by Victoria Smith
Sophie and I sit in our backyard against the trunk of a maple tree so thick we can’t touch our fingers together when we stand on opposite sides and hug it. Every few months we check to see if we’ve grown enough for our fingers to meet. We tried again this morning, and there’s still too much distance. Sometimes, I wonder if Sophie’s really trying to touch my fingers. I wonder if she’s pulling her shoulder blades in or putting a bend in her elbows. I wonder if she doesn’t like being my sister.
Grownups are always asking how old we are. Sophie’s twelve and I’m eleven. “Aah, Irish twins,” a lady once said. Later we tried to figure out what the lady meant because we aren’t twins. “You look nothing like me,” Sophie said, emphasizing the you and me like crashing cymbals. But we know we’re Irish because when we belch at the table or track mud into the house, Mom says, “Girls, we’re lace-curtain Irish, not shanty Irish.” Once Sophie said, “Being shanty Irish sounds more fun,” and Mom snapped, “Just get those muddy shoes off.”
“You want to go crayfishing?” Sophie asks, scratching her back against the bark of the tree. The air is so thick and sweet it could be sliced and served like a sugary grocery-store cake, nauseating and satisfying at the same time. If we walk on the road to the river, we’ll be trudging through air that wants to hold us in place.
“We just went a couple of days ago. How about going to Boulder Mountain?” Walking through the fields and woods would keep us off the road, spare us from sidestepping blistering patches of tar, and save us from scraping black goo off the bottom of our flip flops when we don’t sidestep it.
Boulder Mountain is what we call a pile of rocks farmers dug out of fields so they could plant crops. We found it on one of our hikes after walking into the woods at the back of Mr. Doyle’s hayfield. Year by year as rocks crept to the surface, Mr. Doyle and his father before him, dug them up and hauled them away. All those rocks, in the way and unwanted, dumped in a clearing surrounded by maple, oak, and hickory trees. We don’t go there much after Mr. Doyle told us to stay off his land. But I’m drawn to it. It’s my church. I feel God is there and not in the church down the road, the one the priest is always calling the Lord’s house. So, once in a while we trespass, but only if Mr. Doyle isn’t in his hayfield. Like mountain goats, we climb the rocks, some jagged and some smooth. At the top, I sit and gaze at tree branches stretching toward each other to form a dome. My eyes follow shafts of sunlight that break through and shine down on the rocks, causing flecks of mica to sparkle like tiny diamonds, nearly hypnotizing me. I pray about whatever’s worrying me on that day, and I always pray that Sophie will like me better.
“Nah,” Sophie says, “climbing those stupid rocks isn’t exciting, and if Mr. Doyle catches us, he’ll call Mom and Dad.” Last year we’d been lucky he didn’t call them when he nabbed us coming through the fields carrying a bag of hickory nuts. We didn’t know the hickory trees were his. Those trees were in the woods behind his hayfield. We didn’t know someone owned the woods. Red-faced, me from shame and Sophie from anger, we gave him the bag of nuts. It was my first lesson knowing that everything around me was owned by someone.
“What if Larry goes with us?” I ask. Larry’s sweet on Sophie. Sometimes she’s sweet on him, but she also flirts with his older brother. I’m very sweet on Larry. I keep asking him to do stuff with us, hoping he’ll get bored with Sophie’s hot-and-cold treatment and see me as kinder and prettier. But he’s not seeing me that way.
“We’re going crayfishing.” Sophie rises from the ground and brushes the seat of her shorts. Dirt and bits of old leaves scatter in the air. “You can ask Larry to come along.”
“Larry doesn’t like crayfishing. He says it’s not real fishing because it’s too easy.”
“He can get stuffed.” Sophie crosses her arms. If I don’t go with her, she’ll be angry all day and sit at the supper table in unending silence. By bedtime, she’ll be fuming. She’ll crawl under the pink-flowered spread covering our double bed. She’ll roll over and turn her back to me. We won’t peer out our second-story window, talking about our day, looking for the owl who lives in a hollow in the box elder tree. Or worse yet, she’ll threaten me.
“Okay,” I say. It’s easier to let Sophie have her way.
I go inside and cut up raw bacon, place the pieces in a plastic bag, and seal it with a twist tie. Sophie goes to the garage to get our homemade fishing poles, a pair of sticks with a string tied to each one and a safety pin tied to the end of each string. We catch a lot of crayfish with them. I meet her outside by the maple tree. She has our poles in one hand and a white five-gallon bucket in the other.
