FLOTSAM

He looked at it like it was the Lusitania, the Bismarck-watery eyes looking first from it to me, back to it, back to me, trying to see if I had caught on to the magic of it. The truth of the matter was it was flotsam to begin with: a rude collection of planks and driftwood, lashed together with the nylon cord from the tire swing behind his parents’ house. The tire itself was present, given a central position on the craft, and, along with a five gallon paint bucket, comprised the seating. I allowed my jaw to hang agape, channeling the shock and surprise of actors from Hitchcock’s personal circle, flavoring it all with a dash of wondered awe. My face spoke exactly what he was hoping for. It was Da Vinci’s helicopter, fully realized, and he bought it hook, line, and foreshadowed sinker. “Did you build this all yourself?” “Yup,” he replied solemnly. “This morning?” He nodded. I squatted to scrutinize the construct. A pair of painted boards. A broom-handle cross beam. Toward the center, a thick pine branch, still furry with needles, oozed sap. “Well… you’ve done nice work here. Is that your dad’s fish bucket?” I asked, pointing to the front of the raft. “It’s the forecastle,” he replied. My eyes snapped to his, surprised, but I quickly regained composure and continued perusing the raft. I tried to imagine where this eight-year-old boy got a hold of such a specific piece of nautical terminology, but came up empty-handed, simply leaving it to the ingenuity of the young mind, thankful that he hadn’t picked up poop deck instead. “What are you planning to do with it?” He aspirated sigh that only Captain Aubry or Tom Sawyer could have truly appreciated. “I’m going to sail it.” He looked toward the horizon, his expression that which you can only hope the sculptor captures in crafting your monument. “Hmmm…” I faltered, “I’m not sure about that, John.” He looked back to me, his eyes already watering; his face a crestfallen graveyard of disappointment. “Why not?” I should have pointed out several aspects of seaworthiness that I found troublingly absent in his craft, but then, in a flash, two thoughts came to me. First, I saw John’s day in thorough flash-forward. The design. The execution. The scouting. The hauling of materials. The hundred mistakes, all of which had been worked through. Second, it occurred to me that it might actually float. Probably not. Probably, it would sink-turtles and craw-fish scurrying out of the way as it crashed into the bottom. But wood is buoyant, is it not? And, lashed tightly together, could it not form a viable platform upon which an eight-year-old could stand? Or even me? Both of us? He stood there, his lower lip quivering, and I broke. “Well… let’s tighten that cord first.” I bent down to make some adjustments. He smiled the way a kid does when he’s convinced an adult to go along with his scheme, and we set to work. It took more than just tightening. We spent an hour laying new boards and securing them. When it was done, the two of us stood there, grinning broadly, poisoned with the call of the sea.# # # We didn’t have any champagne. No wine, either. Nothing glass, even, in the fridge, with which to christen her, but John pressed for the formality. “What do you want to call her?” “Why’s it got to be a girl?” he wrinkled his nose. “Because boats are girls. It’s just how it is.” He nodded, simply accepting this as a law of the sea. “How about the Titanic?” My eyes went to the raft, then back to him. “How about something else?” He shrugged. “The Lasagna?” I tried to gauge whether or not he was kidding, but he just stood there, waiting for my response. I had never thought of Lasagna as particularly feminine, but I was game. “The SS Lasagna!” I shouted, my voice thick with ceremony. I handed him a half-full glass of Cherry Coke we’d gotten from the kitchen, and, with the pride of a carpenter and an architect all rolled into one, he poured it over the hull-the two ice cubes bouncing off the pine and settling in the grass.# # #I carried it across my back, down the hill and to the pond-the boards digging into my shoulder blades. John trailed on my heels with a Ziplock freezer bag: two triangle-cut PB&Js and a slim quart of red-capped milk (the only kind of milk, we had agreed at the gas station).The surface was caked with a yellow film of pollen, but the Lasagna splashed a patch of muddy, brown water clear, and it lay in its birth, waiting for us to board. I extended my leg in a ginger ton due, placing my toe onto the edge of the raft. It tipped generously downward. More pressure. It continued to tip. 20 lbs, 40 lbs, 90 lbs; the craft stood nearly vertical, the corner squelching 6 inches into the murky bottom. I threw myself prostrate across it-desperately, faithfully clenching my lips against a mouthful of dank pond water. But it never came. The boards leveled and I lay there, face down on the raft, staring through a knot hole into the water below. I rolled onto my back and propped on my elbows. John was staring at me, caught between humor and disappointment. He stepped from the shore to the planks, nimble and sure. The vessel groaned, it swayed, but, after a few touch and go moments of settling and clearing its throat, the S.S. Lasagna admitted her two man crew. It was the aqueducts, it was Stonehenge, a marvel of engineering, and it cut through the water like a fork through butter. We sailed, the two of us, for hours, The Lasagna admitting us into an ecosystem where we did not belong. John pointed out a turtle, shell as wide and hard as a football helmet, as it paddled through our meager wake. Two bass in a copse of reeds… a crane… a sturgeon… he called them out as we sailed. A school of blue fin tunas crowded around our little raft, whistling, and chirping, and nuzzling each other out of the way so each could catch a glimpse of us. A humpback and a giant squid, caught in the thick of battle-a fleshy tendril in the whale’s maw, the squid’s strong forelimbs wrapped securely around the whale’s neck. The two noticed as we approached, and they paused before finally deciding to go their separate ways, one returning to the depths, the other coasting out of sight, spouting water. Just below the surface, stoic mermen scowled as we invaded their home, brandishing gold tridents and pursing their mackerel lips. John burbled a formal greeting in their native tongue, and their faces broke into fishy smiles. I would have missed them all, had John not pointed them out to me.# # # The problem wasn’t that the cord snapped, it was that the boards came loose as it snagged on a sunken tree-trunk, the tight loop pulling wide. I tottered on the edge briefly, the we plunged shoulder deep into the pond. Wet. Cold. Terrible. A long tube of rough skin flashed across my ankle, but I swallowed a scream for the good of both of us. It was a crippling blow, and on the raft, John was struggling to stay aboard. Struggling, and miraculously managing as the boards went their separate ways and the watery gaps widened between them. “Jump down.” I held my arms out, ready to catch him and slog us back to shore. A curious thing happened then, or, rather, didn’t happen. He didn’t jump. If anything, he stood straighter. Chin up, shoulders back, chest out, he planted himself more firmly atop the spreading wreckage. I lowered my arms and watched. Time and physics stopped and watched, and for a count of nearly two Mississippi, they allowed him to remain aboard his ship. He slipped beneath the water. I caught him neatly under the arms, and, silently, we walked to the bank. The two of us sat on the edge of the pond, looking out, for half an hour, sand caking on the bottoms of our wet jeans. The bucket and the tire sat in the middle of the pond, caught in the rushes, looking back at us. They were caught there for years. They were satellites in deep space. Submersibles lost in the abyss. They were a sign post-a mark of where we’d been going and what we’d done. I thought about sea shells, discarded snake skin, and the hollowed-out husks that cicadas leave behind. The fascination kids have for these things, adults have, I have. A silver tuna fish bumped the bucket inquisitively with its nose. It bobbed; then it was still.