Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

by Tucholke, April Genevieve

  He shook his head. “No, I want to see it. Casablanca is one of my favorites. I wasn’t just saying that to rile up your brother.” He paused, and gave my hand a squeeze. His forehead crinkled as he did it, as if he was concentrating. “Do you have to check up on Sunshine? Or do you think you could lie down here and take a nap with me?”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t even think. I just slid myself onto the couch, pressed my back into River’s torso, and let his arms wrap around me. I breathed in the warm, boy smell of him, the smell of leaves and autumn air and midnight and tomatoes and olive oil. His face nestled into my hair, and the last thought I had before I fell asleep was that I’d known River all of one damn day but who the hell cared, who the hell cared at all.

  CHAPTER 7

  I AWOKE WITH the sun on my toes. I had fallen asleep with it tickling my fingertips, so God only knows how much time had passed. I squeezed out of River’s warm arms and got to my feet.

  “What time is it?” I said, and rubbed my eyes. “We’re going to miss the movie.”

  River’s eyelids fluttered, then opened. “Aw . . . why did you leave? Come back.” He patted the spot next to him.

  I turned to look at the old clunky metal clock above the kitchen table. It was late. “I need go over to Sunshine’s. I have to see how she’s doing, and if she wants to watch this movie with us.” I paused. “There’s a picnic basket in the cabinet by the fridge. Do you think you can pack it while I’m gone?”

  River stretched. He wiggled his toes in the fading sun, and smiled. “Violet, Violet. You curl up next to me, nap, and leave. What is this, some sort of one-nap stand?” He smiled. “Screw the movie. Get back over here.”

  I laughed. “You said you wanted to go. You said Casablanca was one of your favorite films.”

  “I was sleeptalking when I said that. It’s like sleepwalking, except you do it with your mouth.”

  I laughed again. “Pack the basket. I’ll be back in a bit.”

  I walked over to Sunshine’s. The sun glowed behind the Citizen now, and the house cast its shadow over the dirty fountain girls. It was almost twilight.

  The road that ran by Citizen Kane ended in a tangle of blackberry bushes that bordered the woods. I turned around at the end of Sunshine’s driveway and stared at the trees. Sometimes, at dusk, I felt like they were edging in, slowly, slowly, so as not to be noticed, and suddenly, one day, I would look up and find myself, and my house, back in the middle of the forest.

  Sunshine was sitting out on her porch, as usual, doing nothing. Her color had come back and she looked healthy and lazy, her face shining in the rust-colored slants of the late evening sun. I didn’t know how she could sit there, with nothing to do, as the day waned. Like it or not, I had my parents’ artistic temperament, and if left to themselves, my thoughts started to pace and circle and snarl. Things in Sunshine’s head must be different. Maybe her idle thoughts were more like a trickling little brook. A trickling brook that ran by tweeting meadowlarks and pink teacups and talking squirrels and thatched cottages.

  I was envious of her, all of a sudden.

  “Hey,” I said. “Do you want to come to Casablanca with me and River? It’s starting in an hour.”

  Sunshine picked up a half-eaten tomato sandwich from the plate by her feet and took a bite. The tomato had been plucked from the vines by the porch minutes ago, no doubt. I’d noticed one of the big red ones missing when I walked up the steps.

  “Is Luke going?” she asked.

  “Yeah, but Maddy will be there too. So don’t expect him to give you much attention. He’s stealing some vodka and hoping to get to second base, whatever that means anymore.”

  Sunshine lifted her hand and waved it across her breasts. “I believe it generally refers to these girls. But maybe that was a hundred years ago, when our parents were kids. For all I know, second base now means reciting poetry together on a rooftop, naked from the waist up.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  Sunshine swallowed another bite from her sandwich while shaking her head. “No, Violet, I don’t actually know what the kids are doing these days. Haven’t you noticed that I spend most of my time sitting on my porch or following you and Luke around?”

