The Deep Lake Dragon

By Richard Mosher

A young drifter falls in love with a modern dancer in New York, then sabotages his own happiness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Mosher
• Release date: Sep 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463814406

Richard Mosher

Born in India, Richard Mosher grew up in Ithaca, NY, attended Antioch College, and has lived in France, Costa Rica, New York City, the Dominican Republic, Ireland, and Minnesota. He's worked on the railroad, in trees (trimming elms in Maine), in an auto plant, and in classrooms, teaching. He's also driven taxis in NYC and driven a nursery school van in Minnesota. Mosher's published novels include "The Taxi Navigator" (1996) and "Zazoo" (2001); this is his first ebook to appear. Others will follow soon.

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The Deep Lake Dragon

A Novel by Richard Mosher

Copyright 2019 Richard Mosher

Smashwords Edition

This ebook is a work of fiction, all characters sprung from the author’s imagination.

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The Deep Lake Dragon

Chapter 1

Coming from Antioch there were several ways of approaching Ithaca; I liked to let my rides determine which route I took. This time it was December and cold and when a salesman offered me a comfortable lift up past Erie and Buffalo to Rochester, I decided to stay with him and drop down on Ithaca from the north.

Outside Geneva, while I waited for my next ride it began to snow, but before the cold grabbed more than my toes, a big truck stopped. I threw my bag up into the cab and we rode in jouncing silence that last diagonal stretch between the head of Seneca Lake and the foot of Cayuga. Strings of colored lights jumped alive in picture windows; reindeer stood on roof peaks, waiting.

My driver wasn’t a talkative man, which was good; those last miles were always best passed in quiet.

Home for Christmas? was all he asked.

Nodding, I felt myself dubiously reforming his easy word Home. A simple syllable and a many-layered riddle. Yes, home to Ithaca for the holidays.

Through Trumansburg we rolled as the dusk gathered on snowy fields . . . then between the blue woods, coasting downhill, steadily downhill in the final descent, traversing the slope that fell away to the lake as it angled closer beside us—the long lake always there, gray and slender and alluring.

Although far from summer—three days shy of Christmas and very cold, with the lake not blue but hammered gray—still I thought of Timmy Ellman’s father, as so often when I saw the lake after a long absence and let it surprise me again.

That lake, said the trucker, never freezes clear across. Even in cold like this. Only in forty-eight, maybe. More than twenty years ago now.

We sat jouncing, watching, as the lake failed to freeze clear across yet again.

Too deep to freeze, that lake. Pursing his lips, he stared at the road.

I nodded. Yeah, it’s deep. When someone drowns in Cayuga, his body might not rise, after the usual few hours or days. In Cayuga, a body might sink down and down and never float back up again.

Christ. The trucker quickly touched his chest.

Timmy Ellman’s father hadn’t floated back up. Might still be down there, hundreds of feet down in some glacier-scooped cranny, caught in one of the caves that took in a corpse and never released it, preserving it in a crypt too cold and deep for any fish to reach. Might still have his eyes open, down there in the dark.

He’d drowned when Timmy and I were six years old, in first grade together. And perhaps because he’d never been recovered, his eyes respectfully closed, he drowned afresh whenever I happened to gaze onto Cayuga from some preoccupied height.

The man’s drowning would have been sad enough if he’d been ailing at the time, or alone, or if his drowning had been witnessed only by strangers. But as it had happened, Timmy Ellman’s father had been in the solid prime of life when he sailed out in his boat on a sparkling September afternoon with his sister and wife and two children, one of them Timmy, barely six.

Mr. Ellman had grown up in the town itself, not in any Cornell neighborhood—Cornell, such a lifeline for the town but so resented by those of us who lived below on the flats in Ithaca proper. He had grown up a golden boy, as good as any Cornell man and better than most, smart, cheerful, an outstanding athlete and citizen . . . and he hadn’t abandoned Ithaca for any place bigger; he had stayed and prospered.

As everyone agreed, he’d been a strong swimmer and there had been no sense to it, no sense at all, he hadn’t eaten or anything before the cramp took him. But when he dove from the stern of his sailboat, it was a while before he came up, and then he was choking and flailing and thrashed back down, this time clutching his sister, a strong swimmer herself and a large woman but no match for his desperate strength. She came up, alive; he did not.

