The Foul-Friendly Sea Sam’s driving the boat. He loves the sun, the choppy water, the salt air. He likes the soupy feel of going slow when he has to turn the big silver wheel three, four, five times to get around the green buoy. He likes it too when they get up to speed, when they are jumping over white caps, getting air, when the wheel jerks left or right at a mere touch. They are on their way to the bait shop to gas up the boat and pick up the girls. It’s Brendan’s boat, but Sam is the better driver. It’s just a fact. Brendan’s up at the front of boat naked from the waist up and lolling on one of the cushioned bench seats like a lizard on a rock. He’s getting sun and they are getting air. Sam thinks he could do this for the rest of his life. It’s early, 9:30 in the morning. Crossing the Cape Cod Canal, the water is full of eddies and swirls, currents that tug at the prow, trying to take their little fourteen-footer and send it back through the bay and into the open sea. Sam has lived in Bourne all his life. His grandfather is a fisherman and he is the one who warns Sam the hardest against living at the mercy of the sea. But Sam is stubborn. He lives by principles. He knows the choice is ultimately his. Sam takes the boat past the docked barge at the Maritime Academy, past the vacation houses on stilts, under the overpass that leads cars and trucks and buses to Wareham, Fall River, Rhode Island and all other unimaginable points south. He tries to guess what Gretchen will be wearing before the dock comes in sight. They’ve only been dating for three weeks and Gretchen surprises him constantly. She’s louder and more confident than any Bourne High girls and flirts with much more authority. Sam guides the boat through the glassy surface of Buttermilk Bay where Gretchen and her friend sit on the dock with their legs swinging over the murky green water. Today Gretchen’s short red hair is in two pigtails and adorned all over with silver butterfly clips. She wears a black bikini top and red running shorts. Sam knows her friend’s name is Meg, though they have never met. Meg wears cut-offs and a T-shirt. The girls go to a Catholic high school in Fall River. “That’s the girl she brought for me?” Brendan sits up and squints across the water. His voice startles Sam, who had almost forgotten his friend draped inert across the bow. “She looks alright,” Sam says, steering them closer. He can’t really tell anything at this distance but Meg is certainly bigger than Gretchen, shorter too. “A regular Rosie O’Donnell,” Brendan says lightly, unconcerned. As Sam guides the boat slowly toward the dock, Brendan wriggles into his shirt, then slips on a pair of mirrored shades so Sam sees reflected a nightmare version of himself, all stretched, distorted features.
Last night, over beers at Brendan’s empty house, Sam confided that he hasn’t slept with Gretchen yet, or with anyone. He regrets the admission now, remembers the cool bitterness of beer in his throat, the rise of color to his cheeks beneath his freckled tan. “What about her,” Brendan asked, studying his Rolling Rock. “Virgin territory?” Sam allowed one corner of his mouth to turn up in a rueful smile. “She won’t say.” Brendan choked on a long swallow. “You know what that means,” he smiled, privately pleased with something. “Man, Catholic girls.” “I’ve got other priorities anyway,” Sam said, studying the tiny bubbles adhered to the inside of his green bottle, clustered together like barnacles on a rock. “Right,” Brendan said. “Your precious boat fund. You work too much, dude.” Sam swilled more beer. “Not everyone’s father can buy them a boat.” Brendan studied him then, pushing aside his empty beer. His jaw flexed and Sam wondered if the blowup that had been threatening for months would finally come. But the other boy snorted and crossed the kitchen to fetch another beer. “Dear, old dad,” was all Brendan said. Brendan’s wealth had never mattered before one way or the other. But in a year they’d be eighteen. Brendan’s boat had been a birthday present. Meanwhile, Sam worked long hours at Park Marina, painting the undersides of yachts and dinghies, refinishing cabin doors, replacing cracked windscreens and reupholstering torn cushions for $8.25 an hour. Saved every penny. It was about to pay off though. He’d circled an ad for a Marada bowrider in last week’s Cape Cod Times. 21’ and canvas-topped, it even came with its own trailer. He’d called the owner, who said he’d hold it a month. Which left 30 days to drag in the last $800. Sam would have to cut some classes, but it would be worth it. Meanwhile, Brendan couldn’t even captain his own Sea Ray. A slow grin bloomed on Brendan’s face and he pushed another beer to Sam across the kitchen island. “I’m going to make you an indecent proposal,” he said. Sam’s heartbeat began to slow immediately and he knew there would be no fight tonight. As his breathing calmed, Sam felt the words he’d been about to say slide sickly back into the pit of his stomach where they made a heavy weight. “Let’s keep your mom out of this,” he said. “Listen to me, jackass,” Brendan said. His grin widened. “If you seal the deal tomorrow, I’ll front you the last thousand on that junker in the paper.” “It’s $800,” Sam said. Then he laughed, shaking his head as