Spring Tide (10 page)

Jackie poured more wine into both their glasses.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Gail said, “I saw that chick again the other day. She was at the hardware store. Pat and I were there getting a new flapper for our toilet. Flushing great now, by the way.”

“What chick?”

“That chick we saw when we were kayaking last week. The hot mama with the dog. She was buying a cartload of stuff. I said hi, but I don’t think she recognized me.”

“Even if she did, she wouldn’t have been friendly.”

“Why not?”

“She’s arrogant as hell!” Jackie realized that had come out a lot more forcefully than intended.

A small, suspicious smile appeared on Gail’s face. “Jacks?” She laid her cards down. “What do you know about sexy dog
lady?”

“I paid her a visit,” Jackie admitted.

“No!”

Jackie nodded. “I did.”

“You’re a sneaky one, aren’t you?”

“Just being neighborly.”

“Uh-huh, sure. So tell me all about it. What’s she like? What’s she doing here? Is there a husband? Wife?” Gail’s eyes bugged out with the possibility. “Is she gay?”

Jackie laid her cards down and considered her answers as Gail leaned in with an anxious, almost comical look on her face.

“She may be gay,” Jackie said noncommittally, remembering the incredibly luxurious kisses they had shared. Despite what it felt like at the time, it had turned into a shameful memory. She didn’t want to share her humiliation with Gail. “She didn’t have much to say about herself. Her name is Stef. Just Stef. Not Stephanie or she’ll bite your head off.”

“Stef, yeah, that’s kinda butch. What else?”

“She’s living in Compton’s houseboat on Baylor Road, trying to get it fixed up to get back on the water. She’s planning to sail away into the sunset.”

“By herself?”

“Just her and the dog.”

Gail looked impressed. “Nice reconnaissance, Jacks. What makes you think she’s gay?”

Jackie balked, unprepared for the question. “Uh, you know, the usual things that add up. She’s got the lesbian lope, for instance.”

“Lesbian lope?”

“You know. That gait that when you see it, you just know.”

Gail pressed her lips together thoughtfully. “Hmm. Do I have that?”

Jackie hesitated, considering. “Yeah, you do.”

“Do you?”

“I don’t think so. But it’s not something you can see in yourself. You have to be observing. So you’d have to tell me if I did.”

“I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a lesbian lope. Sounds funny. Lesbian lope.” Gail pronounced the phrase with an exaggeratedly low tone, making it sound like something cowboys might do in a rodeo. “Can you demonstrate so I’ll recognize it when I see it?”

“I’m not sure I can. Why don’t you have Pat videotape you walking normally and play it back?”

“If I walked normally, there’d be no lesbian lope now, would there?” She laughed.

“Very funny.”

Gail leaned back in her chair, smiling. “You must be ecstatic.”

“Why?”

“A single gay woman with a luscious body, passable face. Yours for the taking.”

“Passable face?” Jackie was incredulous. “She’s gorgeous!”

Gail laughed, and Jackie realized she’d been tricked.

“But don’t get ideas. I admit I was…intrigued.”

“Intrigued? You’re so cool, Jacks. Anybody else would say they were drooling.”

“Whatever. But after talking to her a couple of times—”

“Oh! A couple of times?” Gail slapped the table with both palms and stared in amazement.

“Yeah, yeah, a couple of times, briefly.”

“Now the truth comes out. You went back for more.”

“She’s not for me,” Jackie stated flatly.

Gail’s grin faded. “Why not?”

“She’s extremely conceited and rude. She’s a loner. She made fun of me just for trying to be welcoming.”

“No kidding? She didn’t go for Stillwater’s best and most respected veterinarian?
Only
vet, actually, but still the best.”

“She doesn’t care who I am. She practically threw me out.”

“Maybe you need to put a little more wiggle in your waddle.” Gail blinked coquettishly.

Jackie sighed.

“A livelier worm on your hook?” suggested Gail.

“She’s not going to bite, regardless of what I dangle in front of her. She doesn’t want to be friends, even, let alone…”

“Lovers,” Gail pronounced in a sultry voice, making bedroom eyes.

“Yes. Definitely not. I can’t even imagine going there.”

“Well, I can.”

“That’s because she hasn’t spoken to you. I think she may be nuts. She actually threw a knife at me.”

“For real?”

“For real.” Jackie realized she wasn’t giving a completely accurate picture of her encounters with Stef or her feelings about her, but this version of events was the one that suited her current opinion, that Stef deserved to be left alone, just like she wanted. “Barely missed my head.”

“Wow.”

“She’s a menace.”

“Maybe I should go out there and arrest her.” Gail nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll go arrest her, cuff her to her bed and teach her to be polite...and obedient…and ladylike.”

Jackie giggled. “Fantasize all you want. The real thing isn’t worth the effort.”

“Okay, then, if you’re serious. Too bad. For you, I mean. You know I want you to be happy.”

“I am happy,” Jackie protested.

“I mean really happy. Like clothes in a wad on the floor, skin covered in sweat happy.”

“My God, Gail, all you think about is sex.”

“And I suppose you don’t think about it?” She took a drink, looking over the rim of her glass skeptically.

