Into the Great Wide Open (31 page)

“No hurry,” Syd says, and waves him off. “There’s a lot to do.”

Kenny grabs a tennis ball on his way out and bounces it on the
deck near the sleeping dogs, who bound into action, following him down the beach, panting and slavering and nipping at each other’s ears. His sneakers crunch in the smooth pebbles of the shore. Kenny tells himself small meaningless lies, trying to calm down: he is on vacation, everything is fine. A hundred yards down, out of sight of the house, he throws the tennis ball as far out in the lake as he can, expecting the dogs to chase it down, which they don’t. They stare at his face, while the ball bobs greenly up and down in the water fifty yards off shore.

“Stupid dogs,” he says. “Bad dogs, bad dogs.”

They look up expectantly at him.

“I don’t know what you expect me to do,” he says. “I threw the damn thing.”

Cupid starts to whimper, or maybe it’s Psyche. Dogs: an alternative to humans. I think I’ll just go out and
buy
a friend. The other one starts to circle him, sniffing his hands, looking for the ball. Kenny clambers through the brush at the edge of the trees, looking for a stick. Both dogs stand at the edge of the brush, yelping at him. He finds a two-foot pine branch and hurls it out next to the tennis ball. This time they both leap after it, splashing into the water then swimming out, with only the tops of their heads above water. They look earnest and purposeful and easy in the water, like golden red beavers, but neither of them can find the stick. Nor can they find the tennis ball, which is two feet from one dog’s head.

But they
have
to chase it, no reason known or needed. It’s just a reflex: fetch! And then there’s Kenny, throwing the stick for them to get it, a little closed circle of pointlessness. While up in the house, Junie and Jacob are alone in the basement. Kenny is supposed to stand clear, stay out of the way. Jacob with his shirt off. Suddenly he feels like weeping, screaming, something. It’s hard to imagine what, exactly.

The first cool breeze of evening descends from the mountains,
starts a faint shiver in his spine; not from cold … Kenny gives up on fetch, starts skipping rocks. Some of the shoreline pebbles are perfect for it, smooth, round, and flat, and the lake is flat where the dogs aren’t churning it up. He’s killing time. Junie and Jacob are alone in the basement. What am I doing here? he wonders; and asks himself again and again, with each rock he skips into the water, what am I doing here, what am I doing here, what am I doing here … A reflex, maybe—he can’t let go, doesn’t want to let go. And then the idea comes to him, the one he’s been avoiding, the idea he didn’t want to have: it’s over.

It’s over: three thousand miles to find out a thing he already knew. And lots of trouble all around, trouble for everybody. The water seems to be glowing with a light of its own. Kenny throws a big rock into the water, to end the game, but the dogs come furiously paddling over and start to search around the splash. She’s gone. She’s outgrown him, or the other way around, or something else completely. It doesn’t need explanations. He sits on the ground and watches the light slowly leave the water, the sky turning a delicate transparent gray but never completely dark. He lights a cigarette, another small betrayal but this time of Syd, and after a while the dogs get tired of the chase and come to shore. With the water slicked down onto their bodies they look skinny and embarrassed, until they fluff themselves up again with a big luxurious shake. Two weeks ago Kenny was sitting in another patch of dirt, outside of Baltimore, splitting a pint of lime vodka with Severin Watkins. Friday afternoon with the landscaping company, and everybody was fucking off, which was traditional. Severin was black, twenty-three years old, fresh up from Hampstead, North Carolina. He and Kenny tended to get the pick-and-shovel jobs, the ones the foreman unapologetically called “nigger work.” They were what?—not quite friends, or like the kind of friends Kenny imagined you would make in a foreign country if you were just passing through. Severin was country, he said so
himself. He was always talking about shooting squirrels and raising tomatoes, outboard motors and so on. But that last Friday—it was the day Kenny quit—Severin was talking about pussy. Specifically he was saying that there was a lot of pussy two thousand miles closer than Montana and Kenny was crazy to drive all that way.

And now Kenny is sitting in the pebbles at the edge of a strange lake, a long ways from familiar, and Severin was right; and Kenny left Severin behind and the job and the apartment and everything else to come dragging out here, for no good reason. He saw himself as he imagined Severin saw him: a kid, inexperienced, dumb. Kenny measured himself for the clown suit and saw it fit. He should have known better, should have been a man about it: suck it in, take the loss and get on with it. Instead of this pissing and moaning, O my poor sad feelings! Put on the manly armor.

