Up Through the Water (8 page)

“Shut up,” John Berry said, watching the sneakers, crab nets, and clam racks, sprawled all over her front porch. A sudden glow came on from inside the bedroom. “She's lit a candle,” he whispered.

Tom moved the car forward, its tires muffled in the sand. Neither spoke till the car was speeding up the island highway, a splinter of moon above. “They're lemon-scented,” John Berry said as he watched the waves beat against the sand.

TEN

NORFOLK

W
e're outta
here,” Birdflower said, his hands on the wheel. “This island doesn't bother me in the winter, but when the tourists start coming out of the woodwork . . .” He shook his head and noticed the tall birds wading in Sugar Creek to their left. Wind sprayed from window to window. Emily watched the town end of the island fade till it was only a few slanted roofs and the top half of the lighthouse. Not since she borrowed John Berry's truck to pick up Eddie in Norfolk had she been off the island. She had been late and he was standing outside, his duffel bag by his feet, leaning against a phone booth. His voice high and breathless, “I thought you'd forgotten me,” he said.

Birdflower zoomed the tape deck fast forward to a whiny finish. He lit a cigarette and plugged the lighter back in. “What if he's on here?”

“He won't be,” she said, her fingertips tracing a seagull-shaped scar at her temple. “Nothing will happen.” Her eyes were focused on the back of the car in front of them, packed so tightly with clothing that a few boxes of cereal and crackers seemed to float up to the glass.

Emily sat in a back booth—a famous landmark map of North Carolina above her head. Birdflower watched her from his spot in line. Fluorescent lights made her skin look olive and patchy. She didn't take the mainland well. Two bare-chested boys in shorts danced near her with a helium balloon. They held it down, then let it go, laughing each time it floated back up. At a table close by, a surfer snuggled with his remarkably pale girlfriend.

Behind the counter a girl bagged burgers. In front of Birdflower was a man and his little girl in a blue bathing suit with a flounced skirt. The cashier pushed his tray forward and the child followed like a duck.

Emily caught his eye, smiled, waved.

Birdflower smiled back, then turned to order. On the ferry trip she'd kept her eyes on the empty cans and paper on the van's floor. She'd shifted in her seat and pinched the skin on her thigh. He'd tried to calm her, offered her weed, played the slow ballads on all his tapes, and finally asked her about being pregnant. It was then that she settled herself and talked quietly about sensations, moods, and how her hair had changed from yellow-white to a tone like goldenrod.

Birdflower listened, but he was preoccupied. He'd seen the ferrymen glare at the van and talk among themselves. He'd watched her and thought how important it was she stay with him. He was worried because he knew styles of men changed with the times. For a while he had been in fashion, sensitive, intuitive; but now women wanted other qualities, discipline, sternness, and money. On the mainland, his situation had been dismal, and that was why Emily seemed so crucial—she didn't seem to care that he'd gone completely out of style.

“This is so weird,” Emily said when he'd sat down. “All these people so close to you.”

“Seems a little barbaric,” Birdflower said. He unwrapped his burger.

“But you miss it,” Emily said. “I mean, these skinny french fries, and who could make a burger like this?” She held up her bun—mustard and ketchup mixed like an ink blot. “Like you could eat one of these anywhere.”

“Comfort in that?” Birdflower asked.

“Kind of,” Emily said, squirting a ketchup pack all over her fries.

The clerk handed him the aqua key ring. “We've tracked people down as far as Texas for stealing stuff. You can have the Bible. But the rest is ours.”

Emily walked out of the motel's office and up the curling cement stairs. On the second floor, Birdflower slipped an arm around her waist. His eyelids looked heavy.

At the first convenience store after the McDonald's—which they had not stopped at but still somehow seemed a marker for him—Birdflower had pulled a rolled plastic bag from under the seat. He puffed, spoke in a held-breath voice, and let the smoke blow against the glass. He turned up his tapes, and again and again raced the reverse to familiar guitar riffs. It wasn't that she didn't like getting high, she appreciated the easing, the slight numbing sensation, the way time lost parameters, and how touching became central and diaphanous as air. But she didn't think Birdflower should smoke so much and he'd gotten so stoned on the trip she'd felt like the only sober one at a drunken high school party.

Her thonged sandal sucked cement. “Why so fast, baby?” Bird, flower said, grabbing her arm. He looked like a retarded man: same slow eyes she'd seen once on a man watching girls pass on the beach.

