by Ben English
They stayed like that another minute or two, the water growing colder. One of the runners—Jack assumed it was Floyd; that guy seemed to only have one speed—rushed by overhead.
No one up there spoke. Music from the party at the far end of the marina echoed off the water and the stony hillsides. Jack took a deep breath. Any more ideas? he threw toward the calm voice in the back of his mind.
Then he had an idea of his own. “Back to Al’s boat,” he whispered to Mercedes. “Our stuff is there, you might even have cell coverage.”
She agreed, and they felt their way under the dock toward the boat through cobwebs and grit. Moss clung to the barrels in heavy, bearded clumps, and the tang of oil, gas, and other mechanical fluids hung in the close, cramped air under the dock.
They ducked down and swam the last fifteen feet underwater, and when they reached the stern of the boat, Jack came up first, slowly. He hugged the lines of the Mastercraft, ready to peel off and dive for deep water if anyone made a grab for him.
No, he’d never leave the girl. Screw tactics, he’d fight all of them together if they—”
“Nice to see you again, buddy,” said Alonzo from the bow, where he’d been reclining.
Jack felt Mercedes tense behind him, and his own skin was suddenly two sizes too small. “Al!”
The smaller man was eating a sandwich, nervously.
Jack cast about mentally for something to say. “Why aren’t you at the party?”
“Angie already went over. I think she’s going to break up with me tonight, just like before I left last year.” He took another bite of bread and meat. “She just wanted a day on the lake. I was going to head over myself, but you guys hadn’t come back yet and I figured I’d stick around until it got dark. Figured if you’re not coming back by dark, you’re not coming back.” He made a show of not looking in Mercedes direction. “‘Til morning, at least.”
He cleared his throat, and his voice changed subtly. “I saw what happened when you tried to tie up.” He looked at the other side of the lake, framing his next words carefully.
“Was that a baseball bat?”
Jack nodded, handing Mercedes a towel.
“You think it was the same one?”
Jack nodded again.
Alonzo nodded himself. Chewed a bit. “What do you want to do?”
Mercedes was clambering back into her tanktop and shorts. Goosebumps rode her skin. “Are you kidding?” she said. “Call the cops!”
“No good,” Jack replied. “The chief of police is Merrick’s uncle. His cousin is the county sheriff.”
Mercedes set her jaw and began rooting through her bag, but they’d taken her phone.
Jack looked at Alonzo. “Where are they now?”
“All spread out, and moving.” Alonzo replied. “They’re not going to give up easy. The old guys with the goatees went up each side of the marina, in case you guys swam over to the shoreline. Merrick and Kyle are at the parking lot by your car. They managed to pop the hood. Who knows what they’re doing.”
So they were trapped? “What about Floyd?”
Alonzo swore. “That’s the worst part. Floyd’s at the party, telling everybody how you trashed their jetski. Their crowd has a lot of friends at the party this year, guys who graduated way before us, like the whole offensive line from the first time Merrick took the school to state—rumor is that he brought three kegs and a bunch of fireworks, so –” he shrugged.
Mercedes frowned. “Sounds like it’s his party this year. You know, I don’t really feel like going all of a sudden.” She grimaced, and put a hand to her stomach. “I’m okay,” she said quickly.
Jack wasn’t sure how true that was, but at the same time he had to admire her strength. He assumed she would be in some degree of shock, but the more he observed her and watched for the signs of confusion and trauma, the less he saw. Alonzo, an Eagle Scout for nearly 3 years, had much the same lifesaving training, and Jack felt him observing them both.
“You know what?” he said, addressing his friend. “We’re both okay, and we’re going to make it back to town tonight.” First things first. Jack could be strong for short bursts of time, even if all he really had to draw on was the girl’s example. Merrick hadn’t really taken anything measurable from her, despite all he’d done so far—no, there was nothing so far about it. He wouldn’t get another chance to touch her.
Now their eyes were on him.
“Al, Mercedes and I are going back to town. We can’t wait for them to get bored and we can’t count on them not coming back here to check the boat again.”
Alonzo shook his head. “The road is bottled off.”
Jack nodded. “But the reservoir is only a few miles from town at its closest point. Mercedes, do you feel up to a little walk over the hill?”
They grasped his idea immediately. It made sense: Jack and Mercedes would take the boat to the end of the reservoir, to the finger inlet nearest the town proper, then hike down into Forge. The hill wasn’t that high; the surface of the reservoir was several hundred feet higher than the elevation of the town. It would be an easy walk.
“Ah, Mercedes,” Alonzo was nervous again. “I’m really sorry about all of this. Forge is usually a great place, really.”
She hugged him. “You just got back home,” she said. “You go away for a year and look what happens.”
With one last look around to make sure they were alone, Alonzo helped Jack start the boat and start to ease backward out of the slip. When he leaped back onto the dock, he had their bags, and they were left with a flashlight and the last of the food.
The boat felt odd at night. With only a vague treeline for a horizon, their balance was off. They moved deliberately and thoughtfully, staying low and close to the deck.
