Sometimes girls came to visit, too. I lived in a fine spot that summer, in a place between two lakes where my friend was a chalk-yellow flower with the lemon-yellow center, and another friend was the long woolly sausage of a willow bud. Brown birds danced through the moss. When my guests got close I'd hear them exclaim at all the birds. — One girl said: My grandmother saw a big black bird in the morning when she was young. Bigger than this little house. It tried to catch kids. — I'd hear the girls unzipping my back doors since my front door was broken; I'd hear them unlacing their boots as they knelt upon the giving, prickly-brittle mound of lichens. I knew them; I'd seen them on Sundays listening to the the little white-robed trio at the altar; I knew those girls' slender arms and the way their shirts worked up to flash their bikini-breasts in the water. They called each other sluts and talked about the boys whom they wanted to fuck. They shot my pistol. They asked for liquor, which I didn't have. Sometimes boys and girls would come together. When my tent was crowded, a boy would just pull his coat over his shoulders and his girl's shoulders so that they could kiss in private. That reminded me of the bridge, too, where the women tented inside towels or quilts as they changed. Everything had begun to remind me of the bridge by then. It was as if this island where water pulsed around me between long blue windblown pond-fingers were inside a paperweight. There was nothing but this. Alone in my tent at night, chilly from my day's swim at the bridge, I dreamed of grabby willow-islands and also good flat stones to cross, but grassy mossy bogs on either side. The world went chill and grey as more clouds thrust their elbows across the sky. And in the morning when I heard my friends coming, I knew that we would go together to the bridge. I felt interested in their loves, being but a spinning camera eye which could not and must not love them because I would never come back. — The girl who'd stolen my best Polaroid and the boy who always got into trouble loved each other, I think, but they never visited me at the same time. My best Polaroid was of him, and that was why she stole it.
Do you swear? she'd said.
No.
Why? she said contemptuously. Do you use drugs?
Sometimes.
Why not all the time?
When at last she jumped, unannounced, long after everyone had given up on her, I saw the dance of her white breasts through her wet T-shirt, the fierce downward point of the running shoes she'd swiped from one of the younger kids and then she was in the air but still very far away and then with the ripping-cloth noise of a gyrfalcon swooping to protect its nest she plunged into the cold brown water with a roar and a splash, bobbing back up immediately among the other orange faces rising and falling in the dark water which was occasionally stained orange by the bridge's reflection.
The boy she loved, the one in the Polaroid, was the boy who'd slit his wrists because he was caught breaking into the mayor's office, "just to see what was there," and his mother (he was adopted) said that none of her
He sat in my tent, playing with my scare pistol. — I think my uncle saw I slit my wrists, he beamed. I told my cousin if my Dad don't change, I'm gonna go all the way!
Minutes later he was swimming and laughing.
After the girl who loved him jumped, he clambered up the chickenwire-lined gravel wall of the bridge, passing the small girl who clung peering at a baby bird, until he stood beside me in the spot where his admirer had stood, and in lordly summer silence the two of us surveyed the black turtles' backs of rocks under the greenness and brownness, and kids' skinny phosphorescent bodies making waves like obsidian arrowheads.
Dive in, Jobie! cried she who loved him. Splash me good or I'm gonna quit!
He pretended to look away from her upturned face. Then, smiling, he dove. The river exploded with his splash (the lake where the river came from was a swollen gray cloud with orange bloodstains on it).
Oh, my toe hurts! cried a water-spouting girl.
What about my balls? he shouted, and they all laughed.
The girl who loved him stood where the water was only knee-deep, her wrists clasped across her breasts, watching him and shivering. — Let's go to the other side an' dive! she said. Then she crept all the way into the cold water.
