The Moon Pinnace

by Thomas Williams

  Once, when he was seven or eight, he told her a dream he’d had, one he couldn’t now remember except that there had been a great white mare on the ice, and asked her to tell no one. But it had been a cute dream, revealing, his mother had thought, superior imagination in her only son, and in his very presence she had told it to another woman. She could not understand his anger and sense of betrayal. She said that the dream was not shameful and the other woman was sympathetic, so why was he upset? Because you promised you wouldn’t tell, he said.

  She didn’t understand. She was unhappy because of his anger, but her motives had been impeccable, hadn’t they? In all ways she was kind and good to him, wasn’t she? Gradually, through this sort of incident, he had come to believe that in her mind he did not belong to himself, nor did others to themselves, but all were the property of her charm.

  His own vague memories of his father were of a tall, smiling man in another country, another world. They were living in a small hotel that looked like a painting by Edward Hopper, especially because in that country, southwestern Minnesota, the sky came down to the ground at all points of the compass. There were trees, but they grew against the sky. Buildings stood alone like children’s blocks upon the plain. This was Winota, where he was born. It seemed another life, lost but still possible, an alternative to the realities of Leah, New Hampshire, where he was a singleton.

  In some ways fate had been good to him. When he ran or jumped, or caught bouncing or flying objects, he thought no more about it than a cat. The act presented itself and was done. This gift had made his life fairly tolerable in Leah, that sometimes bloody jungle of violent, dishonest, fickle children, some of them bigger and stronger than he. It was their strange loyalties that he could not always fathom. When one brother was a crook, beware the one who was honest. Beware cousins and those of the same religion, those allied by poverty or by wealth. Beware those who were neighbors. What was right and fair might not be what was in contention.

  But now he was twenty-one and a veteran; as the children grew up they lost the edges of their characters against the abrasions of responsibility. Savages became pale early fathers depressed by rent, by the mysteries of credit and payments on the cars they had so wanted when wheels had meant freedom. Now another generation of children glittered through the town, each no doubt a stunning character, dangerous or brilliant, dopey or queer or all of those, but their societies were as distant to him in his new adulthood as squirrels chasing each other through the branches of a high elm. He heard them down the street: Lee me alone! Three twelve-year-olds banging another over the head and shoulders with little fists, not little to the outcast, their noisy progress seemingly erratic. Unfair, unfair…The procession, its depressing precision, its call to guilt or desperation, passed beyond houses, yards and garages.

  Leaving him alone in his room among the souvenirs of his own childhood—a dusty Stuka made of balsa wood and paper; books, guns, reels, pipes, knives, a vacant bald-faced hornets’ nest, trophies and ribbons, scrapbooks, defunct fountain pens—shelves and drawers full of things once valued for reasons mainly of childhood’s constant, boring fantasies in anticipation of reality. They and the room itself, which really belonged to his stepfather, hardly interested him at all. It was true that his plans for the summer were also rather childish; he would ride his ancient motorcycle from New Hampshire to California, that fashionable migratory destination the urge for which he understood but nonetheless allowed himself. He had wheels, untrustworthy as they might be, and some money he’d saved in the Army. His mother would defer to his wishes and his stepfather would be happy to see him gone, if anything could ever make his stepfather happy; the man had such a talent for rigidity, for embarrassment, for self-belittling rage, that even when John Hearne was a little child he had understood the pathological nature of such an existence and decided that it would impinge as little as possible upon his own fate.

  Of course his real father, if alive, was out there somewhere in the easy West, among friends, charming, friendly, unawed by children, totally irresponsible.

