the bone. And then the tide of memory came in: the white-hot stab in my chest, the jostle as the EMTs loaded me into the ambulance, the masked face of the surgeon hovering above mine, the voice saying, “Shit. We’re losing him.” And I knew I would never leave the haunted landscape. For I was what was haunting it.