Richard Ford - Rock Springs

“He can see us,” she said. “I don’t care. Let him.” She pushed her face up into my face and kissed me. She kissed me hard and opened her mouth too wide and put her tongue in mine, then pushed me on the grass and onto her stockings and her shoes. “Just do this,” she said. “Kiss me back. Kiss me all you want to. I like that.”

And I kissed her, put both my arms around her and felt her skinny back and her sides and up to her breasts and her face and her hair, and held her on top of me, pushing against me until my heart beat hard, and I thought my breath would stop. “You boys,” she whispered to me, “I love you boys. I wish 1 was staying with you tonight. You’re so wonderful.”

But I knew that wasn’t what she meant. It was just a thing to say, and nothing was wrong with it at all. “You’re wonderful,” I said. “I love you.”

“You’re drunk,” I heard Claude call out. “You’re both fuck drunk.”

I was on my back and my mouth was dry. Lucy pulled away from me and looked at him. “Don’t act jealously,” she said, then reached for her can of beer and took a drink.

“I’m down here fishing,” Claude said. “Come look at this. It’s a great fish.”

“Let’s let him have something,” Lucy said and stood up, though I didn’t want her to leave but to kiss me again, to stay. But she got up and started down barefoot to where Claude was kneeling in the grass. “Let’s see your poor fish,” she said.

Claude had another whitefish in the grass. The one I’d killed was dry and lying beside it, and the second one was smaller, but it was bright and bending in the grass. Claude had his hand on it and his spring-knife ready to pry out the hook himself.

“It’s smaller,” he said, “but it’s prettier. It’s livelier.”

Lucy looked down at the fish. She said, “That’s a picture of helplessness, I guess, isn’t it?”

“It’s a whitefish,” Claude said as the fish tried to twist free under his hand. “They’re the best. And it’s helpless. Right. You bet it is,”

“What a surprise that must be,” Lucy said, watching the fish struggle. “For the fish. Everything just goes crazy at once. I wonder what it thinks.”

“They don’t. Fish don’t think,” Claude said.

“Don’t they have little perfect spirits?” Lucy looked at me and smiled. She didn’t care about any of this. I could tell.

“Not this one,” Claude said.

He moved his hand around to the top of the fish to make a better grip so he could use his knife, but the fish twisted again, and with its top fin it jabbed Claude’s hand into the meat below his thumb.

“Look at that!” Lucy said.

And Claude let the fish go and wrung his hand and flung blood on the fish and on his face and on Lucy. He dropped his knife and squeezed his hand where the fish had cut him, his jaws set tight. “Son of a bitch thing, he said. He put his hand in his mouth and sucked it, then looked at it. The wound was small and narrow, and it had begun to seep blood on his wet skin. “Fucking thing,” Claude said. “Fucking fish is dangerous.” He put his hand back in his mouth and sucked the cut again. He looked at Lucy, who was watching him. And for an instant I thought Claude would do something terrible — say something to her or do something to the fish that would make her turn her head away, something he would later be sorry for. I had seen that in him. He was able to do bad things easily.

But what he did was take his hand out of his mouth and stick it in the grass and lean hard on it to stop the blood. It might’ve been an Indian way. “Who cares,” he said, and he seemed calm. He pushed his hand harder in the grass. The blood had dried already on his face. The fish was still twisting in the grass, its stiff gills trapping air, its scales growing dry and dull. “This is your fish,” Claude said to Lucy. “Do something with it. I don’t want it.” I knew his hand hurt him by the way he talked so quiedy.

Lucy looked at the fish, and I thought her body, which I was close to, became relaxed somehow, as if something that had been bothering her or that was hard for her suddenly wasn’t.

“Okay,” Lucy said. “My fish. Let me have that knife.”

Claude picked the knife up and handed it to her, the blade forward in the dangerous way. “This is sharp,” he said, and as she reached for it, he jabbed it at her, though she only moved her hand out of the way and did not take a step back. “You think we’re handsome?” Claude said. “Us two?”

“You’re the most handsome boys I ever saw,” Lucy said, “in this particular light.” She put her hand back out for Claude’s knife. “Let me have that.”

“We could kill you, right now,” Claude said. “Who’d know about it?”

Lucy looked at me and back at Claude. “That woman in the motel would probably be the first one. I had a talk with her this morning before what’s-his-name came back to life. Not that it matters.”

Claude smiled at her. “You plan to kill me when I give you this knife?”

I could see Lucy’s toes twitching in the grass. “No. I’m going to kill my fish,” she said.

“Okay,” Claude said, and handed her the knife by the blade. Lucy stepped by him and, without getting down on her knees, leaned over and pushed the knife down straight into the fish Claude had caught — pushed it through in the middle behind the gills that were still working, and on into the ground. Then she pulled the knife back far enough to get it out of the ground, picked the fish up by the handle, and flung it off the blade into Mormon Creek. She looked at Claude in a casual way, then threw his knife out into the deep water, where it hit with hardly a splash and disappeared down among the fish.

She looked around at me. “There you go,” she said.

And Claude was smiling at her because I think he didn’t know what else to do. He was sitting on the ground in his wet shoes, and he wasn’t squeezing his hand anymore. “You’ll do anything, won’t you?” he said.

“I always commit the wrong sins,” she said. “I thought we’d have fun out here. That must prove something.”

“I bet you’d fuck a pig in knickers,” Claude said, “you Canada girls.”

“You want me to take my dress off?” she said. “Is that what you mean? I’ll do that. Who cares. That’s what you said.”

“Do that, then. I’ll watch it,” Claude said. “George can watch. That’ll be okay.” I thought about kissing her then, sitting on Claude’s jacket in the grass, and I was ready to watch her take her dress off.

And that’s what she did, with Claude on the ground and me standing close to the side of Mormon Creek. She unbuttoned her green dress front, reached down, crossed her arms, and pulled her dress over her head so that she was only in her loose petticoat. And you could tell from her face that she was occupied by something — I don’t know what. She pulled down the loose straps off her shoulders and let her petticoat drop off of her so that she had on only a pink brassiere and pants that looked like the cotton pants I wore. Her legs and stomach were white and soft and a little fat, and I didn’t think she looked as good as when she’d had her dress on. Not as good as I thought would be the case. There were red marks and scratches on her back and down the backs of her legs, which I thought were the marks Sherman had made on her. I thought of them in the motel in Sunburst, under some blanket together, making noise and rolling and grabbing at each other in the dark.

And then she took off the rest. The brassiere first and then the cotton pants. Her breasts were small and up-pointed, and her ass was hardly even there. I didn’t look much at the rest of her. Though I could see then — or so I thought at the time — how young she was by how she stood on her pale thin legs, with her thin arms, and how she turned only at the waist and looked at me, so she could be sure I saw her, too. Like a girl. Younger, maybe even than I was, younger than Claude.