On a hot day in August before school started back, we crossed the tracks, the sand hot under our feet, secrets and promises born on the breeze. The four of us lived in a sleepy river town where the railroad tracks divided Black Oak into two different worlds. On the people side were mimosa and apple trees, corn and tobacco fields, cows and horses; on the riverside were sex and sand, water and rot, life and death. No houses were built between the tracks and the river. The riverside was too unpredictable for dwellings. It was our playground.
I was sixteen. My sister Renee was only a year younger than me, a butterfly spirit. John was eighteen, running on testosterone. His younger brother Mike was my age and lived in the shadow of his brother.
Barefoot and sweaty, we crossed over. Mike and Renee went down river while John and I went up. He set the beer he'd snuck from his dad's cooler under a tree and slipped out of his shorts. His legs were so long, the sun gilding the hair on them. And in the fall of John’s words: “You know I’d never hurt you… It’ll be fun and no one will ever know… Don’t you want to find out what all the fuss is about? I brought beer…I can kiss that frown away, you know I can…You like it when we kiss, said it was the best thing you’d ever tasted. Yes, of course, I love you. I wouldn’t be here doing this if I didn’t want to, would I?”
And his hands fell onto me,
And his kiss fell onto my mouth,
And everything he said fell into my head,
And every lie ever told fell,
And I believed it all,
And fell.
My new breasts experienced hand and mouth. My sides and hips got kissed. His tongue waded into my breath and tasted like the mulberries we’d ate on the other side of the tracks. When he bumped against my thighs, trying to find the place where no one had ever been before, it was the most natural thing to slide my hand between us and guide him inside me.
Then the world shifted. Our breathing became a line in the sand, of different sides, of something not shared anymore. In that moment, I understood the lies. I gasped, scared and hurt. He moaned, blissfully happy and unaware. I understood there couldn't be take-backs. He pounded me, and the sand rubbed my ass raw. It didn't take him long to come, and he growled when he did. I hated him in one split second.
I pushed him off me and raced into the dirty waters of the river, scrubbing between my legs with sand. He laid on the riverbank, chuckling. “What’s the matter?”
“What did I ever see in you?”
“What are you talking about? I’m your boyfriend.”
All I could do was shake my head at him. He’d turned into a monster on the riverbank, his dark eyes made sinister from thickened brows, his heart as dead and black as the coal Papaw used in the old stove on cold winter mornings.
“You’re being weird again,” he said.
I wanted to scream at him that he was ugly and he’d hurt me. I didn’t. I whispered, “You’re mean.”
He slid into his shorts and turned to trudge up the lane to cross back over into our real lives. “Go get Renee,” he said without ever facing me, “Save Mike some little baby girl bullshit.” He opened a can of beer and drank half of it, then he walked up the bank, beyond the tree line.
I watched him until I couldn’t see him anymore. Strangely, I wondered what his mouth tasted like with the beer on his tongue, but that was left over thinking, left over from when John was the boy all the girls drooled over, left over from when John was the boy to have. From before, when I was still a virgin. I stomped out of the river and put my clothes on, the sand scratching me as I yanked and pulled.
Damn it. Renee. I had to get to her. I didn’t want it to be this way for her, especially since this giving ourselves away was my idea. Raging through the underbrush and sand and stagnant pools of isolated river water, I screamed her name, begging her to stop, praying I wasn’t too late.
I saw her before she saw me, her long hair tangled with leaves and matted with sand. Her eye was black, and there were cuts on her arms and hands. Her gaze was dead. Again, I thought of Papaw’s coal.
“I killed him,” she said.
I can’t describe what I felt.
“I said stop. He wouldn’t.”
I tried to shush her.
“He hit me. Tore my clothes.”
I tried to put my arms around her.
“I hit him in the face with a rock.”
I tried to pull her to me.
“Drug him to the river. Held his head under.”
Shush. It’ll be okay.
“I’m not sorry either.”
You’re just upset.
“And,” she stopped and grabbed my face between her gritty hands, put our noses together. “It will never be okay.”
She may have been the youngest, our butterfly, but I just knew she was right.
I told her, “Your clothes. We need to get you dressed.” I took her hand and pulled her along, she resisted here and there, but mainly she stumbled along behind me, her steps kicking sand up the back of my legs.
This had been my idea. In our small bedroom with the eyelet curtains, fireflies twinkling beyond our window and the river mist rising to blanket the treetops, I’d said to her, “How romantic would it be to turn into women on the same day, at the same exact time. How exciting!” We were so close. We shared everything, we might as well have been twins.
When I saw Mike, I noticed the waves of a passing barge had pushed his body up the sand, out of the water. Then I stopped looking at him and found Renee’s clothes. I’d done this to her. It was all my fault. I pulled her top over her head. “I’m sorry, sis. I’m so sorry,” I said, as I helped her slip her shorts up her legs. I'd done this to myself. "I'm so so sorry."
“It’s his fault,” she said, jabbing a finger at Mike. “I hate his guts!” As soon as her shorts settled onto her hips, she tore from my grasp and ran to him, calling him a bastard. She kicked him. He moaned. His hand tried to bat her off as if she was a giant horsefly. She kicked him again, harder.
“He’s not dead,” I yelled.
“No! No!” Renee kept screaming no and kicking.
I ran to her and knocked her on her butt. “Quit it.”
She kicked sand at me. “No!”
I fell to my knees, scooted to her, the sand cutting me. I grabbed her, tried to hug her while she kicked at the sand. It was my turn to put her face in my hands, touch our noses. “Stop. You can’t fix it this way. Nothing will be okay," I stopped and started, searching for the words to calm her down, "ever forever and ever
until you die
and I bury your butterfly soul
if you don’t
Stop.
Stop
right now.”
The fight went out of her, and her body sagged against me. She felt like a wet blanket. She nodded. We stood up and walked away.
John was sitting under the mulberry tree, empty beer cans littering the weeds, when we shuffled by him. He stood, started to say something, but I shook my head.
“Mike’s hurt. Go get him.”
“What the fuck is going on?”
“Life is…going on."
John hated when I went "all poetry on his ass,” as he called it. I noticed he wasn't scary anymore, his eyes warm and fuzzy—probably from the beer. I wanted to wrap my arms around his neck, let him carry me home, but he stormed off, calling us names. I wanted to call him back and kiss him. Renee was crying though. I needed to keep her walking, keep her from thinking.
Renee and I slumped home, cooked supper and told Mama Renee'd fallen out of the mimosa tree. Mama told us again we shouldn’t climb those damn trees. We went to bed early. I tucked her in and listened to her nightmares all night long,
As I watched the mist
The fireflies
The treetops
Through dusty eyelet
Curtains.
