Darcey Steinke - Up Through the Water

His thumb pressed on the gloss of a large one — Emily red-eyed from the flash, in a green halter dress, her glass held up for New Year's Eve. Around her waist were four creeping fingers. He held the photo near his hand to see if they matched. There was a hint of stray knuckle hairs — but how could he really tell? He threw the photo. It flipped backwards and flapped down. Pulleys rang against the flagpole and the aluminum office hissed.

John Berry checked the windows, no cars yet on his side. The green and red channel markers blinked out in the water and beyond he saw the dim winking lights of the island. A van's high beams threw light on John Berry's face and showed his finger pulling down a venetian blind. The lights flipped off and the van's engine rattled.

He looked into the shoe box; shiny bits of color were mixed and jumbled in the rectangle as if his whole life was the turning end of a kaleidoscope. Looking out at the two people in the van, he saw that they were kissing, and before long, he realized it was them.

The tick of the clock beat out pairs of seconds as Emily snuggled her head onto Birdflower's shoulder. A camper pulled in behind the van and a sleepy-looking woman tipped ashes from her cigarette out the window.

He'd get the pellet gun from the truck, shove it into his pocket, and force Birdflower to swim out and grab the last dock pole. Then he'd get into the van and drive Emily over the water to the white house, to their life as it had been.

He gathered the pictures off the carpet. The ferry was maneuvering its mass into the dock. John Berry slipped out of the back, gently resting the door behind him. The deep ferry whistle sounded. He got in his truck and inched the door closed, ignited the engine, and flipped the gear shift into reverse. In snapshots, John Berry envisioned the next scenes, one after another, blurred and hectic. The wheels of the truck straightened and he headed for the curving line of cars.

John Berry stood above the deck, his beige windbreaker making an empty rustle. He watched them talk. In the solitude of swishing wind and water he rehearsed his speech to her. Lines he'd written on scraps of paper for a month formed themselves on his lips.

A light in the van went on and the hippie got out and walked starboard like a drunken Indian against the wind. John Berry bolted to the deck, passed a line of orange preservers on the white wall, and paused at the van's door.

She saw not what she expected — Birdflower back to draw her into the big pink sky — but John Berry, and her hands went up to cover her face from the memory of the bottle and the glass spindrift. He got in and she pressed her body against the door. Through her fingers she saw him in long fractures.

‘'I'm sorry,” he said.

She lowered her hand. Seeing the cuts, he reached to her temple and brushed the tiny speckled ones shaped like seeds. She flinched, and he took his hands back and rested his forehead — rough hair everywhere — on the wheel. “I want to come home,” he whispered. Wind sputtered through the windows.

“Well, you can't.” She heard her voice reverberate off the front window, the floor, and the bucket seats.

“Please,” he said.

She shook her head. “Too much has happened.”

“Bullshit,” he said.

“Get out,” she said in a tired voice.

He placed a hand on her face. With his fingertips he stroked the curve of her neck, and made her ease and press against his hand. “Let me come back,” John Berry said.

Emily didn't answer. His hand firmed around her neck, and he said it again slowly. She rolled her head.

“I might kill you,” he said and opened the door, all the time thinking, What is this? what now? "Those scars,” he said. “One for every man.”

Birdflower watched John Berry run from the van into the metal archway and down into the bowels of the boat. He saw Emily's startled face through the glass and knew he should give her a moment. John Berry's rounded shoulders had looked like his own. It was as though he had watched himself scurry away. Her past lives moved and changed, spit out stories, made her wild some days and quiet some nights. The curtains which somehow delineated past and present would part and from the backstage of her life a player would come to add some scattered scene.

Birdflower opened the van door. His hands moved across the eternity of the front seat. Their fingers meshed and she pulled him back in.

* * *

John Berry's ears rang. It was the way he thought atom bombs would sound: a falling hiss then a long tone signaling the end. Behind his temples he felt a red ache which sent thin spears of color to his eyelids. He kept forgetting if he loved her or hated her. Ahead, the van circled Silver Lake inlet and rattled out of sight. They're going to the long-hair's house. John Berry slowed. “Let ‘em,” he said. “Let ‘em get stoned and eat wheat crackers.”

He flipped the wheel and headed down the sand road, thinking up confrontations. She never spoke, just came in and stood there with the corners of her mouth set and her hands dangling as if weightless and blown against her thighs.

In her driveway he turned off the engine and left the truck. The air smelled early. The screen door banged behind him. Everything was as it had been. He moved through the house, stopping at each doorway. He paused at her bedroom. Through the branches of a hunchback cedar, leaf-light moved on the pillow and the bed made with a crazy quilt: thunder-shaped patches of red flannel and heart-like pieces of men's dress pants. The same posters of black girls with flowers in their hair and palm trees and huts behind them. He rested on the bed. Collected in a box near the door were his razor, belt buckle, and flashlight. He thought of her quite casually picking up something of his — maybe the ivory-handled brush — and begin to move the bristles through her hair, but the handle would heat up as she realized it was his, and she'd drop it and kick it over to the box, get a rag, and carefully, holding it away from her body, put it in.

On the bed he found the way he liked to sleep best, one arm behind her head and the other snuggled under her waist. He scanned the room from his cheek-flat position. His blue pants, a pair he had trouble getting into, were slung over the chair. The hippie wears them, he thought. He sat up, went to the dresser, and began dumping drawers. He saw her, in the doorway, then on the bed. With one hand he whipped across the dresser, spraying her perfume, hair combs, and creams against the wall. He thought he saw her face in the mirror and her image moving in photos stuck along the edge. Her lips were telling him things she didn't know, listing his secrets, his crazy thoughts. Faster, her voice high now, hissing into a sound like rushing water. With his teeth he tore a hole the size of his fist between the legs of her pants.

“Hey,” Eddie said from the doorway. “What are you doing?”

“I came to get my stuff,” John Berry said.

“You gave my mother scars.”

“And you better believe she gave some to me.”

“You could have killed her,” Eddie said.

John Berry pulled the quilt off the bed and stuffed it into the pillowcase. “Get out of my way,” he said as he threw the bag over his shoulder.

“You're a prick,” Eddie said.

At first impulse John Berry held a hand up to slap him, but he saw Eddie was shaking and he moved around the boy. The bright light from the door gave them both grainy auras, made their movements seem blurry and slow. He walked out of the house, one foot on the shaded cement steps, then the other on the next, and out across the yard. He climbed inside his truck and started the engine.

“She's better than all of you,” Eddie screamed from the porch.