Love & Darts (9781937316075)

by Jones, Nath

  There is an elegance as though he wants to draw them more near to something impossible. She turns her mind away from his work and keeps pushing her pole into the river bottom.

  The man in the water notices none of the others’ unseen exertion and swims behind them both, holding onto the edge of the raft, kicking out with fun frog-legs, blowing bubbles, pushing them all downstream his way, keeping his distance, waiting a few more minutes to get back on.

  She likes that he’s pushing, helping her make them go, because she doesn’t like that—doesn’t understand why—the other man laid down his pole and just gave up. The reflections she gathers up from the water exist almost, but they aren’t real enough to distract her from the work that’s necessary: pulling the pole up, planting it into just a reach ahead, pulling her body closer to that place, bringing the raft along with her feet until her body is past that pole, and then methodically pulling it up, and dipping it again, sometimes twisting from one side of the raft to the other to keep their heading.

  The man on the raft is still angry from the neck up. He doesn’t understand why they don’t know he’s laid down the pole and picked up the current instead. Hand-over-hand he pulls the nothing rope that’s frayed and twisted as if caught in the teeth of a gar that swims through the shallows of a faraway, nearly unimaginable delta, through brackish silt avoiding the sea. The man left with his feelings on the raft just wants the man in the water to love him; no, not only him, her too. So of course he lays down his pole and pulls the invisible rope and so they move forward. Hand-over-hand the blisters rise. He is pulling them toward an open end where the river gives up like Sunday afternoon onto the flat forgotten parts of the Gulf and they will be there, soon maybe, if he keeps ever-pulling.

  Hand-over-hand he is angry from the neck up. Pushing her pole into the mud she ignores his pouting pathos and looks back at the man in the water blowing bubbles, kicking with fun frog-legs. She watches him and he likes it. He notices her gaze and rolls onto his back to let go a belly of sunlight warmth. He wears the silver river lining like a glass ornament blown full of mercury and rises endlessly against impossibility.

  She wants him, puts the pole down, starts to climb into the water, but he comes up to her instead, pulls himself onto the raft. With water sheeting down his body and the clay gone he lies in the center of what they’ve lashed together. They aren’t quite callous that the other man pulls them hand-over-hand toward the delta with his whole mind and heart. They just make their love like joint checking used to be.

  The man making love to her thinks, “You can love her. Or you can know. But you can't love her and know. It's too much.” So he pretends he knows. It’s enough.

  But the man pulling them all toward an open end with a nonexistent rope made of what’s felt is exhausted. It is not quite an interruption of their union when he says, “I’m hungry,” as he pulls and pulls and pulls. But he gets tired, bored, lonely, sad, and ties a knot in the rope no one can see.

  The other two know he is angry from the neck up.

  Agreement or not, the unforgiving middle of a heart cannot be quieted. They do not ignore him but do not include him either and their sweat comes together in places to trickle down off their backs past the hairs and over the muscles.

  The other clenches his cringing repetitive curse. “I’m hungry.”

  Between kisses, between dives, twists, caresses, and unfolded origami car commercial double magazine pages one of the two of them acknowledges him with minimum courtesy, “We know. God, we know.”

  His bare feet are burning. He wonders about the knot that holds them there being beaten by the sun.

  CREPE MYRTLE & SUMMER CICADAS

  I am with my husband, who has the day off. It may seem a comfort. Melodious wind and tension left in the sky. But these are delirious times. And electricity doesn’t mix well with water.

  We’ve come to the swimming pool after a thunderstorm. My husband does not swim. He has his reasons. I wouldn’t say he doesn’t want to be here. But coming to the pool today was my idea.

  Years ago someone put a lot of thought into this apartment complex. It’s got to be older than I am. I don’t know. Maybe it’s not. Maybe it just needs to be taken care of a little bit better. A little gazebo full of mailboxes has a sturdy wooden floor under which possums must congregate. But anyway the speed-bumped drive is flanked first by flags and then by unambitious trees that grow up any way in raised planters made of railroad ties. Each gray-and-maroon-painted apartment building has a foundation among hardwoods and the swimming pool sits serene amidst them all on landscaped embankments. Crepe myrtle, boxwood, and Bill’s Blue deodar cedar nearly strangled by the smilax that’s been left untended for years.

