Darcey Steinke - Up Through the Water

He'd taken her kid, Eddie, out on the road a couple of times. It was awkward, his arms stretched around John Berry's hips and stomach. The kid would whisper in his ear, tickle it as a woman might. He never knew what to say back, and the few times he tried, his words were lost in the wind anyway. Emily encouraged him to do things with her son. The day before he'd found out about Emily, he and Eddie had spiked a watermelon, pouring vodka in gulps out of the bottle. “A Fourth of July tradition,” he'd said. “Before long this whole thing will be like one big soaked green olive in the bottom of a martini.” The kid had smiled, stepped back, and said something about Emily, still with his father, making martinis, walking around in this special housecoat with a fake fur collar. Eddie was all right. It wasn't that he didn't like him, just that he imagined his own kid, his child with Emily, would be different.

The motorcycle cruised through the long line of numbered ferry spaces, 100 to 99, 98, like counting yourself to sleep. Emily's big four-post bed came into his mind. 75, 74. The white lines and yellow numbers were like frames of movie film: She was waking him because she couldn't sleep: You don't care whether I sleep well or not she was saying, the curtains blowing. Her tan leg was hanging out of the covers. He had comforted her as best he could, 42, 41, 40, and the way her face caught every new shade of color in the dawn and how everything had happened so slowly and quietly, 30, 29, 28. The dock, not far ahead, was a takeoff ramp to the night sky, 20, 19, 18. He saw the telephone booth fly by and thought of dialing Emily, letting it ring all night, the sound as constant as the sea in her ears. 10, 9, 8. He revved the bike's engine and stood up a little as his tires bumped onto the boards.

* * *

The ferry tugged out of the dock. John Berry woke with a start, one of those falling mini-dreams, toppling over and down huge cement stairs. His mouth was dry as a flannel shirt, his clothes damp, and he didn't remember getting from the water to his cot in the engine room.

“Can't live on booze,” Tom's voice said from behind. “I brought you some biscuits.” He sat down on the metal bench soldered to the wall. John Berry sat up and opened the bag. “You got to get back,” Tom said. “You can't stay on the water all summer.”

John Berry rubbed his beard, cocked one green eye, and put a biscuit into his mouth. “I have a plan to get her back,” he said, looking down at his boots.

Tom walked to the door and shook his head. “We're almost to Pelican. Get up here and unload.”

In the men's room, John Berry washed his face, dried it with paper towels, wet his hand, and patted down the wild cowlicks rising like seedlings all over his head.

There was a process crudely called the Trollop Express, in which ferry men, mostly the married ones, had agreed to call the few eligible island men and let them know if any attractive, lonely-looking women were on the winter ferries. The day Emily had traveled over for the first time John Berry heard Tom say that he was calling her in to the boys to get his twenty bucks. John Berry had watched as Emily leaned her stomach against the black rail. She had on a long, ratty, down coat that fell below the hem of her dress. Her legs were bare and on her feet she'd had blue suede clogs. The wind had forced goose bumps all over her ankles and up her calves. She'd held her frenzied hair from her eyes.

“Buddy,” John Berry had yelled over the fall of wind. “I'll give you the twenty if you don't—” and he had dialed a phone in the air.

John Berry left the bathroom. The last car struggled onto the deck. He walked through the long alley of car doors. Tourists crowded to the right side to see tiny Pelican Island. The fleshy chins of the birds swaggled. John Berry's eyes blurred as he saw girls in the water, wading waist level — six of them blurring to four and then two. Girls with opaque faces like transparent fish and hair cut close to their heads. They all went under with a flick and glint of metallic toes.

“Aren't they something?” John Berry said to Tom, who stood looking over the water with him.

“The birds?” Tom said.

John Berry bent farther over the chain link fence. He wanted to hear their whispers bubbling up from the water. One swam near the boat, moved in arcs and ovals, and motioned with a shimmy of her shoulders. The boat approached the big island. Tom said, “Why don't you come back with me to Hatteras?”

John Berry turned and Tom's hand slipped from his back. He thought of the beads Emily hung in the bathroom on nails above the porcelain tub. How sometimes she'd wear a string of jade, round green beads nudging her nipples, swinging, reaching all the way down to the fine hairs of her lower stomach. He held a hand up to block the sun; it glinted off the hood of every car, making each a blinding flash — he saw Emily in every back seat kissing a stranger.

E ddie drank some Coke, put on his headset, and listened t to his Walkman. Paolo's was the only bar on Ocracoke and because they served food too, pizza and subs, they let underage kids like him hang around. It was a cedar building on stilts just like the cottages on the soundside of the island. Eddie sat at a table near the windows in back. It was his day off and for a while he'd stayed in bed reading a mystery book his father had sent him from home. The hero killed people, but Eddie liked it that the guy always felt bad for a couple of days after. He watched the clock over the bar, waiting for Lila.

Rain hit the roof. Eddie flipped through some postcards, and chose one with ponies running on the front to send to his father. Whenever he heard the door creak or the rain shift against the side of the building, he lifted his head from writing. He couldn't remember seeing Lila last year. Islanders usually stayed away from summer help, even from transplanted year-around residents like his mother. The island girls had always seemed a strange mix, awkward in their oversized boyish clothing and also cocky, having a physical ease that marked them instantly as locals.

Maybe Lila had stood him up. He had trouble making friends in the summers. The island boys were busy with family businesses and the tourist ones always left in a week or two. He picked up a quarter to play another video. The beer man came in wearing a plastic poncho. He wiped rain from his face with two fingers. Eddie turned, not wanting the bartender to know that he was anxious. The door opened again and Lila stepped in. She shook her black umbrella with the bent metal rib and headed for his table. “This stupid rain,” she said.

“I thought you might not come,” Eddie said, half standing, bumping the table with his hip.

“No reason not to,” Lila laughed.

She sat down and stretched her legs under the table and onto the chair across from her. She had on wrinkled painter's pants and a rose blouse, snug around the shoulders. Her face was broad with large eyes and a birthmark shaped like a kidney bean on one cheek. She looked pretty in an odd way.

The silence seemed too long and he fiddled with his cassette case. “You don't remember me from last year, do you?” Lila said, cracking her pink gum.

He didn't know what to tell her. He could remember her, though only vaguely — one of the thin shy girls who hung around the docks at night.

“I saw you once doing push-ups on the beach. Your nose in the sand.”

“For wrestling.” Eddie tried to laugh. He knew how his face contorted when he exercised. “You said you'd show me the ponies.”

“I might,” Lila said. “After the rain stops and it gets dark.”

The bartender put down sodas and Eddie heard his fizz. “Can you ride them?” he said.