You Only Get Letters from Jail (17 page)

It was hotter than fuck, but next to the slough it was cooler and we had decided to stop kicking around in Hurley's backyard, waiting for something to do, and walk down there and swim. We both took our shirts off and shoved them into our back pockets. The water had a smell—thin black bottom mud, frog, and cattail all competing for the same heavy air. It was a familiar smell and it made me feel good. I sat down on the bank and watched the bugs swarm in shifting clouds that hung over the surface. It was even too hot for the fish to take bait, so we hadn't bothered to bring poles even though it would pass the time. I knew the fish were at the bottom, beneath the layer of water that the sun still warmed, and that was the best part of swimming out there—diving down to the point where the water went cold.

Hurley was lecturing me about
The Flintstones
and pollywogs and God, and smoking cigarettes he'd stolen from the mechanic, and I was sleepy and warm and loosened my laces, slipped out of my shoes and jeans, and waded out into the water until the bottom switched to soft mud and small waves knocked against the tops of my knees. I could smell cigarette and pond mud and wet grass and I wished I had something to float around on like at a pool. I waded into the blond grass without looking down, just felt it touch my legs and wrap around and then my shin hit something stiff and narrow that bobbed and moved and it took me a minute to realize that the blond grass was hair and the tree branch was an arm and I was wading through a person.

“There's a girl in the water,” I said to Hurley, but he wasn't listening to me. He was preaching about good and evil and Bugs Bunny, and putting his stolen Zippo to a Lucky Strike.

Hurley Gatz and I had lived on the same street for the last seven years. He and his mom had moved in during a rainy November, right before Thanksgiving. Most people liked his mom—she was pretty and young and laughed easily, and she liked to drink and dance, and people liked that about her, too. My dad worked up in Susanville a lot and wasn't home much, so my mom started hanging out across the street at Hurley's and they would sometimes go out and leave us behind and that meant we could do what we wanted to do. Lately what we wanted to do was spy on One-Legged Ed down the street, and we had stashed binoculars up in Hurley Gatz's bedroom and we would
cut the lights on the house, open the window in his room, slide his bed up to the sill, and pop the screen off so we could lie there and look out on the neighborhood.

Usually we just spied on Missy Lingenfelter making out in a blue Ford with someone who looked way too old to be in high school, who had a beard and a way of leaning his head back on his seat when Missy was no longer in hers. We both knew Missy. The blue Ford came around a lot late at night, and sometimes Missy was already inside and sometimes she wasn't. Sometimes we watched her crawl out a downstairs window, and then she'd get in the car and they wouldn't go anywhere, just stay at the curb and we would watch the flat bottoms of her feet press against one of the rolled-up back windows and we'd spend the next four minutes trying to dial in the focus on the binoculars and fight over whose turn to watch was next.

But then One-Legged Ed had moved into our neighborhood and Hurley Gatz and I had kept our eyes on him ever since. He was missing one leg below the knee and there were a lot of rumors as to how and why it was gone, and he was gray-bearded and long-haired and he kept his hair pulled back and sometimes he wore glasses with thin wire frames like a doctor's. He went around on crutches, and he had a tendency to crutch up to the corner of Placer and Karel, and he'd sit on the dirt patch that had been left behind by a hundred restless pairs of tennis shoes waiting for the school bus over the years, and sooner or later a car would pull up and One-Legged Ed would struggle up from the dirt, crutch over to the driver's side window,
lean in, reach in, reach out, and crutch away back to his house. He sometimes did this two or three times in a day, or sometimes more, and sometimes not at all, but he did it more than he didn't do it, and me and Hurley took notice of it, because no matter how much we tightened the focus, the binoculars couldn't dial in what happened between One-Legged Ed and the cars.

