by Will Weaver
This time they swam out a long way. When they slowed, the waves flowed past them and bent the sheet of the water into a washboard of orange. Far out, a pair of loons sat motionless, watching. Guy and Cassandra swam until their hearts pumped warm blood into the tips of their fingers and toes. Then they turned back to the shore. As they neared the big rock Cassandra suddenly drew up and began to tread water. On the big rock, like sparrows on a wire, stood a line of small Indian boys.
“Hello!” Guy called.
The Indian boys, seven or eight years old, stood silent.
“Aieeee!” the biggest Indian boy suddenly screamed as he sprang forward and curled into a cannonball. The rest of the kids leaped after him. Guy and Cassandra laughed at the rain of brown cannonballs and exploding water. For several minutes Guy and Cassandra watched the Indian boys dart and dive like tadpoles.
“Hey!” one of the Indian boys said. He looked up.
Atop the rock was a row, ascending in size, of white kids with curly blond hair. The kids were short-legged, strong, and wore homemade bathing suits.
“Jump in—y’all wanted to come—now what’re ya waiting for?” a mother’s voice called from behind. Mary Ann Hartmeir lumbered around the rock in a bright pink smock of a bathing suit.
Her eyes widened when she saw Guy and Cassandra. She started to step back.
“Mary Ann,” Guy called, “come on in. But no wading—you have to jump from the rock!”
Mary Ann looked up at the big stone. “I cain’t get up there anymore,” she said. “It’s years since I been up there.”
“She’s too fat,” called her biggest boy.
“No she’s not!” her smallest girl said instantly.
Mary Ann looked up at her children, then out to Guy and Cassandra.
She turned to the big boulder. She squatted. Like a great pink toad, she leaped onto its side and clung there.
“Come on, Mama,” shrieked the youngest of her children.
“She ain’t gonna make it,” called the older boy.
The Indian kids swam closer to watch.
Mary Ann inched her way upward. Her toes spun against the stone, clawed for cracks. Catching one, she pushed off again, gained another few inches.
“Help her,” Cassandra whispered,” she’ll kill herself!”
Guy trod water and waited.
Slowly, like a bright caterpillar inching up the side of a basketball, Mary Ann pulled herself upward. Suddenly she scrabbled onto the summit. Then she threw over the side each of her children who had laughed. “You damn little farts, that’ll teach you to laugh at your mama!”
The Indian boys below laughed and hooted.
Then Mary Ann leaped too. The Indian boys’ mouths came open like full moons. They shrieked and churned the water to escape, but above them Mary Ann tucked under her legs, grabbed them tightly with her arms, and fell on them like an atomic bomb.
Later Guy and Cassandra and Mary Ann paddled and drifted farther out. Mary Ann floated on her back like a pink air mattress. Cassandra swam or trod water; she said she never could float, that she could actually walk across the bottom of a swimming pool.
“That’s cuz your parents didn’t feed you right,” Mary Ann said. “You ain’t got any preserves of body fat.”
Onshore the Indian and the Hartmeir kids shouted and splashed and bombed each other from the big boulder. Their voices echoed across the water until sundown, when the loons started to call to each other.
The Hartmeirs left first.
A while later the Indian boys vanished all at once.
Guy and Cassandra finally emerged, shivering, beside the big boulder.
Cassandra leaned against the boulder, panting lightly, and tipped back her head and drew her hands tightly around her head to wring away the water from her hair. Water ran off the sharp ends of her breasts. Her teeth glinted white in the dusky light.
Guy stared.
She shook her head and flung away more water from her hair. When she opened her eyes she saw him watching her.
They stared at each other.
Guy came forward and put his arms in a hoop about her with his palms on the warm stone. He did not touch her. Her skin smelled of cold water and lake weed. Her breath warmed his neck. They stood that way for a long time staring at each other. The loons murmured.
At the same moment they reached to touch each other’s faces. “Oh, Guy,” she whispered. “Why?”
“Shhh,” Guy said. He wiped water from her forehead and eyes. Her eyes still locked to his, they kissed for a long time. She trailed her hand down his chest and belly, then fit him inside her. Guy slowly pushed forward until her back was pressed against the face of the boulder. At first neither of them moved. Then, like small ripples on the water, they began to lap against each other. He let his hands drop to her shoulders, then to her breasts. Her cold hard nipples stood up straight and he warmed them with his fingers and then his tongue. She pulled him closer for warmth. For weight. For the touch of their skins that belonged no longer to separate flesh and bones, but, wherever they touched, to each other, to both at once, as did their breath and their lapping and lapping and lapping against the big stone. Cassandra spread her arms wide against the boulder and Guy moved harder and harder and harder against her. She moaned. A loon hooted quizzically. Cassandra called out; her knees buckled. Guy shouted, too, as they tipped backward into the shallow water. Its stones were rough and the water icy but they did not let go. They rolled and splashed and held and bit and held each other until they found themselves sprawled panting on sand.
Afterward they went, shivering, to find their clothes.
Which were gone.
***
Guy drove first to the farm. He turned the car heater on. Cassandra rode on the far side of the front seat, naked.