That was the sad part. That, and that Timmy’s mother and sister crouched in the boat watching. But not the saddest part. After all, Timmy’s mother was fully grown, and his sister scarcely old enough to walk. But Timmy was six years old, and although he didn’t scream or speak, he saw it happen, and as his aunt lay gasping on deck, and his mother breathed into her and spoke words of comfort before hysteria took her, Timmy slipped over the side to swim down and find his father. His mother barely heard the splash as he went in, barely had time to pluck him back out.

As so often during my childhood, but most acutely at Christmas, I felt someone was missing and peered around the table to be certain, and still couldn’t feel certain, and had to count faces to reassure myself.

Yes: five. Five, like always: the roll was complete. There were indeed four others and me, plus cousin Erica’s little boy Nick.

Erica sat across from me, as attractive and brittle as ever. Next sat her brother Joe, compact, glasses and opinions firmly in place. This Christmas, he alone had seemed genuinely pleased by my arrival—he and little Nick, two years old, who always crowed to see me again.

My uncle and aunt presided from opposite ends of the table: Brad and Milly Cale. At the time of my insertion into their family, it had been decreed that the others should call them Brad and Milly, no longer Daddy and Mommy, in hopes that such a device might help me feel less the outsider. But a child isn’t easily fooled. I’d been younger than little blonde Nick when my parents had driven away into the trees and had not driven back; by the time I was four and could count, I regularly scanned the table to be sure everyone was present—yes, there were five of us—but never shook my sense that someone had yet to arrive. Some missing other.

By the time I joined my new family, Uncle Brad had already grown flush selling furniture, and Aunt Milly had reconciled herself to her rounds of motherhood and therapy, fashionable in the nineteen-fifties. They both worked hard at whatever they did, and taught their children to work hard. But I, the late-arriving inconvenience, was lanky where their kids were muscled, and halting where theirs were articulate, and was left on my own to dream and devise.

When Erica was sixteen and I was nine, one afternoon I heard her sigh to Uncle Brad that she didn’t understand me. Nor did he, the poor guy replied. Neither of them suspected what a skilled little eavesdropper my loneliness had made me; I may not have worked hard at achieving, but I out-overheard the world.

And even if Cousin Erica didn’t understand me, I yearned to believe that someday someone would, someone I sensed there in the mist, like me, waiting and watching. From an early age, I had assumed that there must have been a mistake. When my parents had driven away, surely they had left two babies behind, not one, and the other, in all the confusion, must have been torn away from me. I was never sure which of us I pitied more, my wide-eyed lost twin or myself.

Christmas Day glowed with good-heartedness, due entirely to little Nick and the softness he charmed from everyone, even Uncle Brad, who wore a red silk vest no one had suspected he owned, and who, at one point, sank to his knees and helped repair the boy’s broken catapult. Not until late in the day did Nick grow touchy.

Juice. He glared at his mother. A sweet boy, but two, now, and starting to assert himself. It had been an exuberant day of toys and shredded wrappers; no one was surprised when he grew crabby. Erica handed him a glass of juice.

Jackson, he commanded, make my garbage truck go.

Winding the crank as I had ten times already, I directed the purple truck across the carpet to him; he sat back and clapped. It wasn’t hard to tire of the others, but I never tired of Nick. Still, someone was missing.

Then I carried him and his truck up to bed, where we discussed trolls who lived on the mountain and drove their garbage truck pretty much everywhere—their rear-loader precisely the size and color of Nick’s truck, except that his was lavender and lopsided. I’d made it of cardboard panels joined with cloth tape. NICK’S GARBAGE was printed in bold green along both flanks; the trolls’ truck, we decided, had CHONGS’ GARBAGE painted on both sides, since they were Chinese trolls.

And the Chongs, I whispered, were very careful handling the crank of their truck, as Nick must be with his. This crank, connected to a tightly coiled spring, had been my biggest challenge, and would be impossible to replace beneath so many layers of tape and paint.

Nick admired the Chongs for being small enough to fit inside their truck. He informed me that their truck, like his, was particular what it took into its top-hinged rear door. No frogs, he said, and no cottage cheese. Mostly the Chongs’ truck was interested in small sports cars and squares of chocolate; his felt much the same.

And does the Chongs’ truck ever get sleepy?

Only sometimes. Nick rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

I waited until I was sure, then pulled the blankets across his chest and returned to the front room and the Christmas festivities, already advancing nicely. Cousin Joe, having broken into the good brandy, had circled back to Vietnam, and Uncle Brad had laid his red vest away somewhere with his good mood.

A tiny paper fish hung from a bough of their tree: a pale green fish, which sparked an association it took me a while to trace. Finally the shape floated back to me: a Japanese paper fish—larger than this, and pale blue—in New York City, suspended from the ceiling of Kate Roemer’s bedroom.

