A Lakeside Tale

I watched the water pour through the jagged crack in the hull and lap on my feet, feeling chagrined more than anything.

“Are you all right?” she cried out. I turned and saw her standing on the dock fifteen, maybe twenty feet away; saw her face, finally, and thought to myself, Holy shit, she’s pretty.

“Yeah, I’m fine. The water’s great.” It was crawling up my ankles now.

She looked at me quizzically. “Are you getting out? Your canoe looks like it’s going to sink.”

“Nah, I’m good. Hey, listen, will you do me a favor?”

“You want me to throw you a line?” She cast about the dock, searching for a rope.

“No. Will you sing something?”

She turned back to me. “What?”

“Sing something. Anything.”

She looked at me blankly. “Umm, why?”

The water was up to my calves. “Is this any time for explanations? C’mon, just sing something.”

She peered at me anxiously. “Why don’t you have a life vest? You can swim, right?”

“Nope. That’s why you have to sing. Now. Before I go under.”

After staring at me a few seconds, she gave a half smile. “You can swim. You wouldn’t be so blasé otherwise.”

Blasé. I was liking her more and more. “Are you going to sing or aren’t you? Look, my canoe’s slipping into the water.”

Her smile was full on now. “You’re insane, you know that?”

The water was starting to soak my cargo shorts. I’d be in the lake in half a minute. “Yeah, and going down with my ship fast. What, you won’t grant a dying man his last wish?”

She shook her head in mock exasperation. Then, after a moment’s thought, she sang:

My Bonnie lies under the ocean

My Bonnie lies under the sea…

Her singing voice was clear, melodious, tinged with mischief – I noted with satisfaction the slight, playful change she made to the lyrics. The canoe, filled with too much water to retain its buoyancy, slid into the depths. I grinned at her as my head sank beneath the waves.

* * *

I had seen her from afar as I paddled along the lakeshore. She was sitting alone on a dock, leaning against a wooden post, her face shaded by a wide-brimmed Havana hat, her eyes by turtle shell sunglasses, her nose buried in a book. Yes, yes, her body was what caught my eye at first. She was fair and long limbed, and the cut-offs and aquamarine bikini top she was wearing revealed and concealed her figure in all sorts of enticing ways. But – honest to God – what drew me in was her face; that is, curiosity over what she looked like, since all I could see were the parts not hidden by the book, the sunglasses, and the shadow cast by her hat. I came in closer to get to a distance and an angle from which I could her face clearly. Since she didn’t even glance up at me as I glided by, I gave up on any pretense at nonchalance and was unabashedly staring at her – so intently that I failed to see the orange warning buoy I had inadvertently steered towards, not noticing it until my canoe had already crunched on the rocks just beneath the surface and scraped over them, mortally wounded.

I hung suspended in the cold water ten feet below in silent contemplation, until my chest began to tighten in its desire for air, and I started swimming up.

* * *

I broke surface with a gasp and with a few strokes covered the distance to the dock. I reached out to grab the overhang and looked up to see her relieved face looking down at me. She said, “Damn, I thought you were dead.”

I combed my dripping hair back, shrugged, and held out my hand. “Would you help me up?”

She crossed her arms, head tilted to one side, lips tightening around a suppressed smile. “Umm, I don’t know. I’m not sure I want a strange guy up here who, one, scares the shit out of me making me think he had drowned, and, two, makes me sing. What was that about?”

I sighed and retracted my hand. “Well… I felt stupid. I was – and I say this totally shamefaced – I was looking at you and didn’t see the rocks until I’d hit them. Since ‘idiot capsizes canoe ogling pretty girl’ makes for a fairly ridiculous story, I thought if you sang to me, I’d at least be able to embellish a little and make it like it was, you know, your singing that made me crash into the rocks.”

“My singing,” she repeated, uncomprehending.

“Yeah, you know. Like the Greek myth.”

After a pause, she said hesitantly, “You mean like the Siren? The Siren’s song?”

I smiled. I was really, really liking her. “Yeah. Stupid, I know.”

Her brow furrowed. “But you crashed before I started singing.”

“Blah-dee-blah. Details are meant to be fudged.”

She looked at me sidelong. There was an almost imperceptible shift about her face, the kind that comes over women when it starts dawning on them that power over a guy was being slipped into their hands. “So, I’m a Siren then? Enchanting seafaring men into a watery grave?”

I gazed up at her, nodding my head slowly. “I think so. I’m still kind of drowning right now.”

“Uh-huh.” She uncrossed her arms. “Okay, good line. And I’ll give you points for creativity. You’ll have a good story to tell your friends.”

“We’ll have a good story to tell our kids,” I said, “about how we met cute.”

She arched her eyebrow. “Oh, really now? And what makes you think that this goes even one step further?”

I grinned. “Because I’m your Bonnie; you said so yourself. And here I am, brought back to you from the sea. Now, will you please help me up?” I said, extending my hand to her again.

(May 2012)

The Siren by John
William Waterhouse