That Actor Who Drowned

by M.C. Schmidt

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​    They found his dogs on the bank, unharmed, staring across the lake. Their coats were scruffy from the swim, but they had dried. The first responders knelt and consoled them, joining in watching the meditative bob of the empty pond prowler.

    The similar thing to Stevie was that they never found the body. The difference was that the actor was a grown man, while Stevie was only thirteen, just like I was then. 

    I didn’t know of the actor before he went missing. That happens when you get old, the falling out of touch with things, the inclination of it all to move on without you. 

    After learning that he was lost in Lake Champlain, I watched all four seasons of the musical television series that made him famous. He had a wonderful voice, and of course he was beautiful. A charming, if modestly talented, actor. 

    It was silly, probably, my newfound devotion to him. An old man’s late-life fandom. I didn’t consider if it was healthy for me to sit through all those hours of campy television. I think I just wanted to feel like I was a part of the tragedy without having to leave Montreal. 


    I met Stevie in the summer of 1970. A year after the moon and Stonewall. The year the Beatles broke up and Bowie broke through. My grandfather had died from angina that March, and a week before school let out, my mother announced that she would be sending me to Colchester for the summer break. I was to make myself useful to my grandmother by doing “men’s work” on the farm. When pressed for what that meant specifically, she only shrugged and said that Nana was old, that it was my duty as the first grandson. We weren’t close to her. I had a child’s recollection of the farm from a family reunion a number of years previous, a time when a field was something to run through rather than seed and mow, when stalled animals were to be ogled and taunted rather than fed and exercised and milked, when all of life hummed along through the work of unseen caretakers, and it was none of my business.

    The fit I threw was halfhearted. My mother was already sleeping with Terry by then, and he had all but moved in with us. I’ve known crueler men in the decades since, but in 1970, when I was a perpetually discomfited child, he didn’t need to be violent or emotionally abusive to reign as the significant villain in my life. It was enough that his gaze identified me as a peculiar sort of creature whose taxonomy was suspect and undesirable. It was enough that he was defining the contours of my life without first bothering to get to know me. I was mortified by the idea of forced physical labor, but there was nothing I was leaving behind that felt like it belonged to me.

    Mom put me on a Greyhound early one Saturday morning. She spent the drive to the bus station drilling me about what I would do when it was time to change buses in Newcomb, forcing me to repeat her instructions again and again. “You should have brought your Polaroid in case you see Champ,” she said when we were sitting in the lot watching buses pile up outside the building, waiting for mine. “He’s not as famous as the Loch Ness Monster, but he’s right there in Lake Champlain, right in Nana’s backyard. Or so they say.” She opened her eyes comically wide to emphasize the enticing mystery of that non-existent plesiosaur as if I were a much smaller kid, as if she wasn’t putting me on a bus to get rid of me for eight weeks. I pretended to read the bus numbers again until I felt her look away to reread them too.

    My expectations of a solo Greyhound trip were informed by the one time I travelled alone by plane to visit my father. I was please to find bus travel more to my liking--no cooing, perfumed stewardesses leaning close with their Cheshire grins to tell me I was being so very brave, no bored businessmen seeking me out for corny jokes and unnecessary reassurances that a certain midflight jostle was nothing to be concerned about. Perhaps it was more common to see children travelling alone on the bus lines, or maybe the lives of Greyhound travelers left them preoccupied with their own troubles and unwilling to take on those of an unaccompanied child. In either case, I reveled in those hours of anonymity.

    When the bus arrived at the Newcomb station, I departed. When it was time to transfer, I transferred. I arrived in Colchester a little before seven in the evening. Nana met me with a tight smile and a brief hug before ushering me to a rusty green Dodge truck that was pocked with dents and caked in dried mud.

    I was a narrow, wispy boy, of average height for my age, but I still stood a few inches taller than her. She was broadly built with a stubborn left leg that caused her to toddle when she walked. We rode, unbelted, on the Dodge’s bench seat. Her hands, gripping the steering wheel, were those of a man--square and rough and thick-fingered. I hid my own in dainty fists on my lap.

    “I reckon you’re starved, so I saved you a plate,” she said, watching the road. “What time does your mom put supper out?”

    “I don’t know. Different times, I guess.”