“What are you doing with the bucket?” I ask.
“We’re going to bring crayfish home.”
“And do what?”
“Maybe Mom will cook them for supper,” she says. “Larry said down South lots of people eat crayfish.”
My stomach churns. Larry’s mom is from Louisiana. I don’t know anyone up here who eats them. I hope if I don’t argue about eating crayfish, she won’t get set on it. I shove the bag of bacon in my pocket. We have a half-mile walk to the river. I carry the poles and Sophie carries the bucket, swinging it like the basket of food Little Red Riding Hood takes to grandmother’s house. My stomach lurches with each swing of the bucket as I imagine it filled with crayfish to be cleaned and cooked by Mom, who cleaned and cooked a pheasant Dad hit while driving down our road. It looked like a small chicken and I might’ve tried it, but pheasants aren’t big and Dad ate the whole bird.
The sun scorches Sophie and me from above, and the heat rising off the road bakes us from below. In the distance small pools of water shimmer, but I know when I reach them, they won’t be there. It’s a mirage, like a lot of things in life. I learned a long time ago I could see something in the distance that would never come to be.
The river is low and slow moving this time of year, but we can only fish off the east bank. There’s no trail to the west bank where masses of bushes and tall grasses snug up to the river. We climb down the well-worn path on the east side and stand on the sloping bank, kicking off our flip flops and wiggling our toes in the cool wet sand, avoiding the water. We don’t want the crayfish mistaking our toes for food. We stab pieces of warm, slimy bacon onto the safety pins at the end of the strings on our sticks and dip our lines in the river. Sophie has already filled the bucket with a few inches of water.
It never takes long to catch crayfish. They grab the bacon with a claw and hang on for dear life while we haul them out of the river and tug on their bodies, yanking them off the bacon and tossing them in the bucket. Today we catch a couple of dozen in no time, which is why Larry says crayfishing is boring. We throw our leftover bacon in the river for the crayfish we didn’t catch, and mindful of them, we dip our oily fingers in the edge of the water and rub away the grease.
It’s going to be a long walk home. It’s hotter, and we’ve added more water to the bucket to cover the crayfish. Sophie and I each clutch the handle and struggle up the path to the road.
“This is too heavy,” I say. “Let’s go back and dump them in the river.” These crayfish are like pets to me. I catch them but always set them free.
“No way. We’ll switch sides when our arms get tired,” Sophie answers. Unless I’m asking to switch, I give her the silent treatment. Not that she notices because we don’t have any leftover energy for talking.
A half-hour later we’re sitting against our maple tree in the backyard, and I’m wondering if it’s going to be years before we can reach around it and touch hands. The bucket stands in the shade, crayfish clack against its sides, trying to climb out and find their river.
“What’s in the bucket?” Mom asks. She’s opened the backdoor and let the dog out because she’s taking him to the vet for his rabies shot.
“Crayfish,” Sophie says. “We thought you’d cook them.”
“I’m not cooking those bottom-feeding, prehistoric creatures,” Mom says. She opens the car door for the dog, tells us to stay home while she’s gone, gets in the driver’s seat, and disappears down the driveway. That’ll be all she says about it. She won’t care what we do with them. But not in her house, not in her kitchen, and not on her dinner table.
I’m about to ask Sophie, Now what? when Larry bicycles up our driveway. He stops by the bucket, straddling his rusty bike.
“What you got here?” His electric blue eyes flicker.
“Crayfish,” Sophie and I say together, using different tones.
“Oh, yeah?” He’s off his bike and leaning over the bucket, pushing his sun-blond hair out of his eyes.
“I wanted my mom to cook them,” Sophie says, “but she doesn’t know how to clean them.”
Not what Mom said at all. I’m never quite sure why Sophie tells white lies.
“It’s easy.” Larry pulls a pocket knife from his jeans, and slips a blade from it. He grabs a crayfish, slits the underside of the tail, and after wiping the blade on his pants, he closes the knife, dropping it back into his pocket.
I’m to my feet.
He pries the shell open and pulls out a grayish-white glob.
“This is the part you eat,” he says as my open palms meet his chest, shoving him backwards. He lands on his butt. “Damn, Anna, what the hell?”
“Drop dead, Larry,” I yell.
“I didn’t mean you eat them raw, you cook them first,” he says. “You toss them in a pot of boiling water.” He thinks I’m mad because he didn’t explain the cooking part first.
