The Watery Part of the World (10 page)

Boyd was struggling into his boxers, about to light out after them, but she stopped him.

“I know who they are. I'll put the fear in them.”

“Don't doubt that,” he said. He came at her, nuzzling her, half-interested, interest growing, but she turned away and dressed, a little bothered by his lack of doubt as to her ability to put the fear in these spy boys, a little surprised that she took so much to heart his surely idle comments.

“Where we going?”

“Just follow me.”

At Woodrow's she knocked loudly at the screen door, in defiance of her sister, who when she wanted Woodrow would come to the door and stand close to it, not knocking, sending her white lady waves inside. She knocked loud enough to be heard, and Sarah in her apron, her hands a little bloodied from some freshly slaughtered game, responded in good time.

“Woodrow here?” she asked Sarah.

“Out around back,” Sarah said, taking in both Maggie and Boyd with her characteristically slight and indifferent appraisal.

After Sarah was gone Woodrow all but said he did not believe Maggie cared much for his bride. But in fact Maggie wanted to feel close to Sarah. She wanted Sarah's affection and she courted Sarah in her own way. Whaley didn't like Sarah because she was a colored woman and haughty about it—
uppity
was the word Whaley used—but Maggie knew the truth about Sarah: she was a hard woman. Wasn't a warm bone in her body far as Maggie could tell. She figured Woodrow had to see a different side of her, but she knew that even Woodrow struggled with Sarah's moods.

Not one day went by that Maggie did not feel bad about what happened to Sarah. She had to remind herself of Sarah's miserly spirit, but in death those faults seemed to fade. Wasn't it the color of Maggie's skin that caused Sarah to look right through her if she looked her way at all? It wasn't personal. She was good enough for Woodrow to love, and he did love her.

They found Woodrow sitting on a crab pot, studying his hogs. He looked up, then right past them like he did most everyone, black or white. Only
living
things she'd seen him study were his boys or his grandbabies, that was about all aside from the horizon, the tide, oaks and yaupons in the yard to see if the wind was shifting, the lit end of those cigars he loved.

“Woodrow?”

“Right here,” said Woodrow. If he was looking at either of them he was looking at Boyd, who was switching his head back and forth between Maggie and Woodrow as if previously separate parts of his life—work and lust—had just come together and he was caught off guard.

“Boyd needs a place to stay.”

She did not look at Boyd. She didn't have to; she could feel his embarrassment.

“Do he?”

“On his own. I was thinking your summer kitchen,” she said, gesturing toward the one-room, many-windowed outbuilding. A few years ago, before Crawl took off for Morehead, Woodrow had built Sarah a kitchen on the back of the house so she wouldn't
have to traipse in and out of the weather. Then he'd fixed up the summer kitchen for Crawl and his off-island wife, Vanessa, to stay in, but Vanessa didn't last out the winter before she dragged Crawl back across the sound to Morehead. Since then it had sat empty and so far as Maggie knew it was the only empty structure on the island.

“What's Boyd thinking?”

“Boyd ain't,” said Boyd, finding his voice and finding it creaky and low. “Obviously somebody's doing Boyd's thinking for him.”

Woodrow smiled slightly, then nodded at the summer kitchen. “Screens is all busted up.”

“We can mend them.”

Woodrow looked briefly in her direction, and she thought she saw an eyebrow raised at her “we.” Later she would get to know Woodrow's every twitch, his every syllabic emphasis; she'd learn to read him, which was as hard as learning to read Braille, for it called on a different sensory approach than she'd ever known before.

“Best soak them in kerosene when you get them patched,” he said, seemingly to his hogs.

“How come?” asked Boyd.

“Keep the bugs away,” said Maggie rotely, as if this trick was obvious to the world, not just their island where the bugs could make life miserable to outsiders especially.

“He have to share the outhouse with me and Sarah,” said Woodrow.