  Sunshine kind of smiled at me, and I kind of smiled back. She drank the last sip of her iced tea, and set it on the nearby porch railing. “So what have you found out about the stranger living in your guesthouse?”

  “I haven’t asked to see his ID, and I won’t, because it’ll sound stupid now. And he’s terrible at answering questions, so I know almost less than I did before. Are you still planning to get him drunk and steal his wallet?”

  Sunshine leaned back in the swing and looked at me. Her eyes were sharp and honest—a rare expression for her. “River doesn’t like me. And his liking me was a vital part of that plan.” She paused. “Did you ask him if he saw the guy with the furry teeth too?”

  I nodded.

  “And?”

  “He said that he didn’t see anything.”

  “I figured. It doesn’t matter. I know what I saw.” Sunshine was quiet for a moment. “Look, you two go ahead to the movie. I’m going to stay here. Maybe a mysterious new guy will pull up and want to move into my guesthouse.”

  River had the picnic basket ready to go when I got back to the Citizen. We took the path into town for the third time in the last eight hours.

  The park was packed with people, and the sky was smoky and getting dark fast. We were late. The front spots were all taken, but the movie screen was big enough to see from the back of the square. We walked by a bunch of kids from school, but they didn’t really acknowledge me, and I didn’t really acknowledge them. It wasn’t that any of us hated each other. There wasn’t enough passion on either side for that. Everyone knew that our parents had been gone for a long time, but they didn’t know whether to feel sorry for us parentless ex-rich kids or be envious of our freedom or make fun of us for having weird, artistic-parent problems. So people left us alone. I guess they thought we were snobs, like Daniel Leap.

  Luke did better than me, socially. He was more attractive and a lot less sensitive. But that was all right. The only person I was ever easy talking to was Freddie, anyway.

  And River, I realized. I was easy enough with River.

  I threw the quilt I grabbed from the house onto the ground, far away from my classmates. I caught sight of Gianni among the group. He was tall, and dark, and he had mischief in his deep Italian eyes, which I liked. He worked at the café sometimes with his parents, when he wasn’t working at their pizzeria, and he liked to talk to me about fair trade beans, and flat whites, and the perfect foam on a cappuccino. He tended to lose his temper over requests for artificial syrup flavors, like white chocolate, and it was pretty charming.

  Gianni caught me looking at him, waved, and smiled. I smiled back.

  On our right was a group of laughing little kids—they were playing with a bunch of red yo-yos and having the kind of wholehearted fun only kids can have. I wondered what they were doing at Casablanca. I supposed their parents kicked them out of the house after supper and they just headed toward the action at the center of town. I wondered if they would stay for the film, and chatter all the way through it. But then I decided I didn’t really care.

  River and I dug into the olives and the cheese and the baguette and watched the kids while we ate. There were six boys, all with yo-yos, and one girl with a hula hoop. I recognized one of the boys. He was maybe eleven, with dark red-brown hair, and pale, freckled skin. I’d seen him around town a lot and had been struck by how grave he seemed, for a kid. Sometimes he had a pack of boys with him, and sometimes not. Mostly he was just all on his own. He’d started coming into the café sometimes, drinking coffee too young, like me.

  After a few minutes, an older kid crawled out of the dark beyond the town square and started bugging my yo-yo boys. He had shag
gy dark hair and a mean look in his eyes, like a wild, half-starved dog. He was fourteen at most. He made fun of my boys for a while, but when they ignored him, he started pushing them around, taking their toys and holding them out of reach.

  River popped the last juicy Kalamata into his mouth and then got to his feet. He went over to the shaggy-haired kid and grabbed his skinny white wrist in one hand. The bully dropped the yo-yo he was holding. River said something to him, and, just like that, the kid ran off into the night without another word.

  River stuck around, and began to show the boys how to make their toys work. He was good with them, easy and natural, as if he’d shown millions of boys how to play with a yo-yo and could do it with his eyes closed. The kids were listening to what he was saying, so closely that some of them actually leaned toward him as if to hear better.

