Summer in the Land of Skin

by Jody Gehrman

  “Better than you—you sit around and drink yourself to fucking death!”

  “That’s my prerogative.”

  “Good! Kill yourself—see what I—” But the last word is drowned by a torrent of tears. I can barely catch my breath as I hug myself, sobbing.

  “Okay,” Bender says, hovering near me. He puts his hand on my back, removes it, puts it on my shoulder. This only makes me cry harder. I feel foolish but I can’t stop. I sit back down and he puts his hand on my head. The warm force of his palm makes me feel like a kid. I cover my face with my hands and let go.

  I find myself adrift in a scene I didn’t know was inside me; my father is staring out the window, and I am crying. I’m young—maybe five or six years old, I don’t know for sure, but I can feel the smallness of my own body; the grown-up world is all-powerful and beyond comprehension, a league of giants who speak another tongue. We’re on the couch, and his huge hand, fragrant with the essence of wood, is on my head. This is supposed to comfort me, I know, but as I watch his eyes on the window, my bones ache for him. I want him to hold me, to pull me tight against him and make a home for me with his arms, his stained T-shirt, shelter me with his great sculpted jaw. But his eyes are so far away. I’m only a child, my world is made of crayons and apple juice, graham crackers and paste, but even I recognize the glazed look of restlessness in his face—the dizzy hunger for freedom. In his mind, he is outside, flying down a freeway, the wind making streamers of his hair. His tank is full of gas, and the ocean spreads out before him like a bright liquid dream. Even as his fingers rest heavily on my head, I can feel the world pulling him out that window. I know better than to ask him to hold me. It’s bad enough that I’m keeping him here.

  In my peripheral vision, a splotch of red appears. I peek through my fingers and see that it is a handkerchief. I take it, and try to clean my face as the tears keep coming. I blow my nose. Bender lingers near me, and for a split second I think he might wrap his arms around me. I wish he would. But he waits too long; his hands find their way to his mess of hair instead. He sits back down on the ice chest.

  “You feel any better?” he asks, when my tears have subsided.

  I consider this. “Sort of.”

  There’s the sound of wings in the air nearby, and I look up to see a huge, fat pelican hovering ten feet from the water, eyeing us. “There he is.” Bender smiles. “Old Cal, king of the sea.” Caliban nosedives, showing off. He emerges with a fish; it wriggles in his beak, its silver scales catching the light like tiny mirrors. Bender chuckles. Caliban flies away, his prehistoric shape moving off into the blue.

  “It was my son,” Bender says.

  “What did you say?”

  “My son,” he repeats. “He was in an accident. Killed. On a motorcycle.” He gets up, retrieves a fresh beer from the cooler. “Sixteen years old.” He yanks at the tab, releasing a thin froth of bubbles that rise and then settle into a circle of liquid around the rim. “Scottie.” He doesn’t look at me. “Couple years after, Sheila left me. Things just fell apart. I didn’t build any guitars after that.”

  “How long ago did he die?”

  “Been seven years, this summer.”

  We sit through another long silence. The water slaps against the docks, sways the boats gently side to side. Somewhere in the distance, a car starts; its fan belt whines, the engine revs several times, then dies. I try to picture his son: a lanky, cocksure version of Bender, with long, skinny arms and a random smattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks. I bet I would have liked him.

  “Did he play guitar?” I ask.

  “Who?” Bender looks startled.

  “Scottie.” The name sits in the air, and for a moment I fear I’ve gone too far.

  “No. He was a drummer.” His voice shakes a little as he speaks. “He liked heavy metal. And opera. He was a funny kid.”

  “I’m really sorry,” I say, but as soon as it’s out of my mouth I remember how much I grew to hate that phrase after my dad died. “I wish I could have met him.”

  He looks at me with a small, barely-there smile for a moment. Then he stands, walks to the bow and stares out at the water with his back to me. “Well, shit,” he says. “I guess I’ll never get rid of you till I say yes.”

  “I guess you won’t,” I say.

  He turns to me with a rueful expression. “Jesus, Medina. You’re so goddamn stubborn, I could slap you sometimes.”

