Horsethief Lake

Some cities cause you to lose your head.

Maybe it isn’t the city. Maybe it’s Ava.

In Sturgis, South Dakota, chains of pine trees fill the land and the intense smell of sausages and pancakes permeates everything, even Finn’s flannel shirt, the one Ava didn’t want Finn to wear, because it made him look like an old man. Sometimes they laughed about that. Ava hated that oily smell in her clothes. But she didn’t mind it in Finn’s clothes. So she’s held onto that one shirt.

Children in cut-off t-shirts run around with red-white-and-blue rocket popsicles slipping out of their mouths with every lick, constantly rotating out of reach, dripping. The children run around the grounds, kicking the dirt up off the floor. Ava gives them a dirty look, then she takes a deep breath.

Ava parks the SUV she’s rented and walks to the lobby of the hotel, with two immense oak columns holding up the building. She feels Finn run his index finger up her arm almost to her elbow. She feels something move inside her. She always wanted him to be as aware of everything just as she was, aware of every damn thing around. And he was abiding.

Then he spoke to her.

“This is what it’s about. This place. I can write here. I really can,” she hears him say.

***

He was there to write the story of when they first met, to turn love into an artifact, to steep something in history, to make something his and only his. He had rewritten it eight times. He vowed there wouldn’t be a ninth. There wasn’t a ninth. Finn isn’t really there. Finn is instead, everywhere now. Everywhere since Horsethief Lake.

For some reason, they were lost here, the two of them, they were on the Earth but not, they were themselves but not. They were in the state of fir trees packed tightly together, lake water a deep blue green, and the people walking around like they didn’t know they lived in grandeur, in majestic splendor.

Finn had said, “This place is a fucking trash hole, right? Did you see that chain gang with the confederate flags?” He always had something to say. This time, she was here alone, wandering through the places they had been to two years ago. She could even smell his cologne, like he had just walked past her, like he had never really left.

Ava does not look forward to the stench of the old wooden furniture in the hotel room. Finn had never minded the pungent scent; and he didn’t mind the big, fat television set with six channels; it worked perfectly, letting out subtle and constant distraction with its background noise.

The most important memory for Ava is Mount Rushmore. The most important memories are the ones you simply cannot forget.

Ava left their room wearing a red, black and white flannel shirt with a pocket on the left. It had a rather big hole at the bottom, so she couldn’t put anything inside it. No sticks of gum, no candies, no mints. Around her waist, she’d tied a green, blue and white flannel shirt, colors clashing, but she didn’t care. Already they had looked at her strangely when she arrived to check in. They remembered her. They remembered her from the past. They remembered her picture from the newspaper. Sturgis was not often reported on.

At eight thirty, a high sodium breakfast made her stomach bloat, and the smell of buffalo sausage frying blew in from the diner upstairs.

Ava’s hair, which was clean at first and smelled like peaches and lavender, was soon smelling like shit, the pleasant smell gone from the sweat and humidity of the day, not to mention the smoke from the kitchen: early lunch preparations of barbecued buffalo meat from the Ponderosa restaurant.

The mystery of Sturgis, South Dakota lingered within Ava: the city had no meaning for Finn or Ava before 2009. Their first meeting gave Sturgis a shape, an outline of a place they would remember for years to come. South Dakota was a two-word name for a place that didn’t really exist until you got there. Now, two years later and for forever, it was a place of horror and Finn was gone.

They met at a Guns ‘n Roses concert in 2009 at the Hollywood Palladium. When Finn saw Ava for the first time standing at the bar in the lobby before the show had started, elbows leaning against the makeshift counter, he opened the conversation by telling her that “Estranged” was hands down the best song Guns ‘n Roses had ever written and that she couldn’t argue with it. Then he bought her a twelve-dollar beer.

His adamant personality would linger with her, like the grease off of a potato chip, long after everything transpired, long after everything was gone.

***

In August, the next year, Finn and Ava arrived in Rapid City. They had no idea where they’d gone. One Ticketmaster purchase, one reservation at the Palmer Gulch resort (the only one that had good reviews online) and several Google map searches later, they came to relive the past, like that one evening in L.A. when a good night consisted of music and beer and cigarettes, back to back.

