Darcey Steinke - Up Through the Water

“Usually I go down with my father in his truck,” Lila said. “He always tells stories of other Fourths.” They walked across a weedy lot toward the seawall. “How many pieces you got?” She pointed to the brown bag Eddie carried.

“Six,” he said. Above them, the first white lights of fireworks.

Lila seemed a little nervous; her hands flittered while she talked on the walk over, and she wouldn't look at him, as she always did, directly in the eye. “Do they always start at midnight?” he said.

“Ever since I can remember.” She held on to his arm and shook a pebble loose from her sandal, then she moved her hand. “Look,” Lila said evenly. She stared at a point just past his face. “Did you get some things yet?”

Eddie nodded, his cheeks flushed.

“Not that I'm worried or anything,” she said and kicked at the sandy dirt with the toes of her sandals. “I just wondered.”

Eddie smiled. “Yeah, I got them at the gas station, in the men's room. They're called french tickle—”

“I don't want to hear about it,” she said, and walked on.

A creeping greenish firework zipped up and burst.

They settled on the concrete sandbags — water nipped at their heels as they leaned their heads back so they could see the fireworks shooting up over the island. Eddie handed her a slice of watermelon. She took it in one hand and nibbled at the corner; a seed slipped off into the water. “Will we get drunk?”

“Maybe,” Eddie said, mushing a bite in his mouth. “We put a whole bottle in.” He watched the horseshoe crabs wading in the shallow water, some joined together, others resting, sand edged up on their shells. They reminded Eddie of space bugs because of the way they moved in that small horrible way, rattails rotating behind.

Three red spinners went crazy, self-destructing in the sky.

Lila ate down to the rind. She flung the green smile out into the sound; it plopped and was gone. “I'm kinda worried,” she said.

Eddie watched her eyes watch a few traveling sparks dissipate into the water. She had on a sleeveless white blouse, one Eddie knew had been her mother's. It had a stain up on one shoulder. She hugged her knees and rocked slightly. “Lila,” Eddie said. She didn't answer, so he handed her another half-moon of pink melon.

She took it, laid it wetly on her shorts, and pressed a hand to her hair. “You know?” she said, and looked at him. “You know what I mean?”

Birdflower sat up on his elbow and filled Emily's cup with champagne. Both lay long-ways on a quilt spread out on the van floor.

Emily paused to watch the dark sky bloom with three yellow wheels of hissing light. “We eloped on a Friday night. He came and got me like a regular date. We crossed over the line and headed into Tennessee. I imagined the baby already kicking. We found this justice that ran a gas station — what I remember was the back room, yellow pine and girlie calendars all over.”

Birdflower shook his head.

“Signed the divorce papers five years to the day,” Emily said.

Birdflower drank from the big green bottle and put his palm on her stomach. “Plan it that way?” he asked.

“No. Things turn out,” she said. “You know how it is.”

Fireworks whizzed up. Emily put an arm around his hips and pulled him forward. “Let's close the doors,” she said. “Let's do it here.”

John Berry swung himself around the dock post and splashed into the water. He moved his legs like riding a bicycle, treading water, watching the sky crackle and flare — the Fourth of July midnight finale was beginning.

From here he saw no one: no tourists cheering like morons, no locals or summer help who'd recognize him. He pulled his shoes off and threw them up onto the private dock, gulped air, and pushed his face under. He watched the last red, white, and blue gunpowder bursts from below the surface. Globes of light widening and shrinking, blurred and broken, like the image he'd seen when he jumped a minute earlier: his own face shifting in water.

T he bartender , playing his fingers across the glass bottles like piano keys, said, “We have Ancient Age, Beam's Blacklabel, Century Brooks, Fighting Cock, Jim Beam, Old Crow, Old Fitzgerald, Old Forrester, Rebel Yell, Sam Sykes, and Jack Daniel's Number 7.”

John Berry's drink showed brown melting to clear, swirling like maple syrup. “Aw. . just give me a beer,” he said. The bartender sulked over to the tap and tilted a glass. He set it down in front of John Berry, the glass curved in the middle like a girl's waist.

“How was your Fourth?” the bartender asked.

“Okay,” John Berry said.

“You back or just visiting?”

“Testing the waters.”

The bartender wrapped plastic silverware in napkins and stood the white cocoons up in containers marked TAKE-OUT. John Berry thought he was intentionally trying to act busy. He didn't want to hear it, especially now in mid-afternoon when he wasn't making any money. John Berry knew that hundreds of men had sat on these bar stools and talked about women. He saw their female faces on the mirrored beer signs, smiling, pouting their bee-stung bottom lips. It didn't matter that much because he wouldn't say out loud what he'd decided anyway — that Emily was the love of his life. And that to ruin things, as he had, without trying to set them straight again would make him mean, crazy, and drunken forever. John Berry knew the bartender didn't trust him. He called him Blackbeard, and once last year he'd shown a painting of a pirate and pointed out to everybody who came into the bar for days how much it looked like John Berry. And it was true he had Edward Teach's blue-black hair and rubied cheekbones. He had the body type too, a mass of solid squares and rectangles placed against one another.

“You know, you look like shit,” the bartender said.

“Why, thanks,” John Berry said, and laughed awkwardly. He watched the beer sign left of the ice machine and slowly rubbed his palms against his knees. “There was this beauty queen in Norfolk,” he started.

The bartender tucked a pencil behind his ear. “Is this some sleazy joke?”

“Nope,” John Berry said. “I saw her in the mall. Standing in front of some formal-wear store passing out coupons. She had on this sequined dress that kind of shook. I sat on the edge of the fountain to watch her. I half thought she'd rise up and the ceiling would split open or else she'd run over to the falling water, dive, and become some kind of a mermaid or something.”

“We don't see ‘em like that around here,” the bartender said.

“No. It was like she walked off the TV.” Smoke spiraled up from the glass ashtray and the TV was turned low to soaps. Light fell in squares on the wood bar, across John Berry's shoulders, one side of his face, and on his arm lifting the glass.

“You off today?” the bartender said.

John Berry watched the bubbles break loose and float fast to the top of his beer. “Yeah, well, half day today. We pulled in at twelve and I walked off. Hitched a ride with three kids in a rusty VW. I could see the road through little holes under my feet.”

The bartender shook his head. “So they just let you—”

“Tell me something. Who's she taking up with?” John Berry said.

The bartender picked up his empty glass. “I don't tell men who look as wild as yourself anything about their former women,” he said. “All I do is pour the beers.” He put the warm beer glass in a sink of water and John Berry heard it gently hit bottom.

“You can tell me who she's screwing,” John Berry said, lifting off the stool.

“I haven't seen her,” the bartender said evenly, drawing him another beer. “But I hear she's with that short-order cook from the Trolley.”