Up Through the Water (6 page)

SEVEN

MTV

S
nowflakes and
stars, no color really, just shapes suggesting silver or white made by the pressure of his fingertips on his eyes. Lila was stretched out next to him. Her head rested on the tab of a huge Miller beer—and her arms and legs sprawled over the towel's edge. “Never?” he said pressing harder.

“You know I've heard of ‘em. The channel we get from Nags Head just has drag racing and reruns. Every time I turn it on, those cars that look like water bugs are rounding the track.”

“Too bad,” Eddie said, fingering the swimsuit his mother had bought him: long shorts, with a drawstring waist and bright shapes floating in canary yellow. He remembered his favorite video: Sting messing up a ballroom, then following a blonde into a Rolls-Royce.

“What's so great about them?” Lila asked.

“They're like movies,” he said, “but better, the best part of movies, when stuff is happening and there's music.”

“I like listening to music,” Lila said, her eyes closed. Tiny beads of sweat gathered on her upper lip and brow. “What's so great about getting a few more channels?”

“MTV is not a TV channel,” Eddie said.

“You turn it on the dial, don't you? It's little color and light particles in the air like all the others.”

“I can't explain it.” He shook his head, leaned back on his palm tree-patterned towel, and put his sunglasses back on. “It's beyond words.” Eddie saw a thin and unshaven rock star, diamond stud in one ear, singing to her. “They're like dreams,” he said.

“Not any I've had,” Lila said and turned her head.

“Take my word for it.”

“Does your mother?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“If they're all that great, I'd bet she'd like them,” Lila said. She started talking about his mom the way she always did, as though she were some sort of magical person, different from everyone else on the island.

Eddie half listened; he looked down to the public beach where kids in the surf caught tame waves as far up the sand as their father's feet. Sometimes in Tennessee—the ground covered with snow, his dog Sebastian sending wet puffs up in front of him, the ice-covered trees tingling like angels—Eddie would wonder about Ocracoke and the island winters there. He'd daydream about high waves drenching his mother's house, the water sitting for days till it froze and encased things: the red bathroom trash can with the British hunters on it; the bag of oranges near the refrigerator; his mother's soft leather sandals with the darker sunken spot for each toe. But rising water wasn't really what he worried about. He thought mostly of her and how restless she would be during the winter rainstorms. He wondered if she missed him. It bothered Eddie that she never asked to see him in the winters. He wondered if she drank too much, if she was careful in the ocean, and what the men she was with were like.

Eddie interrupted Lila and asked her what it was like on the island in the winter.

“You never listen to me,” she said.

“Yeah, I do.”

“You act like I'm some kind of ape or something,” Lila said.

Eddie thought of her being a delicate baby ape. Like the tiny monkeys in lace dresses he'd seen on talk shows.

“Everything closes,” Lila said, “and we all sit around and stare at each other.”

Gulls were edging closer. With heads cocked they eyed the sweaty Coke cans and bag of chips.

‘'I'm sorry,” Eddie said. He waited for her to answer. “Want to come to my house tonight? I got some beers. And my mother won't be back until late—she's deep-sea fishing.”

“Sure,” Lila said lazily. “I got nothing better to do.” As if she just thought of it, Lila leaned up and moved her lips close to his ear. “I heard they found that pony.”

Eddie said, “No one knows . . .”

“Just you and me,” Lila said, lying back down. They were quiet a moment. “If you want, we could go to the lighthouse after.”

“Really?”

“My father helped paint it last year and he still has keys.”

“But let's drink the beers first at my house.”

“Okay.”

She got up quickly and went to the water. He followed, thinking of it like a movie: high steps through the waves, then in slow motion diving into the sea.

“The waves come in sevens,” Lila said. She breaststroked toward his open hand. Eddie pulled her to his lap where she floated light as balsa wood above his knees. She noticed his hair curled up around his face and how the longer pieces on the back of his neck waved. “Do you ever tell lies?” she said.

“No,” he said, looking way off to the blurry horizon. But swift as a good pin, he thought of the time he was caught shoplifting albums under his shirt, and how the cellophane had stuck to his chest. Also the fibs he'd told this summer, mostly to tourist girls, that he played tight end at college, had been an extra in a movie.

