by Mary Morris
On her way down Broadway, Jews for Jesus handed her a leaflet. God is a huge electric generator, it said. Jesus is the spark that lights our lives. Faith is the switch we need to turn on.
At seven o’clock the wind picked up. The sky turned black, as if some judgment were upon them. It rained as it hadn’t in weeks. Pete called during the storm and told her he’d had to spend the night on Marilyn’s sofa. She believed him. She had no reason to doubt him. She was not even angry with him. But she felt some small part of herself turn off, step away. She moved ever so slightly back and found that some of what had been there was gone.
After the rains, the weather broke and the air was cool and crisp. She opened the windows and a breeze blew in. Sally got into bed. The sheets were white and smooth. She curled herself into a small circle and counted herself among the first of her blessings.
Alewives
WHENEVER BUCKY BILL WILSON came to town, he knocked the girls dead. He always came at the same time of year, and every year he picked a new girl for himself for the season. He came for the summers and for a month over Christmas, and when he came to town the boys would tremble.
One year he picked Cindy Michaels. She’d been Gary Thompson’s girl for the past few years and they’d gone to all the hops together. Then Bucky picked Cindy, and though she’d tried to fight it, Bucky wasn’t someone you’d fight off easily.
During cheerleader practice, Bucky would come to the field and watch Cindy turn and spin and jump in the air. The cheer squad didn’t usually practice in the summer, but we really wanted to be ready for the fall; we were certain the Little Giants were going to win state. And most of us had stayed home to go to summer school, anyway. Miss Guerney, who ran the summer school, had agreed to let us use the locker room and playing fields. Every day, after our biology or typing classes, we practiced. We wanted to be able to jump so that our heels touched the back of our heads. Or so that our legs opened in perfect splits.
Bucky was always there, urging us on. We were used to seeing him, stretched out in his tight worn jeans and a bright colored T-shirt that showed off those arms with the thick blue veins. I can still trace those veins in my mind as if they were roads I’ve driven on in the midwest. Long and thick and going nowhere.
I’d been with him the summer before, but he never stayed with anyone too long. I had a new boyfriend now, named Hank. Hank picked me up after practice every day and we’d go to Sherman’s for hamburgers. Then he’d drive me down to the lake, but I wouldn’t let him take me to the places I’d gone to with Bucky.
I knew Bucky well. I knew the only way to have Bucky was not to let him have you. I knew before anybody, because I could tell and because he told me, that Bucky was losing interest in Cindy. I’d heard the rumors about her. How she was hot to trot and had let him cover all the bases. And I wasn’t surprised when I heard about Bucky and Sally Sherill.
The first time I heard about it was the night when Hank and I and Bucky and Cindy went cowtipping. First we went to a drive-in, where we polished off a six-pack Bucky had borrowed from his father’s liquor cabinet. When the movie got out, Bucky wanted to go cowtipping because he hadn’t done it in a while, so we decided why not. There was hardly a better thing to do on a warm summer evening when you’d had some beer than to go cowtipping. We drove out to Libertyville, and while Cindy and I sat on the fence, the boys snuck up on sleeping cows and rammed into them, knocking them over.
Cindy wore yellow shorts and a halter top, and I could see the little beads of sweat on her throat from the warm night. She had long, yellow-tan legs with light yellow fuzz on them and she rubbed them as we sat on that fence. She had a wistful look in her eyes and she took a deep sigh. “I think I’ve gone and fallen in love with him.”
“That’s a mistake,” I said.
“You aren’t jealous, are you?”
I watched as the boys knocked over a few big and startled cows, which tumbled and mooed, their legs in the air like upturned tables. Bucky laughed, flopping on the ground, kicking his legs, and Hank kept trying to lift him up. “Naw,” I said, “I’m not jealous. I just don’t think you should get messed up with him like that.”
Cindy sighed again, rubbing her hands briskly up and down her legs, as if she were trying to make fire. When Bucky had taken up with Cindy, she came over to my house and sat on my bed. “Bucky asked me to a movie.”
