Authors: Jack Ketchum
It was cooler in the woods but it was a damp cool and it wasn’t long before her skin felt sticky with the breath of all that vegetation. Crossing the wide granite shelf that was open to the sun was better and she might have stopped there on another day and set down her blanket but today she wanted the water. The trail turned rocky and steep. She moved slower, more carefully, aware of her sandals and thought that next time she’d remember to wear tennis shoes instead.
When she reached bottom she knew she’d got it right, taking the pool over the lake. There were only about a dozen to eighteen kids scattered across the wide pebble beach, all of them her age or slightly younger. Not a little kid with a pail or a parent in sight. Only one radio and that was way down the far end where most of them were grouped together. From here she could hear it only faintly. Just four people in the water. The water looked a little silty but not bad at all.
There was just one downer. The single person at the pool who was more than only vaguely familiar to her happened to be Tim Bess.
He was sitting with two other guys about forty feet away. He was wearing yellow boxer trunks and she could see the ridge of spine down his pale skinny back. His shoulders were already burnt and he’d spread them with zinc oxide. He hadn’t noticed her yet but he would. On a beach that size it was inevitable.
Live with it
, she thought.
Do what you came here to do. Get cool and wet
.
She slipped off the short terry-cloth robe. Her blue bikini would probably have appalled her father but there were girls on the beach wearing less. Skin was in this year.
The water was cold at first because of the rain but she dove under and dove again and cold turned to refreshing. She stood and pushed back her streaming wet hair and started swimming. She was a good strong swimmer. Her mother in far saner days had taught her how. Crawl, backstroke, sidestroke left, sidestroke right, breaststroke, butterfly. She alternated them three times each going halfway across to the muddy steep bank opposite and back and then dove and swam underwater toward the beach until she was only in up to her waist, and then she surfaced.
When she wiped her eyes she saw Bess and the other two boys roughly five yards away up to their knees in the water and wading. Bess was talking to the kid with curly red hair and hadn’t seemed to have noticed her. The other two had, though and the guy with the red hair nodded in her direction so that Tim turned to see who or what he was looking at and that was when he saw her. He waved and smiled.
“Hey, Katherine.”
“Hello, Tim.”
Her greeting wasn’t exactly friendly but it wasn’t unfriendly either. It struck just the note she wanted. She dove again. In the opposite direction, giving them a brief view of her butt flashing out of and then back into the water but also telling them that she wished to be left alone, thank you very much. When she surfaced she’d put six more yards between them and she was into deep water. She turned briefly and saw them laughing and splashing at one another near shore and thought, my god,
boys
and began to swim away, the crawl this time, taking the pool lengthwise.
She did this twice until her muscles began to ache and then turned over on her back and headed for shore. Taking her time, stretching out the burn in her muscles with the backstroke. She was nearly to where she knew she could probably stand and wade the rest of the way in when a head popped up to the left of her not three feet away and of course it was Bess, wearing a great big stupid grin and wiping the water from his eyes wiping his runny nose and sputtering.
Gross
.
“Hi again,” he said.
“Hi.”
She was aware that her nipples were erect. Also that he couldn’t seem to keep his eyes off them as he paddled along beside her.
What an asshole
. She pushed one more time and got to where she knew she could stand and rolled over facing him. The water was up to her neck and cloudy. He couldn’t see much of her nipples anymore. She figured she’d just stay there awhile.
“Where’s Ray?” she said. It was really all she could think of to say to him.
“At work.”
“Ah. Right. Work.”
And that about ran her out of conversation with the guy.
“Look, Tim, I don’t mean to be unfriendly or anything but I came down here to be alone for a while, you know? Relax, take a swim, get some sun, do some reading. Know what I mean?”
“Sure. No problem. I’m just hanging out with the guys over there. Just wanted to say hello. Drop by later and I’ll introduce you if you want. See you.”
He stopped paddling and stood and started splashing his way toward shore.
“Enjoy,” he said.
She didn’t answer. She waited until he was on the sand and toweling dry and then walked out of the water. She realized that while she was swimming the other two boys had relocated slightly—instead of being forty feet away from her blanket and towel, now it was more like thirty. That was a whole lot closer than she’d have wanted but she was damned if she was moving. She was aware of their eyes on her as she toweled off and settled in on the blanket. She rolled the towel into a ball as a pillow for her head and dug her sunglasses and copy of Anais Nin’s
House of Incest
out of her bag and started reading.
The book was too surreal for her tastes but her rule always was, you start a book, you finish it. This one had the virtue of being short at least and Nin wrote about her fiction so much in the
Diaries
—which she far preferred to this stuff—that she’d thought she’d ought to give it a try. Now, though, she was bored with the thing.
She glanced across the beach and saw that Bess was faced in her direction and caught him watching her.
Damn this kid!
He was making her uncomfortable. Which also made her angry. Couldn’t a woman just lie on a beach without some dipstick kid gawking at her, wishing he could crawl all over her?
Go get yourself
laid
for godsakes
.
His eyes darted away. They’d be back though. She’d bet the farm on it.
Okay, schmuck
, she thought.
I’ll give you something to gawk at
.
She dug into the bag for the suntan lotion and took off the cap and set it beside her on the blanket. Then she reached around in back of her and unsnapped the clasp to her halter and slid the straps down off her shoulders. It was the first time her breasts had seen the sun this year though not nearly the first time they’d seen the sun. But they were pale and they’d burn quickly without the lotion and besides, she had the feeling that watching her smooth the lotion over them would unravel Bess completely so she did it slowly, taking care not to look at him,
Bess wasn’t even there
, feeling the nipples stiffen under her fingers. As in more ways than one, she rubbed it in.
