David Means - Assorted Fire Events - Stories

there is a reluctant sadness in the way he holds back from the next movement, what would you call it? It wasn’t that he was thinking this but maybe the thought was forming anyhow — that it was a fending off of death, this pausing to keep yourself from coming, to hold off the spillage without letting on that that was what this pause was about, her hand webbing the back of his hair, which was layer-cut black, small specks of gray — maybe he didn’t even know that, wouldn’t allow the pretense of some kind of control into this moment; he wiped the sweat with his tongue.

what’s the matter

nothing

you’re sure

yeah

just resting

yeah

the horn again farther up the river more near Haverstraw, or just a train-coming-in-across-the-river sound playing those desperate tricks — what was it, a mile over there, two maybe? — the water glassy cool and slicked with silver; eyes open; Ellen, six years younger, still taut around the jaw but not clear-skinned, her own eyes hickory brown and small and close to his, maybe too close because he began the waves again to get her away, to move her back to get her to shut those eyes white and pink, that white-pink behind-the-eyelid thing; again the wind, going to the sides now, a nudge of his knee against her inner leg, the whole thing tipping … this groaning inward sound both made once, twice, the white lifting and the house, trying to remove, to rid, to get rid of something. (There was this time last winter when, on the way back from the city, in heavy snow, going up the Saw Mill, he saw deer grazing along the roadside — no it wasn’t what he saw that mattered, it was the monotony of the trip that did it; he was driving so slowly with the great windswept walls of snow blurring the headlights that he had to pull over to get his bearings, and then, for the first time in years, for no reason, in the boxed-in silence of the car he thought of Tom, his going down, the canoe tipping, the hard coldness of the water forcing his own breaths short.) What had he seen? His brother going down? No. Nothing of the sort. Just the red canoe wedged up against the tree, the hard black branches over the water and shadowed and down, too, you could see them; he dove down under after a moment to find — nothing — it was just hard darkness; the water current took him down, below it was much harder — then breaking the surface calling Tom Tom Tom, wondering if, maybe, his brother was playing a joke because he did play jokes. (He’d fallen though the ice once, ice fishing, goofing off, chopping the edges of the hole — but that’s another story, just another story.) He couldn’t remember a thing about Tom’s face anyway, really, not any more than he could about Ellen’s face really when he had his eyes closed and was swelling up into her. (The eyes, the lips, they come undone.) They’d stopped a few times to ford and move around the larger branches — too many times, really — and there were blackflies already that early in the day, already swarming; they’d brought face nets just for that, but they left them back at the camp; that was what he did remember, the smell of the fire, the cool hardness of the night, shaving in Lake Superior in the morning where the water was stupid-cold, dead-cold, it blued your ankles before you got in it. The way Tom threw himself headlong into it.

The logistics of the affair were simple, too simple, he sometimes thought, but not often; both were free, really, all day; to confirm her absence and her distance, to make sure she was really in the city, he talked to Cindy maybe midmorning, her voice tinny and removed on her speaker phone. (Between words, during the pauses, the machine replaced her voice with static; it was either her voice or static and nothing between, which made her all the more inhuman.) It wasn’t that these calls didn’t fill him with a guilt — the guilt was there, it manifested itself strangely enough in prayer. He attended the First Congregational Church, down the river towards the city, in New Jersey — a drive up 9W that hip-hugged the river — alone because Cindy found it boring and because he did not — as they say — feel like losing his soul, which he did pray for; he did, he prayed for the filth he was in, the deep bloodsucking void that he knew he had fallen into, if that’s what you’ll believe in this day and age — as they say — but it was true; he did pray for his own soul, and he did so carefully and with a dedication to making each confession true, frank, open to whatever forces were welling up and deciding the fates of souls at the butt end of the twentieth century — pink behind eyelids and the wetness and that hollowed-out space at the end of his cock, a cave opening up beneath him for a second then closing up; it had taken a while to get to the point of undressing before each other, months really, of talking and meeting for coffee; she wore her hair back, exposing the smoothness of her forehead and the thin pruned eyebrows; there was — he prayed — a meeting of souls involved that couldn’t be avoided and that had led to their eventual disrobing, but that’s another story, the actual meeting of souls — the wind lifts again and there is over his back the cool hand and the smell of fresh-mown grass, of bindweeds, of wild bamboo down near the boatyard, some faint hint of exhaust fumes, and she’s saying softly into his ear, her lips right there, against the lobe, saying some faint phrase her own version of speaking in tongues, the cryptography of her own secret songs oh, oh, hooo,

certainly he did take advantage of her, he saw it right away — the potential for sex, for a liaison of some sort, for a meeting physically; part of it was the way she dressed on their second meeting, out of the lime-green skirt and now raggish; that day, late spring, jeans with holes in the knees and Ked’s sneakers; when they ended up seated together and she bent her legs he caught sight of the dimple in her knees and from just seeing that smoothness extrapolated the rest of her body. It is certainly possible to do so, and he did it.

The noon whistle breaks open and you can hear it spreading over the shimmer of the Hudson, the tide drawing in from the sea, the deep-cut river licking the Atlantic, the Atlantic licking up beneath the bridge now, the sound haunting along the other side, cresting over the hills that you see when you’re at the window of their room, French doors thrown open to a small tarred roof. The sound comes back and he feels the weight of the hill — still flexing, making work with his hands down there to feel himself and her around him, the slick, well-oiled mechanics of it — with that sound opening and widening; down in the depth of that river — it was a dark woody river — they’d slept at the campsite and gotten up with the sun, and after the shave driven twenty miles upstream to portage; in this he found a place to put the blame years later, in the inane act of putting the canoe on the roof of Mom and Dad’s station wagon to drive back upstream just so they could paddle down it (it was the only state-park campground in that part of the U.P. — a shitty little dust-packed patch of ground, creosoted hibachis ringed with faded Bud bottles, a pit toilet to shit in), when they were already at the river’s mouth. The river ended at Lake Superior with a sharp finality; it didn’t fan out, or widen to a delta, but sliced cleanly and neatly into the coldness of the lake. The plan had been to canoe down and then fish late in the afternoon when the fly hatch was good.

What does

this have to do

with the pink lifting white of her hips, the flat of her stomach

against his for a moment eyes opening up to each other

narrative thrust

drive towards

some resolution;

on the hill no one cared

for resolution, but down here near the river the music was