Outside their door, the pink motel sign came on with a neon click and buzz. ‘'I'm sorry,” Birdflower said. “I'll flush it all if you want.” He put the key in Emily's palm.
She thought of the dusty ride and the ache in the back of her thighs. “I'm taking a bath. Why don't you go get some beer?”
She left Birdflower sitting on the orange-flowered bedspread drawing lines around a blossom. “No more,” she heard him say as the water beat into the motel tub.
“I like bottles,” she yelled, unzipping her jeans, yanking them off by the bottom and testing the water with a long first toe. She pulled her T-shirt off.
Emily settled into the bath, her nipples, belly, and knees floating above water like islands. The island's own well water was too rich in iron for soaking. It stained her skin and left her hair tinted red. Steam rose and water rocked against her hips. She remembered failed vacations from her marriage. The trip would turn as reasonlessly as wind drifts over water: a bad dinner, a flat tire, or a forgotten hairbrush and the whole thing would be ruined. It was harder for them because they lived a vacation.
She turned over on her stomach and thought of the first trip she'd ever taken with Daniel, how she'd wanted it to go well. It was just over the border that she'd mentioned flowers and he'd looked oddly at her, and asked where he was supposed to get them. She'd smudged daisies with her pinky over the window. He pulled over and they looked in the brush on the side of the road. She found two tattered daisies. He found a few fisted morning glories that looked like tissue paper when he held out his hand. Soon after, he had taken a flashlight and gone into the woods. She waited in the car thinking of the irises on the dark side of her parents’ house and the big silky petaled magnolia in the backyard. He returned with nothing and they drove on toward the town they had heard of with the judge who would marry you for five dollars.
The door clicked. “Me,” Birdflower said. A bag rustled and then there was a little gasp from a twist-off beer. Birdflower walked into the bathroom and put a green bottle near her on the tub's edge. He sat across the paper banner of the closed toilet seat. Emily tipped her beer up.
Birdflower looked at his beer, then let his eyes slowly peruse her body. “I want this to be good,” he said. “I've been thinking about it every other minute for days.”
“Have you ever noticed when you're off, it's always like you're a silver minnow in a plastic cup or something?” she said, water lapping back and forth from her toes to her neck.
“We're in the same cup,” he said as he moved to sit on the ledge. He kissed her and with a finger drew a line on her neck up to her ear. His hand moved over her wet hair, which separated and dripped at the shoulders.
Emily thought, I'll stay with you as long as I can.
He sat on the bed watching Emily put lotion on her newly shaven legs. She had on a calico sundress and different leather sandals than usual. He was dressed up too, white shirt, open paisley vest, and his jeans were the newer of the two pair he owned. He drank the last beer. It was weird that just two months ago on his birth, day in May he had been so alone. He'd woken early and smoked a joint in bed, watching the tip blend with the rising sun out his window. He made a cake, this year devil's food, sometimes angel: a tradition his mother had started, depending on the behavior of the year. Later, after a quiet day of meditation on his life's odometer turning over, he had dinner and a slice of his cake. When he had finished, pushed his plate forward, and sat back to light a cigarette, he felt that something would have to happen very soon.
“Ready?” she said.
“To hit the town with you,” Birdflower said.
When they got in the van, Emily brushed sand off the seat as though she'd never seen the stuff. He saw them at some low-ceilinged, red-lighted club, fishbowl drinks in front of them with mermaid swizzle sticks. They were quiet and he started thinking about the little house on Lake Michigan his father had left him. A friend had told him a small village had grown up at water's edge. Lately he envisioned them in the back of some bakery there. Her chopping nuts for bread, him pouring batter into muffin tins. He'd told her this a few days ago. She was not as enthusiastic as he had hoped. That scared him. He knew she was like a plant and he worried that if he brought her up there, to the frozen ground, it'd be all over. She might get limp and start asking for water and before you knew it, one morning he would wake up to find a pile of dry leaves next to him in bed. On Ocracoke the cold was different. It blew off the sea instead of moving up from the earth the way it did in the upper peninsula. Last year he'd seen the winter ocean. He'd been stoned and drunk and decided around four in the afternoon to borrow a speedboat and take a look. The water was navy-black and the moving whitecaps reminded him of an old guy's fingertips coming together and then apart, as though the ocean was wringing its hands. Even the few coal-black fish that jumped were shivering: their breath making tiny puffs over the water.
