Anne Korkeakivi - Shining Sea

Come on, Francis, his ex-girlfriend Joan said when they were still going together. Come on. It’s just love. Joan, with her long eyelashes and stubby fingers, with her yellow hair, her way of whistling between her teeth when she was thinking.

Joan, who knitted him two sweaters and a vest this winter, each one uglier than the last, who called him on the phone every evening, who always asked what he was thinking. What are you thinking, Francis? What are you thinking? That Joan.

You might get, you know… he told her . I don’t want to get you in trouble. But that wasn’t the real reason he wouldn’t do it with her. He watched Joan for weeks after moving to Phoenix before sliding into the seat next to her at the movies, the way her hair slipped over her shoulder, the confident way she poured from test tubes in chemistry class. So focused, so self-sufficient. So independent. But once they were going out, she turned out to be just like Lisa and Susan and Becky and all the girls who followed him around his new high school, made him brownies, slipped him joints, offered to sew patches on his jeans. Acting as though they were giving him something when the truth was they wanted and wanted and wanted. They wanted so much from him. The more Joan brought up doing it, the less he felt able to do it with her even if he tried, even if he wanted to try, and, of course, part of him wanted to, the part of him he held in his hand in the dark at night. But no, because once they did it, Joan would own him.

The hard-on is gone now. He is a tiny thing, a minnow, a tadpole, a worm.

Here is Eugene, a shit-eating grin on his face, offering him a drink of his beer. Eugene! Who cheerfully chases all the Susans and Beckys and Lisas. Who would laugh but not laugh at him over what happened with Joan and what didn’t. Who can even find a way to laugh at the possibility of being sent over.

“Eugene, meet Dawn,” he says, touching her long, dripping hair. “And now as Dawn rose…harbinger of light alike to mortals and immortals…”

Eugene laughs his loud laugh. “ The Odyssey? The Iliad ?”

“Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles…but not here in Bethel, cause no one is fighting here…”

“ Iliad, meet rock ’n’ roll!” Laughing again, Eugene makes a peace sign, then turns to the girl. “He can remember anything. Like new songs but also math and history and Latin and old Greek myths. We’re living with his aunt. She teaches that stuff.”

“Out of sight,” the girl says. “I can dig the old stuff. The old stuff is like old, but new, but old. You know what I mean?”

He lies facedown in the water and floats away, letting the soap suds trail off his skin. Eugene’s and the girl’s voices become tiny ants crawling through his outer eardrum into his inner eardrum, through his brain. He rolls onto his back, slaps the water, shakes his head. His hand hits something hard — a knee. He looks up into the face of a chanting boy sitting on a surfboard. There are others; they are all crowded on the surfboard, singing. He pushes away from them.

Now he is standing on the edge of the lake, bulrushes tickling his legs, water streaming down his naked body. Someone has laid a cloth of many colors around his shoulders, deep blue with pink and brown and green explosions of paisley all over. But he needs his clothes, his blanket, and the banged-up steel army canteen that once belonged to his father, the black Bakelite stopper attached by a little chain in a way that seemed miraculous when he was younger. He once believed war had to be a magic thing, littering such treasures in its wake — he didn’t yet understand that the treasures littered by war are people’s lives. Like his father’s. Like maybe that of Mike, over in Vietnam right now, or Luke, if their mom can’t wrestle him back to school fast, or Eugene. Or maybe of his own self, if the president ends educational exemptions.

Welcome to Woodstock, canteen. Welcome to the sixties.

There are his clothes. The arm of his shirt is thrown back as though waving to him. “I’m sorry, man,” he mumbles, slipping his long, thin legs into his jeans, losing the cloth of many colors. “I wasn’t just gonna forget about you.”

Watch out or you’ll end up like your uncle Paul, his mom said one time when he didn’t come home for dinner and didn’t call, either, when he just couldn’t bring himself to join the others. But it always just looks as though he’s running away, because he has yet to find anything to run toward. She wouldn’t have said that if he could find someplace he belongs. Something he could be good for.

“I wouldn’t leave you here,” he says, louder.

Music has started up in the distance, a rumbling echo, and he fumbles his feet into his sneakers, shoves his T-shirt into the back of his pants, picks up his blanket and the canteen, swings the cloth of many colors back around his torso. His movements become swifter and swifter until the cloth trails purple and green through the air in front of him, enveloping him in color, a cocoon of colors, like the blankets their mom wrapped Sissy in when she was still little, blankets worn thin from having swaddled his own baby body before Sissy’s, and Luke’s and Mike’s and Patty Ann’s before his.

Family . He is sure he did not leave Molly, not on purpose. They were sitting on the great heaving hill listening to the music; he, Molly, and Eugene. And when Joan Baez finished singing, no more than a sunflower-seed speck leagues away whom only he with his twenty-fifteen eyesight could make out, but with a voice louder than thunder, and the stage went dark, the three of them moved through the swarm of people as far as they could, settled Molly’s plastic tarp in a field, popped the two-person tent, bound themselves in their individual blankets, and squeezed inside together. Hey, man, Eugene said. Look at that: we’re bivouacking! and practically drowned in his own laughter. Sometime in the morning, awakened by the heaviness of the air in the tent, the risen sun on the canvas, they went looking for the portable toilets and fresh food, and all of that took what felt like hours, and while he was on line for something, some guy handed him something, which he took because they’re at the Woodstock rock festival and that’s how it is here, and then there was rain again and they started back to the tent but headed into the trees instead and Eugene said, Hey, man, where’s Molly? And that was it. Molly was gone.

Eugene doesn’t know where Molly is, either.

He shouldn’t have brought Molly. He should not have brought her. He. Should. Not. Have. He told her so from the beginning. There are about ten million freaks rolling around on this hillside, and Molly is one tiny drop of water somewhere among them. But she insisted: Francis, you gotta take me. Mom will be cool. And he said: I don’t know, Molly. You aren’t even sixteen . Molly laughed. I’ll be sixteen in ten days! Jesus, Francis, you’re only seventeen. C’mon, I’ll die if I don’t go. Country Joe and the Fish, and Canned Heat, and Janis Joplin. They say there’ll be, like, thirty thousand kids there! If you won’t take me, I’ll go on my own. I’ll hitch a ride. Maybe I’ll get stabbed and murdered, like Sharon Tate .

“Whoa, cat. Who you talkin’ to?”

The guy has a beard and glasses with edges that drop down onto his fat cheeks. A pipe made out of tinfoil is in his hand. Hair is flying off his arms and shoulders; it’s moving and swinging and jumping out at him, dark and springy.

He swipes the air to fend it off.

The guy puts up the hand not holding the pipe, and a thousand hands follow. The hair is waving. It’s alive. The guy’s arm is a caterpillar, orange and black, spotted.