Birdflower listened, but he was preoccupied. He'd seen the ferrymen glare at the van and talk among themselves. He'd watched her and thought how important it was she stay with him. He was worried because he knew styles of men changed with the times. For a while he had been in fashion, sensitive, intuitive; but now women wanted other qualities, discipline, sternness, and money. On the mainland, his situation had been dismal, and that was why Emily seemed so crucial — she didn't seem to care that he'd gone completely out of style.
“This is so weird,” Emily said when he'd sat down. “All these people so close to you.”
“Seems a little barbaric,” Birdflower said. He unwrapped his burger.
“But you miss it,” Emily said. “I mean, these skinny french fries, and who could make a burger like this?” She held up her bun — mustard and ketchup mixed like an ink blot. “Like you could eat one of these anywhere.”
“Comfort in that?” Birdflower asked.
“Kind of,” Emily said, squirting a ketchup pack all over her fries.
The clerk handed him the aqua key ring. “We've tracked people down as far as Texas for stealing stuff. You can have the Bible. But the rest is ours.”
Emily walked out of the motel's office and up the curling cement stairs. On the second floor, Birdflower slipped an arm around her waist. His eyelids looked heavy.
At the first convenience store after the McDonald's — which they had not stopped at but still somehow seemed a marker for him — Birdflower had pulled a rolled plastic bag from under the seat. He puffed, spoke in a held-breath voice, and let the smoke blow against the glass. He turned up his tapes, and again and again raced the reverse to familiar guitar riffs. It wasn't that she didn't like getting high, she appreciated the easing, the slight numbing sensation, the way time lost parameters, and how touching became central and diaphanous as air. But she didn't think Birdflower should smoke so much and he'd gotten so stoned on the trip she'd felt like the only sober one at a drunken high school party.
Her thonged sandal sucked cement. “Why so fast, baby?” Bird, flower said, grabbing her arm. He looked like a retarded man: same slow eyes she'd seen once on a man watching girls pass on the beach.
Outside their door, the pink motel sign came on with a neon click and buzz. ‘'I'm sorry,” Birdflower said. “I'll flush it all if you want.” He put the key in Emily's palm.
She thought of the dusty ride and the ache in the back of her thighs. “I'm taking a bath. Why don't you go get some beer?”
She left Birdflower sitting on the orange-flowered bedspread drawing lines around a blossom. “No more,” she heard him say as the water beat into the motel tub.
“I like bottles,” she yelled, unzipping her jeans, yanking them off by the bottom and testing the water with a long first toe. She pulled her T-shirt off.
Emily settled into the bath, her nipples, belly, and knees floating above water like islands. The island's own well water was too rich in iron for soaking. It stained her skin and left her hair tinted red. Steam rose and water rocked against her hips. She remembered failed vacations from her marriage. The trip would turn as reasonlessly as wind drifts over water: a bad dinner, a flat tire, or a forgotten hairbrush and the whole thing would be ruined. It was harder for them because they lived a vacation.
She turned over on her stomach and thought of the first trip she'd ever taken with Daniel, how she'd wanted it to go well. It was just over the border that she'd mentioned flowers and he'd looked oddly at her, and asked where he was supposed to get them. She'd smudged daisies with her pinky over the window. He pulled over and they looked in the brush on the side of the road. She found two tattered daisies. He found a few fisted morning glories that looked like tissue paper when he held out his hand. Soon after, he had taken a flashlight and gone into the woods. She waited in the car thinking of the irises on the dark side of her parents’ house and the big silky petaled magnolia in the backyard. He returned with nothing and they drove on toward the town they had heard of with the judge who would marry you for five dollars.
The door clicked. “Me,” Birdflower said. A bag rustled and then there was a little gasp from a twist-off beer. Birdflower walked into the bathroom and put a green bottle near her on the tub's edge. He sat across the paper banner of the closed toilet seat. Emily tipped her beer up.
Birdflower looked at his beer, then let his eyes slowly peruse her body. “I want this to be good,” he said. “I've been thinking about it every other minute for days.”
“Have you ever noticed when you're off, it's always like you're a silver minnow in a plastic cup or something?” she said, water lapping back and forth from her toes to her neck.
“We're in the same cup,” he said as he moved to sit on the ledge. He kissed her and with a finger drew a line on her neck up to her ear. His hand moved over her wet hair, which separated and dripped at the shoulders.
Emily thought, I'll stay with you as long as I can.
He sat on the bed watching Emily put lotion on her newly shaven legs. She had on a calico sundress and different leather sandals than usual. He was dressed up too, white shirt, open paisley vest, and his jeans were the newer of the two pair he owned. He drank the last beer. It was weird that just two months ago on his birth, day in May he had been so alone. He'd woken early and smoked a joint in bed, watching the tip blend with the rising sun out his window. He made a cake, this year devil's food, sometimes angeclass="underline" a tradition his mother had started, depending on the behavior of the year. Later, after a quiet day of meditation on his life's odometer turning over, he had dinner and a slice of his cake. When he had finished, pushed his plate forward, and sat back to light a cigarette, he felt that something would have to happen very soon.
“Ready?” she said.
“To hit the town with you,” Birdflower said.
When they got in the van, Emily brushed sand off the seat as though she'd never seen the stuff. He saw them at some low-ceilinged, red-lighted club, fishbowl drinks in front of them with mermaid swizzle sticks. They were quiet and he started thinking about the little house on Lake Michigan his father had left him. A friend had told him a small village had grown up at water's edge. Lately he envisioned them in the back of some bakery there. Her chopping nuts for bread, him pouring batter into muffin tins. He'd told her this a few days ago. She was not as enthusiastic as he had hoped. That scared him. He knew she was like a plant and he worried that if he brought her up there, to the frozen ground, it'd be all over. She might get limp and start asking for water and before you knew it, one morning he would wake up to find a pile of dry leaves next to him in bed. On Ocracoke the cold was different. It blew off the sea instead of moving up from the earth the way it did in the upper peninsula. Last year he'd seen the winter ocean. He'd been stoned and drunk and decided around four in the afternoon to borrow a speedboat and take a look. The water was navy-black and the moving whitecaps reminded him of an old guy's fingertips coming together and then apart, as though the ocean was wringing its hands. Even the few coal-black fish that jumped were shivering: their breath making tiny puffs over the water.
They chose the place because it was red-barn color and had a chain of pink elephants across one side. The bouncer took their money. “Have you seen stuff like this before?” He turned the bill up so that Lincoln eyeballed Emily's breasts.
“Yeah, man. She's seen it all,” Birdtlower said.
The air conditioner hummed and bubbled, filtered and cooled the place as though it was underwater. They let their eyes focus on the wood tables. Birdflower watched the light and movement of the blinking Busch river, the neon Budweiser clocks, and the giant can of Michelob lit on the far wall. As if each had accidentally floated there, lone men scattered the bar. They chose a table and Birdflower left Emily fingering candle wax at the back.