by Dawn Tripp
Spring comes fast that year, comes right around the bend—boom—and it’s there. Only thin bones of snow left in the ruts and the furrows.
It was a sweet soft day in early April, everything busting out of winter forgetfulness into green, buds on the pussy willows, the sun warm. They were in school—didn’t want to be—all four of them in the E class, sitting together in their underdog row by the window, which was open enough to let them know what cloud-nine sunshine they were missing. It was Pard’s second year in this class, he was chewing away on his tobacco, and once when he had to take a spit, he opened the dictionary, that doorstop of silvery pages, gave a loud ptooey into it, and slammed the thing shut, the sound so loud and sharp like a rifle crack, Missus teacher spun around, her mousy curls spinning with her, lipstick too hot pink for one so plain. A hard glare at each of them to see who’d done it—she knew it was one of them four—then she turned back to her chalkboard and went on scratching out her nothings. They started to fidget then, to titter and fuss, and saw her stiffen, but she wouldn’t turn around again, determined not to let them dupe her twice. She just kept up with her scritch scratching, chalk to the board, and one by one, the four of them slipped out the window into the free and glorious day.
They spent the rest of the morning trouting in the creek, then went back to Robbie’s house after noon, to hang out in the backyard bomb shelter his father built, not just one of the shit-pulled-together kind, but the real deal—concrete, fourteen-inch-thick walls, a double air-lock door he got from the navy base over in Newport, a hand pump run through a charcoal filter to clean the air. There were sleeping bags, a Geiger counter, crates of canned food, a water storage drum, a battery-powered radio, a lantern, a first-aid kit, and the four of them, their shoes wet and muddied from the creek, sat in there eating Hershey bars, bags of potato chips, drinking soda they’d boosted from the machine at the gas pumps down at South Westport Corner. That machine didn’t work right, all you had to do was put your nickel in balanced on the edge of the slit, keep pressing the button, you’d get three sodas for the price of one.
Sitting in the bomb shelter, Huck could feel the cool hard wall through his shirt, and at one point it struck him that above his head, above all of their heads, there was no sky, only dirt, but they were ready. Ready for commies, krauts, japs, nuke-dumping green men, whatever scrod got sent their way. Robbie Taylor now was talking about his sister, who was friends with Susannah Bell, one set of knockers Susannah had. “Well anyhow,” Robbie says, “Susannah’s been working down at the Point boardinghouse after school, cleaning rooms, and that engineer, he’s roosting there. The duck-butt with the blue-tinted frames. What a tear-ass ride he’s got, that cool, fast ’57 ’Vette. Power flip-top. Those silver coves. Must have made money to beat hell to afford a car like that. So Susannah, well, she cleans his room, and she says that on his desk, tacked to the wall above his typewriter, he’s got a picture of Jane Weld.”
Huck chokes on his soda, fizzy stuff bubbling up, squirting right out his nose. He glances at Pard. Pard’s looking at him, that stoned-over look, dull flat eyes.
“Aw for chrissakes, Huckie,” he says with disgust, tossing him a towel. “Soda and snot, you better take that rag home.”
It was a stroke of black, like tar across his heart, a thick swift stroke. Pure black he felt when he heard, then felt the same again a week later when he and his brother Junie drove down to the wharf to help Swig launch his boat, and on their way they drove past that Tweed Man’s onyx car, silver coves and wide whites, squatting by the curb out front of the boardinghouse—that city sucker motherfucker nutter’s car—its rich-as-stink svelte shape, just sitting there in its smug lonesome, windows rolled up ass-tight. He saw that car and felt that black again right through him. What the hell right does he have, that Tweed Man, hack, quill driver, barking through town like he owns things, that Leica on a cord around his neck, snapping pictures, busting out his surveying maps, chatting up the locals who think he’s a fream, and barking orders at the union crew who’ve got no choice but to suck up. What the hell right does he have keeping a picture of Jane Weld up on his wall, like she’s some kind of a pinup, like he knew her, like he ever could, when she is what they say about the moon, the dark side of it you never see. Huck hated that man now, hated him not for the car or the dapper clothes, or even for that little pad of paper he was always toting around, ballpoint pen he’d whip out like he was taking notes on all of them; hating him for each of those things, and at the same time, none of them, hating him in the end only for that photograph of her. How the hell did he come by it?—hating the thought of it, the thought of him, hating, because she is who she is, the one girl you don’t dare to even think about wanting. Don’t even think. You don’t. Because she is. And it is only her.
