Darcey Steinke - Up Through the Water

“Get over here,” Lila yelled to him. He cleared the fence, grabbed the light, then ran back. “Take your shirt off,” she said and he pulled the T-shirt over his head. She asked him to hold the light as she tied the shirt around the horse's neck. A thick line of blood ran from the animal's ear. “You pull and I'll push from behind.”

The horse made horrible rattling sounds. Its fur scraped in the mud. It thrashed its unhurt leg and swung its head and then grew tired and still, its slack weight like a rock.

During these moments they stopped to rest. Lila stroked its neck and hummed as if putting the pony to sleep. But eventually it would buckle and try to push itself up with its head. Right before the shore, the pony gave a long gravelly moan that made Eddie feel sick. Finally, after what seemed like an hour, the horse's head touched water and its thick tongue lapped.

Their tennis shoes squelched on the shelves and rolls of the seafloor. Lila told him to stop. He pulled on the loose arm of the shirt. The water was at his chest. He was not the greatest swimmer and was worried the horse might somehow pin him under. “Put your hands on its shoulders and stay clear of the back legs,” Lila said and moved slowly through the water like a moonwalker. She bent her head down to whisper into the horse's ear.

At first the pony was quieted by the sensation of weightlessness, but then it began to twist, its front leg smacking Eddie's arm as the animal tried desperately to get some footing. Lila carefully untied the T-shirt and with both hands pushed the horse's head underwater. She tipped her face up to the stars. The horse twitched and the water splashed high. Bubbles rolled from its nostrils. Lila closed her eyes and Eddie, with his arms around its belly, tried to keep the pony steady. A few bubbles rose.

“It's almost dead,” Lila whispered, loosening her hand and testing the water above the horse's face. The body slackened. She moved away, dipped her head under the sea, and put a hand to her wet hair.

Eddie let the horse go. It sank down a little, the tide moved it. Blood from the cut leg swirled thick and greasy around him. Lila was waiting in the tall swamp grass. Her features were hazy. She seemed somehow taller and Eddie felt almost afraid. But he recognized then the familiar cadence of her breath above the movement of the water and the birds’ voices.

Ahead, a slow green light nudged against the shore. He walked toward it and leaned down. Lila's hand caught his. “They're worms,” she said, poking one with a dry blade of grass. “And they can crawl under your skin.”

* * *

The next day Eddie shot baskets on the cement court in front of the island school. From each point he shot a couple, then moved just a half step, paralleled his hands, flipped his wrist, and tossed the old leather ball. He was barefoot and each jump scratched his feet. They were not as tender as they had been the first shoeless days of summer, but not as rawhide hard as his mother's — pebbles stuck as he bounced.

With each shot he pictured a miniature of himself and the court, then him shooting the ball. He imagined that small version with a still smaller one, court and boy, then another tiny set, until there seemed to be a point like the speck of dust one sees in beams of light.

Lila pedaled her bike up, an outdated thing with a red banana seat, plastic ribbons whipping out from the handles and colored straws on the spokes. It was a funny kind of a bike, one he'd have made fun of in Tennessee. “Hey,” Lila yelled to him.

“Where are you going?” Eddie asked, holding the ball under one arm.

“Down the beach road,” she said.

He bounced the ball in a slow rhythm and listened to it thud on the asphalt.

“I wanted to tell you not to say anything,” she said.

“Don't worry about that, Lila,” he said.

She turned her face to the sun. He remembered her as she had been last night: first wild on the pony and then thin on shore, deflated like a wet animal.

Lila held her hand up to shield her eyes from the everywhere light. “I'll meet you after dark at the docks, okay?”

He nodded and watched her turn, pushing down hard with her tennis shoes on the fluorescent pedals.

B irdflower flipped burgers at the Trolley. His long braid moved on the back of his T-shirt over Allen Ginsberg's nose, then across a bespectacled eye. Lila tacked another order above the grill and then jumped onto the kitchen counter, crossing her legs Indian-style, “Got any weed?” she asked.

Birdflower looked up. “Maybe,” he said, putting down sesameseed bun halves on the black grill.

“I see you puffing out by the dumpsters. You shoo away the cats and lean against the backside.”

“What's it to you?” he said, squinting at Lila.

She played with a long strand of hair at the back of her neck. “I could tell, you know.”

Birdflower pressed his spatula on the frying burgers; grease oozed up through the silver in a pattern like dog bones.

Lila's white leather sandal clicked against the bread warmer. “You never tell me anything,” she said.

The owner rounded the grill. Lila hopped down with a thud onto the linoleum. “The health inspector would go crazy if he saw you sitting up there,” he said.

“With longing,” she said, her shorts seesawing as she walked over to the ice cream cooler.

“I need two sundaes,” the owner continued. “And stop tormenting Birdflower.”

Lila made a face as she bent half her body into the icy whiteness of the cooler. Waist up, she was a ghost swirling in fog. She set two scoops of vanilla, like tiny planets, into paper bowls, and added chocolate sauce from a can so sticky she had to pull hard to get it from the wooden shelf.

She leaned way over, feeling the strings of her cutoffs tickling the backs of her legs, and looked to see if Birdflower was watching. He stared straight at the grill. Lila reached into a jar with two fingers and arranged cherries on the ice cream. She pushed the sundaes through the space on the counter and rang the ladybug bell. Over the fan and grease sizzle of the friers, Lila said, “I don't need your stuff anyway.”

Birdflower turned toward her and slouched back against the grill. “That's good,” he said. “ ‘Cause you ain't gettin’ any.”

Lila looked at his eyes. They were set back and shriveled underneath and at the corners like old peaches. His face was similar to her father's, though her father wore his hair in a short brush cut, and his scalp was always freckled with red spots of peeling sunburn from days on the boat. There was something weathered but not settled about Birdflower, Lila thought, something like the see-through dome her aunt sent from Florida, with its tiny plastic palm trees and girls sitting cross, legged on the beach. Sand filtered in the air like visible atoms when it was shaken. As it slowed, the flat background of boats and MIAMI written in tiny oranges showed against blue sky. Birdflower's face was settled like that — you knew once it had been moving, completely shaken.

Lila watched him turn back toward the grill — faint smoke blew off the friers like the early mist leaving the marsh — his jeans bowed so low on his hips that she could see the small shadowed crack of his rear. “I know where it comes right up on the beach in bales like hay,” she said.

“You're too young for that stuff,” he said.

“Why do you like it?” Lila said. “Your eyes creeped-up all day.”

“None of your business.”

The milk shake machine and fans took over like rising night noises. With her finger, Lila drew slowly around his head, then shoulders. Traced the line where his body met the kitchen. “Old burnout,” she mumbled, sticking her jaw out as if spitting in the wind.