Brendan resettled himself on his stool. “Jesus, I thought for a second you were serious.” Brendan downed half his beer and belched impressively. “I was. And we’re on the honor system here. I don’t want to have to watch you fumble through it.” Sam skated his fresh bottle between his two hands. It made a musical scraping on the counter. “Come off it, Brendan. Quit fucking around.” “Dead serious, my friend. Offer’s good for tomorrow only though.” The boat in the paper was a beauty. The best deal he’d found. With a small below-deck cabin, and perimeter seating for up to eight people, he could put out a few traps and sell his haul of lobster and crab to the local restaurants where his grandfather had already established connections. He could take businessmen from Boston out on chartered fishing trips, and start saving up for a real commercial fishing boat. Which he knew he could turn into a fleet. And Sam already liked Gretchen a lot. She wouldn’t have to know about the boat. Maybe on some level it wasn’t even relevant. Still. “It seems kind of fucked up,” he said. “Why do you care about my sex life anyway?” “Do what you want,” Brendan said. “I’m just trying to help.” They’d left it open-ended like that, but last night Sam hadn’t been able to sleep. He knew his parents wanted him to go to school for something practical, something safe like business or accounting, but Sam had grown up watching his grandfather work. He’d even been allowed to miss school a couple times a semester help the old man haul up heavy crates of lobster, buckets of quahogs, nets full of silvery fluke. The ocean wouldn’t make him rich, but it would be honest work outdoors close to home. The 21-footer in the paper wouldn’t make him a fisherman, but it would be a start.
When they get close to the dock Brendan sits up and waves one striped beach towel like a flag of surrender. The girls laugh. A red and white cooler sits between them. When Sam brings them close enough, Brendan jumps off and pulls up his green polo shirt to mop some sweat off his forehead. He has MTV abs and wants everyone to see them. Sam slows way down and putts up against the edge of the dock next to the ancient gas pump. Before he can fill up he has to secure the lines, so Sam flips open the window panel between the driver’s seat and the bow and loops a line around one metal cleat. Then he takes a shortcut from the bow to the back of the boat, following along the motorboat’s slippery edge to do the same for the rear cleat. One of his sandaled feet slips and he looks down to judge the distance between the dock and the boat, between his feet and the thick green water shiny with gasoline rainbows. Then his balance is back. He flings the rest of the rope toward the dock where Gretchen makes an awkward grab for it, missing and pinwheeling her arms to keep from splashing into the soupy green water. Sam reels up the line and flings the wet rope toward her a second time, letting go of one end. This time she catches it and holds on while Sam pulls the boat closer. When the boat nuzzles up to the dock, Gretchen rests one small, ringed hand on the side and leans into him. She smells like baby oil and chlorine. Sam is glad to see Gretchen, excited to have their bodies close together, but it embarrasses him when she kisses him, open-mouthed, across the small gap between boat and dock. He thinks of Brendan’s proposal, and blushes up into the roots of his hair. When they pull away both Meg and Brendan, standing next to each other on the wooden planks, are looking. While the other three head down to the bait shop, Sam fills the red plastic gas jug. It’s an old pump, salt-encrusted and rusty at the corners and Sam watches the numbers tick by, slow and audible in their antique, reluctant motion. The total comes to $9.50 for a full tank. Brendan and Gretchen and Meg are laughing together further down the dock, Brendan holding his stomach and Meg quietly shaking while Gretchen throws her head back and howls into the blue sky. The corner of Sam’s mouth twitches. He wonders what’s so funny. Sam is always a little uncomfortable leaving the two of them, his best friend and his new girlfriend, alone whenever he has to get a refill from a keg or find a bathroom at a football game. It’s not anything specific, Sam thinks, just the newness of Gretchen herself, and Brendan’s enthusiastic approval. “Nice work, bro,” he’d said after the first time he’d been introduced to Gretchen, “she’s a hottie.” Meg has wild hair. Sam notices this in the bait shop. It’s dark brown and long and full of uneven coiled curls. It reminds him of the crinkled green seaweed the night crawlers rest in, except, of course, for the color. This is the friend Gretchen has brought for Sam’s friend. But her face is bare of makeup and her fingernails are short and stubby, as if she bites them. Meg is not Brendan’s kind of girl. It is hard to know whether or not bringing this particular friend is meant to be ironic. The bait shop is small and dark, the shelves crowded with iridescent lures and packages of strong white line. The cloudy windows let in a soft glow the clerk stands against. Gretchen moves down one of the narrow aisles and holds up a package of small silver fishhooks. She shows them first to Meg then to Sam at the counter. “These