    “Different times, you guess?” She whistled through her teeth. “Well, it ain’t that way here. Supper’s at five thirty except for Sundays when I eat at five so I’m in time for Father Landry’s six o’clock service.” 

     “Okay.”

    “Okay or not, that’s how it is. Sundays, I put out cold sandwiches at five on the dot.”

    Businesses became residences. Traffic thinned, and so did the trees, until we entered mile after mile of flat farmland. We never passed Lake Champlain. Either Mom had overstated its closeness or else we were approaching from the opposite direction. Both turned out to be true. I didn’t see the lake in person for another few days, not until I had proven myself useless on the farm and she stopped expecting anything of me that required strength or skill. 

    Even before then, it was clear that Nana didn’t need me. She had a high school boy named Peter working for her over the summer. He was local and strong, and he would arrive at some ungodly hour and be elbows deep in one task or another by the time I came downstairs to find Nana cleaning dishes from the breakfast I missed. Those first few days, she would say something to me like, “You’re still here? When you didn’t come down, I reckoned you ran away. Why don’t you go out to the barn and give Peter a hand?”

    On those first few mornings, I shrugged and did as she asked. I was fine to begin my day on an empty stomach. The most I ever ate at Mom’s was a bowl of Corn Flakes or Kaboom, and only then if there had been a Saturday coupon.

    When I found him that first morning he was in the barn, bent over the open hood of a tractor. I passed the mostly empty stalls and stood apart from him, where I would be in his line of sight. When he finally looked up from his work, he eyed me disinterestedly and asked, “You’re the grandson?’”

    “Yeah.”

    “Have a nice sleep?”

    “I guess.”

    He smiled, softened. “I’m just messing with you. You know anything about engines? This bitch won’t start again.”

    “No.”

​    He wiped sweat from his face with the crook of his arm. He was short and snub nosed with skin that was tanned a deep reddish-brown. His eyes were small, dark beads. Perhaps it was a lack of nutrients in the local water or the effect of hard living, but his physical similarity to Nana made him look much more like her kin than I ever would. “Ever slop a hog?”

    “No.”

    “Milk a cow?”

    “No.”

    “Goddamn, boy. Have you ever seen a cow before? That’s one over there,” he said, pointing. “And that’s a horse beside her. Don’t get confused and try to milk him; he might get to liking it.”

    I glared at him.

    “Don’t get pissy now, I get it. I got a kid brother like you, an indoor kid, weak--or, I mean, not weak, but, like, not...ah, you know what I’m saying.” He slapped his admirable bicep to show what his brother and I lacked. “He’s cool, though. I got no problem with him. There’s plenty of room in the world for guys like me and guys like him, both. The bitch of it, though, is that I’m the one that’s got to show you the ropes around here, and that kind of intrudes on my good thing. I don’t know if you can tell, but your grandparents sort of ran this place into the ground. There’s just about enough work for one guy, and that gig’s already mine.” 

    I glanced around at the dilapidated barn and then back at Peter. “Don’t worry about it then,” I said. There was an upturned crate a few feet from the barn door. I turned and sat down on it. It creaked and shifted but held.

    Peter eyed me around the side of the truck. “Nah,” he said after further consideration, “if the old gal wants you to work, then we ought to find something for you to do. Something easy. Wallace needs fed. Why don’t you give him his breakfast?” He pointed in the direction of the only stalled horse in the barn. It was poking it head out, watching us. Broken down or not, it looked enormous and alarming.

    “What do I feed it?”

    “Fuck a duck,” Peter sighed before explaining that there was grain in a barrel by the open barn doors and a feedbag on what looked to me like a railroad spike hammered into the wall. 

    I rose from the crate with an expression meant to suggest that the task was beneath me, that I was a city kid, bred for more sophisticated pursuits.

    
    For the next two mornings, Nana sent me out to assist Peter. I weeded the vegetable garden, swept out the barn, refilled water troughs, and hammered nails into the railing of a fence I was ostensibly mending.

    On the fourth morning, she only wished me a terse greeting from her place at the sink. I stood, awaiting instruction, but none came. “Should I find Peter?” I asked her finally.

    “If it suits you.”

