Lucky Turtle, page 6
“Didn’t I tell you not to do that!” I cried.
“You don’t like to be married?” he said.
“That’s something different!” I said.
In the river I washed and washed and he felt free to help some and seemed properly remorseful, also full of respect: I’d taught him a thing or two his aunt didn’t even know about. I pushed him in and dove over him, this flailing narrow wrangler, came up behind him and helped him back to shallow water, and there we kissed the longest kiss in the history of kisses, a whole language, taste of the old river, which is mineral and honeysuckle and glacier melt, the taste of winter and rock, and me rippling again, rippling hard.
At about the peak of which we heard a car, the crunching of tires on sand as they left the road, squeak of tired springs.
I got into my T-shirt and loose camp pants all but instantly. Lucky got into the water stark naked, began his splashing imitation of swimming.
I saw my gray panties down on a flat rock, but too late, just sat there like I was watching the show as the car came in view, and it was the police, old gumball-machine light on top, this huge black car with white doors, the whole rocking like an elephant waddling into the center ring at a circus. I waved—nothing wrong here, Officer. But of course there was the camp van, all its doors wide open.
“Cry, don’t wave,” Lucky said from the water.
And so I cried, no problem, leaned into my knees.
The officer got out of his car, young guy, cop sturdy, outdoorsman, or anyway quite dark from the sun, no urgency, assessing the situation, Lucky wading up out of the river like he’d been swimming all day, naked as a baby mole.
“Jesus, Lucky.”
“Officer Boardman, howdy.”
“What have we got here?”
“She doesn’t want to go back,” Lucky said, extra laconic.
“Laundry day,” said the cop. And then to me: “I know the feeling, miss. I know it well. I never did want to go to work up there, and I was only a guard, and not for long.”
“I thought a swim,” Lucky said.
“That’s what I was thinking, too,” the cop said. And he stripped down just as Lucky had, down to his khaki boxers and his suntan—another ex-Marine become a cop—and dove in, a terrific swimmer with a build like a Jeep.
Chapter Fourteen
Leslie Hilton handed me a letter, the first I’d gotten at daily mail call. My heart jumped to think it might be from my dad, but of course Camp Challenge wouldn’t pass such a thing along even if Daddy had had a mind to break the no-contact provision, never. No, it was in a Camp Challenge envelope, just a handwritten note, elegant old-school script, fountain pen. I was to go see Donut Dora before dinner.
Her office was the nicest indoor space in Camp Challenge, occupying the second floor of HQ, several fragrant rooms of log walls and stuffed bookshelves, huge desk made from a slab of pine with the bark still on underneath, view through large windows down the valley and across the whole wide world. This was behind her as she sat at her desk, and she did share its grandeur, her hair carefully French braided away from that famous face, its stony kindness.
“Depression,” she said without preamble, “is the common enemy of the girls here, all of you. But when you’re new, it’s dangerous, insidious, even if routine. Abruptly you’re in a bunk with eight other girls and your world is upside down. You miss family and friends. You feel estranged from even the Lord. You are full of remorse. Your heart breaks. Dear girl, we understand.”
“I’m feeling okay,” I said.
“Tribal Officer Boardman told me otherwise. He said he chanced upon you down at the river? Our employee has been reprimanded for that offense, letting you out of the van, swimming naked in front of you, my goodness. Not you, who could hardly be blamed, you weren’t swimming, which I do find exculpatory. Lucky is very simple. If it’s hot, one swims.”
I flushed. “I’m sorry.”
“Officer Boardman said you were crying copious tears.”
“I guess I was sad.”
“He said you were fully dressed?”
“Oh, Miss Dora. Of course I was!”
“Lucky hasn’t the best social skills. He hasn’t any social skills. Did he scare you?”
“The driver? He never said a single word, Ms. Conover. Just suddenly there we were on the river, and it was so beautiful.”
“You didn’t want to come back.”
“I didn’t mind coming back.”
“And don’t worry about it happening again. You are relieved of laundry duty.”
