Anne Korkeakivi - Shining Sea

“You like my old lady?” not-Eugene asks him.

“Your…” he begins, struggling with a new panic.

“So when are you going over, man? Are you going over?” not-Eugene is asking him now. “Is that it, man? Is that why you’re freaking out? You been called up?”

“He’s not going over,” the girl says in a singsong voice. “He’s a baby. Baby baby baby. Sweet baby.”

“Not yet, you mean. Not yet. Fuckers .” The leather necklace around not-Eugene’s throat bobs. “Who’s Molly, then? She belong to you?”

The rain is falling harder, every single drop hits him and explodes, as though his face were a hill in the jungle and each raindrop a tiny liquid hand grenade. He jumps up, and the girl stands up with him, two in a sea of people. She takes his hand. “We’ll find her,” she says. “Your Molly.”

She’s leading him again through the unreal people, through the raindrops. The farther they walk, the more the crowd thins. They pass a grove of trees where a couple is cutting up a watermelon while listening to the concert on the radio. They offer up chunks of the bright pink fruit, and he feels the shock of food in his stomach. He hasn’t eaten for hours, or maybe days. Is there anything left that bread could buy to eat here? No one is selling local corn or lunch-size cartons of chocolate milk made from local cows along this path anymore. Eugene packed most of their food in the army-issue brown-canvas rucksack his dad had given him to use as a suitcase again this summer. It took my Dad through the Apennines, Eugene said, stuffing a package of sliced American cheese, a jar of Jif peanut butter, and a loaf of Wonder Bread into the oversize rucksack while he and Molly sat at Aunt Jeanne’s kitchen table. It can get us to Woodstock . They tossed some of the beer and cola in there, too, the rest in a box, the tent on top and everyone’s blankets thrown over it, and he and Molly carried it between them. Somehow he still has the canteen around his shoulder. He still has his blanket. Eugene has probably given all the food and beer away by now. That’s how Eugene is.

“Umm,” the girl with sunspot eyes says, licking watermelon juice off her fingers. “Groovy.”

And then suddenly she is gone. He is standing alone on the road, an open-mouthed endless yawn of crookedly parked abandoned cars, of puddles and swollen ditches. There is no crowd, hardly any sound louder than the sound of evening. Relief peels off layers of weight from his already lean body.

He hoists himself onto the hood of the nearest car and pulls his blanket around his torso. The glass of the windshield feels cool against his back and head. Above are stars, thousands of them, twinkling. There is Uranus again, god of the sky, father of the creatures on earth. The air sprinkles a dust of amplified music and country sounds over him and the blanket. The smell of mud and motor oil rises. The breeze blends together the sweet hovering remnants of grass and hashish.

The globe is slowing. The sky is clearing. The world is reassembling. He tucks his blanket all the way up to his neck. Sleep tugs on him and drags him under. It brings no dreams with it.

“I don’t know.”

He struggles to open his eyes. It’s still dark out; the stars are still shining. Hours may have passed or just minutes.

“That’s the password,” Molly says.

He touches her arm. It is solid.

He closes his eyes long enough to swallow the rush of his heart. “Password for what?”

“I don’t know.” She laughs. “The free concert. To get in. Can you believe we paid for our tickets? Such suckers.”

She leans over the hood of the car, a dark silhouette in the heaviness of night.

“You look terrible,” she says.

“You smell terrible.” But she doesn’t smell terrible. She just smells like Molly. “How did you find me?”

Molly lifts her ankle-length granny dress and clambers up onto the hood. At fifteen, she’s taller than most boys her age. She’s not taller than he is, but their legs stretch side by side on the hood of the Chevy. “That was easy.”

“Yeah?”

“I just started walking away from the crowd, in the direction of the highway.”

“I wasn’t going to leave without you,” he says. “I was looking for you.”

“Yeah,” she says.

“A lot of people here. More than thirty thousand.”

“Yeah. A lot more. Ten times more.” She smiles and slugs him. “Pretty far out.”

He opens the flap of his blanket, and she squeezes under it. They lie there, looking at the stars, listening to the faraway sound of music.

“Bet your brother Luke wishes he were here,” she says.

Maybe Luke is here. Who knows? “There’s Sagittarius,” he says.

She searches the sky. “You’re sure?”

“Yes.” He uses a finger to trace the archer for her. “See? There’s his centaur body. There’s his shield. There’s his lifted arm.”

Molly pulls the filthy blanket further up over her, claiming most of it. She tucks her chin in. In the dark, she looks even more like Aunt Jeanne than usual — long-faced, coconut-haired. “You know what I’ve always thought was kind of strange?”

“What?”

She giggles. “How can there only be male centaurs? I mean, wouldn’t there have to be female centaurs, too? So there would be, you know, new centaurs?”

He remembers the girl with sunspot eyes. He thought getting it on with a girl would be the ultimate trap, but it turned out to be the opposite. For a brief minute — he winces; a very brief moment, the first time around — he disappeared entirely. Now he wants to do it again and again. He wants to find that girl. He wants to find all the girls. All the Joans. All the Lisas. He wants to disappear over and over again into them. They won’t own him. They will free him.

“We’ll have to ask your mom, the classics professor, to explain the reproductive lives of centaurs,” he says.

Their laughter mixes with the sweet air and fades away. Molly props herself up on one elbow and looks at him. “Are you going to be a hippie now?”

“I already am a hippie.”

“Seriously.”

“Christ, Molly. No. Probably what I’m going to be is a shaved-headed soldier and then a shaved-headed corpse.”

She sits all the way up. “Don’t say that, Francis. That’s just stupid.”

“Well.”

“Well, nothing.” She throws the blanket off. “Hey, this is a downer. Come on, let’s go back and listen to some music.”

“No. I dunno.”

“Eugene’s waiting for us.”

“You know where he is?”

“Of course I do, silly. You’re the one who got lost. Not us.” She kicks him.

He breathes in the night air. Hanging low to the west in the sky is the string of stars that make up the constellation Pisces.

He sits up. “Found.”

Molly slides off the hood of the car, extending a hand to him in the semidarkness. “You’ll be okay, Francis,” she says. “Eugene and I will hold on to you.”

He takes her hand. The peace it gives him won’t last. It can’t last. But for now, it will have to be enough.

SWIRLS OF BLUE AND pink and pale yellow, like a melted Bomb Pop, spread out over Squaw Peak toward the north. Outside the library’s large glass windows, random palms blacken against the sky. Toward the downtown are the dark silhouettes of Phoenix’s three or four tall buildings, and then nothing, the city fading out into endless desert, flat, flat, and more flat.

“Barbara,” the librarian whispers, beckoning from the front desk. “Would you mind? I have to…”

She shelves the last book on her rolling cart and slips behind the circulation desk. It’s almost closing time; probably no one will come in. But maybe someone will still come in. Or one of the few people left in the library will have a book to check out. There’s the stamp — for a moment or two, she’ll be the same as a real librarian, not a once-a-week volunteer shelving books, taping book covers, watering plants. Not just a transplanted housewife desperate to find something to do. With the Mexican girl whom Ronnie insisted she hire to clean the house and no one left at home but Sissy, her life is so easy now. It’s enough to drive her nuts.