SIXTEEN
Big people were mostly alike, men anyway. All of Emma's men acted mostly the same way. At first they'd be kinda far away like you knew something they didn't and you made them nervous anyway. Then they'd ask you a million questions like they were your best friend or long-lost stepfather or someone, then finally they'd get this lame, jokey tone in their voices and everytime they talked their eyes would be pulled way up in their foreheads like some frog or something. It was supposed to be cool, Molly guessed.
It's because of incest. Emma had a book that said that adults are threatened by the intense sexuality of adolescents, and so they turn them into objects of ridicule or targets of aggression.
"You want to make fun of me, Flynn?"
"What?" He was pulling in the fish for her, and she thought she'd test his psychological stability. It was another one of those flat, spiny things that he said had all kinds of names. When he gave her her choice, she decided they would call them pumpkin seeds cause that was an asshole name for a fish, but she figured he would think it was cute enough for her.
He got it in his hand, his pitching hand, and slid the hook back out from under the gickey transparent lip, then he flopped it back on the water. You could see it screw itself down through the light and then disappear in the darker water down below. Dumb shit would still bite the next hook you dropped. Already she had seen that happen, Flynn threw one down and it bit her damn hook and made the bobber sink. Pumpkin seeds sucked, as far as fish go.
"Make fun of what?"
"You feel like you want to beat me up or something...?"
"Jesus!" he said, "What the hell are you talking about? Look out, damn it! Your bobber's a foot under. Hook him!"
"Aha!" Molly said, "You do feel anger."
She purposely let the pumpkin shit swim away with the bait.
It was calm in the bay, real smooth and hot after the flop flop trip down the channel. She kind of liked it better, even though there were bugs and all these crappy little fish. At least Flynn was starting to get a little less hyper. For the first hour or so you would of thought he was that geek Jim or whatever his name was from Wild Kingdom, the guy Marlin Perkins is always getting to go into the pen with the wild pigs or wrestle alligators.
And he was sad. You could tell that even in the middle of all the cool talk. Maybe the big sap did miss Emma like he said.
Though she couldn't see who would.
What was Emma doing right now? Probably sitting on some big rock by the river, getting real daring and pulling her skirt up and tucking it under her like a diaper so she could tan her thighs. Maybe even letting her straps slide down over her shoulder to get some sun there while she read some book about sad women and dinosaurs or any of that crap she read. Actually Emma hadn't worn any underwear at all except for the tube top thing that held her prostheses in place. She was getting daring.
"Can I take my shirt off, Flynn?"
"Christ!," he said, "Spare me from pre-pubes..."
Molly laughed. It was a great word, pre-pubes, it made you think of something growing on you, like yeast infection or something completely gross. But when she laughed, she banged against the bottom of the boat and made a big noise, just like he warned her against.
"Oops," she said and stuffed her hand into her mouth like it was what made the noise. It made her laugh again.
"What do you want to take your shirt off for?"
"Tan."
"What you got on under it?"
"A bra."
"Ha," he said and pissed her off.
When your breasts got cut off, did that part of your body just go away? I mean, was it something that didn't count anymore, like your knee or something.
"Answer a question?"
"No," he said, "Fishing's not talking. Anyway, I'm getting tired of the twenty questions routine."
"You and Emma make love?"
"Shit!" he said and banged the boat himself. "I swear I'll run us right back if you don't cut that flirty-gurty crap!"
Flirty-gurty! Jesus, Flynn was a hundred years old sometimes.
Actually she already asked Emma once, not about Flynn, the operation. You could ask Emma anything.
"No..." she had said, "It's still part of me... I mean, I still like to be caressed there, you know... Oh shit, you know Molly, it feels good but I don't... I don't trust everyone with the scars."
"Why?"
"They're mine, darling. I earned them. It takes a special man to be understanding about some things..."
She had let it go at that, Emma would only tell you anything up to a point, and that point probably didn't include telling which of them were understanding men. It was just like when she had asked about how it felt to make love. Emma would go far enough to say it was warm and close and it built to something that took you over, but she wouldn't say exactly what it felt like to have that thing stuck there. And she absolutely threw a shit fit about calling it fucking.
Or calling it "it" for that matter.
