by Dale Peck
Aunt Bessie told him there is an easy footpath that runs around the whole thing—she walks it early in the spring to pick the ramps and morel mushrooms that grow in the pine forests clotting the higher hills on the north and west side of the reservoir, and over the course of the summer she comes back for raspberries, blackberries, wild strawberries, and plums, all of which the boy has tasted in preserved form, and then finally the fruit of one fine old walnut she says not even the squirrels have found. He will have to wait until Christmas to taste the tart she’ll make from ground walnut and venison sausage, but as soon as he sees the water he has to have it. He hurdles a low wire fence and high jumps his way through burdock and tangles of rushes and last year’s rusty loosestrife until he comes upon the beaten red earth. Instinctively he veers east, preferring to run in the open air while he’s still relatively fresh and cool, saving the shadowy forest stretches for later.
The footpath is slippery with broken flat shale and then uneven with the half-exposed roots of wind-twisted willows and junipers, but in the patches of bare earth he can see the tread of boots and bicycle tires and horseshoes, dogs and deer and raccoons and birds. From the moment he’d seen the water he’d noticed an increase in the insect population too, greenhead flies especially, and now they seem to be winning a game of dodgeball with his hands as he swats head, shoulders, chest. His flailing arms upset his gait until he works them into a tempo with his legs, and when sometimes he actually hits a fly he feels its exoskeleton crunch against his scalp like a blueberry bursting its skin. He can see how Aunt Bessie could call the path an easy walk, but it’s hard running. The slap of his rubber soles against the earth, his uneven in- and exhales, now long, now short, completely out of time with his feet. His legs still feel strong but his shoulders ache a little—Donnie’s damn hay bales, he thinks. Just happened to be driving by that field on 81 my ass, the boy thinks. Trying to make himself look good is more like it. Trying to prove he’s still needed. It’s a little cooler by the water but the boy feels a hot flush on his skin as he thinks about Donnie’s naked attempt to curry favor with his uncle. His breath is hot in his lungs, and he tells himself he must have done at least five miles. I played football, track is a sissy sport, I played football when I was a kid. The boy’d like to see Donnie Badget try to run this distance on those bandy little legs of his. He suddenly remembers running from Vinnie Grasso and Bruce St. John and Robert Sampson. Screw all of you, he thinks, streaking along the water’s edge. Screw you all.
First he tells himself he’ll stop when he reaches the pine forest and then he tells himself he’ll stop when he reaches that weddingcake rock and then, no, he tells himself, he’ll push on to that big smooth slab of granite. He sets his sights on a gigantic poplar next, as thick as he is tall and growing at such a steep angle over the water that it seems to have tipped the world off its axis. The path is more root and rock than earth, and the pine pins covering everything make each footfall a bit of a guess; three times he skids and nearly falls. The reservoir looks small from the road, on the way to church in Aunt Bessie’s old Chevrolet, but then the only thing he has to compare it to is the Atlantic Ocean. To make it worse its shoreline sticks out and dips in and seems constantly to be doubling back on itself. Each sharp turn in the trail seems to lead to yet another V-shaped tree-shaded bug-infested inlet, and he’s finally decided he has to stop when he sees a bicycle leaning up against a rock. A girl’s bicycle, with a dropped center strut and wicker basket mounted in the handlebars and big white-wale tires. He isn’t sure but he thinks it’s—
Why if it isn’t the star of track and field.
When he stops running it seems as if some part of him, his powerplant, his energy, keeps on going. He watches it streak around the reservoir, free of the burden of his body. Six miles, he tells himself. At least. Surely. And then he lets himself fall to his knees.
Goddamn I’m tired.
There he goes, talking that trash again.
Julia Miller is tucked into a little glade of thin birches wearing a white one-piece bathing suit and a pair of flip-flops. The crisscross straps of her bathing suit meet in a little loop of bunched fabric just above her breasts, forming an open circle the size of a quarter through which the boy can glimpse the merest hint of cleavage. She has a notebook in her lap, and when his eyes linger too long on the circle of flesh and shadow she picks it up and holds it to her chest, just below the loop of fabric. The boy feels himself blushing, and hopes that the general flushed tint of his skin covers it up.
Hi, Julia. What brings you here?
His words sound slightly ragged to his ears, his breath still hot in and out of his body. Six and a half, he wonders. Maybe even seven.
I’m doing that paper for Mr. Borden’s ecology class.
She speaks as if she expects him to know what she means, and he says, I’m just in general science.
Oh. Julia puts her pen in her mouth. Looks thoughtful. Then: Congratulations.
Huh?
Heard you did good at the Schoharie Invitational. A stunning debut, Mr. Borden said.
We come in second.
But you were in fourth when Jimmy Orstler handed you the baton.
The boy blushes.
Jonny. Jimmy runs second leg.
Well anyway, I heard, Julia says. She looks at the boy for a moment and then she looks at her notebook, then scowls. She rips the page from the notebook but only half of it tears out, on a diagonal, and she wads it up and throws it on the ground. Ooh, she says, this paper’s going nowhere.
