Glenn Barrett I knew on sight and from his sign, but not to speak to, a man with too many consonants in his name. His is one of but five houses occupied daily among the twenty along this uninhabited shore, a number including me and Obie, the amputee, the mansion-dwellers, Glenn and now Boy, all strung out along what is called the road but is no more than a private lane forking off through the trees from the year-round compound.
The amputee had carved a jade enclosure along the border of the cool mosquito ridden swamp north of us along the road, he was a pleasant and brave man with huge dogs and ancient madras Bermuda shorts and I had taken to waving to him as he sailed along the road swinging between his crutches whenever the dogs ran away.
He always waved cheerfully and precariously back, letting loose of the crutch grip on the backswing of the waving arm, grasping it again just before it wobbled loose on the follow-through.
The mansion-dwellers were as far south as the amputee was north. The half-assed road curves through their compound just before it rises along the hill between the boulders where someone’s poured blacktop like pancake batter over critical patches of the mud and the road narrows like an Alpine highway making each additional hundred yards a pure decision and an occasion for tooting your horn to avoid meeting neighbors head-on.
The mansion-dwellers also always wave cheerfully, although this is perhaps in submission to fate and country engineering rather than out of friendliness. For the road skirts their long porch by something a little larger than the length of a lounging man. They test this clearance with a row of web and aluminum chaise longues and they oil their section of the mud road to keep dust down. If you approach the lake along the road at night, you can view their suppers intimately. They seem to like pasta and bowls of what look like roasted peppers. Word is he’s a teacher somewhere, although he looks like a Sicilian Don, muscular and tan and silver haired, his house alone on the whole lake having grounds and lawns of substance, thus The Mansion.
Boy’s thin house I’ve never seen, and not yet been invited to, although I know by now it’s in the little landing just before the mansion, where five or six lakeside shacks were squeezed into two lots and the doubtful title of “cottages,” each of them seeming to have been re-sided annually in gaily colored roofing paper.