by Rick Bass
In the dark harbor he would climb into the boat, slippery and naked, as she removed her own clothes, pulling off the old sea-green sweater she wore over her swimsuit in the chill night air, then removing the yellow swimsuit itself, and then her earrings, placing all of these things in the bow, out of the way, so that there was nothing, only them. They would lie in the bottom of the cool green canoe, hold each kiss, and feel the lake pressing from beneath as they pressed back against it, riding the surface of the water. With the water so very nearly lapping at her skin but not quite—separated only by the canoe’s thin shell—Lory felt like some sort of sea creature. One or both of her arms would sometimes hang over the edge of the canoe as they made love, would trail or splash in the water, and often she didn’t see why they didn’t just get it over with, dive into the lake and never come back to the surface.
Later, they would get up and sit on the wicker bench seat in the stern, side by side, and lean against each other, holding hands.
They would sit in the harbor, those cool nights, steaming from their own heat. Other boats rode into the harbor, idling through the darkness back to shore, their lengths and shapes identifiable by the green and yellow running lights that lined their sides for safety, as they passed through the night, going home. At times it seemed as if one of the pleasure boats was coming right at them, and sometimes one of the boats with bright running lights would pass by so close they could see the faces of the people inside.
But they were unobserved. They watched the boats pass and let the night breezes dry their hair, dry the lake water from their bodies so that they felt human once more, and of the earth. They would make love again, invisible to all the other passing boats, all of them full of people who could not see what it was like to be in love.
A.C. and Lory would have coffee at a restaurant on the short drive back—five or six miles from home—on a deck beneath an umbrella like tourists, looking out at Highway 9A. Lory drank her coffee slowly, stirring milk and sugar into it, cup after cup, watching the black liquid turn into swirling, muddy shades of brown. A.C.’s weight was up to three hundred pounds now, more muscle than ever, but she would reach over, smiling, look into his eyes, and grip the iron breadth of his thigh and squeeze it, then pat it and say, “How are you doing, fat boy?”
She felt lake water still inside her, even though they had gone in for a quick cleaning-off swim—A.C. staying right next to her, holding her up in the water with one hand. She felt deliciously wild. They drank coffee for an hour, until their hair was completely dry. Then they drove home, to Louella’s dismay and the brothers’ looks of happiness, but looks that were somehow a little hurt, a little lost; home to Heck’s mild wonderment and interest, looking up from his gin and tonic; home to Lindsay’s impatience, for A.C. and Lory would have been gone a long time.
“We’re just friends, Mom,” Lory would say whenever Louella tried to corner her in the kitchen. “I’m happy, too. See? Look!” She danced, leapt, and kicked her heels together three times, spun around when she landed, then went up on her toes—an odd interpretation of the discus spin that A.C. was trying to learn.
“Well,” said Louella, not knowing what to say or do. “Good. I hope so.”
One morning when A.C. stayed in Glens Falls, he lifted himself from sleep and moved around the basement, examining the old weights, the rowing machines, the rust-locked exercise bikes, and the motionless death-hang of the patched and battered punching bags. A.C. ran his hand over the weights and looked at the flecks of rust that came off on his hands, and thought how the brothers were outlasting the iron and the steel. He stared at the rust in the palm of his hand and smelled the forever-still air that had always been in the basement, air in which John and Jerry had grown up, spindly kids wrestling and boxing, always fighting things, but being part of a family: eating meals together, going to church, teasing their sisters, growing larger, finding directions and interests, taking aim at things. That same air was still down there, as if in a bottle, and it confused A.C. and made him more sure that he was somehow a part of it, a part he did not know about.
He pictured pushing through the confusion, throwing the discus farther and farther, until one day he did the skip-and-glide perfectly. He would be able to spin around once more after that, twice more, and still look up after the throw in time to see the disc flying. It would make the brothers happy, but perhaps then they would not feel that he was a brother anymore.
