“I’ve never been much good at diving,” I eventually said.
That night Margaret drove me to the Starlings’. She took the back roads. Her old white Volvo, with its wooden stripe and bullish head, flew down the hill out of town. She drove in the center of the road with no regard for sides or lanes. With the wheel she took a light touch, switching hands often to tap her cigarette. I put my arm out the window when we took the curves.
Ray’s pickup was parked in the drive when we arrived.
The two men were on the back porch.
“You’re forgetting something,” Margaret said as I opened the door of the car. She reached into the backseat and handed me the dusty black body of the old point and shoot we’d practiced with that afternoon.
“Here,” she said. “Next time, we’ll develop some of yours.”
There was something definite about the weight of the machine in my hands. I slipped the camera strap over my head, righting its body on my chest.
“Sure,” I said.
Father and Ray were on the deck as I came up the stairs. Their backs to me, the two men stood side by side looking out over the yard. Ray was teaching Father how to shoot. “Loosen your grip and let your wrist do the work,” Ray said.
I paused as Father released a round over the pool and into the clearing. A metallic smell hung in the air. Ruth emerged from the kitchen with a tray of rock glasses and a bottle of Scotch. Father and Ray startled at the sound of the screen behind her.
“Where’s all your fish?” I said.
Father turned to look at me. I glimpsed a light in his eyes, a reflection perhaps from Ruth’s lampshade in the window. As he bent down, it flickered and went out. I reached up to him. He picked me up in his arms and pulled me to his chest.
“Let’s get you home,” he said. “I bet that sister of yours is knee-deep in trouble.”
My legs knocked against the Starlings’ railing as Father carried me down the stairs to the truck. I was too big already for carrying.
The sun set over the hill as Ray drove Father and I home. The bed of the truck behind us smelled of sweat and fish. The stink came in through the windows.
“Wreaks to high heaven,” Father said.
“Keeps the coyotes away,” Ray joked. “They’ve been kicking up a storm. Woke me from the dead last night. I went out on to the porch and heard this yelping. It sounded like it was coming from over your direction. By the time I got my gun, whatever it was had wandered off.”
“Poor sucker,” Father said.
“Next time,” Ray said. “He’ll get what’s coming to him.”
13
Fender turned me into the kind of girl who was always tearing the clothes off her body at the first sign of running water. “Hold up, little bug,” Father’d say those nights I came home from the clearing. “Stop all your buzzing. You’ll confuse the flies.”
The day after Father’s big fish, I was waiting for Fender at the start of the drive. The smell of bass in the morning is enough to make anyone go running into the world. Father was sleeping. I scribbled a note for him on a napkin and left it in the kitchen under the glass duck where Mother’d once stashed notes to Father those nights she was going to be late at a Separatist meeting.
“You’re early,” Fender said when he arrived.
“Stunk out,” I said.
“Well,” Fender said. “If your funk gets too thick down there in the clearing, you might have to go bathe it off in the stream.”
The previous week we’d flung ourselves headlong into a stealing pact, pilfering Liden’s collection of dirty magazines. Fender’d come down one morning with a bruiser. Liden had gone on a hitting streak. K and I iced Fender’s eye with bags of frozen peas. We made him promise he’d sleep it off in the basement.
Fender and I were going to paper the box by the marsh with cut outs from Liden’s magazines. Fender’d been slipping them out of the attic one by one since the bruiser. Each morning he brought me a few glossies: monster trucks, and Sports Illustrated, and some of the harder core stuff, which he kept at the bottom of the pile and told me not to be alarmed about. “That’s not for papering,” he said. “One night we’ll build a bonfire and blaze this smut.”
“Sure,” I said. Smut sounded like it would burn.
Fender was leaning hard on something. “Dad’s home,” he said. “First time since last time.”
“When was last time?” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “When Mom went on a cruise with her pharmacist. Said he came around to watch over us while she was out fucking. Admitted to liking us a little bit even.”
“You’re a likable lot,” I said. “Minus your brothers.”
“Mostly,” he said, “I think he came back to clean out his things when she was out of his hair. Now he’s on us about the house.”
“Is it his?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “He left it to her when he split. Payoff for his mistress until he found out she had her own on the side. Now he lords it over her whenever he’s short on money.”
“Maybe they’re fighting over custody,” I said.
“Nah,” he said. “At this point we probably belong to the state.”
“Refugees of California,” I laughed pointing at an ad for surfboards on our box.
“Right,” he said. “At least it’s better than Michigan. Michigan never had any thing other than a lake.”
“Well,” I said, “At least you could row out into it if you needed to make a break for a while.”
We abandoned the bikes in the sand next to the mailbox and packed into the marsh on foot. Every now and again Fender gunned me with one of his half-smiles. When the wind picked up, I thought I smelled a trace of cologne he’d lifted from his father.
At the bridge, he smoked a few cigarettes while I rummaged around under the trees picking my sprinters, short narrow twigs with enough heft to get picked up by the current but without the girth to create friction with the undertow. I won twice of my own merit.
Fender lifted a small golden bottle out of the pocket of his bomber, which he said he wore to protect his arms from the brush, but really I knew he was keeping his bruises hidden.
“What’s with that?” I said.
“Nothing,” he said.
He took a few swigs, more nosegay than fire. It made me sad, this kind of trying.
“You don’t need any,” he said, when I reached for it.
“How do you know what I need?” I said.
It didn’t take long before the box from the rider was gleaming. Elmer’s glue, monster trucks, beaches with girls with all their womanhood in the chest. According to the front door, Winchesters were on special. We clipped the ad for surfboards that boasted the slogan California Dreamin’, and posted it on the rear wall above the little window I’d slit.
The box was big enough that we could lay side by side on our backs with our legs stretched. Fender had stripped down to his shorts. He bathed his T-shirt every now and again in the stream and tied it around his neck.
“Take that thing off,” I said. “Before you flood the place.”
“Just you make me,” he said.
I straddled his middle with the thick part of my thighs while batting around at his head trying to undo the place where his T-shirt was knotted. The move was a holdover from childhood games of wrestling with Father. Father had said he didn’t want me to turn soft like him.
Fender was swift but I had the advantage of his sleepiness from the liquor. I had him by the wrists. We paused like this for a minute, his arms out in front of me, raised up above his head. His chest heaved. I looked him in the face.
“Not bad for a light weight,” he said.
We struggled, my forehead cupped in the palm of his hand, the weight of my body blazing down into him, until a head rush set in.