The Watery Part of the World

by Michael Parker

  “Boyd needs a place to stay.”

  She did not look at Boyd. She didn’t have to; she could feel his embarrassment.

  “Do he?”

  “On his own. I was thinking your summer kitchen,” she said, gesturing toward the one-room, many-windowed outbuilding. A few years ago, before Crawl took off for Morehead, Woodrow had built Sarah a kitchen on the back of the house so she wouldn’t have to traipse in and out of the weather. Then he’d fixed up the summer kitchen for Crawl and his off-island wife, Vanessa, to stay in, but Vanessa didn’t last out the winter before she dragged Crawl back across the sound to Morehead. Since then it had sat empty and so far as Maggie knew it was the only empty structure on the island.

  “What’s Boyd thinking?”

  “Boyd ain’t,” said Boyd, finding his voice and finding it creaky and low. “Obviously somebody’s doing Boyd’s thinking for him.”

  Woodrow smiled slightly, then nodded at the summer kitchen. “Screens is all busted up.”

  “We can mend them.”

  Woodrow looked briefly in her direction, and she thought she saw an eyebrow raised at her “we.” Later she would get to know Woodrow’s every twitch, his every syllabic emphasis; she’d learn to read him, which was as hard as learning to read Braille, for it called on a different sensory approach than she’d ever known before.

  “Best soak them in kerosene when you get them patched,” he said, seemingly to his hogs.

  “How come?” asked Boyd.

  “Keep the bugs away,” said Maggie rotely, as if this trick was obvious to the world, not just their island where the bugs could make life miserable to outsiders especially.

  “He have to share the outhouse with me and Sarah,” said Woodrow.

  That’s no problem, she nearly said, but she caught herself this time. She’d best be careful, speaking for him, calling his shots, presuming to know what was and was not a problem for him. She knew that, left on his own, Boyd would have kept right on staying with his aunt, Virginia Balsom, who already had begun to spread talk about Maggie “corrupting” her nephew. Ginny was a vengeful cow who, soon as she heard what those spy-boys had to report, was liable to try and poison Boyd against her by dragging up every wrong thing she’d done in her lifetime. The times she got a little tight and went off with some ill-chosen man. There had been a few of those times over the years. Things got away with her sometimes when she drank. After a few drinks this overwhelming feeling of license, of entitlement, would begin its tug. Look how you live, the liquor would whisper, all shut up on this island, cut off from most everything that makes life worth the uphill trudge. Said every sip: You deserve whatever pleasure you can piece together tonight. The booze would strike cells in the pit of her stomach and keep on surging southward and when it reached her loins it was like a waiter was there to take her order. Tonight’s the night, whatever you want.

  Only she never let it get further than some sloppy kisses, some old boy equally as looped rubbing his hand up her stomach. Whenever she went off with one of these men, the booze would at some point blot out the desire it had awakened. She opted for drunk over laid every time. Wasn’t any high moral wrangling involved either. More like that buzzer went off in her stomach, Hit me baby, time for another patch, and she’d push away whatever worked-up male she’d dragged out to the dunes, set off to douse her fiery nerves.

  Boyd said, “I got a place to stay.”

  Straining again, not wanting to step in, not wanting even more for him to ruin everything, she said, “When Crawl or any of them come for a visit he can stay back at his aunt’s place.”

  Woodrow smiled his okay, much as she was going to get out of him, and before Boyd could speak, Maggie turned and led him through the house and outside, calling good-bye to Sarah who had made herself scarce in some hidden corner of their neatly kept cottage.

  “What in the world was all that for?” Boyd asked.

  They were nearing the creek, close to the footbridge Woodrow had helped her father and the other men of the village build years ago when a storm washed out the previous one. She dragged him off the path and led him into a bowed shelter carved out by stooped and gnarled yaupons. The mosquito buzz sounded mechanized, like an outboard cranked up high. He slapped at his ankles as she pulled him closer, kissed what she thought of as some sense into him.

