Two Fledglings

By Michael Dusenberry

In his novel Two Fledglings, author Michael Dusenberry, with vivid imagery and colorful, expressive dialogue, tells the coming of age story of Owen Davidson and Carol Przywalski. Set in the 1960’s in a fictitious town in America’s northeast, we see Owen and Carol, so naturally drawn to each other, struggle with their inner demons and with the class divisions and parental disapprovals that eventually drive them apart. Owen the son of upper middle class Anglo parents; Carol the daughter of working class Polish immigrants.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781620951897

Book preview

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Chapter 1

Owen met her first one spring, when they both were in their teens, by a pale nervous lake where he went with his parents on weekends to sun and water-ski and fish. The day had seen a huge storm that scarred the skinny headlands that plunged down from the mists and clouds into the lake; lightning and thunder tore the earth and the air and the water with a brute subterrene dullness, like the first awesome groans of a world just recently born. And then the storm had settled; and the water now sloshed and gurgled in new-found life, as the sun jammed back through the clouds and fell on the plant-darkened lake. It was like the dawn of a new life or a new vision for him in those days, when every shaft of light or gesture or unexpected pause seemed to promise a new and difficult and troublesome world he had not sensed before, but which he knew lurked somewhere inside himself.

She was standing out on the jetty in the dim twilight amid the spent hush, framed by the melancholy glow of the falling sun on the lake—for a moment like a half-lit gypsy, swaddled in solitude. Until he asked her if she were lost, or needed help.

Oh, oh, no, ‘m jus’ sittin’ here thinkin’. And then she turned her buggy orbs on him and stuck him with her stare; her eyes glowed like live coals against the gray lines in the sky. You see, I come home here to see if my mother and father will come home tonight. Sometimes they come home before midnight and say good-night to me. So I wait here ‘til then in case they show up. But most of the time they never show up, ‘cause they get drunk or they have a real brannigan an’ they start swearin’ at each other in Polish, an’ then my mother will hide on my father, an’ he’ll haf ta spend the rest of the night findin’ ‘er—which ain’t easy when you’re drunk an’ cin hardly take one straight step after the next. Know what I mean? She moved toward him as if she wanted to confide in him. She was dressed in nothing but a smock splotched with dirt, with torn shreds on the bottom hems, that flapped limply in the breeze around her ankles. Her head was thin and her nose jutted out like a grapnel, with a saddle of freckles on it that looked just about ready to disappear. She eyed him as though she were searching for something on his clothes, and then she pointed a finger at him and spoke: You ain’t gunna throw me out, are ya? I mean, you ain’t no guard here, are ya?

Oh! Naw, naw, Jesus, no! I just come out here ta see how the lake looked after the storm this after. Ya know? But I wouldn’t be out here, if I was you, with only a slip on. Aren’tcha cold or anything?

She trained her deep eyes upon him, and for a while he thought they glistened like two wet marbles hung aloft in a windy gloam: His reverie was interrupted by her voice, which was suddenly angry and heated.

No, don’t you never think that, buster. I know jus’ what I am doin’. You ain’t gunna tell me I’m doin’ nothin’ wrong. ‘Cause … Gee, ya know ya got pretty nice blue peepers, kid. I’m a Polack; I’m suppose’ ta have blue eyes, but I don’t … It wouldn’t be half so cold if ya’d stand in front o’ me here an’ sort o’ break the wind.

Out on the lake, just beyond their sight, a tired fog-horn blatted and startled them both. From the dusk a cabin cruiser materialized along the crease of white between the grey of the sky and the black-green of the water; it ploughed toward them, dragging fronds of white water along its hull to cut the opaque sameness of the lake. Soon the cruiser was sighing and floundering in the wavelet of its own halted momentum beside the jetty, and two tipsy voices called for Carol, baby from the stanchions beneath a canopy in the stern. Owen looked back at the jetty a few times while he was walking back the path to his parents’ cabana; but he caught only vague shapes, like tarnished bells, cluttering the jetty.