“Thank you, Ms. Conover,” I said. But tears sprang to my eyes, real tears this time, at the thought of the loss of Lucky.
Dora gazed upon me benignly. Finally she said, “Have you prayed on your sadness?”
I sniffled, not a tissue in sight. I tried honesty: “I don’t pray, actually.”
Dora pounced, a sharp streak plummeting from above, falcon’s claws: “You cry instead?”
Crying all the harder, I said, “I don’t cry often.”
And then there was the soft Dora, face of an angel: “‘Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray.’ Did you hear that, Cindra? ‘Let him pray.’ That’s from the book of James, chapter five, verse thirteen. Let. Him. Pray.”
I clasped my hands and bowed my head, no way around it, and no way to point out that I wasn’t a him. When I peeked, I saw that Dora had bowed her head as well, a gentle muttering, nothing showy. No reason I couldn’t bow my head. You could bow your head and not pray. You could bow your head and think of Lucky naked and lying upon you, hot ripples.
“Amen,” Dora said at length.
“Amen,” I said, straightening, bereft: How would I ever see Lucky again?
“You feel better.”
“Blessedly, yes.” But then I was crying again.
Dora let me drip and sniffle a while before she said, “Let us try this: I can get you out of the bunk for a night or two a week. Psychological confinement, we call it officially. But truly, it’s just a break. Your meals are brought in, your time is your own, there’s even a shelf of good books. Also, a private restroom, and a tub, salutary. It’s called Solitude, but it’s not solitary. I will visit, as will your group leader. We all feel sad at times, but those that go amid the Lord get His blessings. Best if you don’t spread the news around, however!”
I was speechless, afraid, didn’t want to leave Cats, though a bath sounded nice.
“Salutary?” I managed at length.
“It means healthful.”
“Healthful’s good.”
“Praise Him!”
“Praise him!” I repeated, meaning Lucky.
And Dora took my hand, walked me out of her office and down a knotty-pine hallway, past several closed doors and to the far other end of the building where she opened a knotty-pine door to reveal Solitude, simply an apartment over the infirmary, knotty-pine walls, knotty-pine furniture, woolen blankets, rag-wool carpet, knotty-pine lamp on a knotty-pine table beside the full-size knotty-pine bed, real sheets, two pillows, small knotty-pine desk, knotty-pine bookshelf full of church titles, knotty-pine bathroom. Dora pointed out towel and washcloth, fresh camp garments, and toiletries, including a fresh toothbrush, then bowed her head in prayer, backed out the door, shut it behind her.
I didn’t recall taking a vow of silence! I tried the door and realized I was locked in. Well, no matter. After a look around (not much to see—extra blankets in a closet, no hangers, lots of medical pads in great variety, also a pregnancy manual, it looked like, and mothballs in an otherwise empty chest of drawers, a little balcony looking out high over the back ravine, sound of the river), I picked through the bookshelves, pulled out something at random, and then something else, dense philosophy, it looked like, Martin Buber, Miguel de Unamuno, Paul Tillich, philosophers whose names I’ve never forgotten, read sentences slowly. Later, I pulled down a book of poems by someone called Pablo Neruda, poems in Spanish. Dora’s name was in the flyleaf, and a date, December 9, 1969. I had taken Spanish class and knew enough to translate the title, which was Twenty Love Poems and a Song of . . . something. That word I didn’t know. But I thumbed through and lingered over several poems and did find the word for love a great deal, also a pencil translation in the same hand as on the flyleaf:
I desire your mouth, your voice, your hair.
So Donut Dora was human. There were penciled question marks over some of the words. I read the poem in Spanish then, picking out the odd word, and read Dora’s English, checking back and forth. I desire your mouth! Boca. I found that word several times in other poems, worked on the sentences that contained it, didn’t get far, but far enough. I filled the old claw-foot tub with the hottest hot water, and soon my soiled camp garments lay on the floor beside it. I adored my body back then, but there were no mirrors. I liked to twist a private curl around a finger and tug ever so slightly. I must have been in there two hours, refreshing the hot water intermittently, tugging that curl, various scenarios in which I got to kiss Lucky, squeezing my knees together, making a cow, as we used to call it, I don’t know why. Moo. A small red pebble tossed into my still pond, none of the huge stones and boulders Lucky had thrown in.
