Jefferson Flanders

Short Fiction

Last Pond


The nearby neighborhoods hadn’t changed appreciably, except that they seemed smaller. Didn’t everything seem smaller, he thought, savoring his own middle-aged cynicism. It sounded like the punch line to one of the raunchy jokes Angus collected when he went pub-crawling.

The rental car, a cheap Ford Taurus, struggled to maintain speed as he drove it up the hill, past the sky line of lean pine trees and occasional boulders to where he knew the pond lay. There had never been many houses there, and he was pleased to see that new houses hadn’t been jammed in by inventive developers. It’d been more than fifteen years since he’d been back, and despite the reports from a distant uncle of a local real estate boom, it clearly hadn’t extended to the outskirts of the town.

Curtis had first planned this visit to the hometown of his childhood six months before. He was there, oddly enough, because of a chance conversation in a shabby hotel in West Africa on a Monday filled with bad news. The local political situation had deteriorated over the weekend before. Hopes of a truce between the “government,” if the ruling clique of thugs deserved that term, and the rebels had waned; there were reports of ambushes and lawlessness on the outskirts of the city, a city which had born the brunt of the fighting because the European colonizers had once decreed it the capitol and therefore, ipso facto, a coveted prize for both sides.

There was more specific bad news, as well. The arrival of promised medical supplies for the Center had been delayed. Curtis had been told that there was engine trouble with the chartered plane, but the real trouble was that the pilot didn’t want to risk the sporadic small arms fire that had been greeting in-bound flights for the last week. Curtis didn’t blame him.

And Montgomery had stopped by to confirm the worst news of all, about Joseph, one of their drivers, a favorite of both Curtis and Angus. Joseph’s body had been found four miles outside the capital city; he had been shot in the back of the head and robbed, his pockets turned out, his wallet and Center ID card missing. Curtis was dismayed: he’d held out the slim hope that Joseph’s disappearance had a benign explanation.

Curtis had retreated to what passed for a lounge in the hotel and took three bottles of beer over to a table and began drinking; He had finished his second bottle when a young physician, Mereille Desrosiers, of Medecin San Frontiers, came over to his table.

“Curtis,” she said. He acknowledged her with a wave of his beer bottle. “Drinking alone? Where’s Angus?”

“He flew down to Jay-burg. Gone for a week. So I’m abandoned.”

“That’s bad. You know that you should always have company when you drink. Let me join you.”

He gestured to the empty chair across from him. She was pretty in a gamine way, her hair cut boyishly short, her clothes stylish. While Curtis found himself attracted to her, he also knew that Mereille already had a lover, one of the female doctors. Gossip about romantic attachments and sexual entanglements spread quickly in the NGO enclave.

“Please do,” Curtis said. “I’ve got a plan tonight. Very simple plan. Based on drinking enough beer in a short enough period of time. I want to wake up tomorrow with a hangover so bad I can’t remember today.”

He put out his cigarette (he remembered that Mereille was sensitive to smoke) and got to his feet awkwardly and went over to the bar to get her a bottle, and a clean glass. She drank beer, he remembered, which made it easier. The bar always seemed to have chilled beer, which was one of the few things they got right. The hotel had been run by Hilton once, and then had been nationalized. It was rumored that the President’s nephew now had a controlling interest. At the bar Curtis bought three more bottles and asked the bartender for two glasses.

“Rough one?” she asked when he had returned.

“We lost Joseph.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He poured beer into their two glasses and handed her one.

“I’d been expecting the worst for the last few days. The car turned up before Joseph did. They abandoned it by the airport when they ran out of gas.”

“I think I met him once,” she said.

“A good man. A good driver.”

“The rebels?”

“Who knows? It could have been them. It could have been our so-called friends with the so-called government. It could have been someone freelancing. I don’t think it particularly matters to Joseph.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I don’t need that,” Curtis said, suddenly embarrassed. He waved in the direction of the door. “We have the ultimate advantage, don’t we? When it gets bad enough there’s always the airport. We show our passport, hop aboard the next plane and can bug out.”

“It’s not that easy,” she said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t still be here.”

Curtis kept silent.

“It bothers all of us,” she said. “The massive stupidity of it. The waste. The pain. It doesn’t make much sense. I concede that.”