Chapter 2

He remembered her well enough so that he recognized her the second time they met—a week later, just before the end of another storm; when the rain thundered from the swollen sky like transparent Brussels-sprouts, and the sun struggled to glimmer through the dull congestion of weather, a primeval creature from the dawn of time set to dispel Gloom and Chaos. He was rowing a clapboard dinghy across the lake from the promontory where he used to practice diving, the hollow cluck and spank of his oars drowned by the chatter of the rain, when he spotted another dinghy lying to and pitching among some skerry-rocks by the shore, with a dirty yellow figure in it, turned toward the sun, still and quiet. He called out to the dinghy just before he snubbed over to the rocks and shipped his oars; until she turned around and stared hard at him, with her long black hair matted by the rain and strewn all over her forehead and cheeks and chin.

You’re the guy las’ week, on the dock, before my parents came back … Don’ worry ‘bout me. I just come out he’ ta take in the sto’m. I sort o’ like to sit out here when the rains come. Sort o’ wild, ya know?

She kept staring at him with her dark burnt-out orbs, as though she were waiting for him to respond. And while they were both sitting there, bobbing in the wavelets that slapped against the rocks, caught in some terrific mute suspension between water and sky in the ragged bowls of a storm—then the rain stopped, abruptly, as if an invisible giant hand simply swept it aside and let it plummet over the edge of the earth. The sunlight raced into the noiseless void and nestled and snuggled into the cold water. And while Owen was staring at the strange new sunlight and the new-fuzzed contours of the hills and the hovels along the lake, she smiled, not at him but to the air. She unbuttoned her slicker and began to breathe in the raw air. He turned; and she looked at him almost with tears, her face averted and suddenly shy. She pulled the lapels of her slicker back over her chest and sat hunched, like an oversize gnarl, darting nervous glances at him from her stained-glass eyes; and she mumbled to the futtocks beneath her:

Y’ know, I am kind o’ cold. I shouldn’t ‘a’ opened my coat like that. So … kid … I don’t know what your name is … What is it?

Owen. Owen Davidson.

Yeah, Owen, well Jee-sus, why don’tcha haul me in to the dock? You look pretty strong. She shot a hard and timid stare at his face; then her eyes settled down and wandered like twin burglars over his chest and shoulders. Owen reached down and picked up his painter and secured it to a cleat on his gunwale and threw the other end in her lap; and with her hands clenched firmly around the painter, they chugged across the few yards of water to the jetty, plucking quietly against the cool glitter on the lake. Owen just stared at her all the way to the dock, with a strange feeling of warmth inside of him, a feeling he was almost afraid to feel too long—as though it were some uncertain beast that had escaped for the moment from its underground pen to the depthless surfaces of his soul. He would not have cared so much if she were just another girl, and this were just another day; but this was all different. He was aware, intensely aware, of the raw glow of the sky and the supple breath of life in the woods around the lake newly freed of rain and chill, of the gurgle and lap of the water against the hull, and the girl, coiled and delicate and shivering, with her skin pink in the wind and her hair plastered and disheveled over her face. She looked for the moment so helpless and tearful, and yet so powerful when she stared with her deep-set sphinx eyes, the same eyes that had sat mellow and mysterious in the soft glow of twilight the week before, as though lost and wrapped in the lonely valleys where gypsies and witches roam. He knew there was nothing special about her; but he suddenly wanted to talk to her, for hours and hours, to stare for a long time into those eyes and look at her body and limbs.

The padded prow of his dinghy nudged against the pads of the jetty, and he guided her boat alongside too. Even before she had climbed out he asked her her name, and he fell into a conversation with her as they walked off the jetty onto the trail that led back to the cabins. He spied a rotting log beside the trail jammed against the bole of an oak tree, and they both sat down on it, in the shifting light and shade from the crown of oak leaves above them. Their voices resounded like lush chords in the toneless bluster of the wind:

You prob’ly thought I was some kind o’ real do-do out there in the rain. But … you see (And she shot him a glance full of bitterness and fear.) I really like to be out in a storm like that and watch the whole world bust apart. And it’s fun (I mean it. Really!) ta shive’ all ove’ you’ body an’ breathe in the ai’. See, it’s like a new world every time. Like as if the old world was demolished ta smithereens an’ a new world entire came to replace it every time it rains. I … Jee-sus, I bet you think u’m some kind o’ really super crazy freaky girl.

