The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [28]
But then Boyd started coming around. Woodrow took him out between four and five in the morning and brought him in early afternoon, a full day’s work, after which Boyd, being so new on the island, without a boat to tinker on all afternoon, nets of his own to mend, turned up wherever Maggie was: working her and Whaley’s patchy little garden, talking to Grady and Ellie up at the store, taking her bask in the late afternoon sun. One day he turned up beside her in the ocean. She was on her back, feet pointed toward Portugal. Dressed in her “suit,” her shift and sandals discarded on a dune. Boyd, near as she could tell, wore only a droopy pair of boxer shorts. He was well built, not too thin though, broad-shouldered, capable it appeared of heavy lifting.
She let him float awhile unacknowledged.
“I hear you’re wild,” he said after a while.
She heard a little fear in his voice, which made her like him—and what he said—better than if he’d come on all cocky.
“You must have been talking to somebody tame,” she said.
He snickered. “That’d be about everybody on this island.”
She put her feet down, jumped a coming wave, turned toward him for the first time since he’d appeared floating beside her.
“How do they act where you come from?”
He smiled and shrugged, and she understood him to say: “You got me. Harker’s Island ain’t much different.”
“The young and foolish act young and foolish all over,” she said, smiling at the thought of it, that insolent and selfish desire to make every moment feel better than the previous one.
“You’re not exactly old.”
“Not exactly, you say?” She laughed a little, but it was a forced laugh, conversational. “I’m nearly exactly old enough to be your mother.”
This was nearly exactly true on Yaupon, where women fattened up with children in their midteens. Plus, at the time she thought Boyd was even younger than he was.
“My mama’s ancient compared to you,” he said.
She studied him until he turned to her, at which point he was smacked unawares by a wave. She rose above him, buoyant in the swell. She thought about his name—transpose two little letters and it would read “body.” She shook her head, as if to clear the water from her ears, though there were thoughts, warm and shooting, she was really trying to clear.
“I mean she’s not that old, but you’re not nearly so old as she is.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I know you love your mama. Let’s go in before you drown,” she said, windmilling away from him in a backstroke turned breast as the breakers receded and the water shallowed.
They sat in the dunes watching the waves roll golden in the declining light. He pulled a flask of homemade wine from the pocket of his jeans, and as they sipped he talked about growing up on Harker’s Island, hearing stories about the home place, stories about his father the fisherman. He had been in the army—he’d joined right out of high school and had been stationed in Germany—and this surprised and pleased her, for he was so innocent, so tentative and nervous in her presence, and it amazed her that he could have done all that and still grow so scared around a woman that he let the waves slap him silly. Of course she was wise enough to know that there is no reasoning what scares you. People otherwise invincible can turn to quivering at the sight of, say, a spider. But it surprised her still to be a witness to it, this innocent cowering by a man who’d seen so much