Into the Great Wide Open (29 page)

“In August,” Junie says; and by some miracle Kenny has said the right thing again, and they’re all right. A truce. He takes advantage by reaching out to touch the soft skin of her arm, just above the top of her cast.

“You’ve damaged yourself,” he says.

She takes his hand in both of her own, holds it in her lap, examining it: a workingman’s hand these days, rough from the shovel handle, a carapace of hardened skin.

“Where have you been living?” she asks.

“I’m apartment-sitting,” Kenny says. “I feed the plants, I water the cat, it’s tough.”

“Whose apartment?”

“A friend of my family’s,” Kenny says; which is not only a lie but a very lame lie, which Junie would see through in a minute if she could spare him her attention. Kenny doesn’t have a family; and even when he did, they didn’t have any friends. In fact he’s watching Mrs. Connolly’s apartment but he doesn’t want to tell Junie. Not exactly” a guilty secret but hard to explain.

Fortunately Junie is preoccupied: her little light of sadness, Kenny thinks. Feeding the flame, Scandinavian sunsets, the dripping pines of Oregon.

“It just feels different here,” she says. “It’s like being in love or something, I just wake up in the morning and I can’t believe I’m here.”

“Even better than camp,” he says.

“Don’t be an asshole, Kenny.”

“I don’t mean to be,” he says; but as he says it, he realizes that he is angry with her, a little tired of the aesthetic fussy-wussy, all these gray skies and silences. Somewhere outside of this little valley it is still summer. Somewhere out there is beer and corn and hamburgers, baseball games on the radio when you drive across Iowa at night.
The life they would have lived: scraping by, the young catastrophe with the baby and the tiny ugly apartment, green shag carpeting, Kenny still wants this. Young Americans struggling. He would love to feel her beside him, love to fight with her about who would go down to the courthouse and sign them up for food stamps; one of those American biographies, falling down to the bottom and then rising stronger than ever. Instead he’s having to do it alone, which is lonely work. Maybe he’s been listening to too much radio, country-and-western sermonettes and John Cougar Mellencamp, but Kenny wants to be an American again, join the navy, drink Budweiser. He wants to dive into the thing, bring her with him. It’s not too late, he thinks. We can try again.

“How are you?” he asks. The last light is fading from the room.

“I’m the same,” she says.

She takes his hand and holds it over her breast; an invitation, he hopes, but also a ritual gesture of friendship or solidarity. He sits behind her on the bed and kisses her neck and they watch the light disappearing from the sky, from the lake. This is where I started, Kenny thinks. This is where I should come clean, tell her everything, try to reanimate. Her lovely body. Her complicated brain. She’s all right now, she came through the miscarriage without breaking up and now she’s better, or something—contained within herself, anyway, no more loose threads and rough edges. She’s learned survival, as Kenny has. He should be glad for her, and in a way he is but he misses the other: the open heart, the daring, the carelessness. Come on, he thinks. Come along with me.

“Junie,” he says.

“Ssshhh,” she says. Turns and stares at him, her face indistinct in the twilight, and then what? Something will happen next. She is not weeping, for him or for anybody else. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she says.

“Living and dying,” Mrs. Connolly explains. “Don’t you see they’re both the same?” In this dream she’s in the schoolroom still, she’s angry with Kenny but she won’t say why and she won’t stop smiling. After that he’s in the all-night drugstore again, trying to buy maxi pads but the clerk keeps telling him he’s got the wrong size and he knows that Junie is bleeding to death back in the motel room but he can’t seem to get the right size, he thinks he’s got it and then the clerk says no, I’m sorry.

Kenny wakes up alone, late in the morning, the sunlight streaming in. He can still sense her in the bed, sex and another smell he can’t identify at first, something rude and chemical: diaphragm junk, he remembers. They’re being practical now, prudent. He feels the loss.

