Lila swung the flashlight to the beaten grass around the wooden stakes. “They must be down by the water, grazing in the swamp.” She pulled herself over. Eddie scaled the fence and followed. Light illuminated their feet along the dirt path. Above them the sky was purple-blue with a smattering of stars. He stumbled a little and tried to hide it by bending over to retie his shoe. Now that he was here, he wasn't sure he wanted to ride the ponies. But he couldn't think of any excuse.
They were clumped together. The light made their eyes blink lazily like cows. Eddie'd heard about them for years. His mother had told him that men once wanted them for polo ponies because they were petite, elegant, and strong. He'd caught a few glimpses of them from car windows, their loping manes moving down by the sound, and once the ponies had been grazing by the highway. Their quick retreat had sent up dust so that to him they hadn't seemed real.
“Looks like they're talking,” Lila said. Eddie watched her study the blue-gray shades of their fur. “I bet they're talking about the old days when they ran everywhere.” Eddie knew the story—they were pirate horses. The only survivors of a shipwreck. Lila pointed the flashlight on a gray mare who whinnied loudly. “See how their backs bow?” Lila said. “My father says that's from scurvy.”
She put the end of the flashlight into the sandy earth. Its circle of light immediately drew gnats and tiny white moths. The horses stirred. “We have to sneak up on them,” Lila said, squeezing her hands into fists.
“I wish we had some rope,” Eddie said.
“You can't tie ‘em up; they'd go crazy. Just hold on with your legs.”
She put her finger to her lips, grabbed his hand, and they crept to the group of horses. Lila whispered now and she ran toward the darkest of the bunch. Eddie's heart pounded in his head as he grabbed the mane of a smaller one and pulled himself over. He'd ridden horses before, but none as lively as these. The horse bucked up, threw its back legs out like a rodeo bronco, and whined as though it had been shot.
“Talk to it,” Lila said. She cooed at her own tussling animal. His horse turned its head and tried to bite his leg. “Dig your heels in,” Lila yelled. Eddie did this, and the horse eased the struggle and began to run at an awful jumping clip. It wanted him off. He was jerked and the stars in front of him blurred across the sky. “Do you have him?” she yelled back.
“I think so,” Eddie said.
Lila steered her horse away. “I know,” he heard her say, “I wouldn't want nothing riding me either.”
Eddie's pony followed Lila's toward the fence. He listened to the wet hoof sound in mud. She crouched, grabbed deeper into the mane, and gave her horse a sharp kick in the shank. He watched how her body lifted with the horse, heard it humph and then the sound of its hoofs on the grass. His pony was less angry now, cantering toward the fence. Eddie tried to breathe evenly and think how great it was going to be to ride on the beach with Lila.
“What are you waiting for?” she called to him from the other side.
He couldn't see her, just the bare stakes of the pen. “Over,” he said and kicked the horse with his heels. It reared back, pitching its front legs into the air.
“Hit it on the neck,” Lila said.
He did and the horse tried the fence. Eddie's head burst big red blossoms. He heard the hoof catch and the horse cry out. Then the crunch, the sound of a huge branch snapping: Eddie was falling, breathing the horse, face pressed to fur, head vibrating on the ground. He sprawled so near he could touch the belly and hear its quivering breath. The pony lay just over the railings, body twisted: back right leg stuck between the wooden rungs, front legs bent under, a visible gash at the knee, protruding bone.
“Get up,” Lila screamed.
He heard her feet thud on the ground and her horse gallop off toward the beach. Standing, he saw silver minnows on the edge of his vision.
“It's in shock,” Lila said.
“We have to get someone,” he said loudly, looking toward the dark ribbon of highway and then to Lila. He knew an injured horse would be shot.
“Calm down,” she said. The pony blinked a watery eye. “Once it gets light, the birds will eat its eyes out.” The animal's breath steadied. Eddie's legs felt shaky, the air around him throbbed.
“Get the flashlight. We'll drag it to the water.”