    Perhaps he’d said something, or she may have just seen enough to write me off as a lost cause, a boy so soft that he could not be toughened. Nana was a farmer and thought in the farm’s stark terms of life and death, and from that day forward she was as curt with me as a mother cat that’s pushed aside an unviable kitten to preserve the strength of her litter.

    Still, I wandered out to find Peter in the grass on the far side of the barn, washing the tractor’s tires with a bucket and sponge. When he saw me approaching, he said, “Just finishing up here. Sorry, man, but I think this is about the only easy thing I got going on today.” 

    Had I been a boy in a film, I would have dug in my heels and proven them wrong; I would have ended my story by riding a horse that even the older boy couldn’t break or lassoing the most dreadful bull at the rodeo for the payoff of a brusque nod of approval from Nana, her red-rimmed eyes crying tears of pride. I wasn’t that boy, though. “Screw this crap,” I said and started back toward the house.

    “Hold up,” Peter called after me, rising from a crouch and flinging his sponge into the bucket. It slapped and then floated on the surface of the grassy water. “I thought maybe you’d might want to go hang with my kid brother today. I told him to come by. I said to walk over later in the morning since I know you like to sleep in.”

    “It’s eight-fifteen.”

    “Right, so he should be by any time. I’ll tell you what, man,” he said, closing the distance between us, “you’ll actually be doing me a favor. I can’t take much more of the folks scolding him for never leaving the house. It’s the same damn thing every night. They--” He rose up on his toes to peer around me, something in the distance having caught his eye.

    I turned and saw the figure of a boy in the distance, heading up Nana’s long gravel driveway. 

    “He’s a nice kid,” Peter assured me as we watched him. “He don’t say much, though. Not much I understand, anyway.” He laughed at his own thick-headedness, a kind and patronizing gesture. When his brother was close, he called, “Gosh, Stevie, I can’t even look at you with the sun shining on that pale skin. Like to burn out my eyeballs.” He made a visor across his brow with his hand. 

    “Har, har, thug” Stevie said. He came to a stop at a distance from us. 

    Peter put his fists on his hips and looked from one to the other of us. “Well,” he said, “I got work to do. You boys keep out of trouble, now.” He kicked up a cloud of dust when he walked off with his bucket. 

    Stevie sniffed and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand, then he dropped the hand and held it at his side before bringing it to his nose again. “Goddamn allergies,” he said, though I suspected it was a tick of social discomfort. He had that creaky voice common among adolescent boys, making him sound like he was perpetually recovering from some recent bout of violent shouting. His nose, itchy or not, was thin and fine, unlike the snub nose of his brother, but they shared the same small, black eyes. To me, he resembled Roddy McDowell circa My Friend Flicka, though encountering him on Nana’s farm likely influenced my appraisal. When I think of him now, it’s young Roddy’s face I see.


    The actor had almost definitely drowned.

    He was single when he went missing, but he had a child from a previous partner, a girl, Kaitlyn. She looked to be three or four from the recent online photos of them together. There was one I liked in particular--a paparazzi shot of them holding hands as they walked together down a New York sidewalk, each of them holding an ice cream cone. They wore matching denim jackets. 

    I’m not religious, but I’ve had a lifelong OCD compulsion to go down on my knees first thing in the morning and then again as my last act at night. Likely, this is how I’ll die--unable to get up from my knees, an atheist starving to death in his bathroom due to his stubborn desire to commune with a faintly rendered God. I added Kaitlyn to my prayer, joining Stevie and so many others. I wondered, as I did, if it would be better for so young a child to simply forget her father entirely rather than spend her life missing him. 


    Peter was wrong when he said Stevie was a quiet kid. As we walked along the shoulder of the town’s main road, he talked and talked. Complaining about Peter, mostly, and their parents. He was into comics but had to hide them due to some Christian objection I only pretended to understand.

    “Do you smoke?” he asked me.

    “No.”

    “Me either. I don’t have any way of getting them. My mom quit because she says it’s bad for your health. That’s bull, though. Even Fred Astaire smoked, and he was a world-class dancer. People around here don’t know shit. Have you found that to be true of this place?”

    “I don’t know. I haven’t talked to anyone. Only your brother and Nana.”