Her lips were taut and looked like sardines.

No, no, I just … Well, you know, I really never heard anybody talk about the rain like that. I mean, to me it’s just a time to take cover, or to get out o’ wherever you are, if you’re outside. You know, the sky gets overcast, and the air gets cold, and you haf ta pull in the tarps an’ things like that. But ya sure do have a good imagination, I’ll say.

Well, O-wen, (She over-enunciated the syllables of his name, as a faint smile invaded her cheeks.) it certainly looks like we’ll jus’ have ta let big guys with brawn like you rescue us dear little maids who like to sit out in bad weather and philosophize. She clasped her hands in her lap, and looked askance at him, as if coiled and waiting for him to make the next move.

Hey, ah, Carol. Look, do you stay around this lake all summer? I mean, I don’t even know you. Do you go to high school here? I mean … well, you must know what I mean. You’re a girl. So, can I see you next weekend, like, say, Saturday night?

She stared at him with her eyes a dull glow—hard and subterrene—and ratcheted out a reply:

You prob’ly wouldn’t like me. See, I’m not the kind o’ girl you play tennis with. You’ve never heard of a good Polish tennis player, have you? Unless he was a Jew and had about six million stashed away. I’m not the cheerleader type, and I don’t dream about hamburger, coke, and French fries at night. See, you look like you’re prob’ly a first-class jock and a good student and all. Like you’d marry one of those Miss Elk’s Clubs of the Year and become a stud floor manager at a department staw with a couple of football trophies in your office for all the salesgirls to see. Her expression suddenly clouded. Hey, I’m sorry if I said anything nasty. I cin get pretty catty sometimes. And she stared disconsolately down at the log.

Look, he returned. I can’t say how I look or what I look like. I jus’ know (He gulped and grunted and spoke to her downcast eyes.) that I like the way you look. I mean, it’s not as though you’re a really beautiful girl, or a knock-out; it’s just … oh, how can you say it? You just seem to make me want to talk with you ─ an’ be with you. I have no idea if you’ll like me. Truth is, I hardly know anything aboutcha, really. So, look, if you aren’t gunna give me any answer ta what I asked ya, I’ll jus’ say goodnight right now, an’ that’ll be it. It’s startin’ ‘o get dark, you know.

Okay, she said and darted up from the log. Here. I’ll show ya. I live in the cabin without the po’ch, with the dirty greasy windows—or at least I sleep there at night. I can’t say as much for my parents. They must think it’s still Prohibition, an’ when they spot a nice quiet nook out in the countryside like this, they think it’s the place ta fill up on illegal hooch and futz around with their beer-buddies. It’s up the’. See where a’m pointin’?

Following her finger, he finally made out a swart dumpy cabin on the crest of a knoll; behind it the setting sun flared like the lit end of a cigarette. They walked up to the dingy windowpanes in the front, that stared with the orangish glint of a single bare table lamp out at the somnolent colony of cabanas, cabins, lean-tos, and sheds. She rapped hard at the front door. The noise reverberated immediately over the swales and knolls and trees around the cabin, but it brought no response from inside. And she turned her eyes on Owen, dull, leashed, and furious:

Shit! Fuck! Piss! Goddam! And cunt! The assholes. Here I am, about ta shiver myself ta death, an’ they’re off again—the toads! So, a’ll haf ta sit out here an’ share my germs with the moss an’ chat with rabbits an’ mosquitoes ‘til they come.

Look, uh, Carol, why don’t you come to our cabana? It’s not far at all─just take this path over the hill, gee to your right after about a hundred yards onto a gravel path, cross over a plank bridge, an’ you’re there. You can spend the night with us.

She snickered over her taut lips at him. An’ just where are your little ol’ parents tonight? Or do they encourage their progressive son to do this kind of thing?

Jesus, I didn’t mean that! Come on. Give me a break. What kind of a guy do you think I am?

I can’t be sure. You’re so dull it’s hard to say. Do you stay up late at night memorizing clichés?

