Shot-Blue

by Jesse Ruddock

  Sean stepped up and punched down, thrusting his fist into Tristan’s mouth.

  Only after he was hit Tristan did lift his hands, but not to fight or protect himself. He lifted his hands to feel the wet. He was still standing somehow. No one said anything, only listened to the count. No one thought it odd that Tomasin kept counting; silently, they counted too. Only after Tristan broke the circle and was a few steps away did they start calling his name and telling him to come back because he had to try harder than that. He had to try, they said.

  Jer LaFleur told Tomasin to go get Tristan, knowing she could. He knew she was close to him, they all did.

  But what did they know? If they knew so much, could they explain it to her?

  ‘Go talk to him,’ said Jer.

  ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘Say something.’

  ‘I’ll tell him something, let me think. Hey! Come back! They want to fuck up your face.’

  Tristan was holding his bottom lip in his mouth, sucking on it and hiding it from her.

  ‘Let me see it. Let it go.’

  He wouldn’t.

  ‘You’re religious,’ she said, ‘let me see.’

  He let go and his lips parted. His top lip was whole. His bottom lip was split like a bait worm into two loose pieces.

  ‘Christ,’ she said, only whispering, as if talking might make the cut worse. ‘You need stitches.’ But that didn’t matter to him. What mattered was her mouth, familiar to him. It was small. If one of them had a perfect mouth, that was good enough – it didn’t have to be his mouth.

  ‘You have to put your hands up, Tristan.’

  He had to?

  ‘Do you hear me?’ she said, still whispering. ‘You have to.’

  He sucked on his bottom lip, half smiling at her. ‘A ring on his finger,’ he tried to say, fumbling his lip. ‘He’s wearing a ring.’

  ‘He doesn’t wear rings.’

  ‘He put on a washer.’

  If she wanted to touch Tristan, she had to pretend to do it by accident. But they could hit him across the face with washers on their knuckles. They could not only touch but crush him. She’d been thinking of trying to kiss him, but now his lips were in pieces and wouldn’t heal for a long time.

  ‘They’re yelling for you,’ she said. ‘You didn’t say mercy yet.’

  She would have liked to feel what it was like.

  He nodded and sucked on his lip.

  She walked him back. It didn’t occur to her that she might do anything else.

  Tristan and Sean stepped into the circle.

  ‘Nervous?’ said Sean.

  Tristan looked over at Tomasin, maybe to say go ahead, start the count, or maybe something else.

  Sean wanted Tristan to look at him.

  Tristan was still looking at Tomasin when he was hit in the high stomach. He kept looking at her. Now he knew what he wanted to say. He wanted to ask her, ‘What was that?’ He hadn’t seen Sean coming. It was as if she’d hit him.

  Two punches landed: the first in his stomach, the second against the side of his head.

  ‘Surprise,’ Sean said.

  Tristan dropped to the ground concussed. And the Mercy circle fell apart like a beaded necklace. The string snapped and the beads slid off. Tomasin watched the others run. They weren’t accomplices to Sean, but must have felt more than just themselves. It wasn’t enough to split, they had to keep splitting, running not only away from Tristan – face down, he’d fallen on his face – but from each other too. They ran alone: Sean, Adrian, Philip, Jer, Noah Coke. And Tomasin was left holding the string of the necklace in her hand, kneeling over Tristan. His body had bounced, she was sure. He wasn’t bouncing anymore.

  Noah Coke came back down the path. He’d been running when he remembered these were children. It was a children’s game.

  The boy was on his stomach. ‘Let’s turn him,’ he said.

  She turned the shoulders while Noah turned the legs.

  Not only Tristan’s lip, but his nose was bleeding. His nose was bent flat against his cheek.

  ‘Is he asleep?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think it’s sleep.’

  Tomasin rubbed Tristan’s chest to comfort him and herself. She wiped the blood from under his nose and dabbed it off his lips with the back of her hand. But she couldn’t clean the blood, only spread it around.

  ‘When will he wake up?’ she asked. She liked touching him like this.

