Into the Great Wide Open (3 page)

Not that it mattered, not that he had a choice. The pines tapered off in the sandy soil and then the dunes rose out of them, grass and sea oats. Kenny trudged up the path and into the deep, soft sand, which trickled down into his shoes, Chuck Taylor high-tops, black, wet with rain anyway. He reached down and took them off, and his ragged socks. Better to come to the ocean barefoot anyway, he thought: humble, a supplicant … He came over the top of the dunes and there was the Atlantic.

A greater sadness rose up inside him at the sight of the ocean. Kenny surprised himself: it was just wind and water, a gray indefinite sky. But there it was, his sadness; he stopped for a minute at the top of the dunes and let himself feel it, sink into it; reminding himself, at the same time, that he had been warned against depression. Too much crazy sorrow in his family already for Kenny to flirt with it. He heard a crazy preacher on the radio once:
you give the devil a ride
, he said,
he’s gonna end up driving
.

She was right where he expected her, walking down the beach. He saw her from a quarter mile off, hundreds of yards, a black scarecrow dissolving into rainy distance.

He started off behind her, tracing her footprints in the sand. She was barefoot, like Kenny. Experimentally he slipped his own foot into the track she left behind in the hard sand but he was bigger, he wiped her out. Her stride was as long as his. A girl my own size, he thought, matching her stride—like the game he used to play with himself, walking down the sidewalk without ever stepping on a crack, the footsteps coming in alien rhythms. Walking to her pace. The sky went dark and then darker, the gray of a rainy afternoon giving way to evening, and still she didn’t turn around.

Almost dark when they came near each other, almost cold. A
raw day, Kenny thought. A
cooked
day. He watched her turn, glad for the distance between them. He didn’t want to be accused of lurking, creeping. A gradual certainty as she came closer that it was Junie after all, and it was, and then they were within shouting distance.

“It’s raining out here,” she said. “You’re supposed to be back with the fire.”

The wind took the words out of her mouth. Kenny stopped so he could hear her.

“Why do people keep telling me?”

“What?”

“It’s raining,” Kenny said. “I mean, water from the sky.”

“Am I being stupid?” she asked.

He meant to amuse her; instead he had annoyed her. He said, “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t be so touchy, I just …”

“That’s OK,” Kenny said. “I think I was being sarcastic.”

A sense of futility hung between them, a silence. Then, without warning, she wheeled around him, where he stood in her path, and started moving again back toward the camp. She flung herself into the walking, like she didn’t care whether Kenny followed her.

Which she might not. He followed a couple of steps behind her, waiting for her to tell him to go, tell him to stay. The Atlantic heaved and buckled on their right, crashing into the shoreline, lacy skirts of foam. Storm surge, Kenny thought. Something clean about it. The wind had swept the beach clean of birds, and now it was just the two of them under the lowering gray sky, not talking. She was wearing a fancy mountain parka, yellow and black, a little too big for her but plainly expensive. Under it the black cotton of her dress rippled and furled around her legs, a flag in the wind. Bare feet, bare legs. Kenny watched as the wind blew her dress up around her hips, then just as quickly down again. Quick glimpses of pale skin, white underwear. She didn’t fight it.

She slowed down a minute, to let him catch up. “It isn’t you,” she said. “It isn’t you in particular, I mean. I just like to be alone sometimes.”

“I’m sorry,” Kenny said.

“I get off on the wrong foot,” Junie said. “It’s not your fault. I’m antisocial, is all.”

Kenny couldn’t think of what to say. He was losing her, needed a pill, a magic formula.

“I mean, don’t be sorry,” she said.

“I can’t help it,” Kenny said. “It’s a what?—a syndrome, I have to apologize about everything whether it’s my fault or not. I’m sorry about the weather. I’m sorry about Oliver North, China, the whole works.”

Junie’s face relented into a grim little smile. “I’ll have to be careful around you, then,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You shouldn’t have to do that.”

He kept himself from smiling, and she searched his face again, and then she smiled unwillingly. He had said the right thing somehow, some accidental miracle. He had not, for once, fucked up. They started walking again, slower this time, together, Kenny stealing glimpses of her face: rain-streaked, her hair matted down. She had been out with her hood down, letting the rain fall on her head, her face. A little self-punishment, he thought, mortification of the flesh.

