“Okay.” The red-haired man squinted his eyes at something off in the distance. “Say, do either of you ladies know anyplace nice to take a swim? The kind of place where dogs can go too and nobody squawks much?”
“Like the lake?” Frances broke off a piece of the ice cream’s cherry coating with her fingers and placed it flat side down on her tongue. “Do you have a dog?”
“I used to. Where’s the lake?”
Jory was standing next to Frances now. She stared up into the truck’s interior, quickly memorizing the clear green beads hanging in a loop around the truck’s rearview mirror, the transistor radio that sat on the dash in a black leather case, his blue-striped shirt with ROGER embroidered in red above one pocket. “Don’t you live here . . . Roger?” She could feel something in her rib cage tightening and burning a little. She closed her eyes. Maybe he hadn’t heard her.
“Ha!” He hit the spot where the name tag was with the flat of his hand. “Roger! Wouldn’t that be something? Roger Mylander. My land, Roger!” This last he said in some high, squeaky lady’s voice.
Jory took a step back. “I know Roger Mylander,” she said. She now dared to look at the ice cream man’s yellow-brown eyes. They had tiny crinkles at the corners that made him look like he spent a lot of time smiling. Or else squinting. “He sells houses for Reddish Realty.”
“He goes to our church.” Frances had squatted back down on the curb in order to eat the ice cream bar with greater ease.
The ice cream man sat down too. He got down from the driver’s seat and perched on the truck’s metal step and held his hands out in front of him. He spread his fingers wide, as if examining the backs of them for dirt or scars. For an instant, Jory could see the small blue tattoos between his fingers. They looked like fish tails or maybe tiny hooks. “Where do y’all go to church?” he said.
“Garden of Gethsemane Church of the Nazarene.” Frances reeled off this information proudly.
Jory glanced away, pretending a sudden interest in something on the Reisensteins’ front porch. Her shame at having to discuss their churchgoing with him was like a live thing—a small wriggling worm that left a red-hot trail as it climbed higher up her throat and face.
“Bible-thumpers, hm?” he said, looking at Jory for a long moment. “I’m not from around here, so I don’t have the foggiest notion where the lake is. What do you think? Could one of you draw me a map, maybe?” He pulled a small paper napkin out of his shirt pocket and after fumbling around in all of his pants pockets he finally produced a pen. He handed them both to Jory, and she held them out in front of her as if she’d never had any contact with either before.
“I’m not very good at drawing directions.” She wrinkled her nose. “I could probably tell you how to get there, though.”
“Hey,” he said and slapped himself in the forehead like the man in the V8 commercial. “I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you two ride along with me, and you can show me how to get there?”
“I don’t know.” Jory had no idea what to say—was he serious? “It’s pretty far from here.”
“Really? Shoot.” He took his hat off and turned it around and around in his hands. He looked different without it—younger and a little forlorn—like the dog that used to live in the alley behind Albertsons. “That’s too damn bad. It’s so hot, you know—I was really looking forward to some swimming.”
“Well, there’s the canal. The Elijah drain ditch. It’s a lot closer.” She knew that she was moving deliberately down a road her mother had told her never, ever, ever to go on.
“Hey, great! And y’all have to come too.” He stood up and put his hat back on, and then he held his hand out to Jory.
She reached up and took it.
The water in the canal was freezing cold. Frances wisely sat on the grassy bank, making dandelion chains and eating another cherry Push Up. Jory, however, did not want to look like a baby, so she had waded out until the water reached her waist, and there she stood, feeling the current pull and tug at her legs.
“C’mon in,” the ice cream man yelled at her from the middle of the canal. He was stroking furiously against the current, going nowhere. “Wow!” he shouted. “This is incredible!” He ducked under the water and then came up in a different spot, his red hair all dark and slicked to his head like an otter’s.
Jory had no idea what she was doing here. The whole thing was like some really strange dream that was sweeping her along and would end with her living someone else’s life way across town somewhere. He used bad language and she had seen several silver beer cans rolling around in the back of the ice cream truck. Plus, he was out there in the water in a pair of blue cutoffs. Only a pair of cutoffs, no shirt or anything. Her father always wore a T-shirt when they went swimming. He said it kept him from getting sunburned. Jory had never seen a man with his shirt off before, except for maybe once or twice when old Mr. Garmendia was mowing his lawn. The ice cream man had slightly curly red hair on his chest. It traveled in a V down to the top of the blue cutoffs, and he had two terribly pink nipples that reminded her of raspberries. And whenever he came up on shore, like he was doing now, his wet shorts dragged down and exposed some small, rounded, muscly place above each of his hip bones.