Mercedes knew her part without having to be told. The boat was not rigged for running after dark, so she sat in the very front with the flashlight and played it back and forth as they motored across the lake. Jack kept the speed low—under six miles per hour—and steered well clear of any of the other watercraft still on the lake. There were a few lighted sailboats out on the water, with deck lights ablaze, and a few blocky houseboats at anchorage next to each other in a cove. A woman’s laughter and the sound of happy conversation carried across the water, and faint echoes of base-heavy music played across the hills from the direction of Bash Beach, where everyone else their age played and ate and danced.
So they were missing it, and honestly, what a relief. He’d gone to the Bash for a few years now, and he always ended up leaving before everyone else, and not just so he could avoid the serious drinking. Most times, even in a crowd—even when he was dancing with some lithe, smiling girl in the middle of a great song, right down thick in the thump-thump of the music, in the heart of being a teenager—he felt isolated and detached. The world and whatever it held for him stayed at arm’s length.
You have other things to do, the voice whispered.
The boy caught the scent of Mercedes’ hair again, and smiled to himself in the dark. He wasn’t alone. Too much to hope for, but Jack couldn’t shake the thought that she felt the same way. That, right then, despite the danger and assault and the wrongness of the night, she wasn’t alone either.
She turned, careful not to shine the light at his eyes. “You seeing everything okay, Potatohead?”
He saw well enough to get the boat to the end of the reservoir and ground them gently against a tiny slip of a beach. They started up and over the hill right away, following deer trails right up over the ridge and down the long, scalloped hills to the town. Neither of them felt the urge for conversation.
Jack’s head ached where Merrick kicked him. Things felt jumbled, unclear. Even though Jack had seen Merrick with the bat, he was still baffled. Whatever else he was, Merrick was pure confidence. The assurance he radiated drew every eye to him; it always did. With uncanny clarity, Jack remembered Merrick’s history in the town, how so much success followed him. Merrick’s upbeat nature,
the layer-upon-layer of sports victories, all the girls and adults so absolutely focused on him. His self-effacing manner and lack of vanity drew people to him all that much more. As the success of the university’s football and debate teams became absolute when he joined their ranks, the story grew. Merrick became the standard by which all the boys and many of the men measured themselves.
Had Jack imagined the baseball bat?
It was another gorgeous, cloudless night of no moon, and the stars came right down to the earth. The first time they used the flashlight was right at the edge of the pines near their final descent.
All its lights were off, but they saw the swimming pool at a steep angle through the trees. Jack guided them carefully down a fold in the valley wall, and they took the last few vertical yards at a full run, coming out in the picnic area behind the city pool.
Jack started immediately for her grandparents’ house, but Mercedes held him up. “Can I call them from the pool office?” she asked.
A single car drove by on the far side of the park, its headlights a strobe through the trees. Jack found his keys.
“Why’s it so quiet in here?” she asked. The building lacked the background vibration and low hum which normally filled it. The whole office felt odd, abandoned somehow. Too silent.
“Spooky, isn’t it? Everything’s shut off—we had to replace some of the machinery. Didn’t know they’d turn the lights off, too.” There was enough watery illumination from the windows and skylights that they could make their way through the front office and storage area to the lifeguard lounge.
“What time is it?” she asked.
The clocks had all stopped with the electricity. He laughed. “You know, I can’t remember when I knew what time it was. Days I don’t have to work, I barely look at a clock.”
“But you came to work this morning.”
There were some candles around here someplace. Maybe by the first aid kit. “I’m sort of running an experiment. Our high school won’t let us take both chemistry and physics, so I had to get the chem credit by doing a project for the University of Idaho.” He hoped she understood. Chem and physics—who would want to have to settle for one without the other?
“What kind of experiment?”
Jack shot her a look. She was serious.
“My mom and dad are engineers, Jack. Theoretical scientists. Our dinner table conversation leans toward deconstructing Star Trek. The only fight I can ever remember them having was a debate over faster-than-light travel. Something about wormhole versus a hyperdrive.
“How did you deal with that?” he asked.
“I think they were both nuts. My money’s on the Alcubierre drive. Give me a warp bubble any day.”
And just like that, she was brand new to him again. Who would have suspected it, this wonderfully casual, familiar way of addressing science and science fiction? Jack marveled. She wasn’t afraid to let him ogle her brain.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” the girl asked.
“You speak Geek,” he said.
“Fluently,” she replied.
With the power out, the cordless phone was useless. Mercedes returned it to the base station on the desk, then paused. “Jack, what are these?”
He’d nearly forgotten about the packages he’d laid out. “I thought you might deserve a little reward for successfully learning to waterski. Or a consolation prize, in case you wound up in the hospital with a broken leg and needed something to distract you from filing a reckless endangerment suit.”
The little boxes seemed so corny; mawkish, now that he thought about it. He made to block her view, but she caught his arm. “Let me see.” She maneuvered around him, somehow, and laughed. Mercedes dug a thumb between his ribs as she passed.
Jack threw himself into the logistics of lighting a candle, shaking his head at the effect her low chuckle had on his nervous system in general and his limbic system in particular. What did it even mean when she made that sound?
“These are so cute!”
Disaster. He was in danger of being thought of as cute.
