The Watery Part of the World (9 page)

Much as she loved her island, Maggie was suspicious when people came from the mainland to settle there. More often than not they were running from something or someone. Boyd came to the island to fish, or so he claimed. He went straight to Woodrow to learn how. Back then, Woodrow had Crawl crewing for him. He'd bought a boat from the O'Malleys and contracted out to sell them most of what he caught. No one on the island would allow it, but Woodrow was the best waterman around. He could always come up with some fish. Whaley said he was lucky, but it wasn't luck because there wasn't any such thing to Maggie's mind and besides she'd had this conversation with Woodrow once and he said he didn't believe in luck either. He claimed the whereabouts
of fish in the sea was a process of elimination, a strict adherence to the tiniest subtleties of wind and tide.

Why would Woodrow take on Boyd when he already had Crawl crewing for him? Years later when she got around to asking, Woodrow said, Black man couldn't say no to a white boy no matter what a yes might cost him.

Maggie used to believe that the quiet sinewy strength her sister admired in Woodrow was maybe just years of having to go round agreeing with white people. Instead of resilience, it was suppressed indignation. Her sister looked at Woodrow and saw pride, but she didn't respect it because she did not think it was hard fought for. It was far easier for Whaley to pretend Woodrow was a fine upstanding colored man, exemplary among his race, than to stop and consider who he really was.

Whaley never did see what Maggie learned too late: Woodrow had his jellyfish tentacles spread out every which way, feeling the world in ways most people would not dare. This did not mean he was fragile or weak. Maggie and Whaley would have died every day for years if not for Woodrow, who made it possible for them to live on the island long after every living thing but the mosquitoes called it quits. What he was, Maggie came to understand, was particularly sensitive. He could feel the approach of a storm some claimed by snuggling his bare toes in the sand off his front porch. He knew water. God knows he could pull flopping silver bodies from it with a hook or net. But these were learned things—not
nearly so powerful as the brooding resolve so long misunderstood by Maggie, never understood or appreciated by Whaley. Maggie herself was not inclined toward this brand of sensitivity. She felt, and felt deeper, surely than her big sister. But before Boyd came and before he left, she wasn't one to put her feelers out for very long or for very far. She'd as soon shrug it off. Life on the island, despite its many and mostly long-gone pleasures, was hard enough without letting every little thing get away with you.

But then Boyd started coming around. Woodrow took him out between four and five in the morning and brought him in early afternoon, a full day's work, after which Boyd, being so new on the island, without a boat to tinker on all afternoon, nets of his own to mend, turned up wherever Maggie was: working her and Whaley's patchy little garden, talking to Grady and Ellie up at the store, taking her bask in the late afternoon sun. One day he turned up beside her in the ocean. She was on her back, feet pointed toward Portugal. Dressed in her “suit,” her shift and sandals discarded on a dune. Boyd, near as she could tell, wore only a droopy pair of boxer shorts. He was well built, not too thin though, broad-shouldered, capable it appeared of heavy lifting.

She let him float awhile unacknowledged.

“I hear you're wild,” he said after a while.

She heard a little fear in his voice, which made her like him—and what he said—better than if he'd come on all cocky.

“You must have been talking to somebody tame,” she said.

He snickered. “That'd be about everybody on this island.”

She put her feet down, jumped a coming wave, turned toward him for the first time since he'd appeared floating beside her.

“How do they act where you come from?”

He smiled and shrugged, and she understood him to say: “You got me. Harker's Island ain't much different.”

“The young and foolish act young and foolish all over,” she said, smiling at the thought of it, that insolent and selfish desire to make every moment feel better than the previous one.

“You're not exactly old.”

“Not exactly, you say?” She laughed a little, but it was a forced laugh, conversational. “I'm nearly exactly old enough to be your mother.”

This was nearly exactly true on Yaupon, where women fattened up with children in their midteens. Plus, at the time she thought Boyd was even younger than he was.