Dora returned well after dinnertime with a plate of meat loaf and overly much salad. She prayed a little, said, “And how are we feeling?”
“Much better.”
I’d put the Neruda away and had laid one of the twelve or so Bibles open on the bed. At least there were good stories in there. Dora bowed her head slightly at the sight of it, still not a word. But now I knew she had once wanted a mouth like I did now. As soon as she left, I pulled the Neruda down, translated painfully, found more kissing, a whole line I could translate from a poem whose title I couldn’t make sense of, unending kisses.
Unending! I loved that.
Chapter Fifteen
The next morning Dora slipped into Solitude and woke me with a hand to my forehead. “You’re more peaceful,” she said.
It was true.
“Do you want another night?”
“I think that was just enough,” I said.
“All right. Let’s give you Friday, too. Two days a week, perhaps, just for a while, as you adjust. Tuesday and Friday for a while?”
“Okay,” I said. I never understood language like that: adjusting. I wasn’t going to adjust anything, not like you adjust the volume on a TV set. I wasn’t going to change at all. I was only going to learn a new world, and then live in it, the same me as ever. “I’d like that.”
Dora cast a benevolent eye upon me: God’s work practically made her glow.
I was being cossetted, my mom would say, but she’d been raised by Lutherans. It seemed natural enough to me at the time that a blond girl some people thought so pretty would get better treatment than the rest. Some voice in me wants to say, But that didn’t make me a bad person, did it? Yes, I was a bad person, ignorance no defense.
Out among the less blessed and less benighted girls, after breakfast I kept an eye peeled for the van, knew where to wait. Soon here it came. Lucky paid me no attention, but then, he couldn’t, not if he was in trouble for our swim day. I tried to imagine what discipline they’d given him. Docked his pay? Threatened to fire him? Whatever it was, it was enough to make him disappear into himself. Not that he would have known I was there: he didn’t look around at all, didn’t even get out of the van. Probably he’d been prohibited from any more contact with the campers, and certainly with me.
I contented myself with staring, no one having prohibited me from anything (the usual double standard—the ethnic kid pays, the white kid skates—but this time enforced by my crying game, and suddenly my complicity stung). I watched the girl on grocery duty loading the empty banana boxes, the meat coolers, the potato sacks neatly folded. She was awkward, clumsy, and slow moving. Her face was puffed from a fistfight before breakfast, but oh, she’d won in the end, given that loudmouth girl a drubbing behind the upper bathhouse—I’d seen it all from a distance, a mean girl from Yonkers who knew how to punch. Lucky wouldn’t take a thug like her to the beach, that’s all I cared about.
My fellow Cats welcomed me back to the cabin at siesta. “Solitary,” I said. They were all sympathetic, plain they’d never been. “There’s a bathtub,” I said. “There’s a clock.”
Everyone laughed, hard.
“Nah,” Puma said. “Can’t fool me. I been. There’s only a hole in the floor. There’s not even a bed!”
“Solitude,” I said. “I meant Solitude.”
But that didn’t help. More laughter.
The next day I joined the stream of campers heading to soccer league, a huge crowd led by four of the oldest girls who acted as coaches, plus a male guard, a grizzled old gent who acted as referee. Evidently the games were pretty well organized, three standing teams and a perpetual round robin.
I fell behind, fell behind some more, ducked into the forest, my heart pounding. The sports field wasn’t far enough away. I crawled farther into the woods, then up the mountain for twenty minutes, then a long way on an elk track, then down the hill again, trying to come out below HQ. There was a garage there, and that, I hoped, was where Lucky would park the van as he came back in from his rounds. I waited in thick underbrush behind a ponderosa pine, held the tree, pressed my cheek on the rough bark, fragrant sap in my hair, sap on my hands, my face, waited more, no idea how much time had elapsed (time not my gift), and just as I was about to give in and flee back up the hill to where I could intercept the soccer crowd Franciella-style, I heard the Camp Challenge van rattling. It parked neatly on the gravel near the garage, and then (thump-thump in my chest) Lucky climbed out.