    “Well, Peter for sure doesn’t know shit. Your nana either, probably, if she comes from here. Do you have a girlfriend where you live?”

    I shook my head, but he was walking ahead of me and didn’t see it.

    “Women are bad news, so I hope you don’t. Do you like monsters? Dracula, Wolfman, the Mummy?”

    “They’re fine,” I said. “I watched some of them on TV when I was a kid.”

    He stopped walking then turned to face me. His expression was challenging. “When you were a kid, you probably just didn’t understand them. You’ve probably never even seen the real ones anyway. The Vengeance of She? Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed? They make them in England. They don’t play around here, of course, on account of they’re too sexy. But I have a cousin in the city who tells me about them, and I read about them in the magazines. She says she’s going to pick me up and take me back with her to see Taste of the Blood of Dracula as soon as it gets released. Christopher Lee, he’s the real Dracula. He’s got real sex appeal. Not like that shoe-polish-haired Lugosi.”

    I flitted my eyes away from him. “Are we actually headed somewhere?” I asked. It came out sounding harsh and condemning of his leadership, which was probably how I intended it.

     He frowned and I saw that he had a little divot of a scar on his chin in the shape of a sesame seed. It was impossible for me to look him in the eye. “Well, where would you like to go, your grace?”

    “How should I know? I just don’t want to walk on this road.”

    “Do you have money? Do you have a car?”

    I didn’t respond because the answers were obvious.

    “Exactly.”

    “We could go to Lake Champlain,” I suggested. I wasn’t particularly interested in seeing it. It was only a suggestion to stop his scrutinizing stare.

    “Well, it is close enough to walk,” he allowed, but then he shook his head. “Nah, it’ll be too busy. I have a good swimming spot that not a lot of people know about, but it isn’t worth it with summer tourists. We could go tonight, maybe. It’s better swimming at night anyway. You’re more likely to see Champ at night too.”

    “Never mind,” I said. “I’m just going to head back.”

    “Ah, what, are you afraid?” He was sneering unnaturally, like a mimicry of bullying but with no teeth behind it. It occurred to me that his school life was likely as lonely and fraught as my own.

    “Champ isn’t real. I’m not going to sneak out to look for something that isn’t even real.”

    He put his hands on his hips and smiled. He was standing too close to me when a woman drove by in a Datsun. She turned her head, keeping her eyes on us as she passed. “Well, I’d tell you I’ve seen him myself, but you’d probably just call me a liar. I can show you, though. Sometimes he comes to that secret spot I mentioned. I think he likes that it’s out of the way. And, anyway, you’d be sneaking out for the fun of it. If you see Champ, then that’s just a bonus.” When I didn’t respond, he put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. The appealing warmth of it through my thin t-shirt overcame my reflex to pull away. “You never know, it might change your life.”


    There were no hotels available near Lake Champlain due to the public’s morbid interest in the missing actor. I supposed that I was one of them too, a ghoul. With some hesitation, I reached out to a cousin, the inheritor of Nana’s farm who was nearly as old as Nana herself had been in the summer of 1970. We caught up. It had been years. She told me about life without her husband who had died in a car accident a few years earlier. She was in good spirits and was enthusiastic when I suggested that I come out and stay with her for a few days so we could catch up. She told me things were crazy around there lately on account of “some Hollywood type” drowning in the lake. I didn’t respond. I waited instead to see if she would draw a comparison to Stevie, who I imagined she’d refer to as “your little friend,” or something similarly anonymizing. She must not have known, though, because she didn’t say a word about him. We agreed that I would come around for three or four days the following week. I didn’t know her at all--her politics, her prejudices. Still, I told her I couldn’t wait.


​    Sneaking out of Nana’s house was no problem. She was a farmer, and she slept as hard as she worked. I navigated the unfamiliar stairs then stepped out through the back door into a night which was balmy and still. Beyond Nana’s porch, the world was dark and endless. Crickets sang. June bugs tacked against the kitchen window seeking heat from the Christmas tree bulb that flickered in the plastic candle on the other side of the glass. I walked to the end of the gravel driveway and waited for what would happen next.

