Spartina

by John D. Casey

  “You’re no fun.”

  “How you plan to get back in?”

  She reached up across the canoe, put some weight on her far hand, and rolled in. She flicked water at him.

  He said, “I don’t want to get wet.”

  “Come here. I remember that story now. Come here, in the middle.”

  Dick turned around on his seat. She took his hand and pulled him closer. She sat on her heels on one side of the center thwart. He knelt on the other.

  “I can’t remember what it’s called … ‘La Marée.’ Maybe. Two cousins, a boy and a girl, in Brittany. They’re wading in the sea, the tide is about to come in. The boy is like you, he can feel the tide. Maybe they are in the water, that’d make it … No, they’re in a marsh, I seem to remember having to look it up … roseaux, reeds. The boy makes her take his prick in her mouth. But he makes her stay completely still. Nothing can move except the tide. He can feel the tide coming in. He feels himself as the tide, her as the—what?—the land about to be flooded? Anyway, he holds her still. She’s scared, but she adores him. No—we don’t know what she thinks, maybe that’s what I liked, I had to imagine her.… The tide comes up to her waist—which is to say his shins—then up to her breasts—I may be making this part up—then up to her shoulders. It’s Brittany, the tide comes in faster than you can run. He can feel the tide in his body, his blood expanding. He feels her terror, but then he feels her change, she feels the tide too. I did make that up. He can feel the water on the fingers of the hand that’s holding her hair. His body is taut. It’s unbearable.” Elsie stopped. “What do you think?”

  “You’re just full of your bad French novels tonight.”

  “This is a short story. I remember reading it, I was in college, I’d never been good at French, I had to look up a lot of words. Frantically.” Elsie laughed.

  Dick said, “I’ll tell you what I think. I think the next part is they both drown.” He was in a rage. With everything. With his clothes, with his leather work shoes he didn’t want to ruin with salt water, with his body, with her stories, with how beautiful she’d looked underwater, with her playing with everything—she was like a kid in a workshop, picking up everything she didn’t know what it was for.

  The canoe drifted up the pond, got caught sideways in the creek to Mary Scanlon’s restaurant. He looked up at the thick stars.

  Elsie said, “Fine. Good. I see that you’re …” She turned and pulled her sweatshirt on. When she stood up with her blue jeans in her hand, he stepped out into the mud and wrenched the canoe. Elsie tilted out.

  The creek was chest-deep. She had trouble getting to the far bank; once she started to wade, her feet got stuck. She swam free and got a hand on the bank. She said, “Shit! Where are my pants? The key to the boathouse … You asshole!”

  He swam across. She started to pull herself up the bank by tugging on the solid spartina roots above her. He got his knees on a shelf of mud and grabbed her. She shoved him hard with her heel, but her shove made her slide back too. She dug her hands into the bank. She still slid belly-down into the mud, now awash with salt water. Dick pulled her sweatshirt up around her head and arms, held it with one hand like the neck of a gunny sack. He scooped mud onto her back, onto her butt, onto her legs. It spread like very thick paint, thick as toothpaste but black, even by starlight you could see it was black.

  Elsie wriggled back out of the sweatshirt. She spun around and threw a handful of mud. She dug into the bank for another handful. He picked up her feet and twisted her over onto her front, holding her legs up like the handles of quahog tongs. Her arms sank into the mud halfway up to her elbows. He let her legs down and straddled her, slowly poured ooze onto her shoulders, the back of her neck. He reached over her shoulders and pulled a wave of mud under her breasts, under her stomach, up into her armpits. He unstraddled her and sifted mud onto the bare spots on the back of her legs, smoothed it out.

  “Okay,” Elsie said. “Pull me up.”

  He slithered his arms around her and raised her to her knees. She caught her breath, then stood up and slowly smeared his cheek. She unbuttoned his shirt and painted his chest. She pulled at the waist of his pants and ladled in a handful of mud. She said, “On second thought,” and undid his pants and tugged them down. She smeared his legs.

  “I see,” she said. “You’ve been painting me black to make me disappear.”

