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

dancing around the rooms, kicking into the bathrooms, and throwing herself on the beds, smoking cigarettes and watching soaps. “All My Children” as she lugged the bags of towels to the stairs. “Days of Our Lives” as she traveled from room to room making beds. “As the World Turns” when she placed new pink soaps by the tub, and “One Life to Live” as she did mirrors, the glass always clearing to her face in a cloud of cigarette smoke.
    “Can I have another Coke,” Lila said. “With two cherries this time.”
    The bartender shook his blond head. “Your teeth will rot right out of your mouth.”
    Lila thought she heard Birdflower's voice outside the bar. She'd been waiting for an hour. He always came to the bar when his day shift was finished. Her plan was to approach him for a joint. She figured she'd have a better chance of him saying yes in front of his friends. They might even ask her to sit with them. They'd tell drug stories, like the few Birdflower had on those first slow kitchen afternoons. What she liked to hear best were the stories of him getting stoned and feeling like a genius, like he knew with perfect clarity how everything connected.
    She pretended not to see him come through the door with David and Michael, the guys who ran the tourist sailboat, and head for the corner table. In a minute, a waitress brought mugs and a pitcher of beer.
    David put his bare feet up on the table and told Birdflower about a tourist they took out on the boat. “One of these divorcees,” he said. “Gold jewelry. Silk tank top. She pulled a stick of butter from her cooler.”
    “Peeled the foil off the tip,” Michael added, and showed with his fingers. Birdflower smiled. “Then she rubbed it on her nipples. They were the size of half-dollars.”
    “Needless to say,” David said, “we took her out a little farther than usual.”
    All three laughed as Michael tipped the pitcher to fill the mugs.
    Birdflower said, “Some good weed's coming up from Florida around the end of the month.”
    “Yeah,” David said. “That last batch wasn't worth shit.”
    “You know Emily?” Birdflower said.
    “Of course we know Emily.” Michael smiled, thinned his lips over his teeth.
    “Can she come along fishing next weekend?”
    “That would be up to you,” David said. “Long as that islander isn't with her.”
    Lila rehearsed what she would say, drank the rest of her Coke, and headed back to their table.
    “Got one doobie?” she said, firmly like drug addicts she'd seen on TV.
    Birdflower put his head down. “Not for you.”
    “You think I'm a baby.” Lila raised her voice. “You think you're great,” she said. “All your long hair and stupid stories.”
    “What do you want?” Birdflower said.
    She placed a stray hand on her hip. “Weed,” she said.
    “Get out of here, Lila,” the bartender yelled.
    Birdflower rocked back on his chair. “Go play,” he said.
    She ran out with her hands over her face. He saw the backs of her tan legs—thin and spindly as a colt's. “If I were a couple years younger.” Birdflower turned back toward the table. “She'd be trouble.”
    *  *  *
    With a full moon behind the cedars, Lila walked along the sand street and saw the family graveyards to one side, old stones and new ones in plots no bigger than a modest front yard. She touched the white fence surrounding her family's plot. “I know things,” she said out loud.
    She'd been off the island a dozen times, to Hatteras, Nags Head, once on a class trip to Washington, D.C., which was lush, not the weathered beige of everything on the island. All the way up the coast, rows of tobacco plants spread out as straight as lines on paper. Every few miles, there was a trailer or shack, and women in pastel-flowered housedresses sitting in lawn chairs, flesh jiggling on their upper arms. It went on forever. Lila always imagined them driving off the island, riding underwater, seeing big fish, the car's headlights shining on pink