All right, all right. Funny, I admit, funny. But, just seriously, for a moment. You can sleep with my mother. She’s got a big mattress.

Hey, jughead, look, jus’ because I’m not all peaches an’ cream the second day I ever seen a guy don’t mean I’m, like, no lesbo. Besides, I’ve always preferred the company of girls of about my own age. Her eyes prowled furtively over his features, then sank to the night-stained soil and the tussocks of grass at her feet. Naw, naw, I’ll just stay he’. They’ll be home, I guess … sometime befo’ the Second Coming.

You’re sure? I offered it to ya as a friend. I mean that.

Yeah, I know, boy scout. Too bad I’m not a little old lady, eh? I’ll really get the royal carpet from you, right? You gents like ta be nice when ya think we’re defenseless.

Hey, come on. Why do you haf ta be like that? I’m just trying ‘o get ta know ya. That’s all.

Well, you have Buckethead! In the living flesh, without my permanent wave, without my mascara, or rouge, but still bewitching, no doubt, in an Old World, peasanty sort of way. You know. (She rounded and faced him square.) I’m Polish, Polack to you, I bet—but any Pole worth his salt will tell ya he’s no peasant but the descendant of a once proud and noble Polish family that has hit on hard times for about the past three or four hundred years, because of the lousy Prussians, the creepy Russians, and the god-damned Austrians. That’s how the old man always says it."

The muffled echo of feet and voices from the dirt trails and the hoots of owls in the branches and the chirrup and saw of crickets and grasshoppers in the grass greeted the sudden cessation of the wind. They were suddenly no longer alone. She looked at him askance, as if she were tired of him; she wrapped her yellow slicker around her throat like a cassock, and her face froze. Above them a half-moon spread a pale discarnate glow over the bare windless dome of the night sky. She began to talk again, speaking in the direction of a cluster of rocks at her feet.

She looked up at him, and a smile fled across her face and disappeared. Then she softened for a moment; her body seemed to relax and burst into a wary bloom, and then recoil. Her eyes were soft and lively; they captured and reflected bits of the pale moonlight. And she breathed the way she had breathed on the lake that afternoon, in deep and weary gasps. I don’t dance after lunch because I sneak ove’ ta Room 214 ta work on my etchings. By locke’ numbe’s 643, down nea’ the end of Edith P. Billingsgate Memorial Corridor, just outside Room 331. I go home on Bus 16-A. Now, scat! Okay?

Owen walked off without a word, now and then peeking back over his shoulder; until he saw her sag down against the wood of the cabin beside the front steps and glare sulkily at her feet.

Chapter 3

Carol was not new in town, so he learned; he had just never met her before. Her father was the day-shift foreman at the Security Data-Processing plant. She was the eldest child of three born to Roman and Konstantsya Przywalski. She lived in a moldy saltbox house near the railroad tracks beside a lumber yard rank with ferns and long grass frequented more by bees and gnats and midges and mosquitoes than people. This lumber yard glinted during the hot spring and summer days like a scene from a suburb of Hell around which the brilliant disembodied souls of the damned might crowd and shout in some surrealistic dream. The house was shoved into place along with ten other houses, distinguishable from one another only by their varying degrees of dilapidation, on one side of a street called Pilsner Lane. The walls of the house were fronted with calcimined wood shingles and two square windows on either side of a front door painted red, and shipped and split in several spots along the grain of the wood.

Owen saw her again on Tuesday of the next week standing beside Locker No. 643, just before school let out; he made a date with her on the spot for the next weekend to row with him in his dinghy. And so it went. Week after week she always obliged him, not (it seemed) because she liked him, but because she desperately wanted to get away from home. She would sit in the stern sheets with her knees crossed and her slender torso hunched and clutched by her sun-browned arms and her strong lithe fingers; and talk, with her face fixed on the waves or the bubbles around the oar-blades or the coils of rope or the lunch-hamper in the bottom or the cleats on the tops of the gunwales—and occasionally on him—cold and furious or plaintive or sarcastic, but sometimes with a deep longing note that rose to fill the ashy rigidity of her eyes with flashes of solitude and emptiness. Owen was never quite able to explain to himself why she attracted him; (nor did he understand why she always wanted to be with him, since she spent most of her time twitting him about his short hair and his boyish face and laconic speech). But he knew he felt strangely moved whenever he saw her, as if about to weep and quiver all over; except that whenever he began to feel kind, or sorry for her, her face would change, and she would appear suddenly tough and hard. (She reminded him of a ragged gnarly pioneer wife, sighting the cold and hostile expanse of nature, by a scree of stubble or a lifeless bolson, in the echo of loneliness and waste). He felt that some zealously guarded coals of outrage and bitterness smoldered somewhere deep inside her; and he sometimes felt, in moments of weakness and intoxication, a desperate desire to plunge into the vat of her venom and burn out the dead ballast and numbing loneliness within himself.

