The girl had lifted her feet away from the man’s feet, drawing them back so that her knees pointed straight at his. She had turned slightly to one side and was stroking one cheekbone and her lower jaw with the fingertips and thumb of one hand, leaning her weight on the other forearm and hand. “I’m already putting on weight,” she said.
“It doesn’t work that way. You’re just eating too much.”
“I told Mother.”
The man stopped rowing and looked at her.
“I told Mother,” she repeated. Her eyes were closed and her face was directed toward the sun and she continued to stroke her cheekbone and lower jaw.
“When?”
“Last night.”
“And?”
“And nothing. I told her that I love you very much.”
“That’s all?”
“No. I told her everything.”
“Okay. How’d she take it? As if I didn’t already know.” He started rowing again, faster this time and not as smoothly as before. They were nearing a small, tree-covered island. Large, rounded rocks lay around the island, half-submerged in the shallow water, like the backs of huge, coal-colored pigs. The man peered over his shoulder and observed the distance to the island, then drew in the oars and lifted a broken chunk of cinderblock tied to a length of clothesline rope and slid it into the water. The rope went out swiftly and cleanly as the anchor sank, then suddenly stopped. The man opened his tackle box and started poking through it, searching for a deep-water spinner.
The girl was sitting up now, studying the island with her head canted to one side, as if planning a photograph. “Actually, Mother was a lot better than I’d expected her to be. If Daddy were alive, it would be different,” she said. “Daddy…”
“Hated niggers.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“And Mother loves ’em.” He located the spinner and attached it to the line.
“My mother likes you. She’s a decent woman, and she’s tired and lonely. And she’s not your enemy, any more than I am.”
“You’re sure of that.” He made a long cast and dropped the spinner between two large rocks and started winding it back in. “No, I know your mamma’s okay. I’m sorry. No kidding, I’m sorry. Tell me what she said about you and me.”
“She thought it was great. She likes you. I’m happy, and that’s what is really important to her, and she likes you. She worries about me a lot, you know. She’s afraid for me, she thinks I’m fragile. Especially now, because I’ve had some close calls. At least that’s how she sees them.”
“Sees what?”
“Oh, you know. Depression.”
“Yeah.” He cast again, slightly to the left of where he’d put the spinner the first time.
“Listen, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I might as well come right out and say it. I’m going in to do it this afternoon. Mother’s coming with me. She called and set it up this morning.”
He kept reeling in the spinner, slowly, steadily, as if he hadn’t heard her, until the spinner clunked against the side of the boat and he lifted it dripping from the water, and he said, “I hate this whole thing. Hate. Just know that much, will you?”
She reached out and placed a hand on his arm. “I know you do. So do I. But it’ll be all right again afterward. I promise.”
“You can’t promise that. No one can. It won’t be all right again afterward. It’ll be lousy.”
“I suppose you’d rather I just did nothing.”
“That’s right.”
“Well. We’ve been through all this before. A hundred times.” She sat up straight and peered back at the trailerpark in the distance. “How long do you plan to fish?”
“An hour or so. Why? If you want to swim, I’ll row you around to the other side of the island and drop you and come back and get you later.”
“No. No, that’s all right, there are too many rocks anyhow. I’ll go in when we get back to the beach. I have to be ready to go by three-thirty.”
“Yeah. I’ll make sure you get there on time,” he said, and he made a long cast off to his right in deeper water.
“I love to sweat,” she said, lying back and showing herself once again to the full sun. “I love to just lie back and sweat.”
The man fished, and the girl sunbathed. The water was as slick as oil, the air thick and still. After a while, the man reeled in his line and removed the silvery spinner and went back to poking through his tackle box. “Where the hell is the damn plug?” he mumbled.
The girl sat up and watched him, his long, dark back twisted toward her, the vanilla bottoms of his feet, the fluttering muscles of his shoulders and arms, when suddenly he yelped and yanked his hand free of the box and put the meat of his hand directly into his mouth. He looked at the girl in rage.
“What? Are you all right?” She slid back in her seat and drew her legs up close to her and wrapped her arms around her knees.
In silence, still sucking on his hand, he reached with the other hand into the tackle box and came back with a pale green and scarlet plug with six double hooks attached to its sides and tail. He held it as if by the head delicately with thumb and forefinger and showed it to her.
The girl grimaced. “Ow! You poor thing.”
He took his hand from his mouth and clipped the plug to his line and cast it toward the island, dropping it about twenty feet from the rocky shore, a ways to the right of a pair of dog-sized boulders. The girl picked up her magazine and began to leaf through the pages, stopping every now and then to examine an advertisement or photograph. Again and again, the man cast the flashing plug into the water and drew it back to the boat, twitching its path from side to side to imitate the motions of an injured, fleeing, pale-colored animal.
Finally, lifting the plug from the water next to the boat, the man said, “Let’s go. Old Merle was right, no sense fishing when the fish ain’t feeding. The whole point is catching fish, right?” he said, and he removed the plug from the line and tossed it into his open tackle box.
“I suppose so. I don’t like fishing anyhow.” Then after a few seconds, as if she were pondering the subject, “But I guess it’s relaxing, even if you don’t catch anything.”
The man was drawing up the anchor, pulling in the wet rope hand over hand, and finally with a splash he pulled the cinderblock free of the water and set it dripping behind him in the bow of the boat. They had drifted closer to the island now and were in the cooling shade of the thicket of oaks and birches that crowded together over the island. The water was suddenly shallow here, only a few feet deep, and they could see the rocky bottom clearly.
“Be careful,” the girl said. “We’ll run aground in a minute.” She watched the bottom nervously.
The man looked over her head and beyond, all the way to the shore and the trailerpark. The shapes of the trailers were blurred together in the distance so that you could not tell where one trailer left off and another began. “I wish I could just leave you here,” the man said, still not looking at her.
“What?”
The boat drifted silently in the smooth water between a pair of large rocks, barely disturbing the surface. The man’s dark face was somber and ancient beneath the turban that covered his head and the back of his neck. He had leaned forward on his seat, his forearms resting wearily on his thighs, his large hands hanging limply between his knees. “I wish I could just leave you here,” he said in a soft voice, and he looked down at his hands.
She looked nervously around her, as if for an ally or a witness.
Finally, the man slipped the oars into the oarlocks and started rowing, turning the boat and shoving it quickly away from the island. Facing the trailerpark, he rowed along the side of the island, then around behind it, out of sight of the trailerpark and the people who lived there, emerging again in a few moments on the far side of the island, rowing steadily, smoothly, powerfully. Now his back was to the trailerpark, and the girl was facing it, looking grimly past the man toward the shore.