WHEN I CAME DOWN HERE I met Gage, and Gage showed me Einshein’s junkyard. Einshein is a large, slovenly man, with two signature looks. One is a chewing tobacco-stained tee shirt that says “I’m With Stupid” even though he’s always by himself, so think about that, and the other, in cold weather, is a flannel shirt and work coat on top of the “I’m With Stupid” tee shirt. He lives out there in a trailer with two bony, ridge-ribbed dogs staked in front. Whenever a car approaches on Einshein’s dirt road the dogs explode wild-eyed in a cloud of dust and clanking chains and spit. The road used to be thickets of poison oak that people drove through on their way deep into the woods to dump their junk. Then Einshein bought the land for nothing and put his trailer down, and made it into a road just by driving back and forth a thousand times with his pickup, hauling junk he’d get for free from dead people’s houses and businesses that had gone under, and later by tow trucks dropping off wrecks. Up on Route 7 where Einshein’s dirt road forks off, he put out a sign that he painted on the hood of an old car and leaned against a post. Einshein Scrap & Dump Road.

My name is Carl Emory. My father’s name was Carl, too. His daddy was Karol, Emr was the last name. Karol was my grandfather, and my great-grandfather was Imre, Imre Emr. Names were funny back then. The old country. People died young back then too, typhus or tooth infection, it could be anything. Imre and his wife Erma died young too but not of natural causes. One night in 1898 when the boy Karol Emr was eight, a fireplace ember floated up from Imre and Erma’s chimney while everyone slept. It mistook itself for a star and took to the air, and then changed its mind and lay down glowing on the dry brush roof of their little house. Shack, whatever it was. Burned the place down with the family inside—only the boy, Karol, escaped. People in town raised up a collection and put the orphan on a boat, and he came to America. I think about that sometimes when I’m out on the lake on my boat, surrounded by water. His parents burned up by fire, and him saved by water.

Before I take the boat out I have to tip it over to dump the rain and whatever else has collected, a snake, a toad. I drag the boat across the grass and into the water. It’s a hulk, rusted out, it leaks; I bought it from Einshein. I have to wade it out a good ten feet before I get in or it’ll lodge with my weight in the muck at the bottom of the brown water. Displacement. The boat goes down when I get in.

Daddy changed our name from Emr to Emmer. The world should be able to spell a man’s name was what he said, meaning a man was to be respected. He had a printing shop: twelve-page local news, bread $1.99, sales, death notices, classifieds by the column inch. Daddy had very fixed ideas. He could smell a lie before you even thought of it. He would not be disrespected in his own home. We owed him that, and he collected. You could not misspell a word in that house. He looked at hard metal letters in wooden cases setting type every day. It was important that words be respected.

When I grew up I changed Emmer to Emory. It wasn’t hard. It didn’t even cost that much. But this is the thing that still makes me laugh. When you change your name they make you put a notice in the paper, in case somebody wants to find you. I sent in the words and my twelve dollars. I think about my father in his print shop hunched over the job case wearing his thick glasses, cigarette ashes falling, setting the type for my ad with broad, calloused fingers. Did he notice my name, his name? He used to amaze us kids by how he could read backwards; tricks of the trade he called it from setting the type. The man was well-informed. Or by then was he just sliding fixed bits of metal in the shape of letters into racks and locking them into place? Did he even notice that there I was right in front of him, leaving him behind? That’s the thing that makes me laugh.

I wonder what it was like back then when Karol sailed across the ocean, water everywhere around him. In the middle of the lake I pull in the oars and set down my can of beer and lay on the metal bottom, water sloshing between the raised metal ribs. All I see is the metal horizon of the boat around me, and sky. Weather. A couple of birds, airplanes up high drifting, silence, glare of sun. It’s quiet, except for the sound of an outboard motor across the lake. I’d like to put an outboard on this boat. Oh I can picture it. The lake slaps against the side of the boat, and I close my eyes.

I wake up and the bottom of the boat is filled with water. That leak I can’t find. Somehow the beer has tipped over too. I raise my head and look over the metal rim of the boat, then lay back down. The sky is bright. I close my eyes and try to go back to sleep. The boat rises and falls on the faint echoes of the distant outboard motor’s wake. I do fall asleep. Eventually I hear the shusshing sound of leaves. The boat’s drifted and settled under the trees next to Gage’s dock. He calls it a dock, but it’s a sad row of planks sagging between floating barrels, roped to a couple of stakes in the mud. One hot day in August, I painted the boat blue. An optimistic color because I was feeling optimistic. Patched the spots where water comes in as well as I could. Earlier that day Einshein had gotten in a big load of scrap. Usually I go with Gage because Einshein likes Gage better than Einshein likes me, but Gage wasn’t around. It didn’t matter because Einshein wasn’t there anyway.

