Brad Watson: The Heaven of Mercury

Finus went absolutely still. Birdie was soaking wet because (he would find out later) she’d slipped on the bank and fallen into the river fully clothed. Avis looked up into the air, then all around. Finus squatted under the dense, low cover of the shrub, pants around his ankles, ass cooling in a low breeze. Avis straightened and said, — My Lord, what is that smell?

— Something died, Birdie said.

Finus quietly began to scoop sandy soil and dead leaves between his legs over his sick scat.

But just after she’d made her comment, Birdie had peeled off the last of her wet undergarments and stood naked and pearly white in the light-threaded shade from the taller trees and this is what Finus looked up again to see. She had that shape and look all around of the actresses and models of the day, just fleshy enough to make a man think of reproduction. And that which had seemed merely ordinary inside her clothing now took on a baroque sensuality Finus could not have imagined in the abstract, much less in the reality of chattery Birdie Wells. Ample in the hip yet augmented in protruding carnality of bone, pelvic jut like a smooth white plow, a sweet little benaveled pooch, and shoulder blades beautifully awkward as the small futile wings of a hatchling. He gazed through the leaf lattice at the immaculate cradled shading of her visible ribs, smooth and defined of faint bone shadow, and the delicate scoop from which her long slim neck rose into an oval face made beautiful in this light and unself-conscious nakedness. A plum-shaped mouth, her sad and impish pale blue eyes. Not the face of a girl given to governing herself without considerable chaperonage and whackity discipline across the open palms — at least that was the way Finus imagined it.

Her dark brown hair curled about her ears in a bob, fleeting red hues in the slim rays of sun that slipped in and fell upon it. Compared to Avis Crossweatherly’s hard angularity, Birdie seemed like a regressive dream. Finus felt himself go curved and firm as a summer squash. He watched, his heart heavy with the grief of longing, as Avis approached Birdie with a white bath towel. But something struck Birdie at that moment. She turned away from Avis and did a naked cartwheel, her legs and low, scanty pubis flicking through the dappled light, the motion quick and graceful as a child’s, the child she still was in ways he would never see again, and she landed upright with a look of surprise and conquest on her face, little breasts aquiver. They were hardly more pronounced than little halves of peaches, he’d never seen a delicate color brown like the brown aureole around her nipples.

Upon landing she gave a little yelp of surprise, and then laughed out loud, spreading her arms for imaginary applause. Birdie’s face seemed so free of all self-consciousness and open, in a way he’d never seen before, to all the possibilities of her beauty. And never before that moment had he really understood beauty, or been able to look beneath or beyond the masks women wore over their beauty like veils — not just makeup, but the masks of conventional behavior and attitude, of modesty, of keen privacy, and of coy lust. He never really considered Birdie to be “beautiful” in the conventional sense, but he’d felt some kind of discreet and inarticulate longing for her, which he’d vaguely imagined had something to do with their kindred spirits. And then Avis stepped up to Birdie with the towel and began to buff her down, vigorous rubbing with the towel all over her shoulders, her back, and then gently under her breasts and between her legs. They were giggling. Some sound almost escaped him, some sort of muffled carp, and he closed his eyes then and thought he’d actually made no sound but maybe he had, since before he could detect her approach the leaves of his hideaway rustled and he opened his eyes to see a pair of hands parting the branches.

It was Avis. Her long, kangaroo face peered at him with no more emotion in her eyes than the animal she was often compared to. For a long moment, they stared at one another. My God! All the requisite proprieties between him and this girl vanished in that instant, as if a mischievous god had tossed some sort of magical clarifying dust in their eyes. Finus’s horrified humiliation was brief, for the look of cool, detached appraisal in Avis’s eyes — the gaze of an animal one realizes has no interest after all in eating one at that moment — both calmed and created a sort of detachment in him. He thought, Maybe she’ll stop paying so much attention to me now, stop embarrassing me with her flirtation when everyone knows I’m not interested in her. But she stared at him so long, her look penetrated him so precisely, that he understood this wouldn’t happen. She knew exactly what he had seen, as if through his own eyes. Her eyes, at that moment, were on his waggling member, which in spite of discovery still asserted itself. Avis Crossweatherly’s eyes went back to Finus’s own, and he sensed that she knew exactly what had happened inside him, beyond pure sexual infatuation, that he’d been imprinted with something beyond a simple, lustful fantasy. Years later, he would understand that she knew he’d been struck with an image of the ideal form as surely as if Birdie Wells had been a bathing goddess there in the wood, and she — plain Avis Crossweatherly — the goddess’s attendant maid.

— What is it, Avis? Birdie had called out then.

— Nothing, Avis said, and the leaves closed up again as she turned back to the glade. -Something dead, like you thought.

He would remember all this keenly years later, when he learned how Avis subtly worked on Birdie to accept the insistent but unwanted courting of Earl Urquhart, how Avis spoke so glowingly of Earl to Birdie’s parents, how Avis even hinted to Birdie that if Earl were to shift his affections to her, she would feel like the luckiest girl alive. But by then he figured it didn’t matter. He came to believe, in the late evening of his life, that it was all finally unavoidable. As fates will be.

HE’D CONFRONTED Birdie in a manner of speaking, about her imminent marriage, at the Potato Ball, spring of 1918. It was held at the old country club, now defunct and returned to pastures but for the lodge-style clubhouse. Men were a little scarce, most boys off to war. The stars and moon were out, the skylights open beneath the eaves of the hall, and the soft light spilled in upon them. They’d turned down the gas lamps. Finus had cut in on Earl, who let him so he could go smoke with some boys out back nipping raisin jack.

— You’re speaking to me again now? Birdie said, teasing him.

He said nothing, gave a grim smile. They danced, and Finus said, — So you are going to marry Earl for certain. And she said, looking at him with that gap-toothed lighthearted frankness she had, — Well I reckon — it’s all set. I wish they could do it all without me, though.

Finus said, — Are you sure you don’t just want to run off with me?

She stood still and stared at him, astonished. It wasn’t all astonishment, though. He thought he could see in her eyes that she might really consider doing such a thing if he was serious. He’d caught hold, for the moment, of some loose line in her that would attach itself to stray wildness. And then, he couldn’t explain this at all, something in him had panicked at the whole idea, of how much his life would change if he did that. Some current of reticence went down through his hands and into her bare shoulders. And Birdie sensed it, he could tell in an instant that she did, and before he could quell it as the momentary rationality of a sensible man that would always, of course, buck away from the acquiescence of love, it was over, she was knocking him on the arm and turning away.