Martin's Pond
Steve Masover
Copyright 2003, 2012 Steve Masover
https://www.stevemasover.net
Martin's Pond was originally published in Five Fingers Review #20 (2003)
He leaves his scratched-up yellow tenspeed leaning against the muscular trunk of a flowering buckeye, hidden away in a stand of laurel and oak on the near side of Heineman's Creek. It's late spring, and Martin has been coming out to the pond for a few weeks now. The planks he re-anchored across the pebbly shallow feel solid under his feet. He climbs the sloping bank, angles through a V-shaped stile, and saunters through the empty pasture.
Martin is tall and very, very thin. His face is smallish, rounded and button-nosed, haloed with lazy curls of chestnut brown hair. He wears jeans that are sunbleached even in the seams, and a t-shirt that could have been orange once, years ago. A turn in the ruined road unmoors him now from the pasture fence. In the scaleless frame Martin's gangly limbs and simple calm lend him the air of a child, though he'll turn twenty-eight come October. Descending around the last, rutted curve he hears a rhythmic splashing, but doesn't decode it until the arc of a hand flashes up over the water, the twist of a stranger's face rises for air out of the pond's smooth surface. He freezes. His expression clouds. All six lanky feet four inches of him is checked in mid-stride. In six springs, six summers, six scorching hot autumns, Martin has never seen anyone else -- not anyone, ever -- here at his pond.
* * *
Martin's pond pools where a snaking tributary of Heineman's Creek feeds a hollow first dammed by generations of beavers, lost long ago to coats and hats and moccasin trim. Dairy farmers reengineered in stone at the turn of the century, but over years of neglect the pond lowered and lowered, marshy edges creeping toward its center. Each May, as the rush of winter rainseep slows, Martin gathers spilled, river-smoothed boulders and piles them up again. Within a week the pond deepens sufficiently to cushion cannonball jumps from a mass of dark rock jutting out of the hollow's steeper slope.
Martin visits almost every day, coming through the empty pasture and along the neglected claydirt road, through wild radish pastels and yellow Scottish broom to a powdery thread of beach. If the sun is out he changes underneath a towel wrapped around his middle, tucked into itself like a worn terrycloth lungi, and swims over to the jumping rock. He might jump one or two or three cannonballs, and swim lazy strokes back and forth across the pond; then, smiling beatifically to feel the mud squishing under his feet, emerge onto the narrow strand to dry. On cooler days, when fog reaches in from the coast, Martin comes not to swim but to revel in the secret life that surrounds his haven. Officious red-wing blackbirds hurry from perch to perch through the reeds upstream; speckled newts swim indolently among their tangled roots. On clear evenings when he doesn't have to work at the restaurant, Martin might stay through sunset, watch Venus come shining into the indigo heavens, wonder at oceans of stars glittering in the riffled surface of his pond. He might listen to the night sounds for a long while, long enough to mostly master his fear of them, then walk warily back over the rise, across the fenced pasture, through the angled stile to his beat-up, too-small-for-the-length-of-him bicycle. Martin rides furiously back toward town, an exhilarated tangle of jutting elbows and knees hugged close, wind whipping through his hair as he pedals through the darkness and hush.
* * *
Martin is stopped where he stands. After an eternity -- the time clocked between the swimmer's stroke, breathe-right, stroke, stroke, breathe-left -- he fades back and measures what he's seen. The clean line she cut through the water doesn't fit the loose muscle of her upper arm, the fleshfolds of her back, the contrast at her temple where cropped-short hair has gone from reddish brown to gray. She's old, he realizes. Motherage old. And he recognizes with a start that she wasn't wearing anything. She was naked. Martin withdraws further and circles wide around the pond. He listens, stopping to reorient when he loses the sound of her swimstrokes, searching for how she came to be in his place: a truck, a bicycle, a wandering swath trampled through the surrounding grasses. From a reedy blind he watches her come out of the water, breasts hanging low against the middle-aged thick of her body. Martin turns his head, blushing fiercely. Slowly, he backs away into a fold that hides him from view, then runs as if the ground itself were burning.