And she always brought to mind a dream of his. It had made its appearance first when he was still quite young, and it was vague and blurred and confusing. Now it was clear—photographically clear—but none the less confusing; and it recurred of late with an agonizing frequency. He was on a podium, a frictionless, bright metal podium, in a gymnasium filled with neither odors nor sounds, with walls made of the same frictionless metal as the podium. And he was performing for a crowd of people, people with monochrome skin and monotone voices, urging him on with an identical chorus of tuneless chants. But he never knew exactly what it was he was performing for them; and for some reason he could not observe the performer (who was himself) well enough to find out. But he always felt the same sensation, the same dreadful conviction that this was all he could do, all he would be doing for all times; and wanted to tell that performer on the podium to quit his act, to leave the gymnasium and those metallic-eyed people ranged in rank and row before him. But he couldn’t reach him, and he wanted, when he finally felt the terror of it all, to cry loud and long; but the performer on the podium couldn’t cry. He would shout (in the dream) and brandish his fists; but there was nowhere to land his dukes in that powerless, odorless, immaculate gymnasium. And then he would clench his fists against the sides of his mattress, his body tense, paralyzed, as his mind slowly shifted in torture from the mute timeless suspension of dream to the drab empty melancholy of things and space and time.

Owen lived on the other side of town from Carol, in a roomy split-level ranch house with large picture-windows looking out on rolling yellow and green country knolls, a clinker-and-cement false chimney on one side and a two-car garage on the other. In the back was a flagged piazza with a replaceable green awning for the rain, occupying the alcove between the rump of the kitchen on the left and the rump of the two-car garage on the right. Round it all was a green lawn, with a sandbox and a partially corroded jungle gym to the right of the driveway and a pergola just to the left of the chimney. On three sides, screens of oaks, maples, and birches divided the Davidson property from three other properties; on the fourth was a tarmac road, Tyson W. Trueblood Drive.

Owen owned a car—an old Army jeep with a cowl and no top, painted red over the original coat of olive drab—, so he could ride to Carol’s house if he wanted. For the first summer in his life his mind was not on football and exercises. In past summers he would run wind-sprints devoutly every morning, lift dumbbells and barbells lying flat on a picnic bench in the back of the garage in the afternoon, study his playbook in the evening, and then do some isometric exercises before he turned in to bed; but he didn’t think of those things at all this summer—or of the self-styled wholesome girls with pearly cheeks and toothpaste breaths he used to date, or of the tuxedo and cummerbund of which he had been so fatuously proud at his junior prom. All that had plunged into oblivion. The summer was calm, but it was a strange calm filled with uncharted loneliness and barren suns, and heats that barely twitched and twitted him. He spent many afternoons and early dusks with Carol—in his dinghy, or exploring caves on a holm that arched out of the middle of the lake like the end of a drumstick, or on foot along the trails and dirt paths that snaked and writhed in the hot sun, beneath the cover of elm and birch and maple trees that fled down to the lakeside from the sedge and grass higher up on the hills. And despite all this togetherness he realized that he had not even begun to get to know her; he knew only that she drew him to her all the time, that she ruffled the dreadful, primevally inert anguish he felt. Carol was performing for him like a marionette before a child who could not hope to grasp its subtleties and disguises, but wonders and warms at it nonetheless.

