Robert Coover - Pricksongs & Descants

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“Listen, Swede, you need some help?” Swede didn’t reply, so Carl stood up in a kind of crouch and made a motion as though he were going to step back and give a hand. He could barely make Swede out back there. He stayed carefully in the middle of the boat He wasn’t completely stupid.

Swede grunted. Carl took it to mean he didn’t want any help, so he sat down again. There was one more can of beer under his seat, but he didn’t much care to drink it His pants, he had noticed on rising and sitting, were damp, and he felt stiff and sore. It was late. The truth was, he didn’t know the first goddamn thing about out board motors anyway.

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There’s this story about Swede. Ola liked to tell it and she told it well. About three years ago, when Ola was eleven, Swede had come back from a two-week hunting trip up north. For ducks. Ola, telling the story, would make a big thing about the beard he came back with and the jokes her mother made about it

Quenby had welcomed Swede home with a big steak supper: thick T-bones, potatoes wrapped in roil and baked in the coals, a heaped green salad. And lemon pie. Nothing in die world like Quenby’s homemade lemon pie, and she’d baked it just for Swede. It was a great supper. Ola skipped most of the details, but one could imagine them. After supper, Swede said he’d bring in the pie and coffee

In the kitchen, he discovered that Ola’s cat had tracked through the pie. Right through the middle of it. It was riddled with cat tracks, and there was lemon pie all over the bench and floor. Daddy had been looking forward to that lemon pie for two weeks, Ola would say, and now it was full of cat tracks.

He picked up his gun from beside the back door, pulled some shells out of his jacket pocket, and loaded it. He found the cat in the laundryroom with lemon pie still stuck to its paws and whiskers. He picked it up by the nape and carried it outside. It was getting dark, but you could still see plainly enough. At least against the sky.

He walked out past die barbecue pit. It was dark enough that the coals seemed to glow now. Just past the pit, he stopped. He swung his arm in a lazy arc and pitched the cat high in the air. Its four paws scrambled in space. He lifted the gun to his shoulder and blew the cat’s head off. Her daddy was a good shot.

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Her mock pout, as she strides across the room, clutching the imaginary cat, makes you laugh. She needs a new pair of shorts. Last year they were loose on her, wrinkled where bunched at the waist, gaping around her small thighs. But she’s grown, filled out a tot, as young girls her age do. When her shirt rides up over her waist, you notice that the zipper gapes in an open V above her hip bone. The white cloth is taut and glossy over her firm bottom; the only wrinkle is the almost painful crease between her legs.

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Carl scrubbed his beard. It was pretty bristly, but that was because it was still new. He could imagine what his wife would say. He’d kid his face into a serious frown and tell her, hell, he was figuring on keeping the beard permanently now. Well, he wouldn’t, of course, he’d feel like an ass at the office with it on, he’d just say that to rile his wife a little. Though, damn it, he did enjoy the beard. He wished more guys where he worked wore beards. He liked to scratch the back of his hand and wrist with it.

“You want this last beer, Swede?” he asked. He didn’t get an answer. Swede was awful quiet He was a quiet type of guy. Reticent, that’s how he is, thought Carl. “Maybe Quenby’s baked a pie,” he said, hoping he wasn’t being too obvious. Sure was taking one helluva long time.

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He lifts the hem of his tee shirt off his hairy belly, up his chest, but she can’t seem to wait for that — her thighs jerk up, her ankles lock behind his buttocks, and they crash to the bed, the old springs shrieking and thumping like a speeding subway, traffic at noon, arriving trains. His legs and buttocks, though pale and flabby, seem dark against the pure white spectacle of the starched sheets, the flushed glow of her full heaving body, there in the harsh blaze of the Goleman lantern. Strange, they should keep it burning. His short stiff beard scrubs the hollow of her throat, his broad hands knead her trembling flesh. She sighs, whimpers, pleads, as her body slaps rhythmically against his. “Yes!” she cries hoarsely.

You turn silently from the window. At the house, when you arrive, you find Ola washing dishes.

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What did Quenby talk about? Her garden probably, pie baking, the neighbors. About the wind that had come up one night while he’d been gone, and how she’d had to move some of the boats around. His two-week beard: looked like a darned broom, she said. He’d have to sleep down with the dogs if he didn’t cut it off. Ola would giggle, imagining her daddy sleeping with the dogs. And, yes, Quenby would probably talk about Ola, about the things she’d done or said while he was away, what she was doing in sixth grade, about her pets and her friends and the ways she’d helped around the place.

Quenby at the barbecue pit, her full backside to him, turning the steaks, sipping the. whiskey, talking about life on the island. Or maybe not talking at all. Just watching the steaks maybe. Ola inside setting the table Or swimming down by the docks. A good thing here. The sun now an orangish ball over behind die pines. Water lapping at the dock and the boats, curling up on the shore, some minutes after a boat passes distantly. The flames and the smoke. Down at the kennels, the dogs were maybe making a ruckus. Maybe Ola’s cat had wandered down there. The cat had a habit of teasing them outside their pen. The dogs had worked hard, they deserved a rest. Mentally, he gave the cat a boot in the ribs. He had already fed the dogs, but later he would take the steak bones down.

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Quenby’s thighs brush together when she walks. In denim, they whistle; bare, they whisper. Not so, Ola’s. Even with her knees together (they rarely are), there is space between her thighs. A pressure there, not of opening, but of awkwardness.

Perhaps, too, island born, her walk is different. Her mother’s weight is settled solidly beneath her buttocks; she moves out from there, easily, calmly, weightlessly. Ola’s center is still between her narrow shoulders, somewhere in the midst of her fine new breasts, and her quick astonished stride is guided by the tips of her hipbones, her knees, her toes. Quenby’s thick black cushion is a rich locus of movement; her daughter still arches uneasily out and away from the strange outcropping of pale fur that peeks out now at the inner edges of the white shorts.

It is difficult for a man to be alone on a green island.

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Carl wished he had a cigarette. He’d started out with cigarettes, but he’d got all excited once when he hooked a goddamn fish, and they had all spilled out on the wet bottom of the boat What was worse, the damn fish — a great northern, Swede had said — had broke his line and got away. My Jesus, the only strike he’d got all day, and he’d messed it up! Swede had caught two. Both bass. A poor day, all in all. Swede didn’t smoke.

To tell the truth, even more than a cigarette, he wished he had a good stiff drink. A hot supper. A bed. Even that breezy empty lodge at Swede’s with its stale piney smell and cold damp sheets and peculiar noises filled him with a terrific longing. Not to mention home, real home, the TV, friends over for bridge or poker, his own electric blanket.

“Sure is awful dark, ain’t it?” Carl said “ain’t” out of deference to Swede. Swede always said “ain’t” and Carl liked to talk that way when he was up here. He liked to drink beer and say “ain’t” and “he don’t” and stomp heavily around with big boots on. He even found himself saying “oh yah!” sometimes, just like Swede did. Up on the “oh,” down on the “yah.” Carl wondered how it would go over back at the office. They might even get to know him by it. When he was dead, they’d say: “Well, just like good old Carl used to say: oh yah!”