would make cool earrings,” she says, flattening the plastic packaging with her thumb. When Sam doesn’t say anything she taps the flat package against her leg and follows Brendan down a different aisle. There is a beat of silence. “Stop it,” Gretchen says, out of sight. Playful. Meg leans against the counter next to Sam, watching the worms wriggle their segmented bodies through seaweed before the kid behind the counter closes the white cardboard box tops. Then Meg looks straight ahead with her mouth closed. She shifts her weight from foot to foot. “$12.50,” the kid says. “Plus $9.50,” Sam says. “For the gas.” Sam watches the boy work out the math in his head. The kid rolls his eyes up and drums fingers with neat nails cut short on the register. Sam wants to say twenty-two and speed things along but doesn’t. Meg stacks the white boxes of bait, three of them – they are planning to fish all day – and drags them across the counter. She blows upwards and stirs some of the thick dark curls that crowd around her face. “Twenty-two,” she mouths. They share a quick smile. Meg will be a junior in September, like Gretchen, at Sacred Heart. She could be in the drama club with Gretch, or in chorus, or on the yearbook committee or on the soccer team. If he had to guess he would pick chorus or drama, but he doesn’t know why. Slowly, the boy punches in the numbers. Sam has two twenties in his wallet and he brings them out, but Meg touches his wrist with one cool finger. “Wait,” she says, digging into her pocket. She comes out with three crumpled dollar bills and straightens out two of them. “So you don’t have to break that twenty.” “You don’t have to,” he says. She pushes her last dollar down into her pocket. “No biggie,” she says. The air in the bait shop is thick with the smell of low tide. Sam, waiting for his hand-written receipt, wishes he could see the letters on Meg’s shirt but she’s got those boxes up against her stomach and they block out the writing. He thinks the letters might spell Rewind, the name of a local band he’s seen three times at Pufferbelly's, one of which was the night he met Gretchen. He owns both their CDs. Gretchen wanders up and puts an arm around Sam’s waist. “Honeybee,” Gretch says, “Wouldn’t these make great earrings?” She holds up the fishhooks and their metal catches the light, sending it into his eyes like diamond skewers. “Pretty dangerous,” he says, thinking of what might happen if one of those hooks were to dangle from her ears next to her neck. She shrugs at him, lips pursed, and pushes the package across the counter to the boy.
Brendan is already in the boat, shirtless. Meg carries the boxes of bait. Sam climbs into the boat and extends his hand to Gretchen. He extends his hand to Meg too, but she just passes him the bait boxes and scrambles in by herself. Sam unties the lines, climbing over Meg in the chair she’s chosen toward the back of the boat. It’s just a little powerboat, open top, with four small white chairs, two tall swivel stools with backs, one for the captain and one for the first mate, and two curved bench seats up at the bow. Brendan laces his hands behind his head. “Someone put some tunes on,” he says. Sam steers the boat away from the dock. Gretchen takes the tall, white chair next to Sam. The compartment there opens forward like a glove box. She takes out a large square CD case and flips through it, then slips an Incubus CD into the player, squeezing Sam’s leg when she leans over to do it. They are all young and beautiful, full of attitude, out for the day without responsibility, without ties to the shore and all the little cottages they pass, without ties to the children that splash in the shallows. They are a floating world, ready for fishing, ready for a picnic at Bass Island, ready for sunburns, for kisses tasting like salt, for getting sand in hard-to-reach places. Brendan reclines with his eyes closed in concentrated relaxation. And Gretchen sits in a lotus position on her seat; elbows on knees, her beer can gripped with both hands. The sun winks off her hairclips. Meg leans over her side of the boat and lets one hand graze the rushing-by white water. The ocean is green and flat blue; their music is loud. Old men in rowboats look up quick with squinted faces when they pass and the little rowboats ride their wake. After twenty minutes of speeding along like this, heading roughly northeast, Brendan lifts his beer can above his cavernous mouth to catch a last precious drop. He tosses the can in a bag they brought for empties and takes a wide stance between Gretchen and Sam, fighting the wind. “Captain, your astrolabe,” Brendan says, mock serious, and reaches over Sam’s steering arm to flick on the fish finder. “Ass-tro-what?” Gretchen giggles, swiveling in her tall cushioned seat. She lifts her leg up to Sam’s seat, uses one toe to tap his thigh, and is rewarded with his warm hand briefly closing over her ankle. In the back of the boat, behind them all, Meg has been singing along with the CD in an octave above the singer’s gravelly voice. “Astrolabe,” Meg says, from the back of the boat, screaming a little as Sam kicks the engine into high gear to jump a bigger boat’s wake. Gretchen swivels in her chair to face Meg and shrugs her shoulders. “Like a star compass,” Meg