  Outside his window the new maple leaves were as pale as lettuce, small but quickly unfolding into what they would be in a week or two. Through them he saw movement, a figure against black earth in the Perkins’s backyard. There was the lurch and stoop of spading, the flash of a bare arm, the hiss of the blade into stony soil. For a moment he didn’t think to think who it was, and when he did look more closely, sliding his vision through the leaves, he didn’t recognize whoever it was by name. It was a young woman in dungarees and a sleeveless cotton shirt, her back toward him. The difficulty of her work and the slimness of her body exaggerated each motion, so that at first he saw her as a system of thin beams and levers, a stiltlike machine operating near the limits of its power. Conscious of spying, he crouched by his windowsill to see her better. She stopped at the end of her row of fresh black earth and moved a slender wrist over her forehead to push back her hair, the color of which didn’t matter because he saw her as form, as if all in grays against green and black. And now, as she stood for a moment to rest, she was so neat and sturdy and slender, so right to him that he must have invented, long ago, an idealized shadow form for the body of a girl. He hadn’t known that he’d had this concept of perfection, but it must have been there all along, waiting until this girl with a spade happened to stand directly in its shadowy beam and make the design visible to him.

  “What is this?” he said out loud. He was excited and felt the presence of danger, the marvelous kind that might threaten a change in the direction of his life. Yet he hadn’t gone totally mad and was ready for disappointment. Maybe his eyes were wrong and she was a giant, or he was having a wishful hallucination as surprising as a fit. But then, with the deflating thump of the ordinary, like waking, he saw as she turned toward his window that it was Dory Perkins, whose mortal power slowly receded. There was her plain, pleasant, immature little friend-face, a smudge of soil on her round forehead. He had never really looked at her before without having known exactly who she was, and in fact hadn’t seen her since Christmas vacation, and then only on the street when she had been wearing a large red mackinaw and leather-top boots.

  She went back to enlarging her mother’s kitchen garden, and he watched her from hiding. In a way it was reprehensible to watch every part of her like this. She placed the blade upon the segment of turf she wanted to turn, then jumped on the spade as if it were a pogo stick to make it slide straight down into the soil, an almost hydraulic, steady impalement. She pulled the spade handle back with all her strength and weight to lever out the bladeful of adhesive dirt and sod, then stabbed the chunks into smaller chunks. Small stones she picked out and tossed over to the cinder driveway. She would be determined to complete her task no matter how much effort it took; that he knew, but what else did he know about her? She had always been, after having been a baby, when he hardly saw her at all, a trim little girl who lived in back of his backyard in a house smaller and plainer than the house he lived in. One time when she was eight or nine, the neighborhood children playing kick the can or prisoner’s base, someone had pushed her into the raspberry bushes and she’d cried, but they had easily cheered her up again in spite of her scratches and she’d run with them in the summer evening until the dusk fell like fog among the lilacs and juniper and her mother called her home. He had always felt somewhat protective toward that good-humored child.

  Her sister, Debbie, had tended to whine; in Debbie’s limbs, or psyche, or somewhere, was less of the unifying force that made for character. Debbie would have sulked if she’d had to labor with a spade, but Dory attacked the job with a sort of neutral fervor. She must be seventeen now, graduating from high school in a week or so, if his arithmetic was right. Most of the girls that age he’d known wouldn’t much have liked to spend a sunny afternoon in June spading dirt, not with the new reality coming up, their new bodies radiating a more exciting power.

  He really didn’t know her very well; he couldn’t know
what she might want to do. He watched her use all of her strength. Though her struggles with the heavy, winter-packed turf and the rigid spade might be considered awkward, what he was seeing was the configuration, proved rather than refuted by each violent motion, of a woman beautiful to him. She was his childhood friend, his neighbor; all the childhood history of small important fears and insecurities was there between them, parents between them too, and even so he wanted to begin something with her. The desire was painful, wickedly near to child molestation.

  He would have to go down and speak to her and see what this new creature was like. He had no idea what thoughts might come out of her head these days. Maybe she had turned into a silly idiot, and his toleration of that might sober him. He was nervous, but he did know that she liked him. One other asset he might have, the cautious or scheming side of him noted, was that because of her plain little face she might not be aware of her beauty.