* * *
Up to his elbows in hot water and soapsuds, staring into white blur and steam, Martin's mouth works soundlessly. Piled on the steel counter are stacks of greasy plates, crusted frying pans, thick white coffee cups smeary with lipstick. Amrit has been at him all night to snap to it, to hurry up, to keep it moving. The manager's birdbead eyes flash mad with prophecy of an epic late rush, when the movie theater lets out around nine. "What are you trying to do," Amrit castigates him, "grind the enamel off with a sponge?"
The late rush comes. Martin wrestles his attention back to the plates and pans but it slips his grasp like a pint glass slick with soap. He wants to believe that today was a fluke, that she'll never trespass again...but how can he know? She just appeared there, from nowhere, without warning. What if she wants it for herself? What if she means to make the pond her own private place, the way he made it his? At the thought of speaking to her his tongue goes numb. What if she belongs there, if her right to the place is greater than his?
Now an actual pint glass slips from his hand like wayward attention, falls in slow motion to the rubber-padded floor, bouncing once, twice before striking rim-first against an exposed tile, cracking into jagged pieces and razor-edged grit. Amrit is over him in an instant, teeth flashing in the contemptuous dark of his face. "Will Mr. Pickering come complaining to you when he sees the breakage figures, Martin? Will it be you who has to answer to Mr. Pickering? No, Martin, he comes to me, and what am I to do then, so? What am I to answer, that he should please deduct your clumsiness from my salary?" Martin squats down on the black rubber mat, balancing broken fragments in his hand, carefully gathering splinters from the floor. His fingers, puffy and soft from the dishwater, close too tight around a glittery siliceous spike, and the pad of his thumb blooms red. The delay only angers Amrit further; he leaves Martin to tend his own wound and returns to the counter. Claire is at the register, totaling up a check. "He's not himself tonight," she observes. Martin closes the first aid cabinet quietly, listening. "It only confuses him when you shout like that." Amrit snorts and shakes his head. "If this was my place I'd have fired him years ago."
* * *
The next day is the every-other-Friday that Martin meets his father for lunch at the mall. Martin Sr. runs the Eye Can't Wait franchise there, a cut & mount eyeglasses store, orders complete in 99 minutes. Martin finds himself sitting in the customer service area at Eye Can't Wait as noon comes and noon passes, his knee idling like a jackhammer, nervously biting at his nails. The band-aid on his thumb is rimed black with sweat-salt and country dust. He has already been to the pond and back this morning. Standing at the edge of the water on this Lunch With Dad Day morning, Martin hadn't been able to shake the feeling that he was being watched, that the alien swimmer's eyes were poking like stiff blunt fingers at his back. He'd been blind to the swallows and blackbirds. Slow-wheeling turkey vultures registered as little more than dark dust on a pure blue ground. That the woman might have appeared at any moment put Martin off from swimming himself; the chance she might come upon him wearing nothing but swim trunks fixed an icy fear in his bowels, a suffocating anger in his chest. He skipped pebbles across the pond in long, low arcs to crack sharp against the diving rock, and then he played the stone-tossing game.
The stone-tossing game had evolved over Martin's years at the pond into a kind of Pliocene-era basketball: lofting them up to the flat diving-shelf, thirty feet across the pond and seven
feet off its surface, Martin aims stones to land on the ledge and stay there. Those that come to rest inside a ring built of rocks too big to throw -- little boulders hauled one or two at a time, each addition punctuated by a cannonball jump into the pond -- those throws score. The stone-tossing game rewards sureness and restraint. A single score in ten throws is passable; three is exceptional; four is Martin's all-time record. This morning, every single stone bounced back into the water.
* * *
At eleven past the hour Martin Sr. appears at the counter. His father is tall too, with a swell in the middle to accommodate Beverly's freezer-to-microwave cooking and decades of accreted food-court cuisine. He lifts the linoleum cutaway, offers Martin his hand and a strained, mind-on-something-else smile. "Hello, son, how are things in the world of crockery renovation?" Martin doesn't attempt to get his father's jokes; he has come to understand that the first question is always about his job. This afternoon Martin is dreading his shift at the restaurant, dreading Amrit's sharp rebukes. Martin stands and reaches for his father's extended hand, mumbles something about work being all right, okay, how about you.