says. “Thanks, professor,” Gretchen says, giving Meg a mock salute. Meg looks mad for a second then Gretchen goes to sit with her in the back of the boat. Their whispers, punctuated by short bursts of laughter, make Sam feel scrutinized somehow. He wants to turn around and look back, to catch Gretchen’s eye, but he just steers. When they get within sight of Bass Island Sam slows the boat down so they can all feel the grinding gears beneath their feet, the gradual lifting of the propeller up out of the water. He doesn’t anchor it. The current isn’t bad out here and if they drift it won’t be far. Brendan gets his rod from the four that are stashed along the right side of the boat and cracks open the tackle box. He catches a fingertip on a sharp hook, swears, and then extricates it from the soft flesh, sucking his finger to make the bleeding stop. Sam fixes his rod with a metal weight shaped like a teardrop and a small silver hook, and then does one for each of the girls. Gretchen eyes the boxes of bait. Meg looks out toward the island. “If we only use half-worms they’ll last longer,” Sam says. He opens one box and picks out a night crawler. “Tell me they don’t bleed,” Gretchen says. “They don’t, right?” She watches Sam use his fingers to squeeze the worm in half at what is roughly the middle and closes her eyes at the bright liquid burst. “Oh God,” she says, bringing a hand across her chest and grabbing onto her shoulder to make a kind of V. “I can’t do that,” she says to Meg, but the other girl shrugs. “They aren’t that bad,” Meg says, and picks up one whole worm dragging itself up into a fat spiral. “I mean, they don’t have faces. Or thoughts. Or memories. Right?” “I doubt it,” Sam says. “They’re pretty primitive, evolutionarily.” This is another option for college, if he goes. He loves finding clams down the beach under their pinprick holes, horseshoe crabs walking backwards in the shallows, egg cases, manta rays, fiddler crabs, all the different kinds of fish. He can see himself as a marine biologist, or an oceanic geologist, or a zoological statistician with a specialty in marine field work. He can’t imagine himself happy away from the sea under a fluorescent light somewhere, locked in a neat office where everything sits at right angles. “They’re almost graceful,” Meg says, still holding her fat, wriggling worm. “Just don’t get your fingers near their mouths,” Brendan says to both the girls. Gretchen lifts one blue-painted fingernail to where she guesses the worm’s mouth is and lets it hover, not quite touching. “Why not?” she says. Brendan leans his pole against one of the tall chairs and uses both hands to pinch Gretchen around her waist. She squeals. He says, “They bite.” “No they don’t,” Sam says, hooking Gretchen’s halved worm for her. “And don’t worry,” he says, wiping his fingers against his shorts, “they don’t feel anything.” Sam doesn’t know if he’s telling her the truth, but he doubts it. There’s always a reluctant pop of the hook through the thick gray-black-red flesh of the worm when he prepares his lure and though he doesn’t mind forcing the hook through, Sam definitely doesn’t relish doing it. These night crawlers are not, after all, garden variety worms. They are eating and crawling machines, a centimeter in diameter, little sentient beings, sentient enough to twist away from the hook and to pinch with the setae lining their bodies. “Listen to the man,” Brendan says, sprawling in the front of the boat with the fishing rod propped between his knee and the short metal railing on the prow. “He’s a worm specialist. That’s going to be his major, wormology. He’s going down in history as the 21 st century’s premiere wormologist.” Meg looks at him closely. “Where are you applying?” Sam plays with the pull tap on his beer can before taking a sip. “I’m thinking about Florida State or maybe Colby up in Maine. My dad wants me to go to Chapel Hill,” he says, the old anxiety squeezing some vital inner part of him in one slicing wire fist. “That’s where he went. I haven’t decided yet.” He means about going at all, not about which one, but he doesn’t try and make this clear. She’ll get in somewhere good, Sam thinks. He can tell she’s smart. She doesn’t hang on Gretchen’s every word like the other friends he’s met. Meg, Sam thinks, will want to major in Political Science, or Sociology or Anthropology. He thinks this without knowing why. “The best way is to do it like a Band-Aid,” he says, letting her worm latch onto the relatively steady ground of his finger. “One quick motion.” To demonstrate, Sam picks a big worm out of the box and rips it in half, placing the remainder in the damp seaweed. He works the tip of his hook through the half still in his hand. “See,” he says, holding it up, locking eyes with Meg through the lower curve of the S-shape his worm has pulled itself into. “Yeah,” Meg says, “Until something bites it in half.” But she’s grinning now. Ready to try it. The boat beneath them rocks suddenly on the wake of a tugboat pulling a big black barge toward the canal. Sam is caught by surprise and he stumbles forward, into Meg. Even in falling he is careful to hold his hook away from Meg’s face, and his own. Meg puts out two hands to catch him and they both land on his chest, which heaves with