Jesus Out to Sea

“He didn’t learn to fight at First Baptist,” she said.

I’m sure her statement made sense to someone older than I, but Terry Anne was a beautiful riddle, and who was I to require that she make sense or be more than the mentor she was. After Nick had worn himself out on the bag, she draped a towel over his shoulders, then, as an afterthought, blotted the sweat out of his eyes with it. “You know, you might just surprise a lot of folks,” she said.

That summer was marked by both drought and sudden electrical storms over the Gulf, an unexpected infusion of cold air into the park during a ball game, a burst of rain-flecked wind gusting plumes of dust high in the air. It was also the summer that we heard the Russians had developed the atom bomb. While the night sky pulsed with lightning that made no sound, World War II vets, wearing Hawaiian shirts, drank iced-down bottles of Jax and Pearl beer in the stands and talked about nuclear war. They talked about cities that would be melted into green glass. I wanted to stop my ears.

Mary Jo Scarlotti had taken to wearing shorts with lace sewn on the hems, and a gold chain and cross that hung inside her cleavage. She tied her shirt under her breasts when she played volleyball and danced up and down after spiking the ball into an opponent’s face. On the Fourth of July she climbed up in a tree to put a bird back in its nest, then plummeted ten feet, her arms outspread, as though she had been crucified on the air, knocking all the wind out of her.

I tried to shake her awake and not look at the torn button on the top of her shirt. Suddenly her eyes clicked open, like a doll’s.

“I thought you were dead,” I said.

“Of course not. Here, listen to my heart,” she said.

“What?”

“Silly,” she said, and pressed the side of my head against her breast.

She stroked my hair while I listened to the whirring sounds inside her chest. Her perspiration smelled like talcum powder and flowers. Out of the corner of my vision, I saw a kid lift a yellow baseball bat in front of him and smack a ball across the grass.

The next afternoon I bought Mary Jo a banana split at the ice cream store next to the old fire station on Westheimer. We walked back toward the park to play Ping-Pong, then Frank’s convertible pulled alongside us, the dual Hollywood mufflers throbbing softly against the asphalt, the steel curb feelers on his fenders scraping against the concrete. Angel Morales sat in the passenger seat, hunched forward, grinning at nothing, a deck of Luckies folded in the sleeve of his T-shirt.

“Hop in. I’m barbecuing by the pool,” Frank said.

“We’re going to the park,” I replied.

“I’m hungry. I didn’t get to eat supper,” Mary Jo said.

Frank opened the door for her. She squeezed behind him into the backseat, the tops of her breasts bulging out of her shirt. “I got a swimsuit just your size,” he said to her.

I watched them drive down a long street that was flanged on each side by trees and clipped lawns of St. Augustine grass and brick houses that had turned mauve-colored in the sunset. Mary Jo turned and looked back at me, her face like a white balloon. Then she was gone.

I went back to the park to find Nick, but he had left for home. I got on my bicycle, one with fat tires and canvas saddlebags inset in wood racks above the rear fender, and rode to Frank’s apartment complex. I could smell meat cooking on a grill and hear water splashing and Frank and Mary Jo’s voices on the other side of a brick wall.

I climbed a side stairs onto a second-story walkway that overlooked the shallow end of the pool. Frank was showing Mary Jo how to swim on her back. One hand was propped under the nape of her neck, the other moving back and forth from the bottom of her spine to the backs of her thighs, as though only his touch could keep her from sinking. The underwater lights were on, and her hair floated out from her head like black ink while she giggled and spit water from her mouth.

Behind me, I heard a hiss of released carbonation as someone sank a beer opener into a can.

“I think he’s AC/DC, so Mary Jo’s not necessarily in danger,” Angel Morales said.

He upended a can of Grand Prize and looked at me over the bottom as he drank. He wore a pair of yellow swim trunks that stuck wetly to his genitalia and there was a smear o

f salt on his mouth from the top of the beer can.

“What’s AC/DC?” I asked.

“It means don’t take a leak next to Frank at a public urinal,” he answered. “What are you doing here, Charlie?”

I started to answer, then realized I didn’t know why I was there. At first I thought my concern was for Mary Jo. Or at least for Nick. But that wasn’t it. “Frank doesn’t have any business at the park. It’s for kids. It’s supposed to be safe,” I said.

“Check it out after midnight and tell me about it,” Angel replied.

“You let Frank use you for bait, Angel.”

Angel’s eyes were lustrous, like obsidian, unfocused, his thoughts buried deep in his face. He pawed at his cheek with four fingers and balanced his beer can on the railing. Down below, Mary Jo dipped under the water and swam like a giant fish past Frank’s legs. Angel stepped close to my face, his breath touching my mouth.

“Wake up, Charlie,” he said. “Mary Jo Scarlotti’s family runs whorehouses in Galveston. That park director broad, what’s her name, Terry Anne, was Frank’s pump. You don’t get no free lunch in this world. Now beat it.”

The next morning I spaded out my mother’s flower bed and didn’t go to the park. At noon Nick came to the house, his baseball glove hooked by its strap through his belt. The sun was white in the sky, the air like a moist cotton glove on the skin, the street blown with dust. The grass in our yard was yellow and there wasn’t a teaspoon of shade on it.