  ‘I don’t know. I never know when he wakes up,’ said Noah. He didn’t know the boy. Nobody did. ‘The rest of us wake up together, you know. He gets up and goes before first light. I think he’s done for the night now.’

  Tomasin leaned over Tristan to shade his face, though there was no point, it was getting dark. She wished Noah would go. She laid claim, put her mouth to Tristan’s ear to whisper something. But she couldn’t think of what to say and just left her mouth there.

  Noah wondered if Tomasin knew him. She had no experience knowing people, he could tell. But children did have ways of understanding each other.

  Tomasin tried pushing Tristan’s broken nose back into place, but couldn’t, or she could but it wouldn’t stay. She tried lifting him. ‘Don’t help me,’ she told Noah, wanting to do it herself. She tried carrying Tristan in her arms. She tried getting him on her back, but his body was all relaxed. It wouldn’t cling or attach.

  In the morning, William and Noah Coke talked to him and rocked him. They all tried, even Jer LaFleur, but they couldn’t wake him up for work. The sun rose, the light filled the air over the water, came to land, and cut the island’s paths open, but Tristan wasn’t there. He was asleep with his hands clenched. Jer LaFleur tried to pry his fingers open, but it was no good.

  He slept through sunrise, all morning, into the late afternoon. When he woke finally, the cabin was stifling, the air thick with the heat of midday and the feverish heat of his body. He was covered in blankets up to his chin. William had pulled them up in the cold of early morning, but now the air itself was as heavy and prickly as an old blanket. Tristan pushed the blankets off, but couldn’t push the air.

  He woke again, this time with a terrible pressure in his face. He tried breathing to ease it, but breathing carefully only made the pain worse. He leaned over the side of the bed and dryheaved, leaned more and threw up, then fell back and kept falling until he was asleep.

  ‘I can’t believe you,’ she said, ‘you should see yourself.’

  It was Tomasin.

  ‘I’ve been here. When I couldn’t get away, I sent Marie. You know Marie,’ she told him. ‘Marie is Marie, she’s useless. Though not completely useless. She can run an errand. But generally, she is. Why am I talking about her?’

  He tried licking his lips, but they were swollen and pungent and disgusted him.

  ‘Of course you woke up for me,’ she said, sitting at the side of the bed, putting her arm across him. ‘I brought you an orange juice. I’ll bring you other things.’

  The thought of juice made Tristan feel like throwing up again.

  ‘I came in here and she was holding your hand, or at least she had her hand near yours, right here on the sheet. I’m talking about Marie,’ said Tomasin, showing him, taking his hand. ‘She had her hand here.’

  He didn’t like to think of people touching him in his sleep.

  ‘I wasn’t going to tell you, but I guess I couldn’t help it.’

  He didn’t like to think of people touching him when he was awake either, and she had his hand. He didn’t need to take it back – it could be left out flat – but he needed her to let go.

  In his sleep, she’d touched his ear with her mouth, his forehead and hair, and had thought about kissing him and would have if his lips hadn’t been ruined. She was young enough that her sex didn’t have any blood in it. No, she wouldn’t touch blood: it was too much the other person.

  Nothing was his, not his hand. If he had ever wanted to believe he owned anything, Tomasin was the end o
f the illusion. She held the glass to his lips. It wasn’t orange juice she’d brought, but orange crystals half-dissolved, and she’d made it strong – stronger than anyone else would. It stung the tear in his lip and coated his tongue. It was grisly mixed with dried blood, but he sipped because he was thirsty. And because if he didn’t sip, she would still tip the glass.

  ‘I have to go, but drink the rest of this,’ she said, putting the drink down on the floor below his bed. ‘And by the way, your nose is broken, so don’t touch it. It has to set, you know, like a cake.’ She was leaving. ‘You want it to have some shape.’