adrenaline as he stands there recovering, stands there close to Meg. She peers up, lips open in a surprised smile. “Oops,” he says. “Some captain, huh? Can’t even find my sea-legs.” Meg starts to giggle but closes her mouth abruptly and removes her hands. She throws a quick glance over Sam’s shoulder. When he turns Gretchen is watching them. Her ponytails, an impossible shade of red, one Sam has never actually seen in nature, are too short to blow around in the breeze and so she appears to be a wax statue, a still life, until she turns back to the rod in her hand, figuring out on her own how to work the reel. Sam watches Meg, bolstered by his confidence, or his demonstration, as she develops an interesting system. She puts the worm on the floor of the boat and digs the hook down into it, once, twice, to make sure it’s secure. Sam sees the stains of blood and slime she leaves behind, but when she lifts the hook by the plastic line and holds it up for him to see he only gives her a wide, genuine smile. It’s not his boat, not his mess. It’s 11:00 now and the sun is hot on their shoulders and backs. They are working their way through a twelve-pack. The wind comes up while they’re fishing. Gretchen sticks her fishing rod in a hole built into the side of the boat and switches the CD to Pink. A big barge goes by close enough to momentarily block out the sun, and the waves from its wake rock the little boat violently. Gretchen takes the middle of the boat like a stage. She dances there with her arms up over her head, shaking her hips, and both boys watch. Meg lets her reel out, drags it in, lets it out. Sam and Gretchen have had fun together. Gretchen likes sports and so far she and Sam have gone rock climbing at the Adventure Park on Macarthur’s Boulevard, mountain biking for a day in the Berkshires, scuba diving out of P-Town, and they are signed up for a very expensive sky-diving session not far from Amherst. Sam thought she would be more into fishing. At the front of the boat, Brendan’s helping Gretchen learn how to send her line out into open water. There is a lot of giggling up there, and a fair amount of touching. Sam glances up that way but doesn’t know how to stop it without seeming paranoid. He looks away and counts the sailboats darting in and out of each other’s paths like a flock of oversized snowy egrets. Sam knows Gretchen likes this boat, if not the fishing. She likes Brendan’s CD collection, his winding driveway, which she saw last weekend at his latest party, and his big eight bedroom house; now, in the front of the boat, she seems to like Brendan’s stomach against her back, his hands on hers trying to teach her how to cast her line in one clean flicking motion. Sam wonders if this is Brendan’s way of skewing the playing field. When they were kids, Brendan hated to lose. Checkers, baseball, Go Fish. Eventually Sam started letting him win at everything. It was just easier. But Sam hadn’t known Brendan counted their bet as a game. Sam likes Gretchen’s body, her smooth planes. She’s funny with her short dyed hair, her random bursts of song or dance, but often he feels far away from her, as he does now. He bounces his line in the water. The depth counter over the steering wheel reads sixteen feet and the fish finder shows a number of swirling black dots, but so far nothing’s biting. Sam stares out over the waves until he is sunblind. On the ocean, nothing stays the same. Meg gets a tug on her rod and when they pull it up it’s a flounder so small and frightened Sam can’t help laughing. “Don’t worry, we’re not keeping you,” he says, unhooking it. “We’re not?” Gretchen stands in front of the fish in Sam’s hand where it flips its frightened tail. She makes fish faces back at it. “Too small. Too much trouble to clean,” Sam says. Gretchen pulls at her beer and changes the CD to Coldplay. When Sam tosses the flounder over the side it makes a bright white dot in all the green before darting down and out of sight. The flounder will be dead in a few hours, the small amount of blood from its wound will attract some larger, hungrier fish, or maybe even one of the dogsharks that sometimes get hung up in these bays full of rocks and cold water. Brendan catches two more small fish and Sam catches one and they throw them all back so the ice in the five gallon drum they brought for the fish stays clean and melts slowly. “Lunchtime?” Sam says. They crack open new beers and he steers them closer to the island. There is no hurry. The CD is now Dave Matthew’s Band and Gretchen and Meg dance together, spinning and holding hands, in the middle of the boat. Sam sees the way Gretch’s red shorts are folded down and the way her hipbones poke up above them. It makes him think he should have worn a different T-shirt, or that he should take this one off, like Brendan. Meg, dancing, lifts her face to the sun. She can pin a worm to a hook. Her hair is long and wild and full of looping spirals and Sam can tell just by looking at it how it would feel against his skin. He feels guilty immediately. When the song ends Meg collapses into a seat, breathing hard and smiling, and sits chipping red polish off the toes of her right foot. Sam thinks, it’s a choice to be with someone. The problem is drifting into things. It’s so easy to drift.
