Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  ‘What are you staring at?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing much.’ Go on and tell her. ‘See that house up there with the green shingles? That was my grandfather’s house.’

  ‘Really? Is he there now?’

  ‘No, no. He’s been dead for years. It’s my uncle’s now.’

  ‘Do you want to go up and say hi?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not especially. Anyway, he’s probably not there. He rents it out a lot.’

  ‘Do you see him much?’

  He shook his head. ‘We used to. When my mother was alive.’

  ‘He doesn’t get on with your daddy?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. But my father doesn’t like coming over here. He never did, and now that my mother’s gone he doesn’t have to. My uncle still drops by our house when he’s in town.’

  ‘At least they get on. My father hardly speaks to my mother’s family any more. My aunt in Berkeley had to pay my fare when I visited.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t have the money.’

  ‘He has more than she’s got. He just didn’t want me to go.’

  He doesn’t want you to go anywhere, he thought. ‘Your father,’ he started to say, shaking his head.

  ‘Hush,’ she said, and pressed her fingers to his lips. They felt cool and dry. ‘I know what you were going to say. Please don’t. I have to look after him. I promised my mother.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, and thought of his own mother in those last days, between the alternating sessions of pain and sleep. She hadn’t asked him to look after anybody. Just don’t get stuck here.

  ‘Like you did?’ he’d managed to ask.

  His mother had shaken her head. ‘If I hadn’t lived here, young man,’ she’d said with the mock-formality she used to tease him, ‘you wouldn’t be here today to listen to me.’

  ‘Earth to Michael Wolf,’ and he looked up to see Cassie staring at him.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said dully. ‘Say, tell me, is your father unhappy that we see each other?’

  ‘He doesn’t know we do.’

  ‘What?’ he protested.

  ‘Keep walking,’ she said, and took his hand. After a minute she said, ‘What do you miss most?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘About your mother. Go on, you can’t get mad at me. I lost my mother too.’

  He looked down at the sand. ‘I miss the way she’d listen to me.’

  ‘I did too. Until I met you.’

  ‘I didn’t mean you don’t listen to me.’

  ‘I know. Let’s swim.’

  ‘I don’t have trunks. And what about you? We can’t go skinny-dipping in broad daylight.’

  She was tying her hair up in a ponytail with a rubber band. She started to take off her shirt. She undid her buttons with a provocative movement of hands until he could see she had a T-shirt on underneath. She unbuttoned her jeans to reveal basketball shorts instead of panties.

  ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘I’m not swimming without you.’

  ‘I told you, I don’t have trunks.’

  ‘You wear underwear?’ she asked, not without reason, since many of his friends didn’t. He nodded. ‘Well, then we can go swimming. Anyway, we’re going to have to swim back across the channel, aren’t we?’

  How could he say I’m scared? So he took off his jeans and shirt, gritted his teeth, and followed her into Lake Michigan, running across the first tier of sandy bottom, with ridges like the corrugated surface of an old-fashioned washing board, until they reached the sandbar.

  ‘Come on,’ she called, and he turned and watched her swim out towards the second sandbar. He had always loved to swim – my water rat his mother had called him – but he saw at once that Cassie had a grace in the water he could never match. She flutter-kicked and lifted her arms high and slow in a crawl that propelled her with a surprising speed. Her feet flashed white in the air, and he could glimpse her thighs as she moved, sleek and porpoise-like, through the water.

  As she swam further out, he felt a flicker of his usual panic, which recently came less often than before and less deeply, although whenever he thought it had gone for good it would inevitably reappear. Now he turned round to face the shore and found this comforting, for it was the endless expanse of the lake merging into the distant horizon that most unsettled him. He tried to distract himself from his anxiety by scanning the dunes, looking for his uncle’s house, which was lost, hidden in the towering pines and hardwoods that had never been cut for lumber. Suddenly Cassie’s arms were around his chest. ‘Come on in,’ she said.

  He shook his head, unwilling to turn round; even the thought of it brought the edge of panic back again.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. ‘Is something the matter?’

  He shook his head again, and she tightened her grip. ‘Go on, tell me,’ she commanded. ‘I can tell something’s wrong.’

