A few bubbles broke the surface of the water, then the body came up. For the past several weeks, the body sat at the bottom, tissue, bones and fluid, denser than the freezing water. As Spring approached and the water warmed, internal decay sped up and created gases inside the body. Finally, on this warm April day, the body’s buoyancy increased and it floated to the top. Ricky sat with Scotty and Gerard on the wall at the water’s edge, throwing stones, enjoying the early spring sunshine at the town Reservoir. The water along the wall was thirty feet deep. Ricky noticed the bubbles, didn’t think anything about it and stirred the water absent-mindedly with a stick. The body came to the top, immediately tipped forward and lay floating head down.

The boys jumped to their feet. “Holy shit, what’s that,” said Ricky. He stared at the odd shaped brown and green mass in the water and said “It looks a like a barrel.” Scotty said “I think it’s a body. That looks like a head.” Despite being four feet from where the body came up, it wasn’t obvious at first what the object was. After being underwater for over two months, a combination of decay, algae, leaves and mud disguised the body to where it looked like something foreign, something wet and wooden, perhaps a round piece of furniture. “Aren’t those legs?” said Gerard. “Yeah, that’s definitely a body.”

Ricky wondered what the dead guy’s face looked like. The only other dead person he saw was his grandfather at the funeral. He remembered seeing people, one by one, kneel down at the casket, say a prayer and touch his grandfather’s hand, which was wrapped in a rosary. When it was Ricky’s turn, he knelt down, said his Our Father, but could not bring himself to touch his grandfather. Afterward, he asked his mother how it felt. “It felt kind of cold and dry, honey. It’s OK that you didn’t touch him.” After that, Ricky would often wonder what the hand felt like.

*************************************************

The man of Polish descent grew up in the town with the reservoir. He went to school in the town, got by but did not excel, and used his size and strength to do well at sports. After high school, he went off to fight in the Second World War. He fought well and won a medal of valor for holding off a platoon of Germans for two days until reinforcements arrived. After the war, he returned to the town with the reservoir. He took a job at the munitions factory where he made the big shells that were used on battleships. He neither liked nor disliked his job. He met a woman at Church, dated and got married. Their life was good. They went out to movies, out to dinner, sometimes bowling and every summer vacationed in the poconos. They used the money from the munitions job to buy a two bedroom house in a good neighborhood. They tried to get pregnant but had one miscarriage after another. Eventually the pregnancy took and they had a boy, their only child.

As the boy grew, he brought great joy to the man and his wife. The man went to the boy’s little league games and his wife made cookies for the boy and his friends after school. The boy was smart, got good grades and had lots of friends. Every Sunday they went to Church and the boy stood between his parents, wearing the clip-on tie the man bought for him at Sears. The man was always shy and had never before sung the hymns or said the prayers, but did so now because he felt it was important for the boy. The boy went to high school and was on the football team. The man sat in the stands and cheered for his son. The boy was an offensive blocker so he rarely did more than protect his quarterback. One fall afternoon the quarterback fumbled the ball. The boy picked it up and ran for a touchdown that tied the game, giving their team the chance to win in overtime. That night the father celebrated by grilling hamburgers for the boy and his teammates at their home. The man drank cold Rolling Rock beers and let each of the boys have one to celebrate their victory.

***************************************************** 2

 

Ricky looked at the body floating in front of him. The reservoir was the town’s source of drinking water. The public utility company owned it and the thousands of acres of surrounding watershed. A small paved maintenance road surrounded the reservoir and every weekend when the weather was nice, people would arrive to stroll the three-mile circumference. At the main entrance to the reservoir stood a large stone and mortar structure called the lookout. It was about forty feet high and had steps leading up to a platform that extended out over the water. People climbed to the top to get a good view of the reservoir and the surrounding mountains. Ricky often climbed up, hung way too far over the railing, ignored his mother’s protests, and stared into the water below, trying to imagine how deep it was. He remembered his mother telling him the reservoir was fifty feet deep at the edge and several hundred feet in the middle. Ricky and his two friends stood at the bottom right side of the lookout.

“We should go tell somebody, maybe the police,” Ricky said.

Scotty looked at the body and said, “Boy, I wonder how he got there. It doesn’t even look like a person. I wonder when he fell in?”

The three boys ran to the parking lot shouting “there’s a body in the water, somebody call the police.” A man walked over to meet the boys and then some more people and quickly they were surrounded, the center of attention, as they told their story and pointed to where the body was. Two men walked down to where Ricky pointed. Other people decided they’d rather not see a dead body, if indeed there was one. More people continued to come over to Ricky and his friends and ask what happened. A few minutes later two police cars and a van pulled into the parking lot. Behind the van was a small boat on a trailer.

