Dark Water - Laura McNeal [61]
Les Enfants du Paradis began, and I shifted the laptop a little so that he could see it better—one half of the keyboard on his leg, one half on mine. I thought he liked it, but I wasn’t sure. He might have nodded now and then to make me think he liked it.
At the intermission, I said, “Do you like it?”
Another nod. “Los cangrejos,” he said, and went to check the floating milk jugs, so I followed him. When Amiel lifted them to show me, he grinned at the crayfish that were stuck there, six of them sucking down the lamb’s liver.
We boiled them over the fire in the roofless house. Pretty soon I had to follow Amiel’s example as he poked a fork inside the red shells of the crusty things and plucked out bits of crabby stuff. He began to extract whole lumps of chubby meat, while I just kept shredding it, and when he saw my clumsy efforts, he held out his fork of cray meat for me to take with my mouth. At first he was laughing, but as the meat got closer to my mouth, he stopped. I took the bite and chewed. He wiped my lower lip with his finger and then he leaned back. After that, he ate his crayfish and I ate mine. The weather had turned hotter, and I was desperate for a swim, a thing, strangely, we’d never done together. I wasn’t wearing a swimsuit, but it was so hot and humid that I wanted to duck under the water in my clothes.
“I’m going to swim,” I said. Sometimes, if I knew the Spanish word for something, I liked to show off. “Nadar,” I said. “Yo.”
He gave me the look my Espanish deserved, but I walked to the deepest spot on his side of the river, dramatically plugged my nose, and plunged in. I have to admit I wondered if the crayfish would mistake me for lamb’s liver. I treaded water and then, gingerly, let my feet touch bottom. “Amiel?” I said.
He appeared on the bank and stepped out of his shoes.
He took off his shirt.
Unmoored, I looked away. That was all he removed, though. He stepped into the water as you would step off a cliff, still wearing his jeans, and the two of us laughed. The skies got darker and heavier until the thing that almost never happens in summer here happened: it began to sprinkle and, briefly, to rain. It didn’t last, but for a while we swam in the dimpled water and listened to the drops falling on all the sun-warmed rocks and roasted dust.
It stopped within fifteen minutes, and we climbed onto a table rock to dry. The air smelled sharply of minerals and lead. I saw the hats of walkers on the other side of the river, heard their voices and the jingling collar of a dog. I ducked my head, though we were doing nothing wrong. I thought briefly of my computer in Amiel’s house, but I didn’t want to go back there and check on it. If I did, it would seem like I was collecting my things, and if I collected my things, the day would end. I would have to go home.
Instead, I gestured for Amiel to follow me to the roofless house where we’d cooked the crayfish and drowned the fire. I didn’t have a plan. I was vaguely sleepy, vaguely hungry. The ruin had a strange glow in the aftermath of the rain, the old white stucco bright against the spent gray clouds. The sharp mineral scent of the air gave way to woodsmoke and fish scales as we stood in the center of the wide-open house, and the silence became something you could feel all over, like cold. I didn’t know what to do, so I stuffed my hands into my pockets, which were still wet, so I couldn’t get more than my fingertips in.
“Why won’t you tell me about the accident?” I asked.
Amiel stood near me, and I felt the old helplessness, when what I wanted to say I couldn’t say. He reached down for his whittled stick and said hoarsely that after his father stopped sending money, his grandfather decided Amiel’s mother should be his wife. “Mi abuelo,” he said, either translating