Suspicious River Read Free Page A

like a big black boot in your chest, and it makes you either shy or angry, sometimes both. You probably don’t kiss her, you just put the palms of your hands on those breasts you’ve been thinking about, move your fingers around on her shirt, and you’re breathing hard. But she just stands there like a closed white door.
    You’re touching someone who doesn’t want to touch you back—all yours, like the room, the TV, the conservative bedspread for the night: You already paid. But she’s so quiet, sort of smirking, you think. It makes you nervous. You can’t help it that your hands are shaking, but you’re a big man who worries a lot about his middle-aged heart—all those uncles lined up in coffins dead of heart attacks, predictable in Michigan as winter. In a flash you see yourself five years old in a little blue suit on tiptoes peering over the edge of a glossy trunk to get a look at one of those uncles as a powder-dusted corpse:
    You realize, as you take her flesh in a handful, that you’re the age of that corpse now.
    Lately, you sweat in your sleep, wake up soaked and cold.
    Dead, they smelled like women—talcum and old rose water.
    You unbuckle your belt with one hand, you’ve pushed the other up under her shirt and bra. Her breast is cool and soft. If you are hurting her, grabbing it too hard, she won’t let on. You wish she would. You grab it harder as you pull yourself out. You take your hand out of her shirt and put it on her shoulder. You’re holding yourself with the other one. You push her down to her knees, put it in her mouth, and there’s that warm parting of lips like sinking slowly into mud. You groan when you feel something soft and hot swim over the tip of it—and now you know she’s a pro. You wanted it to last longer, do some other things to her, too, but she knows what she’s doing, and you come.
    Some sweet small-town thing: Right.
    You barely last ten seconds.
    Sixty fucking dollars.
    She coughs, closes the door lightly behind her like a kind of apology, or a shrug.
    That night you sleep badly in your motel room. Mold and river, even between the sheets. With the lights out it’s so dark you think for a terrible moment that you’ve gone blind. Instead of dreaming, you turn on the TV, and when the sun comes up you blow your nose in a towel and leave.
    There’s another girl in the office when you check out. This one is pregnant, chatting on the phone. She doesn’t look at you when you drop your key on the counter. Your mouth tastes mossy all day, and something pale films your tongue.
    You drive on.

 
     
     
     
    T HE WHITE FLASH of a sailboat, silver light on water, a high blanched sky; too bright. A woman in a navy blue striped bikini: She has long legs. She’s holding a dented can of beer, stepping onto the boat. Her narrow foot, toenails painted red, is poised for a moment in shimmering air.
    Wind billows the sail, the sound of sheets flapping on a line and the smell of bleach.
    The woman holds her arms out in the air like wings, a dancer balancing herself onto an extravagant curtain of movement beneath her. She laughs, and a shirtless man, tanned, takes her hand, the hand that has no beer can in it, to help her onto the water. She stumbles, the boat rocks harder.
    He doesn’t embrace her when she falls into him, but their bodies meet.
    They look, then, at me, and I see his hand flat in the small of her bare back. The hand is dark and large against her pale waist. Her shoulders are round and smooth as blank faces, gleaming.
    “Bye-bye, Leila,” she sings.
    Red fingernails and flesh—she is drinking from the beer, cold and sweaty in her hand. Waving bye-bye baby with the other.
    He waves bye-bye, too—my uncle, my father’s younger brother, a salesman like my father, but luckier, and also a magician who knows a card trick in which the Jack disappears into thin air, then reappears, fast and flashy, behind your ear.
    They are carried away together by wind on my uncle’s