That's no problem, she nearly said, but she caught herself this time. She'd best be careful, speaking for him, calling his shots, presuming to know what was and was not a problem for him. She knew that, left on his own, Boyd would have kept right on staying with his aunt, Virginia Balsom, who already had begun to spread talk about Maggie “corrupting” her nephew. Ginny was a vengeful cow who, soon as she heard what those spy-boys had to report, was liable to try and poison Boyd against her by dragging up every wrong thing she'd done in her lifetime. The times she got a little tight and went off with some ill-chosen man. There had been a few of those times over the years. Things got away with her sometimes when she drank. After a few drinks this overwhelming feeling of license, of entitlement, would begin its tug. Look how you live, the liquor would whisper, all shut up on this island, cut off from most everything that makes life worth the uphill trudge. Said every sip: You deserve whatever pleasure you can piece together tonight. The booze would strike cells in the pit of her stomach and keep on surging southward and when it reached her loins it was like a waiter was there to take her order. Tonight's the night, whatever you want.

Only she never let it get further than some sloppy kisses, some old boy equally as looped rubbing his hand up her stomach. Whenever she went off with one of these men, the booze would at some point blot out the desire it had awakened. She opted for drunk over laid every time. Wasn't any high moral wrangling
involved either. More like that buzzer went off in her stomach,
Hit me baby, time for another patch,
and she'd push away whatever worked-up male she'd dragged out to the dunes, set off to douse her fiery nerves.

Boyd said, “I got a place to stay.”

Straining again, not wanting to step in, not wanting even more for him to ruin everything, she said, “When Crawl or any of them come for a visit he can stay back at his aunt's place.”

Woodrow smiled his okay, much as she was going to get out of him, and before Boyd could speak, Maggie turned and led him through the house and outside, calling good-bye to Sarah who had made herself scarce in some hidden corner of their neatly kept cottage.

“What in the world was all that for?” Boyd asked.

They were nearing the creek, close to the footbridge Woodrow had helped her father and the other men of the village build years ago when a storm washed out the previous one. She dragged him off the path and led him into a bowed shelter carved out by stooped and gnarled yaupons. The mosquito buzz sounded mechanized, like an outboard cranked up high. He slapped at his ankles as she pulled him closer, kissed what she thought of as some sense into him.

“I want you every night,” she said. “In a bed, not on some borrowed blanket in the dunes where those little brats are going to be every evening now, waiting on a show.”

“Hell,” he said, “that's fine, but everybody's going to know it still. I mean, me living back behind the only black on the island so I can bed down with my woman?”

“Lover,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Say I'm your lover. Don't call me your woman. That sounds like some trashy song on the radio, talking about your wo-man.”

“Okay, lover,” he said, laughing. “You really think it's better, me living over there behind them?”

“If you have a problem living behind Woodrow and Sarah, I believe we've got problems doing what we're doing.”

“I like Woodrow,” he said. He looked confused for a minute, as if trying to decide what to say. “I don't know that he cares too much for me. He's never out-and-out rude or anything, but most of the time we're out on the water he looks right through me. Sometimes he even tells Crawl something to tell me. Like I don't speak English.”

“Woodrow likes you fine,” she said. “That's just the way Woodrow is.”

“Talks to my shoes if he talks to any part of me.”

“You'd do that to him if you were black and he were white.”

“Hard to say. I've never been all that good at imagining anything other than what I got.”

Maggie filed this comment away, and in the years since he'd been gone, she trotted it out often, found ways to use it to
justify what happened between them. She often felt she was the opposite—capable of imagining anything but what she had.