They chose the place because it was red-barn color and had a chain of pink elephants across one side. The bouncer took their money. “Have you seen stuff like this before?” He turned the bill up so that Lincoln eyeballed Emily's breasts.
“Yeah, man. She's seen it all,” Birdtlower said.
The air conditioner hummed and bubbled, filtered and cooled the place as though it was underwater. They let their eyes focus on the wood tables. Birdflower watched the light and movement of the blinking Busch river, the neon Budweiser clocks, and the giant can of Michelob lit on the far wall. As if each had accidentally floated there, lone men scattered the bar. They chose a table and Birdflower left Emily fingering candle wax at the back.
“Piña Coladas are the only faggy drinks we serve,” the bartender said. With his thick fingers he poured powder into a silver shaker. Birdflower looked to a shallow pool in front of the bar. He threw down ten bucks. “You keep fish in that center thing?”
“That there,” the bartender said, “is for mud wrestling.”
Birdflower saw the sheen off the smooth mud. “Big guys?”
The bartender set the drinks down, each with a half-opened paper umbrella. “No,” he said. “Girls. Real live girls.”
On their way to this place, the full moon had sometimes seemed to race the car, other times falling back beyond the trees. It reminded her of the things she'd said, in June, she'd try to figure out. During the varied phases she had thought some. But it was hard for Emily to yank herself into thinking like that. Her life worked by brief exchanges. It was a twisting, swerving thing that formed in a familiar but always somewhat remarkable way. The moon had appeared then, and she realized this: No man could save you from any other man. Birdflower was no solution, as she'd been trying to convince herself, for her fear of John Berry.
Birdflower came back with the drinks and sat down. A couple squeezed into the table near them. Emily sucked her straw. The woman was fat, had on blue bell-bottoms and a shirt tied at the midriff with a white tube top underneath. When she saw women like this, so obviously confident with themselves but so different from herself, Emily tried to figure out where she fit in the long arch of females. She saw it like some kind of rainbow, spread not with thin color but with millions of different women. She looked down at her knees, the rough scar like a wild berry on her right and the burn from the lowest rack of the restaurant stove on the left.
Her eyes caught two women in small red bikinis coming out a door near the bar along with a big striped referee penguin walking behind.
“They're going to wrestle,” Birdflower said. He pointed to the threesome lining up by the pit. She watched the women do muscle poses. The referee touched the mud and winked at the men in the front. Emily stared at the small sequined suits. “They look my age,” she said. “You can tell by that crepe paper skin on their upper arms.”
A whistle blew and the jukebox slackened mid-song. Birdflower looked embarrassed. He was opening and closing his own little umbrella. The two women stepped into the mud, arms out like sumo wrestlers. There were tentative ringside shouts of enco
uragement.
Birdflower pulled her wrist forward so their heads met in the middle of the table. “We can leave.” Emily shook her head. Men around her were lifting off their chairs. Smoke from their cigarettes was backlit by the red net candles on every table. More men lined up against the walls, long-neck beers held with a finger in their belt loop.
“I want to see this,” Emily said. She had said that same thing years ago about a porno flick her husband had rented for a bachelor party. He had reluctantly set the projector on a chest of drawers in their bedroom. Lights off. A little square over the bed no bigger than a TV screen. And many men around one woman, at all angles, moving in a variety of directions like some out-of-whack machine. At the end Emily left the room. She made no comment, but it stayed with her. Later that night as she moved her husband onto her, she closed her eyes and somehow felt what she'd seen all over her body and then imagined more than one man with her and for an instant it was simple; she was a functional organ. Like a heart pumping.
