Into the Great Wide Open (32 page)

“I don’t know.”

“You scared Syd halfway out of her skin.”

“I don’t care.”

“You ought to, Kenny. She never did anything to you.”

“Look, let’s just say that I’m sorry, OK? You can tell them I’m sorry and then we’ll drive the rest of the way out tomorrow and then we can just forget about it, OK?”

“What’s this about, Kenny?”

“You know,” he says. “You know better than I do.”

“Jacob?”

But just to hear his name in her mouth is hateful to him. Kenny turns his back on her and walks quickly down to the shoreline, picks
a heavy rock and hurls it as far out into the lake as he can, and another.

“What do you want to know?” Junie asks.

“I don’t want to know anything,” he says. “I think you ought to go back in. I’ll sleep in the car. We can go in the morning.”

“We started as lovers about a week after I got here. It’s part of the deal,” she says. “I don’t know if it is or not but I know I’m a long way from the first.”

Kenny can’t face her, can’t seem to turn. He holds a heavy, night-cold rock in his hand but can’t throw it.

“I thought he was interested in my work,” she says. “I was such a little asshole.”

“He wasn’t?”

“No, I think he really was. But then he’s got to prove that he’s better, I don’t know. It’s all such a game to him.”

“And Syd knows all about it?”

“Sure,” Junie says. “As much as she wants to.”

Kenny takes the rock in his hand and sails it out over the lake, aiming for the reflection of the moon in the water, so when it hits the moon is shattered into a thousand concentric splashes; then turns quickly to face her.

“Are you pregnant?”

“What makes you want to ask that?”

“I don’t know. Are you pregnant?”

“No, Kenny. I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so or you’re not?”

“I’m not pregnant, Kenny, OK?”

“You’re not pregnant?”

“I’m not pregnant, OK? Look, Kenny, what’s this all about?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I can’t figure it out. Why don’t you come over here?”

“Where?”

“Here by me. Where you were before.”

“I can’t do it, Kenny. I’m not your
girlfriend
anymore,” she says. She takes a seat on a driftwood log, facing toward the water, and Kenny can’t help coming to sit beside her, that same magnetic resistance keeping them connected but apart.

“At least with Jacob, it’s something different,” she says. “Something new.”

“Tell me what you mean.”

“I don’t want to be that little girl anymore, Kenny, no matter how much you might want me to, or my dad might want me to.”

“What does your dad have to do with it?”

“Whose car are you driving, Kenny? Who paid for your trip? Who sent you out here?”

She’s right. Kenny feels caught, corrupted, a coppery bitterness at the base of his tongue. The glad hand of Junie’s father on his shoulder: good boy, good boy. “There’s nothing much to say then, is there?”

“Maybe not,” Junie says.

“Then I think I’ll go to sleep.” But he doesn’t go, not yet. He watches her for a sign, a revelation, but she keeps her eyes from him, staring out over the water toward Jacob’s house, cradling her cast in her good hand. Kenny sees that empty white plaster and wants to write his name on it. He wants a flaming angel to descend from the skies, the earth to open and swallow the water from the lake, anything to break this deadlock. But nothing will come of it.

“Well,” he says slowly. “I guess it’s good night, then.”

“I guess it is.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Go back out to the house, I guess, in a while. I’ll figure something out. Good night, Kenny.”

“Good night,” he says. “Good night, Junie.” Kenny leaves her by the lake, takes his flashlight and his sleeping bag and her father’s fancy foam sleeping pad from the backseat of the car and thrashes through the brush of the lakeshore, looking for a level spot. He settles
in against the base of a tree, snug in his bag, although the night is still warm and there’s no wind. When he turns the flashlight off, the darkness comes alive around him: flickers of moonlight through the limbs of the firs, wing beats in the dark air. He hears a screen door creak open and footsteps on hollow wood, the deck of Jacob’s island most likely, although it sounds startlingly close. No voices, no calls except the sporadic dry sound of insects calling to one another. Kenny’s biology teacher had joked once that all the varieties of insect sounds, and all the birds as well, had only one thing to say: I’m here, make love to me, I’m here, make love to me, I’m here … He listens for Junie to make some noise, listens for the rasp of aluminum on gravel, waiting for her to go back but she doesn’t. After a few minutes, three or five, he hears Jacob’s footsteps again and then the screech and slam of the screen door closing behind him. A yellow bug-light, a beacon, clicks on.

