⌊ ON PURPOSE ⌉

It happened in July, several years back.

      It was a beautiful night. The full moon was up, the crickets were singing. Phil had snagged a bottle of something out of his parents liquor cabinet. I want to say it was vodka but I don’t remember. All I know is it was gross. I don’t think any of us actually drank enough to get a buzz.
      When we parked at Oden we were the only car there. The sun had been down for about an hour but the temperature had hardly dropped. It was hot and humid, and we got it into our heads that it was the perfect time for a swim, so we took off running through the long grass and as we came up into the woods one of us spooked a deer or something. The noise made me jump a bit and that’s when I took a wrong step in one of the mud holes and ate shit. I was running full speed, and the fall was messy. I twisted my ankle, skidded through a snowberry bush and scratched my shin on an old stump.
      Phil kept right on running, but Mikey stopped to help me up. We had a good laugh about the giant skid mark I’d left in the trail and then I told her to go on ahead and I’d catch up. It’s not far from the mud holes to the lake shore. Maybe a couple of minutes on good legs. It probably took me about ten to catch up to them. When I get up on the shore I can see two piles of clothes laying next to the fire ring. The moonlight is bright on the water and I can see Phil and Mikey floating probably about fifty feet off shore. At that point I’m not sure I want to go in. My ankle really hurts and I know those scratches are going to sting in the water. But then I hear Phil and Mikey splashing around out there and I think there’s no way I’m missing this moment. Who knows where any of us will be next year?
      And with that in mind I start stripping down to my underwear. I can hear them having a great time and I’m just so excited to be doing this - so I don’t even bother to take off my socks. Instead I just hobble into the water and it doesn’t even matter that my ankle gives out because I made it. I’m swimming. Night swimming. And it’s exhilarating.
This is my first night swim at Oden, but I’ve been here a thousand times in the daylight. Even in this eerie moonlight, I know my way along the bottom. When I come back up for air I’ve closed a little more than half the distance to the others, but I can tell that something is wrong. There’s a lot less splashing and I can hear Phil half-choking. He’s calling for Mikey, and I have this thought: what if she’d had more to drink than we realized? What if she’s drowning? So I start calling for her too.
      I’m sure she was only under for a few seconds, but it felt like years. When she did surface, she immediately started doing this loud backstroke towards shore, all the while screaming “Something bit me!” … They say a bull shark can survive in fresh water and, well, you don’t grow up around here without occasionally wondering if one might swim hundreds of miles up the Columbia and Pend Oreille rivers just to terrorize Bonner County residents. Why not? Tourists drive hundreds of miles here to do the same thing. Now I’m thinking shark, but I’m also thinking that’s stupid and all the while I’ve been instinctively swimming towards her. I’m almost there when something rips me underwater. It’s dark. Darker than it was on the swim out. Maybe it was mud… or blood… or just the fear. I don’t know. It was like the moonlight just left.
      I can’t see anything but I can feel it clamping onto my right leg just above the ankle. I start punching at that whole area and somewhere in the flurry I must have scored a good hit on the thing because I was suddenly on the surface again. That’s when the pain hit me. It felt like my ankle had been ripped open by a saw blade. I’m crying. I’m yelling. And every time my face goes underwater I can taste the blood that I know must be coming from me. I can hear Phil asking if I’m alright but I know the answer is probably no and I’m too terrified to think about it so I just yell back that he needs to get Mikey to shore.

I’m the best swimmer here…

Phil is the worst…

      But the bottom here is a really gentle slope. I know he’ll be able to stand soon. That’s good, but what am I going to do? I have one mutilated ankle, and one that’s just sprained, and I’ve lost one of my socks. My sock! If I can get go shore, I think, I can use my sock as a tourniquet to stop the blood loss. I reach my arm out to swim and that’s when the thing grabs my left forearm. My right hand shoots out and grabs for a body, but it’s so slimy that it slips and catches the spine of a fin. Not a shark. It’s some kind of huge fish.
      I ball my left hand up into a fist and pull. I can feel everything in my arm being torn open and I know I’m probably dead, but I’m not giving up without a fight. I clap my right hand around the other side of the head and then jab my whole finger into the eye socket. It worked. The jaws release, and at the same time my left foot lands on a rock. I push myself toward shore and then somehow I’m on land. Phil is standing over me. He’s got the sock wrapped around my forearm and he’s torquing it down hard with a stick.
      That’s all I remember. I blacked out after that. When I woke up I was in a hospital bed. How Phil got Mikey and I out of there I’ll never know. He doesn’t like to talk about it. But he did tell me one thing. He said that, as he was pulling me out of the shallows, the fish came for me one more time. It was at least six feet long, and well over a hundred pounds. He’d pulled me out just in time, but in the moonlight he could see that it was a pike. He said that when he looked at it, it looked right back at him, and its one good eye shone red in the moonlight.