When she was through and her breasts were glistening she lay back on the blanket and closed her eyes. Shutting him out. Shutting everyone out. Feeling the nipples slowly soften again. She wondered how many women went topless here. It was no big deal in California but it might be here. She wondered if word would get around. She wondered if he’d tell Ray and if he did, what he’d think.
She decided she really didn’t give a damn on any of these questions and took the sun.
Evenings were the worst times, not the nights.
Nights he could lose himself sitting in front of the television set with a couple of beers and it was fine even to fall asleep that way sitting in his chair, feet up on the hassock. He didn’t need the bed.
But evenings like this after leaving Teddy Panik’s the sheer goddamn emptiness of his days would wrap around him like a dull soft glove. The glove concealed a fist. One that could hurt him. He made it a rule not to have more than three or four tops at Teddy’s bar because more than that and he knew he’d be nothing but a drunk again. They were calling them alcoholics these days but that was bullshit. What they were were drunks. The problem was that three or four wouldn’t get him past the glove, that sense of uselessness that had settled over him since Lila took his son Will and daughter Barbara to Arizona to live close to her parents in Mesa.
Will was eleven when that happened and fifteen now. Barbara had just turned seven. It struck him as very interesting that Barbara was Elise Hanlon’s mother’s name too and he wondered if that had anything to do with the bug up his ass on this one. But he didn’t know from psychology and it probably didn’t matter anyway one way or another. The bug was there. Sometimes he thought since Elise died it was just about
all
that was there.
Ed Anderson called it obsession but there you went with the psychology again.
He’d been a lousy father, he knew that. A slightly better husband.
Slightly
. There had been so much physical going on between him and Lila that it had the power to smooth out a lot of the rough spots. The sex was wonderful, had been ever since they met in high school. And so was the tenderness. Their sensitivity to each other’s touch remained a constant between them no matter why they were doing the touching, whether it was for reassurance or just holding hands or foreplay. The touch. They’d never lost that. Not until the distance between Jersey and Arizona made it impossible to touch.
He remembered seeing her off at the airport. They were wildly early getting there for some reason that neither of them could quite understand but that would eventually become clear to them and the kids had gone on ahead a week before with their grandmother. So they sat for over an hour and a half at a table in the crowded airport bar, Schilling drinking scotch even though that was a good part of what had got them there in the first place and Lila drinking vodka tonics and they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. At first it was across the table and then he slid in beside her into the booth and they held one another and kissed and cried and tried to fathom what had happened here, what kind of beast had savaged them and what this meant. How could two people have no future together when they clung so ferociously even at future’s end? It made no sense. Even in their final hour and a half as a couple there was a sweetness he would not know again. He was aware of it even then. To deal with that fact, to experience it fully was why they’d arrived so early at the airport. Somehow they’d known they’d need the time.
You could not love like this more than once. It would never happen to either one of them again.
But at least he’d had that much with her. At least they’d had the touch. He was never even in the ballpark with the kids. Probably he wasn’t meant to have kids in the first place. His job was his passion and second to that was Lila and third to that was drinking, a product of the first passion probably mixed with plain old genetics he guessed. His parents had had that problem too.
His kids had got the short end.
Will had been difficult from birth and did not get any easier. He talked to Lila and the kids on a weekly basis and it was still true. Will was angry and defiant and running with an equally fuck-you crowd and Lila was worried. Schilling had treated him with very little patience and had always wanted more from him self-discipline-wise than the kid was prepared to give. He loved him but the fact was that Will exasperated him and stirred his anger, and it had always been that way and no matter how he tried to hide it, it always showed.
With Barbara he was a little better. Barbara was a quiet little girl by nature, an early reader who spent more time with her books and toys than with other kids. She’d sit outside by the brook all day with a well-thumbed book and be happy as a clam. The problem was that when Schilling finally got around to admitting it he realized that his daughter really didn’t interest him. He was proud of her reading skills and delicate fair good looks—she got that from her mom—but he probably didn’t understand young girls enough to wonder much about them or about what was on their minds. She was not the kind of demonstrative child who always wanted to sit on her father’s lap or have him tell her a story at bedtime. She didn’t ask and he didn’t volunteer. So largely he guessed he ignored her. He was ashamed of that, but it didn’t stop him knowing it was true.
He’d been a lousy father, a slightly better husband and what he had for his thirteen years of married life was empty hands and memories and a woman who had once been his lover who was now his friend and a heart that rarely even ached anymore. He hadn’t had a woman in years. Not since Steiner/Hanlon.
At first after he realized Lila wasn’t coming back to him he’d searched out women with a kind of manic fervor like someone dashing around the house scrambling for gauze and bandages after shooting himself in the foot. That had lasted a few months. He couldn’t sustain it.
After Lila it was mostly nonsense to him. The touch was gone.
It occurred to him that he was probably still in mourning.
Since then he’d had plenty of offers, bold and subtle. That wasn’t the problem. You drink in a bar, unless you’re Quasimodo you get offers and maybe you get them even then. He didn’t have the energy most of the time even to want a woman much less court one.
Someone once said that in matters of love we never renounce our loved ones. Instead we replace them.