lake trout

by Anthony Neil Smith

I dumped Harriet into Grindstone Lake in broad daylight. Pulled my truck off the road, heaved her body bag over my shoulder and away she went. In the state of ten thousand lakes, it’s easy to find one out of the way without another set of eyes watching you for miles and miles.

An honest to god coroner’s body bag. You can buy anything online. I had wrapped her in thick chains, padlocked both ends together, and filled the bag with your basic red bricks, same as every yard behind every working-class home in the Midwest. Zipped the bag, loaded it onto the truck.

After committing Harriet to the deep, I grabbed my fishing pole. The lure was clanging spoons, a lake trout’s preferred bait. I stood at the water’s edge and cast out. Jigged. Reeled in easy. More keeping up appearances than expecting to land one. If someone else drove by, I’d wave. The driver would lift a couple fingers off the wheel and never give me another thought. I was pretty much invisible. A white man in a Vikings cap casting a line on a sunny, clear August afternoon in a cloud of gnats and mosquitoes.

Five minutes passed.

Then seven.

Just when I started to worry, Harriet burst to the surface and gulped air before starting for shore. She wore a black one-piece swimsuit, black water shoes and goggles, her hair braided into a rope. I helped her climb onto shore. In her hand was a mini SCUBA tank.

“How long?”

“Nearly nine.”

“Fuck!” It echoed across the lake. No one could mistake it for a loon. “Eight what?”

I checked the timer on my phone. “I forgot to stop it.”

She grabbed a towel from the truck. “Guess. Eight what?”

“Eight point three-ish.”

She shook her head, wrapped the towel around her shoulders and hugged herself. “Twice now, same time.”

“Better than last week. Down from ten.”

“It’s got to be four. Attention spans are shrinking. No one wants to sit there waiting eight minutes.”

“They can watch their phones while they wait.”

She cut her eyes at me. A real cut, not a funny one. “Let’s go.”

I tossed my pole into the truck bed. We got in the cab. I reached for the keys but she caught my hand. “Forgetting something?”

“Right.” Sheepish grin. I lifted the center console lid, pulled out a pair of handcuffs, and locked myself to the steering wheel.

Harriet hitched her shoulders and pulled her towel tighter. “Good boy.”

We went home.

I’d met her on Tinder.

More like, she’d met me on Tinder. She said I had the “right look.”

“For what?”

“A sexy assistant.”

I peered left, then right. “This a job interview?”

“Maybe.”

“I mean, I appreciate it. I’ve got a job. A good one.”

“I like your jawline, your hair. You’d look amazing in a suit. And out of it. Mm.”

I thought back to my sexual harassment training at work. I wouldn’t report her to HR. She wasn’t exactly my type, but gift horse, etc. Wearing a tight black latex dress, black net-stockings, black shoes, and a deep burgundy lipstick, almost black in these dim lights. Thick mascara. Posh Goth.

Me? Khakis. Flannel shirt. Loafers. Normcore.

So, sexy lady boss treats male secretary like a piece of meat? Play along.

“So, I’m sure you’ve seen my resume. I’m a people person.”

She raised an eyebrow. “People person doesn’t tell me anything about you. What does people person even mean? I need to see you use your skills.”

We faced each other on barstools in a basement speakeasy of a hip Minneapolis Asian joint, her choice. Everyone except me was dressed like a throwback to a black-and-white movie. I thought about Gilda. Rita Hayworth. In the background, the house speaker bubbled synth jazz.

“I’m a creative at a major ad agency in town. I’ve won awards.”

She said, “Do you like magic?”

“Magic?”

“Magic.”

“Card tricks? Abracadabra?”

A smile. She kicked me. The point of her heel stung my shin. “David Copperfield? Penn and Teller?”

“Sure. I like magic.”

She leaned towards me, her dress squeaking against the seat. “Want to learn some tricks?”

