by Brad Watson
She watched now from the picture window as he almost reverently palmed a cleaned fish into the pail of water. He rinsed his hand before sliding another one off the stringer. The shadows of patchy clouds moved across the yard and over him with the slow gravity of large beasts floating by. She still felt the effects of sleep, of the drinking and smoking, and a mild vertigo, as if she’d stood up too quickly. That hung-over sense of having waked into a life and body that were not her own. She reached out to the window and steadied herself.
As if he’d heard her, Tex turned to look, fish and knife poised in his hands, interrupted so deeply into his task he seemed lost, either not seeing or not recognizing her image behind the windowpane.
She had dreamed, reentering the waking dream she’d had of the catfish in the river. Her sight in the dream through the eyes of the fish. Tex had lifted her into the boat, taken her home, lain her on the old plyboard table, and carefully slit the fish skin covering the length of her belly, worked it away from her own true form. But he was unable to detach the fish’s brain from her own. Her words, some gurgly attempt to say she loved him, bubbled out and then she died.
It was a whole world, the way dreams can be.
He buried her in the yard, with a stone on top to keep the cats from digging her up to sniff at the bones. But over time she drifted in the soil. The grass grew from her own cells into the light and air. She watched him when he passed over with the lawn mower. The times between mowings were ages.
Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives
THE DAY WE RAN OFF WAS HOT, EARLY AUGUST, NO AIR conditioner in my 1962 VW bus. It topped out at forty miles per hour, so the forty-mile journey took us more than an hour, during which we drove along, kind of stunned by what we were doing, sweating, saying little, staring ahead at the highway, other cars and trucks blasting past us in the left lane. Just over the state line we stopped at a Stuckey’s and bought a pair of gold-painted wedding bands for a dollar apiece.
Olivia wore her favorite pair of red and white polka-dotted bellbottoms. None of her other pants fit, by then. The bellbottoms were low-waisted, and Olivia was carrying high, so she wore them often. She never did gain weight. She seemed to lose it. She threw up every day, throughout the day, from the beginning. How she’d been hiding that from her mother, I had no idea. She’d begun to look like one of those starving children in the CARE commercials, all big eyes, gaunt face, stick limbs, and a little round belly up high underneath her ribs.
We parked on the downtown square and started up the old brick walk to the courthouse door. But halfway to the building, Olivia headed back toward the bus.
I caught up with her, took her by the hand.
“Look,” I said, “what else are we going to do?”
She took a deep breath and then looked directly at me for the first time that day. The skin beneath her eyes seemed bruised from lack of sleep.
“I don’t know what else to do,” she said. “I want to do the right thing.”
“I know,” I said. “I do, too.”
We stood there listening to songbirds in the oak trees in the square, watching cars make their slow, heatstroked weave through downtown. A couple of old men wearing fedoras, sitting on a park bench in the shade, stared speechlessly at us, their old mouths open to suck a last strain of oxygen from the incinerated air.
She came along reluctantly. Once, she tried to go back to the bus again, but I held on to her hand. When we got inside the courthouse, she stopped trying to run away and sat like a chastened child in one of the hard wooden chairs in the anteroom outside Judge Leacock’s chamber as we waited our turn. Judge Leacock was known to marry just about anyone who asked. Two other couples sat there like us, silent, jittery. A third couple—a soft, pale, fat girl with pretty blond hair and a thin, pimply boy with a farmer’s haircut—waited in their seats with strangely beatific, vacant smiles on their faces, their hands on their knees. They seemed like Holy Rollers or something, but I didn’t imagine Holy Rollers would get married in a courthouse by a judge.
The ceremony took about five minutes. Judge Leacock was an older man with a slackened face and tired-looking folds beneath and at the corners of his eyes. But the eyes themselves were alert, even crafty, as he leaned back in the chair behind his desk and looked at us for a long moment.
“How old are you?” he said to Olivia.
“Eighteen,” she lied.
“You?” he said to me.
I lied and said I was eighteen, too. We were both heading into our senior year.
He asked us if we were sure we wanted to get married. I said yes. He asked us to sign the certificate, then asked us to stand up before his desk. He remained seated.