Eddie walked toward the hum of light. He wanted to run hard toward the beach and look back to see the horse sprout wings—thick, feathery, and muscular as a duck's—and fly toward the stars. The faded lights of the sky reminded him of the ovals and longer-shaped cuts that scattered his mother's face—there was something about those cuts, they seemed to hold a charged and tingling energy. And there was something also around the pony that reminded Eddie of his mother. Both threw the same invisible hurt and wobbly arrows. His mother's eye paired, in his head, with the pony's.
“Get over here,” Lila yelled to him. He cleared the fence, grabbed the light, then ran back. “Take your shirt off,” she said and he pulled the T-shirt over his head. She asked him to hold the light as she tied the shirt around the horse's neck. A thick line of blood ran from the animal's ear. “You pull and I'll push from behind.”
The horse made horrible rattling sounds. Its fur scraped in the mud. It thrashed its unhurt leg and swung its head and then grew tired and still, its slack weight like a rock.
During these moments they stopped to rest. Lila stroked its neck and hummed as if putting the pony to sleep. But eventually it would buckle and try to push itself up with its head. Right before the shore, the pony gave a long gravelly moan that made Eddie feel sick. Finally, after what seemed like an hour, the horse's head touched water and its thick tongue lapped.
Their tennis shoes squelched on the shelves and rolls of the seafloor. Lila told him to stop. He pulled on the loose arm of the shirt. The water was at his chest. He was not the greatest swimmer and was worried the horse might somehow pin him under. “Put your hands on its shoulders and stay clear of the back legs,” Lila said and moved slowly through the water like a moonwalker. She bent her head down to whisper into the horse's ear.
At first the pony was quieted by the sensation of weightlessness, but then it began to twist, its front leg smacking Eddie's arm as the animal tried desperately to get some footing. Lila carefully untied the T-shirt and with both hands pushed the horse's head underwater. She tipped her face up to the stars. The horse twitched and the water splashed high. Bubbles rolled from its nostrils. Lila closed her eyes and Eddie, with his arms around its belly, tried to keep the pony steady. A few bubbles rose.
“It's almost dead,” Lila whispered, loosening her hand and testing the water above the horse's face. The body slackened. She moved away, dipped her head under the sea, and put a hand to her wet hair.
Eddie let the horse go. It sank down a little, the tide moved it. Blood from the cut leg swirled thick and greasy around him. Lila was waiting in the tall swamp grass. Her features were hazy. She seemed somehow taller and Eddie felt almost afraid. But he recognized then the familiar cadence of her breath above the movement of the water and the birds’ voices.
Ahead, a slow green light nudged against the shore. He walked toward it and leaned down. Lila's hand caught his. “They're worms,” she said, poking one with a dry blade of grass. “And they can crawl under your skin.”
* * *
The next day Eddie shot baskets on the cement court in front of the island school. From each point he shot a couple, then moved just a half step, paralleled his hands, flipped his wrist, and tossed the old leather ball. He was barefoot and each jump scratched his feet. They were not as tender as they had been the first shoeless days of summer, but not as rawhide hard as his mother's—pebbles stuck as he bounced.
With each shot he pictured a miniature of himself and the court, then him shooting the ball. He imagined that small version with a still smaller one, court and boy, then another tiny set, until there seemed to be a point like the speck of dust one sees in beams of light.
Lila
pedaled her bike up, an outdated thing with a red banana seat, plastic ribbons whipping out from the handles and colored straws on the spokes. It was a funny kind of a bike, one he'd have made fun of in Tennessee. “Hey,” Lila yelled to him.
“Where are you going?” Eddie asked, holding the ball under one arm.
“Down the beach road,” she said.
He bounced the ball in a slow rhythm and listened to it thud on the asphalt.
“I wanted to tell you not to say anything,” she said.
“Don't worry about that, Lila,” he said.
She turned her face to the sun. He remembered her as she had been last night: first wild on the pony and then thin on shore, deflated like a wet animal.
Lila held her hand up to shield her eyes from the everywhere light. “I'll meet you after dark at the docks, okay?”
He nodded and watched her turn, pushing down hard with her tennis shoes on the fluorescent pedals.