  “Hearne,” he said aloud to his solitude, “what are you thinking of?” That was little Dory Perkins down there in her mother’s vegetable garden.

  3

  It was she who had decided that she would spell her name with a y instead of ie. A dory was a small boat; a dorie was something vague or fluffy, diffused and cute, a feminine diminutive she couldn’t apply to herself. She felt more like a good useful thing, tight in its seams, agile, made of good wood, maybe not too brilliant or pretty but well constructed. She knew where she began and where she ended. She could ride the waves.

  She saw him watching her from his room. He might not even know that she knew he was home and that she often looked up at that mysterious window of his. She wondered if he might come out. When she finished the spading she went inside and washed her arms and face, quickly brushed her hair and went out into the sun again. She sat on the pipe fulcrum of the teeter-totter her father had made long ago. John Hearne was no longer at his window, but then he came out of his kitchen door and asked her if she wanted to teeter-totter. In their new adulthood this was a joke. How small the teeter-totter was; she remembered how high and scary it had once been, and how trust meant that the other person wouldn’t get off and let you fall straight down with a terrible jar to your spine. Debbie had done it to her once, probably out of thoughtlessness; she’d just got off when her end was on the ground.

  He had to sit in front of the handle on his end so they’d balance, and after talking about what they were not really thinking about, he’d come sliding down to her pretending it was an accident and out of the blue kissed her on the lips.

  That was yesterday, and now here he was, actually on her bed, no one else in the house, and she wasn’t even dressed yet.

  4

  At the other end of the sloping bed was this girl, strange because she had always been something other than what she was now. She didn’t say much, but meanings were all different and her use to him was different, so whatever words they said, words that applied to a previous existence, did not mean anything. He could tell that she knew the words didn’t mean anything, and that was why she didn’t say very much. She had thin gold hairs on her forearms. Between the buttons of her pajamas he could see crescents of the pure skin of her chest; only thin bleached cotton covered her. The house was too-meaningfully quiet, and his bravado ebbed. She looked at him curiously, somewhat warily. She seemed to look at all of him while he found himself looking at parts of her, then guiltily shifting his eyes away from parts of her toward some general place he could not quite ever find. He was reminded by her bright look of the face of a waterfowl, that rightness and dignity seen before the strangeness counted, the even-gazing brown eyes, small and bright, and the wide mouth. As he watched, the face inseparable from its intelligence, he felt it imprinting itself upon his recognition of it, changing its meaning to him in dangerous ways.

  “Well, you’re here,” she said.

  So she had decided to talk about what was meant. He said, “Did you think I’d come?” which was evasive.

  “I didn’t know whether you would or not. I’m not sure what you want.”

  Silence. Then he said, “I’m not sure either.” He thought this was perhaps a lie. “My intentions are honorable,” he said as a joke, but she didn’t smile.

  “I always thought you were an honorable boy.”

  That was a stunning thing to say, and he considered it. In some strictly relative, more or less tolerantly interpreted way, there was some truth in it, and he was surprised by her authority. Hoping he didn’t seem as nervous as he was, he moved on his knees to her, put his arms around her and kissed her. She was passive, quiet and unmoving, her hands still folded in her lap.

  “Let’s lie down,” he said. After a moment of thought she lay down beside him.

  In this small old house, everything faded brown from another age, stains on the wallpaper, the room heating up as the sun rose on the other side of its thin walls and roof, no attic over this room that was really a narrow dormer, he smoothed and straightened her pajamas. It was hard to believe that she had obeyed him. He really couldn’t see a reason for it. His ordinary hands did not deserve this privilege. He shivered and burned, pleasurably constrained by his clothes. Beneath the thin gauze of her pajamas, the childish cloth, she was like miraculously firm water, smooth and cool no matter how his hands formed it, or it formed the undulations of his hands. He was very careful not to subject her to the possible necessity of having to say no, or to have to indicate no in any way.

