Quenby at the barbecue pit, her full backside to him, turning the steaks, sipping the. whiskey, talking about life on the island. Or maybe not talking at all. Just watching the steaks maybe. Ola inside setting the table Or swimming down by the docks. A good thing here. The sun now an orangish ball over behind die pines. Water lapping at the dock and the boats, curling up on the shore, some minutes after a boat passes distantly. The flames and the smoke. Down at the kennels, the dogs were maybe making a ruckus. Maybe Ola’s cat had wandered down there. The cat had a habit of teasing them outside their pen. The dogs had worked hard, they deserved a rest. Mentally, he gave the cat a boot in the ribs. He had already fed the dogs, but later he would take the steak bones down.
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Quenby’s thighs brush together when she walks. In denim, they whistle; bare, they whisper. Not so, Ola’s. Even with her knees together (they rarely are), there is space between her thighs. A pressure there, not of opening, but of awkwardness.
Perhaps, too, island born, her walk is different. Her mother’s weight is settled solidly beneath her buttocks; she moves out from there, easily, calmly, weightlessly. Ola’s center is still between her narrow shoulders, somewhere in the midst of her fine new breasts, and her quick astonished stride is guided by the tips of her hipbones, her knees, her toes. Quenby’s thick black cushion is a rich locus of movement; her daughter still arches uneasily out and away from the strange outcropping of pale fur that peeks out now at the inner edges of the white shorts.
It is difficult for a man to be alone on a green island.
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Carl wished he had a cigarette. He’d started out with cigarettes, but he’d got all excited once when he hooked a goddamn fish, and they had all spilled out on the wet bottom of the boat What was worse, the damn fish — a great northern, Swede had said — had broke his line and got away. My Jesus, the only strike he’d got all day, and he’d messed it up! Swede had caught two. Both bass. A poor day, all in all. Swede didn’t smoke.
To tell the truth, even more than a cigarette, he wished he had a good stiff drink. A hot supper. A bed. Even that breezy empty lodge at Swede’s with its stale piney smell and cold damp sheets and peculiar noises filled him with a terrific longing. Not to mention home, real home, the TV, friends over for bridge or poker, his own electric blanket.
“Sure is awful dark, ain’t it?” Carl said “ain’t” out of deference to Swede. Swede always said “ain’t” and Carl liked to talk that way when he was up here. He liked to drink beer and say “ain’t” and “he don’t” and stomp heavily around with big boots on. He even found himself saying “oh yah!” sometimes, just like Swede did. Up on the “oh,” down on the “yah.” Carl wondered how it would go over back at the office. They might even get to know him by it. When he was dead, they’d say: “Well, just like good old Carl used to say: oh yah!”
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In his mind, he watched the ducks fall. He drank the whiskey and watched the steaks and listened to Quenby and watched the ducks fall They didn’t just plummet, they fluttered and flopped. Sometimes they did seem to plummet, but in his mind he saw the ones that kept trying to fly, kept trying to understand what the hell was happening. It was the rough flutter sound and the soft loose splash of the fall that made him like to hunt ducks.
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Swede, Quenby, Ola, Carl… Having a drink after supper, in the livingroom around the fireplace, though there’s no fire in it. Ola’s not drinking, of course. She’s telling a story about her daddy and a cat It is easy to laugh. She’s a cute girl. Carl stretches. “Well, off to the sack, folks. Thanks for the terrific supper. See you in the morning, Swede.” Quenby: “Swede or I’ll bring you fresh towels, Carl. I forgot to put any this morning.”
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You know what’s going on out here, don’t you? You’re not that stupid. You know why the motor’s gone dead, way out here, miles from nowhere. You know the reason for the silence. For the wait Dragging it out Making you feel it After all, there was the missing underwear. Couldn’t find it in the morning sunlight either.
But what could a man do? You remember the teasing buttocks as she dogpaddled away, the taste of her wet belly on the gunwales of the launch, the terrible splash when you fell. Awhile ago, you gave a tug on the stringer. You were hungry and you were half-tempted to paddle the boat to the nearest shore and cook up die two bass. The stringer felt oddly weighted. You had a sudden vision of a long cold body at the end of it, hooked through a cheek, eyes glazed over, childish limbs adrift What do you do with a vision like that? You forget it. You try to.
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They go in to supper. He mixes a couple more drinks on the way. The whiskey plup-plup-plups out of the bottle. Outside, the sun is setting. Ola’s cat rubs up against his leg. Probably contemplating the big feed when the ducks get cleaned. Brownnoser. He lifts one foot and scrubs the cat’s ears with the toe of his boot Deep-throated purr. He grins, carries the drinks in and sits down at the dining-room table..
Quenby talks about town gossip, Ola talks about school and Scouts, and he talks about shooting ducks. A pretty happy situation. He eats with enthusiasm. He tells how he got the first bird, and Ola explains about the Golden Gate Bridge, cross-pollination, and Tom Sawyer, things she’s been reading in school.
He deans his plate and piles on seconds and thirds of everything. Quenby smiles to see him eat She warns him to save room for the pie, and he replies that he could put away a herd of elephants and still have space for ten pies. Ola laughs gaily at that. She sure has a nice laugh. Ungainly as she is just now, she’s going to be a pretty girl, he decides. He drinks his whiskey off, announces he’ll bring in the pie and coffee.
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How good it had felt! In spite of the musty odors, the rawness of the stiff sheets, the gaudy brilliance of the Coleman lantern, the anxious haste, the cool air teasing the hairs on your buttocks, the scamper of squirrels across the roof, the hurried by-passing of preliminaries (one astonishing kiss, then shirt and jacket and pants had dropped away in one nervous gesture, and down you’d gone, you in teeshirt and socks still): once it began, it was wonderful! Lunging recklessly into that steaming softness, your lonely hands hungering over her flesh, her heavy thighs kicking up and up, then slamming down behind your knees, hips rearing up off the sheets, her voice rasping: “Hurry!”—everything else forgotten, how good, how good! ‘
And then she was gone. And you lay in your teeshirt and socks, staring half-dazed at the Coleman lantern, smoking a cigarette, thinking about tomorrow’s fishing trip, idly sponging away your groin’s dampness with your shorts. You stubbed out the cigarette, pulled on your khaki pants, scratchy on your bare and agitated skin, slipped out the door to urinate. The light leaking out your shuttered window caught your eye. You went to stand there, and through die broken shutter, you stared at the bed, the roughed-up sheets, watched yourself there. Well. Well. You pissed on the wall, staring up toward the main house, through the pines. Dimly, you could see Ola’s head in the kitchen window.
You know. You know.
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“Listen, uh, Swede…”
“Yah?”
“Oh, nothing. I mean, well, what I started to say was, maybe I better start putting my shoulder to, you know, one of the paddles or whatever the hell you call them. I, well, unless you’re sure you can get it—"
“Oh yah. I’m sure.”
“Well…”
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Swede, Carl, Ola, Quenby… One or more may soon be dead. Swede or Carl, for example, in revenge or lust or self-defense. And if one or both of them do return to the island, what will they find there? Or perhaps Swede is long since dead, and Carl only imagines his presence. A man can imagine a lot of things, alone on a strange lake in a dark night.