In fact, Emma had a whole set of careful words about it. Not making love to, but making love with; not rubbing, but caressing; not frenching, but another kind of kiss, a deeper kiss.
"Let's do it?"
"What?" Flynn had the same scaredy pre-pube tone.
"Twenty questions."
He pulled the rope on the motor, nosed the boat back out toward the channel. Bye Cranberry Creek.
Little packets of spray bounced up from the floppy front of the boat and went shooting back over their heads. Molly ducked them, one by one. When you got going the wind sort of made you grin all the time, the way it pushed down your throat and pressed against your eyes and face. That's why people on boats always look happy, Molly thought, they're bored to shit but the wind gets them grinning.
"Prostheses," she said.
Flynn shouted back to her through the wind and the grumbling sound of the motor. "What? I can't hear you..." He throttled it down so it sounded like a blender and the boat kinda just dropped in the water, real satisfied like. She liked that, how the boat would respond.
"I was only talking," she said, "It's the name of a guy in one of those old time Greek stories."
Flynn nodded, and sort of set his jaw, looking along the river like he expected to see something there. Rhinos crossing maybe. It was surprising what he would believe. She moved back in the boat to be nearer to him, crouching real low as she moved, stretched way out to hold the two sides.
"Careful," he said, but he didn't try to help her. He could be okay when he wasn't hyper.
"A hero," she explained, still running a game on him about prostheses.
He nodded again, keeping a careful eye on the dreaded rhinos while Marlin took a moment to say a few things about Mutual of Omaha.
"What are you grinning about, girl?"
"Sex and violence and drugs," she said, "Don't call me girl."
All he did was nod, she started to think of his head like the bobber, a round wooden thing with a stick through it.
There was something she didn't want to talk about. Something she wasn't sure if she understood at all. The more time went by the more Flynn just started to become somebody like anybody else, and that was okay -- in fact it was good, now that he wasn't being the good guy or hyperspace freak-- but it made her feel weird about herself. I mean, you find out that someone who was always your hero knows your whole goddamn family, and that's kind of exciting. Then you spend a few days around him, and that's weird but not so bad. You even know that your mother is probably making love with, caressing, and giving another kind of kiss to him, a deeper kiss, and that's okay too, even if it doesn't quite make sense ( I mean, he was around for years and they never saw him and you go away and come back and he's there and "confused" according to Emma and it's like he's one of her patients, except he's not dying.).
Is he?
"You're not dying, are you, Flynn?"
He turned the throttle way down now, so it was like an eggbeater sound. She expected him to say Jesus again and give her that pre-pube look. Instead he just looked at her, and suddenly it was much worse about how he wasn't really a hero anymore but only somebody, and she felt like she wanted to cry but she didn't know why and it was a stupid thing to rhyme like that and it only made her feel worse and why the shit didn't he say something!
She was a strange girl, Flynn knew. From the moment they had cleared Chippewa and put Emma out of sight it had been all questions, all keeping him off.
"Who was the best pitcher ever, Flynn? Except you, I mean..."
"Henry Schmidt," he had said without pausing.
"Who?"
"Henry Schmidt. Went 22 and 13 for Brooklyn in 1903 or so. One year up and never pitched again."
She had turned her whole head cockeyed to look at him, as if hunting for a hint that he was putting her on. She lifted her hand from where it trailed in the water, let it trickle down upon the bottom of the boat in a pattern. She let herself be convinced that he was serious.
"Why?"
In the beginning of the trip, before she tired of the effort and got a little bored, all their talk had really been shouting, across the length of the boat. It was an odd feeling, strangely reminiscent of being interviewed on the field after a game. The announcer with a finger pressed against the little earphone, the microphone thrust in your face like a grey cloth ice cream cone, and all the fans shouting from the stands, all the noise of people making their way out of the park. You talked through a wall of noise then too, and only the announcers face and your own little earphone told you what you or he had said; and even then you would have to pick your voice out through the noise of the director in the truck, whispering on a track that only you and the announcer could hear that there was twenty seconds to go, get ready camera three, ready to roll the credits, one more Brian.
And how do you view your career now, Jack?
In twenty seconds.