“So how do you make sense of it?”

“I’ll tell you how I’ve kept my sanity,” Mereille said. “If I’m sane, and I’m sure that my colleagues trained in psychiatry might question that. It’s a very common technique. They teach it in all the meditation classes. To relieve stress I visualize. J’imagine le plaisir. Not world peace. That’s merde. I wouldn’t waste my time on that. The more time I spend here, the more I think John and Yoko were full of crap. You better come damn well armed if you want to give peace a chance. No, I think of something more practical, a boulangerie on Rue Charlotte near my aunt’s apartment, and I imagine the croissants and bread they make there. I can smell the bread baking and I think about the taste of those croissants, how flaky the crust is, and it helps.”

“You find that helps?”

“Crazy. I know. But it helps. Whenever I get back home I go to that boulangerie. I buy a dozen croissants, a few with chocolat, and I take them back to my mother’s place and I eat them all. In one sitting.” She laughed. “It makes me sick. But it’s home and it’s rational, a civilized place and it’s something to look forward to no matter how horrible it gets here. C’est une ancre. An anchor.”

Mereille, despite her small size, kept up with him beer for beer. They got drunk together, and he found the oblivion he wanted that night and the distraction of an awful hangover the next morning.

For several days afterwards he gave some thought to Mereille’s coping mechanism. He had seen many of the diplomats, relief workers, journalists and U.N. types lose themselves in sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll: the Expats’ Trinity for the dead time, for the off-hours. Others couldn’t deal with the grinding reality and the daily fear and despair and they found a way to cut their time short and leave, to escape.

A few adopted a neo-colonialist position of detached superiority: “What do you expect?” asked one Austrian, a tall, bitter man named Rolf. “They’re not ready to govern. You don’t have to be here long to figure that out. And that’s not racialist. It’s fact. I was in Liberia when the marvelous Sergeant Doe assumed power. 1985. He marched the old government leaders out onto the beach and tied them to posts and had them shot. Very direct way of showing his displeasure, wouldn’t you say?”

Curtis would always mumble about Bosnia and Northern Ireland and that Africans didn’t have a monopoly on tribalism, but he didn’t really want to debate the matter. What would it prove? He found himself wishing that he had Angus’ sharp wit, for Angus always quickly deflated the cocktail-hour pontificators with a stinging comment or two.

“I’ll tell you the problem,” Rolf continued. “We’re all here as a half-measure. All the NGOs. The U.N. All the fucking alphabet people. We band-aid the disease. We don’t have the balls to do it right, to bring in the troops and govern this place. That wouldn’t look good. We’d be taking up the White Man’s burden. But if we can’t do that, we ought to get out.”

“I don’t know,” Curtis said, shaking his head.

“I do know,” said Rolf. “We need to drop our illusions. They’re dangerous, I tell you, they’re dangerous.”

Curtis saw no point in arguing about “the situation on the ground” – to use Angus’ term -- with Rolf, or with anyone else. He had given up on making much sense of the current situation; he worried that he was giving up on more than that. There had been a time when he was fiercely proud of what he and his colleagues at the Center did; he knew that he’d bring some order, some hope to the places they’d been sent. But he had begun to wonder whether Rolf had gotten some of it right, that they had become ineffectual, that they were offering band-aids to a part of the world gone mad.

He welcomed not thinking about it. It was best to follow Mereille’s form of psychic escape, he decided after a week of visualizing. It worked. Curtis would lie on his bed and try to block out the sound of the rickety air conditioner and drift back to the same place, Last Pond, and the same time, the winter afternoons when he and Ned and Frenchie and the O’Connor brothers would play pick-up hockey games, pond hockey.

In his mind he would trace their route from his house, past the railroad tracks, under the bridge, up the hill to line of trees and the pond, hidden from view at the top. They would abandon their boots and shoes and eagerly lace up their skates and choose up teams, pretending to be their heroes: Bobby Orr and Tony Esposito of the Bruins, Rocket Richard of the Canadiens, Bobby Hull and Phil Esposito and Stan Mikita of the Black Hawks. Curtis loved being Bobby Orr, poke checking the puck away from the attacker and dashing up ice in a headlong rush, deking out the other skaters and finally flipping a quick wrist shot past the goalie and scoring. One Christmas his parents gave him a black-and-gold Bruins sweater with Number 4 on it and he wore it proudly to the pond games, giving him, he argued, first claim on being Bobby Orr. He was amazed at the details he could recall, and remembered reading once that whatever the mind kept and retained for long-term memories would be especially vivid.

