Author Archives: tim

“Look at this guy, he thinks he’s the Terminator or something.” He smiled a crooked smile.

Sherri was smoking a cigarette. Mike turned toward her, with his back to Keith, willing him to start something. “Is he hurting you?”

She crossed her arms and exhaled her smoke with a suggestion of defiance. “I’m fine, hon.”

“What the fuck? Can’t you people mind your own goddammed business?”

“We’d like to mind our own business, asshole, but it’s hard when you’re saying “˜Fuck you, Sherri’ every two minutes.”

“Look, tough guy, if you don’t like it, feel free to call the police. It’ll take “˜em an hour to get here, and then we all know how quiet the police are.”

Sherri chuckled.

“Oh, I’m not gonna call the police.” Mike could feel the muscles in his forearms tensing. “I’m just going to give you one chance to apologize and shut up.”

Keith flashed his best white trash sneer. “Fuck off, Die Hard!”
Sherri laughed. She actually laughed. “Die Hard!” She laughed again.

Mike got two hands around the guy’s throat and squeezed. Keith’s eyes grew wide, and he slapped weakly at Mike’s arms. He fell to his knees. Mike was keenly aware of his hands; they felt enormous, electric, invincible.

From the clifftop, Chris heard a metallic thump, followed by silence. Then coughing and then Sherri. “Oh shit,” she said. “Did I kill him?”

He felt clairvoyant, prophetic. He saw the events to come. He’d go discover Mike Wallace dead; he’d identify the body for the police; he’d be stuck in Fishtrap for days; and then he’d drive 24 hours back home to Minneapolis with two boards and all of Mike’s belongings. He’d be named at Mike’s funeral, remembered as a true friend, contacted for years by Mike’s mother.

Or not. Sure as he was of his prophecy, he couldn’t be certain.

He only knew that walking back down those rocky steps would reveal possibilities for which he wasn’t prepared.

He stood, took a step toward the precipice. He could jump – submerge himself in the deep, become the swamp creature of Fishtrap. He’d subsist on whatever meat he could gather by overturning nighttime fishing boats or by snatching up cliffjumpers before they returned to the surface. Occasionally, he’d emerge from the water and let out a low bellow that would send chills down the spines of the campers on shore and set the dogs to barking.

For once in his life, he’d be what people feared.

They heard another “Fuck you, Sherri.”

“You wanna put up with this all night?” Mike said.

“You don’t even know what this guy looks like. He could be Mr. T or something.”

“Or he could be like you.”

On the brink of saying, “What’s that supposed to mean?” Chris stopped himself. They both knew what it meant.

Mike walked away, toward Sherri and her bad night. Chris grabbed his flashlight and headed toward the lake.

Next to the “No Cliffjumping” sign, Chris found a set of rock steps that headed up the outcropping. At the top, he found a smooth boulder near a ledge littered with crushed beer cans. He turned off his flashlight and sat down. Once, in high school, he’d gone cliffjumping with some friends at Taylor Falls. The place was full of teenagers, daring each other to perform various aerial stunts on their way to the water. Chris had jumped a couple times, relishing his brief flight before crashing into the river. But then fifteen minutes after his final jump, some kid impaled himself on a pipe under the water. Chris saw it from the clifftop. The boy emerged from the depths screaming bloody murder; once the white, bubbling water had calmed, a red blotch could be seen floating under the surface like a maritime ghost.

It’s funny. He knew that boy. But when he tried to remember his face, he could only picture Mike, flailing his arms and gazing upward toward the clifftop.

He looked over his shoulder toward the campground. Three or four campfires were still burning. Mike was at one of them now.

Sherri’s man was definitely no Mr. T. In fact, he looked more like Keith Richards with a mustache – leathery, thin, dried up, and used. “What do you want?” he said when Mike showed up in his fire light.

“You need to shut the hell up.” Mike stole a glance at Sherri. She was a pretty woman – slightly overweight and at least a decade younger than her camping partner, but still old enough to be Mike’s mother.

Keith eyed the tire iron. “What are you gonna do with that?”

Mike considered it, then threw the tool on the gravel.

Mike popped the trunk and threw his bag inside. In the dim light cast by the weak bulbs in the car, he caught sight of the tire iron.

“Are you hearing this?” Chris persisted. “I wonder if it’s some domestic dispute.”

Another “Fuck you, Sherri” echoed across the campground.

Chris listened for Mike. He’d heard the warning dings of the car door ajar, the punch of the trunk’s latch releasing, a shuffle of luggage. And now he listened to some metallic clink. “Mike?” What if it wasn’t Mike? “What are you doing?”

Again: “Fuck you, Sherri.” And this time, another “Relax! God!”

“Mike?” Chris fumbled for his flashlight and turned it on, illuminating the inside of the tent. He sat up and shone the light at the mesh entrance but couldn’t see out. He unzipped the tent door, grabbing onto the oversized tag warning to “Keep all flame and heat sources away from this tent fabric” which he’d neglected to remove from the zipper after purchasing it three days earlier.
Mike was standing by the car, looking slightly guilty.

“What are you doing?” Chris said.

Mike held a finger to his pursed lips.

“What’s going on?”

Mike shushed him.

Some campers were confronting Sherri’s companion. The words “quiet,” “need to,” and “police” rose above the other mutterings.

“Call the police, then!” the man shouted. More barking reverberated over the dark lake.