The piece of paper is wadded into a ball, falls straight to the ground, but even so the boy’s mind is suddenly filled with a vision of the handkerchief that had flown off the Jew’s head on that last morning, and suddenly everything is different. The glade is no longer as isolated as it once was, or, rather, he becomes conscious of its isolation, aware that this conversation is only taking place because it is so far away from everything else: as soon they are back in the world it will no longer be possible. Julia will tuck her hair behind her ear and blush but that is as far as it will go because Julia’s name is on a sign in front of his uncle’s house and his name is on another boy. No matter how far she strays from that sign Julia will never forget where she comes from and no matter how far the boy runs he will never find out who he is. But at the same time this realization makes him bold, and it is with sadness—a sadness that accentuates rather than obliterates all those other teenage emotions—that the boy reaches out and uses his hand to do the thing that Julia normally does with her own: he locks her hair behind her ear, lets his hand follow the soft curve of it down until his fingers come to rest on her collarbone and his thumb lands softly on, then under, the strap of her swimsuit.
I was wrong.
Wrong about what?
Julia’s voice is curious but not confused, confident but not brazen. Completely unafraid. For one moment the boy loves her more than he has ever loved anything in his life. The emotion hangs in the air between them as clearly as a thread of milk shot from an udder, and then it is gone.
My sister Joanie has hair like yours. A little blonder maybe. When I first saw you I thought hers was prettier but that’s just because I miss her so much. Yours is prettier.
It doesn’t have to be. Her hair can just be her hair and my hair can just be my hair. You don’t have to compare us.
The boy shakes his head. She is sweet but she doesn’t understand.
When you come from a family like mine everything goes back to it. Everything I’ll ever know I learned in that house first.
Julia’s face clouds for a moment and then it brightens and she says, Even this? and just like that she helps his thumb do what it wants to: she slides the strap of her swimsuit off her shoulder. She slides the other one off herself but the top of her swimsuit doesn’t fold down just yet. Not until the boy slides his hands inside the loosened fabric and cups her breasts in his hands does the top of her swimsuit roll down below her sternum.
And he’s a
dairy farmer, he can’t help but make the comparison. There’s almost none, save the warmth. Each of Julia’s breasts is small enough to fit into his cupped hands, and their softness has no milky slackness but is instead almost muscular. And there is a pulsing too, in the crease where they meet her body. It is the beat of her heart.
These are mine, Julia says, not understanding that the boy has never thought of making such a statement about anything, including his body. I want you to kiss them.
He blushes. A sound almost escapes him then—it would have been a giggle. He is thirteen years old and a girl has asked him to kiss her breasts.
He bends his face to them. All he can do is breathe them in at first. They are slightly damp in his hands but in his nose they’re dry and an odor of baby powder lingers. With dry lips he kisses the top of each of them—it is no different than kissing a shoulder, a knee—and then he stands up suddenly, blushing so red it colors his vision.
With a laugh Julia steps back from him and dives into the pool and the boy dives in after. And the water is freezing. Fucking freezing. Its coldness makes the boy feel as though he has jumped through a concrete wall. For a moment he is paralyzed and hangs suspended a few inches above the bottom of the pool, a few inches below the surface, and then one foot finds purchase in the loose pebbles and he kicks himself above the water.
Jesus Christ!
Julia is laughing hysterically. She has swum the few feet to the shallow end of the pool and dragged herself onto a mossy rock and slipped the straps of her swimsuit back up her shoulders. She points at him with first one hand and then the other as she adjusts her suit, laughing all the while.
It’s fucking freezing!
The boy is so cold he can’t think what to do. The water only comes up to his ribs but he hops from one tiptoe to another, and then he runs toward Julia. The water shallows quickly and in a moment he is on the rock beside her, shivering uncontrollably.
Why didn’t you warn me? My God, I thought I was having a heart attack!
Julia giggles.
Haught attack.
Through chattering teeth the boy says, Huh? Hnnh.
Haught attack. Mutha, fatha, sista, brotha. You talk funny, city boy.
I told you, I’m from—
I know. Long Guy-land. What is a guy-land?
The boy has to admit he doesn’t know.
Just a place where people talk funny I guess. Tawk.
Julia smiles.
Say something else.
Say what?
I don’t know. She splashes some ice-cold water on his chest and he yelps. Say water.
Wauta.
Julia kisses him, a little peck on his nearly numb lips.
Say … say all right you guys.
Awl right youse guys.
Julie kisses him again, longer this time.
Say the porter took the water and threw it on his daughter, even though he ought to have thrown it on her courter, who was …
Shauta? Than his daughta?
This time she kisses him for so long that he has to slide off the rock into the water. It is freezing and it only comes up to his thighs but he crouches down so that only his head sticks out. He had jumped in the water not so much because of the sudden tightness in his shorts, but because the tightness reminded him of the one time he’d tried to wear the pair of Lance’s drawers the old man had packed in his bag.
Say baseball, Julia says, still in love with her game.
Joe DiMaggio.
She laughs.
