The Seas by Samantha Hunt Read Free Book Online Page B

look like someone once tried to write Jude a message on his torso with a razor blade, but then changed his or her mind and scribbled the letters out instead. They don’t look like gills. Jude resembles a very unhealthy version of Snow White, with black hair and red lips, like a Snow White after years spent drinking in bars.
    I put my toes on his back, right where his jeans end and walk each toe, one by one, up his vertebrae, as if he were a bony fish. No one else is on the beach. No one is here to see that he is with me. He could take full advantage of me if he only wanted to. When I sit up, I sit around him, one leg on either side of Jude’s. I touch his back with my stomach. I lift my hips until they touch him like I am a barnacle on his back. But after he exhales three times, I can feel it, he stands up and says, “Let’s go down to the water.” Maybe, I think, he is still angry about Neil.
    Even if I added up all the things Jude’s name rhymes with and all the words I could spell with the letters of his name it would not measure up to him. A phrase like, “Calm as the bottom of the sea” comes closer. I would be a sloppy typesetter using the more economical “Jude” in lieu of, “Smooth night with stars for navigation.”
    When I first met Jude he told me my skin was so pale that he thought he could see through it. “You’re like the acetate pages of an anatomy book,” he said. One page holds blood with oxygen, one page is blood without. “I can see what you had for lunch,” he said, and then poked me in the stomach which made me feel awkward because he is fourteen years older than me and fourteen years younger than my mother, like he is a ball tossed between us. Sometimes he’ll be on my side, but sometimes one of them will remind the other of, “And the red bird sings I’ll be blue because you don’t want my love.” I’ve never even heard of that song. But Jude has heard of everything. There is nothing he doesn’t have some knowledge of or thoughts on. Having Jude is like having a dictionary the size of a man there beside me. I open him up and ask him all sorts of questions.
    Until my grandfather finishes his dictionary, which probably won’t ever happen, the biggest dictionary in the world will still be the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s enormous. We don’t have one. It’s too expensive. Instead we have a condensed OED. The cover is as navy as a bruise. I looked up the word navy in it and found that this word shares a history with nausea and navel from the Sanskrit na or sna or snu, which means to bathe as in the word snake. Unwound language can look like the white cord of unwound brain. It can be dangerous to unwind some words. Jude wasn’t in the Navy. He was in the Army and army comes from ar—to fit, to join, see art, see inertia, the dictionary says.
    When Jude joined the Army he was twenty-six years old. He and two other new recruits spent their first nights away from home in a motel. Their assignment there was indefinite. On the first night Jude climbed up to the roof to see if the ocean was anywhere in sight and to get away from the other new recruits. The other recruits were both bodybuilders. They had a caliper to measure body fat and they seemed anxious to try it out on Jude. They called each other “privates” and laughed.
    From the roof Jude saw the two soldiers leave the motel. In the next hour and a half they worked the eastern and the western street corners trying to find a girl who would let them buy her a drink. Jude heard them. He had a good bird’s-eye view to watch them after each woman walked away saying, “No thank you,” or saying nothing. The privates would shoot at her pretending their arms were machine gun arms.
    On the roof, Jude said, before bed, he spread his wings and looked toward the edge.
    Jude returned to the room not long after the soldiers had gotten in bed. “Where were you all night, man?” they asked.
    “Upstairs,” he answered.
    “Oh