Winter Loon(35)

“You’re taking long enough.”

She swirled her thumbs and fingers around my shoulders and back like she was finger painting.

“I’m serious,” I said. “I can’t breathe.”

“Fine,” she said, and climbed off me. “You want me to do your stomach, too?”

My boner was boring a hole in the river bottom. Nothing could have made me turn over right then. “Maybe later,” I said, thinking softer thoughts.

Jolene shrugged me off and rambled on about school and teachers and girl stuff while my eyes surveyed the length of her leg, the long scratches darkened by healing, the way she propped herself up on locked arms and tilted her head back, twitching the tail of her braid over her spine. She went quiet and I did, too, happy to doze listening to the clack of aspen leaves, the laughter echoing from beneath the bridge, until my back sizzled like pork rinds in a fryer. Pebbles crunched next to me when she got up. I rolled over and watched as she stooped for flat stones to skip into the eddy. My gaze drifted from the bright string bow in the middle of her brown back to the dangerous curves leading down to the waistband of her cutoff shorts. She’d taken her braid out, and her hair fell in heavy waves on her shoulders. She turned to look at me, and I will swear it was in slow motion.

Everything in front of me shifted and tossed like trinkets in a kaleidoscope—the pink bikini top, the white frays of denim brushing her thighs, the tawny crescent moon and the starstruck eyes. I could see bits of the river, the stands of birches, kids swinging from the rope. But more than anything, there was her. She unbuttoned her shorts, let them drop on the stones. She flexed fierce like a bodybuilder, laughed at herself. How I wanted to be strong like her. For her. To this day, I can’t be at the river bottom and not think of how we became bound by love and loss there. The particular smell—the decay of wet things, fish and moss, that heady pine-and-honey stink of cottonwood resin, the river disappearing and remaking itself in the current—it’s the stuff of memory. I am soaked in it.

She summoned me. I was at once powerless and powerful. “C’mon, sleepy! Let’s jump in.”



THE COOL SLIME ON THE river rocks slipped between my toes as we gingerly waded into the cold water. We let the current carry us downstream. Beneath the bridge we hooted and hollered so our voices would ring hollow off the riverbanks. The boys beneath the bridge watched us float by from their rock perches.

I was a graceless swimmer, I knew, but I was strong and capable. Jolene, on the other hand, swam like she’d sprouted a tail, a trout effortlessly dissecting the currents. We took turns dunking each other and, underwater, I caught fleeting glimpses of her brown legs kicking in the green river, bits of algae and fish scales swirling around her like tiny water fairies. Tinfoil rays of sunshine shimmered on the submerged rocks. I had no winter thoughts. I was anointed in summer water. In that moment, I was all for rivers and swimming with Jolene. I could have floated all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

We watched from downstream as one of the boys scrambled up the rock embankment. He had the rope in his hand as he pitched backward, kicked up both feet, his backside for a moment barely missing the ground. Then he swung far out over the river and, at the last minute, he surged upward, let go of the rope, and plunged into the deep water.

I watched Jolene watch him, her eyes calculating the angles. She made for the shore and ran back upstream. “Dare you!” she said. I followed her wet path and jumped back in behind her as she powered her way across the current before wading out under the bridge on the opposite side.

The boys were older than us, with scruffy beards and lean bodies. The rope was secured next to them on a rock. It was only then that I realized one of the bikinied girls was a friend of Kathryn’s.

“You mind?” Jolene asked.

One of the boys handed her the twisted rope. “All yours,” he said. He passed a lighter-weight and longer rope to me. “You have to hold this so we can get the big rope back.”

“Guess this means I’m going first,” she said.

“You want me to go? I can.”

“Not my first rodeo, Wes.” She hiked her hands way up on the rope, pulled herself back like an acorn in a slingshot, then picked up her feet with little hesitation and launched. At the top of the arc, she let go of the rope and grabbed her own bent knee instead, jackknifing cleanly into the water below.

“Whoa,” one of the boys said.

Kathryn’s friend scoffed. “Big deal.”

“How was it?” I yelled to Jolene, ignoring the friend’s glare.

“Cold!” she yelled back, her voice in stereo beneath the bridge. “Cool.”

I reeled in the big rope and was surprised by how heavy it was, by how much I had to counterbalance it to keep it from swinging out on its own. I gripped it tight and felt its frayed threads scratching my hand. The river seemed a long way down from the top of the embankment. Kathryn’s friend whispered to another girl. The two of them snickered in my direction.

“Don’t forget to let go,” Jolene yelled.

“Helpful. Really.”

“Go on,” she said, treading water in the pool. “Don’t be a chicken.”

I reached up as high as I could, took a deep breath, and pulled up my feet. In a moment, I was a human wrecking ball, angling over the river toward the center of memory—my own defiant jump into Bright Lake, my mother above ice, then below. A split second of flagging courage and I scotched my entry. Instead of elegantly puncturing the water, I let go on the backswing and tumbled into the current off balance and backward, a boulder in a landslide. The river rushed up my nose and I swallowed a mouthful, the mineral cold ache of it heavy in my chest but earthy and clean on my lips. I kicked for the surface, snorted out my nose, alive, and shook my head like a dog after a cloudburst.