Her favorite haunts were the caves on the holm. They went, usually, at twilight, when the owls cried like muezzins and the winds moaned dull lections to the monastic creak and sway of the trees. Carol’s eyes glowed as she poked into every spur and jog of the caves and motioned him to follow. And at the end of a session of spelunking they would sit on a dark brow of dirt and detritus on top of the caves in the raw half-light and the wind. The dying light played upon her now vague articulation to give a far-off gypsy color to her—at times, he thought, like an ugly gnome, at other times like a gorgeous elfin queen, sometimes sultry and alluring, other times wildly alone and ecstatically chaste.

One day they had just come out of one of the caves and were trotting down a sand furrow between two stands of oaks—Carol in a shift with a bathrobe cinch around her waist, and tongs; and Owen in a blue and white bicycle shirt and olive-drab dungarees and moccasins—when he heard a crack, and then heard Carol scream and sob. She was on her rump, holding her right ankle with her knees gathered up to her teeth. But Owen didn’t feel like doing anything right off; he just stared down at her with dumb ox-eyes and watched her writhe and whimper for some time, his eyes fixed on the blue swelling on her ankle.

Jesus Christ, do I haf ta scare the wolves out o’ their graves before you’ll do something? she snapped. Carol flung back her arms and let them prop her against the dirt behind her, trembling and weak. She was showing him her pain, and a certain weary terror crept into her eyes; but it was only after some more moments that he put his clumsy hands around her ankle.

Ow, buckethead! Forget ta screw yer brain in ta place this mo’ning? That’s not a head o’ lettuce on sale, ya know? It’s my ankle; it’s alive. (And she cried again before she got a grip on herself.) Why don’tcha row ta the shore an’ get somebody—a bones, or maybe a stretche’? It’s broken, can’t ya see? Or least ways it’s good as broken. So, hightail it, an’ leave me alone. I don’t want you getting’ yourself juiced up watchin’ me cry an’ groan. Leave me alone ‘til I’m strong again.

He left her exactly where she had fallen and climbed into his dinghy and rowed off, his heart in palpitations and his eyes smudgy and numb. He found a few people in boats by the jetty, and he brought them along with some gauze and splints and iodine, back to the holm.

She looked completely different: she lay stretched out on the ground, motionless, while the tattered soiled hems and cuffs of her shift glanced along the ground like weightless eerie feathers; her skin was no longer its customary burlap color, but was like a dirty-yellow metalwork tinted green with age; and her body seemed to have shrunk, except for the purplish bulge of muscle-knots and busted blood vessels around her ankle. Her eyes stared up at the night sky with a look of clouded arctic outrage, like the eyes of Daphne losing her humanness. She stirred and rose up when she heard their footsteps.

Hoist me up. I’ll swing between your shoulders.

After they had bandaged her, they carried her to the dinghy and laid her down between a salty coil of rope and a hassock, between the thwarts, just beneath the snap of wind above the gunwales, and Owen rowed them all back to the half-oblong glow of the cabins and mosquitoes around the jetty. A woman—a middle-aged woman with coiffed platinum-blonde hair—offered to keep her in her cabana overnight. Owen asked Carol if she needed him for anything more; but she just glared at him with the cold fury of helplessness and a strong tint of sadness in her face, and when Owen was out of sight, Carol collapsed into the arms of the platinum-blonde woman and cried.

Owen spent the night in his parents’ cabana. He awoke with the first stiff chatter of sparrows and the hwhit-hwhut of the bobwhites, and dashed out of bed and sped along trails still wet with the raw chrism of the morning. The bold, open blue of the sky gaped at him like a child and seemed to tremble with a presentiment of adventure, as his heart and temples pounded. When he reached the cabana, she was awake already, lying on a palliasse on the screened verandah; she sighed and rustled in her dirty-linen covers. He walked up the steps and pushed open the screen door with his knuckles and said:

Hi, champ. How is it this morning?

She made no attempt to rise or corkscrew around to see him.

She spoke in a soft reedy voice.

What’s it look like? Has the ugly thing gone down at all? I bet it looks like a bloody bee-hive.

He stepped forward over the sagging floorboards. Carol was the color of dead leaves. Outside, the morning light oozed off the leaves and branches and shrubs and roofs like a white and gold puree; he felt dense and solemn. He removed the rags from her ankle gingerly and saw that the swelling was gone; only the purple color remained.