Emily sunk lower. She watched the women down in the mud roll onto each other. The mud oozed through their toes, under their arms, and gathered in their hair. One was down and there was a two-beat chant from the back tables and then a roar as both women twisted like water moccasins. Emily braced her hands on the table; she felt as if she were being sucked into the mud. She saw herself in the pit: brown mud hiding the everyday her, letting her become someone only her body knew. With their strong arms the women pulled at her waist, kneeled over her, and pinned her arms. When she tired and looked into the face above, she found that it was her own muddied features. She jerked. The woman pressed up to her lips and kissed her. The room was only dim red light as her other self disappeared into the mud.
The crowd cheered. Emily watched the girls in the ring claw and kick. The dark-haired one straddled the other. Emily felt the mud squish between her stomach and another's. Both arched up into familiar pinup poses. The referee circled like a dazed bear.
Birdflower grabbed her hand as people all around started to stand. He shouted, “Baby, let's go somewhere civilized.” Emily heard this, but just smiled and ran a finger down the curve of her cleavage. She was already wriggling in the mud. There were other shapes approaching her, moving on her. Emily watched the women push each other's face into the mud. One wrestled the other's top off. Emily fingered the nipple of her breast. The muddy top was held up like a caught fish. The chanting was louder and Birdflower's hand tightened on hers. He used his head to signal toward the door. The cheering voices were like an ocean. You can't tell them apart, she was thinking. They could be anyone. She could see only through a mass of men's legs and around their hips, a jungle of body parts. Slithering like some new animal, she found her way, feeling the mud on her neck and between her legs. She'd slip off her dress and roll till, if she lay still, no one could find her. Only her light eyelashes would rise out of the mud like seedlings. She was very close. Only a few men to pass. She went slowly, squirming all her parts forward.
A hand tightened on her arm. “Where the hell do you think you're going?”
She knew him and watched him carefully through slit eyes as he pulled her through the crowd toward the exit sign.
Emily did a dead man's float in the motel pool. The moon was like an earring she once lost. Inside, Birdflower was lulled in sleep by the air conditioner's steady breath. She'd come out to stand on the diving board and do an easy striptease, T-shirt then panties floating near her like huge petals. Lazily she lifted her head for air and saw herself in an aquarium, a fish floating sideways, cloudy-eyed on top.
There were plate-sized lights underwater. A NO DIVING AFTER MIDNIGHT sign, scattered lawn chairs, and a vista of two long double-decker rows of motel rooms, clipped shrubs, and the late night stars above. Emily preferred the ocean—she backstroked from blue ceramic side to side—but this was nice, clean water on her skin; her body a showpiece, a trained porpoise doing laps. She floated, toes arched skyward, and sank into an underwater somersault. Because her mouth was dry, she sidestroked to the spigot under the diving board. There was one childhood moment she always remembered. She'd walked to the rabbit cage the neighbors had in their backyard. Inside the mother rabbit had been slouched over, showing her nipples, a baby rabbit attached to each one. Off to the side, there had been a dead one covered with a dozen flies. One of that rabbit's eyes gazed loosely into the straw. And she'd stood there at six or seven, her hands climbing into her shirt for her own nipples. This is me, she thought and turned her head up to the sky.
Emily left the spigot and dived underwater. Swimming along the bottom, her belly grazed the pool floor like a blue-gray shark.
She floated on her back: body down five inches, head a mask above water. She had seen Eddie walking barefoot along the main road with Lila. He'd dropped her hand when he saw Emily's car. She spread her arms and legs out wide like angels in snow. Maybe now he was on the beach with her, their hair blown back from their faces, Eddie's head flipping from the moon to the girl's blouse whipped tight around her. She had to be careful what she said to Eddie about girls, because her feelings were irrational; she felt jealous and oddly suspicious of the intentions of a local girl like Lila.
Emily rolled over and over like a kid circling down a hill. John Berry might be on the ferry tomorrow. His face was unclear. She remembered now just a vague beefiness around his upper thighs and the coarse quality of his hair.