  Frightened as he was of telling her, he was more frightened still of what would happen if he turned round, the shakiness he sensed he’d feel if he tried to swim out with her, the panic he could anticipate as his throat would tighten and adrenalin surge through his nerves like electricity. ‘Do you ever get scared?’ he asked, almost in a whisper.

  ‘All the time,’ Cassie said at once. ‘I get scared I’ll flunk math, I’m scared I won’t get into college, I’m scared—’

  ‘No,’ he interrupted her. ‘I don’t mean those kinds of things. I mean just scared generally, scared about everything.’

  She held onto him and he could feel her breath tickle against his back. ‘Oh, you mean being scared without knowing what you’re scared about.’

  ‘Sort of.’

  He felt her lay her cheek against his back; it felt warm against his wet skin. ‘I used to, after my mother died. Why? Does that happen to you?’

  He couldn’t say anything and just nodded.

  ‘Were you scared just now?’ she asked. ‘Is that why you wouldn’t turn round?’ When he nodded again, she leaned up and put her lips close to the side of his head. ‘The next time that happens, just tell me, okay?’ She lowered her clasped arms and hugged him gently, until he felt himself growing excited. Then she kissed him on the back of his neck, small tender kisses. She must have sensed him growing, but she kept her hands clasped around the front of his boxer shorts. ‘Not all of you feels scared to me,’ she said with a light laugh.

  ‘Don’t tease me like that,’ he said.

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘You’re driving me crazy. You’ve got no idea.’

  She laughed. ‘Yes I have.’ She grew serious. ‘I’m not teasing you. It’s just that it’s my turn to be scared. I’ve never done it before.’

  Done what? he started to say, then stopped.

  Cassie laughed. ‘You know what,’ she said. ‘You’re probably an expert on the matter.’

  He started to blush, and was glad she couldn’t see his face. He wanted to reassure her she was wrong, yet felt embarrassed by it – it seemed slightly sissy to be a virgin still. ‘You probably know all about it,’ she continued. ‘You think it’s amazing that I don’t. The prissy parson’s daughter – that’s what you think, isn’t it? Go on, admit it.’ She seemed to be getting cross the more she went on.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ he admitted, telling the truth but not sure he should.

  ‘Am I?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, goddamnit. Now stop it,’ and he unclasped her hands.

  She stood up and came round to face him. ‘Look at me,’ she commanded, then kissed him lightly on the lips. ‘I know you want to,’ she said calmly, ‘and what you don’t know is that I want to too. But I want it to be right. Trust me, it’ll happen.’ She laughed. ‘I guess we’ll have to show each other how.’

  Which is exactly what they did, early one Friday night in his own bedroom when his father was having dinner at the Fells’ and Gary was on a sleepover. He didn’t know what scared him most, anxiety about what to do or the prospect of his father coming home early. He had taken a box of Trojans from the
drugstore, snuck that very afternoon while Marilyn was serving up front and Alvin was writing payroll cheques in the office.

  Now Cassie insisted on reading aloud the written instructions tucked into the box. ‘Expel all air before unrolling,’ she commanded in a gruff voice. ‘Remove immediately after ejaculation.’ She was naked under the covers, having taken off her clothes quickly while Michael tried not to stare after his first long look at her: the tan legs the colour of sun-soaked apricots, the dark bushy triangle of soft hair, her flat stomach with an almond slit for a belly-button, and her breasts – white, curved rounds with nipples like the small buds of pink roses. She seemed so entirely beautiful to him, as he sat on the edge of the bed in his boxer shorts, that his hands trembled as he struggled with the foil packaging.

  Suddenly Cassie threw the instructions onto the floor. ‘Let’s do it together,’ she said, reaching out for him. ‘Because at the rate you’re going I’ll be here for breakfast.’

  Soon enough he lay down beside her, breathing hard, elated by what they had just done but feeling utterly peaceful as well. He didn’t care if his father did come home early. Cassie cradled her head on his chest and he stroked her silky hair. ‘You okay?’ he said.

  ‘Never better. Say,’ and she sat up suddenly, ‘what time is it?’ He told her and she grinned as she lay down again. ‘We’ve got plenty of time for round two.’

