Him lost too, finally. But that was as it should be. A woman didn’t always need a man to be fulfilled. She was looking for something more, but wasn’t quite sure what. Only that she’d know it when she came upon it. It sure wasn’t three grizzled men.
Sitting there, sipping at the steaming hot tea, her eyes were drawn once more toward the faint glow amid the trees. Beyond the shadowy hulk of the tent a park security light burned, outlined the bath house, where she surely would have to go before turning in for the night. Forced to walk past their probing stares and into the place, them knowing full well what she would do in there. Come back out and retrace her steps, their eyes following her every move.
There appeared to be no one else in the park. Lord, why had she done this? Of course, she expected no answer to that question and got none.
To her great relief, the men weren’t about when, a while later, she ventured along the road with a towel and soap, sneakers crunching on gravel illuminated by the beam of her flashlight. Parked against the rustic rail built to keep cars out of the tenting area were three motorcycles.
Oh, great. Not bad enough they were scruffy and boisterous and foul-mouthed. On top of that, they were bikers. Could it get any worse than this?
A while later, she walked back, imagined three sets of curious eyes peering at her from the darkness, but neither saw them nor heard a sound. What had she expected? Wolf calls? Well, maybe.
Dear God. Was she disappointed?
****
In the darkness of the tent, Lefty and Shadow’s noisy night breathing lulled Steven toward a restless sleep. Touching the woman, smelling the vague fragrance of apricots in her hair, disturbed his other self. The creature he kept tucked firmly away where nothing could get at it. With a sigh he turned toward the back wall, sucked in the musty smell of old, damp canvas, closed his eyes, and found himself gazing down with nine-year-old eyes into Papa’s coffin. Saw the familiar old man change into a young soldier dressed in jungle gear. Steven Michael Llewellyn, killed in ’Nam, like he should’ve been.
A terrifying darkness swallowed him up.
He lay in the gloom of the smelly tent, clawed at the filthy canvas floor, at a round, cool hardness. A weapon. A bottle. Trembling fingers closed on the neck. Feeling around, he found the hump of a rock beneath the canvas and began to hum “Puff The Magic Dragon.” As his voice broke on the high part, he sang the words.
“Lived by the sea, and frolicked in the morning mist...in the autumn mist....” Always got that part wrong.
He smashed the bottle on the rock. “In the land called Hanna Lee.”
The glass shattered, sparkling like shimmers of iridescent water. Squeezing his eyes shut, he ran a fingertip over the jagged edge, imagined its color and substance, felt for an instant the glorious finality of death, and jammed the wicked shard deep into the inner flesh of his wrist. Twisted. Odd how he felt nothing.
“Little Jackie Paper loved that Dragon Puff.”
He hated to do this without Lefty. The best friend a man like him could have. Always telling him he wanted to go along when the time came to do the ugly deed.
“Take me with you, man,” he’d say. “Take me with you, ’cause I’m scared to stay here alone.”
Crazy Cajun mud-runner.
“And brought him strings and sealing wax and other lovely things.” Was that right? Maybe not.
No tears. Too late to cry. Much too late. His ruined life twisted behind him in long, ugly spirals. Like he’d snatched at it, squeezed it dry, then tossed it away. Never once looking back. Lot of good it’d do to tell everyone how sorry he was. Not at this late date. But he was. All those people he’d hurt, especially Mama and Jennie. Dear God, he was indeed sorry.
From far off came a bellow of agony. An echo that rolled like dying thunder. Oblivious, he gazed into the illusionary faces of the women he’d loved and abandoned. The pain came then, in blinding blues and reds, fire bolts that exploded and slashed away their images. Jaws clenched, teeth grinding...cloaked by flames, he tumbled into a dark empty hole.
“One gray night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more, and Puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar…crawled into his cave…”
With remnants of the song on his lips, he awoke, struggling against the mad embrace of a ratty blanket, kicked both legs even as he caught his breath in snatches. Like he’d been dead and come back to life. One of these days he’d make that nightmare come true, create a reality from which he’d never awaken.