  The birds are quiet now, just after midday, just after the thundering rain. But the incessant sounds of cicadas reminds us of the surrounding heat, which makes the pool road’s sloped asphalt seem a steam plate. It is silly to bring a towel to lie on because the chaise lounges are pooled with water. But habits die hard. The sky is still black with clouds. There is the stench of Banana Boat sunscreen but that may be a film on the water.

  My girlfriends say my husband’s controlling.

  We’ve been talking about it. Not what my girlfriends say. They don’t understand him like I do. What I meant is, we’ve been talking about my wanting to come to the pool today. I thought it would be something fun for us to do on his day off. I didn’t think he’d be playing poker online all morning, drinking all the milk, and then keeping at that computer stuff while we waited two more hours for the rain to stop.

  I was watching talk shows in the living room but saw him go and get the emergency credit card that’s taped to the wall behind the calendar. He took it back to the back bedroom and shut the door. I heard the lock click. What am I gonna do? Go back there? Try to get the credit card away from him? Try to unplug the computer, turn off the power strip, change his password, tip the monitor over? I’ve tried all that shit before. What’s the point? All he’s gonna do is shove me out of the room and get back on that stupid website. No use having that lady upstairs call the cops again. It’s not like I care. He’s the one who said we needed to only use the credit card for emergencies and keep it taped to the wall and hidden like that. He can do what he wants.

  I thought maybe we’d go to breakfast or out to the mall and then talk and laugh by the pool and then make dinner together and make love all night. But once he’s on that computer there’s nothing I can say. Plus, he didn’t want to go to breakfast or out to the mall. Said we didn’t have the money. He said we were going to Sonic or staying home, said he always has Sonic for dinner on his days off, said I should know that by now. But I didn’t want Sonic. I wanted to make dinner at home. He said, “Fine. Then make dinner. If you don’t want to go out and spend more money I don’t have, great. Why are we even talking about this?” I am definitely not making love with him after he kept the volume up all the way on his poker game when I was trying to hear my aunt on the phone. So coming to the pool is probably our only fun thing together for his day off, now, and he won’t even get in the water with me. He can pretend all he wants but I know he’s not asleep over there.

  I dive in and split a limpid box full of wet blue that I wish were cooler.

  For five minutes, I’ve got the pool to myself and my husband has all of the deck chairs since it just stopped raining. Then some obnoxious man, his kid, and his buddy show up. I didn’t mean to be such a bitch. But. Whatever.

  The man is a jerk, you can tell. He has red hair and muttonchops that are probably meant to be funny. His trunks are ugly forest green and five years old at least. But his kid is worse. This child is the kind that I truly hate. Speech impediment. Loud. Female. An awkward tween with no discipline. Not at all cute. She’s got a fat belly, stumpy legs, drooped broad shoulders, and must be totally attention-starved because she stomps right and left and shrieks around her too-young father and his pot-smoking friend. They are men with tribal armband tattoos and budd
ing tans.

  They miss her doing a cannonball that splashes water onto my head. I look at my husband, appalled. But. He’s not watching. He probably really is asleep.

  Safely perhaps, the child flops around in the shallow end of the pool. I do a little breaststroke to get further out into the middle of the pool. I can tolerate a lot. I don’t really care what people do. But the wave action she creates is still a problem and I’m here to have fun. I don’t want to get too close to those guys she’s with. They are lying in the sun at the farthest possible point away from the child. So I’m caught between them while the girl shrieks continually, “Daddy, did you see that?”

  “See what? Do it again, Hoss.”

  Hoss? Now, if I had a child, and I don’t—my husband says we don’t have the money—and I were a man, which I’m not, and my child were a little girl, which I hope to God I never have, I’m thinking that one of the least endearing terms I could ever use for my daughter would be Hoss. I mean, sure the kid’s a little fat, a little boorish, a little—well, yeah, Hoss is apt. But certainly she grew into her expectations.