Mike had already imagined how things might go. He’d walk calmly over to the asshole and deliver a few intimidating lines – something like “Say, “˜Fuck you, Sherri’ one more time. I dare you.” Or maybe, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to call the police. By the time we’re done here, you might be the one calling the police.” Yes, they were silly one-liners, but aren’t there times when the bad guys are so bad that you can forgive the over-the-top machismo of the hero?

It was no mystery why Mike was a better windsurfer than Chris. Much better, in fact. He’d gotten beyond the 12-knot barrier soon after beginning and was working on his slam jibes, quick 180-degree turns that lost little speed. A week in Hood River and he might come away with an aerial jibe or two if he worked at it. Chris, on the other hand, preferred long, straight glides in calmer waters, when the surface wasn’t so bumpy. Give him a big lake with little boat traffic and he could traverse it dozens of times without tiring. Truth be told, water scared him a little. He hated falling off the board, sinking into the dark drink of unknown depth. And that’s why skating on its surface was so exhilarating.

“I’m gonna go talk with Sherri’s buddy,” Mike said.

Chris noticed the tire iron that Mike was half-concealing behind his thigh. “Seriously?”

The commotion started just as Chris was drifting off to sleep. He dreamt of a ninja leaping onto his car and smashing the windshield with a hammer. And though it would only take a second or two for him to realize that, in reality, someone across the campground had broken a beer bottle, the dream logic persisted long enough to cross over into the waking world. He had to save his car. He would need help. He shouted Mike’s name.

It was unfortunate, really. The ninja scenario had provided a common enemy, a reason to band together again. And the hope of being of one mind with Mike outweighed the dread of discovering the car’s windshield in pieces on the dashboard.

But outside the tent, putting away his toothbrush, was Mike, who, unaware of such amicable intentions on Chris’s part, felt that the shout was one more demand, one more instance of Chris holding him back. What would happen, once they got to Hood River, if Mike were to hook up with some hottie and take her back to the hotel? Would Chris emerge from the closet, shouting “Mike”?

“Did you hear that glass break?” Chris spoke to the flimsy wall of the tent.

“Yes.” They were in a campground. A bottle broke. Big fucking deal.

A thick silence punctuated Mike’s yes, as the entire campground held its breath, listening as if more bottles would break. And then more bottles broke. Three of them, actually. Each shrill crash came at a regular interval: one, one-thousand, two, one-thousand, three. And then came the first shout: “God damn it, Sherri!”

Dogs barked in the distance, probably somewhere across the lake. Mike exhaled audibly, vowing that if shit like this continued throughout the night, he’d kill someone. Of course, a part of him wanted it all to go south; it would make his anger just.

“I was just having the weirdest dream,” Chris said. Like Mike cared.

A woman in the distance implored someone to relax.

“Fuck you, Sherri!” came the reply.

“Mike, are you there?” Chris’s voice once again rose from the darkness, disembodied – like a conscience.

Don’t be surprised if you’re ever on the interstate west of Spokane and the road kill still looks alive. Here, where the urban sprawl gives way to tall pine forests and then to high, treeless plains, things don’t die easily – despite the open skies, the lack of obstructions, the frequency of collisions. Exit at Fishtrap Lake and beyond the still-snarling dead possums on the roadside you’ll see the landscape turn strange. Unlikely mounds of rock covered in wispy grass, small abrupt hills that seem drawn by children, a crooked tree here and there, winding roads – it’s like something from a Dr. Seuss story. A perfect setting for a murder.

There’s no way, of course, that Chris Vance could have known what would happen once he headed off the highway toward the campground at Fishtrap. Though he’d claim later that he’d had a bad feeling about the place, the truth is he had no such premonition. But he did have an argument with his passenger and friend, Mike Wallace (yes, Mike Wallace), which soured the entire evening. Chris wanted to stop for the night; Mike wanted to push through to their destination – Hood River, Oregon – where the two would spend ten days windsurfing.

It began with playful college-boy goading, but when Mike finally said, “God, you’re always pussin’ out,” the awkward silence that followed confirmed that he meant it.

“Fuck you,” Chris said, spotting a sign for a campground and pulling on to the off ramp.

It was Mike’s turn to pay, and his mood was improved when he discovered how cheap the place was — well below the price of your typical KOA or other side-of-the-highway campsite. As he gave the gregarious, gray-haired campground owner twelve dollars, he felt like he was getting some revenge for Chris’s pigheadedness. They only had four and a half hours left to Hood River. It was ridiculous that they were stopping now, at nine o’clock.

Outside the office, Chris was standing at the edge of a small inlet, examining the labyrinth of docks and small fishing boats. The inlet was flanked on one side by a 20-foot cliff; a red and white hand-painted sign warned that cliffjumping was prohibited. The sun had set recently, leaving a still-blue sky, but robbing the world of shadows. Mike stood by his companion, saying not a word, but following Chris’s gaze to a spot on the surface of the shallows where bubbles were rising like boiling water.

They said nothing to each other, despite being faced with this blatant curiosity. Was it a bullfrog? A spring? A swamp creature awaiting the hour when the campfires went dim?

“We’re at site thirteen,” Mike said. Behind him, a floodlight turned on, illuminating Chris’s squinting face.

They got in the car and drove 30 feet to site thirteen, where they wordlessly set up the tent and unpacked their sleeping bags. Chris crawled into bed first and listened to the quiet chatter of campers across the grounds, the snapping of twigs in fires, and what he thought sounded like waves lapping the shore, the origin of which was as mysterious to him as an easy friendship.