by Maria Flook
“Did we ask you to get undressed?” Bell told him.
Christine looked over at the CVS girl and waved. The girl knew it was a snub; she shifted her legs and looked in the other direction.
“Maybe you can get the box,” Christine told Miller.
“That’s crazy,” Miller told them. “I’ve got insurance. Let’s just travel. I’m ready.”
“Tell you what. I’ll race you for the cost of that thing,” Bell said. “Swim out, touch the mooring at Bailey’s, turn around, come back. Ten minutes. If you win, I pay for the machine. Even-steven. Time us, Christine.” He pulled his jersey over his head and the wind snapped it until he wadded it down.
Miller turned to Christine, but her eyes were squinting and unreceptive. Her face showed a refined acknowledgment of something. Miller said, “Does your brother want me to race him to that mooring? Is he serious?”
“That’s the request,” Bell said.
“Sorry, my friend,” Miller said. He tried to edge past Bell.
Bell put his arm out. He grabbed Miller’s throat, half-serious, pinching the windpipe with his thumb and middle finger. Bell wiggled the ribbed cartilage left and right, like a toilet paper tube, until Miller started coughing. Bell might be reaching his maximum capacity for self-control and the other man recognized that Bell was nearing this boundary.
Miller pushed his sweats down and stepped out of them. He marched around the ledge of rock, searching for a way down into the trough. The water was rough. He turned back. “Fuck you,” he told Bell, but he was looking at Christine. “I’m not going in that Mixmaster to please you.”
“What about Christine? Here’s your chance to make it up,” Bell said. He was marching Miller backwards on the ledge.
“You want me to jump in that icy water?”
“Does he have to?” Christine said.
“It’s a free world,” Bell said. “Do whatever you want.” He turned away from Miller and let the two of them discuss it.
A retired couple, exercising their dog, arrived at Spouting Rock. The dog climbed the boulders, its nose brushing side to side for mollusk scents. The couple were surprised to see Miller without his clothes.
“The Polar Bear Club, are you?” the man asked Bell. He had to shout over the surf.
“That’s right,” Bell told him. “The initiation stage. It’s a closed session, try not to gawk.”
The man stopped coming when he heard Bell’s tone. He watched from a distance. Bell’s grave, no-nonsense dementia was beginning to show. He was shifting his legs, stepping in place. He clenched his fists at intervals, and some surface veins had engorged along his pectoral ledge, his dark nipples flared. The stranger steered his wife by her elbow and they walked off. The dog raced ahead.
Christine found her shirt and slipped it over her head. Bell looked at his sister’s lover; his penis was screwed close inside the scrotum, his teeth were clacking, an inaudible chatter of strikes and pauses as he pulled the fleecy side of his sweatpants right-side out.
“Pants on, pants off. Can’t decide what to do with it?” Bell said.
“You’re sick!” Miller said, shivering in large, convulsive shrugs as he dressed. Bell looked out at the sea. A tanker was coming in by Brenton Reef; it was carrying a full load and rested flat as a domino. Closer in, there was something in the water. A pale form rolled on the waves, taupe-colored, like a raincoat. Bell watched the waves fill the fabric in fleshy billows before shooting past. He remembered the way the dead girl filled his thinking, devoured that entire morning when he found her, and kept eating into his mind, even now, days later. The garment surged forward on a swell, took the curve of a hip, then flattened as the wave eased underneath.
“What is that?” Miller said.
“Something or somebody?” Christine said.
Bell said, “It’s just a sailcover. A tarp, I guess. It’s trash. This is becoming a nautical waste heap. Jesus—what comes and goes in the water. Things wash up, and you don’t always need dental records to figure it out.” He studied the ragged sheet as it opened and folded, accenting the voluptuous depths that carried it forward. He was taking his shoes off, toeing one heel loose, then the other. He pushed his jeans down.
“What are you doing? You can’t swim today,” Christine told her brother. “The water’s too cold.”
Miller said, “Oh, but it was okay for me—”
“I’m going in.” Bell removed his jockeys and dove from the rocks into the sea. Christine picked up his briefs and collected them in her right hand. She walked to the end of the jetty to keep sight of him. He was swimming towards the mooring, but he swam right past its rusty sphere and shifted in another direction. He headed towards the mysterious cloth. He swam in smooth, aggressive strokes, as if he could swim a long time, perhaps he could swim far beyond any return to land. He wasn’t trying to worry his sister, but he knew she waited. He felt her longing like a vibration in the water. It seemed to help his rhythm; his kicking was silky and powerful, but he was getting tired.
The scrap was a loose-weave sheet used to repair drift nets, something makeshift and discarded. Its grommets were knotted with nylon wire that feathered in the surf like a colossal hydra. Bell circled the torn square as if it were marker for a particular disaster in a man’s life. Its ghost outlines flowered, palpitated, and contracted in mockery of the living. He tried to sink it. Free it from its endless float. He shimmied onto the netting, but it disappeared under his weight, retreated to the deep like a frightened pneuma. The mesh wrapped his ankle as he kicked, fanned out behind him like a train, then swirled to the surface again.
The Irish girl floated, lofted in his retina’s mirrory sea. Seeing that kind of thing once was plenty. Her body, its helpless curve against the shore, everything, even the tiny decals on her fingernails. Glossy as a photograph. Her body washed in, it conformed to a few general expectations, but her spirit collected or dispersed—where? He couldn’t imagine. He had no imagination for that. Ordinary silver nitrate could never etch a picture of heaven. He preferred to think of the live girl, her summers at Marblehead. What was her line of work? Was she in the profession? Did her innocence seize up, suddenly, or was it a natural decline?
Bell tried to gather the unmanageable netting and tow it in to shore. Despite its transparency, its coarse knots, the sheet was too difficult to maneuver and he had to leave it. He worked to get back to the rocks. The rip current made swimming hard. When he pulled himself out of the water, his flesh was pink from the effort, he felt a tingle of sweat beneath the crystallizing salt scum. He picked up his jeans and put them on, forgetting his underwear. Christine twirled the waistband on her pointer finger and let them sail. Miller tried to lead Christine back to the car. Her dramatic handling of her brother’s briefs made Miller question out loud his luck with women. Why did Christine have to insult him with such inventive gestures? Miller told Christine, “I want to leave. Now. Fish or cut bait.” She waited for Bell to lace his shoes.
Christine looked at her brother and smiled. She started to recite her lines, her voice silky and true to her role. “There does be a power of young men floating around in the sea—”
Miller rubbed his forehead with the back of his knuckles. “Jesus Christ. You’re a sad story. The two of you. You’re both really sad.”
At the car, the CVS girl climbed in the backseat with Miller and Christine rode in front, beside her brother. The girl wanted to return to her job and Bell let her off at the drugstore. He drove down Memorial Boulevard. He watched his sister’s profile and he bounced the heel of his hand on her knee. “Christine. Green Animals?”
“The topiary? You want to go there? You’re not just being nice?”
Bell told her, “I’m giving it another chance.”
She smiled and turned her face the other way. “Look, there’s Pop,” she said, pointing to a car in the next lane. She started to wave but her father didn’t see her. “In his own world,” she said.
“It’s the same world,�
� Bell said.
“Just let me out here,” Miller said. He jumped out at the next intersection and left the car door swinging. Bell watched the light change, then he tapped the gas pedal just-so until the door came back and the lock caught.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maria Flook has published two novels, Family Night, which was awarded a PEN American/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Special Citation, and Open Water. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize for Fiction. Ms. Flook teaches in the core faculty of the Bennington Graduate Writing Seminars at Bennington College. She lives in Truro, Massachusetts.