We ended up in Harriet’s apartment, me down to my boxer-briefs hunched over with my hands, ankles, and neck chained while she stood back in a leather dominatrix outfit, heels higher and sharper than the ones at the bar. Got a better view of her skin – pale, soft, stretchmarks suggesting she’d once been a fat girl who had slimmed down a ton and loved showing it off.

All around us were props, tricks, toys. A box for sawing someone in half. A vanishing chest. A seven-foot tall X with shackles that belonged in a sex dungeon. A bookcase full of decks of playing cards and hardback magic books. A coat rack with cuffs, restraints and chains hanging from the pegs.

I’d been chained five minutes. Six. Seven. Too long.

“Do you feel helpless?”

“Yes. Yes I do.”

“Would you do anything I tell you if I let you go?”

This made me worry. We hadn’t discussed a safe word, any boundaries. I’d never so much as nibbled nipples on the girls I’d dated. I always asked pretty please for any sort of affection. Trying Tinder was a risk for me. A bold step, my friends told me.

I didn’t feel as bold as I’d hoped.

“Anything.”

Harriet took a walk around me, slow circles. I rotated with her. She examined me like a parrot in a cage.

“You can get out anytime you want.”

“I’d like out, please.”

“There’s no magic word. If you want out, you’ll get out.”

The aches intensified. My head throbbed. Lifting my eyes brought on too much strain. “Harriet, can we stop now, Harriet?”

She stepped behind me. Melded with me. Ran her fingers along my arms. “The locks are an illusion. It’s Magic one-oh-one.”

“Yeah?”

Ran her fingers down my sides, past my underwear, over my erection. I flinched. She kept doing it. Arms shaking, legs cramping.

Her voice in my ear. “If you want out, keep at it. When you free yourself join me in the bedroom.”

“Wait a minute.”

She stepped around front, sneering. “If you’re quick enough, you can catch me in the shower.”

Harriet walked out of the room exactly the way you’d think a woman with a tight grip on your balls might walk out of the room. Soon, the shower began to flow.

I wish I could say I’d joined her in the shower.

Instead, I spent the next two hours hating her. Hating myself. Hating Tinder. Hating magic.

Magic.

I examined the cuffs around my wrists. They felt like heavy-duty steel, but Harriet said I could get out if I wanted to. I took a chance. Clicked the one around my left wrist tighter. As soon as I did it loosened. I slid my wrist through, got both hands free, then checked the other locks. After playing around a bit, both popped open. I could’ve sworn they were real. They were real, just “fixed.” I stretched my arms and legs and abs and neck and nearly wept. Freedom!

In the bedroom, Harriet was already asleep, naked beneath the sheet. Her confidence was a wonder, leaving a stranger alone in her apartment, chained. No telling how I’d feel when I broke out of bondage. Might want to do her harm. How many other men had she “auditioned” this way?

I slipped in beside her and she stirred. “You took longer than I expected.”

I kneaded her shoulder. “It took me awhile to believe in magic.”

“But now you do?”

“Oh yeah, I do.”

She turned, then pulled me closer. “You’re hired.”

For the next six months we worked up an act. Some humor, some sexual tension. Sleight of hand. She taught me as much as I needed to know in order for her to pull off the tricks, but she held back. Guarding her secrets. Not wanting me, a lowly copywriter with a Twin Cities ad company, to usurp her. When she wasn’t paying attention, I memorized the names of the books on her shelves so I could hunt them down for myself. Or, when she left me alone for any reason – a phone call, or to pee – I’d scan another few pages.

“How’d you get into this,” I asked in bed, Harriet’s head down under the covers.

She came up for air. “Now? You want to know now?”

“Seriously. How did you get your start?”

Sad eyes. “My dad. He was a magician. Always had rabbits in his pockets and pigeons up his sleeves. He made a lot of kids happy but died a very poor man.”

I snorted.

“What?”

“You ripped off Temple of Doom. The screechy singer tells Indiana Jones about her grandpa.”

“So sue me.” She shimmied down again, resumed.

