But this practice I wasn’t just showing off. I kept looking for Irene on the beach, relieved, somehow, to see her there, her face shaded by a white baseball cap, her hands busy building something in the thick sand. A couple of times she noticed me hanging on the dock, and she waved, and I waved back, and it was this secret between us that thrilled me.
Coach Ted noticed the waving. He was in a mood, pacing back and forth, up onto the low dive, around the guard chair, chewing on a liverwurst-and-onion sandwich, whacking our butts with a hard yellow kickboard if we weren’t off the starting blocks fast enough after the whistle. He was home from the University of Montana for the summer, all tan and oiled up and smelling like vanilla extract and onion. The Scanlan lifeguards doused themselves in pure vanilla to keep the gnats at bay.
Most of the girls on my team had a crush on Ted. I wanted to be like him, to drink icy beers after meets and to pull myself into the guard stand without using the ladder, to own a Jeep without a roll-bar and be the gap-toothed ringleader of all the lifeguards.
“You bring a friend to practice and you forget what you’re doing here?” Ted asked me after we swam a hundred-yard free and he didn’t like the time staring back at him on his stopwatch. “I don’t know what you wanna call what you just did off the walls, but they sure as shit weren’t flip turns. Use your dolphin kick to whip your legs over your head, and I want at least three strokes before you breathe. Three.”
I’d been swim teaming it since I was seven, but I’d come into my own the summer before. I finally put together the breathing—how to blow out all my air while under the surface, just how much to roll my head—and I’d stopped slapping the water with every stroke. I’d found my rhythm, Ted said. I’d placed at state in all my events, and now Ted was expecting something from me, and that was sort of a scary place to be: in the scope of his expectation. He walked me off the dock and up the beach after practice. His arm was hot and heavy around my lake-cold body, and my bare shoulder wedged up into his armpit hair, which felt gross, like animal fur. Irene and I laughed about that later.
“Tomorrow no friends, right?” he said loud enough for Irene to hear. “For two hours a day it’s just about swimming.”
“Okay,” I told him, embarrassed that Irene saw me get a talking-to, even a small one.
He grinned a Coach Ted grin, small and sly, like a cartoon fox on a cereal box. Then he rattled me back and forth a little with that heavy arm. “Okay what?”
“Tomorrow will be all about swimming,” I said.
“Good girl,” he told me, squeezing me in a bit, a coach’s hug, then swaggering off toward the bathhouse.
It had seemed such an easy promise to make at the time, to spend a couple hours the following summer day focused on swimming—on flip turns and pull-outs and tucking my chin during the butterfly. Piece of cake.
Grandma put on a Murder, She Wrote rerun after lunch, but she always dozed during those, and Irene and I had already seen it, so we quietly left her asleep in the recliner. She made tiny whistling noises as she breathed, like the last seconds of a Screaming Jenny firecracker.
Outside we climbed the cottonwood next to the garage and then swung over to its roof, something my parents had told me again and again not to do. The surface was black tar and it was sticky and melted; our flip-flops sank in as we stepped. At one point Irene couldn’t pull her foot out and she fell forward, the melted roof burning her hands.
Back on the ground, the soles of our flip-flops gummy with tar, we prowled the yard, the alley, stopping to examine a wasp nest, to jump from the top porch step to the sidewalk below, to drink well water from the hose. Anything at all, so long as it didn’t involve talking about what we had done the day before in the barn, what we both knew we wanted to do again. I was waiting for Irene to say something, to make a move. And I knew that she was waiting for the same thing. We were good at this game: We could make it go on for days.
“Tell me your mom’s Quake Lake story again,” Irene said, plopping herself into a lawn chair and letting her long legs hang limp over the plastic arm, those tarry flip-flops heavy and dangling from her toes.
I was attempting to sit Indian style in front of her, the brick patio hot, hot from the sun, burning my bare legs enough for me to change positions and pull my knees into my chest, wrap my arms around them. I had to squint up at Irene to see her, and even then it was just a hazy-dark outline of Irene, the sun a white gob of glare behind her head. “My mom should have died in 1959, in an earthquake,” I said, putting my hand flat on the brick, right in the path of a black ant carrying something.
