lake house

I'm trying to avoid being eaten alive.

That's how everyone complains about the mosquitoes once they've slapped the hell out of their bare arms and scratched welts in their legs. I smell like bugspray so bad it makes my eyes water, but Uncle Harp doesn't seem to mind it and neither does Dante. All those summers - the chemicals must have sunk deep in their skin by now.

The repellent doesn't seem to do the trick, I've realized. Only two weeks and I'm already a landscape of scratch marks, ugly bumps. Honey blood. I must be delicious. I'm like a goddamn buffet.

From our perch on the high deck, the lake looks like a yawning mouth: fiery sunset for a tongue, the scattered houses on the shoreline teeth with far gaps. Hungry to soak my body in its cool.

I'm blistering, too, from spending so long on the shores, biking into town with Dante - my whole back and neck beet red and freckling. Sunscreen and insect repellent make me feel like a man turned statue. Like a wall after you've repainted a couple times. Caked. Like I couldn't move if I wanted to.

Watermelon juice sticks my fingers together.

"I think I'm going to go for a walk."

"Do your dishes first," Uncle Harp says, resting an arm across his belly and taking a sip of beer. He has the hands of a sculptor, plastered fingertips and knuckles like he just got in a fist fight with a mountain of clay. I'm still not sure who wins those fights. "Dante, go with him."

My cousin and I clear the table and eat the vestiges of cobbed corn and watermelon rinds. He tells me about something weird he heard on the radio last night. A false broadcast, or something, Dante says. Freaky shit, he says. We'll have to listen again tonight. Just in case. Freaky shit.

-

Dante and I walk down the road that connects Uncle Harp's lake house to the rest of the world. I'd call it a lane - a straightaway leading to a dead end and an old pickup, shrouded in stretching birches and dotted with spouts of gold evening light. There are breaks in the tree trunks, gravel that leads to other houses, other waterworn docks, other sunburnt families with sailboats and their own hollow bits.

It didn't take me long to recognize the missing pieces in my cousin. Dante gets night terrors, meaning that in the middle of the night he screams like he's being set on fire. I think he's lost something big but he doesn't want to talk about it. Right now he's talking about his favorite radio station - the freaky one - how he has an old boom box that lets you record a tape of whatever's playing and he sits up sometimes flipping through all the channels, recording what's interesting and then recording over it.

"They play shit like you've never heard before, man," he says. In the sunset his hair looks like ash.

"Music?"

"Music." He shrugs. "Advice - like that Delilah lady but without all the romance bullshit. You can call in and ask a question and no matter how insane they'll answer it for you. Real ethical stuff, moral stuff. Like..." He thinks for a moment, conjuring a question. "If you could go back in time and stop one terrible thing from happening, what would you pick? And you gotta consider all the bad things that have happened in the world and weigh the consequences of changing something personal versus something that's impacted the whole planet. And then you gotta realize that whatever you change might make the whole world today drastically different. You could cause World War III just by asking a different girl to prom."

I wonder what Dante would go back and change. JFK's assassination? His mother dying? I think about what I would change but my mind goes blank. I have missing pieces, too, but none that big. Nothing that burns me up at night.