Thirteen or fourteen hours of sleep, and the highway buzz still faintly under his skin. He gropes under the bed for the glass of apple juice she left, heavy, sweet, all-natural, and lies naked in the bed remembering the exact answering shape of her body. Just thinking about her gets his dick stirring again. Nothing worried, nothing married, nothing hesitant. Maybe that’s it: maybe it’s just body to body, straight animal lust, and their brains can go fuck themselves. When did she leave? At night or did she wait for morning? It doesn’t matter, he was asleep anyway, but he wishes he knew.

Outside the sun is shining upon the mountains and the lake, a greeting card except that Kenny is stirred by it. Why not? It seems like he is falling for it, but really nobody made this, nobody is trying to sell him; and the air, where it comes through the open screen, is bright and clear and warm. He throws the covers off and fishes around in his suitcase for the cutoff jeans, his only shorts, his asshole angling toward the ceiling, thinking about hidden cameras. Maybe he’s seen one too many spy movies but he feels like he’s being watched; shakes his ass one last time, thinking
Rosebud
.

In his shorts and sunglasses, then, his lifeguard regalia, he sits
on the little patio and rolls a morning cigarette. The sound of a single chain saw echoes from across the lake somewhere, muted, insectile. A moment of luxury. The heaviness of a long sleep, the sound of bees, feel of the sun on the bare skin of his chest. He’s been working all summer without a shirt and he’s got a tan, a few muscles. He was prettier when he was a lifeguard but he’s stronger now. He has not come begging to her. Why this is important, he can’t figure out, but he has brought his own resources with him, his own stock of secrets. Kenny has a future, for instance; nothing guaranteed but Mrs. Connolly arranged for him to take the high school equivalency test, which he passed, then called a friend who taught at a small college in Florida. It was too late for the fall but he’s apparently going there spring semester—a pleasant prospect but dreamlike. Kenny is going to sit in this chair in the sun until something happens. He can wait.
You should have called me a few weeks ago
, Mrs. Connolly said. Circumstances had changed: a boyfriend, with whom she was bicycling through France. She invited him to her apartment anyway, invited him to stay while they were gone. She kissed him, too, and Kenny knew that she would have gone farther if he had pressed her but he didn’t, afraid of upsetting the balance. Now that he’s got a future, he’s gotten attached to having one, even if it isn’t quite as bright and shiny as Junie’s.

“A smoking criminal,” Syd says. “I knew there was a reason I liked you.” Kenny looks up, startled, and loses her face for a moment in the sun; a presence, another body, and when he gets over the surprise he’s glad for the company.

“Can I have a cigarette?” she asks.

“It’s just these Dutch things. You have to roll them, I mean, I’ll do one for you if you want.”

“I can do it,” Syd says; perches on the arm of his chair and expertly, easily rolls a cigarette. She’s wearing shorts today, baggy nondescript girl-shorts but her legs are long and brown, girlish. Wide
World of Sex, Kenny thinks. Beware. He hands her a lighter rather than lighting it himself.

“When did you get up?” she asks, around the wreath of smoke.

“A few minutes ago,” he says. “Is it late?”

She shrugs. “The crack of dawn by New York standards. Out here, though, we get up with the pioneers. Jesus, I’m glad you came. I love to smoke but I like to have somebody to do it with. Otherwise it feels sordid.”

“A solitary vice,” says Kenny.

“That’s right,” Syd says. She holds the cigarette in the air in front of her, and both of them watch the smoke drift up through the sunlight. Curlicues, Kenny thinks. Arabesques. What am I doing here?

Without looking at him, Syd says, “We’re all pretty interested in June around here.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“She’s got this kind of, I don’t know—daring, I guess. She takes a lot of risks when she takes pictures. It’s very strange, very personal stuff, I don’t know where she gets the nerve, especially at her age. I mean, I was thinking about what sorority I wanted to go to in college or something. That picture of you, for instance.”

Kenny didn’t know there was one. He makes a small noncommittal noise.

“You look so innocent, lying there asleep,” Syd says. “At the same time there’s this whole other not-so-innocent side, you look kind of bruised and worn. And it’s still unusual, that kind of nakedness. I mean, women’s bodies are a dime a dozen but men are still taboo.”