It looks a lot better, he observed. Have ya tested it out, like, ta see if it hurts?

No. I didn’t dare. But let me try. Here. And she twisted her ankle from side to side, and her eyes sparkled and relaxed when it didn’t hurt. Boy what a freakin’ night! It was a bum, I tell ya. I felt like one hell of a schleck … ya see, I kept on wakin’ up with the weathe’ so muggy an’ sticky ya felt like screamin’ ‘n’ these damn flyin’ bugs battin’ theirselves silly against the screen, ‘til I thought one of ‘em was fer su’ gunna bust a hole in the screen. An’ these creepy frogs ‘n’ crickets ‘n’ all that—Jesus, Mary and Joseph! You’d think they was involved in some kind o’ protest. I can see the signs now— Graveyard Shift Frogs and Crickets Against the War. But worst bum part of it was not being able ta move. It was so damn hot, an’ I was jus’ lyin’ there with these shots o’ pain rippin’ right through me, an’ I couldn’t do nothing, not nothin’ about it. The only thing I could do was sit there an’ let all that pain flow in an’ take root an’ grow there. Dontcha’ think that’s just terrible? She twisted over on her pelvis and propped her head on her palm and trained her eyes on him—but with an expression that he hadn’t seen from her before: she had for the moment lost the hard edge and defensiveness and seemed to want to communicate with him, in a manner oddly gentle and almost friendly.

I guess it’s a tough fer anybody, he said, off the top of his head.

Don’t ya know what I mean, though? Can’t ya see how much I hate it? It was better you weren’t here. That’s why I shooshed you home. It’s … Yeah, ya know, it ain’t that I don’t like you or anything.

Well, I certainly hope you don’t. I hope I’ve been doin’ more than just markin’ time this summer.

Gee. Ya know, it’s funny, me goin’ out with a jocko type like you. You with your big sure quarterback eyes an’ yer apple-pie mouth. I thought a girl had to be a cheerleader an’ have blonde hair an’ be able ta sing The Star-Spangled Banner in a high soprano an’ have a daddy with a yacht on the side ta make it with your type. You’re sort o’ queer, like you ain’t what you’re suppose’ ta be, judging from yer face.

He scraped a cane chair across the floorboards and sat down beside her legs and looked at her body sprawled limp and crumpled, and her eyes flecked with fear and surprise. He began to stroke his fingers over her wound, and watched to discover her reaction; while a new feeling he had never felt before limped and shivered inside him, till he stammered:

You know. You’re a nice girl. E-even better than that, you’re a nice person. I don’t care what ya say.

A wave of warm happiness was checked immediately by a chill blast of fear; he winced and crumpled up and looked away from her, but he kept massaging her ankle, until she rose up and grabbed hold of his hands and removed them.

Hey, wait till the bones comes. Tugboat Annie said she was goin’ ta one o’ the cabins down the trail ove’ the’ ta find a doc she says is here on vacation. Hope e’ don’t skull me fer getting’ a bum ankle out o’ season.

Sorry, I just felt … felt like doin’ it. Ya looked so damn lonely an’ depressed, an’ you’ve been so open and nice this morning, I just wanted ta help ya feel better. Y’ know, it’s the first time you’ve been open ta’ me. Ya know what I mean?

She didn’t answer this, but just stared at him and sighed as if in boredom and riveted her gaze on the fine-cement ceiling of the screen-verandah, until the platinum-blonde woman returned and banged open the door with the vacationing doctor behind her, and they settled themselves in two other cane chairs to look at Carol. The platinum-blonde woman introduced herself to Owen as the ex-Mrs. McFeeley. She was a lumpish woman of about fifty who was using her first alimony cheque to spend her first vacation in twenty-five years. (Her former husband believed in work above all else. He also believed that work was a punishment for mortal sinfulness. So, even more than work, he practiced gloom.) The ex-Mrs. McFeeley glared at Owen when she walked in and flew at him for removing the cold rags from Carol’s ankle, even though Owen explained that the rags were quite