  “I want you every night,” she said. “In a bed, not on some borrowed blanket in the dunes where those little brats are going to be every evening now, waiting on a show.”

  “Hell,” he said, “that’s fine, but everybody’s going to know it still. I mean, me living back behind the only black on the island so I can bed down with my woman?”

  “Lover,” she said.

  “Do what?”

  “Say I’m your lover. Don’t call me your woman. That sounds like some trashy song on the radio, talking about your wo-man.”

  “Okay, lover,” he said, laughing. “You really think it’s better, me living over there behind them?”

  “If you have a problem living behind Woodrow and Sarah, I believe we’ve got problems doing what we’re doing.”

  “I like Woodrow,” he said. He looked confused for a minute, as if trying to decide what to say. “I don’t know that he cares too much for me. He’s never out-and-out rude or anything, but most of the time we’re out on the water he looks right through me. Sometimes he even tells Crawl something to tell me. Like I don’t speak English.”

  “Woodrow likes you fine,” she said. “That’s just the way Woodrow is.”

  “Talks to my shoes if he talks to any part of me.”

  “You’d do that to him if you were black and he were white.”

  “Hard to say. I’ve never been all that good at imagining anything other than what I got.”

  Maggie filed this comment away, and in the years since he’d been gone, she trotted it out often, found ways to use it to justify what happened between them. She often felt she was the opposite—capable of imagining anything but what she had.

  Six weeks after Boyd arrived on the island, his uncle Skillet from down at Harker’s Island towed over a twenty-one-foot skiff he’d bought cheap off a retired waterman from Atlantic. Probably he did not want his nephew crewing for a Negro anymore, Maggie said, suspicious of such an extravagant gift, but it was hard to harbor suspicion, Boyd was so proud of that boat. Woodrow helped him get it sea-ready—the boat had spent a season set up on sawhorses in some old boy’s backyard—and Boyd promised to take Maggie out with him after he’d bought and set his pots, borrowed from Woodrow a purse seine, hocked half his belongings for setup gear. Maggie’d spent plenty time out on the water with her daddy and brothers, and it wasn’t something she’d dreamed of repeating. It was hard work and even half days could turn tedious, but this was Boyd and the boy was beside himself and she did dearly love passion of any stripe, the more intense the better, and they would be alone, no one around to look askance at her and her emphasis-on-boy boyfriend and what better way to see the sun come up than the way they did those few mornings she went out with him which happened to be smack in the middle of a big moon that made the sea foam shimmer, turned the spray silver. They would trade sips from a thermos of coffee as black as the sea beneath them. She’d tuck her hands up his shirt, cup the muscles rippling his rib cage. He was too giddy and proud-nervous to interrupt his fishing with a little sunrise loving, but being out there all alone, salt breeze batting them as they turned for home, got them so hot they’d barely get the boat tied up before they’d walk run back to the summer kitchen, fling their cast-off clothes at the blinds, and tuck into each other, inside and outside, all of them and the whole shut-tight dead-aired cottage awash in sea-pricked passion.

  Of all the things she could have done, going out with Boyd those mornings was what drew her big sister’s ire.

  “You think I’m here to wait on you while you’re out on the water all day long? It’s not for me to run this house. Last time I checked, Daddy left it to both of us.”r />
  It was just past noon when she returned—plenty of time yet for whatever chores needed doing, and she told her sister so.

  “That’s not the point. You’re making a trashy fool out of yourself, and of me too in the process. Putting that boy up in Woodrow’s summer kitchen, my God. You got people in Meherrituck talking about the boy lives behind the colored couple, got himself an old lady lover.”

  “Let ’em talk is how I feel about that.”

  “I know good and well how you feel about everything. You don’t give a damn about anything but feeling good at the moment.”

  “Don’t start, Miss Whaley.”

  “Don’t call me that. I have a first name.”

  “No one’s allowed to call you by it.”

  “We’re not discussing what they choose to call me. We’re talking about what they’re out there calling you.”