Six weeks after Boyd arrived on the island, his uncle Skillet from down at Harker's Island towed over a twenty-one-foot skiff he'd bought cheap off a retired waterman from Atlantic. Probably he did not want his nephew crewing for a Negro anymore, Maggie said, suspicious of such an extravagant gift, but it was hard to harbor suspicion, Boyd was so proud of that boat. Woodrow helped him get it sea-ready—the boat had spent a season set up on sawhorses in some old boy's backyard—and Boyd promised to take Maggie out with him after he'd bought and set his pots, borrowed from Woodrow a purse seine, hocked half his belongings for setup gear. Maggie'd spent plenty time out on the water with her daddy and brothers, and it wasn't something she'd dreamed of repeating. It was hard work and even half days could turn tedious, but this was Boyd and the boy was beside himself and she did dearly love passion of any stripe, the more intense the better, and they would be alone, no one around to look askance at her and her emphasis-on-boy boyfriend and what better way to see the sun come up than the way they did those few mornings she went out with him which happened to be smack in the middle of a big moon that made the sea foam shimmer, turned the spray silver. They would trade sips from a thermos of coffee as black as the sea beneath them. She'd tuck her hands up his shirt, cup the muscles rippling his rib cage. He was too giddy and
proud-nervous to interrupt his fishing with a little sunrise loving, but being out there all alone, salt breeze batting them as they turned for home, got them so hot they'd barely get the boat tied up before they'd walk run back to the summer kitchen, fling their cast-off clothes at the blinds, and tuck into each other, inside and outside, all of them and the whole shut-tight dead-aired cottage awash in sea-pricked passion.

Of all the things she could have done, going out with Boyd those mornings was what drew her big sister's ire.

“You think I'm here to wait on you while you're out on the water all day long? It's not for me to run this house. Last time I checked, Daddy left it to both of us.”

It was just past noon when she returned—plenty of time yet for whatever chores needed doing, and she told her sister so.

“That's not the point. You're making a trashy fool out of yourself, and of me too in the process. Putting that boy up in Woodrow's summer kitchen, my God. You got people in Meherrituck talking about the boy lives behind the colored couple, got himself an old lady lover.”

“Let 'em talk is how I feel about that.”

“I know good and well how you feel about everything. You don't give a damn about anything but feeling good at the moment.”

“Don't start, Miss Whaley.”

“Don't call me that. I have a first name.”

“No one's allowed to call you by it.”

“We're not discussing what they choose to call me. We're talking about what they're out there calling you.”

Maggie said nothing. She was folding wash off the line and the sheets were stiff and sun-warmed, and she held the cotton to her cheek and missed her lover, who in her mind had merged with other things she desired: sun and saltwater and dusk and that feeling of finally having found someone you wanted to spend all your time with.

Though this last part, well—she got to where she didn't trust it. She wanted him to stay and yet she worried she could not keep him. She did not think he was liable to give up everything you want and even need when you're young—excitement, loud fast nights, traveling (even it was off Harker's Island up to Raleigh or Norfolk or down to Wilmington, hell, these were places she'd barely been herself), and most of all, maybe last of all, other women. Say he settled with her. She'd be his first real lover—the backseat girls, the upside-the-shed-girls didn't hardly count—and he'd nearly be marrying the first girl he went with. She knew that's how it happened lots of times, but she'd seen a lot of unhappiness in those couples who had to get their parents to sign for them in order to cross over to Morehead and get married.

It was herself too that she didn't trust. She had a history, and he did not understand nor want to
learn
to understand history. No one does when they're young. Whaley loved to talk about how her namesake was so well versed in Latin and Greek, could read
old dead poets in French, knew by heart the names of the British royalty and all the stories from the Bible. Maybe that's where Whaley got her taste for all the ancient things she lived to tell the Tape Recorders. But Whaley wasn't ever young, really. Not that Maggie was ever so young as Boyd. When she was his age exactly, she was stringing around with a married man as much older than her as she was to Boyd. But there was enough youthful innocence left to remember what it felt like, having to deal with the fact that this man she fancied she loved had slept alongside a wife he swore he could not stomach the sight of (how incredible she found this notion, how oddly repellent, so much so that she would not let herself ponder it even though her mind wanted to go there, like the sight of some washed-ashore half-pecked-apart tern you can't
not
look at) and had children in a world that should have been slate clean for their own offspring. She knew that sooner or later, her history would get to Boyd.

And perhaps there was something of the island itself, the fact that every second it was being taken away by wind and water at the same time it was being added to, grain by grain. This place seemed to have something against the notion of forever. Everything felt so
borrowed;
it was hard not to be skeptical of anything lasting longer than a season. But she got around to this reason lastly and treated it lightly, preferring to blame herself over geography and nature.