Sweetwater Creek (14 page)

Lulu’s head popped out of the water, gilt hair darkened and plastered to her narrow, beautiful skull. Her eyes were closed in ecstasy.

“Oh, God, it’s heaven,” she called. “You’re right, it’s wonderfully cool. I don’t care what’s in it. Aren’t you coming in?”

Emily stepped out of her shorts and T-shirt, slowly and reluctantly. She wore her tank suit underneath it, faded red-gray with years and creek water. Still, she automatically shielded her breasts with her hands. They were, she knew, spilling out of the tank suit like overripe fruit.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Emily, take that awful thing off and get on in here,” Lulu snorted. “You think I’ve never seen a naked girl before? Nobody wears clothes at Randolph Macon, not when they don’t have to. You’ve never seen so many women walking around naked after hours, when they get out of the showers.”

Emily squeezed her eyes shut, and then, flushed all over with shame and daring, peeled down the tank suit and ran along the tree and jumped into the water so fast that it surged up her nose and she emerged coughing and sputtering. Lulu was right. Cool water on naked flesh was—transcendent.

“I bet you wear that thing even when you swim by yourself,” Lulu teased her. “Throw it away, Emily. You have a wonderful body. It’s going to make you very happy one day. It’s going to make several people happy, I’d bet. If you’ve got to have a bathing suit, get yourself a bikini and strut that stuff of yours. You’ll be a beautiful woman. You already are. What good is that if you don’t enjoy it?”

Emily was startled. So far her burgeoning body had gotten her nothing but Kenny Rouse touching himself, leering. She did not know how to think about it in any other context.

“Do you enjoy yours?” she wanted to ask Lulu. She would not, of course. Somehow she thought Lulu’s thin, attenuated body had not made her happy in a long while. It looked…hungry. Starved.

From the bank, Elvis whined.

“Oh, poor baby,” Emily said. “I should have told you you could.”

To Lulu she said, “Watch.”

Elvis broke into a joyous run and launched himself straight out from the bank, head up, legs folded, tail stiff, all his flags flying. He looked like a bronze torpedo cutting into the water. Once in with them, he paddled in circles and shook his head so that his curly ears flipped water and barked once, as if to say, “This is more like it.”

“That was beautiful,” Lulu breathed.

“That’s how a good Boykin does it,” Emily said proudly. “Not all spaniels can. Lots of them just flush, but some are born retrievers, too. Elvis is.”

Presently they climbed out onto the tree and picked their way back to the little bluff. Lulu did not dress, simply spread her clothes out on the ground and flopped down on them. After a moment, Emily did, too. At first she was miserably aware of her nakedness, but before long the slumberous heat and the silence and the smell of the creek seeped into her body, cell by cell, and she turned over on her back and let the heat wash her down into rocking water sleep.

“So what’s this great thing you were going to show me?” Lulu said. They had waked and dressed and eaten their lunch. The creek had fallen until it was only a ribbon of water, perhaps four feet wide and three deep, between gray, slick banks, with the stains of the holes still dark, deep.

“I think…right around that bend down there,” Emily said, grinning. She knew today was the right day. The widening mud beach beneath the bluff was wet and deeply furrowed.

“What…?”

“Shhhh,” Emily said. “Listen.”

Under the profound afternoon silence they became aware of a tiny, rhythmic splashing, almost felt rather than heard, at the very edges of the water. The last stalks of the spartina were out of water now. The splashing segued into a continual churning, as pervasive and subliminal as the heat song of the cicadas and midges. Elvis lifted his head and cocked it toward the creek, and Lulu looked at Emily.

“What’s that?”

“Come see,” Emily said, and they got to their feet and went to peer over the edge of the bluff, down onto the mud beach and into the water.

“Lord, what’s that?” Lulu breathed.

Tight schools of small silver fish clung to the banks, churning at its edges as if trying to crawl out onto it. The sun glinted crazily off their backs. Several large gulls and a snowy egret stood silently on the bank above them, motionless.

“They’re mullet,” Emily said. “Bait fish.”

“They sure do look nervous,” Lulu said.

“So would you. Listen, now,” Emily whispered.