  I stayed sitting where I was, watching River, and idly wondering what he was telling the kids, when the girl came over and handed me her hula hoop. She was a laughing little thing, with brown eyes and black curly hair. She held out her hula hoop to me with a grin, and I took it, smiling back at her. I got inside it and spun it around my hips, moving my torso a little this way, and a little that, until my body began to remember that hula-hoop feeling and the thing took off on its own.

  The girl watched me. Everyone else was turned toward the screen, because the opening credits had started to play. My hips were moving and my yellow skirt was swinging and River glanced over at me, yo-yo in hand. The boys were still staring up at him like he was the greatest person ever—except my auburn-haired kid, who still looked serious.

  I gave the girl her hula hoop and thanked her for letting me use it. She laughed, and ran back to the boys.

  River came back and sat down next to me, and started fiddling with something in his hands, just as I spotted Luke making out with Maddy off to the side underneath an oak tree. He had a flask in one hand and was groping her back with the other.

  Oh, Luke. You are such a disappointment, I thought. And then realized that was a stupid thing to say, even in my head.

  “Here,” River whispered, because the movie had started. He grabbed my hand, turned it over, palm up, and set something on it. “It’s a bookmark, for your Hawthorne.”

  I looked down. “No, it’s not,” I whispered back. “It’s a twenty-dollar bill folded into the shape of an elephant.”

  River smiled. “Origami is cool.”

  I nodded. “It is cool. But most people fold paper, not twenties.”

  River shrugged. “I didn’t have any paper. Look, Violet, if you ever run out of groceries or something, and I’m not around, you can just unfold that and use it. All right?”

  “All right,” I whispered, because I wasn’t too proud. I put the bookmark in my skirt pocket.

  River nodded at me, and then he bent his knees up, threw one arm around them, and leaned back, ready to pay attention to the movie. He was so flexible and graceful, damn it. I was still haunted by all those boys in my junior high gym class with knees too big for the white legs sticking out of their shorts, their thigh muscles so tight already at fourteen that they moved like someone had taken them apart and put them back together wrong.

  River was different from those boys. River made my insides slither and slide in that good way. River was . . . something entirely new.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE KIDS RAN off sometime during the middle of the movie. Back home to bed, I supposed. I got so caught up in Bogart’s sad eyes and Bergman’s pert little nose and the fresh night air and the never-gets-old novelty of watching a movie underneath the night sky that I was kind of stunned when River got to his feet at the first “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

  He leaned his head down, so his lips were at my ear. “I’m going to go stretch my legs,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  What seventeen-year-old needs to stretch his legs during a two-hour movie? I thought, watching him go.

  And he didn’t come back right away. He was gone for almost a half hour. Tick tock. Tick tock. The minutes dripped by. And then, just like that, he was at my side again for the last “Here’s looking at you, kid.” He didn’t tell me where he’d been, or why, but he did grab my hand. And he held it through the last scene of the film, which was all right with me.

  The movie ended and there was no sign of Luke or Maddy. All around us people were drifting into the dark, repeating classic Casablanca lines to each other. River and I were the last ones left.

  “So where is this town’s cemetery?” River asked me.

  “Why?” I packed the last of the night’s supper back in the picnic basket and threw it over my arm.

  “I want to see it. I like cemeteries.”

  “Me too. But I think it’s illegal to be in them after sunset.”

  River didn’t say anything, just slid the basket handle down my arm and took it from me.

  “Okay,” I said, caving, just like that. I didn’t care that much about breaking cemetery laws, so it was pretty easy to persuade me. “It’s sort of on the way home, anyway.”

  Echo had a gorgeous cemetery. It was big and old, with tall, ancient trees and a couple of mausoleums, one of them belonging to the ex-illustrious White family. I never visited it, although I should have, since Freddie was buried there. The cemetery spread itself out over a hill facing the sea, and had a view that rivaled Citizen Kane’s. It was the kind of place someone like Edgar Allan Poe would want to rot away in . . . drippy green leaves and twinkling starry silence.