  ‘Cassie,’ he said, trying to keep all emotion out of his voice. ‘You said once you’d never sleep with anyone you didn’t love.’

  ‘I did,’ she said cheerfully. ‘So I did.’

  3

  ONE FEAR REMAINED, one he could not tell even Cassie about.

  It was a hot and breezeless Saturday, with a kind of inland mugginess which had people hanging around the air-conditioned store until ten o’clock closing. Saturday night meant that by the time the drugstore closed none of his friends were still around. Cassie had gone to a play reading on South Beach (‘a play what?’ he’d asked) with the parson, and by the time she got home it would be too late to call in there.

  He walked down Main Street, looking through the park surrounding the bandstand for friends, but not finding any. There would probably be people he knew down on the beach, but it didn’t seem worth the walk to share a joint or half a can of beer with a dozen guys staring at the two or three girls sitting by the driftwood fire.

  He took the long way home, by the Dairy Queen where Main Street met the Beach Road. Here he found Kenny Williams sitting on a bench, drinking a malt, and talking to a tanned, blonde girl in shorts and a tank top who could not have been more than thirteen years old. The girl was leaving as Michael walked by, and Kenny waved him over.

  ‘She looks even younger than you,’ said Michael as they both watched the tan calves move across the street. ‘Jailbait or what?’

  ‘It’s like erecting a house, Michael,’ said Kenny in his precocious fashion, ‘and I am building the foundations.’

  ‘She’s a foundation?’

  Kenny shook his head. ‘No, no. Our conversation is. She’s thirteen years old and comes up every summer. Next summer we might make it to the ground floor, like on the living room sofa, then the summer after it’s upstairs to the bedroom. All thanks to a little groundwork done tonight. And she even paid for my malt.’

  Michael could share the logic of this, if not its supreme self-confidence. He bought a snow cone and rejoined Kenny on the bench. They watched the cars turning off Main Street to cruise the beach, and waved to the drivers they knew (most of them) and stared hungrily at the girls in the cars where they didn’t. Michael had to work the next morning, which involved an early start to assemble the Sunday papers, and he was about to walk the few blocks home when Dicky Millicent joined them on the bench, obviously drunk.

  He was a summer kid whose parents had a house in town, down near the Yacht Club, across from Dr Fell’s place on the town side of Stillriver Lake. He had a pint bottle of Canadian whisky with him now, which he made a great show of furtively sipping. Michael was about to leave when he remembered that Dicky’s father had killed himself the summer before; he wasn’t sure why that was a reason to stay, but he did.

  He sat listening as Dicky half-ranted and half-talked, alternately exuberant and cranky. Where Kenny and Michael looked out eagerly at the cars that passed, looking for friends, Dicky sneered. When a pickup with two guys in the cab turned off the Beach Road onto Main Street in front of them, Dicky stared at the driver, and the driver stared back, not pleasantly. It was then that Michael recognized Ronald Duverson in the passenger seat. He didn’t know him really, though he’d been in the Chronicle for saving Raleigh Somerset from drowning when Raleigh, a non-swimmer, had decided that somehow, some way, he could swim after all.

  And Michael knew Ronald’s younger brother Mex – called that for his dark, curly hair and walnut-coloured complexion. Mex was a wiry, little guy, but Ronald was big and fair-haired with a freckly face. He must have been eighteen years old, and had left school as soon as he could – the only one in his class who didn’t wait to graduate – to work construction. He put up pole barns, which were cheap and easy to build.

  ‘Fuck them,’ said Dicky loudly, continuing to stare at the driver as he slowly drove on. Michael figured the driver would have heard him but he didn’t stop. Dicky shook his head. ‘Who are those sorry assholes?’

  Kenny looked over at Michael and raised his eyes. ‘Take it easy, Dicky,’ said Michael. ‘We know one of them.’

  ‘That’s your problem,’ said Dicky, and took a long pull from his pint bottle. He offered some to Kenny and Michael, but both shook their heads. Dicky shrugged. ‘More for me then,’ he said, and was taking another pull when the pickup returned, heading the other way so that this time the passenger seat was nearest.