    When Stevie arrived, neither of us spoke. I followed him across Nana’s property in a direction I had never been. We moved carefully through the fields, between rows of corn that were only as high as our knees. All the while, we kept silent. I wasn’t sure where her acreages ended and another’s began, when my subterfuge became trespassing. I can’t say now how far we walked, only that it was farther than I had ever remembered walking before. I doubt it was much more than a mile. A cluster of trees on the horizon became our lode star. In time, we arrived at those trees and entered them, and I could hear the burble of the lake water somewhere to my left. It was then that Stevie’s temperament shifted. During our long, silent march I felt that we were united, a platoon of two, equal in our misbehavior, headed toward a shared mission. We arrived at a particular clearing where he stopped abruptly and turned to me. We nearly collided.

    “What’s wrong?” I asked, breaking the spell of our long silence.

    “This is it, but you’ve got to tell me something before I show you.” It was too dark for me to make out his features.

    “Tell you what?”

    “It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s a secret that no one else knows. I’m showing you my secret place. You’ve got to give me a secret too.”

    “I don’t--”

    “Jesus Christ, come on! Everybody’s got a secret. Fair is fair.”

    I stared past him toward the water, but I couldn’t see it. Somewhere near us an owl was hooting. I took a deep breath. “Back home...I don’t have many friends,” I admitted, overstating the number I realistically had.

    “That’s it? That’s no secret.”

    Perhaps the position of the moon allowed him to see my expression, or he might have realized it some other way, but I hadn’t been sidestepped with this answer. The weight of my admission had left me trembling. 

    “Okay,” he said, wrapping his elbow around my neck and directing me through the opening in the trees, “okay, you gave me a secret, so I’ll show you.”

    The trees ended on a small bluff beneath which, about a foot down, there was a narrow bank of sand that was marred by fallen branches and rocks. Had I sat with my back against the strata of earth and stretched out my legs, my feet would have touched the gently lapping water. Lengthwise, I would have barely had enough space to stretch my body across it.

    “Watch your step,” Stevie said before jumping down. “Isn’t this great?” He immediately stripped out of his shirt and shoes and shorts, down to his underwear. Fearlessly, he marched straight out into the water while I remained between the last of the tress. “Pretty warm,” he called with a shiver in his voice, “Pretty warm.”

​    I stepped awkwardly down onto the sand and watched as he dived under, only to shoot up again like a cork. I could see the glint of his teeth when he smiled. He stepped back onto the beach, wiping a hand down his face and flinging the water out into the night. “Damn, that water feels nice. Are you going to get in?”

    I shrugged, not knowing if he could see it. I couldn’t swim, but I hadn’t told him that.

    “That’s all right. I probably shouldn’t have either, not if we’re hoping to see Champ. It would be just my luck to scare him off.” With the toes of one foot, he quickly arranged his discarded clothes into a pile and sat down on it. I took a seat beside him on the sand, dislodging a rock from underneath me and tossing it into the water. 

    The place felt sacred, and our silence lasted ages. Occasional, we would cock our heads at the sound of the water being broken by creatures much smaller than a sea monster. Sitting invisibly, shoulder to shoulder with Stevie, I was filled with a fever of warm sunlight.

    “Not a lot of people have ever sat where you are right now. I for sure have never shown anyone else, and God knows the fat-asses around here probably couldn’t even fit on this piddling little stretch of beach. We might be the only two people in all of history who’ve ever been to this exact spot. Think about that, would you? It feels like we’re the only people in the world.”

    I agreed that it did. The feeling was marvelous.

    “That’s why when I hear people say, ‘I know Lake Champlain forwards and backwards, and I can tell you for sure there isn’t any monster in it,’ I’m like, ‘Do you know this spot right here? I don’t think you do.’”

    “You’ve really seen him?”

    “A couple of times. Not that anyone would believe me.” I heard him spit a good distance into the water. After a pause, he said, “You know, that secret you said about not having any friends? You can’t let that get you down. I mean, it’s the same around here. Dumb asses and backward hicks. Who cares if that type doesn’t like you? It’s not like that everywhere, though. The day I turn eighteen, I’m going to Hollywood, and I’m going to learn to tap dance and how to do monster makeup for the movies. You think people call you those kind of names in Hollywood? Not likely.”

