Floating Staircase(46)

We did not know who owned the dock until after Kyle’s death when the owner—a grizzled old fisherman with rubber waders and overalls, his skin like that of a football, his eyes narrowed in a chronic wince—approached my father in the street while I looked on through the living room windows. To offer his condolences and (I assume now in hindsight) feel our old man out about the possibilities of a lawsuit. (There was never a suit.)

Prior to that, my only other encounter with the owner had been one night Adam, his friends, and I had gotten a little too loud—loud enough to alert the old bird from what was probably a half-drunk, midnight snooze on his sofa. He stormed out of the house with what looked like a broomstick disguised as a rifle. A few of Adam’s friends took off through the bushes along the shore, and one kid made it clear across the river to the other side, no small feat. Adam and I swam directly beneath the dock and held our breath.

I remember the man’s waders clacking on the boards above our heads as he shouted, You kids, whoever you are, I’ll shoot you, you come round here again!

Our heads bobbing like seals under the dock, Adam and I stifled our laughter.

A second later, a sharp explosion directly above our heads echoed across the river like thunder. Then the old man returned to his house, no doubt to sit watch in the shadows of the willow trees, the broomstick that was not actually a broomstick after all propped up on one shoulder.

After that, it seemed none of Adam’s friends wanted to risk life and limb for the three seconds of excitement they got from double docking.

“Cowards,” Adam told me after I’d pestered him about why we hadn’t snuck out of the house in over a week. “Bunch of chickens. You still want to go?”

I’d been just as frightened from that experience as Adam’s friends, but I wasn’t going to have my older brother consider me a coward and a chicken. So I said I wanted to go back. Sure I did. Sure.

“Me, too,” Kyle said, spying on us from the hallway.

Adam and I were in Adam’s room, and we both turned to stare at our younger brother.

“Go away,” Adam told him.

“I want to sneak out at night, too.”

“You can’t,” Adam said. “You’re too young.”

“I’ll tell.” This was his ace in the hole, and we’d been expecting it for some time now. “I’ll tell Dad.”

“No,” Adam said, “you won’t. Otherwise we won’t take you swimming in the river after lunch.”

“Travis?” Kyle said.

“He’s right,” I said. “If you tell, we won’t take you swimming anymore. And I won’t let you keep the night-light on in the bedroom when you get scared, either.”

“You just turned ten,” Adam told him, sounding uncannily like our father whether he meant to or not. “You shouldn’t have a night-light anymore.”

“I don’t hardly use it,” Kyle protested.

“You won’t use it at all if you tattle,” I promised him.

And that was the end of it. That night, after our parents were asleep, Adam came to our bedroom and roused me from sleep. I sat up and dressed soundlessly while across the room Kyle rolled over in bed to let me know he was awake. I told him to go back to sleep, and he made a slight whimper, like a dog who’d just been reprimanded.

Sneakers and bathing suit on, I crept out of the bedroom and followed Adam down the hall to the living room. We exited through the patio door at the back, since it was the farthest point from our parents’ bedroom and would elicit the least amount of noise. Before following him out, I glanced over my shoulder to see Kyle standing at the far end of the hall, a milky and indistinct blur in the darkness, watching me. Like a ghost.

It went on this way for much of the summer until Adam came down with the chicken pox. He got them pretty bad and was laid up in bed for two weeks, looking depleted and miserable, his skin practically indistinguishable, expect for the knobby red splotches, from the white sheets on which he rested.

Kyle and I had gotten the chicken pox when we were both very young (and despite my mother’s deliberate exposure of Adam to us in our mutually reddened and itchy state, he hadn’t caught them from us), so there was no concern that we, too, would become ill. I remember Kyle and I eating grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch at the foot of Adam’s bed while the three of us watched the portable television our dad had transported to the top of Adam’s dresser. This vision, however mundane and uneventful, is one of the most vivid I have carried with me into adulthood.

Of course, we’d stopped going down to the river and to the double dock at night. Yet summer was coming to an end, and I’d gradually become addicted to the thrill of springing off those boards and soaring like a blind bat out into the night, interrupted only at the end by the icy, bone-rattling crash through the black, salt-tasting water. I feared he might be sick straight until winter when it would be too cold to resume our nightly jaunts.

Then one night after I was certain our parents were asleep, I sat up in bed and whipped the light sheet off my legs.

I heard Kyle’s bedsprings creak as he rolled over and propped his head up on one hand. He watched me dress silently in the dark. “Are you going alone?”

“Quiet. Yes.”

“Mom and Dad say never to swim alone.”

“Mom and Dad also don’t want us sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night, do they?”