  If I had a daughter, she’d wear dresses every day and have gorgeous long hair that I’d braid across the top of her head or into two matching fishtails. I’d help her with her homework. My husband wouldn’t scream profanity at the computer screen in the back bedroom behind a locked door. I wouldn’t turn up the volume on the TV. No. My parents would come and visit. They’d stay in the back bedroom. I’d have four pillows for them to choose from and a new, warm blanket that matches the curtains.

  I’m not afraid of them or anyone.

  The girl in the pool keeps trying to do flips.

  I want to be nice. I want to not care that this girl is playing at whatever kind of back flip she hopes that is. Who thinks they can plant a handstand without pointing their toes? She’s got one leg bent and both feet angled like an inline Egyptian statue. Lord. I would love to just throw the bratty little ass-child straight up over the blasted fence into the dumpster. Yet I am forced to resort to the much-abused pleasant onlooker who seems to give a shit. Now her dad and his friend aren’t watching at all. Dammit. She’s made eye contact with me and seems to assume I’m enjoying her show. As if I would ever want to be an audience for her. I’d rather watch my father organize his pressed-penny collection.

  Okay. Well. Fine. That was a good one.

  She needs to tuck her chin.

  Better.

  She’s just pushing water backwards. Pushing off too hard with her legs and she’s not getting the height. Damn, girl. Needs to spring up, then arch her back, then lead with clasped hands.

  There. Good. She arched her back enough. Another good one.

  But the rest of her tricks have been poorly executed and lacking in grace.

  Oh. She definitely got water up her nose with that move.

  Plus, she needs to scoot back about five feet to be in a more shallow part of the pool. That water’s up to her shoulders. She’s fighting all that buoyant resistance. No wonder she’s not getting the height. By the time she pushes off, she’s already sinking.

  Who am I to tell her she’s in too deep?

  I call out to the girl maybe because of the charge in the sky. “Sweetie!”

  The child is defenseless. She looks down at her father. Her father looks at the little girl and then at me. But I have them divided. The little girl treads water and looks at me unresponsive.

  The pool is surrounded by crepe myrtle and a mockingbird flicks her tail.

  “Sweetie, why don’t you just play quietly like all the decent children?”

  Finally, she is ready to play elsewhere and stop making all those irritating waves. Good. Her father is up. His friend is glowering but it doesn’t matter. She wants to go home. She wants to watch NASCAR and do the laundry. She wants a soybean burger and chips.

  Resistance dissipates. They leave.

  The pool is quiet again and my husband is snoring.

  It doesn’t matter. I hear the cicadas live their loud surges after seventeen years. I am watching the side of the mountain play dress-up with the clouds curling by, romantic-like. And we are finally alone again at the pool just like I wanted to be after an electrical storm in the summer.

  JEANIE

  Girls with something to prove aren’t the best to fall in love with. The best type of girl to fall for is one who has given up altogether—a girl who wants nothing and can’t remember if she ever cared anyway. The best type of girl, if you’re looking for girls, is a girl who can offer you only herself. You’ll know when you meet her. She’ll have hollow eyes and never enough to do. But not everyone listens, and sometimes a girl, a stubborn and beautiful girl, gets herself fallen in love with. And then I say, pitying, pompous, loving, kind: Why don’t you ever listen?

  “No. I don’t want to, and I won’t.” Her childhood bedroom door muffled Jeanie’s voice.

  Her mother held the locked doorknob and leaned heavily against the door, hoping pressure might help her reach her daughter. “But he’s come all this way, sweetheart. Don’t you want to talk to him? Hear him out?” There was only silence. After a minute her mother heard a page turn. Her daughter was reading and relaxed with no intention of speaking to anyone.