FOUR
BLOW SMOKE
Birdflower flipped burgers at the Trolley. His long braid moved on the back of his T-shirt over Allen Ginsberg's nose, then across a bespectacled eye. Lila tacked another order above the grill and then jumped onto the kitchen counter, crossing her legs Indian-style, “Got any weed?” she asked.
Birdflower looked up. “Maybe,” he said, putting down sesameseed bun halves on the black grill.
“I see you puffing out by the dumpsters. You shoo away the cats and lean against the backside.”
“What's it to you?” he said, squinting at Lila.
She played with a long strand of hair at the back of her neck. “I could tell, you know.”
Birdflower pressed his spatula on the frying burgers; grease oozed up through the silver in a pattern like dog bones.
Lila's white leather sandal clicked against the bread warmer. “You never tell me anything,” she said.
The owner rounded the grill. Lila hopped down with a thud onto the linoleum. “The health inspector would go crazy if he saw you sitting up there,” he said.
“With longing,” she said, her shorts seesawing as she walked over to the ice cream cooler.
“I need two sundaes,” the owner continued. “And stop tormenting Birdflower.”
Lila made a face as she bent half her body into the icy whiteness of the cooler. Waist up, she was a ghost swirling in fog. She set two scoops of vanilla, like tiny planets, into paper bowls, and added chocolate sauce from a can so sticky she had to pull hard to get it from the wooden shelf.
She leaned way over, feeling the strings of her cutoffs tickling the backs of her legs, and looked to see if Birdflower was watching. He stared straight at the grill. Lila reached into a jar with two fingers and arranged cherries on the ice cream. She pushed the sundaes through the space on the counter and rang the ladybug bell. Over the fan and grease sizzle of the friers, Lila said, “I don't need your stuff anyway.”
Birdflower turned toward her and slouched back against the grill. “That's good,” he said. “ ‘Cause you ain't gettin’ any.”
Lila looked at his eyes. They were set back and shriveled underneath and at the corners like old peaches. His face was similar to her father's, though her father wore his hair in a short brush cut, and his scalp was always freckled with red spots of peeling sunburn from days on the boat. There was something weathered but not settled about Birdflower, Lila thought, something like the see-through dome her aunt sent from Florida, with its tiny plastic palm trees and girls sitting cross, legged on the beach. Sand filtered in the air like visible atoms when it was shaken. As it slowed, the flat background of boats and MIAMI written in tiny oranges showed against blue sky. Birdflower's face was settled like that—you knew once it had been moving, completely shaken.
Lila watched him turn back toward the grill—faint smoke blew off the friers like the early mist leaving the marsh—his jeans bowed so low on his hips that she could see the small shadowed crack of his rear. “I know where it comes right up on the beach in bales like hay,” she said.
“You're too young for that stuff,” he said.
“Why do you like it?” Lila said. “Your eyes creeped-up all day.”
“None of your business.”
The milk shake machine and fans took over like rising night noises. With her finger, Lila drew slowly around his head, then shoulders. Traced the line where his body met the kitchen. “Old burnout,” she mumbled, sticking her jaw out as if spitting in the wind.
After work, Birdflower pitched his sweatshirt onto the passenger seat while watching Lila take her break. She ate onion rings at the picnic table on the porch, listlessly looking down into the place mat scene of sailboats on a blue bay—wind like cursive drills across the sky.
He got in, drove the rattling van way up the island highway, and eased into a shallow shoulder of soft sand. No one ever believed him when he explained about his name. They all thought it was given by a guru or a favorite bedmate in a commune—but it had been his mother who called him that. As a kid he had memorized and listed the names of birds and flowers. He remembered chanting them before bed, Yellowthroat, House Finch, Lily, Killdeer, Bluebells, Bunting, Warbler, Winter Wren, Larkspur, Magpie, Murre.
The glove compartment flapped down, he shuffled maps, grabbed the plastic bag, slammed the door, and walked the path, surrounded by waving sea oats. The sun was eye level. He climbed the lifeguard platform, sat, and crossed his feet high on one side. The last light was soft on the water, its motion like tiny tame waves against the side of a bathtub. Birdflower pulled out his pipe shaped like a totem pole. He placed a pinch of weed into the bowl and lit it. He breathed the sweet smoke in, and in an easy way let it go.