Despite her anger at Stef, Jackie’s own fantasies had been progressing nonstop ever since that day, becoming increasingly graphic and salacious and often starting where the real-life incident had abruptly ended. Instead of stopping, Stef’s kisses had become more intense, turning Jackie into a quivering mass of sexually-charged protoplasm. In several of these daydreams, Stef had been unable to control herself and had torn off Jackie’s clothes and taken her right there on the sofa or the little table or the floor. In another version, instead of stomping out indignantly when Stef pulled away from her, Jackie had said, “Oh, no, you don’t. You’re going to finish what you started. Down on your knees, woman.” Stef obediently did as she was told and it just got better from there.

Jackie glanced across the table to see Gail watching her suspiciously. She felt flushed and hoped the look on her face had no resemblance to her thoughts. She picked up her cards and said, “Do you have any twos?”

In a challenging voice, Gail drawled, “Go fish.”

“Not bad, huh?” Stef asked Deuce after tossing him a bite of grilled crawdad.

Deuce licked his chops, looking expectantly at her in case any more treats were forthcoming. But she reserved the rest of the shellfish for herself, shaking a couple drops of Tabasco sauce on each bite. She sat in her picnic area beside the boat, relaxing after a frustrating morning. Nothing was going right today. Having no luck getting the engine running, she’d moved on to the broken propeller, but hadn’t been able to remove it. The nut was fused onto the bolt with rust. WD-40 hadn’t helped. She didn’t have a big enough wrench to apply the kind of torque necessary to break the nut free. She’d been running into complications from the beginning with this craft. It was fighting her all the way.

She turned her grandfather’s knife over in her hand absentmindedly, trying to decide what to tackle next. At least everything on the inside worked. When she’d moved in, there’d been no hot water, but that was now fixed. Hot showers never felt so good. Thankfully, the cold showers of that first week coincided with warm spring days. The interior was in good shape, considering. Now that the leaks were patched and the rotted wood replaced, everything left to do inside was cosmetic, and all of that could wait.

Thinking back over the last month, she could see she’d made some progress, but now she was wondering how likely it was that she’d ever get this bucket floating again. She was beginning to have doubts.

She remembered Jackie’s offer to help. Help would be good, especially from somebody who knew something, like a boat mechanic. But Jackie wasn’t one of those and hiring one would be a last resort. She had practically run out of money. She’d spent her savings on the boat and the new pontoon had cost a bundle. She had one more paycheck coming, then she wasn’t sure what she was going to do. At least her expenses would be small once she got on the water. No rent, just gas and groceries, which she figured she could supplement with fish. And maybe a few crawdads. She stabbed the last piece with the tip of her knife and ate it. Then she sat back in her lawn chair, leaned her head back and watched some fluffy clouds drift across the sky.

Her mind returned to Jackie. She recalled the sensation of kissing her, of holding her close, of how good that had felt. She’d been completely surprised at Jackie’s reaction. She’d expected protestations, shock and recoiling. Cursing, maybe, like, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” or whatever Jackie’s equivalent was. She had never expected to get as far as their lips touching. But once they had, it had been a tremendous challenge to stop.

Stef kept asking herself why she’d done that, why she’d kissed that woman. Just trying to shake her up? Mess with her assumptions? Scare her off? All of the above? But the move had backfired. Stef’s own assumptions, one being that Jackie was straight, had apparently been wrong. She hadn’t expected Jackie to kiss her back. She hadn’t expected the inviting pressure of her body and the eagerness of her arms. It wasn’t Jackie who’d been shaken up after all. Stef still wasn’t sure what all that added up to…if anything.

Though Jackie had seemed very eager to be friends, when she had stomped off the other day, she was steamed. She wouldn’t turn up here again anytime soon. Which was fine, Stef thought. That was the idea, to chase her away. So everything was great. Just quit thinking about her.

She sat up straighter in her chair, aimed at a shadow on a nearby tree, and threw her knife. It hit the target and stuck. She stood and stretched, reluctant to go back to work.

“I wonder if we could catch some of those tasty critters,” she said to Deuce. “There’s probably some here in our creek, don’t you think?”

Deuce lifted one ear and tilted his head, as though perplexed.

She decided she’d had enough frustration for one day, so she rummaged through the hold looking for a long-handled net she recalled seeing, and after several minutes of digging, she pulled it out. After locating a plastic bucket plenty big for a mess of crawdads, she whistled for Deuce and they walked through the rutted field to the creek.

Walking along the bank for a short distance, she found a good perch on a tree root at the edge of the water where she could look directly down into the shallows and watch for any crawdad activity. Deuce went poking around the grass and leaves nearby, exploring. Every so often, he would run through the water at the edge of the creek, gleefully sending up a spray. He was a happy dog with a puppy-like disposition, innocent, playful and sometimes dopey. He was easy to love.

Once Stef got accustomed to the look of things in the water, she could see the muddy bottom two feet below and a school of minnows swimming back and forth through the filtered sunlight. She sat peering at the mud for as long as she could stand it and saw nothing other than minnows. Maybe crawdads weren’t as ubiquitous as the town’s obsession with them implied. Or maybe they’d been fished out in preparation for the crawdad festival.

 After a fruitless half hour, she stood up and looked around for Deuce. Not seeing him, she listened, but the only sound was the rustling of tree leaves. She climbed up the bank to look around the field. As she reached level ground, she heard him barking and followed the sound, scanning the landscape for a sight of him. The barks were the sort that suggested he had cornered a toad or something—joyfully excited.