I realized – what did I know about her? How could I trust anything she said about her past? How did I even know her name was Harriet? Snooping her apartment didn’t help. There was nothing to connect her to anyone else. No photos, cards, address books, the woman going to great lengths to appear as if she had no history. An elaborate illusion for my sake. A blank slate.

Once we had a couple hours’ worth of tricks, illusions, and funny bits, booking gigs in the Twin Cities was a cinch. She was drop dead gorgeous, I was classically handsome. We had a hip act. Sexy, dangerous. My nights with her on-stage and off were taking over. Excitement and glamour at the venue, passionate S&M in the bedroom. We called the act Scandalous Magic, adding double-entendres, simmering looks, suggestive tricks, and were rewarded graciously for it. We started the show dressed up – her black goth dress and my suit – gradually stripping to nearly nothing by night’s end.

I took leave from my day job to see if we could make a go of it.

Even with the illusions more complex (and expensive), the audiences growing, and the media obsession with us, Harriet – stage name Iris – grew dissatisfied.

“It’s phony. It’s not why I got into this.”

“Everybody knows it’s phony. They don’t care.”

This conversation happened while I was strapped to the X, her dripping candle wax on my magic wand. “We need to up the ante. We need something to send us national. International. A worldwide phenomena.”

For Harriet, it meant becoming a master escape artist.

“No illusions,” she said, riding me after a show, scraping her fingernails across my chest, sweat from her hair dripping into the cuts and burning. “Me. Real locks. Chains. Vaults. Caskets. I’ll escape them all.”

After she climaxed, Harriet slid off me, rested her head on my chest. “We need to David Blaine this shit. We need more drawing power.”

For the first time with her, I felt afraid.

After some small-scale death-defying routines – a water tank onstage, an old-fashioned vault suspended over a “pool of acid,” and one truly risky one, Harriet hanging upside down over a tree chipper, wearing only a thong and pasties – she came up with the Lake Escape.

Count me leery. We already filled seats. We joined a burlesque troupe for a short tour. Casinos wanted us for their theaters. We were more successful than I’d ever expected.

Scandalous Magic went harder. Iris and the Sub. I wore leather and dog collars, sometimes chained to a D-ring at the other side of the stage to “prove” I couldn’t possibly have assisted her escape. A cage shared with a poisonous snake. A casket lifted seventy feet in the air, only to suffer a mishap and fall to the stage, mangled, while Iris swung on one of the wires after her miraculous escape.  

Harriet wanted more.

When I protested, saying there was no way to do this cautiously and competently – too many risk factors, no insurance company would touch it – she’d smile wide. “Dream bigger.”

Then she’d say or do something hurtful. Demeaning. Insult the size of my cock even though she’d had no trouble with it in the past. Deny me kisses. Deny me her body. Lock me in a box for hours on end. Punishment for doubting her.

I can’t say exactly when I morphed from the character of a sub to an actual sub. Harriet was brilliantly smooth about it all. By the time sitting naked in my box with my junk in a chastity cage, peering out at her making breakfast or watching TV was how I spent most of my days, I realized I hadn’t been home in months. I hadn’t paid my bills or checked my bank accounts. I no longer had my cell phone. We were together twenty-four/seven, never alone except in her apartment, chained to something, ready to do her bidding.

I loved it. I loved being her footstool. I loved sucking her lacquered toes and shaving her legs. I adored her pet names for me, like Pippi, Doofus, and Mister Tiny. I begged her to poke her stiletto heel up my ass and knee me in the balls and spank me with her lash.

Obviously I had learned how to pick the locks by now. That wasn’t the point. I kept my chains tight to show Harriet my loyalty.

Wince by wince, it was true love.

Until Gareth came along.

Once we’d practiced the Lake Escape to a tee, Harriet free of the chains and body bag in four minutes eighteen seconds, we were elated. We celebrated in an Uptown diner over Juicy Lucys and milkshakes, brainstorming ways to fill those four terrifying minutes with as much suspense as possible. What if we did it on Lake Superior in winter? Slice a hole into the ice, track her body temperature? Suspend the bag from a crane at a depth of ten feet underwater but once she was clear have the cable snap?

