by Terry Griggs
So what had he been doing so far from town on this southern shore on this part of the lake not shy about horking up the dead?
“Fishin’.”
“You were not fishing.” Nor, at this point, were we discussing nuclear physics.
“That right?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
God, why did I bother. Take a look at him. Grease incarnate. And that suspect smell rolling off him? Did he ever wash? Grooming aside, he also had a devil burrowing into his heart like a worm mining an apple. I could practically hear it if I got my ear close enough to his chest.
He looks at me, looks away, laughs.
What, what, what?
Not that it mattered, despite how I felt, longing shooting out of my head in spikes. Nile wasn’t destined to be my first love, the one true thing that I’ll needlessly wreck and never forget, spawning the seductive figure who will slip out of the shadows and into my dreams even when I’m an old bat. No, Nile was emotional mulch, the preparatory ground, romantic tilth. I wanted to sink my hands into this fertile earth deeply, deeply. Eros’ apprentice gardener.
My mother needn’t have worried, if worry the motivation. Never was I invited into his plush, sex-lit sanctum on wheels. Nile had no compunction whatsoever about feeling up anything remotely female, livestock and minerals included. But, now of age, he would not touch me!
“You’re skinny,” he said. “You look like a drowned rat.” Or, more winningly, “What nose did they pick you out of? Eh, Scuts?”
Ah, fond family talk. I wondered, though, didn’t he know the difference between a cousin and a sister?
Yes, yes, all right, while my future physique might best be described as Junoesque, I was presently more goddess-nascent. Larval, if you will. I knew I had potential, because I’d begun to catch looks from boys my own age. Guys without cars, muscles, chest hair, wallets with chains, swagger, dirty yellow combs sticking out of their back pockets, and smokes glued to their bottom lips. I kept an eye on their manly development nonetheless. Juno Fidia.
His girlfriends? No contest, all cross-eyed and bucktoothed, I kid you not. Some were fat, some halt, and some so old they obviously needed elastic bands on their underwear to hold them together and keep them upright. Body bags, all. Generously, Nile paid them court, indiscriminately portioning out his charms. A single focus, one girlfriend only, even one bejewelled with a goiter, would have been a more dangerous proposition, unless the one girlfriend happened to be me. Not that I can’t be dangerous, especially when riled. Juno Fulminator.
Nile in love? A disturbing thought.
I flipped through the phone book to see who might be living in the island’s southern reaches, in some enchanted cedar scrub populated by the inbred, the unemployed, and perhaps a witch. Or a siren, working the beach, who may have called out to a corpse bobbing irresolutely in the water and convinced it to call it a day, to come sculling in like a lonely seal and lie at her feet. RIP, my pet.
Mother snapped her fingers in my face, told me to stop mooning around, do the dishes, do something. I shifted to my room, slammed the door, and hurled myself onto the bed, at one with my discarded clothes, a host of selves slaughtered by ill-use. My childhood hovered beguilingly close. There’d be no retreating, though, no more whirling carefree down the road on my bike, no more spinning dizzily on the tire swing out back, pulling my immediate world down a drain hole vortex. Undeniably I was sick, infected with maturity.
But this thing, please don’t call it puppy love. It was more like something that ate puppies.
Fact is, I was older than Nile in many ways. My command of language, for one. Always silver tongued, I could now spin gold, forging one aureate link after another. Listening to me (I think he listened), the best Nile could do was swill beer, nod, belch.
Evidently, there would be no catching him in a linguistic snare. My campaign required actions, not words. Mother commanded me to do something? Okay then, I will, I most definitely will.
My friend Beatrice, usually firm in her sympathies, regarded me with alarm. Her naturally bulgy eyes bulged a degree more.
“You’re not serious, are you?”
“Darn tootin’.”
“Hero?”
“What?”
“This is not a good idea, you know that.”
“Why don’t you come, too?”
“Hah. Parents.”
Bea’s parents were less distracted than mine, a feature of our domestic arrangement that I’d be counting on. Her parents rarely left the house, their own bulgy eyes relentless in surveillance.
