Cool by Mary W. Walters
Without raising her sunglasses from her eyes or even looking up at him, Katerina said, "I'll see you next year, then."
He looked out at the hot sea, unwilling to nod or blink or acknowledge in any way that he'd heard what she had said.
Bathers had strewn themselves along the beachfront, their umbrellas and towels and bright plastic buckets and beach balls scattered as far as he could see. He felt alone with her in spite of that.
If he turned his head he would have to work at it to find the mouth of the inlet. It would be remarkable only by the slightly hazier greens and blues and browns that extended into sky beyond it. But he did not turn his head.
He did not look at her, either. He kept his attention on the sea sails and on not moving his bare feet - his soles felt scorched from coming this far across the sand - but he was aware of all of her. She too was still, on her low beach chair, the brown smooth skin of her belly forming one darker crease along her waist. At the edge of his vision were long tanned arms and legs, long fingers and long toes, nails bronzed and shining. She was wearing a modest suit, striped mustard gold and scarlet, the halter top so perfectly constructed, it seemed to him, to possess her small round breasts. The thought of them made his heart hurt.
"If I come back again next year, that is," she said. "I may decide to get a job instead."
And God, his heart was breaking now, and still she didn't move, not even one small gesture. She'd told him how she laid herself out for twenty minutes at a time so the sun would strike her in exactly the places she wanted it to, and that she'd even accounted for the movement of the earth against the sun.
After a long time he said flatly, "I said my parents were leaving. That doesn't mean I have to."
He'd imagined it as he came looking for her across the beach, how he would tell her about his parents' change of plans, and she would protest, urge him to find a way to stay. He'd been certain that, if nothing else, their knowledge of what was in the boat house must bind her to him.
Now she did begin to move, not in response to what he'd said but to a tiny beeping sound from the inside of her beach bag. She swung her legs to the side and gingerly lowered those slender brown feet onto the sand, gathering lotions from the shade of the chair into the bag.
"Where would you stay?" she asked him, her smooth brown hair falling forward, obscuring her face as she tucked and pulled the bag shut.
"With my aunt and uncle," he said. "I may decide to do that."
He'd picked up this manner of speaking from her - I may decide this, I may decide that - dipping into options as though anything were possible and the future didn't really matter anyway. In fact, he'd already made the decision - grabbing his mother's suggestion that he could stay with an eagerness he'd never show with Katerina. With her, slowness was demanded, or else all would be lost. He did not know how he knew this, but he did.
She left the chair for him to fold and carry, and he ran to catch up with her, doing so just as sand gave way to stones and sticks and underbrush.
"Shall we go back tonight?" he asked her, using the words he'd put together while he walked out to see her. "See if it's still there?"
"It's dead," she said, head down, hair swinging. "Where's it going to go?"
***
But she did agree to come and then he had to wait for the time that she had set, which seemed to take forever - at least until the hour was nearly on him, and his aunt and uncle were still not back. Then, time started racing.
They'd been eager enough to keep him here because he could baby-sit for them. He'd done it already a few times since he arrived, and it hadn't been too bad. It consisted mainly in making sure his cousins, four and six, didn't fall into the fish pool or eat the berries his aunt was sure were poisonous.
But now instead of the half hour of absence he'd come to expect of them, they'd been gone for more than an hour, and as the time of his meeting with Katerina got closer, his cousins grew more and more demanding. Hungry, they said they were, even though they'd all eaten hamburgers and ears of corn already, and he didn't know or care what they might be allowed to eat at this point. He had to distract them with books and himself with watching the new family next door move in, including a tall bored-looking guy who sort of looked his age, but older.
Finally his aunt and uncle did show up - her running in her yellow summer dress and sandals, frantic to make sure her children were still alive after all that time without her. He thought they must have been held up somewhere against their will but his uncle was sauntering along after her, puffing slowly on his pipe, so maybe not.
As he made his way through the summer village to the place where he would meet her, he was thinking of how it would have been if he and Kevin had been the ones to find the dead man. He'd wanted to bring Kevin with him, so it could quite easily have happened, but his parents had said No, there'd be too many in the cabin as it was. Several times, especially since last night, he'd almost called long distance to tell Kevin what was going on, but he hadn't. Because then he'd have to explain about Katerina.
