I suppose when you're shedding weight, every lost ounce counts.

I guess without us, it was less heavy out there. Dad said it was because she thought me and Dad and the world were holding her down. Two days in the dark and without heat, with the house soon to be repossessed, a blackened head of cabbage and a quarter jug of curdled milk in the useless refrigerator, Dad got rambling fever, and away we went, tires whistling over concrete.Īs we sat parked on the bridge, Dad told me why my mother had left a few months back. We had skipped out on bill collectors two days after we had an interruption in electrical service due to a tardy light bill, as my father called it. We were in our broken-down Buick that had come from a time when cars were big and the American dream lay well within reach for just about anyone white and male and straight who wanted to reach for it. Looking out at the moon on the water, it was obvious how the lake got its name. I was fourteen years old when I learned this, or learned some of it. People were expected to come from miles around to picnic on its shores and fish its depths. The bridge was made of rusty metal and cables and rotting wood, not to mention a few lost dreams, for the town beneath the water had been flooded and the great lake was supposed to be the new town's savior. Me and my dad were parked on a long, narrow bridge that went over the lake. I remember its glow and the way the shadows of the trees on the sides of the lake reached out for it like chocolate fingers groping for a silver platter. My first memory of Moon Lake was as a youngster, on a dark night in October of 1968 with a nearly full moon seeming to float on the surface of the water.

The drive in by joe lansdale