——
Like a nail scraping at the scab sweet center of you, you think of her and everything goes on the tilt. There’s a thud in your chest, a light hammering, and that shallow quick beat of running low on air. The thought of her does that, just that and only her. She is. The one thing you can’t think about wanting, the one thing you ever could. Don’t tell a soul, can’t, don’t breathe a word. Not even to Pard. Especially Pard. Because she is, and it is her. That beautiful secret you keep. Like when you see her treading through the sunlight down the street, lugging some book like she needs the spine of it soldered to her wrist, or sweeping off the front porch of old Pennypinch’s house, that whaling widow she works for year-round who still lays a table for her lost captain every night. You ride by on your bike and Jane Weld might be outside, tinkering with some planting in Pennypinch’s vegetable garden, or washing out milk cans and leaving them to sun, or you might catch a glimpse of her on a warmer afternoon, like last Tuesday, out back of her grandfather’s place, lying in a crook of the woodpile: reading, wearing that faded indigo dress that wraps like a sea around her. You see her in a moment like that, and she’ll never look twice at you, she’s seventeen to your fourteen, Dead Weld’s daughter, all that. But still. You see her, and everything turns over inside you, an ache in your chest—that kind of yearning ache that if you lay down into it, could kill you.
So you don’t. Flick the thought off. You go up with your buddies to the A&W on Route 6—work through a swampwater float, a cheeseburger, a double order of fries, that scrawny carhop up there with the pimply face is sweet on your best friend, and if Pard makes a little time with her, you’ll all get the food for free. Or you go out cruising with your older brothers, Scott and Junie, and some of their friends, cruising through T’aintville and down River Road, all around Westport Harbor, shooting rabbits out the car window, picking them off the lawns of the summer homes, those big houses darked up and empty in the off-season, glaring at you from their fat porches. And you’re the one always getting booted out of the car to scoot across the lawns to pick up the things just killed, bodies soft, wet, and limp in your hands—driving, shooting, fetching, drive, shoot, fetch, until you’re in the backseat up to your knees in rabbits, heading home.
Once, though, it might happen, catch you off-guard, slip past the fear of getting too close, getting caught, you might slow, weaken, think in the flash of a quivering instant that she is the one thing, the one girl you’d bend the four corners of the earth for, fold them up right and make them fit, the one girl, the one—you don’t dare, couldn’t, shouldn’t, and maybe that’s why you do. It’s the joke trick of some toad-bellied God egging you on, the thought of her like an itch in your hands, an itch all through you, like you’ve caught fire in your clothes, the thought of her just burning you to soot.
You get hold of someone’s car. Your brother’s or your uncle’s, you borrow it or boost it, go out driving that fast new road, twilight thrown down like salt across the pavement, and her eyes are like that road at dusk, that sultry and mystical blue, her eyes, and your foot pressing down the pedal to the floor, driving, she is all you can think about and not think about, all you want, just her, don’t dare. And the night is wat
er leaking in around you and you can feel her in the speed, streaming from your skull out through your hair, you pour yourself into that road and drive, faster, like you could drive into her, the forever that is her, go on driving.
HUSK
JANE, SEVENTEEN
Spring 1962
Gray sky. White bird. Wings fold into the seam of a cloud, disappear. Morning noises off the wharf, voices, men loading up their boats—pots, line, barrels of bait—smells of creosote, dead fish, river-muck, gasoline.