Despite our excitement I couldn’t help but bring up, “Who? Who’s going to let us do this? What television execs in their right minds would okay such a special?”

Harriet sheepishly pulled a business card from her handbag. A very pristine and non-creative business card, a la Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. Should’ve been my first clue.

The card proclaimed Gareth St. John in raised black non-serif type. Beneath, Entertainment Management and a phone number. On the back, his scratchy handwriting: “Titillating! Let me know when you’re ready for the world.”

She revealed Gareth had attended one of ours shows at the behest of one of his famous clients – some Tik-Toker – who’d been astounded. The snippet of our act she’d posted had gone viral. Millions of views. Gareth believed the hype, especially when Harriet, still soaked from the finale’s Aquarium Escape after avoiding being devoured by piranha, outlined our Lake Escape concept.

Where was I during this? Chained inside our dressing room waiting for my lover to set me free.

We arranged a meeting at BANK, the restaurant in the Westin. The three of us had an entire room to ourselves, enough seating at a dark mahogany table for a party of twelve. Gareth was big. Linebacker big. He wore a loud pinstriped suit and vest that cost more than I made in a year. His hair was, I swear, a perm, and his aftershave smelled toxic. Still, he had charisma. He sat at the end, with Harriet and me at his left and right hands, facing each other. He told the waiter, “Bring your best food and wine and don’t stop until I tell you to.”

His name hinted his English hertiage, but until he spoke I didn’t know he’d come from the working class. Manchester. Proud of it. No need to talk like the rich if his wealth allowed him to bend the world to his will. He’d started as a broke teenager with DJs in the industrial wastelands before hacking and slashing his way to major pop acts and stand-up comedians.

“I’d love your magic act to join them. It’s dead good. What a concept. A dom and her sub doing magic. Brilliant!”

“Thanks,” I said. Felt like I needed to say something, as his attention was directed exclusively at Harriet the entire time. “Off the stage, though, I assure you we’re equal partners.”

The disdain on Harriet’s face dropped the room temperature twenty degrees.

Gareth didn’t notice. “Wonderful act. You, my dear, are a woman of beauty, raw sensuality, and wicked talent. Why stop with one submissive? I can give you a troupe of them. Dancers, guinea pigs. Think of all the fun you’d have, sawing through them, drowning them, shooting them, trampling them. To sold out arenas all over the world. Then the grand finale, as you escape from increasingly deadly situations to wild applause!”

He had her. Hooked like one of those lake trout I’d been taunting while she practiced her grand escape. Except Gareth wasn’t using shiny bait. His lure was his own reputation. His belligerent confidence. His rugged beard, deep brown eyes, hard-working hands, broad shoulders. His gaudy but expensive clothes, watch, and hairstyle. His whole glamorous life was the bait.

I kept on, trying to throw him off. “We should talk to some other managers, get other offers,” or “The Sub is a beloved character. Don’t dilute what works,” and “We are a united front.”

But, alas, Harriet swallowed hook, line, and sinker.

Across the table she lifted her chin, closed her eyes for the slightest moment. Her moist burgundy lips began to lift at the corners. A deep laugh in her chest. “I’m flattered, Mr. St. John.”

“Please. Just Gar.”

Watching her fall for him reminded me of our first date. Gilda. Rita Hayworth. An “it” factor no one could replicate. You either had it or you didn’t. Harriet had it. She knew she had it.

I’d almost forgotten what they called Rita Hayworth’s role in Gilda, in several others. A femme fatale.

Seriously. How many dead co-stars had she left along her filmography?

Gareth held a tablet in front of Harriet to sign with her finger. He then turned it to me. Where I thought my name would be, directly under Harriet’s, nothing. Gareth pointed to another line near the bottom.

Witness.

We celebrated the signing.

No. They celebrated. I got drunk.

