Shining Sea (7 page)

So Meg doesn't want to eat with Mike, because he is ROTC. Mike probably puts up with stuff like that all the time on campus. In fact, if he weren't their brother, Patty Ann and Luke would probably be treating him as though he had a disease, too.

Luke. Where
is
Luke?

“You can bring a plate for Meg later,” she says. “Unless she'd think it would contain
napalm
.”

“Oh, Barbara, never—”

“I was just joking. Listen, is beer okay, June? Something else? We were just finishing a game of hide-and-seek. Practicing for that jungle combat! Luke? Luke!” She turns to Mike. “Where's your brother gone?”

“I'm here,” Luke says ambling around the side of the house, a whiff of sweet smoky aroma accompanying him. He nods at the O'Connors without saying hello, something Michael would have sent him to his room for were he still here. Ronnie doesn't try to be a father to the boys—more like a wise older friend. A friend to all of them. But it's good. Really, it is. No matter what Patty Ann says. The boys like him. Even Sissy tolerates him. It's only Patty Ann who seems to have it out for him. “But I can't find Sissy.”

“Oh, she has a good hiding place. She wouldn't have suggested playing otherwise,” Patty Ann says, rocking baby Sean in her arms. Kenny sits down in the grass and sticks his thumb in his mouth. He was such a sweet baby. Sean is a different story, quieter but fussier. “She's probably been thinking about it for days.”

“Should I put the steaks in the oven to stay hot?” Ronnie asks.

“Sissy!” she shouts. “You've won! Now, come out!”

Evening is starting to fall, just a little bit, just a touch of veil over the sunlight. The smell of the lemon trees winds in and out through the smoke of the barbecue. Where did she put the sparklers? There's no point in arguing with anyone, not today. Not with Luke. Not with Patty Ann. Not with the neighbors' daughter. It's a perfect afternoon, a perfect evening. They're together, still a family.

“Come on, Sissy,” Luke says. “I give up.”

“I'm up here.” Sissy's freckled face leans over the edge of the roof.

“For God's sake, Sissy!” she cries. “How did you get up there?”

Sissy smiles. Her red hair flashes in the late sun. “I flew.”

“T
HIS IS BEAUTIFUL,” THE
girl in the beige bra says, pulling him further and further into the lake, further away from Molly and Eugene. The girl's laughter breaks over him in murky, rhythmic waves. “It's like the river Jordan, man. It's like everything bad that's ever happened is being washed away.”

Somewhere in the near distance, cows are mooing, their moans plaited with the sound of more laughter; farther away guitars, people singing, the concert. Water fills the hollows of his knees, slipping against his naked thighs. Something soft but determined is clutching at his neck, a clinging slopping strangling water lily, a reed, the arms of an octopus. He pulls on it and, when he's finally freed, hands the bandanna to the girl in the beige bra and high white panties, throwing his lanky sunburned seventeen-year-old arms open wide.

The girl swirls the bandanna across the surface of the thick, green water in a trail of purple. She lifts it to write on the sky, and the letters appear as surely as if the cloth and the sky were made of pen and paper:
B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L
. She comes in close and ties the drenched cloth around his forehead, her body a tingle of flesh against his, and her nipples are right there in their beige nets, so close they are fish reaching out to nibble at him. He wants to look away, but his hand glides like an eel through the water. The girl kisses his mouth, makes a peace sign, flips onto her back, and floats away.

Her lips stay on his lips, soft and warm and silky.

He floats as well, first on his stomach, but that's the dead man's float. He turns over and stretches on his back, staring into the sky. The water is a million tiny velvety hands, holding him up, tickling his ribs and thighs and forehead. He shuts his eyes. The lake is a huge mouth, a big silken tongue, swallowing him. Rain is falling again, crystal drops, breaking against his face, hard, hurtful.

The girl in the beige bra is standing over him, her cupped hands spilling water onto his face.

“You're really freakin' out, aren't you?” she says, smiling. “What're you on?”

Her long brown hair snakes over the water. He grabs a mass and swirls it against his wrist. It becomes a paintbrush, the one he used over and over in first grade; the one with his name written on a piece of tape stuck to it. The one he used over and over at Aunt Jeanne's house this summer and last. He paints his wrist, his forearm, his face. Brown of the sand on the beach. Brown of the wood in his guitar. Brown of the seats in the car Aunt Jeanne lent them.

“You're beautiful, man,” the girl says. “What's your name?”

Letting go of her hair, he glides again onto his back. The sky presses down: it throws its arms and legs over him and pushes, like Uranus, the sky god, on top of green-tinted Gaia, the young mother earth, with her voluptuous hills and valleys and bodies of water; he is stuck between the couple, enveloped by their union, Uranus all handsome and masterful and Gaia with stars in her eyes for her new husband with his beard and broad shoulders, or maybe they are reflections of the stars in his eyes.
He looks so kind,
he told Molly when they thumbed through her worn book of Greek mythology, passing a joint back and forth between them. They were alone; Eugene was showing Aunt Jeanne the stuff they've gotten done so far this summer, talking up a storm, working toward Molly asking for the car. Aunt Jeanne's house looked like no one had picked up a hammer or screwdriver or paintbrush for fifteen years before he and Eugene arrived last summer; she teared up when they said they wanted to come back and work for her again this year.