He had a vacation coming, and he knew he needed to take some time, to get away, to gain a bit of perspective. Angus encouraged him to take a month off; he reminded Curtis that he wouldn’t be helping anyone, or the Center, if he burned out.

So he bought round-trip tickets back to the U.S., flying through Johannesburg and then to Atlanta, and forced himself to leave at the appointed time. His flight was inevitably delayed and when he arrived at customs in Miami he found himself tired and cranky. He still had the flight to Atlanta to reach his family, which didn’t improve his mood any, nor had sitting on airplanes that prohibited smoking.

He spent a miserable week with his sister, Janice, and his brother-in-law and their two kids. They lived ten miles or so from his parents in a suburban development, a cul de sac. Janice seemed tired all the time, and they had little to say to each other. Curtis, bored during the days, went on long walks. The houses and streets all looked the same to him, all fake colonials with large driveways and front lawns.

He knew that the comparisons between the suburban comfort of his sister and her neighbors and the misery he’d left behind were trite. Janice wasn’t responsible for the nightmare conditions in Africa, nor could he blame her for her ignorance about what was going on. That few in the First World knew, or cared, about the tragedies of the Third World was a fact, nothing more. If Angus had been there he would have reminded Curtis that it had always been that way, and that not until the end of the 20th century had television and CNN given the haves any sense of what the have nots struggled with. But Angus wasn’t there.

Curtis couldn’t talk to his parents, either. He spent most of his vacation time with them, in their ranch house in Marietta. He was glad there was a television in the guest bedroom where he was left undisturbed. He watched for hours, chain-smoking, amazed at the sheer mindlessness of the soaps and Jerry Springer and the all-sports channels, a new feature since his last visit, and he was somehow delighted by it all.

His mother was well meaning enough, but he knew she wouldn’t understand how he felt. He didn’t want to confuse and upset her with his own conflicted feelings. With his father, it was a different matter: he would understand, but Curtis wouldn’t burden him with his own anger and doubts.

His father approached him after Curtis had been there a week. “I guess it’s been pretty bad over there,” his father said matter-of-factly as if he was discussing the state of the Braves’ bullpen.

“Yes.”

“I’ve seen some of it on the television news,” he said. “I can’t watch it for too long. If your mother is around she gets too worked up. She starts to cry. Especially when the kids are shown.”

“It’s pretty rugged.”

“She worries about you, Curtis.”

“I can take care of myself,” Curtis said. “I’ve been doing this for a while.”

“That’s what I tell her. But she worries.”

“I appreciate that, Pop. But I’m copacetic.”

His father looked at him, weighing something, and then he responded. “I guess you know I saw some hard things myself. In Korea.”

Curtis nodded. His father had been with Chesty Puller and the 1st Marine Division at Chosin; he had been the only member of his platoon to survive the retreat. One of the Chosin Few. A young 17-year-old kid from Massachusetts who had never been south of Boston before the war took him to Asia.

“After a while it comes down to making it through to the next morning. You’d be so damn happy when that happened. Then you’d feel guilty when you saw your buddies, the ones who didn’t make it, and realized you were glad, in a way. That it was them, the other guys, who were dying and not you. That’s hard to live with.”

“I know,” Curtis said.

“But you go on. You don’t forget but you find a way to go on. You’re living. I guess you can’t quarrel with that. You’re alive.”

Curtis nodded. He thought back to a roadblock he had negotiated with Joseph and the teen-age boys with Karishnikovs, stopping all vehicles, who had challenged them. Joseph had talked their way through. The guards were nervous kids; in Marietta they would still be too young to drive. But in West Africa and Central Africa they had guns and the stripped, lifeless bodies by the side of the road testified that they knew how to use them. Joseph’s luck ran out; Curtis’ had not.

“That’s all I wanted to say,” his father said. “For what it’s worth.”

“Thanks,” Curtis said.

