Dancing After Hours (7 page)

The helicopter veered and climbed and turned and the crewman rolled the captain onto his back and, without looking, reached up for the compress Gina had removed from the first-aid kit. Rusty looked at her hand, holding the compress as limply as with guilt, then Rusty looked up at the tearless futility of her daughter’s face. The compress did not change hands. The crewman was looking at the captain’s face and reaching toward Gina’s hand; then he lowered his arm and placed his fingers on the captain’s throat. Rusty knew from the crewman’s eyes, and from the captain’s face while he was still on the ladder, that this touch of the pulse was no more than a gesture, like the professionally solemn closing of a casket before its travel from the funeral home to the church service. Her legs lay straight in front of her, and she bent them and with her palms she pushed herself up, stumbling into the imbalance of the helicopter’s flight, rising from the captain’s blood and wiping it from her palms onto the legs of her jeans.

“And it was his own fault,” she said at the kitchen sink, surprised that she had spoken aloud, in a voice softly hoarse, after the silence of sleep. She cleared her throat, but it was dry, so she left the sink and the window and the images between her and the pines of the dead captain in the helicopter, and the first fin—the second: no one had seen the shark that came up under the mate—and poured a glass of orange juice and drank it in one long swallow, her hand still holding open the refrigerator door. She stood looking at the turkey,
covered with plastic wrapping, the pan holding it set parallel to the length of the shelf. Last night she had removed the shelf above it to make room for the turkey’s breast. She had put in the ice chest the random assortment of food from the shelf that leaned now against one side of the refrigerator. Some of the food she had thrown away—a peach and two oranges molding at the rear of the shelf, a tomato so soft her fingers pierced it, some leaves of rusted lettuce, and a plastic container of tuna fish salad she had made last week—and was angry again at her incompetence, after all these years, at maintaining order in a refrigerator, at even knowing what on a given day it contained. She gazed at the turkey and saw Gina’s long bare legs beside hers in the water, bending and then kicking the soles of her sneakers against the noses of sharks.

It was what the captain had told them to do—had shouted at them to do—and for forty-seven minutes, according to the Coast Guard, Rusty had kicked. Her arms were behind her, down through the life preserver, her hands underwater holding the bottom of its rim, which she squeezed against her back. Gina, holding the same preserver, was to her right. Rusty could glance to her left and see Cal’s back, his head, and his arms going down through that preserver; Ryan and the captain were behind her. She wore jeans, tight and heavy with water, and when a fin came toward her she drew in her legs, then kicked between the eyes as they surfaced, those eyes that seemed to want her without seeing her. Later when she told the story to friends at home, she said the eyes were like those of an utterly drunken man trying to pick you up in a bar: all but a glimmer of sentience and motive invisible beneath the glaze of
drunkenness, so that he did not truly see you, but only woman, bar, night. Those were the men, she told her friends, that even Cal handled gently, saying they were not responsible for anything they said or did. Each time she kicked, and while she readied herself for the next shark, she waited for her blue-jeaned legs to disappear in a crunch and tearing of teeth through her flesh and bones. But more than her own legs she had watched Gina’s, or had been aware of them as though she never stopped watching, for while her memory was of Gina’s legs and her waiting to see them severed, memory told her, too, that she could not have looked at them as often or for as long as she believed. She had to watch the water in front of her; even to hope for a fin there, because she waited, too, for a shark to come straight up beneath her, to kill her before she even saw it, kicked it. So she had glimpsed Gina’s legs, had sometimes looked directly at them when Gina kicked and kicked until the shark turned; but always she had felt those legs, more even than her own; and she had not felt—or had she? and would she ever know?—Cal’s legs or body, or Ryan’s, though she had called to them, every minute, or so it seemed now:
Cal? Are you all right? Ryan?
She had not felt the captain at all.

She closed the refrigerator, thought of making coffee and starting this day. But it was too early. She wanted the day to be over, wanted tomorrow to come, Monday, the day that since she was a little girl and went for the first time to school, not even school yet but kindergarten, had asserted itself on her life, as an end to weekends, an affirmation of their transitory ease. The turkey held for her now no expectancy: it was only a dead fowl, plucked of its feathers, ugly. She was too cool, and
the linoleum floor chilled her bare feet. She went quietly to the bedroom, stood on its carpet, and looked once with loving envy, nearly pride, at Cal sleeping; then she stepped into her slippers and put on her summer robe and dropped her cigarettes and lighter into a pocket, and went out into the hall, where on the wood floor the skidding and slapping sound of her slippers made her halt and for an instant hold her breath. Then lifting and lowering her feet in a slow creeping walk, she went to the bathroom, knowing for the first time since the day woke her that she wanted Cal asleep; she wanted to be alone. She eased open the medicine cabinet and lowered a sleeping pill into the pocket of her robe.