“I do, all the time,” she said.

“Why?” Eddie said. He held her as gently as possible. Cigarette-thin fish turned together toward them, their pale underwater legs an obstacle, then the school formed like geese and headed back to shore.

“Nearly everything I say is a lie,” Lila said, her arms in a loose ribbon around Eddie's neck. “I just start going and I see whatever I'm talking about like usual. But then it has on a new dress, or a green ring, or maybe the words somebody said are funnier.”

“Lying's for kids,” Eddie said.

Lila said, “Your mother lies.”

“She never lied to me,” Eddie said, seeing thousands of his mother's lies coming out from her mouth in written words as if she was a sword swallower pulling out a hundred swords.

Lila snuggled her head into Eddie's neck. He liked the easy motion of the waves breaking behind them. His mother still had a few bruises the color of bird eggs and one heart-shaped scab on her temple. He put his cheek to Lila's wet hair. “Meet me at the dock tonight. Then we'll go to my house.”

“Then to the lighthouse,” Lila said. She slipped her arm down around his waist and they floated, pulled by the ocean but anchored underwater by Eddie's toes sunk into liquid sand.

*  *  *

Eddie rode his skateboard into the few funnels of street lamp light and through the dark connecting spaces of night. He pumped fast in jeans, black high-tops, and a
BOBCAT
sweatshirt. He rolled off the asphalt and onto the cement walk. At the first dock, Lila sat swaying her feet above the water. Around her the lit cabins of boats shined like lanterns. He watched her in the picture of sailboats, dark sky, and water.

Island boys cruised by in a jeep; he heard empty beer cans rattling between their legs and saw a green-tattooed arm and cigarettes in a shirt rolled over a muscular bicep.

He watched Lila. He liked how she lay on her stomach in the sun with her little fists curved under her hip bones. She said things that were hard to forget, that swung round in him like a pebble in a hubcap.

Eddie picked up his board and walked under the big, dark sky. He thought of the time when he was thirteen in the church with a girl who reminded him of Lila. They found the open side door of the local Methodist church and lay toe to toe in the center pew, the long stained glass windows deep with royal blues, ocean greens, and burgundy. It was the girl who had suggested that they strip down to underwear and lie still, catching holy light through glass figures of Jesus, John the Baptist, Moses, and Mary. His head rested on his jeans. Eddie remembered her body and his in a hazy aura and how he tried to make out her breasts and then the altar up ahead, just one hanging candle showing deep tones in the velvet fairlane.

“You're late,” Lila yelled up from the dock. He heard a cling-clang crawling sound and saw a pail of crabs. In her hands was the white cord she teased them with. Over the edge he saw crabs clawing on a barnacled dock post. The dock smelled of charcoal, a lazy banjo tune tinkled from a sailboat anchored in the inlet, and a cluster of tourists in lawn chairs were settled near their rocking boats. They drank gin from mismatched glasses and talked sleepily among themselves. “I almost got one,” Lila said, hand over long-fingered hand, pulling the string up. “It's a baby,” she said. She wriggled the line and let it drop.

“Ready?” Eddie said. The banjo notes drifted over the water. The crabs crawled over each other to get out. He wanted to be home where the beers were on ice. He'd made his bed and selected a few tapes, piling all his laundry discreetly in the closet.

“I knew a boy off one of these boats,” she said. “He was going to play the clarinet in a circus band. He had this tune he was thinking would be perfect for the elephant routine. And another one for the poodles.”

“I saw a circus,” Eddie said, picking up the pail and leading her away. “This lady in a sparkly bikini did tricks on a high bar. No safety net or anything. It was like she'd jump right into your lap. The program said she was afraid of city traffic.” He slipped an arm around her waist. “Isn't that weird?”

“Yeah,” Lila said. “It's like my father. He's out in the ocean with his pound nets every day but he can hardly swim.” She matched her body to his stride. The lighthouse shone like a candle on the trees of the wild side of the island.

Eddie asked if she had the keys. Lila nodded. “I almost snagged the ones for my father's truck, too.”

“That would've been great.”

“Yeah,” Lila said, “but he keeps them with him most of the time.” She stopped and looked carefully at him. “Don't think anything is going to happen.” She put her hand into his jeans pocket.

