‘Maybe that little girl should be wearing a lifejacket,’ another one of them says.
‘That would take out all the fun…’ someone grumbles back to him.
Lymon hits the play button on the cassette deck and blasts ‘Hallelujah, Praise Jehovah!’ which is my cue to raise my arms straight up and allow Stella and Petunia to lift me into the air.
I wiggle my bare toes and feet as if in a devout fervor, which also serves the dual purpose of authenticating there are no rafts or other flotation devices set upon my feet.
The music lowers and Le Loup starts reading the scripture.
I am going to walk, I tell myself, and place my toes into the murky, cold water.
‘Whatever you do, just keep moving,’ Petunia and Stella whisper in my ears.
‘You keep moving,’ Le Loup had also advised. ‘You sink, no one is coming in after you…’
I stare out at the men across the bog. They’ve got their arms spread out to me, like fathers encouraging their baby to take his first steps into their arms.
My body jerks involuntarily at the sense memory, of once having taken those steps into somebody’s arms…
I let go of the hands holding me and take a big step farther out into the cool musky water, and I slowly start to sink.
‘Walk to me, walk to me,’ I hear echoing under the praises to Jesus.
I quickly take another wobbly step as the water climbs to my ankles. I lift my feet high and step again … and I hear the round of gasps as I start to sink and panic begins to take hold of me.
‘Keep moving!’ I hear from behind me.
The gnarl of mosquitoes buzzing in my ear and the excitement in the truckers’ voices grow as the water rises to my knees.
One of the truckers twenty-five feet in front of me squats down and spreads his arms out to me wider.
I raise up my bare right foot and take another step.
He nods at me and smiles warmly, as if he were willing me the raw determination to reach him.
I follow with my left foot and to my surprise, I am buoyant. I feel a soft cloud beneath me. I take another step and I am walking. I am walking on the water. And I am heading toward him, the man wiggling his fingers at me.
The music blasts louder as I coast across the surface of the water. Some of the truckers wave their Bibles, some their logbooks. They all cheer.
His eyes are hazel like the pliant bark of a slippery elm. I am five feet in front of the welcoming arms of the squatting man, and it is only Le Loup’s loud clearing of his throat that keeps me from bolting the rest of the way into the man’s arms.
I take my steps, moving forward steadily, gracefully as we had practiced before at Le Loup’s.
Two more steps and I will be in his arms and nothing will matter anymore. I will forgive his long absence, I won’t even ask why he left, or if he ever thought of me or missed me the way I missed him.
The jubilance of the crowd is masked by my heart surging in all its electrical currents toward him. I take one more step onto the dry land and he is there in front of me. Le Loup shouts a loud ‘Hallelujah!’ I open my arms to the man as he suddenly pops up and turns from me to slap hands with some of the other truckers. ‘You lost that one, buddy!’ he says. ‘You owe me two hundred dollars now!’ He high-fives some hands and whoops ‘Hallelujah!’ and ‘Fuckin’ A!’
Logbooks get pressed into my hands. ‘I rode straight for a solid week without a break. Please bless this falsified logbook!’ petitions one trucker on his knees.
‘Me too!’ another pleads.
‘Gentlemen!’ shouts Le Loup, instantly hushing the crowd. ‘You may have an audience with Saint Sarah back at the church.’ The church was Le Loup’s barn, now stripped of the fur and the wet-animal scent. The wood floor had been spread with sawdust, and urns of imported incense burned on little plywood mantels. The satin zebra sheets had been replaced with bedding more fitting for a saint. Even the 3D picture of the Pope was removed, with apologies muttered by Le Loup. ‘Too confusing to the various Christ-loving factions,’ Le Loup explained.
Lymon wraps a big towel around me and starts to turn me away from the crowd. I look for the man over my shoulder and see him taking money from another man’s hand.
‘You did it, honey,’ Lymon mumbles into my ear and kneels down to tenderly dry my feet. His fingers lovingly glide over my toes, picking off the bits of the sphagnum moss that made my walk on water possible. For the first time I am not overwhelmed to the point of nausea by his strong onion-garlic ramp smell.
I touch him back. I let my fingers run through the hard loofah-like surface of his crew cut. He lets out a subdued moan, stops moving, and presses his arms against my calves. I move my fingers to his shoulders and along the stringlike tendons that seem stretched to their limits as he drops his neck to my thighs. His hands tremble and he peers up at me with flat timid eyes filled with tears.
‘It’s been so long…’ he whispers.
‘I know. And I’m sorry I left you,’ I say and caress his cheek.