  His pants were around his calves, his work shoes stuck in the mud. She yanked him over. He caught himself on his forearms so his hands didn’t sink in but a couple of inches. She put her hands on his back, climbed over his shoulders on her knees to bog him down. She started to pack him with mud. He wriggled forward and raised himself on his forearms. She slid down his back. He raised his legs, trying to catch her between them, to snare her in the triangle of legs and furled pants. She squirmed sideways, slid off his legs. He curled around on his side and grabbed her leg. His hand slid down her calf as if her leg was an eel, but he got a good grip on her ankle. He pulled it back past his waist. He could hardly see her. She was disappearing like an eel in mud. They were both disappearing. His hands were blurred with fine mud. He put his free hand on the back of her other leg, trying to get his fingers around it so he could slide down to her other ankle. His hand slid on past the inside of her thigh, the last bit of paleness in the dark. His hand slid on into the cool mud, but on the top of his forearm he felt heat, which startled him as though it was light.

  They lay still.

  His feet were in shallow water. He felt the creek stirring against his feet, tugging his pants as it flowed by, pushing up into the marsh. He felt Elsie move. The outside of her thigh brushed his face. She slid toward him a little, onto the thicker part of his forearm. He lay his forehead on her as she rocked slightly, like a boat on a rippled pond.

  He was giving in to her imagination now.

  He hadn’t known what he was doing before. (What had it felt like, all that tussling around? Just their outer shells … Like handling some guy you knew who kept popping off at you, but who was too drunk to fight? Like punishing a child?)

  He turned his head so his cheek was flat against her. He could feel her muscles moving softly—her coming was more in her mind still; when she got closer she would become a single band of muscle, like a fish—all of her would move at once, flickering and curving, unified from jaw to tail.

  His mind was half in hers. He felt her still loose-jointed drift—only an occasional little coil in the current tugging at her harder, moving her toward the flood.

  The tide came all the way up.

  He felt all of her pass into him through his forehead: the effort of her body as if she was swimming upward, then the uncurling as she stretched out to catch the break, body-surfing a wave bigger than she’d thought, caught in the rush.

  He felt it—she had an instant of fear—he didn’t hear it but he felt a bleat from her as though her lips were pressed against his opened forehead. Then she breathed—he felt her body move as if her mouth opened on all of him—she took a breath and let herself go tumbling.

  After a while they moved up the bank as though they had to escape the flood. They clambered onto the table of higher ground, onto the spartina. He sat to untie his shoes, and Elsie clambered on his back as if she couldn’t get enough of clambering. He got his feet out of his pants and made a bed of them for her on the long flattened stalks.

  Everything was brighter than in the creek—all around them the even tops of the spartina caught flat shadowless starlight.

  He reached under her back to smooth out broken stems. For an instant he felt her feel his body, felt her register him, his inner sounds, the outer wave of them pressing toward her. And then they both fell into their own urgencies, overlapping disturbances, like waves from separate storms, at first damping, then amplifying each other.

  They lay still in their pit of gray light. Her cheek moved against his. He had no idea what her expression was now—maybe smiling, maybe recovering herself the way sh
e laughed at herself after she cried.

  She moved her head and kissed his mouth. It didn’t make her clear to him. Pretty soon she’d start talking.

  She stayed quiet, though. She wasn’t coming back so easily. He caught one more feeling from the heavy stillness of their bodies. Both of them this time—no matter what silly game she’d started—they’d both been caught and tumbled hard and carried this far. They were both stunned by sadness.

  And then they had to get up and find their clothes, foolish people again. The blue canoe was still caught sideways across the creek. Elsie’s sweatshirt was on the bank. Dick’s paddle was in the canoe, but Elsie’s had floated away, along with her jeans and the key to the boathouse. And the key to her car.

  They left the canoe on the grass above the boathouse and walked back to Elsie’s house. Elsie pulled the hem of her sweatshirt down to miniskirt length when a car drove by them on the point. And again when they scampered across the four lanes of Route 1.

  Dick got into the shower with his clothes, got the mud cleaned off inside and out. The solar-heated water began to run out. Elsie didn’t have a dryer, so she put his clothes in the oven. Dick picked up his unfinished glass of beer from the arm of the sofa. He felt dull about everything now. Dull but unfamiliar again. He felt a sliver of hope that everything here was so askew, so unfamiliar, that it wouldn’t show noticeably in his general life.