In the past few weeks there had been guys coming and going from One-Legged Ed's, guys with jackets and patches that said things like “Harley-Davidson,” “MIA-POW,” “In Memory of Tanks 4-27-77,” “These Are My Church Clothes.” Me and Hurley kept a list on a sheet of paper in his room. The guys drank and smoked and blared the Stones'
Emotional Rescue
for days and days from speakers they set up on One-Legged Ed's back porch, so that the entire street was forced to keep time with Charlie Watts. From Hurley's bedroom window we could look across two houses and into the small window on the side of One-Legged Ed's garage—a window high up that looked out at the night sky for him and was a hole inside of him for us.

Yesterday I had put the binoculars up to my eyes while Hurley read
Swank
, and Ed and the guys were all crowded around the table in Ed's garage and they had some crazy shit in there. The Stones told me that I need money so much I need money so bad and I turned to Hurley Gatz, who was reading out loud from an article on Gail Palmer doing porn, and I told Hurley what I saw. There were beakers and flasks and tubing and burners throwing small flames. “One-Legged Ed is making a fucking bomb,” I said.

I had thought about it all night, what One-Legged Ed might want to blow up, but as we both stood looking down at the girl—Hurley from the shore and me from the water, I forgot about everything that I had seen in that garage. The girl was facedown and we couldn't recognize her from the back. I thought about flipping her over, and maybe Hurley thought about wading in and doing it, too, but neither of us said it out loud or reached to do it. In fact, neither of us touched her, and on the one occasion when I was close enough to her outstretched left hand that a small wave sent her fingertips to lap against my knee, it was all that I could do to keep from making the heavy slow-motion run from the water to the ground, and maybe not stopping until I came up from the underbrush, crossed the road, ran to my house, and scrubbed my knee clean.

“You really think she's dead?” Hurley asked.

I looked up at him and his face was blank. There was no color in him at all. Even his body was a strange shade of white, as though he had been drawn in as a pencil outline on paper and left that way.

“How long do you think we've been looking at her?” I asked. “How long do you think we've been talking here and she's been facedown?”

Hurley still had the cigarette in his hand and he suddenly seemed to remember it, took a drag that didn't burn, and dropped his hand to his side again. He exhaled but no smoke came out. “She could've been sneaking breaths,” he said.

“Okay, yeah, maybe,” I said. “Let's count. Let's see how many seconds go by and see if she breathes.”

We both started counting in unison. Our voices were the only sounds except for distant traffic and the faint familiar whine of a lawn mower, and it seemed strange to hear ourselves ticking off numbers—one, two, twenty, one hundred seventeen. I kept my eyes focused on her back so that if there was the slightest bit of movement I would catch it.

At five hundred thirty I quit counting. Hurley went ahead for ten more, and then he stopped, too. “Did you see anything?” he asked.

A small hot wind kicked up and the waves shifted her back and forth and back and forth against the thinning weeds from the shallow shore. She moved in unison—arms and legs and body all together. I knew it was hard to pull that off in the water. Part of you always wanted to dip below the surface and get out of sync with the rest. “Nothing,” I said.

“Jesus,” Hurley said.

“Fuck,” I said.

A large soot-colored bird jumped down from an overhead tree branch behind Hurley and came up to the water near us. His eyes were hard black and sharp and there was a yellow line on his beak. He hopped up to the edge of the water, stuck his face into it, and then rubbed it under his wings. We were both hypnotized by the process and we watched him repeat it over and over until his feathers were fluffed and he glistened wet in the sun.

“I don't recognize her,” Hurley said.

I looked down at her and tried to put her into some kind of familiar perspective. She was wearing a pair of jean
cutoffs that were frayed and loose around the tops of her legs. Her legs were thin, and even though they were below the surface of the water I could tell that they were tan. The skin looked as if it had been pulled tight and there were creases set deep in the backs of both of her knees. She was wearing a gold anklet, and it was shiny, and one of her shoes was missing and her foot was bare. Her pale heel stuck out of the water. The other foot was strapped into a thin brown sandal with thick soles.