Eddie heard a crab scratch. He heard his heart like a tom-tom in his head and he felt her pulse through her fingers.

“I've had beer before,” Lila said as they sat on his bed popping two of the assorted brands, some green bottles with fancy labels, a few cans, all sneaked from the restaurant. They leaned against the wall of his bedroom, light only from the tape deck. He gulped his beer, embarrassed by the purple beads his mother had strung across the doorway and pulled to one side with a shoelace. The room was paneled gray barn color with a matching twin bed and dresser wedged in and had a view of the porch chair swing moving slightly through sheer curtains.

“I drank a six once. Threw up for three days,” Lila said. Her dice earrings rocked. Eddie put his hand on her knee.

The crabs they'd put on the stove earlier plopped and tangled in the big kitchen pot.

“Why?” Eddie asked, eyeing the racing magazines in piles by the bed and remembering the one smuggled
Playboy
down near the bottom.

“I was bored,” Lila said. “It was at a bonfire on the beach. Everybody else was either passed out, or making out.”

Eddie got a tall brown bottle. “Dark's stronger,” he said, putting his hand back on her knee and thinking of the scars there, a design like fishhooks and question marks. Like an instrument in its velvet cradle, the small dark room seemed to fit them perfectly. She leaned onto his shoulder and Eddie felt little mad-scientist currents between them. As in the movies he kissed her full on the mouth, then moved an unsure hand to her. There was worry that if it came down to it, he wouldn't know what to do, he would be awkward, and the chance to make love to Lila would crackle and evaporate. His mind ran with scattered bits friends had told him and information he had gotten from other girls.

Lila whispered, “What's that noise?”

Eddie heard crabs, crabs bailing out, a quick claw over the edge and then one by one each hurling its weight over. “Water's not hot enough,” he said.

“They'll get all over your house.” Lila giggled. “Like little trolls.”

“I like it,” Eddie said, pulling her to him and trying to roll them horizontal on the sandy sheets. Crabs continued to jump like paratroopers. Lila's body felt as fragile as the swans glassblowers form. A breeze that smelled of leaves goose-pimpled his legs and blew the curtains inward. He heard drunken voices singing up the road. A man said something about warm water. “That's my mother,” Eddie said and sat up.

Emily sang: “How does it
feel?”
And the man joined in, “To be on your own—”

“That's Birdflower,” Lila said. “What's he doing with her?”

“How am I supposed to know? Maybe they're drunk from the boat,” Eddie said. “Let's go.” He got up and pulled her hand. “Come on.”

“I thought you said your mother was taking a break.”

“Lila, let's go.” Eddie saw his mother up the road under the moon. With her skirt held up she kicked her legs.

They left with a bang of the kitchen door, running fast in the moonlight along the sand road. Eddie slowed only when he could no longer make out the words of his mother's song.

“This is the oldest operating lighthouse on the east coast,” Lila said, fingers pinching her nose, putting on her tour guide voice. The key clicked in the lock and the door opened. Eddie stepped behind her into the complete roundness of the lighthouse. He looked up the spiral stairs to the latchdoor with light around the cracks, as if the sun was on the other side. Their feet made metallic sounds on the stairs. “Around three times,” Lila said, taking Eddie's hand. “For luck.”

He watched her climb the stairs to the light. When Lila turned, her eyes flicked red like dogs in photographs. “We would be dead if we fell,” she said.

Eddie caught his breath.

“What's with you?”

“Nothing,” Eddie said.

“My grandmother said one keeper fell and that he deserved it because he was drunk.”

Eddie dragged a hand on the cool wall. “Did he break his legs?”

“Both legs were folded under like a doll's,” Lila said and pushed the wooden door open.

They climbed into a round room with windows. Three giant bulbs in cone-shaped silver reflectors elevated in the middle spun and flashed. “Like a spaceship, I always think,” Lila said as she walked to the side with the view of the Atlantic. Eddie thought of sea captains in heavy wool coats with velvet collars looking up to the light on shore. Maybe in a split second, this one captain in his boat, at the wheel near Bermuda or farther, would see Lila and him leaning against each other by the window. Eddie looked down to the jagged shoreline, rocks below thinning threads of water.