“I don’t believe this is happening,” she said.
“At least it’s dark.”
“I should have known better,” she said, ducking low in the seat as they met a car.
Guy laughed. He drove faster.
“Don’t speed for Christ’s sakes—what if we get stopped?”
“We’ll outrun them.”
But no one stopped them, and Guy turned into the farm driveway. A bunch of pickups sat by the front door of Martin’s house. Guy stopped the car and thought for a moment. He slipped around the side of the house but his bedroom screen would not come loose. So he walked through the front door.
Talk died. Martin and several Defense League regulars looked up to stare. Cigarettes dangled from lips; glasses of beer hung in midair. Mary Ann grinned. She let her eyes travel down his body, down the scratches on his chest and legs.
“Wow,” she whispered, looking at the scrapes on his knees.
“Evening,” Guy said to her. He nodded to the rest.
Martin nodded.
The rest stared.
Guy passed through to his room, dressed, and found some jeans and a shirt for Cassandra.
On his way back through the living room Mary Ann and the men turned to stare again. “Hot enough for you?” one of the men asked Guy.
“Just right for me,” Guy said, passing toward the screen door.
Outside the house, Guy heard Martin say, “He’s been living in California.”
Guy drove Cassandra to the Humphrey Center. As they neared No Medicine Town Guy began to see posters tacked on telephone poles and tied to stop signs: “Recall Tom LittleWolf.”
Guy braked the Mercedes hard and slid to a stop. He got out, tore down one of the posters, and brought it back to the car. Flatwater Printing Service. He turned to Cassandra.
She was silent.
He slammed the poster into a crumpled ball and threw it out the window. He drove on.
After a mile of silence, he
said, slowly, “Tom could dive better off the big stone than anyone I ever saw. He had great spring.” He stared straight ahead through the windshield. “Once we rigged up a big plank as a diving board. Tom would come running, dive onto the end of it with his hands, then go straight up in a triple backward somersault.”
“I have to go,” Cassandra said as he turned into the Humphrey Center. She looked for the door handle before the car had stopped moving.
Guy pressed the door-lock button with his elbow and all the doors clicked shut.
“He’d hang in the air longer than seemed natural. But that was only because he was so high above the water.”
“I have to go. It’s late. Unlock the doors, please.”
“By the time he reached the water he was always headfirst, arms straight out. Never much splash. Like a kingfisher,” Guy said.
Cassandra pulled at her door handle, then tried the rear handle.
“Why are you doing this?” she said, her voice rising, choking.
“Tom and I spent a lot of time on that big stone. We talked about a lot of stuff there.”
“I don’t care!”
“Sometimes we wondered what would happen to us when we grew up. But Tom would never say much about that. I did most of the talking then.”
“Let me out, I want to get out!”
“Once we’d been reading Huck Finn in school. Huck was always marking things in blood, right? So Tom and I did it too. We pricked our fingers with a jackknife and let some blood drip onto the rock. Then we mixed it around and swore we’d always save each other’s lives when they needed saving. Dumb, huh? We were only nine or ten. Later we never said anything about it because we were old enough to know how dumb it was. It was more embarrassing than anything.”
“I don’t want to hear this. All I want to do is get out of this car—now!” Cassandra said.
“Sure,” Guy said, releasing the locks.
She scrambled out and started to walk away. Then she came back.
“Why did you do that?” she shouted. “Why do you always have to ruin things?” At the end her voice caught.
Guy was silent.
“I understand you more and more,” she said rapidly. “You’re stuck in the past. You’re back here from California wishing you could be nine years old again.”
“Nine was a good year,” Guy said.
“You can’t deal with the present,” Cassandra said. “But the present’s here.”
“No, the present comes and goes,” Guy said quietly.
She stared at him.
“You couldn’t make it where I come from,” she said rapidly, her eyes flashing. “Out East you don’t have time to be lonely and enigmatic—maybe in a Woody Allen movie but not in real life. You’d be lucky to hold down a job in your condition.”
“My condition,” Guy said.
“You’re . . . damaged. From your past, I think,” Cassandra said. “There’s a lot of women out there who got damaged some way or another, but there’s a lot of men too. Men just hide it better.”
“I’ve nothing to hide,” Guy said. Which was the point, he suddenly realized, he had been wanting to reach for a long time.
She stared down at him.
“What you see is everything.”
“I need more than that,” she said, her voice faltering.
“More than everything?” Guy said.
“Yes—more than everything!” Cassandra cried.
“Well, you can’t have it,” Guy shouted. “And I’m enough, goddammit. I want you—with me—can’t you see that?”
Cassandra’s eyes widened and she clapped her hands to her ears. “Don’t, don’t,” she said over and over to drown out his words. Suddenly she turned and ran.
Guy stopped himself from running after her. She stumbled into her car and threw it into gear. He watched her drive away.
When her car disappeared from sight she was still with him. He saw her at the Lumberjack, in her room, framed in the window, in sunlight, her clothes falling from her like leaves, like another skin.