‘You two lovebirds better get a move on,’ Pooh whispers behind us, ‘before he sees…’ She gestures at Le Loup behind her.
‘Pooh. I didn’t know you were here,’ I say, surprised.
‘We don’t usually get this much holy fire until the Ramps Festival.’ Pooh winks at me, and Lymon scurries away silently. ‘Couldn’t miss it. Let’s get you back.’ Pooh puts her arm around me and leads me through the marshy ground to Le Loup’s Trans Am.
‘Pooh, I’m really sorry this all got so…’ I suddenly feel a strong desire to reach for her hand, but it’s playing with some necklace under her shirt.
‘Oh, now don’t you worry yourself,’ she says. ‘Things have a way of working out.’ She smiles and I think I catch a hint of slick animosity under her wide grin. Pooh takes her hand out from beneath her shirt and pats my hand.
‘Oh, been meaning to show you…’ She reaches inside the neck of her shirt. ‘I got something I’ve been wanting you to take a look-see at.’ She slowly pulls up on a leather thong. ‘Check this out.’ At first I think it’s a furless rabbit’s foot, then my eyes focus on it and I see it’s a raccoon penis bone.
‘Isn’t it great?!’ Pooh says, dangling it in front of me.
My first thought is she earned one too. Glad must’ve somehow heard of her fame and rewarded her. ‘You got one too?’ I say.
‘Pardon?’ she says and cocks her head.
‘Uh, where’d you get that?’ I try to say mildly.
‘I found it.’ Her smile grows bigger.
Unconsciously my hand searches my neck for my raccoon penis bone, and then I picture myself tossing it out the window into…
‘Funniest thing too,’ Pooh laughs a little too loud.
I nod and, as if I’m in on what’s so funny, I give a hollow smile.
‘Le Loup lets the skunk cabbage grow around the house all winter ’cause it naturally gives out more heat than a goat’s butt in a pepper patch … melts the snow real nice so I don’t gotta get out to shovel…’
I feel a saw blade of fear creep up my spine.
‘But come the warm weather, he has me get out the machete and chop it out afore the stink gets worse than a hog farm in August.’
As Pooh rambles on, my head keeps nodding like a spring-loaded souvenir doll.
‘So, when I was hacking away’—Pooh slices the air with her hand—‘I found this necklace in the skunk bushes. It was in the ones under the window out back, ya know, near your bed?’
‘Did you show it to him?’ I ask, trying to keep my voice nonchalant.
‘Oh, your feet are all bleeding…’ she says, pointing at them.
I glance at them and nod. ‘I didn’t notice.’
‘It’s all the pitcher plants, sundews, and bladder worts. They eat flesh. That’s how a lot of bodies get disposed of around here.’ Pooh shrugs. ‘In those bogs’—she gestures to where I had just performed my miracle—‘you float on the moss, like swinging in a hammock, while them plants chew you up nice and slow…’
‘Did you show it to him?’ I repeat between shallow breaths.
‘No. Should I? What’s it mean?’ Pooh narrows her perpetually swollen eyes at me.
I stare at the little bloody bites on my feet. ‘It just means I once worked for someone else.’
‘I’ve been asking around about it.’
‘What’d ya hear?’
‘Just … nothing. I don’t ask everyone. I just didn’t have a clue who it could’ve belonged to…’ Pooh blinks her eyes in rapid succession. ‘Who’d you work for?’
‘Just someone I don’t work for now,’ I say and turn to the glass to see Le Loup heading toward the car.
‘Uh-huh… Look’—Pooh takes my hand—‘I don’t hate you, okay? I’m not trying to mess you. We can work together, ‘kay?’
I regard her and nod as Le Loup pulls open the door.
‘Some fucking show!’ he says climbing into the driver’s seat, while Pooh inconspicuously slips the raccoon penis bone under her shirt. ‘Those Yanks is forkin’ over like they just been shown the afterworld!’ He reaches over Pooh and caresses my head. Pooh coughs.
‘The plants tried to eat her up,’ Pooh says and points to my bleeding feet.
‘Ahh, we got a new stigmata! Sure beats the fuck out of onion tears, don’t it!’ Le Loup laughs and we drive off.
One day Pooh starts playing Barbies with me. Le Loup was out on his recruiting trips, looking for new lizards he could lure away from their respective lot daddies. Pooh kneels down on the floor near my bed where I’m resting after a long morning of blessing truckers. Without a word she slides out the vinyl cases of dolls. She lifts them onto the bed and sits next to them.
‘Damn, you’ve been busier than a cat covering crap on a marble floor, collecting all these dolls,’ Pooh laughs.