The four days they spent at the Palmer Gulch was absent of cocktails with the tiny umbrellas sticking out of them, and there were no beaches; their presence there would confirm the spontaneity of the trip altogether. Clearly, they hadn’t planned to come here. The city had beckoned them to this part of the country: a place with deep gurgling lakes and blankets of land covered with tossed pine cones. Youthful adventurousness inhabited their insides as they had traveled over a heap of states to listen to the rock n’ roll that moved through the spaces between the leaves of the trees, the music that moved through their bones. That’s the way they had both described it to each other back in 2009, as they waited for their warm beers. Music was the connective tissue.

The beginning of the relationship wasn’t easy. “We have to talk”, he would tell her. And she always had the same response.

“About what?”

What she really wanted to add to that question, but never did, were the words “this time”. He was infamous for his talks. They would occur once a month; if he’d had a bad week, the talks came more frequently. One of the bad talks went like this: Finn was shaving in the bathroom, cream on his face in patches, facial hair all over the counter. Ava sat at an angle on their bed, an angle that showed Ava a side of Finn she hadn’t really looked at before. She placed her finger on an old globe they kept on the nightstand, the sheen of the ball had worn off, and parts of the world were missing. She spun it away and Finn spoke.

“It’s too intense.”

“What’s too intense?” Ava was good at acting stupid. It delayed the pain.

“Everything. It’s everything that’s happening here.” Finn swirled his hand in a counter- clockwise motion, like he was a cotton candy salesman at the county fair, twirling a paper baton in a sugar machine.

This was the talk where he told her he was confused, again, how he didn’t know what direction they were headed in, and how would he ever make her happy? Really, what he was trying to tell her was that he was going to disappoint her. He was always trying to warn her that soon, he would be running away from her, and she could never see it. Why couldn’t she see it?

He doesn’t say it.

Say it.

It would take several hours for Ava to glean that one thing from a million little things Finn blurted out that seemed to make not one bit of sense but which would later come together like an epiphany, a bunch of realizations being bundled together with twine. Finally, the words he uttered started to make sense, he began putting them in a somewhat comprehensible order, he reminded her of that time they took the train to Santa Barbara to go wine-tasting, muttering something about how he felt they were invincible when they were away from everything they knew at home, how he was afraid to love and love too hard.

Ava thought to herself, in another life, you must have been mine, it isn’t going to be this one. Finn was silent. He’d finished telling the story. Ava had finished listening. They both awkwardly waited for the other to say something, anything. Ava’s eyes watched Finn. She looked from the corners of her eyes; they almost hurt.

“Let’s go to that one place for breakfast.” Finn was good at changing subjects.

“That one place? Where?” Ava’s tone became meaner.

“The one with that red-headed waitress. The one that gave us the free muffins.”

“She gave us muffins once. Just once. She gave you the muffins, anyway.

“I deserved it. The eggs were runny. I don’t like the eggs runny.” Finn used his hands to talk often.

Ava mumbled, “Who the fuck cares? Let them run.”

“I didn’t hear you.”

“That’s okay.” It wasn’t really okay. But Ava said it anyway.

***

A sense of doom waited in South Dakota. It was there, hiding under a rock, in a crevice, under the lake, somewhere deep below, undiscovered but present. The future waited to be played like an accordion, unfolding and opening very slowly, spilling things out of itself into the surroundings. Something waited to be found out, something waited to destroy Ava. And Finn too.

She hoped that in Sturgis, they would come to remember where the two of them had begun, a place where they could listen to rock ‘n roll and fuck in the parking lot after the show, flinging crickets off of their bodies when they landed on their bare skin, where they could breathe in the Earth, deep down in their lungs, where they could love and love on.

They would be in the long chain of trees, linked together, tying Sturgis together almost literally, confining whatever events occurred there, to that specific space, hidden in the creases between the trees connecting Sturgis to Hill City, because as it happened, had the concert been anywhere else, they may have ended up somewhere else altogether. Had they not been where they were, maybe Finn would still be here. Had they, had they, had they.

***

Ava came with preconceived notions of what would happen there, how the two of them would be received, if that Welcome to South Dakota sign was just a fake, a big fat farce of an invitation. It’s not like anyone knew them. It’s not like they cared. Ava, with her long, rich, blue-black hair, Finn with his soft, bright brown swirls, Ava thinking, what the fuck are we doing in this place? How did we get here?