I burst from hiding to meet him.
“Okay,” he said, barely startled. And then, not kidding: “You are off limits.”
“I had to see you,” I said.
“Oh, I knew we would see each other,” he said. “But just maybe not right like this, here in the garage lot.”
I said, “You got in trouble?”
“Oh, I’ll say. Ms. Conover prayed over me.”
“She prayed over me, too.”
“She prayed I would learn the difference between a man and a woman.”
“She thinks of you a certain way,” I said.
“What way?”
“Just, innocent.”
He looked puzzled. “No, I was plain guilty,” he said.
“I mean, um, simple.”
He seemed to take no offense but only laughed and said, “Simple.” I hadn’t seen him laugh before. “She did not use that word.”
“‘Very simple,’ is what she said.”
“Like a trout,” Lucky said.
Why was that so funny? We laughed a lot, then stood there a long time. Silence was good with him. Finally, silence not so good with me, I said, “Dora put me in solitary.”
Lucky gasped.
Quickly I said, “The one with the bathtub.”
“Ah,” he said, and dug in his deep overalls pocket, pulled out a large ring of keys, slid them one by one deliberately till he found the one he wanted, held it up for me to see. “You mean Solitude,” he said. “The visitor’s room. That was where they birthed the babies before the clinic came to Elk River. Sometimes still.”
“Friday,” I said. I did not want to hear about babies.
Lucky simply walked away.
“You come back here,” I said.
He did, part of the way. Then a step more. “Wife,” he said.
“Trout,” I said. But then despite myself quoted my poet, saying, “‘I desire your mouth, your voice, your hair.’ Also your unending kisses.”
He seemed to keep listening after I was done. Finally he said, “Unending kisses.” I like that. Unending. My old auntie said there are two trails ahead of you and me, and we must take care.”
“And Dora told me I must pray.”
“She mumbles and calls it prayer.”
“Better if we two just kiss.”
“My aunt says we are married if we want.”
“You are plain weird, my not-husband.”
The sun was in his eyes. He let the slightest smile come, said, “Plain and weird together. If you like. And simple, too.”
I stood up on my toes and kissed his mouth, unending. “Lucky,” I said.
“That’s my name,” he said. “I have a few.”
“It’s on my mouth,” I said. “I’ll save the rest for later.”
We were this far apart, less than a breath. Aspen leaves shivered in the slight breeze. A squirrel chittered. We only stood there, then only reluctantly parted: the other camp van was coming—with those rough roads, you heard every arrival from far away. Lucky pushed me away with a kind of brusque humor. And so I scrambled back up the steep slope to the elk run, ducked among boulders out of all possible sight. From way up there, I saw the second van pull up. And Dora Dryden Conover herself climbed out, as put together as always, flowing white skirts, a kind of unfolding from the graceless van. She approached Lucky, fierce step.
But it wasn’t trouble, or not much. She only gave him a quick hug. And then what seemed a lecture, one long finger aimed at his impassive chest, more like what you’d expect. But then a longer hug, arms around his neck, surprising affection from the boss, shocking, really. I felt ruffled.
But Lucky’s name was on my lips, and I directed every thought his way.
Chapter Sixteen
At breakfast, the nurse pulled me aside. “You have your appointment with Dr. Gilbert today,” she said. “You’ll come with me.”
I was already more than a little flummoxed and overheated from Lucky and his kisses, Lucky and his aunt, his embrace with Dora. And on edge, too, a little nauseated as always from breakfast. I followed Nurse through the knotty-pine corridors. Dora was in her office, didn’t look up. I realized she would be near, and so I relaxed: she might be chilly, but she was a woman to be trusted. A number of doors down, the nurse showed me into the same small examination room I’d seen before.