Crossing over the Point Bridge, Jane glances west toward the wharf where her grandfather Gid’s boat is tied up, that ancient wreck of a thing, still fitted with a niggerhead, manila line, copper- and kerosene-treated wooden buoys he himself had turned.
“Lobsters aren’t potting good,” he’d told her. “Going into their shed.” He’d spent the week moving his lines from the Knob into the colder water off Cox’s ledge. She scans the deck of his boat, the pier. No sign of him.
A truck slips by, wash of shadow, smoke from the exhaust, the rumble of old timber planks under the tires. She clutches the book in her hand, hardboard, plastic-wrapped, its familiar width:
The wheel, for example, is a mechanism consisting of a hub, spokes, and rim. A little part of the wheel touches the ground, feels it, then leaves it, to disappear from the reach of the sensations which connect rim, spokes, ground.
But then it reappears.
When that happens to a man we say, “He was born, lived, and died.”
The larger part of the cycle is beyond our range of perception, just as the larger part of the wheel is beyond the sensed perception of the ground.
She had read the passage at the kitchen table that morning over breakfast before she left for chores, her face still smarting from the scrub she’d given it with her mother’s exfoliating cream. She read it with a pencil, made a note in the margin. Of every passage, it was this one that made her think of her father, reminded her of that late-fall day five years ago when she’d kicked the book over on the floor of his car and saw its cover for the first time. The last time. This passage more than any other. Unreturnable now.
A skiff zings under the bridge, its five-horse humming; in it, two kids who must have skipped school. They zing back and forth, cut three of the four lines a group of Portuguese men have in the water, and when the men realize what the boys have done and that they meant to do it, they start in hollering after them. The boys yell a slur and zoom off, laughing. Wharf Rats, her grandfather Gid calls them, one of them Pard Islington, and the other Huck Varick, both fourteen, already wearing trouble. No good. Huck, the son of Silas and that woman, Ada.
A glint of silver near Jane’s feet—a fishing lure dropped, caught between two planks, a half-eaten apple, the skin stripped. Ants swarm it.
On the other side of the bridge at the sandwich shop, some men are finishing up their breakfast—those men no one really knows, union men who have come down from the city or somewhere, dragging trucks and bulldozers back and forth, down that new road, eleven gray miles of highway, farms taken, hills laid open, plucked, leveled off, that road cutting down through the belly of the town like a blade.
It drove strange, that new road, the first time Gid took her down the leg of it they had opened, so wide and fast and endless in its clean paved newness, no face or body to it, no history played out, no houses or landmarks standing alongside to tell you where you were. Driving that road you could have been driving through Anywhere.
It was almost complete. Talk was by late July, early August, the last bit of the new bridge would be done.
She cuts off the road into the woods and feels him rise up in her, her father, his face a reflection in water inside her like he is still there, walking the path ahead, and she is small again, following in her own hooded silence, through the new light blown in this side of the bridge: salt wind, the scent of pitch pine, piss oak, the rank darker smell of the bog. He would take her here, walking, telling stories sometimes as they walked. They’d find a path that opened up to a sudden meadow flush with sunlight. He’d point out the hollowed places in the salt hay where deer had bedded down, the grass still bent to the shape of their sleep. She remembers it, skin on her mind lifting, like she is a shadow in their world, watching a man and his child walk these woods, in and out of seasons, sunsets, daylight, dark.
He came near her when she wrote in the book. She could feel him looking over her shoulder at the scratch of the pencil into the page—his hands had touched it that day in the car, so odd, unintended, but when he was gone this mishap of a book was what she was left with. She writes in it less often now. When she does, she takes advantage of the wide margins, the fat chunks of white open space at a chapter’s end. Squatted territory.