  Maggie said nothing. She was folding wash off the line and the sheets were stiff and sun-warmed, and she held the cotton to her cheek and missed her lover, who in her mind had merged with other things she desired: sun and saltwater and dusk and that feeling of finally having found someone you wanted to spend all your time with.

  Though this last part, well—she got to where she didn’t trust it. She wanted him to stay and yet she worried she could not keep him. She did not think he was liable to give up everything you want and even need when you’re young—excitement, loud fast nights, traveling (even it was off Harker’s Island up to Raleigh or Norfolk or down to Wilmington, hell, these were places she’d barely been herself), and most of all, maybe last of all, other women. Say he settled with her. She’d be his first real lover—the backseat girls, the upside-the-shed-girls didn’t hardly count—and he’d nearly be marrying the first girl he went with. She knew that’s how it happened lots of times, but she’d seen a lot of unhappiness in those couples who had to get their parents to sign for them in order to cross over to Morehead and get married.

  It was herself too that she didn’t trust. She had a history, and he did not understand nor want to learn to understand history. No one does when they’re young. Whaley loved to talk about how her namesake was so well versed in Latin and Greek, could read old dead poets in French, knew by heart the names of the British royalty and all the stories from the Bible. Maybe that’s where Whaley got her taste for all the ancient things she lived to tell the Tape Recorders. But Whaley wasn’t ever young, really. Not that Maggie was ever so young as Boyd. When she was his age exactly, she was stringing around with a married man as much older than her as she was to Boyd. But there was enough youthful innocence left to remember what it felt like, having to deal with the fact that this man she fancied she loved had slept alongside a wife he swore he could not stomach the sight of (how incredible she found this notion, how oddly repellent, so much so that she would not let herself ponder it even though her mind wanted to go there, like the sight of some washed-ashore half-pecked-apart tern you can’t not look at) and had children in a world that should have been slate clean for their own offspring. She knew that sooner or later, her history would get to Boyd.

  And perhaps there was something of the island itself, the fact that every second it was being taken away by wind and water at the same time it was being added to, grain by grain. This place seemed to have something against the notion of forever. Everything felt so borrowed; it was hard not to be skeptical of anything lasting longer than a season. But she got around to this reason lastly and treated it lightly, preferring to blame herself over geography and nature.

  It wasn’t that she was a bad person; it was that there was something bad wrong with her. Sometimes she felt like the wind blew right through her. The strangest things made her cry—the yellow suds ebbing around some storm wrack, a dead snake, the first few bars of a song overheard from someone’s window as she passed by at night—but let someone she’d known all her life swell up with a tumor and she paid it no more mind than a mosquito bite. Her sister was always calling her selfish, but that was too easy. She cared about other people so much that she wanted to see inside them, to think their same thoughts. She just did not care to sit for hours in their stuffy parlors, talking about couldn’t that new preacher hear their stomachs growling, why were his sermons so long?

  Boyd, by comparison, was noble and believed in people’s goodness. He wasn’t so good he was boring, but he was a fine thing in this world and she got quickly to where it seemed just wrong to think she could have him.

  Doubt kept at her, a whining bug in her ear even when she tried not to consider it. Still, when they were lying in bed, or walking along the island in the after supper settling down of day, talking their playful, idle talk, everything went away. Then there was only the two of them, standing alone and indomitable in the slight spray from the surf.

  One Sunday six months after Boyd arrived on the island, he announced he was taking his boat across to Morehead that weekend to attend his cousin’s baby’s christening. This was the first time he’d left the island and would be the longest they’d been apart.

  “Your cousin’s baby?” she said. A breeze batted the curtains she’d sewn for the summer kitchen, where they lay sweaty and entwined.

  “Yep.”

  “Sounds kind of distant to me.”

  “Y’all don’t have cousins who have babies over here?”

  “I doubt I’d cross the creek to go to their christening if I did.”

  “You don’t want me to go,” he said.

  “Go on across,” she said in such a sulky voice that Boyd laughed.

  “Why don’t you come with me?”

  “What, as your date?”

  “Yes, as my date.”

