Darcey Steinke - Up Through the Water

Something stirred in the low branches over the graveyard. Lila shivered. She saw her grandmother's gravestone and the row of plastic violets she put there herself in April. “There's a disease called Island Fever,” her grandmother once said as she and Lila walked along the beach, bending occasionally to pick up striped scallop shells. “I read once how cows get loose and run into the ocean.” Lila had seen a few of the wild ponies knee-deep, looking out over the water, but they always seemed to come back. She dragged her toe along the packed sand road and imagined whole herds of cows swimming underwater, galloping in slow motion over starfish and sand dollars, their moos bubbling up to the surface.

“Birdflower,” she said, then sang it in different melodies and at various speeds all the way to her house. She said it so many times it lost all meaning and became only sounds. The bedroom door banged behind her. Lila flopped across her flowered bedspread. With a little of his weed she would forget everything: the ugly trailers by the coast guard station, the raggedy string of T-shirt shacks, and the pony, that queasy bone that had poked her underwater. Yes. With his pot she would float up, look down on all this, and laugh.

In the morning, Lila watched Birdflower hosing off with the spigot in back of the Trolley Stop. He undid his hair, tips hanging nearly to his waist. He wet it, then sprayed water down his pants and under his armpits, and then sat in the sun and braided his hair back up.

Lila poured six large Cokes into striped cups, the last overflowing.

“Quit your dreaming,” the owner shouted. “And get those up here.”

Lila stuck out her tongue and rolled her eyes.

Dripping, Birdflower came in and reached for the mayo and ketchup tubs in the refrigerator.

Lila counted out loud all the jars of green pickles shelved above her. “A lifetime supply,” she said, brushing Birdflower and stepping around the puddle by his feet.

He tipped his chin. “Why did you do that yesterday?” he said.

“What's the big deal?”

The grill began to sizzle. It smelled like grease. Birdflower scraped it with a spatula.

“All I want is some of your stuff,” she said flatly.

Birdflower looked at the faint circles like crescent moons under her eyes.

“And back here we could talk,” Lila said, pointing to the dumpsters. “During breaks we could smoke out there.”

Birdflower held out his hand. “I don't know anything,” he said.

The lights blinked. “Goddamnit!” the owner said from the front. “Those underwater lines aren't worth crap.” Everything went dead. The fans slowly wound down and the grill crackled lightly. “Break,” the owner said, shaking his head.

Lila followed Birdflower behind the dumpster. The sky was ultravox blue. Cats weaved around their feet and dived to the weeds from the top edge of the dumpster. He pulled a joint out of his T-shirt pocket, lit it, and breathed in. “First puff of the day,” he said, eyes closing from the morning glare.

“Just one drag,” Lila said. She reached and picked up a scrawny cat; its back legs hung loose under her arm.

“You'll burn yourself,” Birdflower said.

Lila dropped the cat. “Blow smoke in my mouth then.”

He breathed in, his hand held backward and his lips tight together. Birdflower motioned with his head for her to come closer. Lila made her mouth a slack, choirboy oval.

Birdflower put his lips inches away and blew blue-gray smoke into her mouth. She held it, forced it down, and pictured it spreading in her lungs like smoke in a white room. “Again,” she said. He took a drag, leaned closer this time so their lips just barely did not touch. Lila closed her eyes. “All I want to know is how far you have to go before you can come back.” Birdflower pulled back and listened for the sound of water moving out on the point. When he passed her the joint, their fingers touched.

The owner yelled, “Electricity's on.”

B efore noon on Sunday, Emily left the house and the outer arc of dappling leaf light and headed toward town to meet Eddie. She had on khaki shorts, washed soft as skin, and a blouse that gathered around the neck with a green ribbon. Her sunglasses hid the bluish bruise around her left eye and reached over half of one of the larger scabs on her forehead.

Emily's street was the only complete sand one; all the rest that crisscrossed over the island were either gravel or cement. And the sloppy roads on the soundside were often marked with boards. In the winter the population dwindled to less than six hundred, but now there were two thousand or more, counting tourists and summer residents. The island itself was shaped like a thermometer. The Texaco, Trolley, and Paolo's were along the fourteen miles of highway that led to Silver Lake. The town horseshoed around that inlet. On the northwest tip was the coast guard station, then the tourist docks, post office, community store, and the old Victorian houses. These were inhabited by captains’ widows who, some people said, still smoked opium as they had earlier while waiting for their husbands to return from the sea. A dozen long docks radiated into Silver Lake, and the commercial fishing boats and shrimpers docked there alongside locals’ rowboats and tourist sailboats. On the northernmost point stood the lighthouse, and near it a storybook Pentecostal church. Emily had been there once, and she remembered the snapdragons in milk glass vases on the altar.

Her sandals flipped sand against the back of her bare legs, and she rested for a moment on the gate of one of the small family cemeteries. The stones were granite, most with simple crosses, names, and dates. Above her, a sparrow landed on a low cedar branch. She remembered her father and how in sermons he would use her and her sister Sarah as examples of naturally sinful children, telling things to the whole congregation — never smiling or looking down to where his family sat in the front pew.

It was Easter sunrise she liked to think about in detail. There was always a huge cross twisted with forsythia and braced with gold cord. The altar guild ladies brought lilies in their cars. The big trumpet blossoms pressed against the glass. Around five-thirty the light diffused. A piano arrived in the back of a pickup truck. Her father's cape arched out from his shoulders. Fifty or so members sat in folding chairs and there were another twenty like Emily and her mother in cars. The organist banged out the Alleluia and it was then that she always felt herself dissolving. Only the sight of her father, his blond hair backlit by the sun, anchored her.

Emily came out of the tunneled trees and crossed the main street to the post office. She was a few minutes early, so she sat down on the sidewalk curb and squinted across the parking lot.

Eddie had gone at low tide to clam. She'd offered to help but he'd refused, saying they would meet later near the market to pick out a fish for dinner. He had insisted on coming, she knew, because he loved the mackerel and bluefish lined on ice, the delicate filleting knives and the loose scales that stuck to everything.

Though he'd asked several times, she still hadn't told him why John Berry had thrown the bottle. She figured he understood, but he seemed to want her to say something about her lovers and Emily was unsure if she could.

She felt a damp hand grab the back of her neck, and Eddie sat down, slung the net bag of clams between his legs, and laid the rake next to him.

“You got all those by yourself?” Emily said.

“Yeah. Let's go get the fish.” He seemed oddly anxious.

Emily heard a rustle behind her and turned to see the branches of a bush near the P.O. shake. Under the white blossoms and leaves were a girl's bare legs in a pair of wet tennis shoes.