Greenville (11 page)

The boy figures he’s done about three miles. He’s taken his shirt off at some point—doesn’t remember doing it, but it flaps from the waistband of his shorts—and although his torso is wet with sweat he feels he could run forever. He does a hundred paces marching band style, snapping his knees so high the tops of his thighs nearly touch his belly, and then he turns around and
runs backwards another hundred paces, then runs backwards while doing jumping jacks. The sun is beating straight down on his head but to him its rays are strings holding him up, pulling him along like Apollo in his chariot. He sprints for an imaginary audience.
And Peck comes into the homestretch now, the competition’s nowhere in sight but this kid’s still giving it all he’s got—and there it is, Peck by a mile! Another victory for the Golden Eagles!
He pretends his fingers are a finish-line tape snapping across his chest, and then he leaves them there, feels the swell where his chest muscles rise off his ribs. Swinging hay bales and feed sacks over the past four months has changed his body. Jimmy’s football jersey pulls across his shoulders when he puts it on now, and a few nights ago he was so impressed by the sight of his biceps in the bathroom mirror that he kissed them. He is only in eighth grade but he drills with the high school track team, and he has decided he will be captain by his sophomore year. He is polishing a caseful of trophies and listening to the jingle of a dozen gold medals dangling off the bright gold G of his letter jacket when he rounds a bend in the road and comes upon the reservoir. The water is clear and brown and dark all at the same time, and seems to hold the clouds in it as though they were tufts of algae. It is small as reservoirs go, and unusual in that no stream or river runs into it: it collects the water of half a dozen springs as well as the runoff from the foothills hemming it in, and its waterline is all around as jagged as a broken one-by-six save for the single sharp line of the concrete dam on its southeastern edge. An osprey floats in an unraveling spiral high above, but is rewarded by nothing save its own reflection on the flat surface of the water.

Aunt Bessie told him there is an easy footpath that runs around the whole thing—she walks it early in the spring to pick the ramps and morel mushrooms that grow in the pine forests clotting the higher hills on the north and west side of the reservoir, and over the course of the summer she comes back for raspberries, blackberries, wild strawberries, and plums, all of which the boy has tasted in preserved form, and then finally the fruit of one fine old walnut she says not even the squirrels have found. He will have to wait until Christmas to taste the tart she’ll make from ground walnut and venison sausage, but as soon as he sees the water he has to have it. He hurdles a low wire fence and high jumps his way through burdock and tangles of rushes and last year’s rusty loosestrife until he comes upon the beaten red earth. Instinctively he veers east, preferring to run in the open air while he’s still relatively fresh and cool, saving the shadowy forest stretches for later.

The footpath is slippery with broken flat shale and then uneven with the half-exposed roots of wind-twisted willows and junipers, but in the patches of bare earth he can see the tread of boots and bicycle tires and horseshoes, dogs and deer and raccoons and birds. From the moment he’d seen the water he’d noticed an increase in the insect population too, greenhead flies especially, and now they seem to be winning a game of dodgeball with his hands as he swats head, shoulders, chest. His flailing arms upset his gait until he works them into a tempo with his legs, and when sometimes he actually hits a fly he feels its exoskeleton crunch against his scalp like a blueberry bursting its skin. He can see how Aunt Bessie could call the path an easy walk, but it’s hard running. The slap of his rubber soles against
the earth, his uneven in- and exhales, now long, now short, completely out of time with his feet. His legs still feel strong but his shoulders ache a little—Donnie’s damn hay bales, he thinks. Just happened to be driving by that field on 81 my ass, the boy thinks. Trying to make himself look good is more like it. Trying to prove he’s still needed. It’s a little cooler by the water but the boy feels a hot flush on his skin as he thinks about Donnie’s naked attempt to curry favor with his uncle. His breath is hot in his lungs, and he tells himself he must have done at least five miles. I played football, track is a sissy sport, I played football when I was a kid. The boy’d like to see Donnie Badget try to run
this
distance on those bandy little legs of his. He suddenly remembers running from Vinnie Grasso and Bruce St. John and Robert Sampson. Screw all of you, he thinks, streaking along the water’s edge. Screw you all.