Alone in his cheap sleeping bag—the kind with cowboys and cactuses on the flannel liner, a treasure—Kenny is filled with the calm of a survivor: the crash came, the crash went, he is still around. Only Junie, sitting silently in the nearby dark, disrupts this queasy calm.

Why won’t she go? What good can she do him now, or even herself? Kenny has made a fool of himself, isn’t that enough? He wants her gone, wants the collapse to be complete, just so it will be over.

Still she won’t go.

Kenny tries to imagine what she is thinking but can’t. All that comes is a picture of her, sitting on that bleached log, staring out at the water, at the long yellow reflection of Jacob’s beacon. Her face is closed to him now, a house where he once lived but no longer can enter. Kenny sees that he has
not even started
to miss her yet. Why won’t she go?

Finally he hears her stir, not toward the lake but toward him, the snap of twigs and rattle of branches. Just go, he thinks, and then says it: “Junie?”

“What?”

“It’s late. I don’t know what you want.”

A long silence, filled with wind and crickets. He can almost see her, a few feet from his plain bed, a darkness against the deeper, mottled darkness of the forest. He feels her with some other sense, maybe his skin, receiving the closeness of her like radio waves.

“I love you,” she says.

“Don’t give me that.” Kenny’s anger spills out of his throat, fills his mouth, surprises him. “I’m not some goddamn bug you can pull the legs off, he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“I don’t care what you meant. Why don’t you go?”

“I’m going to,” Junie says, her own blood rising. “I will in a minute.”

“What do you want with me?” Kenny asks; and in the silence that follows his question, he discovers that he is no longer angry. Neither is she.

After a minute she says, “I didn’t exactly plan this. Any of this.”

“No.”

“I just wanted you to know. It would have felt like a lie if I didn’t tell you. I love you, that’s all.”

“Let’s just stop talking, OK?” Kenny looks over into the darkness where she sits, silhouetted against the dark forest, then slowly unzips the length of his sleeping bag and crawls toward her across the pillowy nylon, takes her hand and pulls her to him. She comes to him, slow but willing, and they lie close and kiss once and then hold each other. Junie is awkward, resistant, all angles and projecting bones. Kenny traces the outline of her head with his fingers, touches the hollow of her throat, lightly. Then slowly starts to unbutton her blouse.

“Kenny,” she says.

“What?”

“We can if you want to, but … Well, you wouldn’t be the first.”

But I
was
, he thinks; then realizes what she is saying: Jacob fucking Junie, down in the darkroom. Mr. Mustard in the library with a knife. His hand freezes onto her blouse. Falling, spinning, sinking. Kenny has no idea what to do; he never quite imagined that he was
right
.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and sits up, cross-legged at the end of the sleeping bag, facing away. “I didn’t mean for things to happen this way. I didn’t mean any of it.”

Kenny has his flashlight in his hand, ready to run, just get in the car and go, anywhere but here. Then looks at the flashlight, then puts it down. He can just barely see her. Kenny comes to her on his knees, rests his head against her neck, and wraps his arms around the angles of her stiff shoulders, so they are together, staring off into the darkness. Slowly, like always, he feels her relax into his embrace. “I don’t care,” he says.

A lie; but one that will get them through the next few hours, he hopes. The wheel, the big motor pushing them forward and forward. They lie nestled into each other on his sleeping bag, listening to the darkness around them, wondering what will happen next.

ALSO BY
K
EVIN
C
ANTY
 

A STRANGER IN THIS WORLD

The men and women in this mesmerizing collection of stories walk a thin line between alternative lives. On one side are well-lit homes, steady jobs, love, or its approximation. On the other side lies chaos. To step across takes only one false move, one bad choice. Kevin Canty has the rare power to re-create the chain of thoughts that take his characters over the edge.

In
A Stranger in This World
, the summons to do the wrong thing may come from a neighbor with the body of a grown woman and the mind of a submissive child. It may come from the ex-wife who shows up just when you’ve gotten over her. Disaster may take the form of a drunk driver who carries a gun in his glove compartment. Canty gives us an entire catalog of risk, in stories that unveil the hazards at the heart of American lives.

Fiction/0-679-76394-5

VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES

Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order

1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).