Well,
Molly said about kindly Uranus, before flipping to the next page.
He's getting what he came for.
Molly is the coolest.

Molly?

He stands up in the lake. “Where's Molly?”

The girl sprinkles him with water. “Is Molly your old lady?”

The idea of his cousin being mistaken for his girlfriend rips him up inside. His too-tall, too-funny cousin. Whom he and Eugene should not have brought along with them to Woodstock, because she's a girl and younger and so he's responsible for her and how could he be responsible for anyone? He pats the water, searching for an explanation. His reflection looks back up at him, his deep-set eyes, his wavy chin-length hair wet and plastered against his thin face and sharp cheeks, a trace of stubble on his chin. Almost a man.

But so far from a man. He returns to floating on his back. There's the lake, a big warm mattress. He shakes his head, and water whooshes in his ears.

The girl crouches down next to him, knees tucked up, arms spinning in the water in circles like the wings of a sodden butterfly.

“Sleeping Beauty,” she says. “That's your name.”

“Hey, man! There you are!” It's Eugene, plowing into the water from the shore, a beer in hand, his curly dark hair shining in the sun. Eugene, an arrow shot from real life. Eugene, his best friend since always, his best friend still, though the desert now separates them most of the year, his best friend forever.

Eugene will know where Molly is.

“Are you Sleeping Beauty's friend?” the girl calls out, standing up in the waist-high water, her beautiful breasts emerging, the tips of her long hair emerging, her soft rounded stomach. Now that she has turned her brilliant smile away, toward Eugene, he can look at her face. Her hair is parted in the middle, and her eyes sit light and close in the tent of her hairline. Beneath them, her cheeks are smooth and pale and slightly swollen, as though she has just awoken.

“When the child of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared,” he says too softly to be heard, but she hears something because she turns her smile back on him. “This is Dawn,” he says more loudly to Eugene, splashing his way toward them.

Eugene's dark-haired legs disappear into the silty, khaki-colored lake water.
I'll spill my all-American blood in a rice field,
Eugene said on the drive over to Woodstock, or to Bethel, as it turned out, balling his hands up and pow-powing at the windshield. Eugene's parents won't have the money to pay for college, not even CSU-LA, and Eugene won't have the grades to qualify for a scholarship.
Why doesn't Eugene fuck up enough to have an extra year of high school?
Patty Ann wrote him, but what would be the point? Eugene would either become eligible one year later or get thrown out of high school without having earned even that diploma. If it were that easy half the boys in the US would be actively flunking twelfth grade.

Yessiree, one more for you, Uncle Sam,
Eugene said.
At least I'll die high on Southeast Asian wacky weed. They say it's even better than Acapulco Gold.

FAMILIES FOR PEACE. STOP THE WAR. END THE WAR IN VIETNAM
. A phalanx of signs on the way to the concert grounds, after the grilled local corn stand and before the straw-hat stand.
No coolie hats? No paddy hats?
Eugene shouted at the two girls selling the hats.
Shut up, Eugene,
Molly said, waving her arms like she was fending off horseflies.
Hey, man, just ignore him.

He bundles his hands into fists and rubs his eyes.

When he looks again, the lake is the color of an olive, the kind his mom would slice and mix with cream cheese then spread on slices of bread for his lunch.
That's all I've got in the house right now, Francis,
she'd say back before she married Ronnie. Sometimes it would be jelly. He'd get a scholarship, though, if he had to: there's always a girl willing to help him with a lab or paper, and he has a good memory. But he won't have to now because Ronnie's promised to pay his tuition. He doesn't even have to go to CSU. He can go to UCLA and live in a dorm in Westwood.

Cool,
Eugene said.
I'll be your lowlife townie off-campus connection. Until I get sent over.

Maybe you won't. Or maybe I will. Aunt Jeanne says they're going to change the draft. Anyone will be eligible to get called up—no more deferments.

Maybe, maybe.

Something told him that Eugene was certain only one of them would ever get sent over. And that Eugene was right. At least he himself will still be able to get the one-year student deferment. Eugene could be knee-deep in a rice paddy by then. Or worse.

The girl laughs. “Groovy. I can be Dawn.” She has something in her hand, something white and oval. She rolls it over his collarbone and shoulders. “Soap yourself,” she says. “Wash it all away.”