They heard a strange, high clicking, almost inaudible, from around the bend of the creek, and then a long, silver projectile ghosted into sight. Two or three followed, silent and stealthy as partly submerged submarines. In an eyeblink there were half a dozen. Sleek, wet, gray and white, large eyes set wide and benign on either side of slim, pointed noses, smiling sweet, playful Disney smiles, the dolphins came into the creek.

“What…?” Lulu began again, but Emily made a sharp gesture and she fell silent.

The lead dolphin circled back to the pod, and a strange, sonic blast shattered the air, and the pack began to compress the school of mullet into tight balls, pinned firmly to the shore. The dolphins bobbed their sleek heads just above the surface of the water, eyes on the squirming ball of silver on the bank, and then, with precision timing, rushed the mud shore, roiling up a large wave that carried both bait fish and dolphins out of the water and onto the mud. The thrashing chaos was enormous, dizzying; silver water flashed and flew. When the wave receded, the mullet lay high on the mud bank, wriggling frantically, and the six dolphins, completely out of the water, tails and all, thrashed toward their prey. They lay packed together on the beach, on their right sides, as precise and choreographed as a chorus line, and snared their flapping prey in smiling jaws. Above them the birds swooped down for their free lunch. After the dolphins had fed, as if on signal, the pod thrashed its way back into the water with dorsal fins and tails and vanished around the bend from where they had come. What mullet they left fell to the birds. In another moment the creek was as silent as it had been before.

The whole ballet of hunters and hunted had lasted scarcely five minutes. Lulu and Emily did not move for several more minutes after the dolphins were gone. Then Lulu turned to Emily, her face luminous, lips parted, tear tracks on her brown cheeks.

“Oh, my God,” she breathed. “That was just…magical. It was unearthly. What are they? How often do they do that? Who taught them? How did you know they were coming?”

“They come in the late summer and fall,” Emily said, enjoying her new role as tutor to Lulu Foxworth. “They may do it once or twice a day, or sometimes a lot more. I guess it depends on how many mullet are around. They come back year after year to the same place on the creek; it’s kind of a family thing. These same guys have probably been coming to Sweetwater all their lives, and their ancestors before them. There are other pods on other creeks along the coast, but they don’t go out of the Lowcountry except maybe into Georgia, a little.”

“They came right out of the water! Out of the ocean and up on a creek bank!”

“Yeah,” Emily said. “At just this spot, and they’ll do it almost every day for a couple of months, and then you won’t see them again until next August. But they always come, and they’re always the same pods. Sometimes I think it’s a game they play.”

“You knew they’d be here? How did you know that?”

“Well, I’ve been coming to watch them for a lot of years,” Emily said. “And I knew they’d be here because the skids were smooth and shiny and fresh. And there are a lot of them. It means they’ve been doing this a lot this summer. Some years there are just a few skids, kind of dry and old. This is a good year.”

“Will they come again today?”

“Probably. But I don’t like to hang over the bank too long, watching. I think it must spook them. You wouldn’t want people watching you eat all the time, would you?”

“No,” Lulu said. “Let’s go home. I think it’s magic enough just to have seen them, and to know they’re down here doing that…wonderful ballet, over and over. I wouldn’t ever want to get used to that.”

They turned away and walked slowly along the deep-shaded tunnel of the path through the palmettos and live oaks, toward the edge of the burning field and home.

After a long silence, Lulu, trudging behind Emily, said, “Elvis doesn’t bark at them?”

“No. For some reason he never has.”

“Elvis knows magic when he sees it,” Lulu said. And then, “I wish I were Vivienne. The Lady of the Lake. Do you know who that is?”

“No. Should I?”

“Yes, you should. Vivienne was Merlin’s lover in the stories about King Arthur. She beguiled him into an enchanted cave by the sea, or maybe it was a lake, and they never, ever left again. I wish I never had to leave here, this creek, this river, this water. You’re lucky. You are Vivienne, in a way. You don’t have to leave it, not yet. And when you do, you can always come back. Though you’ll do really well out there. You have a very good mind, Emily.”

“Out there?”

Lulu gestured vaguely to the north, where the world lay, and chaos.

“Out in the world. You’ll have to go some day; all of us do. It’s the only way we get knowledge. You can have all the brains in the world and still not have knowledge.”

“What if I don’t like what I find out there?” Emily said, thinking but not saying that Lulu herself had opted out of the world and appeared to have no wish to go back.