Gareth regaled her with stories of his famous clients and how she could open for them on tour. He also told her she would have a television special in no time, with the Lake Superior Escape as her crowning achievement.

“Bigger and better!” He bellowed. Yes, bellowed. The dude was all bellowing all the time. The opposite of me in every way.

Eventually he offered me a contract too. I would be “an independent contractor” working for Harriet’s “corporation” with very few benefits and guarantees. They cornered me with it after a show at the Pantages in Minneapolis. When I tried appealing to Harriet, our relationship, our brainchild, she asked Gareth to step out.

Alone, facing each other after another triumph, sweaty and exhausted, Harriet slapped me across the face as hard as she ever had.

“Don’t embarrass me in front of Gar.” Finger in my face, scolding me like a grade-school boy. “You and me, we’re a team. Why do you need your own piece of the company? To use as leverage one day if you decide to leave me?”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

I’d never seen this side of her. This wasn’t dominatrix dirty talk. This was pure rage. “I signed the contract for us. As long as you’re with me, you enjoy all the benefits.”

“It’s our act. It should be fifty–”

Another slap. Brought me to tears.

“Shut up, Pippi. Do you need a reminder of how this works?” Harriet slid her hand up my bare thigh, over my tight leather shorts. At my balls, she gripped. Hard. The pain was beautiful. “Just be glad I said no to more subs. You and me are the act. Understand?”

I nodded. Teeth gritted hard. Throbbing pain.

She let go. “I’ll go tell Gar you’re ready to sign.”

I signed it. Of course I did.

Gareth delivered on his word. We opened for megawatt pop stars and stand-ups. We did interviews with major outlets. We upped the ante every night – nothing to compete with the Lake Escape yet, the event for the year. Dead of winter, Lake Superior.

The act began to change without my input. Subtle at first. Harriet’s lips ripened from burgundy to candy apple. Her wardrobe included more color, more sparkle, less dominatrix. She lightened her hair. The soundtrack to the show shunned The Cure for EDM. I no longer had to strip to my skivvies.

Gareth was taking us mainstream.

Regular people didn’t want to pay a mint to watch master and slave, butch and gimp, leather and lashes. What they wanted was Iris, a stunning beauty and intellect who could fool all the men in the world and make them like it. After shows, Gareth would whisk her away while I was driven back home to chain myself inside my box.

Harriet began spending most of the days away. The few hours offstage I saw her, she was ravenous. Fuck that. She was horny. Angry and horny. If I brought up anything other than me being subservient to her, I paid for it. I ached. I seethed. I throbbed. The welts on my back, chest, and legs stung, then bruised. But at least she wanted me.

The moment I knew my say in the act had ended for good – not even allowed to help plan the illusions and escapes anymore – was when, onstage, I realized something about Harriet I’d missed. She had a tan. A deep, golden tan.

Broke my heart.

I allowed leaving into my thoughts. What if? Where? How? Maybe the ad firm would take me back, especially now after I’d earned a little notoriety. Harriet or someone must’ve been keeping my apartment paid for, right? Or would I return to find someone else living there, all my things tossed to the curb months ago?

I couldn’t do it. My whole life was tied up, literally, with Harriet’s. Leaving was too complicated. Besides, I was – kinda – a star!

Big deal.

One of those nights Harriet stayed out with Gareth at some business meeting or dinner or soiree – sniff sniff, a soiree – I was at Harriet’s as usual. My home now, too, I supposed. Sitting on the couch, reading the next to last book on her shelf, I heard them in the hallway. Gareth’s Jolly Green laugh alongside Harriet’s fire alarm. Both of them laughing like mad.

Once I heard them, I replaced the book on the shelf, shed my t-shirt and shorts, and locked myself in my box. I fit the chastity cage in place and sat cross-legged, waiting for Mistress. Seconds later, they burst inside, the laughs still pouring from them. Pretty drunk, leaning on each other for support.

