Do the Crawfish Know How Cold It Is?

To skip to Part Two (continuation from the print edition) click HERE

   

The second time I almost killed my brother in front of my godfather it was on a warm Wisconsin day in August 1994. 

At least once a summer, for many years, my parents would pack us kids and one of the iterations of good puppers we had into the conversion van and journey eight hours from Pittsburgh to the northwest Chicago suburbs. My grandparents’ home had always been too tiny for their four children. Even after the addition of a large open room that held the dinner table and den, it was still too small. As empty nesters, my grandparents had enough space, but our visits provoked a full family reunion. On these occasions, the house swelled like stretchy pants on Thanksgiving.

My Grandpa Bill, my brother’s namesake, would make way too much food and my Grandma Marilyn served it up as we crowded around the small circular table to eat, drink, laugh, and argue about politics if my Aunt Dianne happened to be there. When I was younger, I often fell asleep at that table in my dad’s lap, ear to chest, lulled to sleep by his booming voice unsuccessfully trying to convince my Aunt how wrong she was about everything. Grandma’s pleas for peace and decorum around the children would usher me, carried in my dad’s strong arms, to the fold-out couch in the playroom. I imagine the verbal battles harried after I was fully asleep.

In the morning, my bleary-eyed father would pack us all up again to drive three hours north to our family’s large but rudimentary log cabin in Clay Banks, Wisconsin, an intersection masquerading as a town. On this occasion of my brother’s near-death experience, my godfather John with his wife, son, and brother, UFD, aka Uncle Fucking Dave vacationed with us too.

“Let’s go shoot stuff!” UFD taunted his younger brother John through a gritted but genuine show-all-of-your-teeth sort of smile. In one facial expression he was able to perfectly demonstrate that he was about to embark on some nickname-affirming behavior in the next few hours. I hoped none of my stuffed animals that he always playfully stole and held just out of reach would be involved. How could I have known I would be the one engaging in assholery? 

At 12, I was the eldest nonadult and was allowed to carry a small unloaded rifle as the five of us—John, UFD, my dad, me, and my bother (heh, sorry Bill)—traipsed through the hip-high grass in the older section of my extended family’s vacation farm. I don’t know what I was thinking moments before I took aim. Sometimes, even now, my thoughts come without warning. They float like a ghostly spider on a traveling web, landing on my overactive brain and grasping it in spite of chaotic thunderstorm gusts. The difference is that apparently, now I hide it well.

Once the barrel was aimed squarely at the skinny seven year old’s back, I sang his name in that tauntingly sinister way that only big sisters have mastered, “Hey Billy!!!!” He turned around and my godfather, John, immediately grabbed the end of the rifle and pointed it at the ground. His hazel eyes momentarily flashed the deep burgundy of disappointment as he scolded me for aiming a deadly weapon at someone I didn’t intend to kill. The look and his words shot through me like the bullets I swore weren’t in the gun I was holding. 

“I don’t care if you say it’s not loaded, you have to always assume it is! I thought you knew better and could be trusted!” 

I looked down at the ground but not before I saw the looks on the faces of my dad’s two best friends. I had let them down. Apparently, I had been able to convince them that I was smarter than this, otherwise they wouldn’t have given me a gun. Now they knew how dumb I really was. My cover was blown. I’d have to learn to hide it better.

You have to hide it because you don’t want to be spotted, like a crawfish scurrying from the space the stone in my hand had just occupied. My brother and I played in the crick three blocks from our house, spending long summer hours, ”green in judgment and cold in blood,” scaring freshwater shrimp and unsuccessfully avoiding stinging nettle. 

Salad Days don’t last forever. On a cloudy day in 1995, an older neighborhood boy attempted to get a little too nature documentary with me. The Bad Touch by the Bloodhound Gang wasn’t out yet but I knew what he wanted to do. I backed away, ever-politely stammering, “Uhhhh, no thank you!” and ran down the steep wooded hill on the side of Montour Street. I found my brother, ankle-deep in clear water and dragged him all the way home. He cried because I made him leave. I wanted to cry, too. The crick was my favorite place in the world and it was ruined as long as that boy lived and breathed in my neighborhood. I could not risk going back there and feeling shame again. 

The next day, Billy asked if we could go to the crick. I knew if I was mean about it, he might tell mom, so I made an excuse about wanting to play at home. I got good at hiding behind rocks that summer. He asked me every sunny day until school started and I denied him each time. Once it got chilly, I no longer had to pretend that I was too cool for the creek and he had to pretend I didn’t break his heart.

The first time I almost killed my brother in front of my godfather, I was seven years old.

 I don’t remember many details about that day in 1989, but the shame still pulls at me on random but increasing early morning hours when I am spared from the threat of sleep. I can plop down into the front passenger seat of the sedan parked in front of the closed garage door at the top of a slanted driveway. I am fidgeting, waiting impatiently for John to buckle my brother and godbrother into their respective car seats. I’ve never sat in the front seat before and soon, I will know why. Looking around at the various controls accessible to the driver, I grab the shiny knob between the two front seats and pull it back. The car starts moving backwards and John starts yelling. 