Like the woman he’d dragged out of the lake. What gave her the guts to walk out into the water until it closed over her head, not once lifting a finger or making a sound? He’d fought in a war, for God’s sake. He was a fucking hero. Why couldn’t he do such a thing?
Maybe he’d ask her.
****
Up with the sun, Mary Elizabeth carried her coffee down to the shore. The lake bled a cool morning mist that slithered around her ankles, reminded her of what she had done the evening before. She sucked in a breath of air, raised her face to the rising sun. How good it felt to be alive.
A voice from over her shoulder startled her.
“Thinking of jumping in there again? ’Cause if you do, I’m letting you have your way.”
Coffee sloshed over the rim of the cup as she whirled to see the man who’d dragged her from the lake the day before. He stood several paces away, twitched a brief smile. Dimples carved humor into the features as if the artist who had sketched him had returned to add one more detail. It was an amazing restoration. She couldn’t help but smile back.
“That smells good,” he said when she didn’t reply.
She held out the steaming cup. “Here, take it.”
He held up a hand. She saw it trembled ever so slightly. Probably on drugs and needed his morning fix.
“No. Please take it. I owe you more than just a cup of coffee for…for yesterday.”
To her surprise, he shrugged and wrapped a hand around the cup, strong fingers capturing hers before she could let go.
They held on like that a while, then his lips performed that odd little tremor again, and he allowed her fingers to slip from under his.
“So you didn’t really want to die? I’m disappointed. I’d hoped you’d explain to me how you got up the courage to do it.” He sipped the coffee, eyeing her with skepticism over the cup’s rim.
“Of course not. I mean, I slipped. I was just wading around…thinking…and I got in too far. The mud—”
“Shit,” he said softly. Once more his features were altered, this time by disbelief.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You beg my pardon? Certainly. Most certainly. You’re pardoned.” He tilted his head in a mock bow that infuriated her, left her speechless. “Is it that you never heard the word or that you resent I don’t believe you?”
“Both…neither.” She wanted to yell “shit” back at him, to see if she could wipe the smirk off that face.
“Go ahead,” he said, as if reading her mind.
“You’re a very unpleasant young man.”
He made a rude noise. “Not so young. You sound like an old-maid schoolteacher.”
She flinched. “As it happens, I am a schoolteacher, but, sorry to say, not an old maid.”
Perfectly drawn eyebrows crawled his forehead. “Okay, that’s settled. I’m hardly young and you’re not an old maid.” He continued to drink the coffee and watch her like a bird on a fence. If she were a worm.
She held up her left hand, then remembered that she’d taken off her wedding band and laid it in the center of the kitchen table where Reudell would be sure to see it. After twenty-five years the mark was still there, embedded in her flesh…her soul.
“You’re married. What’re you doing out here alone, then? Walking into the lake. And what’d you do with the ring?”
“That’s none of your business.”
Again the tilt of his head. “Granted.” This morning the blue eyes appeared overcast with cloud
s, the whites slightly bloodshot, and he stared beyond her, through her, made the mere act of drinking the coffee one of acute desolation. Like he was alone on earth and expected nothing more to ever happen to him. Nothing good, at any rate.
It wouldn’t be wise to feel sorry for this man. Her and her nurturing soul. First thing you know, she’d have his head on her shoulder, fingers threading through that gorgeous blond hair, petting him and telling him everything would be all right. When it wouldn’t…would it? Another fantasy.
Without either of them saying any more, he finished the coffee in one gulp, held out the cup.
She curved a palm around it like she could somehow glean something of him from what he’d touched. She thought he would leave then, but he didn’t.
“You’re not going to take another swim, are you?” he asked.
“No.” She gazed at the ground, at his bare feet in bulky black rubber sandals. He had nice feet, no hairs on the well-formed toes. Then back up at him. “That was foolish. But I truly had no intention of, uh, doing away with myself.”
