Winter Loon(36)
The boys were scrambling feet first, hands dragging down the rocky slope. The drag line and thick rope were both twisting above me. Shouts—“Grab her! Grab her!” and “Shit!”—ricocheted off the cement pilings. And then I saw it. Jolene’s head bobbing lifeless out of the pool and into the current. I swam hard, as hard as I could, while the other boys ran along the shore to head her off. Those two other boys and me, we got to her about the same time. Her eyes were closed, and from what I could tell, she wasn’t breathing. All I could think was that it was me that killed her, and those words came out of my mouth as I laid her across my stomach and backstroked frantically to shore, my arm beneath hers and over her lifeless body.
We got her up the riverbank, and one of the boys rolled her onto her side and pounded on her back. I dropped down next to her, calling her name. Someone screamed something about mouth-to-mouth. A wave pulsed from her stomach and Jolene clenched, spewing a convulsive stream of river water onto the rocks caked with dried moss. I peeled wet hair out of her eyes and rubbed her back. She coughed up a few more times, on her knees now, before sitting back down.
“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” I said, not able to stop repeating my apology.
“God. I told you to let go,” she said, smirking.
Grab hold. Hang on. Let go. Pull. Yank free. “I know. I guess I panicked. Are you okay?”
She rolled her head and nodded with a faint smile, and I hugged her as hard as I had swum to her. The fleshy underside of her arms threaded with mine as river water squeezed out of her swimsuit and streamed down my stomach. She put her hand on the back of my neck, and her musky hair mixed with the green river swept across my nose and cheek. “Did you pull me out?” she whispered.
I knew who I was holding, but I could see that other hand reaching for me, see myself backing away. I imagined the river in winter, floes of ice colliding on upheaved rocks, bodies freighted downstream on some underwater railroad, snagging on dammed timber or snapped twigs. I buried my face in the warmth of her neck, then rolled around until my mouth was on hers. The boys whooped and whistled, but I didn’t care. I want to say it was soft and gentle, a good first kiss. And it started that way, the foreign taste of Jolene’s mouth, the flutter of her lips against mine. I had thoughts of sweet things I knew nothing about, like figs and pomegranates, and homemade brownie batter licked off someone else’s finger. Smells went past my nose to my taste buds—the scent of tobacco leaf still in the field, barreled spices in the hull of a faraway boat, star-shaped flowers tucked behind an ear next to thick black hair. And then it wasn’t enough. I lurched in, cramming my clumsy tongue down her throat, desperate to somehow take in this person who came alive after being dead in the water.
She pulled away, flushed, and ducked her head in embarrassment. “Stop.” She touched three fingers to her lips.
Stung by her rejection, I stood up carefully and reached for her, but she refused my hand, getting to her feet on her own. “You’re covered in dirt,” she said, brushing tiny pebbles and sand off my back.
“Your knees, too,” I said, and she brushed them off, never taking her eyes off me.
Kathryn’s friend was in the crowd that had gathered. Her mouth was stunned open. This whole scene I knew would get back to Kathryn, but right then I could not have cared any less nor could I have known what it would set in motion.
Back at our bikes, Jolene leaned against the tree and, in the privacy, pulled me to her, and we made out there as if we needed each other to breathe.
My chest was alive with hummingbirds when we finally parted. It was the longest ride back to town. We stopped to put our feet in a ditch, to kiss more, took a detour so we could hide behind an abandoned farmhouse and press our mouths and bodies together, with only a feral cat as witness.
Back at her house, she rolled her bicycle into the freestanding garage that opened to the alley behind the house. I followed her in, laid my bike in the rutted gravel. She walked me back until I was against the rotting doorframe. She crossed her arms, leaned into me, and I wrapped her up. “I’m sorry,” I said, “about the river.”
She told me she was not sorry, not about one single thing.
I LEFT JOLENE ON A cloud that day, without asking her when or how I could see her again. Mush for legs, I took my time getting home, walking my bike through town past the newsstand, the pharmacy, the penny candy store. Suddenly, Loma wasn’t so bad. Suddenly, Loma was a town where I could stay. When my father came for me, I would tell him we should find a house there, that it would be good for us both to be in a familiar place. I imagined introducing Jolene to him, how I’d put my arm around her in that way that says, “This is my girl.”
I stopped in front of the thick plate glass window at the radio station. The afternoon disc jockey switched vinyl records on the dual turntables, spinning one on his finger before replacing it in the cardboard sleeve, a move practiced and perfected for passersby. I focused on my own reflection and saw, maybe for the first time, a ghost of my father—the same wavy hair, sloped posture, angled jaw. I could almost see stepping from his shadow and into his clothes and skin. I watched the reflection of me bring my right palm up to my left shoulder, push up the sleeve enough to see that his tattoo was not there. I knew next to nothing about him as a boy, only that he’d left his home in Utah young, a teenager. He’d said he was thrown out, disowned, and would say no more. I had no known grandparents from him, no uncles or aunts to speak of. As far as I knew, I was his only kin, yet still he could find it in him to keep his distance from me.