“Do you take this little gal to be your lawfully wedded wife?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you take this young fellow to be your lawfully wedded husband?”
Olivia stood there looking stunned, her lips parted, and stared at him.
“You need to be able to say it, darlin,” Judge Leacock said.
“Yes,” Olivia whispered.
“I now pronounce you man and wife,” the judge said. “That’ll be five dollars, please.”
“Can I kiss the bride?” I said.
“Go right ahead.”
I kissed Olivia, pulled out my wallet, handed the judge a five-dollar bill. He gave us our copy of the certificate. We drove back home at forty miles per hour, windows down, sweating, not saying a word.
A FEW WEEKS EARLIER, we’d secretly rented an attic apartment over a small frame house on the south side of town, a block from the state mental institution. They had drug cases over there, dementia, catatonics. Maybe a schizophrenic or two. Retarded people. People with injured or disoriented brains who thought themselves to be other people, elsewhere. No hard-core psychotic criminals like they had in Whitfield over near Jackson.
During the weeks we’d spent cleaning and painting the apartment, I took breaks and walked over to the hospital property for a smoke and a stroll. The grounds were beautiful, populated with big, dark, seductive oaks and magnolia trees, and you could imagine being very happily insane if you were allowed to walk their grassy, shaded slopes every day. Once I saw an old man, apparently a patient there, who crept along as if he were hunting something. He wore a pale blue robe over pink pajamas, torn paper slippers, and a broad-brimmed tan cowboy hat. He held an imaginary rifle in his hands and a look of mischievous anticipation in his watery eyes. It never occurred to me to wonder how he’d gotten out onto the grounds. Stealthy, I guess.
“What are you hunting?” I said.
He froze as if he hadn’t seen me standing there. He turned his little bald head very slowly and put a finger to his lips. He moved his fuzzy eyebrows toward the little glen that lay just beyond us, its grass deliciously lush and green in the afternoon light. Then he scrunched his eyes tight shut and whispered, “Lions.”
THE ONLY PLACES YOU could stand upright without knocking your head on the apartment’s attic ceiling were in the middle of the living room, the hallway, and the middle of the bedroom. You had to crouch to get to the sofa or the bed. The bathroom and kitchen were small but okay for standing upright because they were built into dormers. The bathroom had an old wood-frame window fan the size of a ship’s propeller. When you switched it on the blades began to turn slowly at first, and as they picked up speed they huffed and pushed out the wooden slats that stayed folded shut on the outside when the fan was off. Now that we were in mid-August, the temperature inside the place rose above a hundred during the day. Turning on the fan at night flushed that still, stifling air and pulled a slightly cooler breeze of about eighty-five degrees (on a good night) through the apartment’s open windows, small rooms, narrow hallway, and out the bathroom window. If you closed the bathroom door, the fan created a near-vacuum in there, so your ears sucked in and went deaf, and the whole house shook with the fan’s effort to pull wind through the little crack at the bottom of the bathroom door.
W
hile we were fixing up the apartment, we’d be up there every late afternoon and early evening during the week, after our summer jobs, and all day on Saturdays and Sundays, sweat soaking our shorts and shirts, stinging our eyes and dripping from our chins. We scrubbed every surface clean. We painted the walls, the old brown wooden floor, and hung curtains. We made trips to K-Mart, half for the relief of the store’s air-conditioning, half to get cheap aluminum cookware and plates and cutlery, sheets and bedspread, towels, though some of this we filched from our parents’ houses.
And sometimes in the late afternoon, in spite of the heat, we’d go at each other in the little bedroom in the back of the apartment, right under the rear gable. The bed frame was imitation brass, so I could hang on to the headboard rungs with my slippery, sweaty hands. Olivia was getting so round in the belly, and we had to take care in how we did it, and I needed some independent purchase. We sweated deep into the bedding, the creaky set of old steel springs screeching and squawking at even our most discreet, restrained, ecstatic movements. The scrawny, bitter landlady downstairs shouted up through the floor, “HEY! HEY!” Banging on her ceiling with a shoe or something.