I’d been seeing Hank since Bucky dropped me the Christmas before, so I said, “Gary’s going to be mad.”
“What about you?” She’d fiddled with her hair, which was thick and auburn.
I replied, “Oh, he changes every year. You know that.” That’s how she knew she’d gotten my blessing.
After they woke up the rest of the herd, the boys came back, laughing, in a sweat. “Let’s hit the beach,” Hank said. Whenever somebody wanted to go to the beach, everyone else knew why. The beach was where we always went to make out, but I didn’t want to go now because I’d spent so much time on the beach with Bucky last summer and hadn’t been down much since. But that was over, so I said I’d go. We drove down and parked and walked out on the beach.
Bucky walked ahead of us onto the sand. He had assumed his California swagger and was humming “Surfin’” and telling us about this group called the Beach Boys that was the rage out west. He walked down by the shore, his sandy blond hair blowing in the wind, and he paused, taking a deep breath while we caught up with him. When we did, he said, “I hate this lake.”
Hank came up behind him. “How can you hate a lake?”
Bucky shrugged. “I just do.” He’d always turned up his nose at Lake Michigan since he moved away. It was just a puddle, he’d say. It was nothing. A drop in the bucket. As the summer wore on, Bucky always started longing for the fierce Pacific, where he’d hang ten or drop five. He’d talk about strolling the promenade and about those tall, blond California girls. Then he’d start to look west and get that longing look in his eyes.
Bucky lived with his mother in California, but his father got him for the holidays. He didn’t like either of them very much, and what made it worse was that they were his adoptive parents. Bucky used to complain how they’d adopted him and then split. Mrs. Wilson, a big drunk, had taken Bucky away from the icy midwestern winters years ago, and now there was this part of him that couldn’t live without the surf.
Bucky and Cindy headed up one end of the beach, and Hank and I went another way. I turned and saw them in the moonlight, Bucky with his arm flapping over Cindy’s shoulder, and Cindy giggling, pretending she wanted to get away. I took Hank by the arm and we continued in the opposite direction. After we’d walked a little way, Hank paused and said, “Do you wish you were still with him?”
“I’m glad I’m with you,” I said.
“Can you keep a secret?” he asked, putting his arm around my shoulder. He had a catcher’s shape, long arms and a crablike torso. He passed his hand through my hair like a whisper. I said I could keep a secret. “Bucky’s been hanging out with Sally Sherill.” Sally was one of the Highwood gang, and her daddy ran Scofidio’s, a favorite bar, and was not somebody you’d want to mess around with. Hank sucked in breath between his teeth. “And you know what they say about her.”
A few nights later Bucky called. He called late at night and I grabbed the phone quickly, because I didn’t want my mother to get it. He said, “Can you meet me?”
I felt the sweat on my palm as I held the phone. “I don’t think so.”
But he said, “Don’t be a spoilsport. There’s a nice moon. I just want to talk to you.”
So I slid down my drainpipe, the way I’d done so many nights the previous summer. I walked to the end of my street, where Bucky was waiting with his father’s car. He drove down to the lake where we’d always driven and parked the car. When we got out, he tried to take my hand.
I pulled it away and moved close to the water. “I’ve missed you,” he said.
“You could’ve stayed in touch.” I remembered when he’d c
ome back the winter before. He was tan and golden and he hadn’t had much time for me. There’d been rumors about him and his stepsister, but I hadn’t believed them.
“Anyway, you’re with Hank now. He’s a nice guy.”
I nodded thoughtfully. “He’s a nice guy.”
We walked a way down the shore and sat on the sand. I felt the damp sand on my legs and the warm breeze off the beach. My hair was back in a ponytail and I let it loose, to let the wind in. He put his arm around me and I sat stiffly beside him. “And you’re with Cindy now.”
Bucky shrugged. “She’s not really my kind.”
“You don’t know what you like.” I sat up straight, my backside pressed into the sand.