"Because," Flynn shouted through the noise, then he throttled down so she would understand, "because he measured himself, or so I guess. I don't know a damn thing about him except the stats, but he had to have measured himself. Added it up and decided to go back home. It takes courage to do that at any time, but once you've seen the heights... well, he must have been a special man. I mean, the game was different then, a guy named Happy Jack Chesbro won forty games back then, but still...you win twenty some games, you get a decision in thirty games, you've seen the heights then. You've been to the mountain. Takes a whole lot to walk away when there's games to be won, a whole lot..."
He had expected her to say something. Expected praise, really: you've been there too, Jack, or something like that. You walked away from the heights, you did, Flynn.
They were just coming up on the Summerland Group, about to cut back inward and fish the inlet. They were just short of wonderland, turning away just before the river broadened out into wonderland. He felt himself an enchanter, convinced himself that he was giving this lovely girl something of his own, his father's river, a boy's eyes, visions. There was that feeling of wanting to do something for someone so badly that you only dimly perceive that you are doing it for yourself. A great cloud of seemingly undifferentiated love all falling down on yourself. Team spirit and all...
She annoyed him with her silent acceptance of the truth. In the moment of telling her the story, Henry Schmidt was himself, Jack Flynn. It wasn't true, she saw that and said nothing. In the shallows the water formed itself into floating saucers, pockets of blue rocking into one another in an easy rhythm, smoothing into silver sheets. Now and again there was a little eddy, a minature water whirl, circling down. She watched him watch the water. He taught her to fish.
It was a lie, he had brought her here to ask her terrible questions not to give her things. There were matters which he had to understand and she could clear them for him, tell him things that Emma wouldn't.
I wish I were my father, he had thought, and I could summon her a great fish, a walleye with onyx eyes, an ancient pike with rainbow patches along its flanks and gills of crimson.
I wish I were her father, Henry Schmidt, Yves of the flashing eyes, with magic in his fingers.
Now she asked if he was dying. It was too neatly done, too coincidental. He had to ask the things he did not really want to ask her.
They were playing games with him, and he knew how to play games.
She looked stricken by his silence, and so he smiled to ease her, slipped the throttle down another notch to choke the motor off, and reached foreward to slide the oars into the water. He let them sit in the locks, rocking up and down on the pins, while he stripped his teeshirt off for the rowing.
"Yuk," she said.
"What?"
"Those scars," she said, "They go all around your shoulder. Didn't it hurt?"
He had retrieved the oars and begun pulling them, reaching way forward on the retrieve, extending his whole back and legs on the pull, feathering lightly at the end of each stroke, the oarlocks pinging as he let the water go and brought the oars back to row again. It was hard going in this bastardized boat. He hadn't wanted to make her shift around while he changed benches to row properly, hadn't wanted to paddle-wheel her like the guides do, so he pulled them backwards, plowing the water against the flat stern and the heavy motor.
Oh for a double-ender, he thought, his arm already limp with the rowing.
"Hurt, yes...but not as much as it hurt before they operated..."
Nor as much as it hurt at the end, he thought, like part of you has died away. For the last few years it had been that way with every start. For the first inning or so it was as if something caught there, a great hump of bone, a knobby scar of muscle. It was a grinding ache, deep, not something present. You could feel it release with the pitch, literally feel the muscle mass begin to warm with the bloodflow, the ache receeding but never disappearing, gone like a boat to the horizon of a lake. Now and again you'd come from the side, just to let it ease, to feel the arm swing through like it had years before, move the batters back to let your arm breathe.
The numbness spread from the shoulders and forearms both, a radiating, gentle pain meeting at the elbow and bicep, occasionally surprising you with jolts of electrical shock you felt in the bone like thin hot wires. Sometimes these would come so strong you could feel them in your teeth, but none lasted beyond the time it took for the nerve to fire and then scream along the hot wires. Then, when you had learned again to ignore the oncoming numbness, the bone chips would start to ache, the pain gradually piercing through the dull throb of the elbow joint, until you could locate them exactly as an x-ray in your consciousness. You were sure you could cut them out if you could somehow get in there, operating on yourself as if opening clams with a knife, picking out the stones, flipping them off with the spring tip of the blade.
