John Hawkes - Second Skin

And in darkness and in silence Sonny and I made our way to the south beach and naked except for our official caps sat together in the sand on the south beach, ground ourselves back and forth, back and forth in the abrasive white sand and scrubbed our calves, thighs, even fleshy Malay archipelagos with handfuls of the fine sand that set up a quick burning sensation in tender skin. By the time we waded out to our shoulders the moon was on the water and the little silver fish were sailing in to nibble at the archipelagos. My arms floated out straight on the warm dark tide, I rinsed my mouth with sea water and spit it back to the sea, I tasted the smooth taste of salt. When we rose up out of the slow-motion surf the conchs were glistening at us in the moonlight.

“I tell you what. Sonny,” I said, and dried the crucifix, pulled up my tattered white pants, “why don’t you look in on Josie or see what Bertha’s fixing us for chow? I just want to stop off a moment at the water wheel. OK?”

So I left him at the corner of the barn and whistled my way to the water wheel and found her waiting. I stood beside her, mere heavy shadow leaning back against dark broken stone and moonlit flowers, and I smelled the leaves of cinnamon. I put my arm around her and touched her then, and part of the dress— sweat-rotted dissolving fragment of faded calico — came off in my hand. But it was no matter and I simply squeezed the cloth into a powder and dropped it and put out my hand again.

Her eyes were soft, luxurious, steady, in the darkness she reached out and tore off a flower — leaf, flower, taste of green vine — and looking at me put it between her teeth, began to chew.

“Saucy young Catalina Kate,” I whispered, “eight months pregnant and still saucy, Kate? Iguana going to get you again if you keep this up.”

She giggled. I felt the shadow then, the firm shadow of tiny head and neck, little upswept protecting arms. Felt, explored, caressed, and by the position of the moon and direction of the scent of spices I knew that the island was wandering again, floating on.

“Now tell me, Kate,” mouth close to her ear, hand holding her tight, “what’s it going to be? Little nigger boy, Kate, or little nigger girl?”

And spitting out the leaf and smiling, putting her hand on mine: “Whatever you say, sir,” she said, “please God.…”

Yesterday our pastoral, tomorrow the spawn. A mere four weeks and I will hold the child in my own two hands and break out the French wine, and after our visit to the cemetery, will come to my flourishing end at last. Four weeks for final memories, for a chance to return, so to speak, to the cold fading Atlantic island which is Cassandra’s resting place. And then no more, nothing, free, only a closed heart in this time of no time.

So on to the dead reckoning of my romance….

Red sun in the morning, sailor’s warning. I knew that much. And hadn’t I sworn off the sea? After my one thousand days and nights on the Starfish hadn’t I sworn off the sea forever? There was my mistrust of the nautical life, the suspicion of my tendency toward seasickness, the uneasiness I had come to feel in the presence of small boats whether in or out of the water. My sympathy for all the young sun-tanned and shrapnel-shredded sailors in deep southern seas would never die, but I was done with the water, the uncomfortable drift of a destructive ocean, done trying to make myself acceptable to the Old Man of the Sea. So what drew me to the Peter Poor? How to explain that dawn in March which was an eastern blood bath, in the first place, and full of wind? Why did I interrupt our Mah Jongg games or my friendly fights with the black Labradors? Having recovered from the indignities of that crippling December dance, and having spent three frozen months in the calm inside the gale — trying a little of the Old Grand-Dad myself now, not much, but just a little, and building the fires, drying the dishes, dragging Pixie down the cow paths on a miniature creaky sled with turned-up wooden runners — why, having watched the snow at the window and having kept my mouth shut during all those Sunday dinners and having learned to sleep at last on those hard cold nights, why, suddenly, did I trot right down to the dock with Cassandra and submit myself to the Peter Poor which was a fishing boat and didn’t even have a head?

“Go on, Skip, don’t spoil the fun. It’s a good way to see the bland. And Skip,” clicking the needles, giving the log in the fireplace a shove with her bare toes, “it’s just what Candy needs. My God, Skip, how could you refuse?”

And toying with the East Wind, watching her: “What about you, Miranda?” I said, “it’s not like you to miss a good time?”

And throwing back her head and twinkling the light in her glass and laughing, “No, no, I’ve already been out sailing with the boys. Besides, every girl deserves to be the only woman on the Peter Poor just once in her life.”

But Cassandra only looked at me and took my hand.

So it was on a red dawn in the month of March that I succumbed to the idea of Crooked Finger Rock and sunken ships and a nice rough ghostly cruise around the black island, succumbed and gave Cassandra the one chance in her life to be the only woman on the Peter Poor. And it was in the month of May that I raced down the beach for my life in Miranda’s hot rod, in May, the month of my daughter’s death. And in June that we got out of there, Pixie and I, June when I packed our flight bag and hurried out of that old white clapboard house and carried poor Pixie off to Gertrude’s cousin in New Jersey. Four months. Four short months. A brimming spring. And of course I know now that there was a chance for Cassandra up to the very moment she swung her foot gaily over the rail of the Peter Poor and stood with her hair blowing and her skirt blowing on the cluttered deck of that water-logged tub of Red’s. But there was no chance really for Cassandra after that. No chance at all. The second of the four seasons sucked her under, the sea was cruel. March, then May, then June, and the last fragments, the last high lights, last thoughts, the time of my life.

Red sun in morning, sailor’s warning. That’s it. And the dawn was lying out there on its side and bleeding to death while I fidgeted outside Cassandra’s door — accomplice, father, friend, traveling companion, yes, old chaperon, but lover and destroyer too — and while Miranda waltzed around the dark kitchen in her kimono and tried to fix an early breakfast for Pixie. Dawn bleeding from half a dozen wounds in its side and the wind blowing and my old bird fighting its slow way across the sky.

“Hurry, up, Cassandra,” I called through the closed door, blowing on cold fingers, stuffing a fat brown paper sack — lunch for two — under my arm and watching the bird, “you’ll have to hurry a little, Cassandra, if the Captain is going to make the dawn tide.” Even upstairs in the cold dark house I could feel the tide rising, feel the flood tide reaching its time and turning, brimming, waiting to sweep everything away. But there was no need to hurry. I should have known. I should have known that Red had been waiting seven months already for this tide, this dawn, this day at sea, and that he would have waited forever as long as he had any hopes at all of hearing her heels clicking on the deck of the Peter Poor , that he would have let the Peter Poor list forever in the green mud for the mere sight of Cassandra coming down his weedy path at six o’clock in the morning, would have sailed the Peter Poor onto rocks, shoals, reefs, ledges, anywhere at all and under any conditions if he could once persuade Cassandra to climb aboard. No hurry. And yet perhaps I was aware of his bald-headed, wind-burned, down-East, inarticulate seagoing licentious patience after all, and fidgeted, marked the stages of the dawn out of the intuitive resources of my destructive sympathy. God knows. But she appeared to me then, unsmiling-unsmiling since the blustery high school dance when I had done my best to tell her everything, make her understand — and wearing a little pale blue silk kerchief tied under her chin.