“Someone is going to see the bus,” Tracy said. Her voice had a reproving tone. They were all upsetting Cindy and they could all just stop it. “Anytime now, someone will drive by and see that bus and come looking for us.”
“Abso-dol-garned-lutely,” said Fanny. She gave the word an odd little emphasis, more cross than reassuring. She was drumming her fingers, twitching at her hair, tapping one foot. It was a delayed reaction to the accident, or else it was nicotine withdrawal. She took a bottom bunk and the whole bed shook.
“One thing is for sure. Nobody’s been out here for an age,” Sissy said and Irini could feel the May girls glaring in Sissy’s direction.
“When the rain stops, I’ll go for help,” said Walter. “Let’s just take advantage of the beds and turn in.” He chose a top bunk near the door, prepared to vault up to it.
“Walter!” said Helen.
“Yes?”
“You can’t sleep here.”
“You can’t sleep here with us girls,” Margo agreed.
“You’re kidding.”
“It wouldn’t be proper. Someone could come by at any moment,” Tracy said. “There are plenty of other buildings. Plenty of other beds.”
“We have a chaperone,” said Walter. “I’ll be a perfect gentleman.”
“Let him stay,” said Ruby.
“Sorry,” said Fanny. “As chaperone, I can’t allow it.”
Walter went to the door of the building. “What if there were no other buildings? Would you make me sleep out in the rain?”
“Don’t be pathetic, Walter,” said Fanny. “It’s not attractive.”
“So much for every man’s fantasy,” he said.
“See you in the morning.”
The door squealed when it opened, squeaked when it closed. Irini took the bunk Walter had chosen. It had a stale, spoiled smell. In the sunlight, she was sure to find old stains. She could picture them, yellow and kidney shaped under her back. She left her shoes on, curled herself up so as to touch as little of the mattress as possible. “It can’t be later than six. I won’t sleep a wink,” she thought, and she woke several times during the night with the same thought. Once she dreamed about Walter. He was leaning toward her. “We have got to get you out of those wet clothes,” he said. She woke up strangely pleased.
Toward morning, when the rain had stopped, she awoke for good. She was very cold and she had to go to the bathroom. There must be a bathroom, she thought, but it was still too dark to go looking. She had a handkerchief she could wipe herself with, but just the once. She decided to worry about later, later. Desperate times required desperation. She slid down from the bunk as quietly as she could. The door squealed when it opened, creaked when it closed.
The rain had stopped, but the trees still dripped. “Tree rain,” her father called this. “Almost the real thing.” The ground was covered with wet leaves and pine needles, bundled together, bound at the tops like little whisk brooms, some reddish colored, some old and gray. The slugs were out. Irini’s shoes squished. One of the trees stepped toward her. “Irini,” it said. It had Walter’s voice. It frightened the need right out of her. “You scared me half to death,” it said.
There was no reason for him to leap out at her like that. “What are you doing out here?” she asked severely.
“Same as you, I imagine. Come and talk to me afterward.”
He waited for her back at the second building. “How was your bed?” she asked.
“Lonely.”
They sat on the step together. She shivered and he put his arm around her. “Okay?” he said. “It’s just cold.”
“It’s okay.” He had a sort of wet-dog smell, but it was very familiar to her and not unpleasant. She wondered if he could say the same. “Honestly, Walter. How much trouble are we in?”
“None at all.” His arm tightened. “We have shelter, we have water. There’s got to be some sort of a kitchen here, maybe even showers. As soon as it’s light enough, I’ll go for help. The worst that can happen is that we all get a bit thinner. We were lucky.”
“We were so lucky. It makes you think, doesn’t it?”
“What does it make you think about, Irini?” His voice shook slightly. He cleared his throat. She glanced at him, looked quickly away. His eyeball was still cracked with red, but the rim was purple going onto black and had widened.
“You need ice for that eye. You need a big, juicy steak.” Irini thought about big juicy steaks. Baked potatoes. Little green peas. Heaps of pancakes. Her father always made her pancakes when they went camping.