In the kitchen she filled a glass with ice from the chest that held beer, jarred food, and a carton of milk, and pulled a Coke from under ice, and went through the living room and unlatched the screen door. The wooden door had been swung open all night. At home they had an alarm system that four times in three years had frightened away housebreakers. She sat on the old porch swing hanging by chains from the ceiling and looked at the lake, sixty-five feet from the cabin, the owner had said; in the faint light it was dark blue and smooth. On both sides of her were trees, so she could not see the cabins that flanked theirs nor, at this hour, hear the voices and music that later would come through the woods, and around them, too, as though carried by the lake’s surface. The lake was very large and around its perimeter were cabins, houses, wharves, boat landings, all separated by woods. Most of the trees were old pines, tall and straight and durable; far across the lake, they were absolutely still, piercing the windless
morning light. She poured Coke fizzing over ice and when the foam settled she poured again. She pinched the pill out of her pocket, blew off aqua lint; then, holding it at her mouth, she paused. She would sleep till noon. Then she placed it on her tongue and drank.

Soon she would feel it: the dullness in her legs and arms and behind her eyes, so they would see then only what they looked at, objects and doors and rooms and hall; free of sharks and blood, they would steer her to bed, where she would wake a second time to the fourteenth of July, a day in history she had memorized in school; but a year ago, in a sea as tranquil as this lake, that date had molted the prison and the revolution. As when Vietnam had disappeared in 1968, burned up in Gina’s fever when she was nine and had pneumonia. Then Rusty’s passive sorrow and anger about the war, harder to bear because they were passive, so on some nights awake in bed she saw herself pouring her blood on draft files, going to jail; and all the pictures of the war her heart received from television and newspapers and magazines; and her imagined visions of the wounded and dying, and the suffering of those alive, first the Vietnamese children, then all Vietnamese and those American boys who were lost in false fervor or drafted and forced to be soldiers so they could survive—all were cold ashes in her mind and heart while for three days Gina, her firstborn, lay on the hospital bed with a needle in her vein and every six hours a nurse added an antibiotic to the fluid, and every four took Gina’s temperature. Rusty stayed in the room, watched Gina, read, fell asleep in the chair, ate at the hospital cafeteria; when Cal got home from work he and Ryan came and sat with Gina, while Rusty went
home to shower and change clothes, then she returned to spend the night sleeping in the leather armchair. There was no extra bed for her, but two orderlies carried in the larger chair from the sunporch.

On the fourth day Gina’s fever was down and Rusty brought her home, to her bed with fresh sheets Rusty had tucked and folded, and for the next ten days she ministered to her, gave her the medicine Gina could swallow now, sat and talked with her, gave her socks and slippers and helped her into her robe when Gina wanted to watch television from the living room couch, where she lay on her side and Rusty covered her with a blanket and sat at the couch’s end, with Gina’s feet touching her leg, and did not smoke. For those ten days the foolishness Gina watched was not foolishness; their watching it was ceremonial. During these days Rusty’s life drew her back into it: she became married again, she cooked meals, and received the praise of Cal and Ryan, who gave it to her by joking about their cereal and sandwiches and Chinese dinners while she was at the hospital. Three times she and Cal made love, and she guided him to long tenderness before she opened herself to him, and did not tell him that his lover’s slow kissing and touching were exorcising the vapor of death above their bed, stirring her passion until it consumed her, and left no space in the room or bed or her body for the death of Gina. She did not tell him this because she did not know it herself until months later, and by then she did not want to remember it with him through words, for their sound in her throat would become tears she had already wept at the hospital those three days and three nights when she could not place herself in 1968, could not convince herself that she was living
in the age of cures, and that Gina would not die. The word
pneumonia
came to her as though she and Gina lived in 1868, sped at her with the force of a century behind it and struck her breast with a fear she knew but could not feel she ought to reserve for leukemia or some other death knell. As Gina became strong and cheerful and finally restless, the Vietnam War seeped into Rusty’s days and nights and she began reading the
Boston Globe
again and watching the news on television, and within the first week of Gina’s return to school, her old thwarted sorrow and anger distracted her quietude, and rose in her conversations with her friends and her family.