“Sluts,” she shook her head in wonder. “Tramps.”
Bea’s own verbal reach was modest, but she managed to produce the essentials as required. In this instance referring to the kind of women who attended the Saturday night dances held in the boathouse on the town dock, dances that not infrequently featured vile language, vile manners, punch-ups, knives, random grunting, and adulterous scrabbling in dark corners. In other words über-adult affairs. If Nile was to be found anywhere, this was the place.
“I’m going.”
“You’ve got to wear a skirt.”
“A skirt? Jesus!”
“And a bra.”
“——!”
Getting out of the house on the night of my romantic crusade was a snap. All week, I half-expected my parents to deviate from their usual behaviour and unwittingly throw a spanner into the works, some plot complication in our ongoing family sitcom to bugger things up. On Saturday, perchance alerted by my unsolicited bout of hygienic activity (washed hair, brushed teeth), I feared they would smell a rat (one with a dab of Evening in Paris behind each ear) and, in an unprecedented move, award me with the full blessing of their attentions. Make popcorn, break out the Monopoly board, attempt conversation, or dumb jokes, and basically seal up the windows and doors with a gluey clan ambience.
But no, Mother’s fork had barely cooled on the dinner table before she’d peeled away down the drive, off to bingo. (“Hell, I’d shout ‘Bingo,’ too, if he was that good,” says Auntie Viv.) Father ambled into the living room, flicked on the TV, flomped onto the worse-for-wear La-Z-Boy, kicked off his shoes, wiggled his toes, yawned, scratched his chin. Gone.
So no complications. I didn’t even bother to slide pillows under the bedcovers and sculpt them into a surrogate self. Who would look in later to check on me to see if I was all right—in situ angelic and unharmed, or out boogying the night away? Children’s Aid? The actual sitcom remained confined to the tube, unspooling viewer-free as I snuck out, while our particular plot remained predictable, if unfathomable.
Once out of doors, the question of transportation arose. Options: take the bike to town, or be transported along the shore on my own sneaker-shod feet. The road would be quicker but came with perils, mainly from a Saturday night spike in traffic. A pastoral spike, intermittent at best, but still. I risked recognition, dust up my nose, and agonizing death in the ditch at the heedless hands of a driver half-cut and with his tongue planted not in his cheek, but in his lady friend’s waxy ear. This thought was so revolting that I decided on the shore.
No need to hurry. Things didn’t heat up at the dance until dark, and with the boathouse crowded and lights dimmed for body contact activities, I planned to slip in unnoticed. I could afford the dawdling more than I could the cover charge. Or being turfed out before Nile had a chance to take me under his wing, fledgling vamp that I was.
I passed some time on the shore, skipped some stones, sat on my favourite rock, roosting on fossils, hazarding hemorrhoids. With night well on its way—Nyx in flowing, funereal dress advancing across the sky, black chariot, black horses—cold began to seep into the rock, chilling my little cheeks. Trouble with skirts, they let in too much of the outside world.
“Picture yourself twirling,” Beatrice had urged, her saleswoman future already in for
ce as she thumbed through the borrowable stock in her closet.
Friends, it wasn’t me. A plaid, pleated number, browny orange, that fell below my knees. What finally clinched it? The thing was reversible, a feature I’m a sucker for, whether in a product or a human (figuratively speaking). The reverse side wasn’t all that different, a browny green plaid, but I liked the idea of a secret skirt and making a quick switch in mid-manic-twirl, hey presto, part dervish, part magician. Wouldn’t that just floor them.
Halfway to town, much darker now, waves chatting up the shoreline, I began to wonder what it might be like to stumble across a floater. In island life, always a possibility. Like the man from Michigan, deceased water-borne tourists did occasionally show up requiring accommodation. With visibility low to nil, a person might easily trip over one and land smack on top of it, sending a fountain of lake water leaping out of its mouth.
Nile hadn’t seemed troubled in the least about his beach find, but then his life’s mission was to cause trouble, not feel its effects.
I picked up the pace. (I ran.)