“You want to know what my mother used to do when I got hurt?” Walter asked. His arm was around her, which made it important to keep the conversation impersonal.
“No. What do you hear from your folks these days? What’s your dad up to?”
Walter allowed himself to be diverted. “Product development. He’s still sure there’s a future coming when every American home will have a computer in the basement, down by the furnace. He and Mom’ll be in Magrit for Christmas. Of course I may not be.”
“Where would you go?”
“Who knows? The season ends, I have no particular plans.”
“Now you sound like your father.” It was about the meanest thing you could say to Walter. It just came out. Irini didn’t want Walter around exactly, but this didn’t mean she wanted him to leave. Maybe she was just annoyed because he could go in and out of Magrit just like that, whenever he chose.
“What’s it to you?” Walter said.
“A bad time to leave Mr. Henry, I think.”
“Yeah,” said Walter. “Yeah. Something has to be done about Gramps. Anyway I’m not going tomorrow.” She leaned into him. He reached around her with his other arm. She could feel his heart beating against her face and also the pulse in his arms against her arms. She was starting to feel warmer.
There was a long silence and Irini was perfectly relaxed, completely unwary. She closed her eyes and more time might have passed than she realized, because when she opened them, it was growing light. She could hear loons calling to each other from the lake. She could see the trees, drenched and dark with water. She could see Walter’s normal pink face with its abnormal glowing eye. “Golly,” she said, lifting one careful finger toward it. She touched him along the eyebrow. She didn’t mean anything. She was just sorry about his eye.
Walter kissed her. His lips were wet and soft. “Hey,” she said warningly.
“Hey back.” He was grinning at her, revealing the line of his gums.
“Don’t do that.” She pushed him away.
“Too late.”
“Don’t make me hurt you.”
“Too late for that, too. I’m going for help,” he said. “Keep the troops entertained for me. I’m leaving you in charge of morale.” He took hold of her arm. “I’m going to kiss you good-bye.”
“No, you’re not.”
“You’d kiss me good-bye if I were Thomas Holcrow.” His voice was absolutely neutral, his face with its glorious eye, impossible to read.
“I would not.” He was looking straight at her, straight into the black holes of her own eyes. Irini was glad it wasn’t any lighter out, glad she wasn’t a blusher by nature. Even so she couldn’t look back.
“We’ll see,” he said. He stood up, stretched unconcernedly. “Because he’s bound to leave sooner or later.”
32
The whole episode left Irini in a state. Only she couldn’t identify exactly which state. Perhaps she was in several states. She sat on the step by herself, and already the thrill of surviv ing the accident was so muted she could hardly hear it under the louder noise of more trivial concerns. Real life in its tedious, hideous quotidian aspect was back. Partly she was feeling guilty and this was not because she had sat with Walter’s arm around her, not because she had touched his face when it was so dangerously close to her own. No, these actions still seemed natural and excusable. Irini felt guilty because she had set the stage by dreaming about him
erotically during the night.
Somehow he had sensed this. A man might feel nothing but friendship for a girl, but if she introduced the other, he couldn’t help but respond. It was a physical thing, a reflex. Men were born this way. Unless he really did still feel something more for her after all the times he had assured her he didn’t. In which case Fanny was certainly right. All men were liars. Born to it. Selected for it. It conferred a Darwinian advantage.
And was Walter Collins going to be the only boy to kiss her in her whole life?
The morning air was wet and cold. Irini huddled on the step. There was a chorus of waxwings in the trees. Irini had just spotted them, Quaker gray with their pointy little heads, when she heard the squeal, squeak of the bunkhouse door. The sound of the birds stopped like an alarm shut off. “Where’s Walter?” Arlys asked sleepily.
“Gone for help.”
“Where’s the bathroom?”
“I don’t know.” Irini stood up. Her neck and shoulders were extremely sore. She tried to rub them. It hurt to turn her head. “Let’s go see.”
“Not a chance for toilet paper, do you think?”
“Not a chance.”