Then, almost without knowing it, you'd be there. The smooth water, the mindless place, the pain nothing more than a yoke across the shoulders, a cable of muscle, and the dim and borderless hurting low in the back. Tuck the chin, pull up and kick in the high leglift, power through from the legs, rotating the hips, opening them slowly out, rolling as the arm came over effortlessly unwinding in one long reach for the target, releasing right, feeling the stitches themselves as the fingertips ticked them at the last contact, setting it spinning, spinning, hearing it crack into the mitt as the formless pain caught up on the follow through, catching you up like a vacuum, the tail of a comet, as you straightened and waited for the ball to be returned.
By the middle innings the pain would begin to chisel down through the shoulder. Dull and narrow at first, it would open out through your core like an awl through a block of ice. It would grow as the game went on, establishing links, circuits, with the low back pain, the ache in the thighs, the numb arm, the white hot wires, until there were buzzers and momentary flares in distant, seemingly disconnected places. The bone along the arch of the right foot ringing with pain, a rib throbbing as if ripped from its covering, or your throat raw when you cleared it and bunching when you swallowed.
If you measured yourself before and after a game you'd see that you lost a half inch to an inch from the jolting of your vertebrae, driving yourself down into the mound like driving log pilings into river muck. Meanwhile the pitching arm would shrink and swell both. No matter what you did after the game, the muscles in the arm would begin to convulse, shuddering away like an eel hit by a ballpeen hammer. Little electric flares of pain sparked here and there in your body like fireworks. You couldn't lift your arm, couldn't stand to sit for long because of the constant aching of the lower back.
But you really never began to hurt until the following morning. In the morning the knives ripped against the shoulder, the back was stiff and heavy as concrete, in the morning the fingers stung and tingled with a constant shocking like a permanent case of pins and needles, in the morning your mind hurt and your arm was a rag and your head ached and your legs would not stand the weight. You just hoped you'd be happy, happy you hadn't let it get away on you in the eighth, happy they hadn't taken it away.
It was beautiful pain, startling as light.
"There's a lot of hurt in life, kid. Life is hurt..."
"No," she said, "No, it isn't, is it?"
First she spoke bravely, then she bit her lip and questioned. It was wrong, he was browbeating her. He pulled and the boat crawled up into the water, eased itself down. She was a child in designer clothes, a girl with a fearful man.
The river traffic spun in and around them. A big cruiser slowed to hail them, the man at the wheel tight with muscle, his stomach two columns of knotted muscles, slathered with oil.
Flynn waved him on. "Exercise!" he shouted, and the knotted man nodded, fired the cruiser back up, the water itself roaring with the inboard.
"I'm sorry," he said to her, "No, I'm not dying. Of course I'm not, it's my sister who is, you know that."
She stared toward the islands, all sophistication again, but wary nonetheless.
"You rowing us backwards on purpose?" she asked.
"You mind?"
She shrugged, Emma's shrug.
"Bet you didn't think this would take so long," he said, "I mean your mother and me..."
"God, Flynn, you are weird!" she said, "I don't care what you and Emma do with each other."
He laughed. "No, I mean you probably didn't think she'd have to spend as long on my case. I mean, she must have told you, you know..."
She didn't know. She thought for a minute he was seasick, what with the damn boat climbing up and down in the rocking water, and Flynn pulling away at the oars like Charles Antlas or whatever his name was, all the while they're getting nowhere. Just when she figured he was mellowed out, he suddenly has to get hyper again. Definite big person move on his part, but she figured there was no choice but to go with it and hope he didn't get them hit by any of the million motorboats that started to show up as soon as they cleared the mucky bay with the pumpkin shits.
"Emma doesn't have cases," she told him, "She calls them friends or patients, mostly friends... except for her real cases, you know, the people she drags in and tries to change their lives. But the dying people are her friends. I'm surprised she hasn't given you that crap about the air being filled with friends. Emma's a real card, she is, it's all Casper the Friendly Ghost with her."
Flynn was really working away his brain cells trying to come up with what to ask next. He even forgot to row for awhile, just when she spotted this big-ass freighter starting to make its way down the channel off in front of them a mile or so she guessed.