  At last Dick got hold of Keith college-boy. Dick spoke to him agreeably and reasonably. Keith hadn’t heard from Parker either, and agreed they shouldn’t just hang around doing nothing, the boat doing nothing. They’d leave that night.

  Charlie was pleased about going. Tom wanted to go too. May said no. Dick said to May that he’d gone out on a lobster boat when he was Tom’s age. May said, “Not on one of Parker’s boats. And not all three of you on one boat. No.”

  Dick told Tom, “When I get my boat in, we’ll get you some sea duty.”

  Dick took the pickup to go get some more replacement pots. He was only half surprised to find himself jouncing up the dirt road to Elsie’s, running in low so as not to jar loose the lashed stacks of pots.

  Elsie was getting ready to go out to a garden party at her sister’s. He told her he’d be at sea for a few days, going out this evening.

  “Oh no,” Elsie said. “I wish you’d told me.”

  Dick said, “I didn’t know for sure until just now.”

  Elsie looked at her watch. She went to her curtained cubicle and got a red wool sash which she wound around the waist of her white skirt. She put on a pair of sandals, took them off, and put on a pair of high-heeled shoes. She looked at them, looked up, and asked Dick what he thought. Dick said, “Fine.” Elsie took them off and said, “I wish you’d told me. I’m still on leave—I could have gone with you.”

  Jesus, Dick thought. But why did that surprise him?

  Elsie put the sandals back on. She said, “I found out about a preventive for seasickness, but you have to start it the day before you go out. I’d love to go out again.”

  “That’s up to Parker.”

  Elsie looked at the sandals. She said, “I know—I’ll wear the sandals and borrow some decent shoes from Sally. You know, what I can’t wait for is when you get your boat in. Maybe I’ll quit Natural Resources and crew for you. I hope your bunk room’s going to be nicer than Parker’s.”

  Dick didn’t know whether Elsie was serious. He said, “Parker’s boat is the worst you’re likely to see. Around here at least.”

  Elsie said, “Who are you going to get for crew? I mean for your boat.”

  “One thing at a time. It’s not certain I’ll get her in the water.”

  “I wish I’d known you were going,” Elsie said. She tied a silk bandana over her head, pirate fashion. “What about this? Does it make my face look funny?”

  “No,” Dick said.

  Elsie put on dangling earrings. She said, “And these? Don’t just say fine.”

  “You look like a gypsy fortune-teller.”

  Elsie changed them for little pearl studs, straightened the collar of her blouse. “You’re right, this is better. Do you wish you didn’t have to leave? Why don’t you tell Parker to wait a day?”

  “The sooner I go, the sooner I get back. And you’ve got your party to go to.” He held back from Elsie that Parker was up in New York. There was a crazy lurch to his life, there were people running loose all up and down the coast with secrets that could undo him.

  Elsie said, “What time are you going out tonight? I could get back.… ”

  “I’m taking Charlie this trip,” Dick said. “I got to get him squared away. It’s his first time offshore.”

  “Well, then, I might as well spend the weekend at Sally and Jack’s.”

  Elsie packed a tote bag, crammed in her tennis gear. She slipped a wristband over the handle of her tennis racket and zipped the racket head into its pouch. She looked at herself in the mirror. She said, “This is dull.” She took off the bandana, ran her hand through her hair. She got a lavender chiffon dress from behind the curtain and held it up in front of her. “What about this?” Before Dick said anything, she ducked back behind the curtain. She came out wearing the dress, holding the front up by its strings. “The only problem is it’s backless and I’ll stick to the carseat. I can always hang a towel over.… What do you think? Here, could you tie these things, they go behind the neck.… Not so tight.” She stepped away from him. “Any strap marks? Or is it all tan?” Elsie turned her back to the mirror and craned her head around. “I guess that’s okay. You’re not much help, are you?”

  She slipped on a bracelet, held up the long earrings to her ears. “What do you think? The dangling ones, right?”

  “Yes.”

  The phone rang. Elsie picked it up.