  “So you’ll do it?”

  “I’ll look at this ‘workshop’ of yours, anyway. See if it’s decent.”

  “It is! Oh, you’re going to love it!”

  “Meet me here tomorrow around noon?”

  “Absolutely!”

  “And, Medina?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I want Indian rosewood, okay? Sitka spruce, ebony… If we’re going to do this, we might as well do it right.”

  “Understood.”

  We both stand, and suddenly we’re awkward. I stuff Shiva back in my pocket. He holds his beer in one hand, reaches the other palm out to shake. I take a step toward him, grab his hand, and pump it up and down with such enthusiasm I embarrass myself.

  May 5th, 1970

  Einstein,

  Passing through a village near the Sea of Japan. Children watch me like I’m a god or maybe a drooling lunatic. Is this what it’s like to be a rock star? Only the middle-aged squares pretend they don’t see me. What a trip this country is. My ship leaves in a couple weeks. I’ll barely have time to try all the different colors of raw fish and seaweed before I go.

  And where am I headed next?

  Home, brother.

  For the last few months San Francisco’s been calling my name relentlessly. Is it a siren’s song? Will I be smashed to pieces on the rocks of Big Sur before I reach the Golden Gate? California, that whole anarchic state, seemed for a while like a dream I could barely remember. But now it calls to me with such a muscular, breath-taking force, I can’t resist any longer. Old Rot Gut’s shop on Cherry Street and the cool of the fog creeping in from the bay. The head shops on the Haight and the girls in their faded jeans, their tight turtlenecks, their acid-rich eyes. I hope you’re diggin’ it, man, because even though I love this little country with its rice paddies and it’s swaying bamboo, cherry blossoms and sake, right now I would give my left nut just to walk with you into Rot Gut’s shop and waste all afternoon watching him sneak sips from the flask he keeps behind the radio while he strings his new archtop.

  You’re always mindful, though. You’re always diggin’ where you’re at. Not like me. I’ve always got one eye on the next exit. Well, I’ll try to be more like you, huh? I’ll study you when I get home.

  Don’t disappoint me, man. I want a little Panama Red when I step foot on San Francisco soil. Keep a stash in reserve.

  Later on,

  Chet

  Lucy and I lie on our stomachs, stretched out on too-small terry-cloth towels we found in the back of Arlan’s station wagon, while the sun burns through the clouds and lays its warm rays on our shoulder blades. The guys dropped us off an hour ago and are supposed to meet us here later. Our faces are turned toward each other, pressed sideways against the terry cloth. Something about the mossy-wet smell of the lake and the intimate quiet mixing with the sight of Lucy’s childish features makes me feel like we’re little girls. Every now and then, the wake of a distant boat reaches the shore and we can hear the waves lapping up on the crumbly sand.

  I’m thinking about my father’s letters, how human and fragile he seems at times on his see-through airmail stationery. It still makes my heart pound every time I see his cramped cursive there; I read them with wary slowness, and always in absolute privacy. I can’t stand the thought of anyone else seeing his letters. Knowing Lucy’s history of investigations, I’ve taken to wrapping the little leather bundle in several layers of T-shirts and stuffing it all into a paper bag, then stashing it behind the seat of the truck, which I keep locked. It’s one thing for her to read my not
ebooks—my Suicide Maps are now highly edited, anyway. But if she ever read my father’s letters, I think I might kill her.

  I can’t explain why it’s so essential that I keep him all to myself. Maybe it’s just habit, after all the years I spent hoarding my memories of him in the private storage unit of my heart, where no one could ship them off to the Goodwill. Or maybe I fear other people’s eyes will render him mundane—just someone’s dead father, writing letters. How could I reconcile that with the god I’ve turned him into?

  He was human, of course. That’s what Bender keeps reminding me. And still, when I think of him with those zealous eyes, it’s hard to imagine he was of this world.