    I hadn’t told him that they called me names, but I knew the ones he meant. When he realized that I had started to cry, he draped his arm across my back, and I lowered my head onto his shoulder. My hand found its way onto his knee, and he squeezed his legs together, holding it there safely. It was a long time before I was able to calm down and break away from him, and during that time, Champ never came. The water was so still and the night so warm that Stevie finally rose and waded out for a swim, leaving me alone in the dark.


    My cousin had gotten old, just like me, and the farm had left her body hunched. I found her to be surprisingly delightful and on the correct side of most issues as we caught up and discussed the news of the day. We sat at her kitchen table long into my first night back on the farm, drinking rye whisky by candlelight. She brought up the actor and how she’d been accosted by reporters who were seeking the local point of view on the two occasions that she’d gone into town since the tragedy. I realized only after it was too late that it had been more than a decade since I had last taken a drink. I wasn’t sure where the time had gone. The alcohol loosened my tongue, and I told her all about Stevie, how he had waded out that night and never come back, how there had been nothing I could do but stand with water up to my knees, calling his name. She speculated that he had probably gotten snagged on a branch or caught in an undertow and pinned below the surface of the water. I told her how strange I found it that Nana and Peter, of toughened farm stock, had cried for him, while I never did. She squeezed my hand and then lifted it to her mouth and gently kissed it. She asked me why I had really come out to see her. I told her I wasn’t sure.

    The next morning, after helping her with her chores, I drove alone to Lake Champlain. My head was pounding with a hangover but not as terribly as I had feared. I saw only one news van in the lot where I parked, but its crew was missing. I assumed they were having a late breakfast at the café across the street. I had expected to see others like them, but American attention spans were short and there had been no developments since the day the actor went missing. In another week, I might be the only one who still remembered.

​    I took a seat on a bench and stared out across the calm water. I didn’t try to find the spot where I lost Stevie. I would never find it, and I wouldn’t trust my aged knees to navigate that small bluff even if I did. I thought of how Peter had told me later that Stevie had never been a strong swimmer, how he must have been trying to impress me. Even in my old age, I’m not sure what to do with that knowledge.

    In time, I heard a succession of car doors slam behind me. I turned to see a family stepping out of an SUV--a mother, father, and a little boy around eight. The boy ran ahead of his parents, toward me, as they unpacked coolers and floats from their vehicle. The boy sat down heavily beside me on the bench, swinging his legs. On his shirt was a cartoon portrait of a smiling Champ. I turned and waved at the father to show him that there was no problem, and he waved back before continuing with his unpacking.

    “Are you here to see Champ?” I asked the boy.

    “Do you think he’s real?” There was a sticky stain of some kind girding his lower lip.

    “Oh, I know he is. When I was a kid--just a few years older than you--he ate a friend of mine. Don’t let that smile fool you,” I said, nodding toward the cartoon on his shirt, “these waters are dangerous. You’ve got to promise me you’ll stay alert.”

    His eyes went wide. “He did not eat him! Really? You’re lying.”

    “I’m not. Right out there,” I said, pointing, “in that same water. Hard to believe, isn’t it, that it’s the same water from all those years ago?” I continued to stare into the distance, consumed by the thought.

    The boy sprung off the bench when his parents approached, and yelled to them, “Guess what! This man says Champ is real and he ate his friend. In this same water!”

    I looked up and was surprised to see the horrified expressions that had come over his parents’ faces.

   “He said what?” the father asked.

    “That’s sick,” the mother said.

    “Champ isn’t real,” the father said and then his wife repeated it more fervently. 

    It had been years since anyone had looked at me like I was an undesirable other. I smiled at them vacantly and looked away.

    They continued past me toward a handful of small boats that were docked a few yards away, the boy skipping in front, his parents going slower under the burdens of the loads they were carrying. They boarded one of the boats, and in a few minutes, they had backed up and were puttering away from the shore. I snorted rudely at the name painted on the back of their boat, The Christ Saves, still quietly hurt by their judgmental looks. For the rest of his life, when the boy remembered this trip, I would be the crazy liar from whom his parents had protected him. It was the day, he would recall, that he learned that Champ wasn’t real. I sat for some time, watching as their little boat gained speed and ventured out into the open water, and I wished that he was wrong.
 
​  
M.C. Schmidt is a writer from Ohio.

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