The boys went back to the water. The body had drifted and was now about fifty feet from the stone wall. It looked like a piece of wood and if somebody saw it for the first time at this distance, they wouldn’t think twice. Just an old log floating in the water. Ricky looked at the shape and wondered if it really was a body. Suppose they bring it in and it’s just a log? Will we get in trouble? A man with a tie approached the boys and told them he was a policeman, could he ask them a few questions. He wrote down notes on a little pad while the three boys told him what happened. The policeman wanted to know exactly where the body came up and Ricky walked over and pointed to the place in the water. The policeman also wrote down each boy’s name and age. When he was done writing, they all walked back to the parking lot.

******************************************************

The munitions factory worker went to his son’s high school graduation. The boy received his diploma, turned and saw his parents in the audience. Tears fell from the man’s eyes and he held up his hand to wave to the boy. The Vietnam War was a few years old and after graduation the boy joined the army. The man knew it was the right thing to do and gave the boy his blessing. The boy spent four months in Maryland in basic training. He wrote to his parents every week and told them about the pushups and the twenty-mile hikes. The man was proud of his son.

By fall the boy was sent to Vietnam. When he got off the plane in Saigon he had never felt such heat. Within two weeks he was going on patrols in the jungle. He was afraid, but he knew it was his duty and tried never to show his fear. He continued to write to his parents every week. The man and his wife would read his letters over and over. The woman worried and the man felt proud. The couple went to Church every week. The man still sang the hymns and said the prayers.

The boy’s platoon was out on patrol. They had just finished searching a village and were getting ready to leave. The boy was resting with his buddy near a hut when a Vietnamese girl came running out of the jungle. She ran right by the boy and dropped something near his leg. The boy saw something green and metal and then there was an explosion of light. The boy died instantly.

A few mornings later two uniformed soldiers knocked on the door of the two-bedroom house. The woman answered and immediately broke down crying – she knew. The man was drinking his morning coffee and came to the door. “I’m sorry to inform you, your son was killed in action. We’re very sorry. The army will take care of all the arrangements. His body should arrive at the local base in two days. Your son was 3

 

very brave. If there’s anything we can do, please call.” The woman was hysterical. The man did not cry. He tried to comfort his wife. They had a funeral. Their son was given full military honors with a twenty-one-gun salute. After the funeral, the man went back to work at the munitions factory. The couple continued to go to church, but the man no longer sang the hymns or said the prayers.

One night in February, while his wife was out visiting a friend, the man called a cab to the house. When he heard the horn, he went out and told the driver to take him to the reservoir. The driver asked if he was meeting somebody. The man said no, he just liked going there, could he drop him off and wait a few minutes. The cab pulled up to the reservoir. The man got out, told the driver to wait and walked towards the lookout.

***********************************************

Ricky watched two policemen carry the boat to the ramp that was never used – boating and swimming were not allowed in the town’s water source. He looked out and saw the object floating, now at least two hundred feet from shore. It looked like a brown lump, maybe a clump of leaves. Two policemen got into the boat with a wire basket and a green tarp. They started the small motor and headed toward the object.

Nearby a woman was crying. Two other women were trying to comfort her.

By now Ricky and his friends’ parents had arrived and each boy was telling their story. Ricky noticed the woman crying. Ricky’s mother pulled him aside and spoke to him softly. She told him that two months ago a man jumped from the lookout. There was a thin layer of ice and he broke through. She said that they searched for his body for days but could never find it and had finally given up. They say he probably killed himself. She told Ricky she heard that the man’s wife had been coming to the reservoir every day.

The boat approached the body. The policemen reached into the water, dragged the body into the wire basket and pulled the green tarp over him. At the boat ramp, two other policemen helped lift the basket. Ricky was standing near the van and knew they would walk right by him. Part of him wanted to move far away but he couldn’t help but stay where he was. As the basket approached, Ricky could see a hand hanging out from under the tarp. It was swollen and green and kind of looked like the hand of The Mummy, Ricky thought. Then Ricky smelled it – the same as when he and his father found the dead dog wrapped in newspapers in the woods near their house. They put the basket with the tarp in back of the van, closed the doors and drove away.

The next day at school, everybody came up to Ricky and his friends and asked them about the body.

“We saw your names in the paper.”

“What did he look like?”

“I heard he had worms on him.”

“Did he smell?”

“My dad said he killed himself because his kid died in Vietnam.”

After a while, Ricky stopped hearing the questions and could only think of the man’s hand.