His hand slides over the suds, gathers them up like shaving cream. He only began shaving this past year, buying the Noxzema and razor himself. Luke saw his face over the breakfast table and hooted:
Little brother's been to the barber! His cheeks look like a baby's butt!
His mom smacked Luke on the head, but she was laughing. He touches his face, fingers the fuzz on his chin that has sprouted overnight. His beard grows faster all the time, lighter blond than the hair on his head. He spreads the soap foam under his arms and over his chest, where hair hasn't started to grow. His hard-on pushes up through the surface of the water, but it feels strangely separate from him, weirdly undemanding.

Come on, Francis,
his ex-girlfriend Joan said when they were still going together.
Come on. It's just love.
Joan, with her long eyelashes and stubby fingers, with her yellow hair, her way of whistling between her teeth when she was thinking.

Joan, who knitted him two sweaters and a vest this winter, each one uglier than the last, who called him on the phone every evening, who always asked what he was thinking.
What are you thinking, Francis? What are you thinking?
That Joan.

You might get, you know…
he told her
. I don't want to get you in trouble.
But that wasn't the real reason he wouldn't do it with her. He watched Joan for weeks after moving to Phoenix before sliding into the seat next to her at the movies, the way her hair slipped over her shoulder, the confident way she poured from test tubes in chemistry class. So focused, so self-sufficient. So independent. But once they were going out, she turned out to be just like Lisa and Susan and Becky and all the girls who followed him around his new high school, made him brownies, slipped him joints, offered to sew patches on his jeans. Acting as though they were giving him something when the truth was they wanted and wanted and wanted. They wanted so much from him. The more Joan brought up doing it, the less he felt able to do it with her even if he tried, even if he wanted to try, and, of course, part of him wanted to, the part of him he held in his hand in the dark at night. But no, because once they did it, Joan would own him.

The hard-on is gone now. He is a tiny thing, a minnow, a tadpole, a worm.

Here is Eugene, a shit-eating grin on his face, offering him a drink of his beer. Eugene! Who cheerfully chases all the Susans and Beckys and Lisas. Who would laugh but not laugh at him over what happened with Joan and what didn't. Who can even find a way to laugh at the possibility of being sent over.

“Eugene, meet Dawn,” he says, touching her long, dripping hair. “And now as Dawn rose…harbinger of light alike to mortals and immortals…”

Eugene laughs his loud laugh. “
The Odyssey
?
The Iliad
?”

“Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles…but not here in Bethel, cause no one is fighting here…”

“
Iliad,
meet rock 'n' roll!” Laughing again, Eugene makes a peace sign, then turns to the girl. “He can remember anything. Like new songs but also math and history and Latin and old Greek myths. We're living with his aunt. She teaches that stuff.”

“Out of sight,” the girl says. “I can dig the old stuff. The old stuff is like old, but new, but old. You know what I mean?”

He lies facedown in the water and floats away, letting the soap suds trail off his skin. Eugene's and the girl's voices become tiny ants crawling through his outer eardrum into his inner eardrum, through his brain. He rolls onto his back, slaps the water, shakes his head. His hand hits something hard—a knee. He looks up into the face of a chanting boy sitting on a surfboard. There are others; they are all crowded on the surfboard, singing. He pushes away from them.

Now he is standing on the edge of the lake, bulrushes tickling his legs, water streaming down his naked body. Someone has laid a cloth of many colors around his shoulders, deep blue with pink and brown and green explosions of paisley all over. But he needs his clothes, his blanket, and the banged-up steel army canteen that once belonged to his father, the black Bakelite stopper attached by a little chain in a way that seemed miraculous when he was younger. He once believed war had to be a magic thing, littering such treasures in its wake—he didn't yet understand that the treasures littered by war are people's lives. Like his father's. Like maybe that of Mike, over in Vietnam right now, or Luke, if their mom can't wrestle him back to school fast, or Eugene. Or maybe of his own self, if the president ends educational exemptions.

Welcome to Woodstock, canteen. Welcome to the sixties.

There are his clothes. The arm of his shirt is thrown back as though waving to him. “I'm sorry, man,” he mumbles, slipping his long, thin legs into his jeans, losing the cloth of many colors. “I wasn't just gonna forget about you.”

Watch out or you'll end up like your uncle Paul,
his mom said one time when he didn't come home for dinner and didn't call, either, when he just couldn't bring himself to join the others. But it always just looks as though he's running away, because he has yet to find anything to run toward. She wouldn't have said that if he could find someplace he belongs. Something he could be good for.

“I wouldn't leave you here,” he says, louder.

Music has started up in the distance, a rumbling echo, and he fumbles his feet into his sneakers, shoves his T-shirt into the back of his pants, picks up his blanket and the canteen, swings the cloth of many colors back around his torso. His movements become swifter and swifter until the cloth trails purple and green through the air in front of him, enveloping him in color, a cocoon of colors, like the blankets their mom wrapped Sissy in when she was still little, blankets worn thin from having swaddled his own baby body before Sissy's, and Luke's and Mike's and Patty Ann's before his.