His brief chuckle was surprisingly upsetting, like a villain in an old movie. “Of course you didn’t.” He turned and walked away without bidding her goodbye. After half a dozen steps he raised a hand in a farewell wave but didn’t look back.
A feeling of extreme annoyance mixed with an intimate delight that crawled out of hiding from the shadows of her soul, threatening to turn loose her darkest, most vile secret. One she dare not allow to surface.
Not here, not now, not ever again.
Chapter Two
“You gonna do about her?” Lefty asked Steven, hefting a shoulder in the direction of the woman’s camp. Waiting for a reply, he reversed the tape of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” and clicked the button on the battered player. “Dragging. Need fuckin’ batteries.” He let the song play on, swaying a little to the wavering beat, his penetrating gaze pinned on Steven.
Those bright, birdlike eyes made Steven nervous. He knew what madness lurked beneath the surface. Hell of a question, anyway, but typical of Lefty. “Why am I supposed to do anything about her?”
“You dragged her outta the drink. You know what they say.”
“Yeah, but it’s stupid. No one is responsible for anyone else, and surely not someone who’s so dumb as to walk into a lake.”
He knew what Lefty was getting at but didn’t want to think about the agony and guilt of having saved a man who was too miserable to live. And what about himself? They both should’ve died in that hell. Saved everyone a lot of grief. But they hadn’t, and Lefty sure didn’t own him because of it. The bond between them remained one of hate and love, resentment and gratitude.
Lefty slipped on beyond the touchy subject. “She like you, you. Bitches always have.”
The raw slur angered Steven, who ordinarily could match Lefty’s foul mouth word for word, no matter how lowdown. But he didn’t want such references to fall anywhere near the red-haired woman. And wasn’t that a hell of a thing? What did he care, anyway?
Unable to answer his own questions, and not in the mood to go at it with his friend, he took another tack. “What gave you that idea? She don’t even know me. If she did, she definitely would not like me, not unless she’s crazy.”
“She give you coffee, she. Let you drink right outta her cup. Put your lips where hers were. I didn’t see you doin’ no objecting, neither.”
Not sure what Lefty was getting at, Steven decided to let his friend holler around some more, get a fix on his point before continuing this conversation. Lefty liked to start at the tail end of a subject and back into it. And irritating him was no way to go.
“She pretty, but kinda old, ain’t she?”
“Christ. You think we ain’t old? Older’n her by a long shot, when it comes right down to it. She hasn’t seen what we have. And look at us. Scruffy as hell. What’d she want looking at us, anyway? Did you smell her? All womany, and sweet.”
Lefty laughed heartily. “See, I tell you so.”
“Tell...told me so, what? God.” Steven shook his head, stood up and gestured toward a collection of empty cans and cartons. “Look at this mess. Why don’t you clean it up?”
“Let Shadow do it, man.” Lefty pivoted, searching out the small man, shouting in his Cajun drawl, “Hey, boy. Ole S’n’M, he want you clean up this place.”
Steven shot a look at him. “Shit, you don’t gotta do that.”
All innocence, Lefty shrugged. “What, man?”
“You know what.”
With a shift of his dark eyes, like he might be about to deny he’d done anything wrong, Lefty came as close to an apology as he ever did. “Feeling rank, you know? Sure as hell didn’t mean nothing by it. He call hisself ‘boy’ all the time.”
Apparently taking no offense, the easygoing Shadow nodded and set to picking up the trash scattered around the campsite.
Odd how a guy like him could hang with such obnoxious white guys. Steven bent to help him pick up the trash. Deep down in his soul where he kept things he didn’t like to look at, he knew the answer to that. Shadow had missed the war because he was too young, had tried to make up for it in all the wrong ways. Joining protests, going to Washington and getting stomped on by cops. He’d never had the heart to tell him that such actions had only caused a great deal of pain to those doing the fighting. Felt he’d hurt enough people over the years without starting in on a boy who appeared to adore him.