“My mama's ancient compared to you,” he said.

She studied him until he turned to her, at which point he was smacked unawares by a wave. She rose above him, buoyant in the swell. She thought about his name—transpose two little letters and it would read “body.” She shook her head, as if to clear the water from her ears, though there were thoughts, warm and shooting, she was really trying to clear.

“I mean she's not that old, but you're not nearly so old as she is.”

“Don't worry,” she said. “I know you love your mama. Let's go in before you drown,” she said, windmilling away from him in a
backstroke turned breast as the breakers receded and the water shallowed.

They sat in the dunes watching the waves roll golden in the declining light. He pulled a flask of homemade wine from the pocket of his jeans, and as they sipped he talked about growing up on Harker's Island, hearing stories about the home place, stories about his father the fisherman. He had been in the army—he'd joined right out of high school and had been stationed in Germany—and this surprised and pleased her, for he was so innocent, so tentative and nervous in her presence, and it amazed her that he could have done all that and still grow so scared around a woman that he let the waves slap him silly. Of course she was wise enough to know that there is no reasoning what scares you. People otherwise invincible can turn to quivering at the sight of, say, a spider. But it surprised her still to be a witness to it, this innocent cowering by a man who'd seen so much more of the world than she ever would.

Maybe it was the fact that their talk flowed so easily, that there was between them an easy and sassy friction—giving each other a hard time, trafficking from the start in smart-assedness and indirection—that made his age seem irrelevant in the beginning. She'd known so few people she could really talk to, and no men save for Woodrow, who mostly listened. She knew within minutes what would happen between them, for their conversation was as close to foreplay as she'd ever experienced, each sentence a shirt shed, a caress, until they were down to bare skin.

He put his hand on her arm. She let it remain. The sun seared through his veins, into hers. She said, “I'm forty years old.”

“That's just math,” he said. “I'm no damn good with figures.”

“Too old to have a baby,” she said. She wasn't talking to him anymore. If she had been talking to him, she wouldn't have brought up a baby here before they'd even kissed.

But he wasn't the least bit put off by the topic.

“Say what? My aunt had a baby at forty-three. Far as I could tell it only had one head.”

She nodded, uncharacteristically assuaged by his dismissal of mere arithmetic. She wasn't that good with numbers either. Numbers meant less here than they did off island, where there were thousands of forty-year-old men, whole cities full of them no doubt, and yet how many of them could talk to her like Boyd did?

Here was Boyd and he was free and she was too. Neither of them needed to add, subtract, or study chromosomes.

But this did not mean that she could be with Boyd (who that day came at her with a salty, wine-scented kiss and she shrugged and smiled and met him halfway) without some worry. Her ex-husband, Ronnie, lived down island and often fished close to Woodrow, hoping to benefit from Woodrow's impeccable feel for the catch. If she took this boy to bed (and she knew already who was leading this dance), it would get out sooner or later, and Ronnie in his cups would come stirring trouble as he could be a jealous and mean bastard who, even though he was the one run
her off with his whoring up and down the banks, wanted her to sleep forever alone.

More salty-sweet kisses. A hand on her breast, snaking down inside the cup of her bra, a thumb and forefinger pinching her nipple. She laid him down in the sand and said, “How long you going to be living with your aunt?”

“Until I move?” He pulled her toward him, hip-wiggling to position herself over that part of him in need of coverage. After five seconds of pressure expertly applied, she lifted herself up and away, made her point.

“One thing I'll say about being forty,” she said, “is that it's no longer all that sexy to screw some boy up in the dunes.”

“Sand all in your slits?” he asked, grinning like a preteen.

It was hard to believe he'd been to Germany just then. She had it in her mind that such travel turned you into someone out of one of those teaching sentences: Boyd traveled to Europe where he spent the summer studying artifacts of old. She did not think it was possible that you could cross the ocean and come back talking schoolboy playground trash right on, as if you'd spent the whole time drinking beer with your buddies. She must have transmitted this thought, for he immediately apologized and looked at her with such obvious fear that she had found him out that she was back to finding him endearing and surprisingly mature for his age.