They must’ve been making out in the elevator. Gareth’s shirt ripped open, his belt loose, hair disheveled, while Harriet held her heels in one hand, the zipper on her dress down, showing her bare, newly amber back.

Harriet shushed Gareth as she stumbled towards my box and leaned close to my hole. Her lipstick had been smeared to her chin. “Hey, Pippi, we got, um, we have a s’prise for you.”

Gin-breath. Flushed cheeks.

“You do, Mistress?”

“Yeah, is gon’ be great, great, aw, baby. Tell him Gar, you tell him.”

He smacked his palms together. “We signed the deal. Fox. The Superior Escape special. We tape in a few months.”

Harriet applauded. Such an adorably sloppy drunk. Usually when she drank herself silly, she wanted me to play the aggressor, the tough guy. But now she had Gareth. He motioned her over and she toppled into him. They kissed. Hard, deep, licking, sucking, biting. I bit my tongue and made it bleed to distract from the gaping sensation of freefall in my chest.

When they finally broke apart, Gareth stared at me, as if he’d only now comprehended that I, a grown man, was sitting naked in a box in my girlfriend’s living room.

“He really is your sub.”

“I told you.”

“I thought you were keeping up appearances for the act. But he’s…really? Anything you tell him to do?”

She let out a deep sigh along with, “Oh, yes, anything.”

I didn’t like where this was headed. “Harriet? Harriet, can we talk alone?”

She snapped her fingers at me. Placed one over her lips, same hand her heels dangled from. “Did I tell you to speak?”

“Harriet.”

“It’s Mistress.”

“Mistress?”

“See?” Rubbing her hand on Gar’s hirsute chest. “Anything.”

Gareth stepped up to my box, peered inside. Massive bulge in his pants. “Well, well, well.”

“You want him to play with us?”

Could be he meant his grin to be playful or sly. To me it was plain evil. “Of course. That’s why he’s here, isn’t it?”

“Mistress?”

I couldn’t see her over Garth’s bulk, his hand now adjusting his crotch, but I heard the jangle of the key to my box. “Let me get his leash.”

Three months would feel like an eternity, spending my evenings a shining star onstage, and my midnights “servicing” my lover and my lover’s lover. I didn’t know how to tell her no, which meant I couldn’t say no to him either. In their afterglow I was sent back to my box shivering and sore while they talked about “our” future in spite of my obvious demotion.

Leaving me out of it was their mistake. It gave me three months to plan. Three months of sleight of hand, distraction, manipulation, and putting all of what I’d learned from Harriet’s magic books to good use. I imagined it all day every day, working through the kinks.

Harriet in a red bikini chained and bound with locks she would not be able to open this time, no matter how flawless the practice attempts had been. Watch her being placed in the bag full of bricks, her body temp reader activated. Lifted by the crane high above, swung out over the frozen lake where a hole had been sawed through the ice. The crane lowered the bag to a depth of ten feet. Underwater cameras beamed a live stream to show the world this was a real escape, not a phony-baloney illusion.

But wait! Four minutes passed. Five. Six. Something was very wrong. Her body temperature plummeted. The bag writhed beneath the surface. The safety director shouted into his walkie-talkie to bring her up now now now. The crane operator began to reel her in.

A moment later, the cable holding the bag snapped like a gunshot. The cameras captured the body bag plummeting into the depths of Superior, faster than the rescue divers could follow.

Tragic.

The world: stunned.

It would be even more stunned when the police discovered Gareth’s fingerprints – literal and metaphorical – on everything. Not to mention the huge bet he had made under another name with an odds maker in Vegas for Harriet to die trying this escape.

Where would I be in all of this? Where would I end up?

The bedsprings creak. Harriet trills. “Should I go get him again?”

Well, it would be like I was never there. The trout that got away.

Photo of Anthony Neil Smith

BIO: Anthony Neil Smith is a novelist, short story writer, and professor in Minnesota. He likes Mexican food, cheap wine, and Italian exploitation flicks. He edits the online zine Revolution John. More at https://linktr.ee/anthonyneilsmith.