  I remember the exact moment I realized that my mother was human. I was twelve—it wasn’t long after my father died. My nanna was visiting, and my mother tried to cook an eclectic, international meal—Brazilian stuffed peppers with risotto and shitake mushrooms—only she was out of practice, and it turned out badly. The risotto was soupy, the mushrooms were scorched black, the peppers were limp and too salty. It was impossible to fake our way through it. We pushed our food around for a few minutes in silence, and then my nanna pushed her plate away and smiled sadly at my mother. That’s when my mother did something I’d never seen her do: she folded her hands around her face and she moaned. It was a soft sound, hardly even audible, but it made my hair stand up. I remember thinking it was a childlike sound, almost infantile. That’s when it hit me, a huge, blinding lightbulb snapping on in my brain: my mother was afraid of Nanna. And when I saw that, the rest came with it, a string of epiphanies about the tenuous, tinny nature of the adult world, understandings colliding like dominoes. They were just little kids who got bigger. They couldn’t keep me safe; they were terrified themselves.

  And yet somehow my father had remained untouched by this realization. His death and all the weakness it exposed should have been the ultimate proof of his vulnerability. Yet I think of him still as beyond human, instilled with divine power and elusiveness. In my mind his body is a long curl of smoke, and only his eyes are real.

  “What if I don’t get into college, Anna?” Lucy’s voice tugs me back to this: the lake, the sunlight, my friend.

  “Then you’ll apply again.”

  “Never.” She has big, tortoiseshell sunglasses on, but now she takes them off and I can see the anxiety in her eyes. “If they don’t want me, fuck them.”

  “You’ll get in,” I say. I think, What if she doesn’t? but I try to push the thought from my mind.

  “You didn’t tell anyone I applied, did you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You sure? I’d die if Arlan or Grady found out.”

  “You’re not going to tell Arlan, even?”

  She adjusts her bathing suit top and squints at me. “No, and if you do I’ll kill you.”

  “Relax,” I say. “I’m not telling anyone.”

  “Arlan doesn’t know everything,” she says. “He’s not my keeper.” She watches the opposite shore.

  “How long have you two been together?”

  “Four years.”

  I hesitate, remembering the gossip Grady divulged to me that night in the tree. “Did you ever mess around?”

  She laughs. “You, Anna, are the queen of euphemisms. I never ‘mess around.’ Period. Doesn’t mean I never fucked other people. I mean, come on, I was eighteen when we got together.”

  “So you have?”

  “I’m not one to pass up an opportunity.” She puts her sunglasses back on. “Arlan is like good furniture, you know? He’s like your favorite pair of socks. When you come home, you want those things. But they never keep you from getting bored.”

  I roll over onto my side and try to see if she’s being serious. “Arlan is like socks?”

  “Oh, sure,” she says. “He seems glamorous to you. But that’s because you’re infatuated with him. Spend four years with him, see what he looks like then.”

  I’m not at all eager to discuss my infatuation with Arlan. “He’s madly in love with you,” I say. “He doesn’t think of you as socks.”

  “He’s just more sentimental. Or he doesn’t get bored. I don’t know.” She flips over onto her back and stares up at the sky. “He does love me, though. Last week he went all the way to Canada just to get me these little chocolates I was craving. Or one night I was on the rag and out of tampons, so he ripped up one of his T-shirts for me. He’s good, don’t get me wrong. He’s great.” She raises herself on her elbows abruptly and shakes her hair back from her face. “But then again, he threatened to kill me twice, too, so let’s not romanticize.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Of course,” she says. “He’s no saint.”

  I roll over onto my back and watch as she lights a cigarette. “Why? What did you do?”

  “Now that’s a fucked-up question, don’t you think?”

  “No, I mean, not that you would deserve it—I just meant, what made him that mad that he would—”

  “There’s two things Arlan and I are really good at. Fighting and fucking. Our worldviews are not exactly aligned— I mean, he has a lot to learn from me, if he would just shut up and listen—but these are two things we have in common. Sometimes, when yelling our heads off and throwing things isn’t satisfying enough, he threatens to kill me. It’s like an aphrodisiac.”

  “Sort of a dangerous way to get off, don’t you think?”

  “Getting off is always dangerous,” she says.