She felt the pill in her legs now, and in her fingers as she lit her last cigarette before the walk she would have to control to the bedroom. Near the shore in front of the house a mallard swam. In the still air the lake was as calm as the Caribbean on Bastille Day when they fished for marlin. As they headed out to sea in the thirty-two-foot wooden boat, Gina had said: “Let them eat hooks.” Rusty killed fish every summer and sometimes, with Cal, pheasants in the fall; the birds were harder to find and she and Cal hunted some seasons without seeing one, save those they refused to shoot on their land; but she loved anyway walking alertly in the cool air and sunlight. When she did shoot a pheasant, she ran before its sun-brightened green hit the earth, ran with her thumb pressing the shotgun’s safety button, silently telling the bird:
Don’t just be wounded and crawl off to hide and die
. She had given up trying to explain to her friends who did not hunt, both women and men, the thrill of the flushing bird and her gun coming to her shoulder and its muzzle and bead sight swinging
up to the shape and colors, the thrill of firing only once and seeing it fall, and her fear as she ran to it, and, above all, the third feeling: sacredness, a joy subdued by sorrow not for the dead bird, or even for her killing it, but for something she knew in her heart yet could not name, something universal and as old as the earth and the first breath of plants. Those same friends who did not understand her hunting were puzzled when she told them that catching even a mackerel, small and plentiful as they were, or a cod that she reeled up from the bottom of the sea onto boats they chartered in New Hampshire, gave her that same feeling when she unhooked them and placed them in the ice chest. She never mentioned to these friends what she felt when she caught a bluefish. It fought as if it were a heavy cod with the vigor of a mackerel, and the fish’s struggle for life wearied her right arm and shot through her body, which she leaned backward, then moved forward as she reeled. When she brought it alongside and Cal or Gina or Ryan gaffed it and lifted it onto the deck, she put on thick cotton working gloves and pushed one hand into a gill while with pliers in the other she pulled and twisted and worked out the hook, watching the eye looking at hers and telling her as clearly as if it were human:
I’m going to bite off your finger, you bitch
. She had never shot any game but pheasants or an occasional rabbit, had never caught anything larger than a blue-fish; cod had been longer and heavier, but their dead weight on her line, their easy giving up of the hook so she used neither gloves nor pliers, diminished by pounds and inches their size, and kept the fierce blue-fish larger in her heart. She did not know whether or not she wanted to catch a marlin; she did not know
whether she wanted any of her family to. So when Gina made the joke about hooks, Rusty had quickly turned to her, a scolding sentence taking shape; but she said nothing. For Gina, seeing Rusty’s face, had blushed and said: “I just remembered what day it is. That’s all.” Ryan stepped beside Gina at the gunwale and kissed her cheek and said: “Aristocrat. Or maybe a royal asshole.” Cal said: “Did somebody call?”

An hour or two later, some time before noon, the boat sank. It struck nothing. The engine stopped, but there was no sound of wooden bow or hull hitting a reef or upturned sunken boat or a whale. There was no shock, no force to make them fall to the deck or to lurch and reach for one another’s bodies for balance. There was only the captain’s voice: not even a cry, but a low, clear sentence so weighted with the absolute knowledge of what had happened that to Rusty it was more frightening than a scream, and she saw her long red hair wavering like flame above her as she sank beneath her last bubbles of air: “We have to go overboard; she’s sinking.” Then he said to the mate, Zack Chaffee, dark and small and muscular, already running forward the few strides from stern to forecastle, and minutes away from his own death: “Get the preservers and jackets.” Rusty went forward, too, and felt her family behind and beside her as she halted midway to the forecastle and looked at the water rising in it, covering the bunks. A cushion and two life jackets floated. Chaffee went down the ladder and was in water to his waist. He tossed the two floating jackets out to the deck and saw Rusty and her family, and he was looking at her face when he waved his arm toward the boat’s port side and either said or mouthed: “Go.” Cal picked up the jackets and
gave them to Gina and Ryan, then took her arm and led her to the side. As he lifted her to the gunwale, she heard the captain’s voice repeating
MAYDAY
and the digits of their location and she looked over her shoulder at him before she jumped. Then all of them were in the water, swimming away from the boat, Zack pushing the preservers in front of him, holding his jacket’s strap in his teeth, a coil of line around one shoulder; and the captain rising in the water to throw jackets ahead of her and Cal.