The place was hopping when I got there, live band, The Blacksmiths, they were terrible. I hung around on the dock, crouched behind a pile of junk—coiled ropes, nets, wooden crates, a broken outboard—and caught a lucky break when the guy manning the ticket booth went out for a piss and a smoke. Slipping in, I navigated the wall, finding the most shadowy spot from which to observe the goings-on. I’m telling you, it was a study. Fast dances, slow dances. During the slow ones, couples tried to crawl inside each other, and during the fast ones they couldn’t get far enough apart, bobbing their heads, shaking their fat deposits, writhing like they were covered in snakes and trying to fling them off.
I knew most everyone there except the out-of-towners, and I’ll admit to being shocked when I discovered Miss Lewis, the grade five teacher, among them. In my drippy skirt, I looked more like a schoolteacher than she did with her high heels, tight pants, tight top, and scarlet lips. (Wait till Bea hears about this.) Strutting past, Douggie Williams was so busy leering at her that he failed to notice a puddle of puke dead on, stepped in it, then sailed across the room executing an ace triple lutz before felling Hercules Orr, pinboy at the bowling alley who, while no stranger to missiles heading his way, was too impressed to leap aside. The room burst into wildly appreciative hoots and guffaws.
Have to admit, I was enjoying myself. I settled back, sticking to the wall like adhesive, when out of the steamy miasma, composed of sweat, bad breath, booze, and eau de earthworm (the boathouse sold bait during the day), a skeletal hand reached out, latched onto mine, and yanked me into the fray. Some guy, a total stranger, scraggy and old, needing dental work and hair.
“Hey, baby,” he said, looking me up and down, grinning. “Left yer tits at home, didja?”
I took this to be a rhetorical question, and frankly I was too stunned by the appearance of this spectre to respond.
“Take off, dipshit.”
Not me saying it (though it should have been), for Hero’s hero—undetected up till now—had arrived! Nile applied his palm to the side of the guy’s head and shoved. Crick went the interloper’s neck.
“Watch it, asshole. I found ’er first.”
“Fuck off,” Nile said, so casually I gave him a thumbs-up. Such class.
And seeing as he came with a complete set of toned biceps, currently on display, my geriatric date did as advised, spitting expletives as he stumbled through the crowd.
Nile stared at me.
“What are you doing here?”
“It’s a dance, yeah? I can dance, you should see me. Want to? Let’s, c’mon. It’s really something, you know. How I can dance. . . .”
“Listen.” He slid his dangerous hands into his pockets, looked down at his pointy shoes, looked up at me. Dark eyes intent. He sighed, softly. But, magic in the air, that sigh had enough wind power to scatter the prohibition that had been placed upon me like a spell. He reached out, both hands, touched my hair and hooked it behind my ears. He trailed his fingers down my neck, over my shoulders, tenderly smoothing the wrinkles out of my shirt, briefly lingering on the straps of my training bra beneath. He ran his hands slowly down my arms and gently held me by my wrists.
“Go home.”
Exactly what you might say to a dog.
“How? Will you drive me?”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t ask.”
He relinquished his hold and turned away. My own hands fell limp at my sides as I watched him move like liquid past the band and out of the open doorway. About to follow—I had no intention of letting him escape so easily—someone else stepped in front of me, blocking my exit.
“Uh, want to dance?”
Matt Finch. A boy from high school, upper grades, tall, not bad looking, but I’m afraid the name Matt suited him to a T; psychologically speaking, he was a clump of tightly wound and interwoven neuroses. Also, since I had a decent view of his shirt, I saw that he had a piece of meat stuck on it. Hot dog fallout, I surmised. A meager sample, but effective in clearing the room. Of me, at least.
“Sorry,” I said, dodging around him. “Gotta find my cousin. It’s urgent.”
“Oh, don’t,” I heard him say to my retreating back. “Don’t go out.”
Have I ever been accused of listening to sound advice? I have not. I went out.
Not a soul on the dock, strangely. No couples out for a breather, a smooch, a dance that might advance into the lake, depending on their level of blood alcohol.
