He wondered if he should dare her. Yet more than any dare, he wished she wouldn’t be afraid of him. More than anything, he wanted to see her without that blade glinting in his eyeballs.
He reached for his pants in a roll at his feet. Shaking them loose, he turned the pockets out. “See?” he said. “Not a knife or nothing. I didn’t come here to bother you. Didn’t even know you were here.”
He tossed his pants away and took another step toward her. In a second her hand was on the knife handle.
He sighed and sat down again on his towel.
“Ought to can go somewhere without somebody jumping me.” Her voice was peeved and whining. “Can’t even camp without a bunch of people coming around nosing.”
He thought he’d better try to explain, but then she turned slightly and the blade stopped its shine. He could see her clearly. She had a round, expressionless face. And he couldn’t make it fit with that nervous energy that ran beneath the high quality of her voice. She looked calm, but underneath he could tell she was afraid.
“Where you come from?” M.C. asked suddenly. “You ever scared being all by yourself?”
“What’s to be scared of?” she said. The way she looked at him, he had to lower his eyes.”
“I just wondered.”
“Well, I go where I want,” she said, “and see places I never seen.”
“Your folks don’t mind?” M.C. asked, keeping his voice polite, coaxing her.
Reluctantly, she began to talk. “It’s only my mother,” she said. “Since I was fourteen, I work and buy my own things.”
“What kind of work?” Her eyes were not so distant now. He stood, but made no move forward.
“Well, from September to the end of May,” she said slowly, “I get out of school at two o’clock. I go to this center where they gave me a job in the offices. I work until about six o’clock, but I have to keep up my grades or lose the job.”
“Sounds real nice,” M.C. said.
“Nice enough to get me my car and the tent,” she said proudly.
He already knew she had a car. “Where is your car?” he asked.
“On in the town.”
“How much did it cost you?” he asked innocently.
She answered in the same vein, “Three hundred dollars.”
“You mean, you made that much money?” M.C. asked.
“I made more,” she said. “I made almost nine hundred.”
M.C. shook his head, stunned at the thought of so much money.
“I haven’t spent more of it than ten dollars a week in the whole time,” she said. “I save it. I knew I was going to travel—do you work?” she asked.
M.C. looked off at the lake. “Nothing much to do around here,” he said finally.
“Well, it sure is pretty,” she said. “I’ve seen places before, but this is like being lost in a wilderness when you know there’s a town close by. I walked all yesterday. I love to walk. Everything’s so quiet! I never had so much fun.”
M.C. smiled at her, pleased that she liked being alone the way he did. He decided she wasn’t bad-looking. “Your mother won’t mind you going off all by yourself?” he said.
“She minds,” the girl said. “But I call her when I leave one place and go somewhere else. See, I have a letter from her in case I get stopped by the police. They see you’re young and they think you’re a runaway.”
“A runaway?” M.C. said.
He thought she was going to laugh at him, but at the last second she didn’t.
“They say a half a million kids a year run away from home. People don’t know, but they don’t ever find half of them.”
Bewildered, M.C. shook his head again. “I sure didn’t know that,” he said. A vision came to him. He suddenly felt melancholy, and he saw himself running from a huge, gray house. All at once he fell and the earth opened and covered him completely.
“Don’t come any closer,” she said.
He found himself walking aimlessly toward her along the edge of the lake. “What? Oh.” He stood still with his hands at his sides. “I said I wouldn’t bother you.”
“Well, you just ought to see my back,” she said, her voice whining again. “You took a deadly weapon and committed a serious offense.”
“You were going to hit me with that light,” he managed to say. “What else could I do?”
“What was I supposed to do when somebody jumps me out of nowhere?”
M.C. felt remorseful, speaking so casually about the night before. Neither of them mentioned that M.C. had kissed her. But he thought of it. She seemed to think of it almost at the same moment. Simultaneously they looked away from one another.
“We’re even, then,” M.C. thought to say. “I won’t bother you.”
“Wherever I go, I try to make friends,” she went on, “but some kids just aren’t to be trusted. I never know what kind I’ve run into until it’s too late.”
“Who you saying is a child?” M.C. said. Angry, he wanted to sound older. Instead, his words came out as though he had asked an innocent question.
“Look, I didn’t come here to pick a fight with you all.”
M.C. heard something behind him. He turned and down the lakeshore away from the tent came his brothers and Macie Pearl. They must have skirted the lake on the other side, hiding behind trees. They had run off from Jones. Now they came up, not too close to M.C. but close enough to hear every word passing between him and the girl.
Seeing the kids made him so mad, he snatched up his towel. “I’m leaving,” he called down the beach. Throwing the towel over his shoulder, he caught a stone in it and thumped himself in the forehead, right on his bump. The stone hurt and he knew he looked foolish. “I’m leaving right now!”
“We just come to swim,” Macie called in her sweet voice. “You know we always do swim here.” She looked around M.C. at the girl to let her know who it was owned the lake and the shore and all of the pine trees.
Harper laughed and pushed Macie toward the water. She plunged in just to show M.C. she didn’t care about him or the girl. The boys waded in behind her.