He and Kevin would have had bicycles, and they'd have run scared from what they'd seen, but pretending not to be. They'd have pedaled as fast as they could - shouting maybes at one another - to his parents or to the small police detachment house, to tell everyone what they'd seen.
But she'd said, "Let's not tell anyone," as they came back through the woods last night. "Let's see how long it takes."
"For what?"
"For someone else to find him."
"Why?" he asked, near-disappointment slowing him. "He's dead."
"That's the point," she said. "Exactly."
"He should be buried or something," he said to her. "Someone would want to know."
It seemed to him she was thinking about that, but after several minutes she said, "He's been dead a long time now. He doesn't even smell. What difference will it make?"
"It might be against the law," he said, his voice tight because her hand touched his just then.
"Yes," she said. "It might."
***
"Do you want to see my breasts?"
He looked at nothing else but her in the blue-green dusk, forcing himself to keep his eyes away from the dark shape he'd first thought to be a pile of rags when they'd come in last night. The boat house was overgrown with water weeds and land weeds, its planks and tiles fallen apart, away, cracks in the ceiling lifting light reflected from the water to the crumbled wood above, around them.
He nodded, and she undid her shirt and, bending forward from the waist, her long arms out as if to dive, she said, "Come closer then."
He did, shifting carefully down the boards, his feet barely moving the water, and she curled her fingers and took the hem of her halter top and lifted it, freeing her breasts, and lifted it again from off her head, shaking loose her hair. She moved her hands behind her to lean and rest on them, and her breasts came up hard and tight. White light wavered across her skin, and he was glad the man was dead and could not see her, too.
"You want to touch them?" she asked, her voice deep in her throat the way it had been when she'd talked about the man the night before, talked about making it a secret.
He raised a hand and brushed it against his shorts to clean it before he reached out gingerly across himself, to her. Still leaning back against her hands she sighed, and he moved his hand more surely over the smoothness and the roundness of the white, and the hard brown nub of nipple.
"Kiss me," she said, but when he bent toward her lips - his heart pounding, his heart about to scream - she said, "not there," and held his head and gently moved it down until he felt the nub against his tongue.
And God, it was too much for him and he had to turn away and slip into the water. There was a skim of oil across the surface, though there hadn't been a boat in years.
When he finally looked at her again, she was smiling, swinging one foot in the water, her eyes looking far off in the corner where the dead man was.
"I have a boyfriend in the city," she said. "I may decide to marry him."
***
He tried in his head to find ways to tell all this to Kevin while at the same time showing Kevin that he was not to laugh - he'd known Kevin all his life, and he knew he would want to laugh - or poke him in the side, or use words like "cool" or "lucky." He could not imagine how. And then he tried to picture all next winter or all his life not ever being able to tell any of this to anyone, and he could not do that either. He felt fierce and adult when he thought he might know something Kevin never would, but he also felt afraid. It made him turn in his hot bed, wouldn't let him sleep.
***
His uncle went to town to buy some liquor and he helped his aunt chase children up and down the beach to stop them from running into the sea and drowning, which took some doing since there were four of them, two sets of twins. They'd made their mother crazy, his mother said.
He saw as he was running back and forth that the tall guy in the cabin next to theirs had found Katerina on the beach. He saw that the guy was older than Katerina even, and he saw her move in her beach chair when she talked to him and lift the sunglasses from her eyes and smile. And his heart thudded at the thought that she might be telling him about the dead man in the boat house.
That night, he didn't dare to ask, didn't want to know, so relieved was he to be the one. But she wouldn't sit on the boards and dangle her feet in the water. Instead she led him closer to the bundle of rags and flesh he dreaded in the deep dusk corner, and when they came up to it he forced himself to look down into the dead man's face and saw the skin over his closed eyes was paper scorched that would crumble and fall apart if it were touched, wrinkled skin falling into little piles of dust, unlidding orbs, revealing sight.
He stepped back, not letting himself reach for her hand the way he wanted to.