“I didn’t even know it was you,” she said. “I left my glasses back at the cabin, because of the rain.”

“I remember you wearing glasses.”

“It makes your eyes weaker to wear them,” she said, fiercely, like Kenny had been arguing against her. “Your eyes just get worse and worse. You need to build them up. I’ve got these exercises, I do them every morning and every night.”

“I’d like to see that,” Kenny said. “Eye exercises.”

Quickly she looked at his face, to see if he was making fun of
her; but he was trying to make her laugh, and she gave in. “I know,” she said. “It seems silly, but it works.”

“I’m sure it does.”

“OK, I don’t know whether it works or not,” she said. “It’s just the idea of your whole life wearing glasses, I don’t know—I don’t want to just give up, you know? I don’t want to be wearing glasses when I’m thirty, when I’m sixty.”

“Did you ever think about contact lenses?”

“I tried them,” she said. “I gave myself an eye infection. I guess I left them in too long.”

They walked along, not talking. Kenny was trying to figure out who was taller, him or Junie. She was trying to figure out something else, thinking about oranges, maybe, or Kim Nichols. He felt dissatisfied when he thought about Kim; the tens of thousands of confidences they had shared in the privacy of their friendship, hundreds of thousands, millions. Or maybe he was making it up. Really, he didn’t know anything. The sky and the sea had turned the same color, noncolor,
pallid
. Night was coming down quickly.

“How did you end up here, anyway?” he asked.

“I’m being parked,” she said. “My mother and my father are out of town, they thought that I’d be safe here.”

Lips pursed in bitterness when she said the word
safe
. “How did they know to send you?” Kenny asked.

“Oh, I used to come to these things sometimes, a couple of years ago, I still get the newsletters. My mother puts them on the refrigerator door. She thinks these outings are a great idea. Little does she know.”

“I’ve never been on one of these before.”

“It’s just a lot of fucking, a lot of dope smoking. That and a little nature business. Nobody really cares about that.”

She sounded so dismissive when she said the word
fucking
that Kenny sank a little inside. His hopes diminishing.

She said, “I used to come on these things with Kim Nichols and we’d be the only ones who ever paid attention to whatever we were supposed to be doing, bird-watching or whatever. I learned to shoot a bow and arrow once, a real hunting bow. Do you know Kim Nichols?”

Kenny didn’t want to talk about high school; he felt himself shrinking, but there was no way around it. He said, “I was in an English class with her, with Mr. Harris.”

“Dirty Tom,” she said. “You know what he does? He drops his pencils so he can look up your dress, right in front of your desk. Like underwear is so exotic and beautiful, I mean, look in the newspaper ads.”

Kenny nodded, guilty. He could still imagine the white flash of Junie’s own underwear, still touch it in visual memory. Still, he’d rather have that than nothing, even if it was guilty.

“I remember Kim talking about you,” Junie said.

“That business with the sheep?”

“What?”

“Joke.”

“Oh,” Junie said. It wasn’t exactly that she was having trouble keeping up but she wasn’t used to it, the rough-and-tumble, boy talk. She was
sensitive
. “No,” she said, “she thought you were a bright spot.”

“A little sunbeam,” Kenny said. “I’m glad to hear it. It was right after lunch, I was always pretty stoned.”

Right away he was aware that he had said the wrong thing. The light was going, her face fading to gray. A sudden impulse to jump into the Atlantic, clothes and all, see if she’d follow. Returning, a moment’s imaginary escape: the dark water closing over his head, kingdoms of oysters, kelp and mackerel … Meanwhile he was striking out with her again, and again he couldn’t quite tell why.

“I like Kim,” he said, hearing in his own ears how lame it sounded.

“A lot of people do,” Junie said. “A lot of people don’t know her very well.”

What the hell, Kenny thought; then saw that it meant nothing, words to fill up the air, nothing more. She was gone again inside herself, her head still bare to the rain.
Penitent
, he thought. They walked side by side, on separate planets, and then Kenny’s raincoat sprung a leak. He could feel the first cold trickle down his sleeve.

