Into the Great Wide Open (28 page)

Kenny can’t think of what to say. She has been stuck in his dreams all summer and now she has emerged in the flesh, made out of things, wearing clothes. He thought a summer in the Rocky Mountain sun would change her more but no, she looks the same: dark hair, pale skin, not quite the fresh-dead look but still … Her hair is grown out to a boy’s length and she’s tall, Kenny knew that in an official way but seeing her reminds him. It would help if she were more different. He helps her beach the boat on the pebbly gravel shore, hauling it up an extra foot before they embrace, clumsily, the cast in the way. They don’t quite fit. The cast is everywhere, cold white plaster.

“Junie,” he finally says. “What did you do to yourself?”

“It was so stupid. I broke my arm,” she says, laughing but embarrassed. She shows him the cast, first the top, then the bottom, like he needs to see both sides to make sure it’s really broken.

“When? What happened? You didn’t tell me.”

“It just happened the day before yesterday. Come on, let’s get your stuff.”

“I can get it,” Kenny says. “I don’t have much.” It’s true: the Jeep is bulging with junk, books and clothes and stereos, but it’s all Junie’s. He opens the back, which pops open from the pressure of all the stuff, and takes out a tiny comical suitcase.

“That’s it?” Junie asks.

“There wasn’t room,” he says, and shrugs. “What happened to your arm?”

She’s embarrassed, she’s blushing: “I was diving off the dock, on the other side of the island. You have to dive, the water is too cold, you can’t just gradually make your way in. This is so stupid.”

“What?”

“No, it’s just that I thought the water was deeper than it was. You can look, you can see the bottom, but I thought it was some kind of optical illusion that made it look so shallow. And then Jacob had to take me all the way into Kalispell to get it set.”

“Are you going to be all right?”

She looks at him sideways. “I’ve got to have this thing on for six weeks,” she says. “After that I’m going to be just fine.”

Jacob
, Kenny thinks—the familiarity of his name in her mouth, a well-worn feel … Jacob van Wechs is the master photographer she came to study with, to be his assistant. Master and servant and what else came in the package? But Kenny knows better than to think about this. He’s tired, he’s not sure if he’s even supposed to be here and Junie won’t tell him, past their initial relief at the sight of each other.

She shoves the boat off until it is just floating, then hauls it
parallel to the shore, holding the yellow nylon rope in her good left hand. Kenny embraces her from behind, not knowing if he has permission, or needs it. He takes her breasts into his hands, staring over her shoulder at the lake, which is shining like a giant Kodachrome in the evening sun. Her breasts feel familiar and warm. “We missed you,” Kenny says softly. “Me and Little Kenny.”

But Junie shakes herself free of him, stands watching the house, which seems to be watching her back; watching both of them. When Kenny turns her neck, her beautiful neck, to kiss her, he sees that her eyes are tightly closed. He hasn’t got her. Junie’s kiss, this time, is dry and quick:
perfunctory
.

“It’s complicated,” Junie says, stepping into the boat.

Kenny shouldn’t be here. Junie’s gone; this summer’s apprenticeship to Jacob is only a stop along the way. And since the miscarriage they have been wary with each other, careful. He wonders if they would have lasted this long, if she wasn’t leaving anyway.

But someone had to drive the car out with all her things, and Junie’s father—opaque as usual, he’s been kind to both of them—offered to pay all the gas and the plane ticket back and a month’s wages besides. Either that or spend the rest of August laying sod around office buildings in suburban D.C. The problem is that now, as they slowly motor toward the island, water slapping at the tin sides of the boat, darkness settling into the hills around them, now he feels like a trespasser. He wants to touch her and be welcome; wants to put the toothpaste back in the tube, to unsay the things that have been said, to undo things. Where would you start? Consequences, take your chances.

“It’s beautiful here,” Kenny says, to fill up the silence.

“It’s unbelievable,” Junie says. “I am completely in love.”

But Kenny doesn’t know what to say to that, either; the word
love
. A pair of golden retrievers scramble around on the dock, chasing after a tennis ball, until the ball rolls off the dock and the larger of the two dogs leaps into the water, splashing all over Kenny and Junie.

