Adam Johnson - Emporium

“I’m serious. I’ll give you a grade-A thrill, right here.”

It’s like you’re standing in your backyard, and you can feel that spot where that hole is, feel all those fears and desires hot through your feet.

“Okay,” you tell her.

Mrs. Cassini stamps out her cigarette on the bar. Then she takes your hand, wet with lime and alcohol, and places it under her dress. For a moment, nothing registers. The old man in the brown jumpsuit stands at the end of the bar, talking into a telephone. The Weather Channel now shows the whole northern hemisphere, all of Idaho lost under its curve, and then your fingers start to feel the inside of her hipbone, the moist heat from below. She guides your hand to the edge of a vinyl-smooth scar and traces it with your fingers downward to the edge of her pubic hair. You can’t help it, you close your eyes.

It’s not a dance your hands are in, but a mechanical tracing. You are guided to the other side of her navel, where there, soft and flat, is skin you feel as blue.

“It’s on the other side now,” she says and you open your eyes to meet a face without anger or sadness, and that holds you all the more for it. The strong bones of her fingers push yours hard against her skin, deep into the wall of her abdomen until you know it must hurt. “There,” she says, rolling the tips of your fingers. “Do you feel it?”

There’s nothing there you can make out, nothing but heat and resistance, a yellow, oily pressure. You pull your hand away.

“That’s the new baby.”

Your fingers are red and you rub them under the bar, wanting another taste of lime for the brass in your mouth.

“That sounded pretty bitter, didn’t it? I don’t know why I called it that.”

There is nothing you can say to her.

You do the shot on the bar and order two more.

“That’s my Benny.”

The bartender pours the tequila without limes or salt and when he changes the TV to the late news, Mrs. Cassini yells, “What time is it?” She turns to you, excited, and runs her hand though your hair, shaking your head with your earlobe at the end. “Come on, young captain. It’s time.”

Waving her hand to the bar, she yells, “To the satellite!”

With that great pull of Mrs. Cassini, you let yourself be swept. Reaching for the bar, you barely manage to grab a portrait of your mother and down that shot.

Outside, the patrons empty onto an oil-planked T-pier, and drinks in hand, stroll above black water lightly pushed from a breeze farther out. The clatter and footsteps of those moving ahead seem to echo from landings across the lake a pitch higher, like the tin of old wire or metal that’s been spun, and it feels good to be part of a group moving together to see a sight.

Mrs. Cassini is only a strong voice over the others, Sue, a glimpse through the shoulders ahead, and you follow at the edge, skeptical about what you’ll find ahead, even though you get that feeling like you’re safe behind the BlueLiner’s wheel, like nothing bad can come within fifty-six feet.

At the end of the pier everybody looks up. You hear the soft thunk of a wrecker driver’s Zippo, his eyes scanning the night above the hands that cup his smoke. Mrs. Boyden and the older man are together again, each with a hand to the brow as if the stars were too bright to consider straight on. Even the boy who might be Tony squints into the night, and the way he absently wipes his hands on his apron makes you see him as of an earlier version of your father, thinking of policies and premiums as he looks to the future, though covered each way for whatever comes.

“I told my husband I wanted to see the new satellite. Then this morning, over breakfast, he changes the sweep of its orbit with his laptop,” Mrs. Cassini says, and guides us across the sky with her hand. “It’ll be coming from Seattle and heading toward Vegas, with enough plutonium to make a glass ashtray of Texas.”

Judge Helen coughs.

You look at everyone’s faces and you know this is stupid. You can’t put a restraining order on a satellite the same way you can’t change the path of a tumor. It’s stupid to think you can just wave your hand and summons up something that doesn’t care about any of us.

“There,” Judge Helen says and points back and away from where everyone was looking. They all turn in unison but you.

“Yes,” says Sue.

“Of course,” says the kid in the apron, with all the battle-battle-win optimism of a near-champion, and you look just to prove him wrong, because deep down you want to believe.

Twenty fingers guide you to it. At first it’s too much to take in, all those stars. You wish your mother had thrown herself into something the last year of her life, like writing a cookbook or sketching cloudscapes, so that you could make some of those recipes and see how they tasted to her, so you could look up and see what she saw. Overhead, though, is a sky splattered as laughed-up milk, about as shaped as the mass in Mrs. Cassini’s belly. Until suddenly you say of course. It’s that simple. You see it: the green light of the Cassini satellite ticking its chronometer path toward Vegas. You remember the earth-shot on the Weather Channel and the thought that a satellite couldn’t see you but you can see it feels pretty damn good. It makes you want to write of course on a ten-dollar bill in red ink.

Mrs. Cassini dives into the ice-cold lake and begins backstroking.

At the end of the pier, you hear Judge Helen whistling the Blue Danube and look up to see her balanced on a tall shoring post. She launches, extending, and executes a thunderous jackknife, the crowd throwing up whoops as people begin diving in.

The kid in the apron stands in disbelief, and you walk to him. It’s not your father he looks too much like, but yourself. In his hands you place the picture.

“Hold this for me,” you tell him. “It’s important.”

He angles the glass against the light off the lake to see. “Okay,” he says.

You slip off your shoes, and barefoot, hop up to balance atop a post. From here you can see no more of the lake, but the women below are clear as they stroke and stretch as if doing rehab exercises. There will always be a reason not to jump in a cold lake, thousands of them, and a certain sense emerges from this. It’s like the logic of getting a court order against a husband who spends his evenings watching TV in the basement. It’s the desire to control anything you can.

Mrs. Cassini floats on her back in the cold water, facing the sky. She looks at you, then closes her eyes, floating. “I’m twice as alive as you are,” she says softly, her voice so vital she almost sounds angry. Some women clap water in the air while others backstroke into deeper water, their arms lifting in graceful salute to a satellite that cannot see us, that for tonight at least, just passes on by.

You jump. One slow tumble in the air that unfolds into a sailor’s dive, and you enter with your arms at your sides, chin out, barreling toward the beer caps awaiting below. You hadn’t planned on hitting the bottom, but it’s somehow not a surprise. The muted rustling of tin, when you make contact, is the exact sound of the BlueLiner’s air brakes — the shh of compressed air releasing — and the flash of pain in your eyes is bright enough to fire your irises white.

Surfacing, you can feel the flap on your jaw and the warmth on your throat. You swim to Sue and kiss her, awkwardly, half on the nose.

“Easy there, bus driver,” she says and has to smile, just her slick face showing.

“You shouldn’t swim with a Hickman port,” you say. “You could get an infection and die.”

“And that kiss was any safer?”

“I suppose it wasn’t much of a kiss.”