They were most of the way back when he saw the flashlights, then heard the voices calling her name. “Junie!” they shouted. “Joooooonie!”

She didn’t say anything, to them or Kenny. In the fading light he saw she was scared, an animal fright, like she was about to run away from them; like they were hunting her. He loosened his arm at his side, ready to hold her if she ran, but she didn’t go. She stopped walking, turned to look at the ocean.

“I’m over here,” she called out, and the flashlights came together around her: McHenry, the counselorette, one of the others.

“We were worried about you,” McHenry said.

“Don’t wander off like that,” the counselorette said.

None of them paid the slightest attention to Kenny, shining their flashlights in Junie’s face, grinning like Miss America contestants, trying to reassure her.

“You’re fine,” the third one said. “We’re not that far from the camp.”

“Then why did you come looking for me?” Junie asked. It was a challenge; she was angry, distant, herself against the Others. Kenny felt himself lumped in with the Others.

“We were worried about you,” McHenry said. “It was getting dark.”

“I’m fine,” Junie said. “I can do just fine by myself. You go on ahead, I’ll be back at the camp in a minute.”

They all just stood there, Kenny included.

“Go on!” she said; and she was angry with them, all of them;
and they left here there, barefoot, at the edge of the Atlantic. Kenny trudged along in the wake of the counselors; stopped at the top of the dunes and let them go ahead.

He thought of her, blind with water, down in the sand. He looked down into the darkness, trying to see her. The leak in his raincoat spread down his arm, cold water. Junie had a good jacket but she wouldn’t put the hood up. He stayed there, hiding himself in a circle of dune grass, a little ways off the path, until he saw her go by, still bareheaded, penitent.
Trouble
, he thought. He waited until he was sure she was inside, then followed her down.

He had the feeling that came to him in dreams sometimes, in which solid objects dissolved—putting his hand into a wall, for instance, or the old favorite of the car crash, unavoidable, with the phantom car that on impact was nothing more than colored air … He was on the porch of the main cabin after dinner, rolling a cigarette out of his little pouch of Dutch tobacco and listening to the sound of the wind in the pines, the rain dripping off the eaves of the porch, the shouts and laughter from inside. The air was clean, cold, antiseptic. It tore the smoke from his mouth in rags and streamers. I am not lonely, he thought. I’m alone. Loneliness is in crowds.

Then Junie came out onto the porch. “They’re playing
Springsteen
in there,” she said.

“What did you expect?”

She shrugged, still wearing her mountain parka, and curled into the Adirondack chair next to Kenny, one leg tucked under; a dancer’s movement. Kenny hoped she wasn’t. Junie still didn’t have her glasses on and he wondered if she knew who he was.

“I’m sorry I got mad at you, down on the beach,” she said. “It wasn’t you, it’s just, I don’t know. My
problem
.”

“I don’t know anything about your problem,” Kenny said.

“That’s fine with me,” she said. Something about the way she
held her lips, as if she might crumple into grief, a sheet of paper crumpled into a ball, thrown away … Kenny felt himself vibrating along with her, sympathetically.

“It’s cold out here,” she said.

“It’s better than in there,” Kenny said, angling his head toward the door: shouts and laughter, bottles clinking, Tom Petty.

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” she said. “They’re having a perfectly good time.”

But she sounded unconvincing, as false as Kenny had sounded to himself with all his beautiful loneliness.

“The food,” he said.

Junie grimaced. “OK, the food is awful.”

“The music,” Kenny said. “The beer competition, who can bring the fanciest imported this or that. The conversation.”

“Getting high,” she said. “Young Americans getting fucked up.”

Kenny took this personally. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Don’t you get tired of it?”

Well, no, he thought; but this didn’t seem to be the time to say so. “It’s just a pleasure,” he said. “It’s just another thing, like decent food or cigarettes.”

“Or expensive beer, or sex, or television.” Now she put her glasses on, a pair of tiny round wire-rims that made her look like the class Marxist, common scold. “It just seems strange to me,” she said. “So much time and money, just to get away from yourself.”

“I don’t know,” Kenny said. He felt himself deflating, thinking about his father. Blue: the feeling that he was born broken, unrepairable.

“I don’t mean anything about you in particular,” she said.