We’d lie there catching our breath, cooling off as much as we could, with the old fan huffing to pull a hot breeze across our reddened, sticky-slick skin, and then we’d dress, turn off the fan, lock up, get into the car. I’d drop her off at her parents’ house, and drive to my parents’ house. I would go inside, speak to my parents and my brothers, if they were home. Then we would all sit down to supper. Or if I was late, I would sit down by myself at the kitchen table and eat some of what was left, and maybe my mom would sit there and talk to me while I ate, if she had a minute. Then I would go to the bedroom I shared with my little brother, maybe listen to the radio for a while, and then I would go to bed.
I WAS UNDER A SPELL, those days. I had been ever since I’d first seen her.
I was with my friend Wendell Sparrow, that day, skulking about the pool at the local run-down country club my parents managed to belong to. Sparrow and I sat in the oak shade between the pool and the tennis courts, smoking cigarettes and waiting for girls to enter the dressing rooms to change for a swim.
We did this because we knew there had been, at some unrecorded time in this old pool’s history, peepholes drilled in the wall between the men’s dressing room and the women’s. The holes were artfully hidden beneath metal soap dishes attached to the shower’s water pipes that ran from the ceiling down this wall, ending in the hot and cold handles. Just below the handles were the little soap trays. And just beneath the soap trays, so that you wouldn’t notice as you stood there taking your shower, someone had drilled single peepholes about a half-inch in diameter that went through to the other side of the wall, which was the wall inside the women’s dressing room. If you held on to the water pipes and leaned down, peered just below the soap dishes, you could look through the peepholes into the dressing stalls there. It was ingenious and simple. Most people who weren’t in the know never noticed the peepholes, since you’d have to bend down in the shower to see them, and as these were mostly rinsing showers, few ever did. Those who did guarded the secret as if they were the only ones who knew it, for fear of such fantastic information getting out to the authorities, who—being at an age and level of respectability that it would never do for anyone to catch them peeping into the women’s dressing room—would probably plug the holes with concrete from sheer jealous outrage against youth and the effrontery of its prancing, tawdry, exuberant libido.
So, as Sparrow and I were sitting in the lawn chairs beneath the oak outside the dressing rooms, around three o’clock, the pool all but deserted, no one on the tennis courts, who should walk past us in her street clothes, holding a little bundle of swimwear, smiling a little half-shy smile, but Olivia Coltrane, on her way to the women’s side. We smiled and nodded to her. As soon as she’d cleared the door into the dressing room we shot out of our chairs and ran into the men’s dressing room and took up stations, Sparrow at the left showerhead peephole, me on the right.
She was in my stall already.
“You see anything?” Sparrow said.
“No, not yet.”
“Me, neither.”
Olivia had such a playful, placidly languorous look on her face through the peephole, I couldn’t imagine she didn’t know we were there.
She bent over, out of view. Then she straightened up. She raised her arms and slipped off her blouse. I could see everything from her beautiful rib cage up: her brassiere, her long, pale neck, her coy expression. I was trembling just a little bit.
“See anything?” Sparrow stage-whispered. He sounded desperate.
“Nothing yet.”
“Shit. Where the hell is she?”
She took off her brassiere. My God. Her little breasts were beautiful: small, a little heavy on the bottom, sloping down and then up to what looked to be a pair of hard, erect, hazelnut nipples. I was shivering, my body was all but bucking against my grip on the pipes against the wall above my head.
“See anyth—You son of a bitch!” Sparrow said, and he was on me. “Let me see, goddammit!”
But I was stronger and in fact I could not let go of the pipes. Sparrow pummeled me and made far too much noise. Through the peephole, Olivia’s face seemed to register just the slightest increase in some kind of strange satisfaction as she slipped the bikini top over her beautiful little breasts, roughed up her hair, turned, and walked out of the dressing stall, its door slapping shut against my eyes. I let go and sat down heavily on the shower floor. Sparrow grabbed the pipes and jammed his forehead against the soap dish.