Outside their door, the pink motel sign came on with a neon click and buzz. ‘'I'm sorry,” Birdflower said. “I'll flush it all if you want.” He put the key in Emily's palm.

She thought of the dusty ride and the ache in the back of her thighs. “I'm taking a bath. Why don't you go get some beer?”

She left Birdflower sitting on the orange-flowered bedspread drawing lines around a blossom. “No more,” she heard him say as the water beat into the motel tub.

“I like bottles,” she yelled, unzipping her jeans, yanking them off by the bottom and testing the water with a long first toe. She pulled her T-shirt off.

Emily settled into the bath, her nipples, belly, and knees floating above water like islands. The island's own well water was too rich in iron for soaking. It stained her skin and left her hair tinted red. Steam rose and water rocked against her hips. She remembered failed vacations from her marriage. The trip would turn as reasonlessly as wind drifts over water: a bad dinner, a flat tire, or a forgotten hairbrush and the whole thing would be ruined. It was harder for them because they lived a vacation.

She turned over on her stomach and thought of the first trip she'd ever taken with Daniel, how she'd wanted it to go well. It was just over the border that she'd mentioned flowers and he'd looked oddly at her, and asked where he was supposed to get them. She'd smudged daisies with her pinky over the window. He pulled over and they looked in the brush on the side of the road. She found two tattered daisies. He found a few fisted morning glories that looked like tissue paper when he held out his hand. Soon after, he had taken a flashlight and gone into the woods. She waited in the car thinking of the irises on the dark side of her parents’ house and the big silky petaled magnolia in the backyard. He returned with nothing and they drove on toward the town they had heard of with the judge who would marry you for five dollars.

The door clicked. “Me,” Birdflower said. A bag rustled and then there was a little gasp from a twist-off beer. Birdflower walked into the bathroom and put a green bottle near her on the tub's edge. He sat across the paper banner of the closed toilet seat. Emily tipped her beer up.

Birdflower looked at his beer, then let his eyes slowly peruse her body. “I want this to be good,” he said. “I've been thinking about it every other minute for days.”

“Have you ever noticed when you're off, it's always like you're a silver minnow in a plastic cup or something?” she said, water lapping back and forth from her toes to her neck.

“We're in the same cup,” he said as he moved to sit on the ledge. He kissed her and with a finger drew a line on her neck up to her ear. His hand moved over her wet hair, which separated and dripped at the shoulders.

Emily thought,
I'll stay with you as long as
I can.

He sat on the bed watching Emily put lotion on her newly shaven legs. She had on a calico sundress and different leather sandals than usual. He was dressed up too, white shirt, open paisley vest, and his jeans were the newer of the two pair he owned. He drank the last beer. It was weird that just two months ago on his birth, day in May he had been so alone. He'd woken early and smoked a joint in bed, watching the tip blend with the rising sun out his window. He made a cake, this year devil's food, sometimes angel: a tradition his mother had started, depending on the behavior of the year. Later, after a quiet day of meditation on his life's odometer turning over, he had dinner and a slice of his cake. When he had finished, pushed his plate forward, and sat back to light a cigarette, he felt that something would have to happen very soon.

“Ready?” she said.

“To hit the town with you,” Birdflower said.

When they got in the van, Emily brushed sand off the seat as though she'd never seen the stuff. He saw them at some low-ceilinged, red-lighted club, fishbowl drinks in front of them with mermaid swizzle sticks. They were quiet and he started thinking about the little house on Lake Michigan his father had left him. A friend had told him a small village had grown up at water's edge. Lately he envisioned them in the back of some bakery there. Her chopping nuts for bread, him pouring batter into muffin tins. He'd told her this a few days ago. She was not as enthusiastic as he had hoped. That scared him. He knew she was like a plant and he worried that if he brought her up there, to the frozen ground, it'd be all over. She might get limp and start asking for water and before you knew it, one morning he would wake up to find a pile of dry leaves next to him in bed. On Ocracoke the cold was different. It blew off the sea instead of moving up from the earth the way it did in the upper peninsula. Last year he'd seen the winter ocean. He'd been stoned and drunk and decided around four in the afternoon to borrow a speedboat and take a look. The water was navy-black and the moving whitecaps reminded him of an old guy's fingertips coming together and then apart, as though the ocean was wringing its hands. Even the few coal-black fish that jumped were shivering: their breath making tiny puffs over the water.