Curtis had planned his visit to Boston for his third week back in the U.S. He wanted to make sure that Last Pond was frozen over, and he figured that late January would be the best time.

He didn’t see any point in spending any more time in cold weather than he had to: he just wanted to see the pond, to skate for a little while, and then turn around and head back to Atlanta. He scheduled a 7 AM flight, non-stop, on Delta to Boston. He planned to rent a car at Logan, drive over to his old hometown, skate for a few hours and maneuver through the evening rush hour traffic to get back in time to make a return flight at 7 PM. With any luck he’d be back at his parents’ apartment by 11 PM. He had the rental agent at Logan show him the fastest route to the Avis lot because he figured that he wouldn’t have much time to hustle to the gate.

He’d found his old Bauer hockey skates in one of his suitcases in his parents’ garage. He transferred them to an L.L. Bean bag along with a pair of thick socks. The flight proved to be uneventful; he slept most of the way and woke when they landed at Logan. He found the restroom and changed into long underwear, blue jeans, two layers of T-shirts and a heavy-duty fleece.

Within an hour he was driving through strangely familiar neighborhoods. He had forgotten how dingy and forlorn the town looked in winter. Along Main Street’s small commercial strip the stores had changed. A video store had replaced the small grocery market and a delicatessen had displaced the town’s pharmacy. He stopped in the deli and bought a cup of coffee, a tuna fish sandwich and a carton of Marlboro’s. The boy behind the counter ignored him.

He didn’t stay long on Main Street; he was there specifically to come to Last Pond, so called because it was in the northwest corner of the town, on the highest point. First Pond was in the southeastern portion of the town, near the common and the 18th century Unitarian church that the town was best known for. Curtis thought there was a sly Yankee humor in having first and last ponds. If you didn’t live in the town you might not know about Last Pond. A fair number of the commercially available road maps missed it, because it was so small.

He followed Main Street for five blocks and then turned north by the VFW hall. A Civil War cannon and a World War I howitzer still sat on the front lawn there. Curtis drove under the railroad bridge, noting that the tradition of spray-painting initials on the bridge had been continued, before driving up the only road allowing access to Last Pond.

Curtis was surprised to find the pond was still ringed by a dirt road -- he had expected it would have been paved in the years since he had left. He remembered there were three houses, and was pleased to see his memory hadn’t failed him.

Before refrigeration there had been an icehouse at Last Pond; the ice had been carved into blocks and stored there. The icehouse had burned down sometime in the late 1940s but its brick foundation remained standing by the side of the pond.

Curtis parked the car by the side of the road. He sat in the passenger seat for a moment, enjoying the silence. He sipped his coffee and unwrapped the sandwich and ate it slowly. When he finished, he brushed the crumbs off his fleece and put the empty coffee cup and sandwich wrapper in the paper bag and put the bag on the passenger seat. Finally he put on a knit black cap, pulling it over his ears. He didn’t want to return to Atlanta with frostbite. He smoked a cigarette, slowly, enjoying the feel of the smoke in his mouth and throat.

Curtis opened the door and stretched his legs out into the road. He pulled his shoes and socks off, wincing at the cold, and quickly put on the heavy woolen socks. He slid the skates onto his feet, tugging at the leather, and then carefully tightened the laces.

He negotiated his way from the car to the edge of the pond and gingerly stepped onto the ice, keeping his balance. There were no marks on the ice; he was the first to disturb the surface of the pond that day. He pushed off and began skating, feeling awkward and vulnerable, hoping to get the feel of the ice in his first tentative strides. He could sense the first trickles of sweat under his armpits and in his scalp under the cap. He skated in wider and wider circles, swooping close to the shoreline. He pretended he was playing shinny, dashing up the ice with the puck on his stick, chased by all the other skaters, and was surprised at how fast he could skate after so many years away.

Curtis savored the cold air and the slight discomfort when he took a deep breath. He wasn’t used to the cold and the smoking meant his wind wasn’t very good. He could see the moisture coming out of his mouth in a cloud. He did not hear any creaking or groaning sounds from the ice. It had frozen solid. An opaque surface stretched out before him. Curtis had been monitoring the Boston temperatures for the past week, hoping it would stay in the 20s at night. He knew the pond froze quickly and the surface stayed frozen longer than the other ponds in town.