No: that isn’t the way out of here either. Something will happen, one way or the other. In a week, two weeks, this will be over. He wishes for company, then; wishes that Severin was beside him, Candy Connolly, anybody. Born damaged, Kenny thinks, misaligned (and the small voice in his ear, reminding him of his parents’ failure, his own inevitable … They were beautiful once themselves, intelligent and young, there’s no way out for him). He gets up, brushes his pants off, and heads back to the house.

Nothing has changed, not even Syd’s position in the chair. She sits composed, relaxed, with one leg crossed under the other. Kenny, a born fidgeter, admires anyone who can actually sit still.

“What were you doing down there?” Syd asks.

“Torturing the dogs.”

“Oh, well, they deserve it. Let’s go smoke.”

“I think I’ll go downstairs first, see how they’re getting along,” he says experimentally.

“Not a chance,” Syd says. “That’s a no-trespassing zone, Jacob would kick my ass.”

“Till when?”

“Whenever they’re done,” Syd says. “Probably three in the morning. Once Jacob gets started he doesn’t like to quit.”

Kenny gives himself away. He doesn’t even know himself what he’s feeling but he can see it reflected in her face: the trouble.

“Look,” she says, “get yourself something to drink, let’s go out onto the deck, relax. The summer nights here are like no place else.”

“People keep telling me that,” Kenny says, sulky. But he goes into the refrigerator and fetches a beer, meets her outside, where she rolls a cigarette for herself and one for Kenny.

“My cigarette, my friend,” she says, lighting up. “Twenty friends for two dollars, not a bad deal.”

“These are even cheaper,” Kenny says.

“It’s going to be lonely around here when June leaves,” Syd says. “Jacob is a gigantic pain in the ass, and he’s not even here half the time.”

“You’re going to have to pick one of those to complain about,” Kenny says. “I don’t think you can bitch about both.”

Then realizes that she has made some kind of confession to him, something about Junie. She will miss her, too. We’re all jilted, all lonely, let’s all do the loneliness dance …

“What?” she asks him.

“I was just thinking,” Kenny says. “I didn’t mean to say anything.”

“I keep having this urge to give you advice,” Syd says. “How old are you, anyway?”

“Eighteen.”

“That explains it. Everybody wants to give you advice, I bet. Anything in particular you’d like to hear my accumulated wisdom on?”

“I’m OK for now.”

“I think you should go after her,” Syd says. “She’s a beauty, and she thinks about you all the time. She talks about you. That’s all I wanted to say—I don’t know if it’s any use to you or not.”

“I’ll think about it,” Kenny says, wishing she would go away.

“What are you afraid of?”

Then Kenny is angry for real—she’s trespassing, walking all over him where she shouldn’t be. Presumptuous: and, worse, she’s probably right, Kenny can’t tell.
Afraid:
not a word he would have chosen for himself. But maybe that’s the right word for the feeling he has, this wanting to draw back into the safety of the past; really he just wants to set the clock for November again, ride the Wayback Machine to when his father was all right and Junie was all right and high school hadn’t blown up in his face—not that there was ever a single day that was like that, his timing was off as always. Not a single day. A sympathetic silence from Syd, the glow of the coal of her cigarette, orange firefly, a half-moon over the lake. Still he feels misbegotten and alone, born damaged.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s none of my business.”

“It’s OK.”

“She told me about the baby, is all. You don’t want to let something like that drive you apart.”

“The baby,” Kenny says; and all of his own sympathy drains out, and he thinks that Syd is upstairs talking to him about their baby while her boss is downstairs screwing Junie, maybe at that moment, while they are talking; and he was foolish to come. Whatever joke this turns out to be, Kenny will be the punch line.
Faithless
, Kenny thinks. The whore. And of course the stupid husband, unsuspecting … Kenny’s had enough.

“Just take her with you,” Syd says. “Take care of her.”

“You’re missing your lines,” Kenny says; and his voice is harder in his ears than he means it to be, but he can’t seem to control it. “You’re supposed to say it’s
all right
. You’re supposed to say
you’ll get over it
. There are lots of other girls, and you’ve got plenty of time.”

He stops, because he’s afraid that tears will overtake him. Why is he quoting his father’s clichés at Syd? She looks on, unsure, unsteady.
A stitch in time saves nine, he thinks. A penny saved is a penny earned.