“Well, as I said, you can always come back. But first you have to go.”

“Well, I’m not going,” Emily said mulishly. “I’m staying right here. I want to run this farm one day. Daddy won’t always be around, and Carter and Walt aren’t going to stick around one minute after graduation. Daddy may think they are, but they’re not. I think they’re hot to see the great world. I think they’ll head straight for Myrtle Beach.”

Lulu laughed.

“I hope they get a little farther than that. Believe it or not, there’s a good bit of world beyond Myrtle Beach. But even if you do end up running the farm, you’ll need the kind of knowledge that you can only get out there. In the world.”

“What for? I already know almost all there is to know about dogs.”

“Well, how to manage a farm like a business, for one thing. The economics of it. And…public relations, I guess. It’s no good to have these fabulous dogs if nobody knows about them. And like it or not, how to move in the world downtown, because that’s where you’ll sell most of them. And English literature, above all. It gives you an unshakable sense of your place in the world. The bad of it, because you have to know how to avoid it or beat it. And the good….”

She paused for a moment, and then said softly, “If love wants you; if you’ve been melted down to stars, / You will love with lungs and gills, with warm blood and cold…”

She did not speak again for a long moment. Watching her, Emily felt her skin burn and a great, warm tide of something secret start up in her.

“What’s that?” she said. “Who said that?”

“A poet I love. A woman named Anne Michaels. I read her first at school, and I’ve carried her poems around with me ever since. She knows everything about being human in the world. You should read her, Emily. She’s a great start for the knowing.”

“My brother used to do that,” Emily said, the words flowing unstoppably out of her like too-long-bound lava.

“Do what?” Lulu smiled at her.

“Quote poetry. We used to read it together.” She stopped and bit her lip, but it was too late.

“Your brother? Really? Which one?”

Lulu sounded astonished. Emily grinned, unwillingly. She tried to imagine Carter or Walt reading poetry, or quoting it, and the grin became a giggle. Then the pain, long buried, pushed its way up.

“No. My brother Buddy. He…died. He was seven years older than me.”

“Oh, Emily,” Lulu whispered. “I’m so sorry. Was he sick?”

“Yes,” Emily said, briefly and formally. In her mind’s eye the glinting Purdey looped forever into the air and down the deep curve of the river. She knew she would never speak of it to Lulu.

“You must miss him very much. So what do you read now?”

“I don’t read,” Emily muttered.

“Why on earth not?”

“There just doesn’t seem to be any reason to.”

“That’s one of the great things about reading,” Lulu said. “You don’t need a reason to do it. I’d die if I couldn’t read.”

“I’d die if I did,” Emily thought.

A small breeze, just an exhalation, really, stirred the moss on the live oaks and the damp hair on the back of Emily’s neck. The tide had turned. The walk back to the house would still be hot, but not the breath-sucking blast they had come to Sweetwater Creek in. Behind her, Emily heard Lulu give a small sigh.

They reached the fringe of the stubbled field, and Elvis stopped dead and stared into the deep shade of the oaks and the palmettos to their right. They stopped, too. Elvis did not growl; he merely waited, but Emily knew that something or someone was coming. She laid her hand lightly on his head.

Out of the black-green shade a man and a dog moved, so silently that you felt the slight displacement in the air before you heard or saw them. The man and dog stopped. Emily and Lulu and Elvis stopped, too.

He was old, a very old man, so thin and stooped and sundarkened that he might have been a dead, twisted vine of Lowcountry wisteria or a gnarled live oak limb. His face was furrowed like dark plowed earth, but his eyes, sunk deep into the furrows, burned as bright as peat coals. He wore faded denim overalls and a long-sleeved work shirt. The shirt was not stained with sweat, even in the savage heat. Broken over his arm was a shotgun, obviously old and cheap, but gleaming with wax and tung oil.

The old dog, a black Labrador with an apron of matronly fat and a pure white muzzle, was damp and smelled powerfully of wet dog and creek. Emily wondered if the dog was strong enough to swim; before she sat down beside her master, Emily saw the limp of arthritis and the slight dragging of the back legs that meant hip displasia. There was nothing to fear from either of them, she knew, and yet her heart thumped faster. They might have been the desiccated, dying spirits of the parched marsh.