***
At supper the next day they asked him if he wanted to go into the city with his uncle the next morning, or stay the last two weeks. He thought of the twins and how long the days were, and of Kevin in the city in the evenings wheeling along dark, smooth river valley paths, with no one to listen to. He thought of Katerina and said that he would stay.
When they'd eaten the fish, minutely broken before his aunt even gave it to them to make sure the bones were out, his uncle gave him money and told him to take his cousins to the park and then for ice cream, and not to come back until the ice cream was all gone. His aunt seemed fearful, as if there might be bones in ice cream, but his uncle held her firmly by the elbow and told them to go along. So, trailing children, off he went.
They hadn't been in the park too long, him running back and forth from the slides to the swings to the roundabout, when Katerina appeared, all skin tonight in a dress the colour of cantaloupe, bare arms, bare shoulders and bare tanned neck.
"Looks like you're tied up," she said, not looking at the children.
"Not for long," he said, standing at the edge of the playground where he had come to meet her.
"So am I," she said.
"How can you be?" he asked with a quick glance behind him to make sure all four were still alive. One of them was standing silently watching him, thumb stuck in his mouth.
She raised her shoulders until the skin touched the soft ends of her hair and said, "Maybe I'll see you tomorrow."
He turned away. He'd been stupid to think it would happen every night, but the keenness of his disappointment made him take the children early to get the ice cream over with so he could be alone. He came out the screen door of the ice cream shop in perfect time to catch a glimpse of cantaloupe and the tall guy's head on the overgrown path that would take them to the boat house.
***
He stood and looked where they had gone, and then he took the children by their hands and hurried them through the village streets to the small police detachment house, where out front a fat man in uniform was trying to fix a lawnmower in the cool of the shade of the house.
"There's a body," he told the policeman, breathing hard. "In the old boat house, up the inlet."
"What?" asked the man red-faced, raising his head to look at all the children - one of them crying now because his cone was empty, his ice cream fallen out.
"In the boat house," he insisted, feeling sick at the thought of the tall guy and Katerina, and sounding sick as well. "Up March Inlet. You'll need a boat to get him out."
"If this is some kind of...."
"It's not," he said, and to prove it he told the fat policeman what his name was, who his aunt and uncle were. He said, "You have to hurry."
***
It didn't matter how slowly he went, he was still ahead of them, the one with the replacement cone the slowest so he could guard it with his mouth and hand. He came into the cabin clearing ahead of all four of them, and looked up at the window in time to see his aunt leaned back against the table, his uncle lifting up her shirt. And his heart grew tight, and his throat was tight, as he felt the sweet salt taste of Katerina's skin against his tongue.
"Stay here," he said, herding the twins into a place where they were concealed beneath the trees. "Don't go near the fish pool, and don't go into the house until Mel's ice cream is all done."
He left them there and sprinted back toward the village, turning part way there to see that Mel had wandered into the roadway after him. So he sprinted back and gathered up the child into his arms and ran again, not daring to wonder where the others were. The child said nothing, but held on tight to him and he ran through the village, past the detachment house where the fat man was yelling from the police jeep at two other men in trucks and pointing in the direction of the water, ran through the park and the playground, and then slowed when he reached the path so he wouldn't trip on the roots and undergrowth.
Deep in the woods, he stopped. He'd heard the crashing and now he saw the tall guy stumbling through the underbrush toward him. He stood back from the path to let him pass.
His panting sounded hard and painful, and his face was white, and his T-shirt was marbled wet all down the front. "Jesus," he shouted at them as he went by. "Stay back, you guys. Stay back. There's a fucking dead man back there. Jesus. There's a fucking dead guy back there." On the wave of air he made as he went past, he left the smell of puke.
He put the child gently down on the ground beside him while he regained his own breath. Then he saw Katerina come cool and calm - stepping through the deep sunlit evening greenery toward him. She stopped when she saw him, then took his eyes with hers and drew them to the place where the tall guy in his fear had torn apart the path through the branches, making it wide where it had not been wide before. She looked at him and shook her head - and he saw that her eyes were shining, and that she was smiling, and that the one she was smiling at was him.
He looked at the child, and he looked back at her, and he thought about the people in the boat he could hear now, far off in the water.
And God, how he longed for Kevin.