Up Through the Water by Darcey Steinke Read Free Book Online Page A

had been moving, completely shaken.
    Lila watched him turn back toward the grill—faint smoke blew off the friers like the early mist leaving the marsh—his jeans bowed so low on his hips that she could see the small shadowed crack of his rear. “I know where it comes right up on the beach in bales like hay,” she said.
    “You're too young for that stuff,” he said.
    “Why do you like it?” Lila said. “Your eyes creeped-up all day.”
    “None of your business.”
    The milk shake machine and fans took over like rising night noises. With her finger, Lila drew slowly around his head, then shoulders. Traced the line where his body met the kitchen. “Old burnout,” she mumbled, sticking her jaw out as if spitting in the wind.
    After work, Birdflower pitched his sweatshirt onto the passenger seat while watching Lila take her break. She ate onion rings at the picnic table on the porch, listlessly looking down into the place mat scene of sailboats on a blue bay—wind like cursive drills across the sky.
    He got in, drove the rattling van way up the island highway, and eased into a shallow shoulder of soft sand. No one ever believed him when he explained about his name. They all thought it was given by a guru or a favorite bedmate in a commune—but it had been his mother who called him that. As a kid he had memorized and listed the names of birds and flowers. He remembered chanting them before bed, Yellowthroat, House Finch, Lily, Killdeer, Bluebells, Bunting, Warbler, Winter Wren, Larkspur, Magpie, Murre.
    The glove compartment flapped down, he shuffled maps, grabbed the plastic bag, slammed the door, and walked the path, surrounded by waving sea oats. The sun was eye level. He climbed the lifeguard platform, sat, and crossed his feet high on one side. The last light was soft on the water, its motion like tiny tame waves against the side of a bathtub. Birdflower pulled out his pipe shaped like a totem pole. He placed a pinch of weed into the bowl and lit it. He breathed the sweet smoke in, and in an easy way let it go.
    Birdflower's shoulders opened, his eyes narrowed and fogged so the sea was a thin line with frayed edges. Ashes fell and rode on his curving chest hairs. Birds pattered by the water's edge; the tap-tap of their frail feet and the ocean pull on pebbles cleared his mind.
    He thought of the party he'd gone to with his girlfriend the summer before he came to Ocracoke. Libby knew the people whose house it was and they were supposed to go together. But that afternoon, when he'd admitted he didn't have his half of the rent, she accused him of loafing. He'd walked to the door, said a string of things he later regretted, and left. He'd wanted to find her that night to apologize, and he'd gone into the big house filled with people and searched all the rooms on the first level. On the second-floor landing he'd seen a girl who posed at the art school and he asked her if she'd seen Libby. “She was in bad shape,” the girl said, and pointed upstairs. The first bedroom he'd looked in was empty, but the next door was barred by a liquor bottle. Inside, blue from a shaded lamp illuminated Libby's nude body and a man sleeping near her. By the next week he was on the island, working at the Trolley.
    Above the beach the stars winked. He lit a cigarette. Sparks scattered from the tip, and he turned his hand so the wind off the water would not interfere.
    *  *  *
    Lila sat on a stool, ate a school of pizza-flavored fish, and watched “I Love Lucy” on the black and white TV over the bar. Intermittently she wrote in her diary, brief scratchy things, pencil to her lips: today about Eddie and the pony. Lila said to the bartender, “Playa Billy Joel tape,” and as it came on she mouthed the words to “Only the Good Die Young.” Last summer, she'd been too young for restaurant work. So her mother, who was sick of her hanging around the house complaining about everything, had forced her to slave as a maid. She remembered