“For a long time, I hated ’em for leavin’ that night. Then I realized it wasn’t their fault. It was the rain’s. The rain was what killed ’em. Not the car. Not the turn in the road. But the rain.”
She couldn’t get the afghan as straight as she wanted it to be, so she yanked it up and bunched it into a ball that she sat down with in the chair. She hugged it into her stomach as she said with a slight chuckle or something like it, “I don’t know how to swim. My parents, the fish…”
Her words got lost for a moment as her eyes merged into a darkness that cast her face in shadow.
“They never taught me, and I know the rain is just waitin’ on me. Waitin’ to get me like it got them. So I stay out of it. How can it ever get me if I’m never in it?”
“I could teach you how to swim.” Sal stood before her. “I can’t say you’ll never drown in the rain, but at least it will never be because you don’t know how to swim.”
She stared at him until his fish lips made her laugh. He grabbed the afghan from her and tossed it to the sofa.
“Oh, you silly, silly boy.”
He gently pulled her hand until she was up on her feet. She tightened her apron strings and giggled like a shy little girl as he swam around the room, performing the breaststroke.
He directed her arms to do the same until she started doing it on her own, swimming around the room after him, soon kicking her heels off so she could swim faster. Her skirt billowed out behind her, the apron strings bouncing as she swam lap after lap, exhaling loudly through her mouth like a swimmer counting off her breaths.
“You too, Fielding.” Sal bumped into me as he passed.
I did the doggy paddle when they did, the backstroke, the butterfly, the deep dive, and the surface breach. We swam laughing all through the house like this, one country to another, until Yellch came quick and stomping down the stairs from Grand’s room, yelling for Grand to just stay away from him.
Grand followed so closely on Yellch’s heels they almost tumbled down the stairs together.
“I didn’t mean nothin’ by it. Honest, Yellch.”
Yellch wiped his lips hard with his sleeve. “What’s the matter with you, man?”
“I’m sorry. I thought—” Grand’s voice shook, and for the first time in my life I was embarrassed by him. By that fear I’d never heard in him before. That clinging to Yellch like, well, I didn’t know.
“You’re fucked up.” Yellch said it so steady, so grounded in tone that it seemed such a sobering truth.
He was fast out the door, his mullet bouncing in that near run. Grand also wiped his lips as he watched Yellch leave.
“Shit,” he muttered to himself. When he turned to see us all watching, our arms raised midswim, he asked us what the fuck we were all looking at before picking up a vase. He wound up like on the mound and pitched it into the wall.
While Mom was yelling at him for doing such a thing, I couldn’t help but be in awe at how perfect a pitch it was.
15
Here in the dark so many precious things
—MILTON, PARADISE LOST 3:611
SOMETIMES I THINK I see your shoulder. Then I realize it’s just a jar of honey. I scream out your name and am certain I see your mole, but it’s only the last grape on the vine. I grab hold of your neck, but it’s no more than a piece of rope. I reach toward your rib, but it’s simply a grain of rice. I hold your hand, sorrowed to find it is my own.
Who you are, I cannot say for certain. Who you are, Grand, I can never find my way to. You are always just something else. No matter how hard I look for you, I cannot find you.
I try. In the dark, I do try because I was once told you can imagine anything in the dark. So I sit here at night in my trailer with all the lights out, with all the sheets drawn on the windows. I sit here trying to find you and I sit here imagining I do until the light comes back on and I realize you’re just something else.
A light coming on and beaming through the thin sheet on the window by the door. I get up from the lawn chair, on the way knocking into and rolling an empty bottle across the carpet. I remind myself to make a stop at the liquor store. Not the one by the pawnshop. He never has forgiven me for breaking that bottle against the wall.
I open the door to the neighbor boy and his light in my eyes.
“What are you doin’ in the dark?” He lowers the light to my side. “What are you holdin’, Mr. Bliss?”
I turn my hand over, the light shining on the white leather and red stitching.
“It’s just a baseball.” I drop it. He keeps the light on the ball as it rolls across the floor. Once the ball stops, he shines the light in my face again. I squint past it to his eyes on me, quick from thought to smile.
“I’m sorry if I’ve bothered you, Mr. Bliss. It’s just that your trailer was so dark. Not one light. I thought maybe somethin’ happened. That maybe you fell.”
I look at his young face and wince. “How old are you?”
“Thirteen.”
“Damn it.”
“What’d you say, Mr. Bliss?”
“I said leave me alone. Wait…”
“Are you okay, Mr. Bliss?”
I hold my head and try to remember. “Have you seen Sal?”