  From under his bunk he pulled out Rachel’s mirror – like an old letter, but sharp around the edges. Holding it made him feel better. He knew how to hold it on a slight angle to catch the light from his window to show his nose and the top of his mouth. Cotton pink with blood was stuffed up both nostrils and he pulled it out, only to have his nose sink into his cheek. He tried putting the cotton back in, rolling it up tight and handling himself roughly. His nose took some shape back but stayed bent. He’d never seen anything like it: he had to try to recognize himself.

  They met under the verandah at sunset and there was new respect, or new disrespect. She wanted something from him; he was disappointing her somehow. She didn’t like that anyone could be so unaffected by what she wanted.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ she asked. He’d let Sean hit him.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I would understand if you were good at it.’

  ‘You know I have to fight around.’

  ‘I know that?’

  ‘So they’ll leave me alone.’

  ‘You are alone. They don’t come to you, you go to them.’

  Tristan thought he’d never gone anywhere. This was his home. They had all come to him, even her.

  ‘I have an idea for you. You don’t look good,’ she said.

  ‘The swelling is bad,’ he agreed.

  ‘It’s not the swelling.’

  ‘I don’t care what I look like.’

  ‘I care.’

  ‘It’s not useful to care,’ he said.

  ‘If you take a spoon, you could use it, you know,’ Tomasin said, reaching out to touch his face, ‘to fix this,’ but he flinched and pulled back so she missed him.

  But Tomasin kept reaching and took a loose piece of his hair instead. ‘There,’ she said, tucking it over his ear, ‘much better.’

  He was thinking you can’t fix faces with spoons. He was also thinking he could still taste blood.

  In junior high school, Tomasin and her girlfriends had tried to change their faces using anything they could get their hands on: creams from their mothers’ cupboards, sand from the edge of the driveway mixed with the creams to make an exfoliating paste. They made plasters of flour, water, and strips of newspaper: papiermâché casts. They took naps wearing the casts. They talked on the phone wearing them, and tried to sleep in them too, but the masks would fall off in the night and crumple under their pillows. After this, they’d made splints for sleep, which involved tying scarves around their heads to hold glue and popsicle-stick frames. These were never any good, but it was worth a try. And they did the spoon thing, massaging for hours in front of the TV, working the bottom of the spoon in hard-pressed circles, breaking the soft shells of cartilage cells, bruising the tissue to make it malleable.

  With the sun gone, the piano took its place as what they were doing. They didn’t hear it as the sun set, now it was all they heard. It sounded like a toy piano against the silence of the water and far islands. Tristan imagined he could pick up the piano in one hand and crush it like a pop can, or if he couldn’t crush it, at least throw it into the lake. But if he did that, it would be a fixture, the water’s currents forever crossing its keys and strings, and once in a while a note would strike, and more notes on that note’s back. And what would that mean?

  ‘I wonder what this place was like before, you know? Before the piano,’ said Tomasin.

  He knew the piano was heavy, but it had wheels. He could roll it to the Mercy circle and light it on fire.

  ‘Do you wonder what it was like?’

  ‘No,’ he said. If he told her everything, she wouldn’t understand.

  Never, until Tomasin, did Tristan tell any part of his story. And to her, he wasn’t telling it properly.

  ‘Well, I wonder.’

  It didn’t feel good to be with her, not exactly, but he was starting to like how it felt. It didn’t have to feel good. She didn’t need to be better than she was, or to know what she was talking about.

  §

  It was Sunday again, and they pushed out into open water toward more open water. Tomasin didn’t have to ask, he would take her somewhere she’d never been. There was so much sun that the water, low at their sides, was a harsh white, like snow shelled in ice. The waves were white and gold, and the water pouring off their paddles made pocket-size rainbows. If they looked straight down, the sun seemed to shine up from the bottom of the lake three hundred feet below.

  They closed their eyes and flicked them open, not needing to see everything, only the notch in the neck of the distant shore that marked their passage.

  Tomasin hoped the notch was a narrows that would take them from here to somewhere forbidding.

  Tristan never hoped for anything out on the water.

  ‘Looks like sand,’ she said, leaning far over the side.

  Tristan leaned hard the other way to save them from tipping.

  They were in a shallow cove. The water was only three or four feet deep and clear to the bottom. The bottom was white but ribbed.