“Yes, I do,” he said. He turned me around and put his mouth gently to mine. I could feel the moisture of his lips. I pushed him away and said, “I don’t want to do this.” But he pulled me back and I could feel the way his lips parted, the way his tongue moved slowly in between the parting lips. His tongue pushed deep down my throat and his hands moved ever so gently up my back. I could feel everything about him. I wondered how I’d forgotten all this. When he slid his hand from my back to my ribs, something jarred me. I sniffed the air. “It stinks down here.”
He tried to grab me but I stood up. “Something stinks.” I walked to the shore. I put my hand into the water and felt the bodies of some dead fish. I looked where I stood and saw that fish lined the shore. “Dead fish.”
Bucky called me back. “Come here. There’s always dead fish.”
I shook my head. “Not this many. I never saw so many.” I looked down at them closely. My father had taught me a lot about fish. “Alewives,” I said. “It’s all dead alewives.”
“What’d you expect? Tuna?” He laughed.
“Strange, it’s all one kind.” He shrugged and beckoned for me to come back. He didn’t know anything about lake fish.
Cindy and I had to make up a biology lab that summer, and the old maid teacher, Miss Guerney, taught us how to pith a frog. She showed us how to bend the head of the frog forward and stick the long needle in and move it around. The frog squirmed and its eyes bulged, but the teacher said the frog didn’t feel a thing. She handed out frogs to everyone, but I couldn’t bring myself to do the pithing. Cindy and I tried, but the frog just squirmed and then jumped away with the needle sticking in its neck.
After lab Cindy said, “I’ve got some gossip for you.” We went down to the locker room to get ready for practice. Other friends were milling about. “I’ve heard some stuff,” she said. “I heard the boys were over at Sally Sherill’s and that she did things to them.” I asked Cindy what she did and, with a giggle, she whispered to me something that I couldn’t imagine doing to anyone.
After practice was over, Cindy went off with Bucky. He put his hands on her hips and pulled her close to him. The tip of Cindy’s breast pressed into Bucky’s arm. I wished I’d never gone with him down to the shore.
When Hank came to get me, we went down to the lake to park, but I couldn’t bear those pecks like chicken scratchings he put on my neck. After a while I started to squirm and asked him to drop me off. When he did, I blew him a kiss and he looked away, hurt. In the kitchen, my mother kissed me full on the mouth. My father had died a fews years earlier, and my mother was always waiting when I got home. I thought about what Cindy had told me in the locker room and I recoiled from my mother’s lips.
A few days later, I stood beside Cindy in the locker room. I looked at her small round breasts, at her smooth skin. I wondered if Bucky had seen as much of her as I had. I could imagine his mouth on her pointed dark nipples. Cindy caught me staring at her, and she looked at me for an instant with a kind of recognition. The night before, she’d come to my house, red-eyed, and we’d gone down to the bluff. “I know,” she told me. “I know about him and Sally.”
Now, in the locker room, she looked at me again with that same strange look, and it made me think she was capable of anything. “I want to do something,” she said. I told her to forget whatever it was she wanted to do. Bucky’s no good, I told her. She should go back to Gary. “I know he’s no good,” Cindy whispered in my ear, “but there’s something about him I can’t stay away from.” She called some of the other girls who were milling around near the lockers. We were going to go over to Marsha’s to watch “American Bandstand” and set our hair in hot curlers, something we did a few times a week, but Cindy talked us out of it. She talked us into going to McDonald’s, where Sally Sherill worked.
Four of us, including Marsha, a girl named Irene, and me, piled into Cindy’s car. We turned the radio on high and put down the top. The Beatles sang, “She Loves You,” and we sang along as the car zipped over the Deerfield Road. When we pulled into McDonald’s, we could see Sally in her yellow and red striped McDonald’s uniform, the stripes expanding across her breasts, as she put French fries and Cokes into McDonald’s bags.
When we walked in, Sally smiled tentatively at us. She was a big girl, a dishwater blond with a flat, puglike face and sad brown eyes. “Hi there, Sally,” Cindy said.
We lined up along the counter. The place smelled of grease and raw meat. Cindy leaned close to Sally, and Sally smiled now a little uncomfortably. “I’ll give you guys some Cokes on the house,” she said.
