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He tried so hard to fit into this new world, afraid that if he didn’t he’d be shipped back to Ualik. For a while he had thought fitting in meant wearing the baggiest jeans, smoking the most cigarettes, saying “fuck” between every other word and hanging with Eric Walker and his gang. He’d been lucky there; his mom, his adopted mom, had been watching too closely for him to follow Eric and Vasily into McLaughlin. He shivered. Liam had taken him down to the place in the woods and shown him Rudy’s body, what Eric and Vasily had done to it. It had looked like something out of the movies.
It had looked like something from the other side of the curtain in Ualik.
Now here he was at Old Man Creek. Old Man Creek sure wasn’t Ualik, and sure wasn’t Newenham, either. The old man, Moses, was sober for a change, although that wasn’t necessarily an improvement. Drunk, he was one tough bastard. Sober, he was a fiend from hell.
They’d been standing post for twenty minutes and Tim was afraid he was about to disgrace himself by falling flat on his face. Moses had gone up on the porch, where he’d pulled Bill to her feet, sat down in her place and pulled her into his lap. Man, those two were always hugging and kissing and patting each other’s asses-and other things, too, he was sure. Bill Billington had to be sixty years old, Moses had to be a hundred, old enough to act like respectable elders, for god’s sake. The chair creaked and all by itself Tim’s head turned to behold Moses and Bill in a liplock that involved more than just their lips. He forgot himself and stared. They were worse than his mom and Liam. At least Liam pretended to sleep in that camper, and Mom pretended to let him.
Bill gave Moses a last kiss and pulled back to see Tim staring. She had the audacity to grin at him. Moses put back his head and howled.
Tim’s head snapped around to eyes front. He stared hard at the red lengths of salmon drying on racks and hoped his face wasn’t as red as the salmon.
Next to him, Amelia moaned, a quiet little moan, as if she’d had practice in hiding it.
“Keep breathing,” he said in a low voice. “Keep breathing, steady, in and out, in and out.”
“My legs don’t stand up straight anymore,” she whispered.
“Mine, neither,” he whispered back. “We’ll be walking bowlegged by the time that old man is done with us.”
She was silent for a moment. “Like cowboys.”
He bit back a laugh. “Yeah. Like in the movies.” He felt her shoulders shake. “Like John Wayne.”
Moses, walking light-footedly up behind them, pounced, buffeting first one and then the other with rough but not brutal slaps about the head. “I see talking don’t help your standing post none, boys and girls. Let’s see if a little form will keep you quiet.”
He took them through the form three times, going from commencement to conclusion slowly, steadily, progressing inexorably from one movement to the next and the next, gri
It’s not fair, Tim wanted to say, you’ve been doing this for a hundred years, we’ve been doing it for a couple of days, you can’t expect us to be perfect this soon.
At the end of the third conclusion, when Tim was sure in his gut that Moses was going to go for a fourth form, the old man straightened up all the way to his five-foot-seven-inch height and brought his right fist in front of his face, snugging it into his left palm. Tim and Amelia mimicked him. The three bowed.
“I suppose that’s enough for now,” Moses said grudgingly. “ ’Course the two of you got about as much style as a rhinoceros at the ballet. Dismissed until this afternoon. Go on, take a dip in the river. There’s a backwater about a hundred feet up the bank, shallow and still pretty warm. Go on, git!”
They got.
It was a nice little pond, snugged into the curve of a short, smooth ridge of glacial silt and rimmed with tall reeds. Tim stripped down to his underwear and fell in face first. He surfaced to see Amelia standing on the edge, uncertain. “What?”
She blushed. “I don’t have a bathing suit.”
“Just do like me and keep your underwear on.”
She hesitated.
“It’s real nice,” he said. “Warm, and the bottom’s sandy.”
“Okay,” she said.
He tried not to look as she undressed, but as with Moses and Bill, he couldn’t help sneaking a peek or two. Her breasts were bigger than they’d seemed under her shirt, and she wore bikini panties he’d only ever seen on magazine models. Her bruises were fading, faint shadows on smooth skin.
She was up to her waist when she saw him looking at them. She didn’t blush this time.
“Your husband do that?” he said.
She nodded.
“You going back to him?”
She stood where she was, fingertips making circles in the water. On the opposite side of the pond, a lone brant honked at them and then was silent. “I don’t know. He’s my husband.”
“He shouldn’t hurt you,” he said, and he was filled with a sudden and welcome anger. “Nobody should hurt anybody.”
She looked at him then. “Somebody hurt you, too.”
“My mother.” He swallowed, and said as much as he could. “My uncles.”
She nodded, understanding without words.
“Nobody should hurt anybody,” he repeated, and he turned and dived, as if the water could wash away all the bad memories.
They paddled around the pool, quietly at first, until he accidentally splashed her and, after a moment’s surprise, she retaliated. The battle was on, and before it was over a good third of the pool had wound up on the bank. It was an hour before they came out, giggling and shoving like a couple of kids.
With her wet hair sleeked back from her face and her skin flushed and damp, she looked like she was barely old enough for the sixth grade. He finished dressing first and tapped her on the shoulder. “Tag, you’re it!”
“No fair!” she yelled, and charged after him.
They chased each other down the path, laughing, startling ducks out of the brush at the side of the river and an otter family into the water. She tagged him and surged ahead, and he pounded after her, skidding around a corner and ru
“Shh,” she said, putting her hand over his mouth when he would have yelled.
He looked up and saw.
Bill and Moses. On the porch. Without any clothes on. Bill was on top, her hair a silver curtain around Moses’ face. His hands were on her hips, muscles flexing in his arms as they moved together. They were so caught up in each other they didn’t hear anything else.
Tim’s jaw dropped and he turned to Amelia. Whatever he had been about to say was halted by the look on her face.
She held one finger to her lips and crept backward, one noiseless movement at a time. Tim followed. She halted in a clearing, out of earshot of the cabin.
He stood still, hands dangling, awed, confused, aroused.
“Is that how it’s supposed to be?” she said, her face bright with wonder.
He told the truth. “I don’t know.” Liam had come into his mother’s life only five months before. He’d caught them a few times in an embrace that was more than a kiss, but nothing like this.
“She was really liking it.” Her voice rose to a squeak. “She was ontop.”
“Yeah,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to say. He couldn’t get the picture out of his mind, the man and the woman doing the nasty, only it hadn’t looked nasty, or sounded nasty. It had looked-well, he didn’t know how it had looked. All he knew was that it was nothing like what he had grown up hearing from the other side of the curtain. His body stirred. “Yeah,” he said again, his voice husky.
She looked at him, suddenly aware.