  “Oh, hi. No, I haven’t left yet.… Well, sure, I could, but how will she get back? I mean, I thought I’d spend the night, if that’s okay with you. If the problem is she can’t find your house, she can follow me.… Oh. Well, then, she can drive my car back and I’ll get home somehow. Doesn’t Jack have to come look at the construction site or something? Or maybe she can stay over too.… Look. We’ll just play it by ear. Do I have to call her, or …? Tell me the number.… Okay. We’ll be there. Bye.” Elsie put the phone down and said, “Damn. Now I have to pick up that ditz who lives in Miss Perry’s cottage. Do you know her? Phoebe Fitzgerald.” Elsie laughed. “Her one claim to fame is that she got lost in the woods last year.”

  Dick said, “I know who she is. It was Eddie Wormsley found her.”

  Elsie laughed again. “Is that right? Is that right? Did Eddie say anything about her?”

  “He liked her. He said she was kind of shaky at the time. I think he asked her out but she said no.”

  “Aha,” Elsie said, “I can’t wait to get her talking. Maybe I can put a good word in for Eddie.” Elsie dialed the number. “Phoebe Fitzgerald? This is Elsie Buttrick, Sally’s sister. Yes, that’s right. I wasn’t sure you’d remember. Sally tells me you need a ride.… Sure, no trouble at all … I know the house. Are you all set? Well, I’m not dressed yet, but I’ll be along in, oh, just a little while.”

  Elsie hung up.

  Dick said, “What do you mean, you’re not dressed? You going to change all over again?”

  “Maybe I will. Maybe this dress is too gauzy, just too helpless.” Elsie struck a pose, her body leaning to the right, her arms flung back to the left, palms up. Dick laughed. Elsie said, “A little too much fleeing nymph, know what I mean?”

  Dick said, “You could strap your gun belt on, that might even things up.”

  Elsie laughed. Then she said, “I don’t know, I guess it’s okay.” She took Dick’s hands. “I was feeling a little bit wanton a minute ago. Now I just feel tender. And that makes me feel sad and weak. Know what I mean? I was getting ready to be ravished on the floor. Now I just want to be sure you’ll come see me when you get back. Monday night? It doesn’t matter how late. Or even Tuesday mor
ning, just come wake me up.”

  Elsie leaned on his chest, her arms around his waist. Dick felt awkward and uneasy, his hands miles away from him, the thick pads of his fingers still farther away on the soft sliding of her back. Little Elsie Buttrick, fresh as paint. Great big Elsie Buttrick, on top of it all. But now there was a tinge of pain to her.

  There wasn’t a bit of satisfaction in seeing how all her dresses, her big black tennis racket, her Volvo, her solar house didn’t weigh in for much. She was a little bit spoiled was all. The two of them were exactly the same kind of damn fool. But for some reason she was going to get more of the pain. He felt terrible about that.

  She was going to get more of the pain, but he was going to sustain more damage. He wasn’t going to stop just yet.

  It was on his way out along the dirt road that he knew he’d got a fresh jolt from Elsie. All that about the clothes was silly. Maybe she’d done it to annoy him, but she’d done it just to be silly too. She wasn’t careful with him. She wasn’t careful with herself. He admired that—it wasn’t as easy as it looked. Whoever she was at the moment, she came right ahead, swarmed right into him. Good for her.

  He’d been about to blame her for his not working this last week. Wrong. And he’d been trying to work up a notion that he deserved this fooling around as recompense for all his bad luck. Wrong.

  He didn’t understand it all, but it was pretty clear that he’d been stuck for several years. He’d blasted himself loose. That’s what he’d been doing all summer. Even that half-assed clam poaching. Going out with Parker, going along with Parker.

  He’d been thinking all his thoughts as though he was still stuck—lodged in tight among the impossible banks, Sawtooth Point, everyone else floating free and easy, just him stuck. Wrong again. He was on his own. He used to think that bitterly, that he was on his own in the worst way, imprisoned up Pierce Creek by his father’s failure, by the way everyone turned away.

  He’d blown himself out of all that, without knowing what he was doing. Or maybe he’d known. But he’d damn well done it, and he’d better look out where he was going now. Adrift or under way, he was afloat on his own.