She’s seen his dick, that’s what she means. He tries to cobble together an image from the hints that Syd has dropped, can’t quite. Junie didn’t trust him enough to show it to him. At the same time here he was in Syd’s confidence, a circle of knowingness, unshockable—adult-world
and beyond—and Kenny likes it here.
A whisper of steam goes up from that porcelain eurythra
 … and realizes somewhere in here that Syd is gay, or partly gay, or something. Dark imaginings, ménages à trois.

“It has to come from somewhere,” Syd says. “I mean, I don’t know. I just have the feeling that something has to be driving her to it.”

The common fascination, Kenny thinks. Everybody loves my baby. “She’s an American girl,” he says.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s a Tom Petty song, I was listening to the radio a lot on the way out here.”

Syd stubs out the cigarette and looks at him, trying to gauge how much she can trust him, how far to let him inside the circle; which is where he needs to be, inside, and not out playing with the other children … Junie has made it inside, he sees that, and now he needs to follow, or get left behind.

Kenny says, “I know the words to all the Tom Petty songs by now, and all the Bruce Springsteen.”

“You want to keep that crap out of your head,” she says. “It won’t go away. You’ll be walking up some mountaintop somewhere, or swimming in the river, and this voice will pop up in your head going
You deserve a break today …
”

“It’s too late for me,” Kenny says.

“It’s avoidable,” Syd says; but now she’s giving advice, looking down from on high, and Kenny is outside again; a disappointment. “They’re working this morning,” Syd says, “which leaves you at loose ends. I imagine we’ll see everybody at lunch. There’s coffee and so forth on the counter in the kitchen, and if you run out of things to do come down to the garden and I’ll put you to work. You’re leaving tomorrow, right?”

“That’s the plan,” Kenny says.

“Jacob will be pissed,” she says. “Just get rid of your TV, turn
the radio off, quit reading the newspaper. It’s like the all-junk-food diet.”

“I had a buffalo burger in Arlee on the way up here,” Kenny says. “It was all right.”

Syd smiles; he has won again, temporarily. She touches his arm as she leaves, ambiguous gesture, glad to see you. Kenny eases back into his chair. Sunlight, mountain air, the sound of water lapping at the pilings of the dock. Eyes closed, he tries to imagine the photograph that Junie took of him, the nude or naked.
I’m beautiful
, he thinks, and feels it, stretched out in the sun in only cutoffs. A faint persistent buzzing draws his attention to the leg of his chair, where a crippled wasp is wrestling with a crumb of toast, a souvenir of somebody else’s breakfast. The small things, bliss.
I’m beautiful
, he thinks, and rolls another cigarette.

Jacob comes as a surprise. His work—it’s everywhere, calendars and book bags—is woodsy and reverent, temple-of-nature stuff with the occasional French landscape thrown in, the occasional naked. Kenny is expecting what?—some hearty, outdoors … gray longish hair and an
aquiline
nose, maybe even turquoise jewelry.

Instead a man resembling his father sits at the head of the table, drinking not sipping white wine: fat, bald, dressed in white shirt, black slacks, black businessman shoes. Holding forth, charming. Kenny remembers the touch of the yellow antique fat on his father’s sides. Where are you?

“This
complete
asshole,” Jacob says. “I didn’t know it was Winogrand till somebody told me, the next day. So of course I’d just driven four hundred miles in the rain for nothing.”

Syd clucks her tongue, shakes her head in a pantomime of sympathy; she’s heard the story before, obviously. A performance for Kenny’s benefit, or Junie’s. Kenny is unmoved.

“I guess there’s a moral to that story somewhere,” Jacob says;
then turns the headlights directly on Kenny. “How long did it take you to drive out here?” he asks.

“Four days.”

“That’s good time. Which route did you take?”

“Chicago, South Dakota, Wyoming, mostly on 90.”

“It’s quicker if you skip Chicago,” Jacob said. “You cut down around Indianapolis, then north around, what? I guess it’s Rock Island, Illinois. Pick up 90 around Madison.”