“Hey,” he said, plowing toward her through the shallow water. He stood up next to her and gave his head a shake, squeezing at his hair to get the water out. “Don’t you want to come in? It’s not that cold when you get used to it, plus the water’s pretty clear. You can see almost to the bottom.”
“No, that’s okay.” Jory held her arms tight to her chest. “I’m really not that good of a swimmer.”
“Well, you know what? How lucky for you, because I just happen to be a certified swimming instructor.” He flexed his arms and struck a muscle man’s pose. “Junior lifeguard, third class. So here we go, tadpole, time for your first lesson.” He tried to take her hand, but Jory pulled back from him, her feet sliding a little on the canal’s muddy bottom. “Okay, okay,” he said in a quiet voice, “don’t panic. I won’t let anything happen to you—we’ll take it nice and easy. What’s your real name, blue eyes?”
“It’s Jory. J-o-r-y.” She took another step away from him in the water.
“Well, alrighty then. How do you do?” He bowed and held out his wet hand. “I’m Grip.”
“Grip?” She examined his face to see if he was teasing her.
“Yup, and I have a brother named Early. My mother was a strong believer in going with her first impressions. She told fortunes too.” He had his arm around her waist now and was walking her slowly toward the deeper part of the canal. “She thought intuition was the thing. ‘Always trust that stone in your gut,’ she would say. ‘It will never steer you wrong if you pay attention to which way it’s twisting—sharp or smooth, sharp or smooth.’” The water was up to Jory’s chin, but Grip was holding her tightly with both of his arms. She tried to turn around to look at the shore, to see if Frances was okay, but he whispered, “Sharp or smooth,” and then in one quick movement he lifted her up and took a big breath of air and they were floating. They were in the middle of the canal, where the water went down, down, black, blackest, and he was floating on his back and she was floating on top of him, his arms still wrapped around the waist portion of her wet cutoffs. The water barely lapped over her stomach as they moved with the current. She let her head lie back on his chest, watching the clouds in the sky move past, and the tiny holes where the stars were sleeping, each with one eye open. She could feel his legs under hers warm and wet and him moving his feet a little bit, but everything was so gentle that it was as if he and she weren’t really moving at all, as if the sky was the thing sailing past all slow and easy, as if they were merely resting on the water. “Hold your breath,” he said in her ear, “and keep holding it.” And then he had slipped out from under her and she was alone in the water, floating like before, only slightly heavier now, her legs h
anging free in the cool of the water, the darkness below her still pulling her smoothly along on its current, until suddenly, just like that, her body twitched in recognition of its untetheredness, its terrible precarious freedom in this deep volume of water, and she jerked and thrashed and fell. She had taken in only a mouthful or two of water when he got her. He held her up and kept treading water until she quit choking. “Put your arms around my neck,” he said, so she did. He turned around in her arms until he was facing away from her and then he began swimming. “Let your legs hang free behind you,” he said as he pushed his arms through the water. She rode on his back to the shore.
Grip gave Jory a striped Indian blanket to hold around her in case she felt cold. He showed Frances how to move the gearshift when he put in the clutch, and then he changed gears about a million times so Frances could shift over and over. “Like that?” she would say. “Like that?” as they lurched down the road. Jory sat on the metal floor of the truck, her back leaning against a huge cardboard box of paper napkins. Grip had turned the transistor radio on, but Jory could still hear Frances happily babbling away above the song about making love in the green grass behind the stadium. Jory took her comb out of her back pocket and tried to rake through her wet rat’s nest of hair. She couldn’t swim and she’d nearly drowned and she probably looked horrible and like a complete baby. Her shorts and shirt were damp and clinging to her braless front, she had goose bumps everywhere, and she couldn’t think of anything to say. She just sat there doing and saying absolutely nothing like some sort of idiot child. Rhonda Russell would have been doing and saying plenty.
“Hey, you doing all right back there?” Grip had turned around in his seat to look at her.
She nodded and tried to smile, but her mouth wouldn’t seem to work properly. For some stupid reason she could feel her throat getting tight with tears. When he turned back around, she took the pointed end of her comb and stuck it through the side of the cardboard box. Hard.
