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the boat, rocking it slightly. Jude tried to get comfortable but was sweating, and now the mosquitoes smelled him and swarmed. The silence was eerie because he remembered the lake as a dense tapestry of sound, the click and whirr of the sandhill cranes, the cicadas, the owls, the mysterious subhuman cries too distant to identify. He had wanted to connect with something, something he had lost, but it wasn’t here.
    He gave up. But when he sat up to row himself back, both oars had slid loose from their locks and floated off. They lay ten feet away, caught in the duckweed.
    The water thickly hid its danger, but he knew what was there. There were the alligators, their knobby eyes even now watching him. He’d seen one with his binoculars from the bedroom the other day that was at least fourteen feet long. He felt it somewhere nearby now. And though this was no longer prairie, there were still a few snakes, cottonmouths, copperheads, pygmies under the leaf rot at the edge of the lake. There was the water itself, superheated until it hosted flagellates that enter the nose and infect the brain, an infinity of the minuscule eatingaway. There was the burning sun above and the mosquitoes feeding on his blood. There was the silence. He wouldn’t swim in this terrifying mess. He stood, agitated, and felt the boat slide a few inches from under him, and he sat down hard, clinging to the gunwales. He was a hundred feet offshore on a breathless day. He would not be blown to shore. He would be stuck here forever; his wife would come home in two days to find his corpse floating in its johnboat. He drank some water to calm himself. When he decided to remember algorithms in his head, their savor had stolen away.
    For now, there were silent birds and sun and mosquitoes; below, a world of slinking predators. In the delicate cup of the johnboat, he was alone. He closed his eyes and felt his heart beat in his ears.
    He had never had the time to be seized by doubt. Now all he had was time. Hours dripped past. He sweated. He was ill. The sun only grew hotter, and there was no respite, no shade.
    Jude drifted off to sleep, and when he woke, he knew that if he opened his eyes, he would see his father sitting in the bow, glowering. Terrible son, Jude was, to ruin what his father loved best. The ancient fear rose in him, and he swallowed it as well as he could with his dry throat. He would not open his eyes, he wouldn’t give the old man the satisfaction.
    Go away, he said. Leave me be. His voice inside his head was only a rumble.
    His father waited, patient and silent, a dark dense mass at the end of the boat.
    I’m not like you, Dad, Jude said later. I don’t prefer snakes to people.
    The sun pushed down; the smell on the air was his father’s smell. Jude breathed from his mouth.
    Even later, he said, You were a nasty, unhappy man. And I always hated you.
    But this seemed harsh, and he said, I didn’t completely mean that.
    He thought of this lake. He thought of how his father would see Jude’s life. Such a delicate ecosystem, so precisely calibrated, in the end destroyed by Jude’s careful parceling of love, of land. Greed, the university’s gobble. Those scaled creatures, killed. The awe in his father’s voice that day they went out gathering moccasins; the bright, sharp love inside Jude, long ago, when he had loved numbers. Jude’s promise was unfulfilled, the choices made not the passionate ones. Jude had been safe.
    And still, here he was. Alone as his father was when he died in that tent. Isolated. Sunbattered. Old.
    He thought in despair of diving into the perilous water, and how he probably deserved being bitten. But then the wind picked up and began pushing him back across the lake, toward his house. When he opened his eyes, his father wasn’t with him, but the house loomed over the bow, ramshackle, too huge, a crazy person’s place. He averted his eyes, unable to bear it now. The sun