Big Billy’s Burger Bonanza- here the scent of hundreds of pounds of grilled ground meat and cheap tequila filled the stadium where the concert would be taking place. No one important had performed yet, at least not important to them. Ava and Finn walked into the uneven grounds of the Rock ‘n Rev festival happening on a field with plastic roofs, that looked like it stretched on forever, past the horizon, past the state line even, where they would be greeted by thousands of bikers, thousands of men and women on Harleys, some of them having traveled for days on their bikes to get here, to gather together, show off their stuff, talk, discuss the stitching on their leather jackets. The sunlight pierced their skin, but a warm breeze cooled the sweat on their bodies. Ava thought, and under all that leather, whew, what must be going on there? Finn and Ava didn’t know what to expect because they hadn’t expected anything at all; they hardly knew where they were. But there was something exciting about all of it. Just to be, in the middle of nowhere.

They handed their tickets to the guy at the front entrance, and from a distance, they both saw a gargantuan main stage getting prepped to shred the eardrums of a couple of thousand music lovers. At the center of the field, a large tent that could have housed a circus was set up, complete with stripper poles, dancers in glittery bikinis, hair teased with entire cans of hair spray. What this has to do with music, I’ll never know.

“We should drink something,” Ava said.

Neither of them drank heavily, but when Finn told Ava to drive, she had insight into how the rest of the night would play out. What appeared to Ava to be his letting go, his letting loose, was really his confusion about her, saying we can take all the shots we want, and act young, act reckless now, but how long will this last?

After four shots of Jägermeister, they didn’t know who they were; there’s something about the outdoors, somewhere where you’ve never been before, that makes you believe, stupidly, that you’re not going to get as drunk as you think: teenagers sneaking out on Saturday night for a concert, college kids giving the frat party a chance though it was invite only, but one thing was certain: everyone was there in Dakota passionately riding to hear Axl Rose scream his way through four o’ clock in the morning, through the hills and the mountains of this place that seemed to house nothing but nothingness. The air was thick and rich with a fever Ava could not seem to shake away. He was going to leave her. Wasn’t he?

Another shot.

The concert had begun and it didn’t phase Finn or Ava that their skin was salty and sweaty and moist, run down from the sun and the alcohol seeping respectively in and out of their pores. She hadn’t wanted to use the porta potty, disgusted with the stench of other people, by the way everyone seemed to forget their humanness, becoming raw and animalistic. They were here for the music: the sheer chaos of that much noise traveling to that many ears and piercing every particle of sound and air near them, had the ability to give one an escape, a portal for forgetting, an art someone had created that somehow gathered people from all walks of Earth and spun them into one center, one place on the planet where sound traveled openly, in and out of the ears, in and out of the body, leaving traces of grace wherever it could.

The ground shook through the night all the way to 1:15 a.m., when the band, notorious for a late stage, decided they were ready to come on. Bits of soil were constantly being kicked up each time someone moved to the left or right, rather, each time someone was pushed over to make way for the expanding mosh pit. And when all the lights went down at 1:17, a roar began unlike anything Finn and Ava had ever heard. There was a beauty in that roar, a pure passion Ava once remembers that housed itself inside Finn’s body, but which had left his spirit slowly ever since the beginning of their relationship. Ava was a stray carrying a sign around her neck that said Had Home, Need Love.

She would often think, our love doesn’t seem like the crumbling kind. But it kept crumbling.

***

Breakfast happened at noon the next morning. They each had two mugs of black coffee as the staff at the hotel restaurant gave them dirty looks for having come down to breakfast so late. All the good stuff was gone, all the greasy fried food that would have absorbed all of the cheap tequila they had consumed at the concert the night before, was cleaned out.

As Ava considered asking the staff to brew more coffee for her, seated at one of the tables, one foot on the floor, one foot resting against the chair across from her, her eyes wandering the room, catching quick glimpses of peeling, floral wallpaper and fake topiary plants, Finn came to Ava like he had an announcement.

“I know we both feel like shit, but I have an idea. We should do something today. I just talked to the guy up front.”

The idea was to go sightseeing. They went to Mount Rushmore. They saw something they hadn’t planned to see. They saw impermeable parts of the Earth, fashioned into something, impossible stones made possible. And as if the mountain was as important as their relationship somehow, the long walk from the parking lot to the stairs to the entrance lined with flags from all over the country, all little places, hindrances from actually getting there, building anticipation with every forward motion, represented for Ava a long, unnecessary journey with a pained man, a journey she didn’t want or have to take, but did.

