Birdflower opened the van door. His hands moved across the eternity of the front seat. Their fingers meshed and she pulled him back in.
* * *
John Berry's ears rang. It was the way he thought atom bombs would sound: a falling hiss then a long tone signaling the end. Behind his temples he felt a red ache which sent thin spears of color to his eyelids. He kept forgetting if he loved her or hated her. Ahead, the van circled Silver Lake inlet and rattled out of sight. They're going to the long-hair's house. John Berry slowed. “Let ‘em,” he said. “Let ‘em get stoned and eat wheat crackers.”
He flipped the wheel and headed down the sand road, thinking up confrontations. She never spoke, just came in and stood there with the corners of her mouth set and her hands dangling as if weightless and blown against her thighs.
In her driveway he turned off the engine and left the truck. The air smelled early. The screen door banged behind him. Everything was as it had been. He moved through the house, stopping at each doorway. He paused at her bedroom. Through the branches of a hunchback cedar, leaf-light moved on the pillow and the bed made with a crazy quilt: thunder-shaped patches of red flannel and heart-like pieces of men's dress pants. The same posters of black girls with flowers in their hair and palm trees and huts behind them. He rested on the bed. Collected in a box near the door were his razor, belt buckle, and flashlight. He thought of her quite casually picking up something of his — maybe the ivory-handled brush — and begin to move the bristles through her hair, but the handle would heat up as she realized it was his, and she'd drop it and kick it over to the box, get a rag, and carefully, holding it away from her body, put it in.
On the bed he found the way he liked to sleep best, one arm behind her head and the other snuggled under her waist. He scanned the room from his cheek-flat position. His blue pants, a pair he had trouble getting into, were slung over the chair. The hippie wears them, he thought. He sat up, went to the dresser, and began dumping drawers. He saw her, in the doorway, then on the bed. With one hand he whipped across the dresser, spraying her perfume, hair combs, and creams against the wall. He thought he saw her face in the mirror and her image moving in photos stuck along the edge. Her lips were telling him things she didn't know, listing his secrets, his crazy thoughts. Faster, her voice high now, hissing into a sound like rushing water. With his teeth he tore a hole the size of his fist between the legs of her pants.
“Hey,” Eddie said from the doorway. “What are you doing?”
“I came to get my stuff,” John Berry said.
“You gave my mother scars.”
“And you better believe she gave some to me.”
“You could have killed her,” Eddie said.
John Berry pulled the quilt off the bed and stuffed it into the pillowcase. “Get out of my way,” he said as he threw the bag over his shoulder.
“You're a prick,” Eddie said.
At first impulse John Berry held a hand up to slap him, but he saw Eddie was shaking and he moved around the boy. The bright light from the door gave them both grainy auras, made their movements seem blurry and slow. He walked out of the house, one foot on the shaded cement steps, then the other on the next, and out across the yard. He climbed inside his truck and started the engine.
“She's better than all of you,” Eddie screamed from the porch.
As John Berry turned from the loose sand driveway onto the gravel road, he watched the boy in the rearview mirror. Eddie was leaning against the cottage, sliding down like a water drop on glass, his arms wrapped around himself.
Feeling sorry now, John Berry pushed the horn and raised his hand. He waved, waited, but Eddie would not look up. He felt angry at Eddie. His face reddened, he pressed the gas pedal and spun out, throwing up pebbles into the morning sky.
TWELVE. THE VEGETABLE TRUCK
It was too early in the day for mosquitoes, but Emily could see the rain puddles quivering irregularly with the laying and hatching and hovering of them. All night it had rained, at one point so hard she'd been sure water would puddle around Birdflower's door, and she'd gotten up heavily, still tired from the drive back from Norfolk, and stuffed rags underneath the edges. The mosquitoes sometimes got so bad after a storm that the park service sprayed. A ranger drove around a truck that shot out intermittent streams of pink smoke that settled on everything and smelled like a mix of perfume and ash.
She walked up the beach road, toward the spot where the vegetable truck parked. She wanted strawberries, had wanted them for months. Each week the man promised he'd have some next time, and would try selling her blueberries or bruised raspberries. Once even a stray bag of cranberries. Emily leaned up against the farthest end of the pony pen, near the road. She put a leg behind her on a rung. Haze was burning off the highway and she could see triangles of sun on the water at the horizon.
The vegetable man always reminded her of Daniel. To her he looked like the actor in the movies who was always the leading man's best friend, the one with more integrity and sensitivity than the lead, just a bit sloppier and more vulnerable.
Daniel had stayed in bed late on the weekends and drank wine with her. Once he made her a necklace out of tobacco seeds and he always dried some rose petals from the front bushes for her bath. He said that it was only because of her that he could farm, that otherwise he would have been a teacher or a minister.
She half believed someday it would be Daniel asking her if she wanted green grapes or red ones. Maybe that was why she was always the first, able to choose the loveliest of everything. Though sometimes, self-conscious of the island women whispering around her, she'd intentionally buy bruised peaches, browned bananas, lettuce that would soon be worthless. She knew what they were saying, in their patterned housedresses and awkward hairdos. That she was a poor mother and untrue to the people who were stupid enough to love her. The kinder ones might say she was confused, scattered, that she had been disillusioned early, and that this life was the best she could manage.
Every few years there'd be a guy who thought he could really figure her out. “You seem like a person who's been hurt badly,” he'd say. And she told him, no, she'd just come to the conclusion sooner than most, that absolute happiness wasn't possible. The husband, baby, house formula didn't figure and she'd decided that if she couldn't be happy she'd at least do what she wanted. Emily would further explain that absolute despair wasn't possible. They'd always relent for a while before telling her she seemed distant. Not distant physically, they never meant that. They just couldn't understand her lack of interest in their educated intellects, in their world travels. She could count the Indo-China stories she'd heard, Malaysia with a French girl who wore her hair short and had a pair of little round John Lennon glasses. The tattered children in Costa Rica, the way when you were robbed in Latin America they even took your half bar of soap, and how in Berlin the Germans yelled at you to get back if you attempted to cross before the red walking man changed to green. She remembered how she would block them out by listening to her irises knock thickly against the house.
The ferry horn sounded, and minutes later, the vegetable truck appeared, small and blurry up the highway. It looked good beating back the telephone poles. Today there would be strawberries and she would walk back with them along the beach, stopping at a stretch across from Sugar Creek. There the water swung up in a half ellipse and smoothed the sand to a curve as fine as skin. These highs and lows reminded her of the hip, thigh, and stomach of some contorted giant. And she would sit there, snuggled into that lovely passage between groin and upper thigh, and eat her strawberries, cut them thin as petals with the pocket knife she carried and lay each slowly on her tongue.