Read one book on origami, and he’d done the wrappings himself, folded each box out of different kinds and colors of paper. The first gift was a simple rectangular package made from two different papers–thick yellow cardstock and thin newspaper–yet creased and bent so cunningly that if not for the colors she couldn’t see exactly where the edges of one folded over the other to make the tightly-defined shape. The longest package, the second—made from some sort of neon green flier—had three sides. Something rattled inside when she shook it. The last was many-sided and formed a rough sphere around something heavy and solid. It had been folded from a sheet of cartoon wallpaper, fashioned so that the faces of the characters in the comic strips looked out from approximately the center of each facet. She held it up.
“I’m afraid I’ll ruin this,” she said, “You’ve worked so hard wrapping them.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he replied. “I can make those for you anytime.”
She grinned like a little girl, and wriggled into herself. “Which one first?” she asked.
Jack pointed to the largest, a thin, flat box, and she carefully removed enough of the wrapping to see it was a book. Mercedes laughed. Sure enough: a copy of Dave Barry Slept Here.
“Jack, this is perfect.” She flipped through the first few pages. Barry was her favorite comedy writer; a genius as far as she was concerned. “I started reading his stuff a couple years ago, when one of my teachers tried to explain satire to us. How’d you know to get this?”
“I saw you reading his travel guide book last week. This one’s great,” he indicated the thin volume in her hands. “His own version of history.”
Jack cleared his throat. “Mercedes,” he said with mock ceremony, “This is the Past.”
With a bit of effort, she put on a solemn expression. So he was following a theme. She’d play along.
He handed her the second box, an elongated pyramid. She rattled the contents once more, then peeled back an end. It contained a pen; ceramic and tapered.
“I remembered what you said that night about how guys can be thickheaded and only pay attention to what they want, not to how anybody else feels, like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate–about how the only thing that persistence proves is persistence?”
She nodded.
His mouth was dry. “Whatever happens to us, I mean, between us, I –” He blinked and smiled, then worked up enough saliva to speak.
“You write the future, Mercedes. That’s what the pen is supposed to mean–I know, it’s about as corny as anything, but I wanted to give you something so you’d remember how I feel. I won’t, that is…I’m not gonna—”
Then he laughed, leaning away from her. “What are you trying to say, Jack?” he asked. “Here’s the thing.” He touched the pen. “However we work this out, I’m not going to push you into anything. I won’t pressure you, or make any demands of you. We–you and I–won’t do that to each other. The future, I mean whatever happens between us? We write it ourselves.”
She seemed touched. “We’ll figure it out.” The carton-wrapped ball was last. “And what about this one?”
“That’s the Present.” The pun got him a grudging laugh and another thumb in the ribs.
The painstakingly creased and folded ball proved to enclose a glass globe of the world, blue and heavy, and frosted along the edges of the continents. “Neat!” she said. Her fist could barely wrap around it. Jack took it and pointed to one of the etchings. “This is Forge,” he said, then moved his finger. “See? San Francisco is what, a nanometer away?” He tried to make it sound like a joke, but he hoped she knew him well enough to read sincerity.
“Jack’s world,” she said, letting the brief candlelight play through it. “Handle with care.”
And then she made another one of those indeterminate sounds in the back of her throat that Jack’s brain and a roomful of crack NSA codebreakers would never decipher. She lea
ned in for a kiss.
He felt like an idiot, but this was going to be done right. “There’s one more thing. You’ve got to see the pool,” he said, and her green eyes opened, curious. And more. Jack knew he was driving her crazy.
Hurry, Jack.
But the underwater lights had to be working for her to see it. “Power’s got to be turned on,” he decided. “And we need to be higher; you’ve got to see this from the right angle.” He grabbed his keys and looked around. Lifeguard tower? Diving platform? He looked up.
“Here, Mercedes. Stand right underneath the skylight.” He positioned her. Her expression bounced between unconditional bewilderment and curiosity. “Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked. “I’ll be right back. Don’t move,” he warned, then kissed her, fast and light. He looked for his keys.
They were in his hand.
“Hurry, Jack.”
The power mains and fusebox were downstairs, in the pump room. Rather than head out the front door and follow the wraparound deck towards the parking lot, then double back underneath to get to the lower level, Jack exited onto the pool side and made straight for the fence. Two hands on the upper bar, and he jumped right over.
He felt strong, masterful, and brilliant. This, he thought, is as good as seventeen can feel.
The pump room was dark. Sound carried oddly around the maze of quiescent equipment, and as he felt around for the fusebox, Jack thought for all the world he’d heard a footstep on the wooden deck at the front of the building. Better hurry up, he thought. Mercedes doesn’t know her way around down here in the dark. He activated the power and the machinery around him rattled once and then came to life. A scattering of illuminated switches and gauges flickered, and that was that.
Before he could lock the doors behind him, he heard another footstep on the wooden deck.
No, two sets of steps. What?
Without thinking, he leaned around the corner of the building for a better view of the deck—and just as quickly pulled back. Floyd and one of the Goatee Brothers were off the deck and rounding the other corner of the building, coming fast.