She writes only in pencil, as if the words might need to be revoked—borrowed words, for the most part, plucked out of other mouths:
The glacier knocks in the cupboard
The desert sighs in the bed
And the crack in the tea cup opens—
She has reached the bog. The dead thing floating in it. A fox, she thinks it was. She saw it for the first time last November around Thanksgiving, just floating there, dead, but on its front and part-submerged in the dark water so she couldn’t make out what it was for sure. Through the winter, whenever she crossed over the bridge, she’d look for it, watching the ice creep toward it, that lump trapped in the freezing. When the thaw came, it moved. The bog flooded with the spring rains, and it moved again. Finally now it had washed up in the north corner, almost unrecognizable unless you knew what to look for.
It was her father’s skull that haunted her—the skull they’d determined was him. Not the thing itself or even the public display of how it was found—but the comeuppance of it—that token bullet hole. He had been shot, as he himself once shot a man. Like whoever killed him wanted to ensure, whatever goes around, comes back around; his death crafted in that artful symmetry revenge can be.
A mosquito lands on her neck. She feels the bite before she slaps it away. She starts back through the woods toward Bridge Street.
She had done her chores early, then went to pick strawberries in the widow’s garden, brought a box to her grandmother, watered the hens. Now she doesn’t have to be at work until noon. They are down again, the widow’s family from New York, her grandchildren in private school there, let out early for the summer. It is good-paying work, no reason not to want it—except for the girl, twelve now and old enough to give her that smug air, but the little boy is fine, a sweet thing with red fat cheeks, likes to climb in her lap and let her read to him in the afternoons. He braids her hair with his stout fingers, makes a good mess of it.
——
As she is crossing back over the bridge, she sees the two boys—the Islington boy and Huck Varick—they’ve anchored their skiff below the concrete forms laid in for the new span, and now they’re scrambling up; the Varick boy is in the lead, a spidery thing, moving over the bolted wood, he reaches the top of the form, shimmies across until he comes to the very edge, and stands—the thin ropy gleam of his body balanced there—his arms outstretched rise slowly until his hands meet, clasped overhead.
There’s a shout from the shore, Jane looks and sees the city engineer, the project manager. In three long strides, he’s come to the rail of the bridge. He’s all frosted up—his voice carries, amplified across the water.
“What do you boys think you’re doing? You get the hell down from there,” he yells.
“You get down to hell,” Pard Islington shouts back.
The Varick boy is silent, motionless, poised at the top of the form, a silhouette against the overcast sky. He tips forward, still keeping his body straight, a slow-motion deadweight drawn down; then his head tucks fast, legs shoot up, and he dives, knifing toward the flayed river surface below.
Jane passes the engineer, still shouting. Another car sweeps by. She steps off the bridge. As she walks by Pritchard’s store, the gas pumps, she looks again for her
grandfather Gid, doesn’t see him. His boat gone now, he must have set out. The wharf is quiet, the road quiet, no cars coming down it, everything in a lull.
On the middle pier, next to where the Laura May, Swig Lyons’s thirty-eight-foot Novie, is docked, Carleton Dyer sits on an overturned nail keg, his shirtsleeves rolled up, mending a section of net. Jane pauses a moment, her eyes following his hands working the needle over the torn places in the mesh he has begun to knit back. He ties off a knot, glances up, sees her there.
“How are you, Jane?” he says.
His cap, she notices, is set back some on his head. The brim doesn’t quite shade his face. His eyes are brown, deep solid brown but with some quick shiver of light as he looks over her that makes her skin rustle.
“Fine, thank you,” she answers, deliberately, keeps walking, the sense of his eyes still on her, that faint pressure of them resting there. Carleton Dyer. She thinks his name in her head, turns it over once. She had known him, of course, all her life. From down the wharf. From school. He was anyone else. A few years older. Had trouble with penmanship—she remembers this, why?—he was left-handed. Went to sea, the navy. Was back now, so it seemed. Nothing more.
She continues up Main Road. Past the Evinrude shop, the hand-printed sign that reads SKIFFS FOR RENT.