“That’s not how you start it,” Irene said, letting one of her dangling flip-flops fall to the patio. Then she let the other flip-flop go, which startled the ant, causing it to try a different route entirely.
“Then you tell it,” I said, trying to make the ant climb onto just one of my fingers. It kept stopping. Freezing in place. And then eventually going around.
“C’mon,” she said. “Don’t be such an ass-head. Just tell it like you usually do.”
“It was August, and my mom was camping with my grandma and grandpa Wynton, and my aunt Ruth,” I said, making my voice as monotonous as I could, dragging out each word like Mr. Oben, a much-despised fifth-grade teacher.
“Forget it if you’re gonna suck.” Irene tried to scoop her toe along the patio and hook one of her flip-flops.
I pushed them both out of the way so she couldn’t. “Okay, big baby, I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you. They’d been camping sort of by Yellowstone for a week and were supposed to set up at Rock Creek. They even pulled in there that afternoon.”
“What afternoon?” Irene asked.
“In August,” I said. “I should remember which day but I don’t. My grandma Wynton was setting out lunch, and Mom and Aunt Ruth were helping, and my grandpa was getting his stuff ready to fish.”
“Tell the part about the pole,” Irene said.
“I’m going to if you let me,” I said. “The way my mom always tells it is that if Grandpa had even just dipped his fishing pole into the water, they would have stayed. They never would have gotten him to leave. Even if he’d just made one cast, that would have been that.”
“That part still gives me goose bumps,” she said, offering her arm as proof, but when I grabbed her hand to look, we both felt a little current of electricity between us, remembering what it was we weren’t talking about, and I dropped it fast.
“Yeah, but before my grandpa could get down to the creek, these people they knew from Billings pulled in. My mom was really good friends with the daughter, Margot. They’re still friends. She’s cool. And then everybody decided to eat lunch together, and then Margot’s parents convinced my grandma and grandpa that it would be worth it to drive up to Virginia City and camp up there for a night so they could see the variety show at the old-timey theater up there, because they had just come from there.”
“And to eat at that buffet thing,” Irene said.
“A smorgasbord. Yeah, my mom says what really convinced my grandpa was when he heard about the smorgasbord, all the pies and Swedish meatballs and stuff. ’Cause Grandpa Wynton had a helluva sweet tooth, is what my dad says.”
“Didn’t someone in that family they had lunch with die?” Irene asked, her voice one shade quieter than before.
“Margot’s brother did. The rest of them got out,” I said, the whole thing making me shiver a little, the way it always had.
“When did it happen?” Irene swung her legs back over the arm and put her feet on the ground, leaned over her lap toward me.
“Late that night, close to midnight. The whole Rock Creek campground was flooded with water from Hebgen Lake, and then the water couldn’t get back out because this entire mountaintop fell down and dammed it.”
“And made Quake Lake,” Irene finished for me.
I nodded. “All these people got buried at the bottom of it. They’re still down there, plus cars and campers and everything that had been i
n the campground.”
“That’s so creepy,” Irene said. “It has to be haunted. I don’t know why your parents want to go there every year.”
“They just do. Lots of people still camp around there.” I wasn’t sure why they went, either. But they’d been doing it every summer, for as long as I’d been alive.
“How old was your mom?” Irene asked, toe-nabbing her flip-flops and standing up, stretching her arms far above her so I could just see a thin line of her stomach.
That feeling that being with Irene kept giving me when I least expected it again floated up in me like a hot-air balloon and I looked away. “She was twelve,” I said. “Just like us.”
Eventually we wandered away from my house, no plan, just the two of us meandering through shady neighborhoods. It was late enough in June that the firework stands were open, and already there were kids in their backyards blowing things up, ka-booms and smoke curls from behind tall fences. At a yellow house on Tipperary I stepped on a couple of those white snap-pops that somebody had scattered all over the sidewalk. I had barely shrieked at the tiny explosions beneath my thin soles before a gaggle of boys with skinned-up knees and red Kool-Aid grins charged us from their tree fort.
