I nodded.
"I’ll show you, okay?"
He reached for my hand.
"Okay," I said.
Then we kissed.
19
The captain was my boyfriend, my cutie. And I was his l\/Irs. Captain, his special one. When he kissed me, my stomach did somersaults. When I kissed him, I wanted to stand on my head and sing. I wanted to spin in circles. Even while we gathered our expeditionary crew -- a Barbie arm as his first lieutenant, Cut ’N Style as my second Mrs. Captain -- I couldn’t stop thinking about those scarlet lips, so strange and exciting, making my belly tingle. Did he feel the same? Were my lips tingling someplace within him?
"Onward,” he said, assuming his brave captain’s voice. "That ocean boom hole is at least four hundred miles from here."
Four hundred miles in less than an hour. More like two miles, if that. But how far it seemed, how inhospitable. A desert of bulldozer tracks and chalky silt. No brush. No grass or bluebonnets, just dirt and sand.
Soon my dress was dusty. I tasted grit. And Dickens’ wig had gone white. Limestone flour powdered the scarlet on his lips, the rouge on his cheeks. He wiped dust from the goggles.
"If the wind blows bad and we don’t hold hands," he said, "then we’ll be lost and go blind and then we’ll fall in the hole alone or worse. So watch for the wind, okay? It’s a tornado sometimes or a dust devil. So we better be careful. You drop in this hole and you’re a goner for sure. You can’t fly, I don’t think. I can’t. I tried but I can’t. And I can’t swim either."
We’d journeyed to the end of the world -- having traveled through Johnsongrass and tall weeds and across dirt roads and under barbwire, ignoring DANGER and NO TRESPASSING signs -- going where the cream-colored earth sheered and staggered downward; mammoth ledges hewed from the quarried terrain, large enough for a giant to ascend.
And there we lay, at the edge of a high rock cliff, gazing over the rim and into the quarry -- or into the boom hole, as Dickens labeled it -- pondering the murky water that spread out below us.
"If you fell you’d clrop a hundred years until you splashed in the ocean.”
"How far is that?"
"Almost a thousand miles, I think.”
The Hundred Year Ocean lined the very depths of this cliffbound gorge, still and dark beneath the surface.
"But it’s a lake,” I said. "The ocean goes forever."
"No,” Dickens replied, "no, no. ‘Cause it’s deeper than any lake, so don’t pretend you know, all right?”
Then he explained that old cars and old trucks and all kinds of junk lurked somewhere underneath the water. And freshwater jellyfish, about the size of a penny and transparent. Years ago, he told me, three scuba divers drowned before they could find their way back to the surface.
"‘Cause it don’t have a bottom,” he said. "Never did. These people go in sometimes and can’t get out. That’s why I got a submarine. That way I don’t drown at all.”
How often had he explored the bottomless ocean in Lisa? A zillion million times, maybe. And what did he find? A battered bicycle, some tires, beer cans -- pennies? Hidden treasure?
"Just outta space, blue and red stars too. But you can’t breath in space and Lisa is only a submarine, you know. She can’t be a rocketship and a submarine. But if you sink deep deep deep then you’ll reach the moon and much deeper is Mars and deeper than that is God and the baby Jesus, I think.”
"But what about the booms? You’re lucky Lisa didn’t get exploded!"
"They don”t boom this anymore,” he said.
Then using the Barbie arm as an indicator, Dickens pointed across the quarry toward its farthest cliff -- where a solitary cluster of mesquites stretched alongside the brink.
"Past them trees, these men do it there now. They dynamite that new boom hole but it doesn’t even have an ocean or any jellyfish."
No sooner had he spoken when a boom erupted, reverberating like a sonorous thunderclap, quaking our perch, jiggling my insides. Dickens shielded his face in the nook of an arm -- and I covered my ears, gaping at the far-off mesquites, expecting fiery billows and chunks of debris to be blazing upward beyond the cluster. Instead -- as if the mesquites had suddenly splintered apart -- I saw a swarm of black birds shoot from the trees, rising into the sky, shrieking; they sailed around like an angry cloud, sweeping in unison, this way and that, eventually returning to their roosts when the boom had died.