It felt like it was a whole little world back there in Einshein’s woods. Bugs flew in the air and shafts of sunlight cut through shadow. There was the ring of bricks Einshein burned trash in and the three lawn chairs we sat around in, feeding French fries from McDonald’s to the dogs and throwing the garbage into the fire.

The dogs barked, but I had brought French fries with me. I thought I’d just take a look around to see what was new. Einshein had a system for how he sorted his junk into tall heaps, divided by a grid of paths. Up front, for the benefit of the ladies, were kitchen wares and old tabletop appliances, working or not, glass and china in varying states of wholeness. Next came major appliances, scrap lumber, windows, doors, paving stones and garden gnomes, rusted implements, dead power tools. Scrap metal all shapes and sizes. Halfway through there was a porta-potty, padlocked. You had to pay Einshein a quarter to use it. Next to the porta-potty was a rusted metal cabinet whose shelves were filled with pornographic magazines damp with mold.

I peed in the dirt outside the porta-potty. An orange cat with a hanging belly crept away furtively. Past the porta-potty were cars and car parts, and generally speaking things too heavy to move without a piece of equipment, accessible by a rarely used pair of tracks in the weeds. Parallel and separated by a row of rocks was the dirt road to the actual dump, heaps of rotting garbage and plastic cups and cardboard, which was also Einshein’s, since he’d paid off the right people and been awarded a ninety-nine year contract from the township. I waited a week for the paint to dry. My optimism from that day at Einshein’s hadn’t faded. I had seen what I saw at Einshein’s, and I would have it.

We were at Einshein’s drinking beer, swatting mosquitos and watching the dogs roll in the dirt. I didn’t say anything to Einshein and I hadn’t said anything to Gage either, about what I’d found that day I went poking around by myself: a two-stroke outboard motor, baby blue, beautiful, buried in a pile of metal garbage. The prop was a little bent and there was no way to know if it ran, but I had a lucky feeling to it.

We’d been there a little while, enough for three or four beers. “Look at them dogs, would you,” Einshein said. “God damn it makes me laugh the way they itch themselves when the no-see-ums bite. Would you look at that. He’s just about to itch a hole in himself.” He laughed. “Makes me laugh to watch.”

“How long have you had this junk yard, Einshein?” I said.

He looked at me blankly.

“I mean, even for a junk yard, you’ve got nothing here but shit. What have you sold in the last week? Nothing, I’d bet.”

Einshein hawked and spat.

“I mean it. How much did you make this month? Forty bucks? Fifty? And that’s only because people think things work when they don’t.”

A grin spread on Einshein’s paunchy face. “Caveat Emptor.” He smirked. “Nobody around here even knows what it means.”

But I did, that’s how I got my boat from Einshein for two dollars last year. “I’ll pay you the scrap price for the metal,” I had said, and Einshein had bit. When he saw I had caulked it up and put it in the water, he told me I owed him ten dollars more but I laughed. “I didn’t know you were going to sail it,” he had said.

Einshein got up and went to the cooler, and got three more beers. He gave Gage one and gave me one, and we each had to give him a dollar. That was how it worked.

“Never mind,” I said. “I was going to offer you ten bucks for something I saw, because I feel sorry for you. But forget it.”

“I don’t trust you,” Einshein said as he took my dollar for the beer, “whatever it is you saw.” The aluminum structure of his lawn chair creaked when he sat down, and the plastic webbing stretched audibly. “It ain’t for sale whatever it is.”

“Suit yourself,” I said.

Five minutes later I tried again. “I’ll give you fifteen bucks.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But you got to tell me what it is.”

“A man cuts you cards for fifteen bucks,” I said. “You don’t ask to see the card first, do you? You take a chance.”

“You tell me what it is and I’ll tell you yes or no on fifteen dollars.”

“Where’s the fun in that, Einshein?”

“Business ain’t fun, son,” he said, “and this ain’t cards. This,” he said, gesturing toward the cooler full of beers, “is fun. And this is business,” tilting his head toward the piles of junk off to the left, “Come on now.”

I would go to twenty dollars, even twenty-five. That was plenty. It would be a good sale for him.

“OK. Follow me,” I said.

I led Gage and Einshein past the piles, past the porta-potty and the pornography, past mounds of junk that became more and more abstract the further into the woods we went, until we got to where the cars were. When we reached a brown Impala with a crushed front end, I said, “OK,” and pulled open the trunk, which made a loud creak. Einshein and Gage looked at the baby blue outboard motor I had hidden in the trunk. Einshein looked at me. He arched his back and grimaced.