Last Pond had been formed by the massive forces of an Ice Age glacier, which had carved out a bowl-shaped depression in rock. Because of that, and an overhanging tree canopy, Last Pond maintained a low temperature year round. There was some direct sunlight at noon, when the sun was directly overhead, but most of the time the pond was shaded. It was the first body of water in town to freeze, and the last to thaw out in the spring.

Last Pond had always seemed, in some mysterious way, to be linked more closely to the forces of nature than other places. As a boy it seemed to Curtis that the wind blew harder, the ice froze quicker, and snow fell faster at Last Pond. He remembered once, near the end of a day playing hockey, without warning it began to snow quite heavily. Soon the snow was falling so hard and so fast that the boys had difficulty seeing each other. The snow began to collect on the ice and hide the puck. Sometimes they would stay after it became too dark to see the puck and skate by the lights of the nearby houses, but the snow was blocking every bit of illumination. They had to give up the game and hurry back down the hill and head for home, and their warm kitchens where dinner waited for them.

“Something else,” Frenchie said in awe as they left. “This is something else.”

Curtis had never seen a heavier snowfall in a shorter time period, a freakish event if he ever experienced one, now linked permanently in his memory with the pond. He wondered what had happened to Frenchie and the others: probably townies still, plumbers and mechanics and electricians. Or maybe Department of Public Works.

He was brought back to the present by the sounds of yelling. Curtis spun around on his skates to try to find the source of the noise.

“Hey,” a man yelled at him. “Hey.” The man was excited, waving his arms and beckoning to Curtis. It was clear that ignoring him wouldn’t work, so Curtis skated over to the side of the pond slowly, reluctant to leave the center and the smooth ice. He could feel the cold pinching his cheeks and nose.

“Over here,” the man said belligerently. He wore a faded, scarlet and black plaid hunting jacket. He needed a shave. White and gray stubble covered his chin, giving him a grizzled, unkempt look. He had red-rimmed dark eyes. “Didn’t you see the sign?”

“The sign,” Curtis repeated. “What sign?”

“Over there.” The man pointed at a tree to the left of the spot where Curtis had parked the Taurus. Curtis focused on the spot and he could see red type on a white background. “This is private property. The pond is. We can’t have people skating here without permission.”

“I’m sorry,” Curtis said. “I didn’t see the sign. I used to skate here when I was a kid. We used to play hockey up here. I haven’t been back in years.”

“I’ve been here ten years,” the man said, skeptically. “We’ve had the sign there all that time.”

“Well, it’s been longer than that,” Curtis said, annoyed, remembering the instinctive, reflexive hostility of the locals towards outsiders. He had been a local once himself. “Twenty years. More than twenty years.”

“These days just the people who live around the pond skate here. And that’s not very often. If you want to skate, you go to the rink. I own the house over there,” the man jerked his thumb towards the south. “We’ve had it posted and kept the swimmers and skaters off all that time. There hasn’t been any hockey in a long time, that’s for sure. It’s the liability.”

“The liability?”

“All we need is for some kid to break a leg or break through the ice and drown. They’d sue all of us. It’s the lawyers.” He cleared his throat. “Bastards.”

“I wasn’t planning to sue.” Curtis said. He felt he needed to give the man a better explanation. “I haven’t been back here in the winter in more than twenty years. I grew up down the way. I was in Boston on business and thought I’d sneak out here and skate. For old-times sake.”

“You don’t look like the type,” the man said.

“The type to skate for old times sake?”

“No, the type to sue.”

“You’re right about that. I haven’t ever sued anybody.”

The man studied him for a moment. “Where did you say you were from?”

“Atlanta, now,” Curtis said. “Just in Boston for the day. I just had the impulse to come skate on the pond.”

“You say you haven’t been back for years,” the man said. Curtis could see him reconsidering the situation.

“We moved away after high school. My parents ended up in Atlanta. I went to school in New York. Been working overseas. I live in Atlanta when I’m back in the States. Just haven’t had the time to come up here.”

The man looked at him curiously. “When was the last time you skated?”

“Maybe five years ago. In Atlanta.” Curtis felt the need to say more. “They have rinks in Atlanta now.”