Over sandwiches at the Full Belly Deli his father seems at a loss for words. Martin is not troubled by silences. When Martin Sr. asks whether he's heard from his mother lately Martin just shakes his head. He never knows whether he should ask after Beverly and his half-siblings, or whether that's some kind of trespass. Beverly's face closes against him on the rare occasions when he visits his father's home. "What about the apartment?" Martin Sr. asks. "Did those noisy neighbors ever move out?" Martin nods affirmatively this time.
They continue to eat. Suddenly Dad wonders aloud about that pretty waitress at the restaurant. A picture of Charley, Claire's fiancée, pops unbidden into Martin's mind, and he pushes it away. Once he told Claire about the grass fire when he was little, how it was boys playing with matches which was very bad. Claire explained that Jesus forgives, and asked would he like to go to church sometime, but he had been there before and didn't want to. Claire was always nice to everybody -- even to Amrit. Martin senses dimly that he shouldn't have told his father about her, but Dad was always asking did he have a friend. "We all start out as clear glass blanks," Martin Sr. says. "Maybe we're given a base curve, something to start with, but after that it's all in how the lens is ground, how well we cut the blank to fit the frame, how we adjust the frame to fit the face. It's an effort, Martin, a difficult undertaking." Martin doesn't follow the metaphor, but understands he's meant to learn something about earnestness from his father's words. He thinks of his pond and stops feeling hungry. Martin forces down the last of his roast beef sandwich because it would hurt his father's feelings if he didn't.
* * *
The next morning Martin wakes up early. He tries to watch cartoons, but can't sit still. After a while he rides across town to the bike shop where he occasionally helps out, to see about repacking his bearings. A slice of big round belly shows underneath his sometimes-employer's smudged t-shirt; a smile shaped space of teeth opens up in Tony Brocchini's cloud of frizzy gray beard. Soon Martin's hands are slippery with grease, the bearings are pulled and dropped into a can of solvent. He's cleaning the chain when his eye chances on the handleless head of a gap-toothed, red plastic lawn rake propped against the garbage cans out back. "Tony?" he asks. The pudgy old hippie is squinting through reading glasses at a wheel spinning on his weathered repair stand. He grunts softly, so Martin knows he's listening. "How do you make a place so people don't come bother you there?"
Tony brakes the wheel with a callused palm, lifts it off the stand, mounts its mate. "Who's bothering you, son?"
"It's a place I found," he said, thinking hard, trying to shape words that fit his feeling. "To go be by myself. I wish that other lady wouldn't come there."
Tony nods his head as he gives the second wheel a sharp, tangential cuff. "Did you find it first?" he asks.
"For a long time."
Tony considers for a while, then gestures for Martin to follow him out back, draws a circle with a rusty spoke in the dust of the yard. "I'm going to teach you a magic spell," Tony says. "Listen carefully, Martin. It'll work only if you do exactly as I show you."
* * *
Sunday starts Martin's weekend and he wakes up late. He eats a bowl of cereal, and then another, then makes two sandwiches and fills his canteen with water. The things Tony gave him and a salt shaker from the restaurant are wrapped in his lungi-towel. There's high, thin cloud-cover, but it won't last long. At the pond Martin places his watch on the ground and looks at it from above, as Tony showed him. He circles opposite to the sweep of the second hand -- "widdershins," Tony called it -- ringing an old bicycle bell and leaving a length of laundry-line looped around a heap of table salt at each cardinal point, reckoned by where the sun sets. He changes and wades into the water. This part is different than Tony explained, but the Number One Rule about matches can never be countermanded. Safely moated away from the tindery shore, he lights a remnant of smudge-stick and lets the bundled sage burn until it's ready to smoke. Martin points the billowing herb in each of the directions and says the words Tony taught him. The sun comes out just then, bathing the pond in light and warmth. Martin feels tension slough away like a withered skin. He swims and cannonballs and dozes in the benevolent yellow glow. He has better luck -- not spectacular, but better than average -- at the stone-tossing game. He eats his lunch and swims some more, and when he's ready to go he rakes smooth the narrow strip of fine, reddish sand-dirt at the pond's near edge. He's already across the pasture, descending into Heineman's creekbed, when he hears a woman's voice, a fragment of melody on the breeze.
