Darcey Steinke - Up Through the Water

With the spatula, Birdflower put a sword steak onto her plate and then poured butter and squares of onions over it. It smelled intoxicating. The gallon of wine swayed slightly as he raised it between them. Emily felt her hand cupped around a wineglass, the other resting on her thigh, and her back against the metal of the chair. She settled into herself and lifted her glass for more.

S nowflakes and stars, no color really, just shapes suggesting silver or white made by the pressure of his fingertips on his eyes. Lila was stretched out next to him. Her head rested on the tab of a huge Miller beer — and her arms and legs sprawled over the towel's edge. “Never?” he said pressing harder.

“You know I've heard of ‘em. The channel we get from Nags Head just has drag racing and reruns. Every time I turn it on, those cars that look like water bugs are rounding the track.”

“Too bad,” Eddie said, fingering the swimsuit his mother had bought him: long shorts, with a drawstring waist and bright shapes floating in canary yellow. He remembered his favorite video: Sting messing up a ballroom, then following a blonde into a Rolls-Royce.

“What's so great about them?” Lila asked.

“They're like movies,” he said, “but better, the best part of movies, when stuff is happening and there's music.”

“I like listening to music,” Lila said, her eyes closed. Tiny beads of sweat gathered on her upper lip and brow. “What's so great about getting a few more channels?”

“MTV is not a TV channel,” Eddie said.

“You turn it on the dial, don't you? It's little color and light particles in the air like all the others.”

“I can't explain it.” He shook his head, leaned back on his palm tree-patterned towel, and put his sunglasses back on. “It's beyond words.” Eddie saw a thin and unshaven rock star, diamond stud in one ear, singing to her. “They're like dreams,” he said.

“Not any I've had,” Lila said and turned her head.

“Take my word for it.”

“Does your mother?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“If they're all that great, I'd bet she'd like them,” Lila said. She started talking about his mom the way she always did, as though she were some sort of magical person, different from everyone else on the island.

Eddie half listened; he looked down to the public beach where kids in the surf caught tame waves as far up the sand as their father's feet. Sometimes in Tennessee — the ground covered with snow, his dog Sebastian sending wet puffs up in front of him, the ice-covered trees tingling like angels — Eddie would wonder about Ocracoke and the island winters there. He'd daydream about high waves drenching his mother's house, the water sitting for days till it froze and encased things: the red bathroom trash can with the British hunters on it; the bag of oranges near the refrigerator; his mother's soft leather sandals with the darker sunken spot for each toe. But rising water wasn't really what he worried about. He thought mostly of her and how restless she would be during the winter rainstorms. He wondered if she missed him. It bothered Eddie that she never asked to see him in the winters. He wondered if she drank too much, if she was careful in the ocean, and what the men she was with were like.

Eddie interrupted Lila and asked her what it was like on the island in the winter.

“You never listen to me,” she said.

“Yeah, I do.”

“You act like I'm some kind of ape or something,” Lila said.

Eddie thought of her being a delicate baby ape. Like the tiny monkeys in lace dresses he'd seen on talk shows.

“Everything closes,” Lila said, “and we all sit around and stare at each other.”

Gulls were edging closer. With heads cocked they eyed the sweaty Coke cans and bag of chips.

‘'I'm sorry,” Eddie said. He waited for her to answer. “Want to come to my house tonight? I got some beers. And my mother won't be back until late — she's deep-sea fishing.”

“Sure,” Lila said lazily. “I got nothing better to do.” As if she just thought of it, Lila leaned up and moved her lips close to his ear. “I heard they found that pony.”

Eddie said, “No one knows. .”

“Just you and me,” Lila said, lying back down. They were quiet a moment. “If you want, we could go to the lighthouse after.”

“Really?”

“My father helped paint it last year and he still has keys.”

“But let's drink the beers first at my house.”

“Okay.”

She got up quickly and went to the water. He followed, thinking of it like a movie: high steps through the waves, then in slow motion diving into the sea.

“The waves come in sevens,” Lila said. She breaststroked toward his open hand. Eddie pulled her to his lap where she floated light as balsa wood above his knees. She noticed his hair curled up around his face and how the longer pieces on the back of his neck waved. “Do you ever tell lies?” she said.

“No,” he said, looking way off to the blurry horizon. But swift as a good pin, he thought of the time he was caught shoplifting albums under his shirt, and how the cellophane had stuck to his chest. Also the fibs he'd told this summer, mostly to tourist girls, that he played tight end at college, had been an extra in a movie.

“I do, all the time,” she said.

“Why?” Eddie said. He held her as gently as possible. Cigarette-thin fish turned together toward them, their pale underwater legs an obstacle, then the school formed like geese and headed back to shore.

“Nearly everything I say is a lie,” Lila said, her arms in a loose ribbon around Eddie's neck. “I just start going and I see whatever I'm talking about like usual. But then it has on a new dress, or a green ring, or maybe the words somebody said are funnier.”

“Lying's for kids,” Eddie said.

Lila said, “Your mother lies.”

“She never lied to me,” Eddie said, seeing thousands of his mother's lies coming out from her mouth in written words as if she was a sword swallower pulling out a hundred swords.

Lila snuggled her head into Eddie's neck. He liked the easy motion of the waves breaking behind them. His mother still had a few bruises the color of bird eggs and one heart-shaped scab on her temple. He put his cheek to Lila's wet hair. “Meet me at the dock tonight. Then we'll go to my house.”

“Then to the lighthouse,” Lila said. She slipped her arm down around his waist and they floated, pulled by the ocean but anchored underwater by Eddie's toes sunk into liquid sand.

* * *

Eddie rode his skateboard into the few funnels of street lamp light and through the dark connecting spaces of night. He pumped fast in jeans, black high-tops, and a BOBCAT sweatshirt. He rolled off the asphalt and onto the cement walk. At the first dock, Lila sat swaying her feet above the water. Around her the lit cabins of boats shined like lanterns. He watched her in the picture of sailboats, dark sky, and water.

Island boys cruised by in a jeep; he heard empty beer cans rattling between their legs and saw a green-tattooed arm and cigarettes in a shirt rolled over a muscular bicep.

He watched Lila. He liked how she lay on her stomach in the sun with her little fists curved under her hip bones. She said things that were hard to forget, that swung round in him like a pebble in a hubcap.

Eddie picked up his board and walked under the big, dark sky. He thought of the time when he was thirteen in the church with a girl who reminded him of Lila. They found the open side door of the local Methodist church and lay toe to toe in the center pew, the long stained glass windows deep with royal blues, ocean greens, and burgundy. It was the girl who had suggested that they strip down to underwear and lie still, catching holy light through glass figures of Jesus, John the Baptist, Moses, and Mary. His head rested on his jeans. Eddie remembered her body and his in a hazy aura and how he tried to make out her breasts and then the altar up ahead, just one hanging candle showing deep tones in the velvet fairlane.