First he tells himself he’ll stop when he reaches the pine forest and then he tells himself he’ll stop when he reaches that weddingcake rock and then, no, he tells himself, he’ll push on to that big smooth slab of granite. He sets his sights on a gigantic poplar next, as thick as he is tall and growing at such a steep angle over the water that it seems to have tipped the world off its axis. The path is more root and rock than earth, and the pine pins covering everything make each footfall a bit of a guess; three times he skids and nearly falls. The reservoir looks small from the road, on the way to church in Aunt Bessie’s old Chevrolet, but then the only thing he has to compare it to is the Atlantic Ocean. To make it worse its shoreline sticks out and dips in and seems constantly to be doubling back on itself. Each sharp turn in the trail seems to lead to yet another V-shaped tree-shaded bug-infested inlet, and he’s
finally decided he has to stop when he sees a bicycle leaning up against a rock. A girl’s bicycle, with a dropped center strut and wicker basket mounted in the handlebars and big white-wale tires. He isn’t sure but he thinks it’s—

Why if it isn’t the star of track and field.

When he stops running it seems as if some part of him, his powerplant, his energy, keeps on going. He watches it streak around the reservoir, free of the burden of his body. Six miles, he tells himself. At least. Surely. And then he lets himself fall to his knees.

God
damn
I’m tired.

There he goes, talking that trash again.

Julia Miller is tucked into a little glade of thin birches wearing a white one-piece bathing suit and a pair of flip-flops. The crisscross straps of her bathing suit meet in a little loop of bunched fabric just above her breasts, forming an open circle the size of a quarter through which the boy can glimpse the merest hint of cleavage. She has a notebook in her lap, and when his eyes linger too long on the circle of flesh and shadow she picks it up and holds it to her chest, just below the loop of fabric. The boy feels himself blushing, and hopes that the general flushed tint of his skin covers it up.

Hi, Julia. What brings you here?

His words sound slightly ragged to his ears, his breath still hot in and out of his body. Six and a half, he wonders. Maybe even seven.

I’m doing that paper for Mr. Borden’s ecology class.

She speaks as if she expects him to know what she means, and he says, I’m just in general science.

Oh. Julia puts her pen in her mouth. Looks thoughtful. Then: Congratulations.

Huh?

Heard you did good at the Schoharie Invitational. A stunning debut, Mr. Borden said.

We come in second.

But you were in fourth when Jimmy Orstler handed you the baton.

The boy blushes.

Jonny. Jimmy runs second leg.

Well anyway, I heard, Julia says. She looks at the boy for a moment and then she looks at her notebook, then scowls. She rips the page from the notebook but only half of it tears out, on a diagonal, and she wads it up and throws it on the ground. Ooh, she says, this paper’s going nowhere.

The piece of paper is wadded into a ball, falls straight to the ground, but even so the boy’s mind is suddenly filled with a vision of the handkerchief that had flown off the Jew’s head on that last morning, and suddenly everything is different. The glade is no longer as isolated as it once was, or, rather, he becomes conscious of its isolation, aware that this conversation is only taking place because it is so far away from everything else: as soon they are back in the world it will no longer be possible. Julia will tuck her hair behind her ear and blush but that is as far as it will go because Julia’s name is on a sign in front of his uncle’s house and his name is on another boy. No matter how far she strays from that sign Julia will never forget where she comes from and no matter how far the boy runs he will never find out who he is. But at the same time this realization makes him bold, and it is with sadness—a sadness that
accentuates rather than obliterates all those other teenage emotions—that the boy reaches out and uses his hand to do the thing that Julia normally does with her own: he locks her hair behind her ear, lets his hand follow the soft curve of it down until his fingers come to rest on her collarbone and his thumb lands softly on, then under, the strap of her swimsuit.

I was wrong.

Wrong about what?

Julia’s voice is curious but not confused, confident but not brazen. Completely unafraid. For one moment the boy loves her more than he has ever loved anything in his life. The emotion hangs in the air between them as clearly as a thread of milk shot from an udder, and then it is gone.