“Put the shifter back in park! Back! No, no, NO! Towards the front, I mean. The front of the car!” 

I finally manage to shift the gear and the car stops rolling towards the busy street. My god-lyfather swears under his breath but I can hear it. I know I am redder than the ‘P’ I never should have shifted the car out of and I try not to cry. He gets back in and tells me how stupid what I just did was and how I could have killed us all. 

“I didn’t know the car could move if it wasn’t turned on! I’m sorry!”

Sometimes I wonder how this man, one of the smartest people I know, decided to give me a gun five years later. What’s deadlier than a car? A gun! Maybe he has finally learned his lesson about trusting me with deadly objects. I guess I’ll never know if he thought better about gifting me a trebuchet upon my graduation from college.

These are important lessons, you see. Ones that can only be learned through experiencing them. WHO could be so GODDAMN stupid that they need to be told not to aim unless they intend to kill, that cars can move even when they’re not turned on, and that not everyone is trying to help you. The answer is Meghan with an H.

Lessons about guns, cars, and boys take longer to learn. They must filter through the murky water to the base of the brain like dappled sunlight reaching the bottom of an always cool prairie stream cutting through a Wisconsin forest that is older than two generations removed from people in my family I never got to meet.

I never met them but I saw the houses, sheds to me, and during the second summer I could have killed my brother, we explored them. Each year that we came back they were in worse shape than the last but still, we explored the out buildings and sat on the iron rocker sofa on the once screened-in porch. We wandered through the tiny kitchen and bedroom and I imagined wrinkled ancestors taking up the same space here. They wore sleeping sacks like Charlie Bucket’s uncle and they sucked on pipes and chatted about the weather and how cool and crisp the night air had gotten. 

The summer air was crisp and cool at night in Door County, Wisconsin due to the proximity of Lake Michigan in the east and Green Bay in the west. It definitely got hot during the day but at night it felt like winter. At least one night each visit, my brother, cousins, and I spread our sleeping bags on the wooden deck that my family had built with their hands twenty years earlier. Our nylon cocoons were warm; the night, cold. Escaping breath opaquely blurred the silky buckshot of the Milky Way that was so violently bright we doubted it was real. We lay there, eventually trust-falling into the type of restful sleep experienced by those who can’t help but be sure that nothing bad can happen under this spinning smattering of cosmic light. 

As the years went by, I would sneak away to meet the boy who lived on the neighboring farm. We would meet at the previously discussed halfway point on the dirt road between his house and our cabin. In later years, he could legally drive and would pick me up in his beater, blasting Pennywise or Fear Factory. Surrounded by rust and dried clay-dusted windows, we’d opaque the stars another way. My parents had no idea and while I maybe should have felt bad about that, I didn’t. I was no longer a surprised crawfish. 

There were many bullets dodged in those Wisconsin woods but there was a time before the potential torso wound and reckless driving episodes that I didn’t. I was 10 and alone in the forest on a part of the property I had never explored with my brother and cousins. Being unfamiliar with the terrain and there not being any actual trails, forged by hooves or helpful ancestors, I discovered a downed section of rusty barbed wire with the flesh of my calf. It bled a bit but not for long and I thought that was pretty good. Filled with energy, likely fueled by adrenaline and my deserved good fortune, I ran back to the farmhouse and made a very bad mistake. I told my Aunt Dianne about my flesh wound. My parents weren’t there and even if cell phones had existed then, there wouldn’t have been any service in that rural area for her to call them. She insisted we head to the local clinic for a tetanus shot just to be safe.

I thought it was insane to voluntarily take a shot when it was probably completely unnecessary. I knew there was no way my parents would let my vaccine immunity lapse. I knew I was safe from tetanus and the lockjaw that followed. I knew I would be fine. It didn’t matter that in that moment I, like my dad, thought my Aunt was crazy because maybe she thought the same of him and he would actually let his daughter go without proper medical care. It didn’t matter because Aunt Dianne was the adult in charge. We got into her minivan.

On the way, my cousin Meredith reassured me, but by the time we pulled up to the green and beige building, I was utterly panicked. In the waiting room I cried and Meredith told me that if it would make me feel any better, and if her mom would let her, she would also get a shot so I wasn’t alone. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me and still is to this day. Of course I took her up on the offer. Meredith sat on the table next to me and when the nurse came in, she volunteered her butt cheek first. I only watched her face and saw no reaction to the jab. My turn came and Meredith let me squeeze her hand. 

Of course the vaccine didn’t hurt as bad as I had feared. It wasn’t the kind of shot that keeps you up at night 30 years later. Even so, I knew deep down that if Meredith had gotten hurt, I would not have been the one to bare the other cheek. She has always had an emotional range that extends so far outside of my purview, it might as well be in a crick on a kinder planet. My black beads for eyes and antennaed mouth surely revealed my shelfish tendencies but Meredith never let on. She let me hide a little bit longer until I could find bigger and bigger rocks.

I fear they might be getting too heavy.