  Mrs. B. turned slowly in the hall trying to come up with the right words to offer this young man with his earnest intentions. She didn’t want to see his face again. No one had expected him from the way Jeanie made things sound, and yet here he was. He drove over two days to face a family that hated him and a girl who didn’t want to open her door. It wasn’t right. Mrs. B. pictured the poor boy waiting in the living room. His eyes filled with misunderstanding. His limbs loose and unwanted. His hair meant that he had given up and his smile was too vigorous.

  Mrs. B. slipped her hands into the pockets of her apron and leaned back against the hallway wall. Her head knocked a picture frame and she sprang away to prevent it from falling. As it swung on the tiny nail, she looked at the picture. It was from some professional photography studio. Jeanie was two or three in the picture and smiling brightly into the dark hallway across time. Mrs. B. remembered fighting and piling everyone into the car that day. Jeanie had cried all the way to the studio and all the way home, but for a few minutes under the big silver umbrellas of light, which intimidated some of the most brave children, Jeanie basked happily, smiling, and cooing for the camera.

  The picture was beginning to turn yellow.

  Next to it there was a shot of Jeanie in ballet. She was third from the end in a long row of Saturday morning ballerinas. The other thin little figures stood with their feet together and their arms at their sides. Among them, Jeanie stood resolutely with her arms thrown open and her feet planted wide apart. None of the girls was over six years old, and Jeanie was certainly one of the smaller ones, but somehow the command of her stance filled her smiling mother with courage. It was impossible to know what was going on that moment, whether Jeanie were stretching, behind a step, or just plain ignoring directions, but the picture led one to believe that it was Jeanie, little tiny round-bellied Jeanie, who was bounds ahead of the rest and quickly catching on to the newest motion.

  It’s probably more foolish for a bunch of little girls from a nowhere town to ever think they could become ballerinas than for them to believe in Santa Claus. But then it’s even funnier that mothers and aunts go on encouraging hopes of Nutcracker stardom long after Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy become the silly forgotten nonsense of childhood.

  The next picture showed Jeanie with her brothers and sisters and a number of other children at the beach. Her mother remembered the day. Jeanie had organized every child in a two-mile radius into an elaborate game. There were children running along a jetty diligently scraping barnacles and directing the water traffic. There were children pulling beach grass and raking seaweed into enormous piles that other children were building into fortresses. There were children who ran, children who cleared rocks, and children who defended boulders. There were chil
dren making piles of clam shells, and mussel shells, and there were children grinding the shells, in exact proportions, into a medicinal slag with rounded stones in the bottoms of six brightly-colored pails. There were children clearing the ravine of the sharpest rocks, and children screaming to one another from king-of-the-mountain vantage points. There were two tiny children looking for live periwinkles for the sake of an activity, and there were some bigger children who stood awkwardly nearby, wishing they were younger so as to be less inhibited and more involved. No one understood the rules. Jeanie was at the center of it all and the children swarmed around her looking for tactical advice, reassurance, a reassessment or clarification of the rules, and guidance. They brought their products for her approval and asked her to mull over this or that strategy and plan.

  Most of the children were running nonstop the entire morning but Jeanie sat in her emerald green suit and dark tan on top of a rock dictating the show and making sure to include everyone. When no one needed her she sat looking at the water. Sometimes she looked out at the horizon with conviction. Sometimes she looked down into the shadow of the rock and watched the clinging seaweed thrash in the water. Mrs. B. remembered so much motion from those hours of that day but in the picture Jeanie’s little feet were drawn up close to her body. Amid the ocean and the swarm of children she was tiny. Waves crashed all around the huge rock.

  To get the best picture, her mother had strolled up, in the way that mothers sometimes do in their broad-brimmed hats, and dropped in to visit the self-appointed queen. When she asked her daughter to explain the game, Mrs. B. remembered Jeanie's saying to her, from behind Mickey Mouse sunglasses, “It’s like war, Mommy. No one understands it, so someone just has to pretend so that nobody will be scared. Then everyone will be okay.” The game ended late in the day when the troops were exhausted and the queen’s throne was overcome by the tide. Even when every child on the beach fights as hard as any full-grown squadron can, they don’t defeat the tide.