“Get out of here,” I shout. I’m coming at him again, but he hops on his bike and heads down the driveway.
“What’s your problem?” he yells.
I don’t answer. I don’t have a problem with Larry anymore. I’m over him.
Behind me I hear Sophie sobbing and turn to ask if she’s okay. She’s not crying. She’s laughing so hard and trying to suck in air between her sob-like sounds.
“You’re never going to get him to like you by shoving him around.”
My head feels like it’s going to pop open, like in a cartoon. I want to slap her, but I turn and grab the handle on the bucket and lift with both hands.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“I’m taking the crayfish back to the river. Mom’s not cooking them, and we can’t let them die.”
“I’m not helping.” She’s stopped laughing.
“You never do.” I keep heading down the driveway.
“Mom said for us to stay home.”
“So what.”
“I’ll tell Mom you left the yard.”
“Get stuffed, Sophie.” I’m enjoying her fear. She’s in charge when Mom’s gone and she’s going to get in trouble for not stopping me. And if I fall in the river and drown or get kidnapped or get hit by a car, she’s going to be in even bigger trouble, and she’ll be sorry.
She follows me down the driveway.
“Get back here, or I’m telling Mom you broke her lamp, not the dog.”
“Go ahead. I’m tired of it. I should’ve just told her.” In fear of being punished, I’ve let Sophie blackmail me for three months. My struggle with the bucket of water and crayfish has loosened something in my brain. “You’ll get in trouble, too, for lying about it.”
“Come back. I’ll go to Boulder Mountain with you when Mom gets home.”
“No.” I don’t want her in my church. I walk onto the road. Sophie catches up with me and grabs the handle and jerks it toward her. I kick her, and she lets go but her fists are coming at me. “I hate you.” I scream it over and over.
Sophie becomes still. I walk on.
I shift the bucket from my right side to my left. Sophie is walking beside me again. “I’m coming with so I don’t get in trouble for letting you go on your own.” She grasps the side of the handle. “We’ll switch sides when our arms get tired,” she says.
I say nothing.
“You’re going to owe me to keep quiet about this,” she says.
“As soon as Mom gets home, I’m telling her I went back to the river.”
We walk in silence, except when one of us says, “Switch.”
We climb down the path and stand on the bank, the bucket of crayfish between us. “We could’ve given them to Larry’s mom to cook,” Sophie says. “She’d have let us eat some.”
My stomach quivers at the thought.
A couple of feet from the river, I tip the bucket on its side. The crayfish crawl out and scamper toward the water. They don’t go left or right, just straight ahead, creating ripples on the water when they break the surface.
“Look at them go,” Sophie says. “They know they’re home.”
She’s got a look on her face I’ve never seen. We watch until the last crayfish enters the water. Sophie lays her arm across my shoulders. “We’ll go back to catching them and just letting them go.” She turns to me, still wearing that look, and says, “We’d better go if we’re going to beat Mom home.”
On the way back, we take turns carrying the empty bucket.
“Want to play Monopoly when we get home?” she asks.
“How about checkers instead?” Sophie cheats when she plays Monopoly. She cheats when she plays checkers, too, but it’s easier for me to catch her cheating at checkers.
She stops and stares at me. I know she’s going to argue. Overhead a cloud passes in front of the sun, giving us a fleeting break from the dog days of summer.
“Sure, why not,” she says. We start walking again.
She chatters away. At one point she wonders if the crayfish would’ve tasted like the leftover lobster Mom brought home last New Year’s Eve and let us share the next day.
Sometimes our fingers nearly touch when we pass the bucket back and forth, but I take care to make sure they don’t. I’m going to wait and see.
Victoria Lynn Smith lives near Lake Superior. She writes fiction, essays, and articles. Her work has appeared on Wisconsin Public Radio, Twin Cities Public Television’s Moving Lives Website, Brevity Blog, Better Than Starbucks, and regional publications: Talking Stick, Red Cedar Review, 8142 Review and Spring Thaw. Her flash fiction story “Domestic Duplicity” won first place in the Lake Superior Writers’ Contests in 2020. Her short story “Silent Negotiations” won second place in Door County’s 2020 Hal Prize Contest. Her story “Lamb Like a Cloud” won third place in the Wisconsin Writers Association’s Jade Ring 2021 Contest. For more visit https://writingnearthelake.org/.