“The kids don’t skate outdoors much any more,” the man said. “They all go to the indoor rink down off 128. It’s open round the clock.”

“I guess they don’t pretend to be Bobby Orr any more, either,” Curtis said. “Like I did.”

“Bobby Orr. He was a helluva player. Everyone was crazy about hockey back then.”

“We were,” Curtis said. “All of us.” He pointed to the pond. “We must have won the Stanley Cup a hundred times out there.”

Curtis could see that the man’s anger had passed. “You can finish your skate,” the man said. “Don’t worry about the other neighbors here. You won’t be bothered. They let me play bad cop.”

“Thanks,” Curtis said. The man waved at him and walked away towards the tree line, back towards his house.

Curtis skated back to the middle of the pond. He felt stiff from standing and talking to the self-appointed guardian of Last Pond and could feel some pain in his ankles but he resolved to ignore it; he could take some Tylenol for the flight back. He began skating in large, swooping circles, enjoying the sound of the blades scraping against the ice and the sight of the lines that the skates were carving in the ice.

It was enough, he decided. It wasn’t an epiphany or a complete counterbalance to all the pain of the last 18 months. But it was enough. Mereille would laugh at him when he saw her again: his afternoon of skating on a small pond in a tired New England town as therapy for the burned-out. But it had been worth the hassle to come back to this place.

Curtis looked back to the shoreline and saw that the older man had returned. He was standing by the edge of the pond close to Curtis’ car, waiting to catch his eye. When Curtis skated over to him he could see the man was holding a long steel thermos in both hands.

“I brought some hot coffee,” the man said. “Thought you might like a cup.”

“That’s kind of you,” said Curtis, surprised and pleased at the gesture. “That’s great.”

“Nothing beats a hot cup of coffee on a day like today.”

The man unscrewed the cap and poured hot coffee into a plastic cup. Curtis took the cup from him and held it steady while the man poured. “It’s got a little half and half,” he said. “Cuts down on the bitterness.”

“That’s fine.” Curtis brought the cup to his lips and delighted in the fragrant smell. The first sip burned his tongue, but the hot liquid warmed his throat and chest. He risked a larger swallow. He cupped both hands around the cup and it warmed his fingers. He fought the urge to light up a cigarette.

“Solomon Page,” the man said, nodding at Curtis, who belatedly realized that the man was introducing himself.

“Curtis Muir.”

The man bobbed his head in response.

“They used to cut up pond ice and sell it,” he said. “They used saws to cut the blocks and then they’d drag or slide these huge blocks of ice over to the ice house with these heavy metal tongs. They’d take the ice and wrap it in sawdust and ship it all over the world. Sent it on clipper ships. Probably not from here, from this pond. It’s too small. I think they just used the ice here, from Last Pond, in town.”

“Store it in the ice house?”

“That’s what I’ve been told. I’d imagine that without the icehouse nobody would have been up here. Too far from the center of town. They didn’t build these houses until the nineteen twenties, when they had autos.”

“I envy you,” Curtis said. “It is so incredibly peaceful up here.”

“I only bought the house because of the pond. Paid more than I should have, but I liked the idea of looking out the living room window and being able to see water. It’s peaceful, like you said. Calming.”

Curtis could see that Page was enjoying the conversation. He guessed that the man was retired and wondered how much contact he had with anyone other than his neighbors. He checked his watch and saw that he was running out of time if he was to make his flight back to Atlanta.

“Time to go,” Curtis said. He handed the plastic coffee cup back to the older man and opened the car door so he could sit down and begin unlacing his skates. “Thanks for the coffee, and thanks for letting me skate.”

“Anytime you want to, come back and skate,” Page said. “You’ve got skating privileges. If I’m not around, you can tell anyone who asks that you have permission from Sol Page.”

“Thanks,” Curtis said. “I may take you up on it.”

“You looked like you were enjoying it.”

“I was. The pond is just like I remembered. The trees and the houses. The ice. It’s a bit eerie after all this time. I sort of expected it to be different, to be changed. Like everything else. But it matched my memory perfectly. And how many things can you say that about?”

He had finished replacing his skates with his shoes, and slowly swung his feet into the car. He was ready to leave.

“Not many,” Solomon Page said. “Not many things.”

“No,” Curtis agreed. “Not many things.”