  ‘Say something?’ It was Ronald speaking.

  Dicky jerked the bottle from his lips and with liquor still in his mouth nodded, swallowed, then spat out, ‘Sure dickhead. Whatever you like.’

  Again the truck didn’t stop but turned sharply down Beach Road, out of sight behind the Dairy Queen building.

  Kenny stood up quickly. ‘Come on, Michael, time to go. I’ll walk home with you.’ He was lifting his eyebrows again.

  ‘Okay,’ said Michael, and got up with deliberation to disguise his own sudden anxiety. ‘See you, Dicky.’

  They crossed the street quickly and started to cut through the empty lot on the corner. ‘I don’t really want to be there when those guys come back again,’ said Kenny.

  ‘It’s not our fight.’

  ‘You try explaining that once they start throwing punches. Don’t you know Ronald?’

  ‘He’s Mex’s brother. So?’

  ‘He’s not like Mex, I tell you that. Ronald likes to fight. I’m surprised he’s in town tonight. Usually he goes to the tavern in Spring Valley and breaks chairs over the pickers’ heads.’

  ‘Hey, wait up!’ They turned and saw Dicky walking across the street. It was dark here, in the middle of the lot. Then from behind them – they must have circled around – the pickup appeared and braked sharply in the soft, sandy edge of the street, not forty feet away. The driver got out and walked towards them. He was short and powerfully built, and looked like he could give even Ronald ten years in age, much less the two younger boys he now faced. He wore khaki shorts and combat boots, and his arms swelled out of a tight, dark T-shirt. His clothes, and a crew cut so bleached it looked white in the darkness, gave the overall effect of a faintly camp marine – had he not looked both so strong and so angry.

  ‘What were you saying?’ he demanded. Both his fists were clenched.

  Michael turned to see what Dicky would say, but discovered to his amazement that Dicky had disappeared. Then he reappeared in the yellowing arc emanating from one of the overhead streetlights, heading back towards the Dairy Queen. Shit. Michael turned back. ‘Mister, we didn’t say anything.’

  ‘Yo no hablo Ingles,’ Kenny piped up, and Michael could have k
illed him for choosing this time to crack wise.

  The stranger’s head turned sharply towards Kenny. ‘Listen, little asshole. Do you see these hands?’ He held them up in the air, karate-style. ‘I was in ’Nam. I was a Green Beret. And these hands are lethal, these hands are registered weapons.’ Statements at once so preposterous and frightening that Michael’s chief concern was that Kenny would start laughing. But then all three of them were distracted by the sound of the pickup truck, which was now moving along the street towards Dicky Millicent with Ronald at the wheel.

  When he saw the truck approaching, Dicky lifted a fist high up into the air and began shouting: ‘fucker’ was the only distinguishable word. Even before the truck came to a complete stop, the driver’s door opened with a jerk, and Ronald launched himself out of the cab and ran at Dicky. Dicky must not have been that drunk, for he waited until Ronald got close, then simultaneously threw a left kick and a right-handed punch. The kick missed Ronald altogether, and with his arm he easily blocked the punch.

  And then Ronald laughed, a harsh, shitty-sounding laugh that broke through the air like a loudspeaker in a waiting room. Suddenly, as the last notes of this noise died down, he hit Dicky with a right hand that came up and out like the head of a sledgehammer, its weight perfectly balanced to maximize its impact. Dicky fell straight backwards, and as he fell he emitted a strangely feminine-sounding ‘oh’ before his head hit the turf with a thud. Jesus, Michael thought at once, how hard had Dicky fallen if you could hear his head hit the moist ground?

  Fight over, or so Michael thought. But Ronald wasn’t done. He walked behind the prone figure and turned around. As Dicky involuntarily flexed and sat halfway up, his legs stretched before him, Ronald walked deliberately towards him and swung his foot like an old-fashioned field goal kicker, planting the left leg, then swinging boom with his right. He caught Dicky square on the back of his head with the steel-capped point of his boot, and Millicent’s head snapped down like a guillotine. He’s killed him now, thought Michael, and looking up he saw the Dairy Queen’s neon sign shimmering in the hot and bug-swarming air.