Finn and Ava walked through the museum at Rushmore. Dark hallways and focused lighting gave them the impression that they were, in that moment, steeped in history, just like the faces on the stone mountains.

He took a photograph of her; they documented parts of their trip. Ava would probably make a scrapbook out of the few photos they remembered to take.

***

Finn asked if Ava wanted a photo by the lake they had accidentally discovered on their way back from Rushmore. The sun shone blazingly, and their skin glistened from the heat. Something was already turning inside her. She thought, do something, say something. You bring it up this time, Ava thought. You bring up the possibility of demise, for god’s sake.

Finn mused, isn't it curious that a picture only shows a glimpse between present and memory? He stepped down the path lined with some of the boulders that served as a kind of border around this massive lake just because they had wanted to stop driving, because they wanted to rest their tired legs. On the way down, Ava spotted a sign, covered with dirt and dust. She rubbed it with her hand, wiping it away.

“Looks like this place is called Horsethief Lake. Interesting name.”

The two of them, stepping on stones, reminded Ava of their first walk together near Seal Beach in California a few weeks into their discovery of one another; the sand was much softer, everything was gentler and newer. Finn had helped her down the steep edges of the cliff by the water then, he had waited for her patiently. This time, this time it looked like he wasn’t waiting. He just went on, trusting the Earth to keep them both steady and grounded, separate from one another, and Ava would be okay, he thought. She’ll be alright.

They continued down the path from where they had parked the rental, with stones, shrubs, and weeds prickling their calves on the way, like small reminders of nature, consuming them as their trip progressed. By the end of the day, Ava’s legs were crisscrossed red with cuts; she hadn’t felt them as they dug their way into the thin layers of her skin, but they showed on her, they seriously showed, and they were ugly, and raw.

Ava’s stomach turned: it must have been the chewy buffalo meat, like rubber tires, fried in grease. It might have been her feeling like shit for the way he was ignoring her.

She thought maybe she would say something to Finn, like here, look, this is how much I love you, this burst of heat I feel emanating from my skin, my pores, something no one can see but I can feel, it’s real. Maybe if I hold his hand, he’ll feel it, and I don’t have to say anything at all, she thought. But just then, right then, the moment she extended her hand toward him, motioning to him, suggesting that they sit for a moment, their feet resting on the tired Earth, he pushed her hand upward, tossing it aside; her fingers folded backwards painfully. She made a sound that came out like awh. The sound of rupture and sadness colliding together, like a new sound created right at that moment, coming into existence, its point of entry, the present moment. She thought of the insanity of the soul, it losing itself to the things it’s told it’s meant to feel to feel complete.

Heavy breaths took over. Her lungs filled themselves with air and fear, every feeling began to swirl inside her. She imagined liberation, the kind of liberation that comes from unburdening and unhinging the soul from the ropes it has tied itself to, and it hit her suddenly.

It hit her suddenly.

She could let him go.

***

The depths of Horsethief frightened her. The murky waters were a horror; not knowing what was underneath always was. The algae, rooted deep in the water, hid itself from the light of the Sun, the light that shows everything.

She told herself go with it. Be here. Go with it. Think the worst and just let it go.

Just then, and just like that, her imagination took over, and she called forth an image of him. The image, with its colors and Horsethief and the swaying trees and the sounds of brook trout splashing in and out of the water at a distance, was now not only in her mind, it was in front of her. It was happening. Jack’s legs became twisted in the thick, braided kelp that appeared to almost pull him down.

He was in the water and he couldn’t breathe.

He probably thinks you’re standing there watching him, his arms flailing, you screeching, your eardrums blasting, boom, boom, from the sheer power of your voice. You’re running after him, you’re running after him, he probably thinks you’re running after him now, into the water after him, however deep it is, bravely, like a savior, like a total fearless savior, but you’re nothing of the kind. Maybe you never were. A woman, yes, savior, no.

Maybe you never could be.

With the click of a switch in a piece of Ava’s mind, she accepted a thought of horror. And what happened after the event is that she wanted it to disappear, she didn’t want to be haunted, and yet now, she doesn’t try hard enough to forget, she can’t try to put it away like folded laundry.