  The cemetery was surrounded by a wrought iron fence, which I thought would be locked. It wasn’t. The gate was wide open. We went inside, and River set the picnic basket down beside the first headstone he saw. Then he reached forward and took my hand. His fingers wove between my own, and mine tingled where River’s wrapped around them.

  “I like you, Violet,” he said, in a low voice.

  “You don’t even know me,” I said back.

  River looked at me, and he was wearing his sly, crooked half smile that was becoming very familiar. “Yes, I do. I can learn all I need to know about a person in two minutes. And we’ve had hours.” He paused. “You’re careful. Thoughtful. Perceptive. More honest than most. You hate recklessness, but are impulsive yourself, when it suits you. You hate your brother, and you love him more than anything in the world. You wish your parents would come home, but you’ve learned to live without them. You like peace, but are capable of toe-curling violence, if pushed far enough.”

  River paused, again, and his hand squeezed mine. So hard, it almost hurt. “But the thing I’m really into—the part that makes you different—is that you don’t want anything from me. At all.”

  “I don’t?”

  “No. And I find it . . . relaxing.”

  I had no response to that. I supposed I should have gotten nervous, what with River knowing so much about me already. But I didn’t. I just took it in, and tried to figure out how to enjoy it.

  We walked up a hill and came to a stop by the Glenship mausoleum. It was covered in ivy and so old that a person expected the stones to fall apart any second and drop a pile of bones on the ground. The moon disappeared behind a cloud and everything went pitch-black. I couldn’t see anything, not even River. I felt him next to me, though. Heard him breathing. Felt his heat . . .

  Something hard slammed into my back. I choked, and choked again, fell, rolled over, and suddenly there were shadows on top of me, all over me, everywhere, moving and grabbing at me—

  “River,” I cried out. Cold hands gripped the skin of my legs, and hard palms pressed on my stomach. “What are they? They’re all over me, God—”

  “Its all right, Vi, it’s all right. They’re just kids. It’s just a bunch of kids.”

  I stopped writhing underneath the hands and went still. I held my breath and opened my eyes. Above me the clouds separated. The moon shone through,
and I saw three boys. Their faces were white. And grim. They glared at me, streaks of pale moonlight sweeping across their cheeks. They looked somber and gruesome and not like kids at all.

  I felt a scream building in the back of my throat, one I didn’t want to release. I wasn’t a screamer, I refused to be a screamer, that was for Sunshine and other girls, I was not going to—

  Another white face popped out of the dark and bent over me. I recognized it. It belonged to one of the yo-yo boys from the park. The one I kind of knew. A makeshift wooden stake had replaced the yo-yo in his hand. Two twigs were tied together to form a cross, the ends sharpened into thick, splintered points.

  I looked at the points, and shuddered.

  “Please don’t stab me,” I said, looking into the boy’s blue eyes, knowing that I was being scared stupid by a group of children and a couple of twigs, but not caring at all because, ah hell, I was still pretty terrified. There was something about their faces, their grim, shadowed faces, that made my skin shrink. I tried again to get away; I writhed and thrashed, but the hard hands of the other boys held me tight.

  “Let her go,” the serious boy said. He shook his head with impatience, and his hair went flying. He stood, arms crossed and legs apart, like a Seven Samurai warrior. “I told you, the Devil has red eyes that glow in the dark. Did you check her eyes? Are they red?”

  Three boys searched my face, and frowned.

  “Right,” the yo-yo boy said. “Her eyes aren’t red. So let her go.”

  I took a deep breath as the boy sitting on my stomach slid off. The boys on my legs got to their feet and glided away into the dark. I sat up, rubbed some dirt off my face, and looked at River. Two boys were pointing stakes at his throat, but pulled them back as I watched. River stood up and came to me.

  “Are you hurt?” he whispered.

  I shook my head and brushed grass from my skirt. I’d scraped up my leg, and small beads of blood were popping out of the skin on my left knee, but other than that I was fine. River grabbed my hand and helped me to my feet.