“Twenty dollars,” I said. “I’ll give you twenty dollars for it. It probably doesn’t even work.”

Einshein looked at me for a good ten seconds. “No sale.”

“Oh come on, man,” I said. “That’s just spite.”

“No sir. I’m a businessman. Ain’t no room for spite in business. Not for sale.”

“God damn it. I thought you were in business to make money.”

I’d already painted the boat blue to match the motor.

“A hundred. I’ll give you a hundred dollars. The fucking thing had better work though, or else I’m going to come back here and beat your dogs to death with it.” Gage laughed tentatively, waiting to see if Einshein laughed too. He didn’t and I didn’t either, but I would be respected.

“Don’t you bring my dogs into it,” Einshein said. “And you keep your money.” It wasn’t long after that that Einshein had his heart attack. While he was in the hospital recovering Gage would go over to feed the dogs. I would hear the radio from Gage’s car when he drove past on his way home.

At McDonald’s I bought four super-size French fries. “Put it all in one bag,” I told the girl. “And four Big Macs too.” It was going to be a heyday for those dogs. September. Night. Half a moon. Stars flung everywhere, satellites blinking, planes trickling across the sky. The blue boat is silent. The water reflects the moon. The sky is a black hat pin-pricked with light above the horizon of the boat. The shaft of the baby blue outboard motor angles into water. Gasoline, a smell heavier than air. The bloom on the water, an iridescent trail wavering behind the boat. The sound of a loon. On the edge of the lake, some house lights are on here and there. Someone’s got a fire going. For no reason somebody lights firecrackers. They pop harmlessly, tiny snaps in the far distance. Someone laughs. The sound carries across the water.

I lie in the bottom of the boat, three beers in. The sky is filled with constellations but I pick out my own like I’m the original owner of the universe. I connect the stars into letters like a typesetter, like my father. Connect the dots. E, M, R. That’s in the north quadrant, my grandfather. The south quadrant is my father: E, M, M, E, R. There are two quadrants left. There are enough stars to see any letter I want. But when I go to look for my name my mind goes blank. I don’t know if my name is Emory, or Emmer, or Emr.

One by one the lights on shore flicker off. The lake is like glass. I give three hard pulls on the cord and on the third pull the motor rips to life. I throttle up and the back of the boat drops and the water churns like a small hole has opened in the center of the lake. The front of the boat lunges forward and I shoot off into the dark. I’m in my blue boat. At this hour no one is on the lake. I roar across the lake under the half moon. Spray in my face.

Einshein survived, and returned to the junkyard diminished. I look behind me and note with approval the wake that curls away in white ribbons as I cut left and right in violent arcs, wildly, outrunning myself. I double back to run across the wake, and the boat bangs against it like a hit-and-run. Whomp. I do it again. Whomp. If my father could see me now, from behind the lit ember of his cigarette. He’d know who he was dealing with. Whomp.

It’s all bullshit anyway. What did he think, that I’d come running back when he needed me? Where was the mercy when he could have given it without wanting something in return? He lay there in the hospital for eight days, ten days, who knows how many days, dying slowly. But he knew my name. I saw it written in his own typesetter’s hand, Carl Emory, on the front of the letter he sent when he still had strength to write, when he still could lift his head. Some nameless nurse took it to the mailbox for him. I don’t want to die attended by strangers, the letter said. That’s the thing that really made me laugh. Did he think I wasn’t a stranger? Did he think I’d come running back? Well, I didn’t. By the time the letter found me, he’d been dead three weeks.

Soon I’ll drift off to sleep with the lake rising across my back. Water still seeps into the boat slowly from the lake below. Tomorrow, I’ll pull it up onto the grass and re-caulk it. But for now I am suspended, displacing a small volume with my existence. Contrary to what people think, the body is sixty percent water, not ninety. It’s warm for September. I’ve got three more beers if I wake up thirsty. Loons migrate down here from Canada. I hear a soft rolling splash and one lands near the boat. Einshein’s dogs had the best day of their life, that day. Canis Major and Canis Minor, the dog constellations, are rising in the sky. I haven’t been back to the junkyard.

The surface of the lake is dotted with stars and layered with ripples you can’t see, the echoing aftereffects of all that’s gone before. The boat lifts and dips ever so slightly on the miniature corrugations and on the deeper swells beneath. With my eyes closed it feels like a cradle. I can sleep here as good as anywhere.