“We won’t let you pass unless you show us your boobies,” one of them yelled, a tubby one with a plastic pirate patch over one eye. The other boys cheered and laughed, and Irene grabbed my hand, which didn’t feel all awkward in that moment, and we ran with them chasing us, all of us screaming and crazy for maybe two blocks, until eventually the added weight of their plastic guns and the small strides of their eight-year-old legs slowed them down. Even in the heat, that running felt good—hand in hand, all out, a group of shirtless monsters just behind us.
Out of breath and sweaty, we wandered into the cracked lot in front of Kip’s Minute Market, tightroping the cement parking blocks one after another, until Irene said, “I want strawberry Bubblicious.”
“We can get it,” I told her, hopping from one block to another. “My dad gave me a ten before they left and told me not to tell my mom.”
“It’s just a pack of gum,” she said. “Can’t you steal it?”
I’d shoplifted at Kip’s maybe a dozen times, but I’d always had something of a plan. I had always set out to do it, Irene sometimes giving me a list, making it a challenge—like a licorice rope, which was both long and loud, the cellophane on those things a dead giveaway; or a tube of Pringles, which bulged pretty much no matter where you stuffed it. I didn’t do the whole put it in your backpack thing. Too obvious. A kid in a candy aisle with a big bag? No way. I crammed things beneath my clothes, usually in my pants. But I hadn’t been in for a while, not since school let out, and I’d been wearing a lot more the last time—a big sweatshirt, jeans. And Irene had never come inside with me. Never once.
“Yeah, but you have to buy something anyway,” I told her. “So you don’t just walk in there and hang around and walk out. And gum’s already cheap.” Usually I bought a couple of Laffy Taffys or a can of pop, the real loot hidden from view.
“Then let’s both steal gum,” Irene said, trying to pass me on a block, our bare legs tangled up while she did it, me perfectly still or we both would have fallen.
“I have money,” I said. “I can just buy us both gum.”
“Buy us a root beer,” she said, finally all the way around me.
“I could buy us ten root beers,” I said, missing the point.
“We shared one yesterday,” she said, and then I got it. The whole thing again fizzling around us both, around our closeness, like a just-lit sparkler, and I didn’t know what to say back. Irene was studying her bare toes, pretending like she hadn’t said anything important.
“We have to be fast,” I said. “My grandma doesn’t even know we left the house.”
After the scorched cement of that parking lot, Kip’s was almost too cold. Angie with the big brown bangs and long nails was behind the counter, sorting packs of cigarettes.
“You girls getting ice cream?” she asked, sliding a stack of Pall Malls into its place on the shelf.
“No,” we answered together.
“Twins, huh?” she said, marking something on a tally sheet.
Irene and I were both in shorts and flip-flops. Me in a tank top, Irene in a T-shirt, not exactly concealing clothing choices. While Irene pretended to study the label of an Idaho Spud candy bar, taking her time, I grabbed two packs of the Bubblicious and tucked them just inside the band of my shorts. The waxy gum wrappers were cold against my skin. Irene put the candy bar back and looked at me.
“Will you get us a root beer, Cam?” she asked, all loud and obvious.
“Yeah,” I said, rolling my eyes at her, mouthing Just do it before I headed to the refrigerated section along the back wall.
I could see Angie in one of those big circular mirrors Kip’s had in the far back corners, and she was still stacking and sorting cigarettes, not paying any attention to us at all. As I grabbed the root beer, the door beeped and this guy my parents knew came in. He was dressed in business clothes, a suit and tie, like he was maybe just getting off work, even though it was too early in the afternoon for that.
He heyed Angie and headed straight for the beer section, the big cooler next to where I was standing. I tried to pass him in the chip aisle.
“Hey there, Cameron Post,” he said. “You stayin’ out of trouble this summer?”