“You know, it’s a funny thing,” said Arlys. “I have listened to Wheat Theater many a time and heard Anna spend who knows how many nights in the woods. But I’ve never heard her address this issue. There’s got to be some sort of leaf, or something. Something only mountain men know. Wild-growing Sears and Roebuck catalogues.”
They found the bathroom on the far side of the cabins, an outhouse with no front door and an unobstructed view of the lake from the sitting position. It was a pretty scene. The sunlight spread over the lake, turning one side of the tiny waves silver and the other gold. But you wouldn’t linger. In spite of its airy vista, there was the usual smell. Irini waited for Arlys and heard the sound of water falling into water. It seemed rude somehow, to have heard it.
Back up the bank was a kitchen, with a few old dishes and a stove you wouldn’t dare light. There was a small pot you could cook in, which was a find. They could start a fire and boil water. There were spider webs everywhere, dust and dirt. Behind the kitchen was a small shed with some rusted rakes and trowels, which they took along, too, in case anyone could think of a use for them.
They caught up with Tracy standing on the bank looking at the sunken boat. “It’s got a hole the size of a bread box in it,” she said. “It’s no good at all.”
The lake was a busy place in the morning. Under the dazzled surface, Irini could see bluegills and small sunfish darting about in golden blinks. Mayflies grazed over the surface. Down the bank was a tribe of mallards, the green-headed males and the calmly colored females. They clucked at each other crossly or contentedly. What was the difference to ducks? Surely their moods were ephemeral.
The only thing out of place here was the Sweethearts, but the ducks hadn’t noticed them yet. Irini stepped down to the water to wash out her handkerchief. “How’s Cindy?” Arlys asked.
“I don’t think her arm is that bad. She’s just afraid, because it’s the only hand she has. She’s scared to be without it, even for a little while. You can’t blame her.”
“It was a miracle that no one was hurt worse, wasn’t it?” said Arlys. “It’s because the bus tipped so slowly.”
Irini couldn’t help imagining for a moment what it would be like to have no hands, no hooks even or anything. It was so unpleasant she stopped and took the first possible alternate topic. She pictured the bus sinking to its side like a stiff old dog. This also was unpleasant, surprisingly so. Think of something nice, she told herself, and thought about Walter kissing her again even though this was not what she had meant. It did seem better in recollection than she had found it in fact, though. She noted this as something to think about later.
“I wish there was something to eat,” said Tracy. “I’m starving.”
“Here you are surrounded by nature’s cornucopia. And you say that.”
“Fine. What do we eat?”
“For a start,” said Arlys, “I spy a fine field of cattails over yonder.” Arlys was the best possible person to be in a fix with. “I try to go at life as if I were acting it,” she had told Irini once. “It makes things simple. You just try to play the role of the hero.” She was rarely out of character, indefatigably cheerful, but it was never an annoying cheerfulness; it never spilled over into perkiness. “Go grab one of those ducks,” she suggested.
If Tracy hadn’t shown up, Irini might have talked to Arlys about Walter. Arlys would have had something heartening to say. “Certainly it’s not your fault if Walter wants to keep mooning over you,” Arlys would have told her and then supported the statement with persuasive arguments. Although Irini couldn’t work out for herself what these arguments would have been, she tried to pretend that they had already had this conversation, that she had been persuaded and was now feeling better.
Irini had had suspicions on other occasions connecting Maggie’s outbursts with almost every other girl on the Sweethearts, but never Arlys. Of course, if this were an Agatha Christie, nothing would be more suspicious than that. “Red herring,” she thought suddenly, because of the Agatha Christie and also the sun shining on Arlys’s reddish hair. “Let’s wash up,” Irini suggested. “Any moment now we’ll be rescued by a truckload of burly lumberjacks, and we’ll want to be looking our best.”
“Burly is a funny word, isn’t it?” said Arlys. “Especially in combination with lumberjacks. I think of burls and so when I picture burly lumberjacks—”
“You two are having more fun,” said Tracy nastily. “Aren’t you? People are back inside the bunkhouse, hurt and hungry, but do you care?”