But Cindy waved her hand. “We don’t want something for nothing. We’ve got a proposition for you . . .”
I stepped back a little. The smells of the place were starting to turn my stomach. The Musak grew louder and louder. Sally was smiling.
“We want to make you class treasurer.” Sally looked nervous. Her eyes twitched. Cindy paused for great emphasis. “Because we hear you’ve got the treasure chest.”
The girls started to laugh, but I didn’t. If I’d had my mother’s car, I’d have left. The black kid from Deerfield behind the counter turned away.
Sally looked pale and now her hands were shaking, but she bent forward and leaned into Cindy. “I don’t know what your problem is, but you’d better get out of here.”
I was halfway to the door. Cindy said, “We know about you. We know a lot.”
Sally stepped back, in the direction of the grill, which now had some very well-done cheeseburgers on it. “You’d better get out of here,” she said very softly.
“We know about you,” Cindy said, turning away from the counter, “and we’re gonna tell your daddy, if you don’t watch out.”
We got back in the car and drove up Sheridan toward Lake Forest. I sat in the back and I couldn’t get Bucky out of my mind. I’d tried to get him out, but he was stuck there. “I want to go home,” I said when Cindy started driving north.
“We’re going to the beach.”
“I don’t want to.”
Cindy glared back at me; then her face softened with that same look I’d seen in the locker room. She knew she had me. “We’ll take you home later. We’ve got some things to talk over.”
I didn’t want to talk things over. I just wanted the summer to end and Bucky to go back to where he came from. I wanted to forget how he’d called me almost every night the summer before and how on the nights when he didn’t, I’d waited by the phone. Or sat, watching the street sign in front of my house for the headlights of his car. I’d say to myself, I’ll wait for six cars, but then six cars would pass and I’d wait for ten cars. I’d spend hours waiting for a car that never came. But then he’d call or come by. And I’d sneak down to the lake to meet him. Bucky always said he had to be close to water. I didn’t even like him that much, but I’d always gone.
The whole town started to stink. Nobody knew why the fish were dying, but it just crept up on us. Not all the fish. Just the alewives. They were dying by the thousands. We began staying away from the beach, and it was only mid-July. Everyone began getting restless. One night Marsha had a party when her parents went to Oshkosh for the weekend, and about fifteen of us went over.
We turned down the lights and put on Johnny Mathis. Some wandered away into
the yard and a few went upstairs. Hank held me as we danced, his bony arms wrapped around my waist, his nose resting in my neck, and then Bucky cut in. Johnny Mathis was singing “Small World,” and I was all wrapped up in Bucky’s arms, his hips pressed into mine, his breath on my neck, as if I weren’t in this world anymore. I could smell his salt as though he kept the water from the distant coast on his skin the whole time.
I had to get away from that party, so I let Hank take me down by the bluff, where he stood, his back plastered against a tree that he kept kicking with his foot like an angry horse. The moon was full, and from the bluff and for as far as we could see, there were the bodies of dead fish. They lined the shore and were piling up deep into the water. “I knew it,” I said. Alewives were stupid fish. Vile, eel-like things. They didn’t do anything. They had dumb names that didn’t mean anything and they didn’t even belong in the Great Lakes in the first place. They’d snuck in, up the St. Lawrence, and turned themselves into freshwater fish. You couldn’t even eat them. And when they felt like it, they went and died.
Since we couldn’t go to the beach anymore, the cheerleaders started hanging out in Highwood and in the delis in the evenings and after practice. One evening we went to Strike ’n Spare for pizza and to bowl a few rounds. We were having a good time, laughing, when Bucky walked in with Sally.
Cindy didn’t notice, because she was bowling, but I did. When Bucky walked by with Sally, her laughter echoed through the bowling alley, striking like a ball smashing the pins. There was something about Sally as she walked through the place. It was in the way she moved and in the scent that seemed to come from her. She made Bucky look as if he were back in California. She had something, I knew then, that none of the rest of us had, and I couldn’t help wishing I had it.