***

The highway told them where they were going, where they were headed, but definitely not of that moment. The highway told them what was to come, names of roads, exits, passes and detours, but it could not predict the insane quickness of peace turning to horror. The road no more told Ava about herself than her heart did. Her heart held the root of everything: hate, fear, monstrosity, desire, disappointment, of all things Finn. Her heart had become the grayest part of her, the brightest parts of her having withered away.

What if he’s in the murky waters now still, thinking about Ava standing there, judging her still behavior? But Finn is going under now. He’s going down, not because Ava is not helping him, but because he doesn’t know how to save himself.

He didn’t know how.

She didn’t know how.

She couldn’t.

Now, Ava looks at the kids at the Palmer Gulch; they are screaming, kicking dirt, pulling hair, saying stupid shit, eating ice cream. Inside Ava is screaming and thinking... is it ever going to be okay again?

After Horsethief, time only moved backward, and Finn was reduced to a memory of horror and tragedy, no longer defined by his love, but by the accident. The water will tell Finn’s tale of submersion, unfairly; it will leave out the parts that are magic. And in Ava’s mind, every part of Finn was magic, even the unenchanting parts. The lake would not define him, she told herself, the lake would not define him.

Her next thought? Run there now.

Her next move? Wait.

Wait.

But what the fuck are you waiting for, Ava? Go get him.

So he went under, and she stood there. The green lake water filled up every square inch of his body. His eyes hardly stayed open. He slapped his arms down at the water, pushing it off of him; he just wanted to survive. He just wanted to live to see another day.

All Ava thinks now is that he’s angry with her, that he doesn’t want her in his life anymore, if there’s going to be life after this at all, life after Horsethief.

Now, a spark comes.

In her imagination, the sunlight hits the water at an angle, blinding Ava and Finn, both of them at the same time. Ava thinks that the same ray of light in its prismatic tendency, is trying to lead them both to each other: Ava to Finn. The light is telling her to move closer to him, that there’s something there that’s worth saving. When you love a lot, you lie a lot to yourself, that the love will save you, will save him, but is it saving him now, when he needs it the most?

The run factor hits Ava. She launches up from out of her rocky seat. Finn is screaming, but the sounds are muffled and low. When will they be freed from the Earth’s heavy ways? From Finn having to face his most primal fear, and Ava from having to face hers, the burden of rescuer. It occurs to Ava now, that this time, in this memory, she will save him. She will run. She will go for it.

And if Ava tries to leave this memory in the mountains, in the lake, in South Dakota, in the middle of nowhere, the wind will still bring forth remnants of stories come undone, of stories unraveling right now, Finn’s whispers in her ear, his forehead sticking to Ava’s cheek, that part of her face where the hairline begins and the line of the eye extends, the part no one has a name for, but it exists anyway. And just like Ava doesn’t have a name for this story, for what’s happening, it exists anyway.

Some lakes snag you, right at the heart of you. They take you in, collecting pieces of you, drop by drop, injecting you into the liquid that tells you, hey, you’re never gonna forget this, and hey, don’t even try. But Ava will try. She will change the story every time she retells it, substituting words for new ones, hoping that new arrangements bring newness. But like a palindrome, she will always be the same backwards as forwards, murderous or not, it is within her.

He’s gone under now.

He’s going.

He’s gone.

***

Finn’s ears are still full of that murky green water, fluids having taken over the better part of his head. He can’t hear Ava. She screams. She screams loudly.

The lake is still with him, with Ava. She carries it wherever she goes. And who blames whom for the drowning? It consumes Ava, consumes Finn, and what once seemed like a balance, a body buoying atop an infinite wet abyss, becomes chaos: the body becomes the abyss, and Ava loses everything.

Ava stands in the lobby of the Palmer Gulch. She’s just parked the SUV, and the staff is looking at her strangely. They are surprised she is back here, that she would want to be back here. They feel terrible for her. They are saddened by her.

They remember how they tried to console her when the police brought her back to her room that day, how she was frozen, her eyes glazed and horrified.

The lake is still with her, and maybe it always will be.

“I’m checking in,” Ava says calmly, and just like that, Finn is back, reaching both arms out to Ava, searching for a glimmer of hope.