So Arlys went off to gather breakfast. Irini went for firewood. It had occurred to her that the smoke from a fire might do more than just cook their breakfast. It could be a signal fire. Anna Peal would have thought of this last night.
But the only wood Irini could find was wet clear through. When she returned, the Sweethearts were all about. They were rumpled and gritty, limping and bruised. “I thought there could be nothing worse than sleeping in a bed I couldn’t see. And then I saw it,” said Fanny. They were hopeful when they learned that Walter was off arranging their rescue. They were hungry. Arlys had found blueberries. She led them to where huge handfuls could be gathered. Glistening spider webs lay over every bush, stretched between the roots of trees. One trunk showed the fresh wounds of a bear’s claws.
“No one in Magrit even knows we’re gone yet. Isn’t that funny to think of?” Sissy asked. Barely awake and already starting to cry; her eyes were as puffy as clamshells from crying the night before. The lids were so swollen she could hardly open them.
Irini chose a spot for her fire. She made a teepee of kindling, took a match off Fanny. The matchbook, she couldn’t help but notice, was from a hotel in Tomahawk. It was not hot enough to light her wood. “Let me try,” said Ruby. She lit a bit of the grass, coddled it along. The smell of smoking greenery filled the air.
“Maybe we could fish,” Fanny suggested. Her lush lips were stained a delicate blue. It was not unattractive. “What could we fish with?”
Irini held out the rusted rake.
“Maybe we could ask one of those men to borrow a pole,” said Norma. She pointed out across the water. There was a boat with three men in it, and an outboard motor, headed in their direction. They couldn’t hear the motor yet, but it was coming straight at them.
“It’s the Nadeaus,” said Sissy breathily. Irini turned in shock to look at her. A pulse point was ticking in Sissy’s cheek.
“Nonsense,” said Tracy sharply. “There’re only three of them.” She glanced at Fanny, who had a how-dare-she look on her face. But there was really no time to be insulted; there would be time for that later. Tracy began to wave. “Hey. Over here! Help!”
“Help us.” Margo gestured frantically. The boat was closer. Its waves were already licking at their bank.
“Hello the shore
,” one of the men shouted. The Sweethearts gathered along the edge of the water. The boat speeded up. The bow lifted off the lake and pointed right at them. It nosed in. The man in the back cut the motor. He threw the tow line to Norma, who hauled on it. He stepped out, one foot in the algae, then took one big step to the bank. He pulled the boat behind him. “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your savior?” he asked, with his feet dripping and his eyes deeply, sincerely blue.
“Do you have a cigarette?” Fanny asked back.
So the Sweethearts were rescued by a boatload of fishing Christians. They were taken a few at a time across the lake to the men’s campsite and from there in the back of a truck to the big town of Le Coeur, where there was an actual hotel open for the hunting and fishing season, with hot showers and a supper club with hot coffee, and a tow truck and a mechanic named Carl.
The Christian fishermen had spent a short time in a boat and a truck with Fanny and they were ready to fix the bus for her themselves with their bare hands. They glared at Carl. Carl gazed at Fanny. She was wearing Mike Barr’s pin now, and you couldn’t miss it, but you could miss the significance of it.
The Sweethearts told their story in Le Coeur, where the Le Coeurish were especially interested in the deer. Was it a big buck? they asked, because a big buck had run Mr. Runnberg’s truck right into a tree last October. And a big buck had trampled the flowers right there on the supper club lawn. No one had seen him, but he’d left the evidence. And then there was a black stag all surrounded by flame that people saw sometimes, which meant they were going to die, but that didn’t sound like the same one Norma had seen, they could thank God for that.
A man up in Canada had been attacked in his truck by flying squirrels. They covered his windshield so thick he couldn’t see and the wipers weren’t strong enough to remove them. He had to drive the whole way home in reverse. “You were lucky,” the denizens of the Broad and Bonny Supper Club concluded.
The Sweetheart Season Page 28