“I’m sorry,” Kenny says, “I’ll …” But the rest of what he’s got to say is gone, maybe it was never there, a hot, burning emptiness: nothing. She’s gone and there’s nothing. Kenny stubs out his cigarette, goes back to his little room without further explanation, pursued by the knowledge that he is a fool and everybody knows, the little husband, the one who almost made the mistaken baby … He puts his little foolish belongings into his little foolish suitcase and slips out the side door, where the two wet golden retrievers come hammering down the deck toward him. Cupid has the stick in his mouth, Psyche the bright green tennis ball, or the other way around. They dance around him like fools around a Maypole, prancing and leaping, hitting the back of his knees with the stick as he walks toward the dock, rubbing the wet fur of the tennis ball on his leg.

“No,” he says, but he can’t shout—he doesn’t want to answer any more of Syd’s questions—so it comes out in a stage whisper. “Bad dogs, bad dogs.”

They bark nonstop as he lowers his little suitcase and then himself into the canoe. As he casts the yellow line off and starts for shore he hears the little splash of the tennis ball in the water, then the bigger splashes as the two idiots dive in after it. They crash around in the water, losing the ball immediately, then settling in to swim next to the canoe. Kenny feels like the admiral of the idiot fleet, piloting his idiot canoe.

He grinds the aluminum canoe into the rocky shore and beaches it, feeling red-handed, guilty. The two dogs sit at the edge of the water and start to bark. Kenny sits on the hood of Junie’s father’s car and wonders where he will go next, now that he has escaped. No direction known. Although he is in shadow, where he sits, and cannot see the moon, its light is shining over most of the lake, and onto the island, making a dim sketch of the house. The heat of his anger drains out of the hollow in his chest, which slowly fills again with
some kind of sludge that makes him feel heavy and stupid. Kenny says to himself, What’s done is done—as if that explains anything. What’s done is done.

The two dogs curl up into little wet balls and go to sleep.

In the quiet Kenny hears the slam of the screen door, footsteps on the deck, a man and a woman talking. The water carries the voices to him but garbles the words. Kenny listens hard, trying to make it out, then realizes that he doesn’t want to know what they’re saying. What’s done is done, he tells himself. Ignorance is bliss. Kenny is grateful when they go back in.

He finds the cooler in the backseat of the car with two cans of beer still in it. One of them he puts in the lake to cool, one of them he opens. The foaming, fizzing beer is blood-warm and sweet as Coca-Cola, not that it tastes particularly good but drinking a beer strikes him as something that a man might do in this situation. It seems plausible, which is enough for Kenny. His ambition is to get through the night and sort it out in the morning, if he can.

Slowly the tension passes out of his neck, out of his shoulders. He sits on the hood of the Jeep and watches the moonlight creep toward him across the surface of the lake, catching in the hollows of the little waves. OK, he thinks.

Then the door of Jacob’s house opens again. Kenny can see it’s her, silhouetted against the lights of the living room. She calls to him: “Kenny?”

The two dogs stand up and face the island, shivering themselves awake. Kenny doesn’t move.

“Kenny?” she calls again. “God damn it, Kenny.”

The golden retrievers rush into the water and swim toward Junie, their heads trailing a wake in the bright water. Kenny wishes there was something he could tie himself to. Her voice sounds sweet to his ears, and he remembers holding her in his arms and kissing her beautiful neck. She won’t go away.

“God damn it, Kenny,” she says again, not shouting anymore, but relying on the water to carry her voice.

This goes on forever, her standing on the deck, him on the shore. Then he sees her walk away, around the back of the house, and she is gone and it is over. He was wrong to come at all. Kenny feels a door swing shut inside him, a lock turning, not just Junie on the other side but the books they liked, music, winter afternoons alone in Junie’s bedroom. He can remember the day, the hour, the windswept newspaper in the street outside her window. The wheel has made a complete turn, a revolution. She’s gone for good.

So when he hears the rattle of oars in metal oarlocks, the slap of water against the aluminum hull, when he sees her row around the corner of the house toward him he feels more exhausted than elated. No more, he says to himself, no more. I am just plain tired. The dogs watch silently from the deck of the house as she splashes loudly toward him, veering left and right, clumsy with her cast. Kenny wades out to help her beach the boat but keeps a careful two-foot cushion of air between them, like opposite magnets. Junie stands in shadow against the bright water of the lake. She asks, “What was that, Kenny?”