Whitecaps!

By Todd Kimm

After a feast of fruit sliced up in organic yogurt and thick slices of homemade banana bread we drove to a pine grove north of town. Brett made me listen to hear the trees talk, their language. “What are they saying?” I asked, playing along. So much of being with Brett was playing along.” Whoossssh,” he said, and “Shhhhhhhhhhaaaa.”

He kept trying to get me to agree to live in the house he planned to build on the piece of land he bought from his brother. I’d pay the utilities and live there for free. I suggested we use timber and pine from my childhood house to build a new one but he insisted that wouldn’t be economical.

We drove to the path that leads to Squire Point. Brett remembered running down the path with his high school buddies. “Once we got our jeeps stuck out here and it took us three days to get them dug out,” he said. The Point was a place where boats could come in close. The high school kids would come tearing down the path in the moonlight and just run straight off the Point and into the water. Swim out to the boat for an all-night kegger. This was also where years later Brett and Kathy had picnics, where they drank a bottle of wine and then made love. He kept pointing out spots where they’d done it, drank a bottle of wine and made love. Afterward they washed and soaked in a part of the creek they dammed with rocks to create a pool.

We got out to Squire Point and sat there devouring plums and oranges. It was windy. “Whitecaps!” Brett cried. “Whitecaps on fucking Lake MacBride!” I asked him what a squire was. A peasant who owns land, he said. He asked me what the rock we were sitting on was. I said I didn’t know. “Coral,” he said. “This was all a coral reef. Why do you think they call it Coralville?” We started back and Brett related how he used to tell Kathy he’d build her a house on the opposite shore. “I’m such a failure, he said. Brett had followed Kathy out to California where she had a good job and he looked. It was everything he could have wanted. He had it made, but threw it all away when, in a moment of weakness or fear, he cheated on her.

“You’re not a failure,” I said. “You experienced all that.” A hundred times more than me, I thought. But he wouldn’t believe it. He was worried about his heart, a second artirial block, self-diagnosed from his EKG, like when he snuck a look at his chest x-rays and diagnosed himself with late-stage lung cancer a few weeks before. “I’m just going to Africa,” he had promised. “No one’s going to bag up my shit and piss.”

Now Brett was looking for the ruts where the jeeps got stuck. This was like 20 years ago. Worn away, he concluded disappointedly after we finally found the spot where he thought it had gone down–although he claimed to be able to see some remnant of the event in how the trail softened at a certain rise. A ghost. Brett had come out here with Corbin–his second lost love, but this time through no fault of his own–a few years ago. That was the first time he had been back since, been willing to brave it without her.

Going up the hill, Brett’s chest was hurting and mine was too a little. He decided the only solution was to press on harder and then at the top of the hill, hollering he’d meet me there, he burst into a thundering sprint for the car.