He trained harder than ever with them, as if it were the greatest of secrets they were giving him. They put their arms around him, walking back from training. Sometimes they teased him, trying to put his great throws in perspective.
“The circumference of the earth at the equator is more than 24,000 miles,” Jerry said nonchalantly, looking at his watch as if to see what time it was, as if he had forgotten an appointment. Lory had put him up to it. She’d given him the numbers to crib on his wrist. “Why, that’s over 126,720,000 feet,” he’d exclaim.
John looked over at A.C. and said, “How far’d you throw today, A.C.?”
A.C. would toss his head back and laugh a great, happy laugh, the laugh of someone being saved, being thrown a rope and pulled in. He would rather be their brother than anything. He wouldn’t do them any harm.
Lory and A.C. took Lindsay canoeing on the Battenkill River, over in Vermont. It was almost fall. School was starting soon. Lory stayed close to A.C., held on to his arm, sometimes with both hands. She worried that the fatigue and subsequent depression would be coming on like a returning army, but she smiled thinly, moved through the cool days and laughed, grinning wider whenever their eyes met. Sometimes A.C. would blush and look away, which made Lory grin harder. She would tickle him, tease him; she knew he was frightened of leaving her. She knew he never would.
They drove through the countryside, past fields lined with crumbling stone walls and Queen Anne’s lace, with the old canoe on top of the VW. They let Lindsay drive, like a chauffeur. A.C. and Lory had somehow squeezed into the back seat. Now and then Lindsay looked back at them when they kissed, and a blush came into her face, but mostly it was just shy glances at the mirror, trying to see, as if through a telescope, the pleasure that lay ahead of her.
The road turned to white gravel and dust with a clatter and clinking of pebbles, but Lory and A.C. did not notice. They looked like one huge person wedged into the back seat. Sun flashed through the windshield. It felt good to Lindsay to be driving with the window down, going faster than she ever had. Meadows passed, maples, farms, cattle. A.C. reached forward and squeezed the back of Lindsay’s neck, startling her, and then began rubbing it. She relaxed, smiled, and leaned her head back. Her red hair on his wrist.
Lindsay drove down the narrow road raising dust, and brilliant goldfinches swept back and forth across the road in front of them, flying out of the cattails, alarmed at the car’s speed. Lindsay hit one; it struck the hood and flew straight up above them, sailing back toward the cattails, dead, wings folded, but still a bright yellow color. Lindsay cried “Oh!” and covered her mouth, because neither A.C. nor Lory had seen it. She was ashamed and wanted to keep it a secret.
They stopped for cheeseburgers and shakes at a shady drive-in, in a small Vermont town whose name they’d never heard of. The drive-in was right by the banks of the river, where they would put the canoe in. The river was wide and shallow, cool and clear, and they sat beneath a great red oak and ate. Lindsay was delighted to be with them, but also she could not shake the oddest feeling. Again, the feeling was that there was nothing special, that it had been happening all her life, these canoe trips with A.C. and Lory, and that it could just as easily have been John or Jerry sitting with them under the tree. If anything, Lindsay felt a little hollow somehow, and cheated, as if something were missing, because A.C. had shown up only this summer.
Lindsay had never paddled before. She sat backwards and gripped the paddle wrong, like a baseball bat. And Lory did an amazing thing that her sister never understood: she fell out, twice
. It was like falling out of a chair. She hadn’t even been drinking. Lindsay shrieked. They had water fights.
Lindsay had baked a cake, and they ate it on a small island. When the sisters waded into the cold river to pee, A.C. laughed, turned his back, and made noise against the rocks on the shore.
“Lindsay’s jealous,” Lory said when they came trudging out of the river. Lindsay swung at her but missed, and fell back into the water.
The sun dried them quickly. Several times A.C. got out of the canoe and swam ahead, pulling them by a rope held in his teeth.