“At least bring a blanket. If you can't get a blanket, a towel's better than nothing.”

“When?”

“Next time,” she said. She left him adjusting himself in his shorts, twitching about in the sand.

There was a next time. Soon after the first time. They met in the dunes at dusk, spread out on a nubbly chenille bedspread he'd lifted from his aunt's house. He was timid with her at first and maneuvered his body shyly as if he was used to performing in the pitch blackness, in cramped quarters—the backseat of a car, upside a shed in some neighbor girl's backyard—and for an audience indifferent to nuance. She let him work away his modesty before she slowed things down, took time for careful curious examinations, extended fondles and caresses, kisses in places he had obviously never been kissed.

Maggie wasn't exactly not nervous. It had been a year then since she'd been with Ronnie. She knew she looked better than most island women her age, a fact generally attributed by everyone but her to her childlessness. She did not like to think that babies would have ruined her looks. She'd seen some women get their hips back, a few even blossom afterward, take some color in their skin they'd lacked. She'd rather believe that some people are given their looks early and others grow into them. Whaley, when she was seventeen, had a figure used to drive every man on the island to throw themselves in the surf to save showing their obvious and attentive salutation. She hedged badly, banked on looking good forever; she went around with her lip as stiff as her read-aloud voice and did not pay one iota of attention to any man,
and when in her early thirties she started down that lonely-as-hell-I-wouldn't-mind-settling-down road, her ass was flat and her high haughty look yonder breasts were gone to sag and she'd doubled her chin with lard and butter and worst of all was that her expression, which had always tended toward the sweet distracted vacancy of the unself-consciously beautiful, had turned into a look-at-me-why-don't-you wince.

Maggie might have fared better than her sister, but she worried about the effects of time, wind, and sun on her skin, surely sandpaper compared to the peach-fuzzy girls he'd been with. He'd been with a few, she could tell, though they had not taught him much. Or maybe he hadn't been willing to learn.

Now he was willing, and able. He grew looser and a little more confident with each rendezvous, but she hated the way they had to hide and sneak, hated even more the sand and the heat and the godawful tempest of bugs.

“Why can't we go to your place?” he asked when she mentioned it.

“I live with my sister.”

Boyd made a point of exaggerating his habitual, one-size-fits-all shrug. Whaley had surely caught wind of them—the island was too tiny for her not to know how Maggie was spending her evenings. But so far Boyd had not come by the house and she'd not asked him up there because she knew Whaley would disapprove, as she did of every man Maggie had ever brought by there even as she tried to rouse a flirt, pulling and patting at her dress to tighten it. The roles the two of them played were pathetic to
Maggie mostly because they were predictable: tight, disapproving older sister; loose, boy-crazy younger one. Maggie longed for a little more originality, especially given the fact that they had a steady audience, that the whole island was a witness to their stale roles.

“You don't know my sister,” she said.

“No, but I've seen her around. Down at the store some. Woodrow sells her fish.”

“Don't say it,” said Maggie.

“Say what?”

“Whatever you're about to say about her.”

That shrug again. To Maggie it was beginning to represent all the weighty things he knew were out there but, because of his youth, wasn't up to shouldering, this gesture. But the thing she liked about him was that his heart wasn't in this carefree ignorance. Hell, his shoulder was barely in it. The shrugs were mostly flicks and twitches, the blade shuddering from some rippling nerve.

“Just that y'all don't much favor. That's all I was going to say.”

Maggie looked out to sea so he would not see her gloat. She wanted Boyd kept separate from Whaley and all the silly childish things that had come between her and her only blood kin.

“Come on,” she said. As they stood there was a rustling in the sand a dune or two back from where they lay naked on the chenille. High helium squeals of boys, spying.

“Oh hell,” she said.