“They your family?” the girl asked, watching them go far out in the water.
“Yea,” M.C. said. “They have to follow me around like a bunch of baby chicks.” He stood taller; he didn’t have to try to look mean.
“Must be nice though, having someone else around,” she said.
“You the only one?”
She nodded. “I don’t mind it most of the time. But when I’m traveling, well, it’d be nice to have a sister. There’s so many things to see . . . you want to say, ‘Hey, look at that!’”
M.C. wondered about being the only child with no one younger to watch out for, but he couldn’t quite picture what it would be like. Stealing sidelong glances at the girl, he knew he liked her. It was true, though, she was older than he.
She had nice skin, with a smooth sheen to it. Her hair was black and natural. She had a face not beautiful the way his mother’s face was, all deep and distant. Her eyes were the best, being so full of light. They were bright-shining but skittish, shy, like they didn’t know where it was safe to look.
He tried not to stare at the rest of her. But he could tell she wasn’t any little kid. She wore brown slacks that were creased with country dirt. She had on a blue shirt with long sleeves rolled high. It was none too clean, either. She was lean, healthy-looking. Not tall, M.C. could tell from where he stood. Not even as tall as his shoulder. Still, she had to be older.
He followed her gaze to the children out in the lake. “That’s Harper and Lennie and Macie Pearl,” he told her, pointing out each one. “I’m Mark,” he lied, “but everybody call me M.C.” He wouldn’t tell her he was Mayo Cornelius for fear she would laugh at the name.
“M.C., the Great?” she said.
“Yea.” He grinned.
“Why ‘the Great’?” she asked him.
“’Cause I can swim the best and everything.”
“Everything
, what?”
“You stick around and you’ll see,” he said easily.
He liked the way they were talking, almost playing. “My mother, Banina, and my daddy were here,” he thought to tell her, “but they had to leave early.”
“They come to see who was squatting on their land, I bet,” the girl said. Her hands rested on her hips. One leg was forward, making her appear lopsided.
“It’s not our land. Macie Pearl will just pretend. These kids swim here so much, they think they own the whole thing.”
“Who does own it?”
“I don’t know,” M.C. said. “Everybody just swims here. Nobody I know of ever bothered with owning it.”
“Somebody has to own it,” she said. “Somebody owns everything. But I’ll find out. Anytime I stop somewhere that isn’t a campsite, pretty soon somebody comes along and says how I have to move on. Won’t even let one person and a little tent sit somewhere.”
“They make you move on out?” M.C. asked.
“Sure. Land’s the basis of all power, see, and people hold on to their land.”
M.C. had to smile. Land was just like anything else you could lose. He thought of Jones.
Power won’t be the reason some people hold on to it.
But he said nothing.
“I’d like to have me some land someday,” she went on. “Something like this, maybe with some water on it.”
She didn’t notice he kept on smiling at her. She seemed to have forgotten about her knife and any need for it. She had moved closer to the lake where the dark gleam of it reached her eyes. She watched the kids, whose games caused huge splashes. The lake rippled with ever-widening rings; her eyes widened with the wonder of it.
Very slowly M.C. came nearer. But she was intent on the lake.
“You weren’t around here yesterday,” he said. “I know, because Macie and the boys were swimming and they would have said so.”
Vaguely, she looked at him and then turned back to the lake.
“I followed them over here,” she said, “and when they left, I moved my stuff up over.
“You know,” she said, “animals come up to the water all in the night. They scared me to death, but then I got up my nerve. I crawled right up in the tent opening. Didn’t move a muscle and I saw this deer drinking! It was just there and then it was gone and I didn’t see it leave, either.”
M.C. nodded, remembering the doe he and Banina had flushed from a thicket.
“They’ll do that,” he said. “Deer will catch a scent of you. He move so fast, you can blink and he’s gone.”
“I’d love to live right here on the lake,” she said. “Without one camper to hang the flag and break out the beer. I’m Pisces. I love water.”
“You want to swim?” he asked her, standing on one foot and then the other. “The water is not so cold now.”
She frowned. “I like a diving board. Anyhow, I misplaced my bathing suit.”
“Just wear some cut-off jeans,” he said. “Shorts, if you have them. Nobody’s going to mind. You can dive from the rocks down there where the beach ends.”
“I have shorts,” she said. She stared solemnly at the water. “I have all kinds of things with me for any event. But I’m all out of Band-Aids.” She looked at him hard. “I need one for that cut on my back.”
“Let me take a look at it,” he said, before he thought
There was an awkward silence until she said, “It’s just a little cut.”
“I’m sorry,” M.C. mumbled. Louder, he said, “The water’s fine this morning.”
In an instant he had plunged into the lake to begin a perfect breast stroke. In water, all of the awkwardness of a youth standing on land left him. With his knowledge and skill in it, he made no unnecessary move. His powerful arms shot upward, then outward and rearward, as he cut through the lake like some bold sea creature. His back turned gold from the sun glistening on it.