The brandy bottle circulated but I let it go; from the kitchen phone I called the Roemers’ house up the west shore of the lake. Kate’s father answered.

Skate, he called, it’s Cackson Jale! Dr. Roemer was a Cornell professor whose mind left nothing alone, certainly no name that could be reassembled. His wit was prodigious; he wore a red vest always. Cackson on the blower for Katrinka!

Laughing, she came on the line; to me, it seemed a wonder they weren’t arguing politics. When she urged me to come have a drink at their fireside, I gladly accepted. Joe tossed me his car keys without losing the rhythm of his war tirade.

The streets looked silky and felt burnished under the car’s wheels; I drove cautiously, pleased that I’d lost the names of streets along which I’d delivered the Ithaca Journal as a boy, when I’d known every front porch, every vicious watchdog. Sagely nodding, I decided I now knew places, not intersections. Along Plain Street to Seneca Avenue, then west past Meadow Street I rolled, and then across the inlet to Taughannock Boulevard and along the high west bluff to the Roemers’ new home, a house Kate had described but I’d never seen.

Through elementary school, Kate Roemer had lived in my neighborhood, attending Fall Creek School until her father was granted tenure and moved up the hill to Cayuga Heights with its view of the lake, its cream of the Cornell faculty, its country club and superior grade school. From time to time I wondered why Brad and Milly hadn’t moved up the hill, too; they could have paid the fare. During my most scathing years of adolescence, I assumed Uncle Brad had kept himself downtown due to some sense of intellectual inadequacy. Only later did I realize that he suffered more from pigheaded civic pride. He admitted no envy for those who, as soon as they came into money, launched themselves up off the flats—such as Timmy Ellman’s mother who, Uncle Brad said, took her life insurance winnings and scooted on up Snob Hill.

Now Kate Roemer’s parents had made a second move, beyond the town’s hierarchy and Snob Hill’s hierarchy, to a refuge some miles up the lake. Driving along the bluff, I glanced through the skeletal trees onto the water, restless under shifting clouds, and recalled Kate’s face the last time we’d been together. Her confused, troubled face.

This new house was more spacious than the one in Cayuga Heights, but its mood felt the same, large and airy. It also seemed filled with humor—and, the aspect I found most miraculous, it felt filled with music, an element I’d never known in the Cascadilla Street house. Our house. The house of Uncle Brad Cale the furniture impresario, my dead father’s brother. Cale House, I called it.

In the Roemers’ lake house, music issued not from a TV or stereo but from a corner of the living room, where Kate’s brother Sam tootled a silver flute as if for his own amusement but also for anyone else who cared to listen. His O Little Town of Bethlehem, lilting above the conversation, was the first thing I noticed before turning to take a long look at Kate in her home face.

Our single Manhattan night together had ended so clumsily, part of me felt reluctant to study her. It had been an endless night of wine and cigarettes and gloomy contortions beneath her blue Japanese fish; we had tried being sexually advanced and had failed, and, when Kate claimed all the credit for our failure, I had generously let her take it.

Her face that dawn had been fearful, haggard, an alarming memory-veil through which to recall a girl who, from earliest childhood, had seemed so cheery. But on this Christmas night, closing out 1970, she didn’t appear a haggard at all. Maybe wine had brought up the color in her cheeks and charged her black hair with flashes of blue.

"You’re looking good, Kate Roemer. My relief must have been obvious. Kate’s smile widened; her eyes glowed. Your eyes as pretty as your dress."

Jackson, Jackson. She seemed to be blushing.

We shifted and wondered; her mother approached and greeted me.

Why, Jackson Cale! What a delightful surprise—Merry Christmas to you!

And to you. I felt as disconcerted as ever by their family’s easy welcome.

How are things at home? she asked, tactfully avoiding the slip of asking about my parents.

Fine, thanks. We have a newcomer, nearly two now—little Nicholas, Erica’s boy. He’s made this the best Christmas ever.

And is Erica doing all right?

As well as possible, I guess. Her divorce will be final soon, and she’s making some friends. But with Erica it’s hard to be sure—I don’t really know her too well.

But you know her little boy?

Yeah. He’s the one I know best.

A gray-haired woman sat at the piano, pressing the chords to what I thought might be a Chopin piece, while Sammy trilled harmony. Kate’s mother turned halfway toward the music, blew smoke at the ceiling, and turned back to me. "But what are you doing about this war, Jackson?"