“Psyche!” Junie yells. “Jesus! Cut it out!”

“Psyche?”

“The other one’s Cupid—Psyche and Cupid—get it?”

“Cute,” Kenny says. “This is Jacob van Wechs’s idea?”

“Jacob has an assistant,” Junie says. “A majordomo—Syd, she’s really nice.”

Kenny takes the warning and shuts up. Psyche has forgotten the tennis ball and is trying to chase down the boat, paddling frantically in the wake while Cupid barks from the dock.

“A
minor
domo,” Kenny says. “Those are some stupid dogs.”

“They’re good dogs,” Junie says. Apparently he’s not supposed to criticize. She ties the yellow rope to the dock, which is actually the porch of the house, and they clamber out. Jacob’s house is a Lincoln Log extravaganza: gables and picture windows and stone chimneys piled a couple of stories high, some sort of dream of rugged Westernism. Kenny knows it’s a fake but can’t quite figure if it’s
supposed
to be fooling anyone. He takes his tiny suitcase and follows her down the deck that faces the garden, feeling the cool night air starting to creep down from the mountains.

“He might be working,” Junie says, her hand on the door. “We might not see him till tomorrow. He does that sometimes.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Kenny says. “I’m a vegetable myself.”

“Poor thing,” she says, and these words echo around for a while inside his brain as she lets him into the house. It’s all one big room on this floor, a kitchen at one end and a fireplace at the other, where a woman in black is striking a match to a pile of kindling just as they come in—a witch, as near as Kenny can tell. All in black, sharp-featured. She glances at them when they come in, then back to the important business of starting the fire. I like being invisible, Kenny
thinks. He turns back to where Junie was and she’s gone. A moment of confusion, feeling the miles, the long drive.

“Do you want a beer?” Junie asks, coming out of the kitchen with one anyway.

“Thanks,” he says.

“Sit down,” she says, pointing him toward a couch. “You must be tired.”

“I’m all right,” he says, and goes and sits, but when he leans back in the couch he realizes that he’s still got the little suitcase clutched in his hand. He forgot.

“Poor thing,” she says again. “You can stay a couple of days, then? You’ve got time?”

“I’m not on any particular schedule,” he says. He drops the little suitcase on the floor beside him. Junie sits. They look at each other like strangers, like a boy and a girl on a blind date. Where will they start?

The witch walks across the room toward them, preoccupied. “Junie,” she says, “did you manage to make a copy of that video Jacob wanted?”

“It’s running right now,” Junie says. “I took the other deck down from the bedroom.”

“Good,” she says; turns to Kenny and sticks out her hand. “Syd Beasley,” she said. “It’s a joke of a name, I’m sorry, I’m stuck with it.”

“Kenny Kolodny,” he says, pumping vigorously. Syd has a manly handshake.

“I know,” she says. “OK. You’re taken care of, Junie knows where you’re supposed to sleep. What else?”

She’s looking at him, through him, and at first Kenny feels like he’s supposed to answer. I don’t know what else, he thinks. You tell me. It’s the black hair streaked with gray that makes her witchy, that and her all-black clothes, artist clothes, Chinese slippers … She’s
beautiful, though, in a ravaged and wrecked sort of way. She might be in her forties still, her fifties, Kenny never can tell. He’s just turned eighteen, he’s never going to get any older than this.

Syd turns the headlights on Junie: “Are we going to see him tonight, do you think?”

Junie says, “I don’t know. He’s printing.”

“We won’t, then. Good. Is there anything you need to do? I know you’re leaving in a couple of days.”

“I’ve got some printing I want to do myself.”

“God knows when you’ll see another darkroom,” she says; then turns pensively and gazes into Kenny’s face. “Shit!” she says.

“What?” he asks.

She looks at him like he spoke out of turn, a sleepwalker awakening. “Nothing,” she says. “Shit! I just remembered what I’ve been trying to remember all day.”

“What’s that?” Junie asks.