My sister Joanie has hair like yours. A little blonder maybe. When I first saw you I thought hers was prettier but that’s just because I miss her so much. Yours is prettier.

It doesn’t have to be. Her hair can just be her hair and my hair can just be my hair. You don’t have to compare us.

The boy shakes his head. She is sweet but she doesn’t understand.

When you come from a family like mine everything goes back to it. Everything I’ll ever know I learned in that house first.

Julia’s face clouds for a moment and then it brightens and she says, Even this? and just like that she helps his thumb do what it wants to: she slides the strap of her swimsuit off her shoulder. She slides the other one off herself but the top of her swimsuit doesn’t fold down just yet. Not until the boy slides his hands inside the loosened fabric and cups her breasts in his hands does the top of her swimsuit roll down below her sternum.

And he’s a dairy farmer, he can’t help but make the comparison. There’s almost none, save the warmth. Each of Julia’s breasts is small enough to fit into his cupped hands, and their softness has no milky slackness but is instead almost muscular. And there is a pulsing too, in the crease where they meet her body. It is the beat of her heart.

These are mine, Julia says, not understanding that the boy has never thought of making such a statement about anything, including his body. I want you to kiss them.

He blushes. A sound almost escapes him then—it would have been a giggle. He is thirteen years old and a girl has asked him to kiss her breasts.

He bends his face to them. All he can do is breathe them in at first. They are slightly damp in his hands but in his nose they’re dry and an odor of baby powder lingers. With dry lips he kisses the top of each of them—it is no different than kissing a shoulder, a knee—and then he stands up suddenly, blushing so red it colors his vision.

With a laugh Julia steps back from him and dives into the pool and the boy dives in after. And the water is freezing. Fucking freezing. Its coldness makes the boy feel as though he has jumped through a concrete wall. For a moment he is paralyzed and hangs suspended a few inches above the bottom of the pool, a few inches below the surface, and then one foot finds purchase in the loose pebbles and he kicks himself above the water.

Jesus Christ!

Julia is laughing hysterically. She has swum the few feet to the shallow end of the pool and dragged herself onto a mossy rock and slipped the straps of her swimsuit back up her shoulders.
She points at him with first one hand and then the other as she adjusts her suit, laughing all the while.

It’s fucking freezing!

The boy is so cold he can’t think what to do. The water only comes up to his ribs but he hops from one tiptoe to another, and then he runs toward Julia. The water shallows quickly and in a moment he is on the rock beside her, shivering uncontrollably.

Why didn’t you warn me? My God, I thought I was having a heart attack!

Julia giggles.

Haught attack.

Through chattering teeth the boy says, Huh?
Hnnh
.

Haught attack. Mutha, fatha, sista, brotha. You talk funny, city boy.

I told you, I’m from—

I know. Long
Guy-
land. What
is
a guy-land?

The boy has to admit he doesn’t know.

Just a place where people talk funny I guess.
Tawk
.

Julia smiles.

Say something else.

Say what?

I don’t know. She splashes some ice-cold water on his chest and he yelps. Say water.

Wauta.

Julia kisses him, a little peck on his nearly numb lips.

Say … say all right you guys.

Awl right youse guys.

Julie kisses him again, longer this time.

Say the porter took the water and threw it on his daughter, even though he ought to have thrown it on her courter, who was …

Shauta? Than his daughta?

This time she kisses him for so long that he has to slide off the rock into the water. It is freezing and it only comes up to his thighs but he crouches down so that only his head sticks out. He had jumped in the water not so much because of the sudden tightness in his shorts, but because the tightness reminded him of the one time he’d tried to wear the pair of Lance’s drawers the old man had packed in his bag.

Say baseball, Julia says, still in love with her game.

Joe DiMaggio.

She laughs.

Say sports.

The New York Yankees.

Say mother.

Whore.

Julia claps a hand over her mouth. She looks at him with wide eyes and then through her fingers she says, Say father.

No-good dirty drunk.

Sister.

Pretty, the boy says, but only after a pause during which he resists the urge to say
gold
.