When they get close to the island Sam drops the anchor and it’s shallow but they still have to swim. Brendan does a neat trick with the cooler, holding it above his head and balancing the lunch bag on top while treading water and moving slowly forward, so everything is still dry when he gets to the beach. They open cans of Busch on the shore. Gretchen is drunk after three. She rolls around getting sand on her damp skin then shrieking and rubbing at it, saying it feels like loofah; she chases Meg with handfuls of sand, and Meg dodges her, clumsily. Sam wants to build a fire so they can all sit around it, so Gretchen can dance around it if she wants to. They are two girls and two boys on a private island. It’s like being shipwrecked. Sam says, “Let’s get a fire going.” He’s snagged the waterproof matches from the emergency kit on the boat and he fingers them now, in his pocket. The girls are enthusiastic. “I’ve got a light,” Meg says, pushing cans around in the cooler and holding up a Tupperware container inside of which is a Ziploc dimebag with a pink lighter and a pack of rolling papers inside. “Forgot about this,” she says, and laughs. She has a deep, slow laugh. It’s the first time today Sam has heard it. There is a stand of woods behind them and beyond the woods there is a little road, and a mansion with a boathouse, and a shed, and a barn, and a stand-alone garage that used to be a carriage house from a long time ago when even people on a private island with no easy access to the mainland needed a pair of horses and a buggy. This is the time, the perfect time, but when Sam look for Gretchen – his palms sweating in anticipation of what he has determined to do – she is disappearing into the woods dragging Brendan by an outstretched arm close behind. The other boy turns to Sam and shrugs, moving away at a fast clip. “Later,” he mouths and Sam lets him go. Lets them go, his hands empty and closed into loose, impotent fists. Meg is moving into the woods on a different angle, walking slowly enough for Sam to catch up. He crashes into the undergrowth behind her, but she doesn’t startle and the two of them fall into a rhythm, she walking point, he bringing up the rear, gathering sticks as they go. Once they have gone far enough into the woods so the waves on shore are just a sound and not a sight, Sam starts enjoying the walk. There are moving things in the forest, animals scurrying through blueberry bushes and birds up in the tall pines make a cheerful racket. “How do you know Gretchen?” he says, holding back the springy branch from a young scrub pine. “Oh,” she says, “We’re both in Debate.” Sam nods as if this is something he’s remembering, but it’s a surprise to him. He’s never heard Gretchen talk about Debate. He wonders what else there is about her that he doesn’t know. Then he and Meg talk about Rewind, whose drummer, Meg says, is her cousin Annie’s boyfriend. She’s talking about two of their jam sessions she’s been to when Sam stops short in front of her and Meg has no choice but to push up against him from behind. “Shit,” she says, “Sorry.” He has time to register the sweet pressure of her body on his, the warmth of her, and then points to the ground where a little brown bird lies still and whole, as if sleeping. Meg bends down by the bird and wraps her arms around her legs. She ducks her head into her knees. Sam stands behind her with his hands hanging down still and helpless. Through the trees he can see the unnatural green of the mansion’s shutters. About twenty-five windows line the side he can see. A breeze pushes one of Meg’s curls against Sam’s hand and the tickle sends a shiver through him. He moves a step closer to her and her shoulder blocks his view of the bird. “I’m sorry,” he says, even though they both know this is not his fault. “It’s not like roadkill,” Meg says, standing, pale and serious-faced. Hugging her elbows. Sam thinks of Gretchen off somewhere with Brendan. They are all so far away from each other. Sam puts a hand on Meg’s arm. He squeezes a little at the cool flesh and feels the springy firm skin push back. He thinks he sees red-rimmed eyes before she turns her head quickly away. “Let’s bury it,” he says. She brings the heels of her hands up into her eye sockets and he tries to imagine himself as someone who could get upset over something like this. He’s never flinched away from dropping handfuls of lobsters with their mottled black and green shells into boiling water. Their claws scrabble against the sides but they have no nerves to relay pain and the sound of the claws against hot metal has never bothered him. How many fish caught, how many boxes of bait used up, how many bullets with his father during hunting season. Sam is comfortable with his arms up to the elbow in blood and meat. But not everyone is built to look life straight in the face. Meg is shaking a little and Sam wants his arms to go around her, but he can’t tell what she wants. He can’t tell if she would push away and claw a path back to the beach and Gretchen with a tale of betrayal. This wanting makes Sam tired. The thought of Gretchen and her painted nails, her bouncy embrace, makes him tired. Piloting the boat in the sun, smelling the sun on fiberglass and plastic and glass has made him tired. It’s cool in the woods and this makes him tired too. Meg is bending around low bushes and spindly Sassafras trees, looking for a good digging stick. The curves her hips make, bending and straightening, bring a sheen of sweat to his palms and he wipes them on his shorts. Meg digs a shallow depression in the ground and pushes away the crumpled leaves left over from last year’s fall. Sam uses her stick to roll the bird over itself into the hole. There is not so much as a smudge of red where it used to be. The bird in its hole seems whole again and all they can see of it are smooth spotted feathers and a pair of tiny, twiglike feet. Meg reaches out to take Sam’s hand and her hand is sweaty too. “I wish it wasn’t so alone,” she says and he knows what she