They chose the place because it was red-barn color and had a chain of pink elephants across one side. The bouncer took their money. “Have you seen stuff like this before?” He turned the bill up so that Lincoln eyeballed Emily's breasts.

“Yeah, man. She's seen it all,” Birdtlower said.

The air conditioner hummed and bubbled, filtered and cooled the place as though it was underwater. They let their eyes focus on the wood tables. Birdflower watched the light and movement of the blinking Busch river, the neon Budweiser clocks, and the giant can of Michelob lit on the far wall. As if each had accidentally floated there, lone men scattered the bar. They chose a table and Birdflower left Emily fingering candle wax at the back.

“Piña Coladas are the only faggy drinks we serve,” the bartender said. With his thick fingers he poured powder into a silver shaker. Birdflower looked to a shallow pool in front of the bar. He threw down ten bucks. “You keep fish in that center thing?”

“That there,” the bartender said, “is for mud wrestling.”

Birdflower saw the sheen off the smooth mud. “Big guys?”

The bartender set the drinks down, each with a half-opened paper umbrella. “No,” he said. “Girls. Real live girls.”

On their way to this place, the full moon had sometimes seemed to race the car, other times falling back beyond the trees. It reminded her of the things she'd said, in June, she'd try to figure out. During the varied phases she
had
thought some. But it was hard for Emily to yank herself into thinking like that. Her life worked by brief exchanges. It was a twisting, swerving thing that formed in a familiar but always somewhat remarkable way. The moon had appeared then, and she realized this: No man could save you from any other man. Birdflower was no solution, as she'd been trying to convince herself, for her fear of John Berry.

Birdflower came back with the drinks and sat down. A couple squeezed into the table near them. Emily sucked her straw. The woman was fat, had on blue bell-bottoms and a shirt tied at the midriff with a white tube top underneath. When she saw women like this, so obviously confident with themselves but so different from herself, Emily tried to figure out where she fit in the long arch of females. She saw it like some kind of rainbow, spread not with thin color but with millions of different women. She looked down at her knees, the rough scar like a wild berry on her right and the burn from the lowest rack of the restaurant stove on the left.

Her eyes caught two women in small red bikinis coming out a door near the bar along with a big striped referee penguin walking behind.

“They're going to wrestle,” Birdflower said. He pointed to the threesome lining up by the pit. She watched the women do muscle poses. The referee touched the mud and winked at the men in the front. Emily stared at the small sequined suits. “They look my age,” she said. “You can tell by that crepe paper skin on their upper arms.”

A whistle blew and the jukebox slackened mid-song. Birdflower looked embarrassed. He was opening and closing his own little umbrella. The two women stepped into the mud, arms out like sumo wrestlers. There were tentative ringside shouts of encouragement.

Birdflower pulled her wrist forward so their heads met in the middle of the table. “We can leave.” Emily shook her head. Men around her were lifting off their chairs. Smoke from their cigarettes was backlit by the red net candles on every table. More men lined up against the walls, long-neck beers held with a finger in their belt loop.

“I want to see this,” Emily said. She had said that same thing years ago about a porno flick her husband had rented for a bachelor party. He had reluctantly set the projector on a chest of drawers in their bedroom. Lights off. A little square over the bed no bigger than a TV screen. And many men around one woman, at all angles, moving in a variety of directions like some out-of-whack machine. At the end Emily left the room. She made no comment, but it stayed with her. Later that night as she moved her husband onto her, she closed her eyes and somehow felt what she'd seen all over her body and then imagined more than one man with her and for an instant it was simple; she was a functional organ. Like a heart pumping.

Emily sunk lower. She watched the women down in the mud roll onto each other. The mud oozed through their toes, under their arms, and gathered in their hair. One was down and there was a two-beat chant from the back tables and then a roar as both women twisted like water moccasins. Emily braced her hands on the table; she felt as if she were being sucked into the mud. She saw herself in the pit: brown mud hiding the everyday her, letting her become someone only her body knew. With their strong arms the women pulled at her waist, kneeled over her, and pinned her arms. When she tired and looked into the face above, she found that it was her own muddied features. She jerked. The woman pressed up to her lips and kissed her. The room was only dim red light as her other self disappeared into the mud.