  It was her turn to laugh at the thought of tagging along behind him through a gauntlet of family, like some schoolgirl he’d met in the parking lot of Dairy Queen.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I don’t think your cousin’s baby’s christening would care to be upstaged by you showing up with the likes of me.”

  “Why, is there something wrong with you?”

  He meant it as a joke, she knew, but how could she take it as such, knowing that there was something wrong with everyone, sure, it was what made people worth speaking to, but at that moment even more than usual there seemed something bad wrong with her. Her sister knew it. She treated her like she was fragile, always had. Only Woodrow treated her normal, though Woodrow, who knew what he was thinking? Maybe his treating her normal was just his way of making an exception for her foolishness. She’d turned away from Boyd at the mention of the christening, and his hand lay heavy across her rib cage, and the weight of it seemed so constricting that she blinked back tears of pain. Then she went silly to stop herself from crying.

  “I’m a leopard,” she said.

  “You’re a who?” Boyd said, his last word wavy with laughter.

  “Leopard. I escaped from a leopard colony.”

  This got away with him enough to derail the subject of her going across with him, but not for long. All week long he kept after her. All week, at his side or alone, she worried about his leaving, and was visited by dreams, waking or in fitful sleep, of a ghost she thought she’d long ago shed.

  Growing up, she and Whaley had spent hours playing a game they called Dare, a version of hide-and-go-seek based in historical fact, island lore, myth, and the endless fascination they had for stories featuring female adventurers. After horrid fights erupted over who would get to play Virginia Dare herself—Whaley always claimed her right because she knew the history better, or “the Truth” as she called it, notwithstanding the fact that the story of Virginia Dare and her lost colony was considered America’s longest-running mystery), while Maggie’s claim seemed irrefutable in its simplicity: she was better at being Virginia, she could scamper up dunes barefoot to search the horizon for her grandfather’s ships come to rescue them, she wasn’t afraid of the forest like her sister, she would gladly get dirty and wet and brave bug bite and even jellyfish sting—their m
other intervened, demanding they take turns.

  The difference in the way Maggie and Whaley understood the world was exemplified not only in how they played Virginia but in what they felt the story was about. Whaley’s version was pitched to people like the Tape Recorders who were all about some stuff happened four hundred years before they were born. So proud even at that age, so convinced of her superior mind, so free from doubt and resistant to the possibility that life was lived mostly in the vague border between right and wrong, certain that the island they happened to have been born on was the only place on the globe for her to live, Whaley’s Virginia was always up in someone’s face (well, Maggie’s face, seeing as how she was the only other one playing the game), lecturing about how she was the first white girl born in the United States of America and her grandfather John White was the true father of this country and to heck with Jamestown and as for the Pilgrims, walking around the woods with buckles on their shoes, they dressed like a nun if you asked her and invented the most good-for-nothing laziest holiday ever where all you do is sit around and eat, what a waste of time. This was just the start of all Whaley’s Virginia had to allow. Whaley’s colony never got around to ever getting lost, because see, she didn’t believe they ever did get lost. She believed the ones who came back for them didn’t look all that hard. She believed she was blood kin to Virginia Dare, that there was not one drop of anything but white blood in her either, all that hogwash about the colonists fleeing the island on account of storms and going across and mixing with Indians, that made no sense, who would ever leave the island? Just because of some wind? Maybe a little storm surge?

  The world according to Whaley, unchanged in the decades since they had last played Dare: why in the world would anyone see the world differently than she did?

  Maggie’s Virginia was not big on words. Her Dare played outdoors. Hours spent lying in the sand, digging in the tidepools for sand fiddlers, wandering the low wind-stunted forests. If at first Virginia loved her life by the ocean, enjoyed pining away for the return of her grandfather and the rest of her colony, the longer they stayed away, the less she missed them. Her fellow colonists began to seem timid to her. She had been born here; she was different. They struck her as too easily pleased. This New World was to her a humongous loaf of bread, hers for the feasting, yet the rest of them were content to nibble like mice on the crust she would just as soon tear away and leave on her plate like a ravished bone. She wanted off island.