“Shit! Son of a bitch. Goddamn you son of a bitch!” and so on for a good five or ten minutes, as he slammed things around the dressing room, lit a Marlboro, and smoked it in that way he had, sucking the life from it, his long scrawny neck flaring ten-dons, the bony Adam’s apple bobbing. He was bleeding from a cut on his forehead where he’d jammed it against the soap tray. He stopped pacing and glared at me. One eye twitched at the little drop of blood leaking into it from his brow. He took off one of his tennis shoes and hurled it through the high window of the dressing room. It crashed through, sending glass shards out into the grass beside the pool apron. He stood there, his breath heaving in and out. He stomped over to one of the toilets and threw his cigarette into it and banged out through the dressing room door.
I sat there on the shower floor, entirely unfazed by Sparrow’s tantrum. You could not have shaken me from what I was feeling, not with the strength of a hundred men. That was when, pretty much, I knew that I had to have Olivia Coltrane. I was just about dying for her, right then.
SHE WAS SLIM, TALLISH, with a thick clump of short black hair that framed her small, delicate face, black bangs against her milky forehead. She was pale and pretty, if not conventionally so. Her teeth were a little too big for her mouth, so she may not have been smiling so often as she appeared to’ve been. She was a little nearsighted, but vain about wearing her glasses, so the crinkling around her eyes may have been more of a squint than the mirth you might have taken it for. You wouldn’t have put her in a magazine to model clothes or makeup. But you might have put her in an ad for some other product, say a snappy new red convertible, because she had a wholesome natural beauty in her, hard to say just what it was except maybe happiness. I think it was that sense of her natural happiness, really, that attracted me to her. I was never a very happy or contented person, and people like Olivia tended to ignite in me a secret, almost feverish desire to absorb whatever it was that made them so different from me. So at ease with the world and themselves in it.
She had a way of looking at me, straight-on, and seemed incapable of the usual emotional evasion, as if she had nothing to fear. It didn’t bother me in the least that she wasn’t the smartest girl around. She struggled in English, was competent in math. If you drew her as partner in biology lab, you would surely do most if not all of the work. She was a little bit lazy. She tended to spend h
er spare time reading ridiculous magazine articles like big spreads on the lavish lifestyle and strange marital relations of Jackie and Aristotle Onassis. But I really didn’t care. Most people thought me a little dim, too. I was ridiculously earnest and deliberate. I wasn’t the handsomest boy she could have dated, either, but I had a kind of appealing, homely kindness in my features, or so people would note from time to time, in one awkward way or another.
Soon after we’d started going out, I took every cent I had in my savings account at Citzens Bank and bought the ten-year-old VW bus, took the back seat out, padded the floor with old blankets and a flannel-lined sleeping bag, and began my serious courting of Olivia. I took her out as many nights as her parents would allow, and on Saturdays and Sundays, too. I started picking her up after church, in the bus, and either taking her on a picnic or over to Sunday dinner at my parents’ house. We did this every other week, alternating with her family’s Sunday dinners at her maiden aunt’s house, which I didn’t attend. I wasn’t exactly ever invited. Olivia enjoyed the picnics, and she loved the dinners at our house. My mom was an old country girl and a fantastic cook, whereas the Coltranes’ fare reflected Mr. Coltrane’s salt-free diet and the family’s general lack of interest in food.
She liked my folks, too, and kidded my little brother about his long, pretty hair and his dreamy, calflike brown eyes. She called him “Beautiful.” “Hey, Beautiful,” she’d say, and he’d frown and leave the room, but soon he’d be back in, grinning, and we knew he loved it. Once he slipped up to her and said, “Hey, Beautiful, to you,” and blushed so deeply I thought he might burst into tears of embarrassment. We all burst out laughing instead, and it saved him. Olivia spent the whole Sunday dinner in the chair next to him, her slim left arm over his shoulder while they ate. It almost seemed she loved him so much because he was still such a boy, and part of her still wanted to just be a girl, with crushes on beautiful boys. She would pet him, then look up at me with an expression of earnest if simulated heartbreak, as if she wanted to possess him somehow, possess his innocence and strange beauty.