  Before I can think of more questions, she throws off her glasses, leaps up and charges into the water. When she comes up for air she screams and shakes her dark hair, sending tiny shards of water flying in every direction, refracting light. “It’s fucking cold!” she squeals, and the pleasure in her voice makes me get up and follow. I ease in slowly, feeling the surface as it grips higher and higher up my legs, then around my hips, and at last encircles my waist. By the time the waterline is even with my nipples, I have given in to its cold; I catch my breath and float under. The world underneath is olive green. The sunlight filters past the surface in angelic beams. I can hear the distant, high-pitched buzz of a motorboat.

  I float in the water for a long time. When I run out of breath, I stay above the surface just long enough to gather more, and then I propel myself under again.

  I feel something grab ahold of my calf. I’m whipping around to see what it is, even as I’m clawing for the surface. Dead body, I’m thinking. Corpse grip. I can imagine the blue-green skin, the decaying flesh, sunken eyes and the crone claws holding tight to my leg. Whatever it is lets go, then grabs again, at my thigh this time. I catch my breath, heart pounding, and turn again, kicking madly, trying to see what it is and get away from it all at once.

  Arlan surfaces, laughing, and then he looks surprised. “I’m sorry! I thought—”

  “What’s going on over there?” Lucy’s balancing on a huge floating log, riding it sidesaddle, about five yards off. “You guys—” Suddenly, the other end of the log rises out of the water and Lucy goes screaming overboard in one swift, unstoppable movement. Grady and Bill appear on either side of the disrupted log and high-five each other with wet palms.

  “I can’t believe it!” Bill laughs. “We finally found a way to shut Lucy up!”

  Lucy comes sputtering out of the water and kicks toward shore, indignant. Bill climbs up on the log and tries to ride it like a surfboard, but it’s too round, and after a brief, hard-earned moment of balance, he goes flying off with a cowboy “yee-haw!” that tears across the lake. I hear Arlan laugh and am surprised to see that he’s still treading water near me.

  “Sorry about scaring you,” he says. “I thought you were Lucy.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I figured.”

  I look at his face, dewy with lake water, his hair slicked back and shining in the sunlight. He looks happy and childish. Arlan always looks either heartbreakingly innocent or brooding and scary; there is no in-between.

  Grady’s head pops out
of the water. “Let’s swim out to the dock,” he says, looking first at me and then at Arlan.

  “Not me, man,” Arlan says. “Smokers don’t swim.”

  “Anna?”

  “Yeah,” I say, squinting at the dock about two hundred yards off. “Let’s go.”

  When we get back to the beach about twenty minutes later, Arlan has disappeared, and Lucy’s looking at Bill like she wants to bash his head in. “Bill, you can shut up about that—” she says, her voice just a notch above normal volume.

  “Don’t tell me to shut up—”

  “You don’t know anything about it!”

  “All I know is, I saw what I saw.” Bill crosses his skinny, naked arms across his chest. With his hair wet he looks more like a rat than ever. “I saw you, and I saw Zukerman. What am I supposed to do? Three o’clock in the morning, you know? Why would I lie about that?”

  “You know, that’s very interesting,” Lucy says, with a tight little smile. “Because I never said you were lying. Why would you even mention lying? All I said is, you don’t know anything about it.”

  “And that’s why I’m asking.”

  Grady and I sit awkwardly a little distance from Lucy and Bill.

  “Anna,” Lucy says. “Pay attention, here. This is exactly the brand of misogyny I’m always talking about. A man sees a woman coming out of a motel with an old friend of hers—what does he immediately assume?”

  “Look,” Bill says, his tone softening. “I just asked a question, is all—”

  “And does he approach the man about it?”

  “Zukerman’s not my best friend’s girlfriend—”

  “Arlan’s your best friend now, is he?” I can see there is hatred in her face. “I don’t expect you of all people to understand this, but I am nobody’s girlfriend, all right? Don’t you ever fuck with my privacy—”

  “I just thought I should ask, instead of wondering—”

  “We were visiting the girl who works the desk, you idiot—but that’s beside the point.”

  “Well, then, I misunderstood, Lucy. I thought—”