Back on Ninth Avenue, everything appeared unchanged. Jory had almost expected to see the house in flames or her mother standing in the driveway in her bathrobe surrounded by police cars and revolving lights. But, evidently, no one had even noticed that they’d been gone. Frances had already hopped out of the truck and was running toward the backyard, where Afro Cat could be seen lying in a patch of late afternoon sun. Jory folded up the Indian blanket and put it on top of the cardboard box. She walked as casually as she could past the driver’s seat. Grip grabbed at her back pocket as she tried to step out the truck’s door. “So, when’s our next swimming lesson?” he said, tugging gently on the fabric of her shorts.
She still couldn’t think of anything to say, but now it didn’t seem to matter. She couldn’t bear looking at him, but she smiled down at the truck’s metal floor, and after a moment he let go of her pocket. She didn’t turn around to watch him drive away either—she kept walking toward the house, waiting for the sweet twinge that would start in the small of her back, the happy eye in her spine she knew would open wide when the truck’s tinkly music began to play.
Before Jory even woke up, she could hear the hum of her parents’ voices. They were talking in the kitchen in low, fast tones. Jory got up quietly so she wouldn’t wake Frances and put on a pair of shorts and her Spy vs. Spy T-shirt. She walked nonchalantly into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Her parents were no longer talking. “You’re up,” Jory said, looking only at the plastic milk jug.
“Yes,” her mother said. “Of course.”
“How’d you sleep?” her father asked as he always did.
“Fine,” she answered as she always did. “Where’s Grace?”
Her father took a small bite of toast. “Do you want some juice?” he said. He picked up the carton and held it up toward her. “There’s just enough left.”
Jory’s mother fastened and unfastened the top button on her bathrobe. “Grace is out back.”
“She is?” Jory turned and set the milk jug down on the counter with a thump. “Is she okay?”
“Grace is fine,” her father said firmly and began buttering another piece of toast. “She’s a little tired and worn-out from the trip and Dr. Henry’s going to take another look at her next week and maybe run a couple tests, but, you know, she’s going to be just fine. Absolutely fine.”
Jory’s mother glanced at her husband and then got up and went to the sink, where she stood looking out the window at something.
Grace was lying on the chaise lounge in the very middle of the backyard with an old green bedspread pulled over her. She was facing the sun and her eyes were closed. Her hair was longer than Jory had ever seen it. Jory felt suddenly shy, as if she’d never met her sister before. “Aren’t you hot?” she said, and then blushed. It was a stupid thing to say to someone you hadn’t seen in nearly three months.
“No. Not really.” Grace’s voice was very quiet and sort of far away. She seemed completely unsurprised to be discussing this with Jory. “It’s just that it was so hot in Mexico that now I feel cold everywhere else.” Grace said this without opening her eyes.
“Are you sick?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Everything looks kind of strange, but maybe I’d just never noticed it before.”
“Is that why you have your eyes closed?” Jory bent closer to the chaise lounge, as if Grace might not be able to hear either.
“Like the streets. Have the streets always been this wide? They seem incredibly wide. And clean. Everything is so big and so clean and empty.”
“You could come look at my and Frances’s room.” Jory smiled even though Grace couldn’t see her.
“Things smell strange, too. The house, our house, it smells like . . . classical music. Like Rachmaninoff or maybe Albinoni.” Grace laughed a short laugh that was almost a bark. “Dad says I probably just have culture shock. He says it happens all the time, but usually the other way around. That when you get to a foreign country, you feel like this, not when you come back home.”
Jory watched a tear ooze out from under one of Grace’s closed lids and slide partway down her cheek. She had never seen Grace cry. Or if she had, she didn’t remember it. “Do you want me to go get Mom?” she whispered.
“No.” Grace wiped at her face with the hem of the green blanket. “No, I’m okay. Really. So,” she said, smiling crookedly at Jory with her eyes still closed, “tell me everything that happened while I was gone.”
Jory thought faintly, briefly of attempting this. “There’s nothing to tell,” she said finally. “I got a babysitting job with the Hewetts.”
Grace pulled the bedspread up even higher, until it covered her chin and mouth. “That’s wonderful, Jory,” she said in her new, faraway voice. “What a perfect chance for you to witness.”