Her T-shirt was dark blue, but maybe would've been light blue if she was dry. It stuck to her skin, and I knew that if I put my face into the water next to her and opened my eyes, I could look over at her and see that she had boobs. I could tell from the way her back was shaped even though there weren't any bra straps. Both of her arms were drifting—the left one moving out a little ways from her body, the right one reaching out past the top of her head. There was chipped orange polish on her nails.

“Look,” Hurley said. He had a stick in his hand and he was using it like a pointer. “Look at her hand.” He leveled the end of the stick over the hand that waved above her head. Her nails were broken and jagged. “She was scratching at something,” Hurley said.

“Or she bites her nails,” I said.

“Not anymore.” Hurley pushed the end of the stick against the back of her right hand and the stick dented her skin before it popped her hand below the surface of the water with a small splash.

“Don't,” I said. “Not with a stick, okay?”

Hurley went back to shore, sat in the grass, and tucked his knees up to his chin, pushed his hair back. He put the stub of a cigarette in his mouth and found his lighter and went to work on it. I waded back to shore and sat on the ground and pulled the laces from my shoes. When I had both of them, I tied them together to make one long string.

I walked the short distance to where the body was floating and I looped one end of the string around the girl's left wrist, knotted it, and looped the other end around a broken piece of branch, knotted it, and stuck the branch into the soft mud. “There,” I said.

“What do you want to do with her?” Hurley asked.

“Keep her, I guess.”

For the rest of the afternoon we sat on the bank and flipped through mental pictures of girls we knew, said their names out loud to each other, gave descriptions when we didn't know the names, tried to figure out who she was. By late afternoon we had run out of names and faces, and Hurley was out of the mechanic's cigarettes, and the mosquitoes were thick and biting and we decided to go home because there was nothing else to do.

I didn't eat and went to bed early. I took my sheets off so I could run them under the bathroom sink and get them wet so I could put them back and lay on them to try and break the heat. I dreamed without sleeping and the faces of girls kept repeating their images every time I tried to close my eyes. I could hear my parents eating in the other room, hear the sound of their silverware clicking, the sound of plates stacked in the sink. I heard the TV come on and I heard
my father's voice, and I thought I was asleep but I wasn't. I finally gave up, took the phone in my room, and called Hurley. His mom said he'd gone to bed, but he took the phone from her and told me that he'd been just as unasleep as me. It was a suck way to waste a summer night, so I pulled on some clothes and walked over to Hurley's and the mechanic and his mom had gone out, so we took a can of Pringles up to his room and dug the binoculars out of his sock drawer, popped the screen, and took our place at the window. It wasn't even dark yet; there was still sunlight in a bright line on the horizon, and the sky was deep orange and made me think of the girl and her nails. I wondered if she was okay there on the shoreline, tied to the branch. I wondered if anybody would find her—I hadn't thought about it before, the fact that we weren't the only ones who used that strip of swimming space—and I wondered if maybe we should've covered her with something but I couldn't think of what.

“Do you think she's okay?” I asked Hurley.

Hurley was on his stomach with the binoculars pointed out the window toward the rows of houses and the street beneath us. “Who? Missy?” He shifted his weight and started fine-tuning the focus.

“You know who I'm talking about.”

“I think I've seen her before.”

I sat up and accidentally kicked Hurley's stack of magazines. The new world sex record issue—eighty-three men in one night—slid into erotic cookies—bet you can't eat just one—slid into sex and alcohol (how to get it up when booze brings it down) slid into the Q and A on junk food
making you a limp lover—take our remedy. The mechanic had great reads. I had secretly taken home the Cheryl Tiegs issue, had her safe between my mattress and springs, and if Hurley got blamed for that one disappearing, I would be sorry, but not very.

“Who is she?” I said. “Is she from school? It's that girl from my algebra class, isn't it? That one girl who used to sit in the back and then she got moved to remedial, right?”