Birdflower's shoulders opened, his eyes narrowed and fogged so the sea was a thin line with frayed edges. Ashes fell and rode on his curving chest hairs. Birds pattered by the water's edge; the tap-tap of their frail feet and the ocean pull on pebbles cleared his mind.
He thought of the party he'd gone to with his girlfriend the summer before he came to Ocracoke. Libby knew the people whose house it was and they were supposed to go together. But that afternoon, when he'd admitted he didn't have his half of the rent, she accused him of loafing. He'd walked to the door, said a string of things he later regretted, and left. He'd wanted to find her that night to apologize, and he'd gone into the big house filled with people and searched all the rooms on the first level. On the second-floor landing he'd seen a girl who posed at the art school and he asked her if she'd seen Libby. “She was in bad shape,” the girl said, and pointed upstairs. The first bedroom he'd looked in was empty, but the next door was barred by a liquor bottle. Inside, blue from a shaded lamp illuminated Libby's nude body and a man sleeping near her. By the next week he was on the island, working at the Trolley.
Above the beach the stars winked. He lit a cigarette. Sparks scattered from the tip, and he turned his hand so the wind off the water would not interfere.
* * *
Lila sat on a stool, ate a school of pizza-flavored fish, and watched “I Love Lucy” on the black and white TV over the bar. Intermittently she wrote in her diary, brief scratchy things, pencil to her lips: today about Eddie and the pony. Lila said to the bartender, “Playa Billy Joel tape,” and as it came on she mouthed the words to “Only the Good Die Young.” Last summer, she'd been too young for restaurant work. So her mother, who was sick of her hanging around the house complaining about everything, had forced her to slave as a maid. She remembered dancing around the rooms, kicking into the bathrooms, and throwing herself on the beds, smoking cigarettes and watching soaps. “All My Children” as she lugged the bags of towels to the stairs. “Days of Our Lives” as she traveled from room to room making beds. “As the World Turns” when she placed new pink soaps by the tub, and “One Life to Live” as she did mirrors, the glass always clearing to her face in a cloud of cigarette smoke.
“Can I have another Coke,” Lila said. “With two cherries this time.”
The bartender shook his blond h
ead. “Your teeth will rot right out of your mouth.”
Lila thought she heard Birdflower's voice outside the bar. She'd been waiting for an hour. He always came to the bar when his day shift was finished. Her plan was to approach him for a joint. She figured she'd have a better chance of him saying yes in front of his friends. They might even ask her to sit with them. They'd tell drug stories, like the few Birdflower had on those first slow kitchen afternoons. What she liked to hear best were the stories of him getting stoned and feeling like a genius, like he knew with perfect clarity how everything connected.
She pretended not to see him come through the door with David and Michael, the guys who ran the tourist sailboat, and head for the corner table. In a minute, a waitress brought mugs and a pitcher of beer.
David put his bare feet up on the table and told Birdflower about a tourist they took out on the boat. “One of these divorcees,” he said. “Gold jewelry. Silk tank top. She pulled a stick of butter from her cooler.”
“Peeled the foil off the tip,” Michael added, and showed with his fingers. Birdflower smiled. “Then she rubbed it on her nipples. They were the size of half-dollars.”
“Needless to say,” David said, “we took her out a little farther than usual.”
All three laughed as Michael tipped the pitcher to fill the mugs.
Birdflower said, “Some good weed's coming up from Florida around the end of the month.”
“Yeah,” David said. “That last batch wasn't worth shit.”
“You know Emily?” Birdflower said.
“Of course we know Emily.” Michael smiled, thinned his lips over his teeth.
“Can she come along fishing next weekend?”
“That would be up to you,” David said. “Long as that islander isn't with her.”
Lila rehearsed what she would say, drank the rest of her Coke, and headed back to their table.
“Got one doobie?” she said, firmly like drug addicts she'd seen on TV.
Up Through the Water Page 4