means. “You want me to kill another one?” He squeezes her hand and imagines Gretchen coming up behind them. He’d say, we’re having a funeral. He’d say, take my other hand. Meg tugs on his arm and pushes her head against his shoulder. She is pressed along his whole right side and he feels warm there. His skin is jumpy to the touch, electric, full of kinetic energy. He wants his other hand in the dense fall of her hair. He wants to curl up inside her in stasis. To hibernate. He can’t imagine going away from this place. Sam drops to one knee on the ground, quickly, trying not to let himself think. He sinks into pine needles, and tugs until Meg comes down with him. His body remembers the rocking of the sea, under the boat, the liquid tons of movable mass, the push and pull of tides. He pushes her down onto her back and there are leaves in her hair already. She hooks her fingers through two of his belt loops and he lets himself down on top of her. They lay like this, fully clothed, without moving, and between them there is the regular rush and recede of their breathing. Meg brings her head up and meets his lips with hers. He lets her, then pulls back, feeling caught. “What do you think they’re doing?” Meg says, so close to his ear she might as well be inside his head. “Playing checkers?” He thinks about Gretchen, dancing, on the boat. Then Meg’s eyes close and he feels her fingers release his belt loops. She turns her face away in the direction of the beach. He is free to go. Sam watches her lips twitch as if she is trying not to cry, and he thinks, irrationally, of the bird with its slightly open beak. “I’m sorry,” she says. Brendan’s indecent proposal had been a joke. Just a joke. There had never been a chance that Gretchen would sleep with him, not that he wanted to now. After today, Sam would not count Brendan among his friends. Not if what Meg said was true. Sam lays alongside of her with his head supported on his bent arm. One of his hands drums out a beat on her hip. He waits until she turns her head back to him and when he kisses her it is only lips and tongue and teeth, and no guilt, not yet, and no grief. Sam tries to think ahead to the rest of the day, gathering wood, lighting the fire, sitting next to Gretchen, driving back over slate gray waters, but all of it is academic and insubstantial next to the taste of Coppertone on Meg’s lips. On one side of them there is the beach and on their other side, the open grave. Sam has his hand on Meg’s hip, she’s got a thumb hooked into one of his back pockets. “Don’t be sorry,” he thinks he says out loud, not sure if he means it for Meg or himself.
Meg and Sam step out of the trees, ready with explanations for the time it took to gather the wood, looking for Gretchen and Brendan to be sprawled out on the sun-drenched beach. Both Meg and Sam carry armfuls of rotting branches crawling with wood lice, and too-green branches from a recently felled baby pine, and handfuls of dry stuff to use for kindling, last season’s crunchy leaves, needles from an ancient rough-barked evergreen, tiny, snaking, forked twigs. Sam scans the expanse of sand and sees the rough circle of stones arranged half-way up the beach, some still glistening and wet from their former home under the timid waves. He sees their beer cooler, and next to the cooler the zippered blue sandwich bag. This morning, making sandwiches in Brendan’s sunny kitchen, bare feet suctioning to the floor, seems very far away. Brendan and Gretchen have left behind scattered articles of clothing, Brendan’s green polo, Gretchen’s red shorts. Sam has enough time to feel swallowed by guilt, pressed down by it so the heels of his feet actually seem to sink deeper into the soft sand. He has time to think about the scales of justice and how, if they were real scales, if they really existed somewhere, physically, they would be built of granite and not of glinting gold. “Unsolved mysteries,” Meg says, stepping up behind Sam and moving half out of the forest and half onto the beach. “At least the boat’s still here.” Sam looks out over the waves. It’s late afternoon now, creeping up on four and the light is made of slanted planks cutting into the sea’s changeable angles. The boat is anchored where they left it, pointing down into choppy green and then surfacing up, proud, like a thoroughbred nosing a win. He starts to agree with her, then sees their heads, Brendan’s and Gretchen’s, in the water. They are swimming, floating on their backs, not touching, halfway between the beach and the boat. They are not talking either, unless very quietly. Sam thinks, even at this distance, he can see the unnatural pink of sunburn kissing along the central ridge of Gretchen’s nose. “There,” Sam says, lifting a hand. The day is still hot and pressing sweat from his glands. He swallows air down a scratchy throat and wishes for a bottle of water, but most of all he is starving. He pictures the sandwiches in their aluminum foil wrapping and actually salivates. But, now Meg is sprinting past, kicking up grains of sand with her heels, dropping the wood in a haphazard pile near the circle of stones and taking off her white T-shirt, revealing a jungle-print one piece bathing suit and her not quite smooth, not quite toned, lovely, rounded back. Sam watches her drop the shirt on the ground and then step on it in her haste to get down to the ocean. She leaves an impression there, a rectangular foot-sized hole in the center of her crumpled T-shirt, and a scattering of sand where her toes had been. Sam goes in too, first arranging the wood he has brought out from the woods in a rough pyramid shape, filling the open center with some of the smaller brush and twigs. He knows when they come out of the water they will be cold, even on this humid mess of a day, and hungry. He leaves his sandals and his shirt, his leather belt and shorts, the matches in one pocket, his sunglasses, his pocketknife, and the boat keys on the shore. The water is cold and delicious, and sends shivers zigzagging down his back.