I took my hands from my ears, slowly, listening as the birds squalled.
"They’re mad,” I told Dickens, who was lifting his head.
"They were sleeping, I guess. The booms will kill them if they don’t leave soon.”
And I remembered my father’s story, how as a boy he murdered starlings. So did his cousins. So did Grandmother. Everyone in their town murdered starlings.
"Because they shit on everything,” my father said, "and they made so much noise. And it was fun as well, I suppose. We got a dime for each bird we caught and killed. Earned nearly five dollars once, and that bought a feast of gum and hardtack back in those days."
The Annual Clatter Pot Round Up it was called.
Men and women and children -- fanning out, walking from one end of town to the other -- banging spoons against pots and pans and trashcan lids, frightening the starlings. That racket kept the birds in flight, kept them swooping frantically overhead, searching for a quiet place to land, flying until they couldn’t fly anymore -- then, exhausted, they began plunging. Starlings came tumbling toward the earth, crashing into streets and sidewalks, in yards and on rooftops. And rny father and his cousins and Grandmother and everyone else would start using their spoons like hammers.
"The ones that were breathing and trying to fly again,” my father said, "we beat the heads flat. Sometimes we just crushed them with our boots, and sometimes the wings were flapping long after the skulls popped."
My mother hated that story. I did too.
"Dickens, my daddy murdered birds. It’s mean doing that.”
But he wasn’t paying attention.
"That was close,” he said.
Then he studied the Barbie arm for a while, pressing a thumb into the plastic flesh.
"I got a secret,” he finally said.
"What is it?"
"If I say you can’t tell, okay? If Dell knows she’ll wallop me good and then I’m in trouble forever.”
"I got a secret too.”
He looked at me.
"Give me your secret and I’ll give you mine, okay?”
"Okay.”
We both sat up on the cliff, crossing our legs like Indian chiefs. Then I shut Cut ’N Style in a fist so she couldn’t hear. And I whispered my secret, saying that he was my boyfriend, that I was Mrs. Captain -- and that I liked silly kissing his lips.
"Oh,” he said, "mine is different -- mine is that I got dynamite in my room and that’s bad news for me.”
Dynamite. Two sticks. He found them at the new boom hole, he said.
"I forget everything," he said, "and stealing is what gets me in trouble. That’s what happens, that’s why it’s a secret.”
"I’d like to see,” I said.
He sighed, drawing his mouth into a tight circle.
"I don’t know, maybe tomorrow when Dell drives to town. I don’t know. When she drives to town I’m in charge, so I can take care of myself if I want.”
"If you show me I’ll believe you," I said. "If you show me, you can keep the arm as my birthday present.”
He was supposed to smile, but his face revealed nothing. He glanced at the arm.
"WIhat’s its name?"
"Army," I said.
"Is it a boy or a girl? A girl is nice, I think."
"It’s a boy.”
"How can you tell?”
I took the arm and held it between my legs, aiming the diminutive appendage outward as if it were a boy thingy.
"That doesn’t mean it’s a boy," he said.
"Yes it does. It’s a thingy. You got a thingy, I know."
"No.”
"I can see it after we peck. I can see it bigger."
"No you can’t. That’s wrong. I don’t have that.”
He rocked forward, folding his forearms over the front of his trunks. A soft breeze pushed around us, stirring the dust in the wig, powdering us with rock flour.
I set the arm on his left knee.
"Dickens, I’d like to see your dynamite.”
"Maybe tomorrow,” he said, "when Dell goes to town. I don’t know.”
"But you’re my boyfriend," I said.
"I don’t understand that,” he replied, removing the wig, dumping it in my lap. "I better get home, I think."
I love you, I thought. You are my dear sweet captain.
And on the cliff high above the Hundred Year Ocean we kissed for a moment in the late afternoon, then we wandered away, silently, listening as we went, hoping for another boom that never came.