And no Nile. Typical. The more I wanted to see him, the less I saw. My man, making himself scarce, rationing himself out. The secret of his success (and my failure).
I raced down the length of the dock to the parking lot. A tactical error. His car sat motionless in the dust, as forsaken as me. The band, venue-sensitive if nothing else, was playing “Smoke on the Water,” loudly, but not so loud that it masked the sound of an outboard starting up. A Peterborough, by the sounds of it. I loved being out in a powerboat at night, tearing along, pure freedom—or a convincing enough illusion of it.
I loved it a whole lot more than sitting on the splintery end of the dock, digging my nails into my knees and sucking in motor oil fumes as I watched the water cresting in the boat’s wake. So it wasn’t my hair that the wind reverently tousled. Nor was that luminous, ghost-white dress, fluttering so evocatively, worn by me. I knew her—all too well—but my brain refused the information, keeping her safely generic, blank as her dress. (What would our family do without the faculty of denial?)
I wondered if they stole the boat. Both stood in the bow, not touching, she steering, facing the open water.
Where Nile had touched me it hurt, as if he’d laid down a trail of bruises or burns on my skin.
I raised my hand to my chest, too late to protect myself, and felt something lumpy in my shirt pocket. Digging in, I pulled out a gold chain. The gold chain, grave robber’s loot, and a gift as dexterously given as it was perplexing. If our Michigan friend, pre-autopsy, remained a mystery, he wasn’t a patch on Nile. Cut him open and you’d be no wiser.
Pouring the chain from hand to hand, this hand, that hand, my heart contracted, pitiful and pitiless. I imagined a dark shape moving in the water below, and with a self-conferred power of occult redress payed the chain into the lake, righting all indignities. I looked up at the starless night sky and imagined rain, a hard, painful, obliterating downpour.
And then it came.
Closer
Let me tell you something. I have resources, not your typical. I’m a bona fide conduit of strange. And something else. Think darkest, what I’m after, what I can almost reach. It’s like a treasure resting on the bottom of the lake, a lost lure festooned with hooks. A cruel thing. I keep trying and trying.
In the meantime, I’m sixteen. I am not sweet. I�
�m steeped in ignorance and yet I know everything, as any respectable sixteen year old should. Not only the goings-on in town—the affairs, the swindles, the vendettas—and the family secrets—dirty or slight or searing—but the more arcane goods, harder to come by. I have no need to make withdrawals from the community loose-lips fund.
Also, I have these new power tools, hormonally acquired, it’s amazing what they can do. But I’m in no rush to use them. The current boyfriend is smitten. (Note: Am using the term ‘current’ loosely here as ‘first’ might give the wrong impression.) He’s head over heels, although you’d never know it from some of the things he says. Of my most recent school photo, proudly presented, he observes, “You look like a witch.”
Well well well. Look who’s dishing out a simile. Unwittingly. You are a witch, might have been closer to the mark. But the mark he usually misses. As he fumblingly slides the photo into a plastic sleeve of his tan cowboy-boot embossed wallet, I give him the once-over. Acne minimal, flop of reddish golden hair adorning his brow, standard issue nose, good teeth—visible, on account of his mouth hanging open. (Okay, lips slightly parted.) (Soft lips, mm-hmm). All in all not an embarrassment. Thus he earns a reprieve, although he needs beware. I know a curse that deployed will suck his head through the neck hole of his freshly laundered Fruit-of-the-Loom T-shirt, lickety-split and without a single feature left lagging.
“X,” he says.
I’m not listening.
“XXX,” he says, louder, more insistently.
Don’t press your luck, chum.
I have more on my mind than boys boys boys. For example, because I know everything and my high school teachers obviously don’t, I’ve decided to extend to them my sympathetic interest and, more importantly, my assistance. This benighted group is so locked in the students’ comedic conception of them that they’re scarcely real. Cutouts, two-dimensional, jokers and cartoons. They’re oddballs I’ll grant you that, but, rolling up my sleeves and cracking the knuckles on my capable and lovely hands, I am prepared to grant them a dimension.