Once, when I wrote to my dad and told him how crappy things were and begged him to let me stay with him, he wrote back that life is about adjustment. I couldn’t tell if he was talking about me or himself. He went on about Corporal Edwards, saying how when he returned home from the war, he found raccoons nesting in his cabin, his wife run off to New Orleans. Sure, being adjusted is easy if you’re dead, I thought, and in some book.
The shore’s rushing toward us, and I’m about to mouth off when it comes to me, the daydream from my other fishing trips. Me tumbling over the side, my mom and my stepfather seeing it all and springing into action to save me. I picture how they’ll worry, the quick sad flash in their faces. And then it’s like, why not? I mean, what if this is the thing, the one thing that’ll make everything else okay? And then it’s like I can’t not do it. I look around. The lake’s clear. I think about it, and then I stop thinking about it. I ball my legs and grip my knees, and I go.
Halfway over, I hear my mom shriek. I’m in the air, and my stepfather’s killed the engine. For a split second it’s like it’s all falling into place. They’re watching, I know they’re watching, and I want to keep this moment forever, the quiet, the smell of the lake below me, the wind whipping my hair, everything belonging, me belonging, just like I wanted.
Then I glance back, and it’s lost. They haven’t seen me at all. That pink hat has flown off my mom’s head — that’s why my stepfather stopped the boat — and they’re looking the other way, watching as the hat floats on a breeze. And it’s like, really? Really? I take a breath, but before I can shout to them, the lake reaches up to slap me and pull me in, and I’m gone.
AT BOQUILLAS
THEY WERE HIKING DOWN THE HILL when they first heard the singing — a distant, lone man’s voice that seemed to echo off the river, or maybe off the canyon walls that rose at the trail’s end. Shelly said she thought the singing might be a radio, and Josh, her husband, said he wasn’t sure.
The hike was short, just over a half mile from the parking lot to the opening of Boquillas Canyon, where you were supposed to stop and watch the Rio Grande pouring between the sheer cliffs. The singing continued as they descended to the river’s edge, where the reeds kept them from seeing anything but the trail itself and the sky above. Cuando, the voice said, pleading.
“Probably one of those guys in the shelter,” Josh said. At the top of the hill, they had looked across the river and seen a small shelter made of sticks with four Mexican men squatting beneath it. Shelly had felt a pang of guilt while studying them — for being invasive, for being the privileged white woman peering into someone else’s hardscrabble life — but she couldn’t help looking. Mexico itself didn’t so much fascinate her as did the simple notion of a wholly foreign place just across the river.
“They were just sitting,” she said now, of the men in the shelter.
They hiked on. The trail bent and rose. Ahead of them the reeds and brush cleared, and in the trail’s path lay a row of painted walking sticks and colored crystals on a blanket. In front of the blanket sat a milk jug weighted with change and bills. Shelly guessed now the job of the men in the hut — to run across and snatch the goods and the day’s takings if the border patrol came over the hill. On the far side of the river a little metal boat was tied up. She discovered, too, the source of the singing.
Near the boat a man stood on the sandy bank, serenading them. He looked about fifty, wore jeans and a green shirt, and had binoculars at his eyes, alternately watching them and then turning to watch the hill, to see if anyone else was coming over. Beside the jug was a plain rock, painted with the words: The Mexican Singing Victor. Your Donations Help Buy Supplies for the School Childrens.
Shelly stopped and took a dollar from her pocket and put it in the jug. “Gracias,” the Mexican Singing Victor called across the river. It was only about thirty feet wide, and shallow. Shelly waved her hand and then looked up toward the rising canyon walls.
“Why’d you do that?” Josh said with a slight scowl.
“Why not?”
“There’s border agents in the parking lot,” he said. “The signs said not to give those guys money.”
“Please,” Shelly said, coming up to him and then passing by. Josh didn’t say anything, just stood behind, giving her room. Shelly had learned over the years how Josh hated public fights, even though it was usually he who started them. She didn’t mind the Singing Victor seeing them. But Josh wouldn’t speak, and later, she knew, if he returned to the fight in the safe confines of their car or their tent, he would say that he’d felt the man’s eyes pressing into him. When she turned around, Josh was walking with his hands in his pockets, affecting calm, and Victor was watching the hill. He’d stopped singing now that he had his dollar.
THEY HAD SPENT THE WEEK IN FAR WEST TEXAS, the Trans-Pecos, hiking the Guadalupes and then driving down to Big Bend. This was their fifth year of marriage, and the trip was to mark their return to normalcy — they’d just taken twelve weeks of counseling after Shelly had caught Josh with his chubby, moonfaced student teacher, Karleen. Shelly had come to the school to bring him dinner, a surprise, and found the two clutching each other in Josh’s classroom. They parted, and the girl seemed about to speak, or to cry, but at Shelly’s stare she ran out of the room, bumping into a desk and toppling a box of pencils. How stupid she looked, Shelly thought, that stupid girl. It was the only thing she let herself think. Already the year had been hard — Shelly had lost her teaching job because of the school district’s funding cuts.
“Three months,” Josh said before she asked. He’d sat in one of the student desks and put his face in his hands. “God, I’m sorry.”
“Shit,” Shelly said in disbelief, the hurt still welling up as she sat at another desk. “I mean, shit.”
“We stayed late putting up posters,” Josh said. He stared at his desktop. A student, Shelly saw, had carved cock into the desk and colored the gouges with blue pen. “And it just happened, and then kept happening.”
“Just happened?” Shelley yelled. “I’m supposed to believe that? One minute you’re tacking a poster to the wall, and the next you’ve got your dick inside her?”
The smell of fried catfish and hush puppies rose from the food containers in the plastic bag. “I’ll do whatever you want,” Josh said.
Shelly wasn’t sure what to say. The anger made it hard to think. It was something hot pressing against her neck and her temples, like when her mother used to grab her. “Do you still love me?”
Josh looked up at her quickly. “Of course,” he said. “Yes.”
And so they had gone to marriage counseling. The counselor had told Josh to move out of the house, that Shelly could only let him back in when she trusted him. And Josh had to keep his cell phone with him, turned on at all times so Shelly could call him whenever she wanted, to see what he was doing. Josh also had to give Shelly a full daily schedule.
“I feel like a science project,” Josh had said, trying for a laugh.
“You broke our trust,” Shelly said, her voice sharp. “This is serious. You broke it, and now you have to earn it back.”
After two months, Shelly felt he had, and asked him to move back in. By the end of the counseling, they seemed well on the path together — that’s how Shelly thought of their marriage now, following that last session, as a path going up a hill, behind which the sun was rising.