Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“No.”

“You don’t feel you should be here?”

“I don’t study a lot on right and wrong these days,” I said.

She fixed a strand of hair on her forehead. “Ernest Hemingway said if you feel bad about something the next morning, it’s wrong and you should avoid doing it again. If you don’t feel bad about it, you should take joy in the memory.”

When I didn’t reply, she turned and walked to the small bathhouse in back with a rolled towel under her arm. She’d had her hair cut and it was thick and burnished with gold light on the back of her neck. The sun went behind a bank of rain clouds and suddenly the wind seemed cold and tannic through the pines. I looked at the firmness of her calves and the way her hips moved under her dress. An old iron water pump by the bathhouse was beaded with moisture that dripped off the pump handle into the dirt. I remained staring at the bathhouse door after she had closed it, my mouth dry, my face moist in the wind as though I had a fever.

I changed inside the cottage. Moments later she came back out of the bathhouse in straw sandals and a one-piece dark blue bathing suit.

“You still have your shirt on,” she said.

“It’s turned right cool,” I replied.

“I’ll fix you a drink.”

“You know me. I’m still nine-tenths Baptist.”

“Oh stop it,” she said, and circled my wrist with her forefinger and thumb and tugged me gently inside the back door of the cottage.

She fixed two vodka Collins at the bar that divided the kitchen and the living room. The door to the bedroom was open, and the bed was made up with a tight white bedspread and fat, frilled pillows and a folded navy-blue blanket at the bed’s foot. She put the Collins glass in my palm, then drank from hers, her face only inches from mine.

“I never thought you were much of a drinker,” I said.

“With time, you learn to do all kinds of things,” she replied. Her breath smelled like ice and mint leaves and was warm against my skin at the same time. “Do you want to sit outside?”

I didn’t answer. Her hand lay on top of the bar and the ends of her fingers touched mine. She moved her fingers on top of my hand, then set down her glass and tilted her face up and held her eyes on mine. I kissed her on the mouth, then felt her body press against me, her weight rise on one foot, the muscles of her back flex under my hands.

Her hair smelled like salt wind and sunlight and I could feel her breath like a feather against my neck. Through the half-opened bedroom door the taut whiteness of the bedspread and the bloom of pillows at the headboard seemed the most lovely rectangle of light and symmetry and comfort in the world. She rubbed the top of her head against my mouth and pressed her s

tomach tightly against me, one hand slipping down the small of my back. In my mind’s eye I felt already drawn inside the cradle of her thighs, inside the absolute glory and heat of her body, her mouth a throaty whisper against my ear.

Then I looked through the window and saw L.Q. Navarro in the front yard, leaning against a pine trunk, his arms folded, one boot cocked toe-down across the other, his face obscured by his hat.

“What the hell you doin’, son?” his voice said.

I felt myself step away from Peggy Jean and the fullness of her breasts and the mystery of her eyes.

“Why are you staring out the window?” she asked.

“Because there’s no sound,” I replied.

“There’s no—” she began.

“The children were yelling in the rapids. Now it’s quiet. Why did they stop yelling?” I said.

“What’s the matter with you, Billy Bob? Sometimes you act like you’re crazy,” she said.

But I wasn’t listening now. I went into the front yard, into the wind that was colder than it should have been, into a smell that was like autumn woods and pine needles in shadow and the gases from dead flowers. From the edge of the promontory I could see the thick green surface of the river, the current bunching at the rapids, the braided foam that twisted and swelled in a long riffle over gray boulders, the evening shadows that seemed to transfix the bottom of the ravine with silence.

The two hired lifeguards, their torsos swollen with the contours of weight lifters, stood on the bank, surrounded by children, scanning the water in both directions. One lifeguard began pushing nervously at his forehead with his fingers; the other walked up and down the bank, questioning the children, his face reddening with exasperation, as though they were deliberately denying him the solution to his problem.

Then I saw Pete through the pines on the slope, forty yards down from the rapids, struggling in a whirlpool that had formed on the lee side of a huge boulder. His inner tube was on the outside of the vortex, only three or four feet from his grasp, but it might as well have been an ocean away.

He flailed at the water, kicking hard for the bank, then his thin shoulders spun in the center of the whirlpool and he went under.

I skidded barefoot down the slope over rocks and exposed tree roots and crashed through a nest of blackberry bushes onto the beach. On the far side of the stream I could see his face just under the surface, his eyes squinted shut, his hair floating from his scalp, his mouth pinched tight against the breath he wanted to draw from the water. I ran across a flat rock and dove headlong into the current, felt the cold strike like an anvil against the bone, then took two hard strokes and went under and grabbed him around the waist and brought him to the surface with me, throwing him as far as I could toward the bank.