Emily held to the side and kicked small tight scissor cuts. As though it was boiling, the water bubbled around her. Birdflower opened the door of the room and stood by the small outside light in his underwear, his long braid over one shoulder like a girl's. He climbed down the stairs, cleared the metal fence, and squatted by the pool's edge. She saw his body pinprickle as he lowered himself in and with one hand loosened the band of his braid.
“Let's not go back,” he said.
Emily laughed and splashed water at him. She swam to the darkest edge of the pool.
In a quick head-thrown-freestyle he trailed her, cornering her, and pressed his body against hers. Emily's back rubbed tiles.
“No way,” she said.
“Come on,” he said.
“Everybody lives on an island.” Their wet heads bobbed above water. Emily said, “Some just aren't out in the ocean.”
“You're so profound,” Birdflower said, his hands resting on each side of her rear.
Open-mouthed and falling, Emily kissed him. She saw at eye's edge a light flicker on in the first-floor row of rooms and a man at the window, looking up to the unanimous night sky and then holding a drink high as if in a toast to her.
ELEVEN
MERIDIAN
Wind moved the small Cape Hatteras office. John Berry flipped photos like cards into the circle of light in the middle of the room. He shuffled to one of himself and Emily on the beach, beers in hand and a bonfire in the background. Her face was flushed and her hair fell into a center part and blew slightly forward. That night, everyone had been so drunk around the fire, singing songs and one guy telling about times he went out on a late-night shrimper with his father, and how the trollers would gather around the boat with the best storyteller, and how that man's voice would whisper into the scene of lantern lights nodding from boat to boat. Near sunrise, John Berry had awoken with Emily's full weight on top of him and he'd carried her to the truck as the sun inched up. He folded the photograph. The next was of him and his father, both in Bermuda shorts, standing in Wanchese Harbor. That was the last time his father had been off the island before he died. For a minute John Berry looked into the tiny eyes of his dad and was oddly lonely for him. But his father had not minded dying. Earlier in his life he'd said right out that he'd seen more change on the island, and in the world, than his father had and probably more than John Berry ever would. At the graveyard, on a bright June morning, one which seemed to take away all the gloomy corners and uncertainties of death, John Berry had stood near his father's grave, and as the first shovel of dirt was pitched
down, he threw in a handful of white sand. It sprayed up like the points of a wave, dazzled, then landed—pelting the coffin hundreds of times.
His thumb pressed on the gloss of a large one—Emily red-eyed from the flash, in a green halter dress, her glass held up for New Year's Eve. Around her waist were four creeping fingers. He held the photo near his hand to see if they matched. There was a hint of stray knuckle hairs—but how could he really tell? He threw the photo. It flipped backwards and flapped down. Pulleys rang against the flagpole and the aluminum office hissed.
John Berry checked the windows, no cars yet on his side. The green and red channel markers blinked out in the water and beyond he saw the dim winking lights of the island. A van's high beams threw light on John Berry's face and showed his finger pulling down a venetian blind. The lights flipped off and the van's engine rattled.
He looked into the shoe box; shiny bits of color were mixed and jumbled in the rectangle as if his whole life was the turning end of a kaleidoscope. Looking out at the two people in the van, he saw that they were kissing, and before long, he realized it was them.
The tick of the clock beat out pairs of seconds as Emily snuggled her head onto Birdflower's shoulder. A camper pulled in behind the van and a sleepy-looking woman tipped ashes from her cigarette out the window.
He'd get the pellet gun from the truck, shove it into his pocket, and force Birdflower to swim out and grab the last dock pole. Then he'd get into the van and drive Emily over the water to the white house, to their life as it had been.
He gathered the pictures off the carpet. The ferry was maneuvering its mass into the dock. John Berry slipped out of the back, gently resting the door behind him. The deep ferry whistle sounded. He got in his truck and inched the door closed, ignited the engine, and flipped the gear shift into reverse. In snapshots, John Berry envisioned the next scenes, one after another, blurred and hectic. The wheels of the truck straightened and he headed for the curving line of cars.
Up Through the Water Page 9