Lory had brought a jug of wine. They got out and walked up into a meadow and drank from it whenever they became tired of paddling, which was often. At one stop, on the riverbank, Lory ran her fingers through A.C.’s hair. In six years, she would be forty. A crow flew past, low over the river. Farther upstream, they could see trout passing beneath the canoe, could see the bottom of the river, which was deep. Stones lined the river bottom, as if an old road lay beneath them.
On the way home, with A.C. at the wheel, they stopped for more cheeseburgers and had Cokes in the bottle with straws. They kept driving with the windows down. Their faces were not sunburned, but darker.
When A.C., Lory, and Lindsay got home and went into the house, the brothers were immediately happy to see the big man again, as always, but then, like small clouds, something crossed their faces and then vanished again, something unknown, perhaps confused.
The day before school started, Lory and A.C. paddled up to the farmhouse in Vermont. They were both sad, as if one of them were leaving and not ever coming back. Lory thought about another year of school. Tired before it even began, she sat on the stone wall with him, her head on his shoulder. He let her stay that way and did not try to cheer her up with stunts or tricks or feats of strength. The cattle in the field grazed right up to the edge of the stone wall, unafraid of Lory and A.C.
He rubbed the back of Lory’s neck, held her close against him. He could be kind and tender, he could be considerate and thoughtful, he could even love her, but she wanted something else. He was afraid of this, and knew he was as common as coal in that respect. He also knew he was afraid of leaving, and of being alone.
A.C. was running out of money, so he took a paper route. He had no car, so he pulled the papers on a huge scraping rickshaw, fitting himself with a harness to pull it. It had no wheels and was really only a crude travois: two long poles with a sheet of plywood nailed to them, and little guard rails so he could stack the papers high on it.
He delivered papers in the early afternoon. All through the neighborhoods he trotted, grimacing, pulling a half ton of paper slowly up the small hills, and then, like a creature from the heavens, like some cruel-eyed bird, he swooped down the hills, street gravel and rock rattling under the sled. He shouted and tossed papers like mad, glancing back over his shoulder with every throw to be sure that he was staying ahead of the weight of the sled, which was accelerating, trying to run him down. It was funny, and the people who lived at the bottom of a hill learned to listen for him, loved to watch him, to see if one day he might get caught.
But now it was lonely for A.C., with Jerry in his final year at school, playing football, and John coaching. Lindsay was back in school too, and Heck was still the principal. Only Louella stayed at home.
Usually A.C. finished his paper route by late afternoon, and then he would put the sled in the garage and hose himself off in the backyard, his chest red from where the harness had rubbed, his running shorts drenched with sweat. He’d hold the hose over his head and cool down. Louella would watch from the kitchen window, feeling lonely, but she was also cautious, a mother first.
Dripping, A.C. would turn the water off, coil the hose up, and sit at the picnic table, his back turned to the kitchen. Like a dog finished with his duties, he would wait until he could see Lory again, see all the siblings. Louella would watch him for a long time. She just couldn’t be sure.
When Lory got home from school, riding on a fresh burst of energy at the idea of seeing him again, A.C. would jump up, shake sprays of water from his wet hair, and run to open the door for her. He kissed her delicately, and she would ask, teasing, “How was your day, dear?” It was all working out differently from how she had expected, but she was fresher and happier than she could ever remember.
The children at Lory’s school were foul, craven, sunk without hope. She would resurrect one, get a glimmer of interest in one every now and then, but eventually it would all slide back; it had all been false—that faint progress, the improvement in attitude. Sometimes she hit her fist against the lockers after school. The desks with “I fucked Miss Iron” on them were still there, and the eyes of the male teachers were no better, saying the same thing. She was getting older, older, and each year she wondered if this was the year that the last of her youth would go away. It was a gauntlet, but she needed to stay close to Glens Falls. She had to keep going.
It was like traveling upriver at night in the canoe with him, up through the rapids, only it was like being one of the darkened iron statues rather than her live, loving self. It was like night all the time, this job, and in her dreams of it, there was never any sound, no promise, no future. She was in the wrong place, taking the wrong steps, and she knew—she could feel it as strongly as anything—that it took her too far away from him, teaching at Warrensburg each day, a place of darkness.