  They lay together as the room heated, time slowing, their seemingly languorous movements charged almost to pain with touch, repeated over and over, an anticipatory near-pleasure that could last forever. For an instant even their teeth touched, a risky light tick joining them bone to bone. Through the hazy ache of pleasure he observed other of his own symptoms: guilt to play with the nerves of this young girl; what about her feelings? At twenty-one he felt himself to be, with her, a jaded adventurer, oversophisticated, overexperienced. It seemed to him that the world was full of kind, warm girls who would risk everything on a bad gamble. To them it wasn’t a game at all, but a future, and yet they gave everything, just so a boy could sample it. Thank God he hadn’t been born a girl; his sympathy was real but overborne by his pride in his good luck in being male.

  The sun heated the little room until they were slippery with sweat. Her hair lay soaked on her forehead. She said nothing. Her brown eyes were open and serene, as if profoundly studying him.

  “Love in a steam bath,” he said.

  She smiled at that, but said nothing.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Let’s go to the lake. I’m supposed to open up the cabin anyway.”

  “I’ve never done this before,” she said.

  “Never done what?”

  “Petted with a boy like this. Robert Beggs kissed me a lot after the junior prom, but that was sitting up in his father’s car.” She was still thinking about it all, looking at him.

  “Do you like it?” he said.

  “It goes beyond any kind of sense at all. It doesn’t make sense. I don’t know enough to know what I feel. I don’t know what makes you like it so much. We’ve been lying here for two hours doing the same things over and over and not getting tired of it.”

  “It’s a mystery,” he said.

  “It’s not just funny,” she said.

  “No. I didn’t mean to be facetious. I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t know whether it’s love or not, either. Is it?”

  “You ask hard questions,” he said.

  “I think I’ve loved you ever since I was eight. I’ve always thought about you holding me and kissing me. It was always you, too. Never anyone else.”

  This startled him, and he felt himself turn a little cool. She saw it immediately, of course. His freedom was in danger; it was as if touch were thought itself, and in thought she was the stronger.

  “Now I’ve made you nervous,” she said.

  “Well, it’s a hard thing to accept. What can you say when somebody tells y
ou that?”

  “I shouldn’t have blabbed it. I should keep my mouth shut.”

  But it had been said, whatever it meant, and if it meant what he thought it meant he didn’t know if he could accept the responsibility. He believed what she’d said but he couldn’t see why he deserved it. He remembered, too, that he wasn’t really from Leah, but was an alien here—just a stranger passing through.

  “What do you have to do at your cabin?” she said, and he saw that she meant to change the subject in order to calm him. His mood shifted mysteriously toward exuberance and he said, “Sweep up the mouse turds and find all the nests they like to make out of toilet paper and leaves, clean the pine needles out of the gutters, see if anything’s drowned in the well, get the canoe out and all kinds of stuff like that.”

  “I could help you. I’m a good housecleaner.”

  “Bring your bathing suit.”

  “The water’s still too cold, I bet.”

  “I’ll jump in,” he said. “I’ll be showing off for you and I won’t feel a thing.” He could handle showing off and making fun of himself. He would jump into the cold lake because the caress of the water would be tender to his hardness. How he would preen and shine and flex his muscles! Even the musty air of the cabin and the greasy feel of damp shingles would be exciting and portentous because she had flattered him and made him nervous.

  5

  “The trouble with a motorcycle,” he yelled over his shoulder, “is that you can’t go slow! There’s something dumb about a slow motorcycle! You look like a kid on a kiddie cart!”

  She thought they must look handsome and brave on the motorcycle. She knew it was dangerous, and his old motorcycle, scraped and bent as it was, must have injured more than one rider, but she was with him and it didn’t seem to matter. Like a dog, she thought; they’ll go anywhere with you, just so they can go. Dory, beware—have you lost your brains? Why had she told him she loved him? It was as if she trusted him completely.