was the latest class any of them had. Deke’s monthly allotment had come in—one of the football-mad alums (the players called them “angels”) saw that he got two hundred a month in cash—and there was a case of beer in the fridge and a new Night Ranger album on Randy’s battered stereo. The four of them set about getting pleasantly oiled. After a while the talk had turned to the end of the long Indian summer they had been enjoying. The radio was predicting flurries for Wednesday. LaVerne had advanced the opinion that weathermen predicting snow flurries in October should be shot, and no one had disagreed.
Rachel said that summers had seemed to last forever when she was girl, but now that she was an adult (“a doddering senile nineteen,” Deke joked, and she kicked his ankle), they got shorter every year. “It seemed like I spent my life out at Cascade Lake,” she said, crossing the decayed kitchen linoleum to the icebox. She peered in, found an Iron City Light hiding behind a stack of blue Tupperware storage boxes (the one in the middle contained some nearly prehistoric chili which was now thickly festooned with mold—Randy was a good student and Deke was a good football player, but neither of them was worth a fart in a noisemaker when it came to housekeeping), and appropriated it. “I can still remember the first time I managed to swim all the way out to the raft. I stayed there for damn near two hours, scared to swim back.”
She sat down next to Deke, who put an arm around her. She smiled, remembering, and Randy suddenly thought she looked like someone famous or semi-famous. He couldn’t quite place the resemblance. It would come to him later, under less pleasant circumstances.
“Finally my brother had to swim out and tow me back on an inner tube. God, he was mad. And I had a sunburn like you wouldn’t believe.”
“The raft’s still out there,” Randy said, mostly to say something. He was aware that LaVerne had been looking at Deke again; just lately it seemed like she looked at Deke a lot.
But now she looked at him. “It’s almost Halloween, Randy. Cascade Beach has been closed since Labor Day.”
“Raft’s probably still out there, though,” Randy said. “We were on the other side of the lake on a geology field trip about three weeks ago and I saw it then. It looked like ...” He shrugged. “.... a little bit of summer that somebody forgot to clean up and put away in the closet until next year.”
He thought they would laugh at that, but no one did—not even Deke.
“Just because it was there last year doesn’t mean it’s still there,” LaVerne said.
“I mentioned it to a guy,” Randy said, finishing his own beer. “Billy DeLois, do you remember him, Deke?”
Deke nodded. “Played second string until he got hurt.”
“Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, he comes from out that way, and he said the guys who own the beach never take it in until the lake’s almost ready to freeze. Just lazy—at least, that’s what he said. He said that some year they’d wait too long and it would get ice-locked.”
He fell silent, remembering how the raft had looked, anchored out there on the lake—a square of bright white wood in all that bright blue autumn water. He remembered how the sound of the barrels under it—that buoyant clunk-clunk sound—had drifted up to them. The sound was soft, but sounds carried well on the still air around the lake. There had been that sound and the sound of crows squabbling over the remnants of some farmer’s harvested garden.
“Snow tomorrow,” Rachel said, getting up as Deke’s hand wandered almost absently down to the upper swell of her breast. She went to the window and looked out. “What a bummer. ”
“I’ll tell you what,” Randy said, “let’s go on out to Cascade Lake. We’ll swim out to the raft, say good-bye to summer, and then swim back. ”
If he hadn’t been half-loaded he never would have made the suggestion, and he certainly didn’t expect anyone to take it seriously. But Deke jumped on it.
“All right! Awesome, Pancho! Fooking awesome!” LaVerne jumped and spilled her beer. But she smiled—the smile made Randy a little uneasy. “Let’s do it!”
“Deke, you’re crazy,” Rachel said, also smiling—but her smile looked a little tentative, a little worried.
“No, I’m going to do it,” Deke said, going for his coat, and with a mixture of dismay and