  ‘I want to walk on it,’ she said, wanting to drag her feet across the ribs.

  ‘There are beaches in all these coves. No one knows they’re here.’

  ‘But you.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘You know everything,’ said Tomasin.

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Yes, you do. Don’t argue,’ she said, turning to look at him. ‘Let me enjoy it.’ She would have moved closer and made him close his eyes so she could press the lids with her fingers – she wanted to cover his eyes then uncover them – but she was stuck kneeling in the bow, so instead she laughed. They weren’t supposed to know anything, but they knew some things. These were their beaches.

  The sun flooded the water and reflected off the sand, and here and there it reflected off the bronze sides of smallmouth bass. Their black backs and white-tipped tails flicked in chase of clouds of finger-length minnows.

  ‘What is that?’

  He told her they were minnows.

  They moved in schools. She’d never seen them. One school shot under the canoe, came up and pooled alongside it, then circled toward shore.

  ‘They can swim anywhere,’ he said, ‘in an inch of water.’

  ‘I can’t think and watch them at the same time,’ she answered, trying to follow them. ‘It makes me nervous.’

  ‘I can,’ Tristan said.

  The minnows slid through the water like slivers. Tristan knew to rock back and give them space, or they’d break away. They followed nothing but each other. They crowded – they cinched – coming so close they could only push off each other. It was intimate, but too much, so it was estranging. The cloud slowed and split into a hard rain of light. When the minnows lost each other, they lost themselves, casting out like a knit mirror. Tristan wondered what they would do without the smallmouths to chase them. Would they split up? They might sliver into nothing, dissolve like salt.

  ‘Come on, it’s shallow enough for you,’ Tomasin said, slipping over the side of the canoe in her shorts. The water reached her stomach.

  ‘But I’m tired,’ he said.

  ‘Tired?’

  ‘From the sun.’

  ‘Come in with me. It’ll make you feel better. The cold water will be good for your face too. Like ice. You’re still swollen.’

  ‘I know.’ He still couldn’t breathe out of his nose. ‘I’m coming.�
��

  ‘No, you’re not. You’re just sitting there.’ She wanted him to feel what she was feeling, the cold water around her waist.

  Tristan almost felt ready to begin. He might say, ‘Do you know why I don’t swim anymore?’ He imagined Tomasin might say, ‘Tell me everything.’ He wanted to tell her how Rachel disappeared in winter. Little boys, younger than he was, seven and eight years old, found her in a place like this, a cove, in the water. After breakup, after the thaw. They were wading in and flipping rocks to catch crayfish. They came back with a bucket full of their catch. They’d found her. They knew what she was. They’d found her but had wanted to fill their bucket until the rim was crawling. They must have lost some crayfish on the walk back.

  ‘I don’t swim where I can’t see the bottom,’ he said. But that was all he could think to start.

  ‘I know that,’ Tomasin said.

  ‘I don’t do it.’

  ‘I already know that. It’s shallow here,’ she said, walking away from the boat, pushing the water with her thighs in a way she liked. Was he watching this? She felt commanding, even to herself, making it hard to understand how he could resist her. All she wanted was for him to come in.

  She pulled fistfuls of sand from the bottom and covered her arms and the back of her neck. She shaped it to her skin, and it relieved the tops of her shoulders, which were so burnt they glistened even before she hit the water. She held still until the sand dried enough to crack and peel, then bent her knees, fell back in the water and went under for a long time. She washed it off only to pull more from the bottom. She liked how it was as heavy as a hand and pressed against her. It made her want to be touched, so much that she went to Tristan and rubbed sand on the back of his hand. She shouldn’t have to ask him to touch her.

  ‘Do you know what you are?’ she asked, putting more sand on the back of his hand and rubbing it in.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mine.’

  He watched her cup water and pour it over his wrist and hand to rinse the sand off. It was a relief, what she’d said, and a disappointment. He’d briefly hoped she would tell him that she knew everything already, so he didn’t have to tell her. She only washed his hand.