38
On his knees, Guy dug in the field with his jackknife. It was nine o’clock in the morning. The sun burned on his back like an iron left flat on its board and sweat bit at the corners of his eyes. He was checking his oats. Or rather, Martin’s oats. Beneath the powdery dirt the kernels lay dry and flat. Some kernels had swelled and sprouted, then shriveled to black an inch beyond the belly of their husks like tiny, dried-up navel cords. Guy stood up and wiped his eyes.
Martin walked into the field, his legs vague in the dust that puffed forward from his boots at each step. He came over to Guy and looked down at his digging.
“How’s it looking?”
“Not good,” Guy said.
“Looks like one of them years,” Martin said pleasantly enough.
Guy squinted at his father. Martin’s tone of voice held the promise, the faint excitement of impending failure.
“Still time,” Guy said, looking at the sky.
“No weather from here to Spokane,” Martin said. “At least that’s what the weatherman says,” Martin added.
Guy snapped shut his jackknife.
His father walked away toward the machine shed. Guy remained in the field.
Why was he here, anyway? Just what was he hoping to do or say or feel? He shaded his eyes to look across the land, which shimmered with heat. There was only silence in the fields.
It was then he realized he had been waiting for something. A sign. A sign that something was ending. A door slamming. A final buzzer. A break beyond repair. A period at the end of a sentence. He had been waiting for the ending of something and then the beginning of something new.
But on the farm nothing ever ended. Or if it did, it ended so slowly that you mistook the ending for the middle of something else. A field of oats dried up from no rain. The same field drowned from too much rain. Neither the drying up nor the drowning came fast enough to be a real ending—like an accident or a death—for in the days and then weeks of heat or rain the oats faded in size and even in memory of their planting, as the burning up or the drowning became the real crop. So there were never any last rites. There was no taps. No rifle salutes. No flags lowered. No final bricks laid. There was no full harvest and there was no complete planting. There was only the endless middle of things.
One had, therefore, to choose his own endings.
One had to say, This broken axle is the end of this swather. I will not fix this machine again. I will not drive it anymore.
One said, This Angus cow is mean. It has always been mean. It deserves nothing more than to be shot and skinned and butchered and eaten by me and my family, against whom it has always directed its meanness.
This frost in August marks the last time I will try to grow corn this far north.
This south wind tells me I must sell my steers this week, for the market will only keep falling.
This field is not finished, but it is very late in the day and so this round of plowing or swathing or combining is the very last. No matter what. No matter how I feel or what I think when I’m nearly done with this, my last round, especially when I near the stone or the fence post or the gate where I declared this to be my last round, no matter what.
This hot wind tonight, by its steady, straight blowing, tells me everything I need to know about tomorrow.
Guy turned back to the house to pack.
In the yard he paused as Mary Ann’s battered Galaxie turned into the driveway. She drove up to him. “So how you feelin’ today, lover boy?” Mary Ann called.
Guy shrugged.
“You and that Silver woman would make a good couple if you could keep from killin’ each other,” Mary Ann said.
“I don’t know,” Guy said skeptically.
“You’ve been known to be wrong,” Mary Ann said.
Guy smiled.
Mary Ann looked toward the house. “Where’s your granddad?”
“In the barn,” Guy answered. “Now with the stair ramp and the sidewalk he comes and goes as he pleases.” Guy had seen him leave early, whirring his way toward the barn.
“In the barn. Figures,” she said. “He knows today’s bath day. Every ten days, on my day off, I come give him the twice-over. Get him in the tub and go after him with a scrub brush. He hates it,” she said. “Usually pretends he’s asleep when I come. Now with that sidewalk he figures he can hide in the barn. Well, he’s got another thing comin’,” Mary Ann said, rocking herself up from the Galaxie seat.
“Need some help with him?” Guy said.
“Nope,” Mary Ann said immediately. Then she blushed slightly and grinned. “Really, Guy, I don’t,” she said. “We got our routine. I took over from your father, who couldn’t handle him right and didn’t wash him good enough, anyway. So I do it. I don’t mind.”
Guy touched Mary Ann’s cheek, then walked on toward the house.
Upstairs in the heat of the eaves bedroom, Guy packed. Once he heard Mary Ann laugh and he looked out the window into the yard. Martin leaned against Mary Ann’s Galaxie. Mary Ann laughed again. Guy watched them. He suddenly realized that, what with the Defense League meetings and her helping with Helmer, Martin and Mary Ann spent a good deal of time together. He stood to the side of the window and watched them for long moments. Mary Ann leaned against the car and folded her arms. She said something that made Martin grin. Then she laughed again. Soon he turned back to his suitcase. Their voices murmured on in the yard below.
Sometime later, Guy’s hand was on the suitcase clasp when he heard Mary Ann shouting, crying out. He ran to the window. Martin stood across by the tractor, holding a can of oil, looking, frozen, across to Mary Ann. She stood by the open barn doors screaming for them to come.
The ambulance came up the road but left its red light and siren off. The sheriff’s car followed. Both vehicles drove the speed limit. If there was a speed limit on gravel roads.