Say sports.
The New York Yankees.
Say mother.
Whore.
Julia claps a hand over her mouth. She looks at him with wide eyes and then through her fingers she says, Say father.
No-good dirty drunk.
Sister.
Pretty, the boy says, but only after a pause during which he resists the urge to say gold.
Brother.
At first the boy doesn’t say anything, and then he says his own name.
Julia has pulled her feet up out of the water and wrapped her arms around her knees.
You’re weird, Dale Peck. But I like you.
The boy nods. When he hears his name in Julia Miller’s mouth he suddenly understands why his uncle doesn’t name his ladies. He understands that you only name something when you don’t know what it is. You name it to squeeze out all the parts you don’t know so that you can hold on to what you do know—what you need, what you think you can control.
I like you too, Julia Miller.
Later, after she gets back on her bicycle, he sees the wadded ball of paper she’d torn from her notebook. He doesn’t unwad it, just puts it in the pocket of his damp shorts and heads home. But his timing’s off, his muscles sore. Long before he clears the reservoir a cramp in his left leg has slowed him to a near walk, and his uncle has already brought the ladies in by the time he gets back to the farm. He can hear the rumble of the boom collars’ motor as they lower in place, and he fills a pail with water, grabs a rag, hurries through the door.
Before he can start with the first cow his uncle tells him to change out of his running uniform. By the time he gets back his uncle has hooked all the cows up. There is no sign of Donnie, but his uncle is seated in front of Dolly herself, milking her by hand. The boy hauls the buckets of milk to the vat room, ignoring the ache in his shoulders and legs but unable to tune out the ringing in his ears of his uncle’s oppressive silence, and as soon as all the buckets of milk have been dumped in the vat and rinsed out he finds the shovel and wheelbarrel and starts in on the gutters, and he scrapes up every last flake of manure and even hoses the gutters out when he’s done.
Come here, his uncle says then, and the boy hurries over, hoping that he’ll be able to do something that will ease the hardness from his uncle’s face and voice. Lay a mile of fence or build a castle out of hay bales or skim all the cream from the holding vat with a teaspoon.
His uncle is standing in front of a little Jersey girl with long brown whiskers. She is tossing her head agitatedly, banging it against the boom collar.
Looks like someone got a little too curious. Poking around where she don’t belong.
The boy blushes and is about to apologize when his brain catches up with his ears and cheeks, and he realizes his uncle has said she. He looks at the Jersey more closely, sees interspersed with her whiskers the barbed darts of half a dozen porcupine quills sticking out of the pinkish white skin of her muzzle.
With a quick gesture his uncle slips a coil of rope around the Jersey’s neck, pulls it tight.
Hold this. Higher up, keep it tight. And watch it now, she’s liable to go for you.
His uncle uses a pair of pliers to pull the first quill out. He has to jerk hard to work against the barbs, and the boy can feel the Jersey’s pain in his hands and forearms and the biceps he kissed the other day, which aren’t strong enough to prevent her from snapping the back of her head against the boom collar. The collar’s hollow piping echoes like plumbing and the Jersey spits a cup of red-spotted cud onto his uncle’s overalls. A few of the ladies look up from their feed momentarily, then resume eating.
Hold it tight now. Come on, Dale, she’ll hurt herself worse than she already is.
The boy puts all his weight on the rope until the Jersey’s triangular head sticks straight out from its thick neck like a bull snake’s. The Jersey’s ears are laid flat against her skull and her eyes rolled back to display two crescent moons below the dark brown irises and her top lip rolls back to reveal a thick pink wedge of gum. Though neither boy nor cow is moving it feels like he is pulling on a tree trunk vibrating in a storm. He wonders if this is what sailing feels like, tacking into the wind, carving sky and sea to your will, and even as he braces his bare feet against the lady’s hooves and watches his uncle work there is a part of him that misses the ocean with the longing that only the island-born can feel.
His uncle works quickly, squeezing, pulling, squeezing, pulling, and each time
he pulls out a needle the Jersey makes a sound like a fan belt about to break. Thin streams of blood marble her muzzle as though she has just slopped up a tomato or a raw steak. As the last quill comes out the Jersey lunges forward, and the boy barely has time to feel her teeth on his forearm before his uncle smacks her on her inflamed nose. When the knob of the Jersey’s skull strikes the boom collar the whole barn shakes.
The boy looks down at his arm, sees first the single crescent of toothmarks and a smear of the Jersey’s blood on his skin, and then a half dozen rubies of his own blood bead up through the thumbnail-sized tears in his forearm. The drops of blood well up, coalesce, drip to the floor, but the wound doesn’t hurt, yet.
The boy looks at the single crescent of toothmarks and remembers that cows only have incisors on their bottom jaw.
First his uncle rubs some liniment onto the red nose of the pricked Jersey, deftly dodging her swipes at his fingers, and then he takes the boy outside and puts his arm under the spigot. The water is cold but not as cold as the water in the Alcove Reservoir. It runs pink off his arm and the cuts immediately burn, but the boy can see that none of them is very deep.