Hemmed in by mountains, surrounded by tall pines, the dark surge of the lake was magical. Fascinated, the girl watched it and the way M.C. cut through it, until she could no longer resist. She backed away, turned and disappeared into her tent. When she came out again, M.C. and the children were down at the far end of the lake.
She wore wrinkled, pink shorts and a faded man’s shirt with sleeves cut away. She had tied the shirttails in a knot at her waist. M.C. thought she was about as nice-looking as she could be. But rather than strike out into the water from where she was, she came around the shore.
“Come on in,” they shouted to her.
She preferred to walk down to the end of the beach. There she leaned on the rocks and plunged a foot in the water. “That’s cold!” she said, looking pleased that they had invited her.
“Not underneath,” Macie said. “Just on the top. You get in, and it’s real warm.”
M.C. said something to his brothers, and then: “Don’t let Macie . . . I’m going through.”
Head first, he upended himself and vanished beneath the surface. The water grew still again as if he had never been there. Macie rode on Harper’s back until he grabbed the rocks and shook her off. Once he had climbed up on them, he gave Macie a hand. Lennie Pool followed.
The girl watched the water but it remained smooth and dark.
“What’s your name?” Macie said, curious all of a sudden.
The girl smiled at Macie. But then her eyes flicked back to the lake where M.C. had gone under. She began to walk back and forth, her hands on her hips.
The children watched her.
“What’s he doing down there?” she asked them.
They said nothing.
“I don’t think he’s coming up, you’d better do something.”
Macie broke their silence with a giggle. “He’s not even down there,” she said. “Just over and behind these rocks.” She led the way around the edge of the rocks. Harper and Lennie went, too, and cautiously the girl followed.
On the other side lay a surprise. It was an opening in the rocks. No one who didn’t know would suspect it was there. The rocks fell back in a small clearing where there was a silent pool with grassy banks.
The children stopped at the edge. Macie turned brightly to the girl and smiled.
M.C. surged up from the center of the pool in a great splash. He sucked in air as though he would never again get enough of it, as the girl covered her mouth to stifle a scream.
The kids laughed at her. “It’s a water tunnel,” Harper told her in his soft, urgent voice. He told how the tunnel went under the rocks beneath the water at the edge of the lake and ended at the pool.
“Only M.C. can travel it,” Macie said. “We ain’t allowed. The kids from town don’t even know there’s a tunnel.”
“You wouldn’t know it, either, if you hadn’t caught me doing it once,” M.C. said. “Better keep the sense never to try it, too.”
“How do you hold your breath so long?” The girl, talking to M.C. as though he were older, showing respect for him now.
He pulled himself up on the grassy bank and wiped water out of his eyes. He had to smile. She kneeled next to him, her fear of him and the children gone.
Proud he’d done something she never expected he could do. And she had come from somewhere by herself in a car. But he could be by himself, too. He could travel through water like nobody. First he thought of lying, to tell her he could hold his breath longer than anyone. The kids would know.
Finally he said, “It’s not so long. I came up before you all ever got here. Hear you coming, and I just went under and waited. Then I splash up like I was out of breath.”
She didn’t seem to mind he had played a trick. “It’s dark in the tunnel?” she asked him. Her face so close, he could see tiny bumps he hadn’t noticed before.
Shyly, he looked at his feet hanging in the water. “It’s gray light, kind of,” he said. “This pool is at the end of the tunnel. Sunlight drifts in and gets faded, I guess. But I see, a little. It’s ghosty, though, when fishes slide over yo
ur skin.”
She cringed with the picture of it. Watching her, Macie shivered with delight.
His eyes on the pool, M.C. sensed the girl watching him. Felt himself reaching out for her, the way he often reached out when he sat next to Jones. His skin itched and came alive with little things he seemed to know about her. She might travel alone, but every minute she was scared being by herself. The impression came to him, swift and certain.
Already he felt attuned to the girl, less self-conscious at having her so near.
He rubbed his arms and neck until the itching went away. Tiredness settled in the knot on his forehead in a dull ache that came and went. He wasn’t feeling quite himself this morning. Yet he didn’t want to go and leave her.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
She shrugged. “No use of saying names.”
“I told you our names,” he said.
“I could tell you a name and you wouldn’t know if it was really mine.”
“Where do you come from then?”
“Same thing,” she said. “You wouldn’t know if I came from where I said.”
“Then why not tell?”
She said nothing. She looked at him and quickly away, as if she wanted to speak out, but couldn’t. Soon she was looking from the pool to the rocks and back to the pool.
She did this several times before it came to M.C. what was on her mind.
“A water tunnel won’t be like a pool,” he told her, “or even a lake.”
She nodded, staring at the rocks.
“A pool or even a lake is simple. Water will lift you,” he said.
She sat still, with just her head turning to look at him and then away.
“But tunnel is a bottleneck. No place to take off the pressure; or maybe pressure’s not the trouble. It’s just a tight place without a top, and you can get sick to your stomach.”
A long silence in which she said nothing.
“How long can you hold your breath?” M.C. asked her.
M.C. Higgins, the Great Page 12