"I am real sorry about your sister," she said, figuring that might help him out.
It was turning out all wrong, she knew, and it was her fault for trying to live through it all before it happened, like Emma would say. She forgot about the river, how it could get all jammed with tourists and assholes, how the stupid big houses could get boring after awhile, how it took you forever to get anywhere even if you had a good boat, which this tub definitely was not. She had imagined something neat, a quiet place where there were ducks and reeds sticking up and flowers on the water. She imagined Flynn like he was on teevee, all in control of himself and careful looking. Now here he was sweating and rowing assbackwards, with a steamer bearing down on him and some cloud passing by turning the air cold and the water dark and purple under it.
She just had to figure it was Emma who had messed him up and turned him crazy.
"But what did she say about me?" he asked out of nowhere.
Molly thought he meant his sister.
"I never heard her say anything. I never saw her really, although Emma says we met once on one of her famous visits."
"I mean Emma. What did she say when she was coming down to meet me in Syracuse?"
"Jeez-zuz, Flynn! Are we in the same world?"
"I'm not sure," he said, "Did your mother plan to meet me?"
"Don't you know?"
"No," he said, "I'm not sure. I don't know what I know."
"No wonder your life is full of piss," she said, "You have to believe in what you see, Flynn. Even I know that..."
They were getting nowhere, Flynn thought, going literally upstream and against the current.
Suddenly he had a mind to show her the skiff, maybe even take it out and let it catch the air, see if he could handle it. They needed to start over again.
"You want to see the boat your father fixed for me?"
She nearly leapt from the seat.
"Fan-fuckin-tastic!" she shreiked.
"Can you watch your mouth?" he said, and pulled the start rope, throttling up.
It was all a put-on, Molly knew, the scream and the potty mouth, all to get him to stop ozone-ing out on her. Sometimes you had to do something to shake things up, especially with Emma's men. It was just what she needed now, another boat, another one of Yves' creations. A boat made out of inlaid breadboards and full of vegetables. But it lit Flynn's eyes up and she knew enough to know he needed that.
How would it be, she thought, to just stop like that, to be always twelve years old, inside your head, a lady outside and a kid inside. There was a kid named Jason in their class, with big lips and the nicest eyes, and you could always see him thinking, and there was a big dumb smile he had when he got something right and Mrs. Mendel would hug him cause he liked that when he was right, just grab him around he head and pull him to her, reaching down around him from the aisle and hugging him in his seat, and some asshole would maybe make a dumb remark or a smooching noise, but nobody much would laugh cause you could see his eyes so happy looking out at everybody else from where Mendel hugged him, like there were sparklers in his eyes and he was so damn proud to be there, so proud it would almost make you cry.
But it wasn't like that for Flynn's sister, Molly knew, they didn't have mainstreaming then, although they had trained her some according to Emma. Probably, she wouldn't even be mainstreamed anyway, probably she was just too much a retard to do anything about, except dress her in those goofy, pretty cotton dresses and put ribbons in her hair and bring her oranges. She loved oranges, Molly knew, cause Emma brought her them before she was sick and couldn't take care of herself any more.
She studied Flynn, he was looking for something. Emma said he was gathering them all in like a lost family because he was looking for something.
The big ship with the Shell Oil shell was far to their right, to starboard in the deep channel, cutting the water with its deep grey bow, the butterfly-shaped radar thing spinning slowly round and round like the tin figures Emma had which ran around a candle in the wind. A couple of sailors looked down over the rail at the boats speeding up and back below.
Mainstreaming. Jason was the name of a real hero from the Greek stories and he sought a golden fleece. Aphrodite rose from the sea on a seashell like the Shell Oil thing. She rose in foam, born of the severed member of her titan father. All the assholes had really had a field day when Mendel told that story. A dick floating in the water, a jet-propelled cock. They made blubbing sounds with their lips like motor boats, but for once Mendel didn't yell at them. She just sat there and stared out half-smiling like some things were hard to understand. Jason had been grinning back at everyone and making the motorboat sounds.
The boat rocked on the slow wake from the Shell freighter, but Flynn kept them pointed upriver, holding fast and moving slowly through the wonderland surrounding Boldt Castle.
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