Four cans of Busch, popped open and nearly empty, mark a rough circle around the fire on the beach. Now it is dark, their fire the bright point of their still universe. They’ve gone back for wood twice already, two at a time but no monkey business, feeling as if they are, for once, actively in charge of their own survival. Brendan comes back from the last trip with a piece of weathered planking ten feet long at least, fragile-looking in the firelight as a column of ash from a giant cigarette left to burn down. The boys go to work at breaking the plank into pieces with a small hatchet from the boat’s emergency kit while the girls sit huddled in bright beach blankets, passing a neatly rolled joint back and forth and spitting into the fire. Finally, when the fire is raging, they open the zippered blue bag and pass around the sandwiches, the tuna caught and cooked and canned by someone else for their consumption, and they rip open a bag of Sour Cream and Onion Ruffles, spilling the ridged chips onto the frying pan from Brendan’s kitchen they’d brought to cook their fish on. The sandwiches are soggy and good, running with water leached from the celery and onions, and they don’t eat politely, they lick their fingers, they grunt. Sam chews and thinks about the way Meg’s hair will smell with the sea salt dried on. He thinks she will smell like living things, like organisms still forming and whole worlds still under construction. He thinks her mouth will taste salty-sweet like the sea. The fire dims. Sam sees how Brendan and Gretchen share one side of the fire, and he and Meg the other. Brendan fishes in the cooler, coming up with the last beer. “Keg’s kicked,” he says. Gretchen mimes strangling Brendan and Sam wonders if Meg had been right in the woods to suggest Brendan and Gretchen are lovers, and if so, how long it’s been going on. He wonders if he should mention it or let it go, happy to have Meg. Because he is happy to have met this girl with the salt-springy hair and the wry sideways laugh tripping up from some secret place between her ribs. But still, there is such a thing as loyalty. There is such a thing as following the rules. “I guess the party’s over,” Gretchen says, sitting back down, stretching her long limbs. “Nah,” Brendan says, releasing a beer belch off to the side. “My father has some benefit tonight. We can drink at my house.” Gretchen winks at Sam, marking the first time they have met eyes since they left the boat. It’s the closest she will come tonight to a confession, he thinks, maybe the closest they’ll come to talking again. She lies flat on her towel so her knees point up to the sky where there are stars, but none bright enough to compare with the little light they are making down here. Meg puts her hands behind her and tilts her head back. “The north star,” Meg says, nodding at the sky. “Otherwise know as Polaris. The big dipper, Orion’s belt. Pegasus.” “Pegasus?” Sam says, torn between Gretchen’s knees, and the warmth of Meg next to him, her fearlessness, her red eyes for the bird in the forest. Brendan, across the fire from them, swallows audibly at the last beer, rummages in the bag for another sandwich. “Sure,” Meg says, “Don’t you see it?” In the dark, the damp patch of sand beneath Sam’s hand proves suddenly brittle as he feels her fingers tunnel under his. “Oh,” he says, tilting his head back too, nodding. “Sure. Pegasus.” They are ear to ear and the ocean is to the left of them, where the windshield of the bobbing boat reflects their fire in equal proportion to the crystalline dots in the sky. Sam and Gretchen are still signed up to go sky-diving, and he will lose his deposit when he calls to cancel. Now, though, Sam can’t picture how it would have gone, him strapped to Gretchen or she to him, or both of them strapped to experienced jumpers, or both of them falling alone, hurtling from a blank blue sky, buffeted by the currents, heavy and headed for earth.
Katie Cortese received her MFA in Fiction Writing from Arizona State University in Tempe and is currently a Ph.D. student in fiction at Florida State. For fiction and poetry she has been awarded the Denise Marcil Prize, five Swarthout Awards, two Sonoran Prizes, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in PANK, The Ampersand Review, The Superstition Review, NANO Fiction, St. Ann’s Review, Zone 3, The Comstock Review, Zahir: A Journal of Speculative Fiction and Passages North.
© 2009 prickofthespindle.com |
||
|