Besides, Shadow was already on a real guilt trip. He’d found himself two sorry souls using that war as an excuse for their behavior, and he intended to make it up to them that he hadn’t gone into battle. Like that would help anyone, himself included.
Figuring that out had taken Steven a long time, and sometimes he wished he hadn’t. Better maybe to resent Shadow because he hadn’t walked in the valley of the shadow. Couldn’t know what it was like. But such arguments were futile.
Trailing the silent Shadow to the Dumpster, he spotted the woman walking along the beach, stooping now and again to pick up something, examine it, then toss it far out into the water. Today she wore shorts, and a red top that clashed with her hair. But she looked great, skin like burnished ivory. Something happened inside him, rose a lump in his throat. Yearning was what it was. Yearning for a hell of a lot more than a good-looking woman.
Too fucking late for that, but, fool that he was, he tossed the trash in the large bin and headed down toward the lake to see if she would talk to him. Just talk, that’s all.
Mary Elizabeth saw him coming, knew she should go back to camp, leave him standing there. But she didn’t. Pretending not to notice his approach, she kept going, let him catch up.
“Morning,” he said, after walking beside her a few steps.
“Good morning.” She didn’t look at him.
“Feeling better today?”
She glanced his way, eyes blinded by early morning sunlight flashing through the trees so that all she saw was his silhouette. “I’m feeling fine.”
Two, three, four steps in tandem. He took a deep breath. “Not sorry?”
“Sorry?”
He gestured toward the water. “About that...I mean, not mad at me for pulling you out.”
“I didn’t thank you.”
“Didn’t do it for thanks.” Short, crisp, harsh words.
She stopped, while he moved on a few paces before missing her at his side, glanced back, features slightly bewildered. An ugly puckered scar on his back tracked under the waistband of his cutoffs, and she tried not to stare at it.
“Seems to me you’re the one who’s angry,” she said.
He held up a hand, and she saw how delicate his long fingers were, like those of a musician. A musician with dirt under his nails. “I always sound this way.”
“Then you’re always angry?” she teased.
Surprise flashed through his eyes and he favored her with that tremulous, dimpled grin. Like a sudden rainbow across a stormy black sky, it nega
ted the danger. He took some time before answering, staring beyond the shimmering lake.
“Yeah, I guess you could say I am.”
“Why?”
“Why?”
She nodded, waited. He was like one of her sixth-graders trying to explain why he didn’t do a test or turn in his homework. Only she sensed a far deeper reason here than a simple excuse. This man had been torn to shreds and pasted back together. She wasn’t sure how she knew that, she just did. Yet he’d come out here, initiated a somewhat friendly conversation. Awakened a desire for the dangers of the unknown she didn’t welcome.
“I’m Mary Elizabeth. What’s your name?”
The abrupt change appeared to catch him up short. “I didn’t want to know your name,” he said. “Knowing someone’s name changes perceptions.”
Where that came from, she wasn’t sure. He sounded almost civilized, not who he appeared to be. “Then, should I call you ‘Hey You’?”
That earned her another of his half-grins. It took him a moment to reply, as if he had to search for the right answer, even though it was his name. “I’m Steven.”
She reached out a hand and he stared at it, then at his own before wiping a palm on the seat of his denim shorts and offering it.
The contact jarred her. Him too, she guessed, for he let her go almost before they touched, like he’d taken hold of lightning, then nodded his head, staring once more out across the lake.
“Why are you always angry?”
“You only think you want to know.”
The morning sun lifted above the trees behind him, and she shifted and gazed into his face. “I’m a teacher, so that makes me naturally nosy. It’s got something to do with dealing with sullen preteens nine months out of the year. Believe me, I’d dearly love to hold an in-depth, important conversation with another adult.”
“Maybe you’d want to talk to me, maybe you wouldn’t.”
In unspoken agreement, they started walking again, in unison…in silence. The sun on her back felt good. So did him walking beside her. He still didn’t explain his anger, and she took him at his word that she was better off not knowing.
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