“Some stupid, stupid fashion shoot in Dallas,” Syd says. “I was supposed to talk to Jacob’s agent about travel arrangements and I forgot.” Again she turns to Kenny, like he was the one who needs convincing. “It doesn’t matter what you do,” she says. “It doesn’t matter what you tell them, they send you plane tickets anyway.”

“Jacob doesn’t fly,” Junie says.

“He will if he has to,” Syd says. “He just hates it, is all. You two have fun, if you can.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to hide out in the basement and pretend to sort negatives,” she says. “There’s an Orioles game on.”

“Jacob has a satellite dish,” Junie says.

“Jacob has one of everything,” Syd says. “ ’Night, all.”

Leaving them tonguetied, blind-date hell in the big living room, side by side. “Everybody’s busy around here,” Kenny says.

“Oh, yeah,” Junie says.

A small sparsely furnished cell somewhere on the ground floor: a single bed, Navajo blankets, a ladder-back chair; she never left her mother’s house. That’s the feeling Kenny has, anyway. He hasn’t seen his own father since he left him in the road, which is something he thinks about. There’s a double glass door at one end of the room and a small patio outside and past that the lake, which is still not dark yet. He takes his watch out: ten-thirty.

“We’re at the edge of the time zone here,” Junie says. “Plus we’re so far north, sixty miles from Canada.”

The lake is turning colors in the last of the day, basically dark gray but with dark purple shades hidden under the gray or dark green. The forest looks solid, gloomy. This landscape looks
depressed
. “You like it here, don’t you?” he asks.

“Oh, yeah,” she says. “It’s different—you don’t realize, living back east, the kind of variety of life you get. There are never two trees of the same species standing next to each other. Here it’s simpler.”

“Nature girl,” Kenny said.

“I
like
it.”

“I believe you.”

“Don’t make fun of me, Kenny.”

“I don’t mean to,” Kenny says; and he doesn’t, but he can’t seem to stop himself. He wants her so badly—or thinks he does, which is no difference—that it makes him edgy, angry:
Tantalize
. She sits inches away from him, unavailable. A bumper sticker he saw, shortly after he passed the Montana state line:
IF YOU LOVE SOMETHING, SET IT FREE. IF IT DOESN’T COME BACK, HUNT IT DOWN AND SHOOT IT
.

“I’m still buzzing from the drive,” he said. “This is a big country when you have to drive across it.”

“Well, thanks for doing this.”

Prim, official. Kenny feels like an emissary from the Department of Normalcy, the Department of Heterosexuality, come to claim her for the family again. Don’t be grateful, please, he thinks. Be glad to see me, overjoyed, oversexed.

“I’d love to spend a winter here,” Junie says. “Syd did it, two years ago. I guess there’s a month in the spring and another one in the fall when there’s too much ice to use the boat and not enough to walk on. Completely isolated. She had a radio, I guess.”

Another silence: her face in the reflected light off the lake, soft outlines of the fading sky. Beautiful, Kenny thinks. Out of my price range. Hard to remember that he touched her once. He asks, “How have you been?”

And she says “I’m
fine
” in an aggrieved tone, to tell him he was wrong to ask.

And the silence falls over both of them again. The magic words, Kenny thinks, knowing they don’t exist. Junie is keeping herself from him, which she has every right to do.
Privacy
, Kenny thinks. The core of unhappiness around which she is spun.

“You look tired, is all,” he says.

“We’ve been working.”

We:
Kenny hears it but he doesn’t know what to say.

“I’m tired myself,” he says. “There’s more South Dakota than there ought to be.”

“I just flew over it,” Junie says. “Next time I’ll drive. Flying feels like cheating to me. You blink your eyes and suddenly you’re there, magic.”

“You want more
suffering
,” Kenny says. She blinks at him, annoyed again.

He changes the subject: “I found the place I want to live,” he says. “Coming across the border, up out of Wyoming, the first thing in Montana is a big green sign that says
EXIT 0
and then a ramp that goes off the highway and there’s nothing there, nothing at all. It’s just
like these grass hills and then the mountains off in the background. There was snow on them.”