Up Through the Water

by Darcey Steinke

  Birdflower looked at Emily. “Go ahead,” she said. “I'll watch.”

  He dropped himself over backwards like a scuba diver. Emily stood and put a knee over the edge as if she was riding sidesaddle.

  David swam around the hull, checking for chipped paint or soft spots in the wood. Birdflower kept his feet up and paddled his hands. The men in the water looked similar as otters and their wet hair and shoulders gleamed. She imagined huge schools of fish extending beneath them. She imagined the prickle of scales as the fish undulated. Sometimes she would find herself thinking of fish and feel a muscle, a swim come over her. Emily loved whales because of the way they moved, quietly as clouds. She still remembered how she and Eddie had played in the inlet. Underneath they swam together and apart as whales do, circling, somersaulting; they seemed much bigger than themselves in the dark water. She was also fascinated with the goosefish. She'd talked one morning to a shaken-looking man from Manteo. He had been fishing on the point and claimed to have seen a goosefish, tiny teeth like ivory nails, damp down and pull a low-flying piper under the surface. Lately she'd been watching the scrawled filefish that lolled in Pamlico Sound. They were gluey white, with the small eyes of a scholar, and each had a different pattern of shapes, like some exotic language, etched over its skin.

  Emily left the boat's edge, leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. She always felt as if she were swimming in a maze of fish, patterns over her body of light and water.

  Later in the afternoon, Emily watched Birdflower on deck. A few hairs blew out of his braid and floated free from his head. Neither of them had even had a nibble all day, but earlier, at noon, David had caught a small dolphin that had flapped on deck—its blue skin stretched thin like a balloon. The small eyes and tender pale belly reminded Emily of a baby and she'd convinced them to throw him back.

  The beer made her head light. She saw Birdflower watching the bones in her neck and shoulders. She felt tugs from her line now and then, but no real tension.

  “Look,” David said.

  Emily flipped her head to the dolphin threading in and out of water.

  Birdflower jerked back. “I got something.” He pushed his feet into the floor, clamping down on the pole, and pulled his weight back.

  The fish, a thin muscle, flipped out of the sea. “It's a sword,” Michael said.

  The pole jerked toward the water. Birdflower leaned back. Emily watched his knuckles whiten. She stood and moved her hand to his shoulder. As she was trying to follow the fin, she saw the image of John Berry over the water. She knew he was there to let her know he thought Birdflower was an insubstantial kind of man and that it was weak for her to start up with him. His face was stern like the pirates from whom he'd descended. Emily would forget the islanders were kin to Blackbeard, but then on Friday nights they'd come out to Paolo's, and when a fast song clicked and fell in the jukebox, they'd do a crazy shuffle step—jeans rolled to their knees, smelling like fish and sun—they swung their long-haired girlfriends.

  The fish buckled above water. Her hair blew back hard, and she had to bring her head forward to steady herself. If he'd been able to, she knew John Berry would have accused her of letting him think nothing was wrong, of making him look like a lovesick fool. She wanted to tell him that in her own way she had felt for him. There were things, triggers, his boyish hand movements, curls like the fine fur of pheasants on the back of his neck, and sometimes with him there had been an abandon.

  The sword's top fin skimmed the water. “Talk to me,” Birdflower said.

  Emily felt hungry and a little dizzy, and again when she looked out over the water, she saw John Berry and her hands tightened on Birdflower's shoulders. It seemed to her it was him, snagged and straining on the end of the line. “Think of it like a man,” she said into his ear.

  Michael gave her a puzzled look. “What are you doing?”

  “Let her go,” Birdflower said.

  The swordfish was twenty yards away, the line tight as a guitar string. Emily watched it buck at the surface. “He's calling you names,” Emily whispered.

  Birdflower grimaced and held on. She tightened her grip on his arm and felt tension through his skin. There was a sudden tug. Birdflower lost his grip and the line reeled out.

  “A breakaway,” David said. “Pull back.”

  Birdflower did, but the line slackened and blew.

  Everyone was quiet and the water too seemed calm. The sudden stillness felt eerie to Emily and she walked over to the edge to look for a flicker or a slash of fin. If he caught the fish, she knew they'd string it up and take pictures, like those at the restaurant behind the cash register, photos of grinning men with beers held high to the camera. There were hundreds of these, some overlapping so only the fish showed, the pictures forming a school of minnows swimming off the restaurant wall.

  The line went taut again and Birdflower pulled his body back, then caught the slack and wound in. This went on till Emily heard the fish bump the side of the boat. The net clapped water, and as they raised it, Emily saw the fish wrapped in rope. On deck, it hissed and flipped. Birdflower beamed over the sword. She reached to the back fin, chrome-green and familiar, ridges fanning out like a wet feather.

  The swordfish steaks cooked in the black skillet, turning from a transparent pink marble to firm white. They swam in butter, mushrooms, and scallion bits. “Cajun style,” Birdflower said, standing over the stove. He took a sip from his wine, then set it down. “It's exciting. Life on the end of your line.”

  “My heart went thump, thump, thump,” Emily said.

  She watched from her chair at a yellow table in his one-room cottage, an unmade bed in the far corner. On the wall, photos of suns over water. And leaning against the far wall, his guitar, a ukulele, and a big Western twelve-string.

  “How old's your boy?” Birdflower asked, the fish crackling behind him.

  “Sixteen.”

  Birdflower shook his head. “You with a kid that old?”

  “I don't see what's so strange about it. Some women have babies at twelve,” Emily said.

  “White trash women.” Birdflower grinned.

  “It's more than some have to show for themselves,” Emily said.

  “I just don't think of you as a mother.”

  She pointed to the photos. “Which ones are which?”

  “The blood-orange suns, the ones like coals, are the sunsets. The other ones are mornings.”

  Emily stared at the dawn suns, which were grayer and seemed to have a kind of music in them; flute, guitar.

  He set down seashore-pattern plates bordered with tiny umbrellas and beach balls. “Former tenants,” he said.

  Emily gazed to the bongs, rolling papers, and pipes scattered among his things. “You smoke a lot, don't you?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But not like you might think.”

  She watched him lever up the fish and peek underneath.

  For months bodies had blurred in her mind. Lips, puffs of underarm hair, the swell and curve of a fleshy calf. John Berry had become familiar, like a brother it seemed; he held her in the nights. But the thought of him fell away each time she strayed. He became a blind spot with the whoosh of her clothes landing on the floor. With strangers there were ten minutes of unornamented reality. A kind of mainline black rush of being alive in the most obvious, necessary way. Her whole life was lived for these: cheek to the hollow space between back and shoulder, arm resting in arm, legs wrinkled together.

  With the spatula, Birdflower put a sword steak onto her plate and then poured butter and squares of onions over it. It smelled intoxicating. The gallon of wine swayed slightly as he raised it between them. Emily felt her hand cupped around a wineglass, the other resting on her thigh, and her back against the metal of the chair. She settled into herself and lifted her glass for more.

  SEVEN

  MTV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Take my word for it.”

  “Does your mother?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

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

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

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

  “You never listen to me,” she said.

  “Yeah, I do.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Eddie said, “No one knows . . .”

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

  “Really?”

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

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

  “Okay.”

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

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

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

  “I do, all the time,” she said.

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

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

  “Lying's for kids,” Eddie said.

  Lila said, “Your mother lies.”

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “That would've been great.”

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

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

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