Tonight their church was having a welcome-back service for Grace. The other mission workers were still in Mexico for another week, but Grace was going to share her slides from Mexico and give a talk about the ministry work they had done there. Their mother did not think this was a good idea. She said Grace needed to take it easy and rest. That the last thing Grace needed to be doing was to be giving speeches. Their father said nothing. Now Jory and Rhonda Russell were sitting in the pew behind Jory’s mother and Frances, and Frances kept turning around to stare at them. “She’s so cute,” Rhonda whispered generously. Jory poked Frances’s hand with one of the tiny gold pencils they kept in the hymnal holders. “Turn around,” Jory hissed. Frances squealed and her mother turned and gave Jory a look.
Jory’s father stood in the middle of the red-carpeted aisle helping Grace set up the slide projector, while Brother Elmore took a long-poled hook and—swooosh—pulled the big white screen down until it covered even the empty wooden cross at the very front of the church. Someone, somewhere, turned down the lights and everyone got quiet. Jory loved this part of church—the light dimming on darkish Sunday evenings. It felt like all the world was en
closed and breathing in this one room. You could suddenly feel the people next to you, the quiet coughing and leg crossing and the smell of breath mints and perfume and unfamiliar shoes moving against the hardwood floor. In the darkness now she could hear Grace, but not see her. “Mexico is a land of many colors,” Grace’s disembodied voice was saying. “A place of plenty and a place of want.” The slide projector clicked loudly and the screen was filled with a picture of a tiny boy with huge black eyes. The boy was wearing only a pair of bright red plastic sandals and he was holding a fly-encrusted chicken bone. Click-chunk went the projector. “We came to offer help and aid and to bring a message of new life to the people of this beautiful country. A message of eternal life for those whose earthly lives may not be filled with joy.” On the screen, a woman with no discernible teeth smiled broadly as she held up some kind of hairy-looking fruit. Click-chunk. “A better way for those who live in darkness—a light by which to see.” Two old men looked up from their work. The chicken whose throat they had just slit hung upside down, its blood draining and pooling onto the men’s bare feet. Jory could feel her mother’s spine stiffening in the pew in front of her. “Gross!” Rhonda whispered hotly into Jory’s ear. Click-chunk. “We came to bring the love of Christ to people who, people who . . .” Grace’s voice faltered. The cone of light that spun out from the slide projector whirled with dust motes and gave off a smell of burning plastic. On the screen a million tiny houses clustered on top of each other against a brown hillside, while in the foreground a bone-thin dog scuttled past. Jory squinted into the darkness, but could see only the outline of Grace’s head and, behind her, their father, bent over the projector. Grace began again, but now it was as if she were breathing or dreaming while she spoke, as if she were in a huge, soft rush to get it all out. “It was strange,” she said in this new voice. “The people keep their dogs on the roofs here—they bark all night, but they hardly ever jump down—and every morning the people all sweep the sidewalks and the balconies with long-bristled brooms and lemon water—sometimes the people below get wet, but they always laugh, and little boys carry newspapers, and huge net bags filled with bananas and oranges, and big blocks of ice, all on their bicycles.” On the screen a group of large white people in short-sleeved shirts stood next to the beginnings of a concrete foundation. Future Sight of the Guanajuato Church of the Nazarene, a handwritten sign proclaimed. The large people smiled through their sunburns. “White-uniformed guards stand in front of the more beautiful buildings and they carry rifles and whistle long, complicated tunes, and there are pigeons everywhere—there was one that slept outside my hotel window and made a smoker’s cough sort of noise all night long until I could hardly sleep, and old women sell long slabs of sticky brown candy in the mercado that have flies crawling all over them, but no one seems to mind.” Jory’s father seemed to be having trouble with the projector. The slides came faster and faster and then stopped altogether on a picture of a brightly colored plaster saint with no nose. “The garbage men wear cowbells on their belts so people will know they’re coming and bring out their garbage and the houses and buildings are orange and pink and gold and lime green like rainbow sherbet and every night everyone goes to the plaza to look at and talk to everyone else and at sundown the bells ring and it’s time for Mass—inside the church is like the inside of those Easter eggs with peepholes cut in them, gold and robin’s egg blue—they keep the hands and hair of Saint Beatrice, the twelve-year-old virgin martyr, in a glass coffin there.” Grace took a big breath. “Once I saw a man carrying a pink Barbie purse, its strap was broken and inside was nothing but dog food.”
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