“Trying to,” I said. I could feel one of the packs of gum slipping a little. If it slid too far, it would drop right out the bottom of my shorts, maybe bounce off of suit guy’s shoe. I wanted to keep walking but he kept talking, his back now to me, the top half of him behind the glass door to the beer case.
“Your parents are up at Quake Lake, aren’t they?” he asked, grabbing six-packs, the bottles clanging around. The back of his suit was wrinkled from where he’d sat in it all day.
“Yeah, they just left yesterday,” I said as Irene joined me in the aisle, a big grin stretched across her face.
“I got one,” she told me through her teeth, but still kind of loud. Loud enough for this guy to have heard if he’d wanted to. I gave her a face.
“They didn’t take you along, huh? You a style cramper?” The suit guy backed out of the case, turned, and pinched a bag of tortilla chips against one of the six-packs he was carrying. Then he winked at me.
“Yeah, I guess,” I said, faking a smile, wanting him to scoot along, stop talking.
“Well, I’ll tell your mom that I only saw you hitting the root beer and not the hard stuff.” He raised up one of his sixpacks, grinned again, too many teeth, and headed toward the front of the store. We followed behind him, pausing for a few seconds here and there, pretending to consider other possible purchases that we had no intention of making.
The suit guy was putting bills in his wallet when we reached the counter. “That all you two are getting?” he asked, and lifted his chin toward the sweating bottle of root beer tight in my hand.
I nodded.
“Just one for both of you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We’re sharing.”
“It’s on me,” he told Angie, handing her back one of the dollars she’d just given him as change. “A root beer to celebrate summer vacation. They have no idea how good they have it.”
“No kidding,” Angie said, sort of scowling at us, Irene practically hiding behind me.
The suit guy whistled “Brown Eyed Girl” as he walked out, those six-packs rattling.
“Thanks,” we called after him, a little too late for him to hear, probably.
In the alley behind Kip’s we shoved piece after piece of gum into our mouths and chewed, those first, hard chews, the gum thick with sugar, our jaws aching, trying to thin it and soften it for bubble blowing. The sun felt good after the cold of the store, both of us still hopped up on what we had done.
“I can’t believe that guy bought us the root beer,” Irene said, chewing hard, attempting a bubble; but it was too
early, and she barely made one the size of a quarter. “We didn’t pay for anything.”
“That’s because we’ve got it so good,” I told her, trying on his deep voice. We impersonated him all the way home, laughing and blowing bubbles, both of us knowing that he was right. We did have it so good.
Irene and I were wedged down beneath the covers on her big bed, the room cold and dark, the sheets warm, just how I liked it. We were supposed to be sleeping; we were supposed to have been sleeping for maybe an hour, but we weren’t at all. We were recounting the day. We were making up the future. We heard the phone ring, and knew it was kind of late for a call, but this was the Klausons; they were ranchers and it was summer, sometimes the phone rang late.
“It’s probably a fire,” Irene said. “’Member how bad last summer was for fires? The Hempnels lost like forty acres. And Ernest, he was their black Lab.”
I was supposed to be at my own house with Grandma, but when Mrs. Klauson came to pick up Irene that afternoon, after Kip’s and the gum, we met her in the driveway, Irene already asking for me to spend the night before Mrs. Klauson had even finished rolling down her window. And she was so easy that way, Mrs. Klauson, always with a smile, her small hand through her dark curls, Whatever you want, girls. She even convinced Grandma Post, who had been planning tuna salad on toast, had already mixed a dessert for the two of us—pistachio pudding. It was chilling in glass sundae cups in the fridge, Cool Whip, half a maraschino cherry, and a few crushed walnuts on top of each serving, just like on the cover of her old Betty Crocker Cookbook.
“I’ll drive Cam in for her swim practice,” Mrs. Klauson had said, standing just inside the front door, me already halfway up the stairs, mentally packing my bag—toothbrush, sleep shirt, some of what was left of our stolen Bubblicious. “It’s no trouble at all. We love having the girls at our place.” I didn’t listen for Grandma’s response. I knew I’d get to go.