* * *
By the time Martin works his way around and back she's already swimming. Martin is stunned. What Tony taught him failed. Martin wonders if the adjustment he made to guard against fire is at fault. He doesn't know what to do. He can't leave. But he can't just approach her either. What would he say? What if she were naked again? He retreats toward firmer ground, keeping low, and just as he's ready to stand and turn he feels something brittle crush beneath his heel. It's a rabbit skull, picked clean and bleached white. There are little ribs too, and long back legs, frail and jumbled. Martin pokes at the bones with a hollow scrap of reed. Some of them are loose and some still joined together with thready ligaments. He can hear the splash of her swimstrokes. He looks up, not toward the pond but south, beyond the pasture. Further than he's been before Martin can make out a flock of vultures wheeling over something, circling and dropping down, rising and circling. The bones and the carrion birds give him an idea.
Martin climbs and descends, climbs and descends, aiming toward the object of the buzzards' interest. It's a deer, he sees when he spots the carcass at last. A fawn, still white-spotted across its back. The vultures watch him nervously, standing at a distance, one bounding in every so often and lolling its red-rimmed eyes around on a lewd, scaly neck. The soft parts are already eaten: the fawn's belly is a sagging hollow. Clouds of flies hover around vacant eye-sockets. Martin considers for a while, then scouts around until he finds a sturdy branch, forked at one end, under a nearby oak. He uncoils a length of laundry line from what's left in his pack, cuts it with his lockblade knife, fumbles it into a slipknot. Martin ties his swim trunks into a mask, to block the stink.
A few stones drive the vultures further away. He approaches gingerly. When the smell gets too awful he backs up a few steps, takes a deep breath and holds it, then comes near to the carcass. He bends close, jerking back at the touch of insects that rise up like gritty, buzzing smog. He lifts a foreleg with the stick and gets the slipknotted loop around it, but then has to fall back and breathe. There's a loose cluster of vultures on the ground, six or eight yards past the carcass; and more in the air, circling in silent reproach. Martin makes a second foray and gets the line around both legs, pulls tight, but drops the rope when he accidentally brushes the animal's stiff dead fur. He feels a thumping beat behind him, ducks down, comes up s
winging the oak staff wildly and clips a militant buzzard across the tip of a wing. The vulture tumbles to the ground, staggers off dragging its injured limb behind. The whole flock hisses in chorus. Martin retreats to breathe again. He watches the tottering bird, afraid its wing is broken. He was wrong to have hurt it, and feels a penitent impulse to abandon what he's started. The impulse passes. The birds keep a prudent distance now. Martin takes a deep breath, approaches the dead fawn, draws the line taut as he circles around to the dorsal side. He pins the carcass to the ground with the forked end of his staff and yanks. The little deer slips. He tries again, leaning harder into the branch. The spine cracks on the third yank. With his knife, Martin now saws at what's left of the clotted flesh, hacking and retreating for air, slashing and recoiling with a dumb, brutal tenacity. When the carcass is separated in two Martin stumbles away and pukes up lunch, heaving until he's wracked and empty.
The vultures that follow track him from hundreds of feet above. Martin holds the carrion at a distance, tied to the end of his staff. Progress is slow. The woman is gone by the time Martin returns to the pond. He works quickly now, piling a stone cairn around an old fence post thick as his arm, a few yards downstream of the diving rock. Martin impales the stinking carcass, turns it to face across the water, toward the place she steps in. He's spent now, and the sun has lowered into an evening fog advancing eastward from the coast. He shucks his clothes, heedless of chill and modesty both, and plunges in for the first-time-ever naked, scrubbing at his polluted skin, scouring himself with pond mud to be rid of the stench. The water is smoky with stirred up sediment where he has washed.
* * *