She was up until midnight every night, grading papers, preparing lesson plans, reading the barely legible scrawled essays of rage—“i wont to kil my sester, i wont to kil my bruthers”—and then she was up again at four or four-thirty, rousing herself from the sleepy dream of her life. But A.C. was also up by then, making coffee for her.
When they kissed in the morning she’d be wearing a tattered, dingy robe and her owlish reading glasses. His hands would slide under her robe and find her warm beneath the fuzzy cloth. He wanted nothing else for either of them. There could be no improvement. He knew she wanted more, though, that she wanted to keep going.
They would take a short walk right before she left for school. By the time they got back, John and Jerry would be up. Jerry’s clock radio played hard rock. John, with no worries, no responsibilities, sorted through the refrigerator for his carton of milk (biceps drawn on it with a Magic Marker) and got Jerry’s carton out (a heart with an arrow through it, and the word “Mom” inside the heart). The brothers stood around and drank, swallowing the milk in long, cold gulps.
Watching A.C. and Lory grow closer was, to Louella, like the pull of winter, or like giving birth. Always, she thought about the one she had lost. Twenty years later, she had been sent a replacement. She wanted to believe that. She had not led a martyr’s life, but she had worked hard, and miracles did happen.
It was true, she realized. She could make it be true by wanting it to be true.
She looked out her kitchen window at him, sitting at the picnic table with his back to her, resting after his paper route, facing the garden, the late-season roses. Sun came through the window, and she could see hummingbirds fly into the backyard, lured by the sweetness of the nectar she had put in the feeders.
Louella watched A.C. look around at the hummingbirds, staring at them for the longest time, like a simple animal. The birds were dancing flecks of color, flashes of emerald and cobalt. Louella saw a blur of orange in the garden, the cat racing across the yard, up onto the picnic table, then leaping into the air, legs outstretched. She saw the claws, and like a ballplayer the cat caught one of the hummingbirds in midair, came down with it, and tumbled and rolled.
Louella watched as A.C. ran to the cat, squeezed its neck gently, and lifted the limp hummingbird from the cat’s mouth. The cat shivered, shook, and ran back into the garden. A.C. set the limp hummingbird down on the picnic table. The other hummingbirds were gone.
Louella went into the backyard. The little bird lay still with its eyes shut, a speck of blood on its throat like a tiny ruby. The glitter of its green back like scales.
“That damn cat,” Louella said, but as they watched, the hummingbird began to stir, ruffled its feathers, looked around, and flew away.
Each morning after the others had left, A.C. would sit at the picnic table a bit longer. Then he would come inside and tell Louella that he was going to Vermont for a while. Always, he asked her if she needed anything, or if she cared to go with him for the ride, and always she refused, saying she had things to do. Always, afterward, she wished she had said yes, wondered what it would be like, wondered what his stone farmhouse looked like. But there were boundaries to be maintained; she could not let go and say yes. So A.C. would lift the canoe over his head and walk through the neighborhood, out across the main road and down to the river, leaving her alone.
What A.C. was working on in Vermont was a barn, for throwing the discus during the winter months. He wanted to perfect his throw, to make John and Jerry happy. He had no money left, so he ripped down abandoned barns, saving even the nails from the old boards. He built his barn in the woods, on the side of the hill behind his farmhouse. It was more like a bowling alley than anything.
He had planned it to be 300 feet long. He climbed high into the trees to nail on the tall roof that would keep the snow out. There was not enough wood to build sides for the barn; mostly it was like a tent, a long, open-walled shed. He had built up the sides with stones about three feet high to keep the drifts from blowing in. It would be cold, but it would be free of snow.
He cut the trees down with an ax to build the throwing lane, and then cut them into lengths to be dragged away. He was building a strip of empty space in the heart of the woods; it ran for a hundred yards and then stopped. He kept it a secret from the whole family, and was greatly pleased with its progress as the fall went on.