‘They’re okay.’ I shrug.
‘When I was little all I wanted was Barbies.’ Pooh sighs and her eyes take on a rare distant softness. ‘When Le Loup bought me from my uncle, he promised he’d get me so many Barbies I wouldn’t have room to fart,’ she says slowly, taking out the dolls and laying them tenderly on the bed.
‘How much he buy you for?’
‘Fuck knows. Probably a case of beer. I woulda gone with him for free.’ She looks puzzled as she examines one of the garishly dressed Barbies.
‘How’d you meet him?’ I take out Dentist Barbie and subtly wave her around to try to interest Pooh.
Pooh crinkles her nose as she turns the Barbie around in her hand. ‘Uncle sold Le Loup his corn liquor, but it was really just Sterno that we would pour through loaves of Wonder bread to clean it up some.’ Pooh creases her brow and begins to lift the little lycra skirt of the Barbie.
‘Did Le Loup find out?’ I quickly reach under the bed for the Barbie mobile and start driving it up to Pooh to get her to seat the doll in it.
‘My uncle’d be sucking chrome off a trailer hitch if he ain’t had me to offer to Le Loup.’ She ignores the car and starts to work down the fuchsia tights on the Barbie. ‘But, Lord, was Le Loup sweet to me. I was his baby.’ She sighs and her hands fall still for a moment. ‘But faster then a feather singeing in hell, I started to let him down.’ She looks up at me and her eyes darken as if she’s remembering a secretly held thought. ‘Like how he treats you.’ She looks at me so directly I can only lower my eyes.
‘Here, look at this one. She’s got a belly button ring,’ I say and try to hand Pooh another Barbie from the case.
While holding my gaze. Pooh pulls down the doll’s tights with a firm tug. She grabs other similarly dressed ones, pulls up their dresses, and pulls down their tights. An eerie smile spreads across Pooh’s face. I look down at a line of Ken dolls lying between us. Their skirts or dresses are hitched over their heads, exposing their little naked U plastic penises or their painted-on underwear, looking like a row of fainted cross-dressed flashers.
‘I thought it was funny,’ I say quietly and offer her a half smile.
‘It is,’ she says, keeping the same disquieting grin on her face.
‘I know you mean more to Le Loup than I ever could,’ I say.
‘What’re you talking about?’ She shakes her head and smiles at me with her mouth sealed.
‘He—he never touches me, never…’
‘What’s this?’ she says, looking at me again and holding up one of the doll’s Q-Tip raccoon penis bones I had made.
I blow out a big sigh of air, ‘Umm, they’re, just necklaces.’
Pooh’s mouth goes askew slightly then resumes its former shape. She claps her hands just like Le Loup does and I drop the doll I’m holding between my legs.
Her hand forms a vise and she reaches for the fallen doll. I snatch it up and hold it in front of my private parts. She delicately reaches over and lifts the dolls away from me, and as she does she snaps the splayed rubbery legs of the Barbie under my skirt and against the cotton crotch of my panties. ‘Whoops … sorry…’
Pooh and I play with our dolls whenever Le Loup is away.
Pooh shows up one day holding a thread-worn folded-over patch of red velvet.
‘I have something special.’ She points with a tilt of her head to the dolls I have already laid out for us. I raise my eyebrows in anticipation. She sits on the bed next to me and slowly opens the velvet square as if she were uncovering a smuggled treasure. I see bits of chicken bones mixed with gold thread.
‘Those Q-tips really don’t look right,’ she says reaching in with her pinky finger and scooping out one of her creations. She holds out on the nail of her pinky finger a miniature necklace.
‘I made more realistic raccoon penis bones,’ she says and winks at me. It’s the first time I ever heard her admit she knew exactly what the necklaces were. ‘Lymon gave me some boiled chicken bones. I hacked chips off of them and I got some gold thread from Stella.’ She reaches for the doll I’m holding, a Ken doll dressed in Flight Attendant Barbie’s gray linen uniform dress. Pooh puts the new necklace on the doll and hands her back to me.
I give Pooh a weak grin. ‘What did they say?’
‘They? Who? Lymon and Stella? Never asked what it was for … why?’ Pooh jingles the diminutive necklaces.
I nod then shrug. ‘I just think we should keep this, ya know, private.’ I start pulling the old dental-floss Q-Tip necklaces off the dolls.
‘It’s nobody’s business,’ she says in a low voice that resembles a growl. ‘Now, I have to run over your flight attendant there for stealing Rock Star Ken,’ she says matter-of-factly.