Water Story

By John Cotter

Charlie stripped while he was driving because Nina told him to.

“I’ll take my clothes off,” she said. “But you do it first.”

He had trouble getting the jeans over his shoes. He wouldn’t drive without shoes, so the car halted and picked up. He’d only been driving for a year, so he made Nina promise to keep watch for angry cruisers or wayward animals that might leap out of the night.

“I’ll be hard,” he said.

“I’ll be flattered.” She giggled, wrestling out of her shirt beneath the seat belt.

She smiled and he liked it, even though he could never tell which of her smiles were real.

 “Why don’t you put off school for a year?” she asked, blowing smoke at his sun visor and not looking out for anything. “We can have fun here, or maybe take a trip – enjoy our youth.”

“Maybe I will,” he said “We’ll fly kites in the evening.”

“And eat shrimp,” she said, “and sing songs.”

“Where do you want to go tonight?” They hadn’t discussed it. Charlie picked her up at her father’s house an hour ago. She wore glitter on her eyelids.

“Should we smoke in the warehouse?”

“No.” He said goodbye to the warehouses when he finished work that night. They were his father’s buildings, converted textile mills, some of which were being leased or sold to send Charlie to school.

She put her hand on his bare leg and laughed. He laughed. What are we laughing at? he thought.

“Do you want to go swimming?” she asked.

“Sure. Where?”

“The river.” Again, that smile. “We can swim naked in the river! Oh God, Charlie, won’t that make you feel free?”

Charlie shouldered the car on a dark corner of the riverfront, across from the worn mill buildings that employed the town a century ago. The river was a hundred feet from shore to shore.

“Let’s go in quickly,” said Nina, unsnapping her bra when her underpants were off.

He’d never seen her naked before, though they’d known each other since they were kids. Her breasts were small with low nipples and her pubic hair was dusted almost blond.

“Do you shave it?” he asked, pointing.

“What?”

“Do . . ?”

 “No.”

A short walk from the car, the water was dark, reflecting streetlights. A discrete line of buoys was visible, stretching into the distance, to keep the freight boats and casino ferries from low tides.

He suspected they wouldn’t see more than one or two boats tonight, or maybe none at all. She looked on as he hid his keys under a nearby rock. When they crossed the littered dirt of the riverbank and climbed down a ladder into the water, she launched herself on her back and swept out with her arms. He came in quietly after her, surprised at the cold, and shivered over to where they linked arms for warmth. Her face was close.

“I wonder if anyone’s done this before,” she half asked with pot on her breath.

“Probably not since the Indians.” It was a guess. His eyes caught a docked casino ferry; it would make three runs to Boston and back tomorrow, fetching gamblers.

Nina’s expression disappeared. “Let’s swim to the buoy. I’ll race you.”

He followed her lead. Nina liked to move. The water covered his vision and emptied from it and he followed her smooth strokes with his loud ones.

As the water line rose and fell, Charlie felt significantly detached from the 19^th century-lost landscape of home. His old home. This is what life is about, he told himself. Don’t ruin it.

When he reached the edges of the mill property, where the larger buildings began to thin out, he grabbed onto the buoy.

She was already there. He looked at her hands. “Are you cold?”

“No,” she said.

He wanted to get nearer to her, but she was talking. “What

do they store there anyway?”

“Bricks,” he said. “Dead babies, asphalt.”

She looked at him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Fruit, radios. Anything without a home. I mean, various things.”

Her voice was immediate. Water acoustics.

“You’re probably not going to call me, are you?”

“Nina,” he said.

“It’s alright if you don’t,” she said, “Just let me know.”

He heard the sound of an engine further down the river.

“Let’s swim to the next buoy.”

He said okay, but felt hesitant, thinking about his keys, and he told her so.

“That’s what being naked’s about,” she said. She moved in a way he couldn’t; she existed differently.

Her father, Rudy, worked as a security guard in the warehouse alongside Charlie. Rudy seemed remarkably old to have a 17 year old daughter. His white beard was thicker on the neck than on the face, and he and Charlie would take smoke breaks together, never talking about Nina.

“I won’t miss it,” Charlie said, nearly nicking his hand on some barnacles that clung to the second buoy. 

“Miss what?”

“The job.”

“You know, my grandfather worked there when it was a mill,” she said. He pictured her legs kicking underwater. He couldn’t imagine how old her grandfather might have been. “And he said when they used up all their cloth and they had to wait for more to come in, they would have to dump all the old dye in the river. Imagine that,” she said. “All the colors swirling in the river.”

“It probably just turned brown,” he said.

“You think too much,” she said, already pushing off  to the next buoy into a wider part of the river past the warehouses. He decided to stay where he was.

 A light appeared in the turret of the largest mill building. That’s her father, he thought, widely known to drink in the unused room, in the city’s tallest and most useless leftover. He maintained a highly eclectic pornography collection, parts of which appeared through the buildings, here and there, on Charlie’s regular janitorial sweeps.

Charlie stared down the waterway, having lost Nina. He saw the next buoy move. It concealed her. He kicked toward it.

He worried abstractly about Nina’s future and told himself he was careless. He should have been looking out for her. She was deceptive, though, and it seemed as though she was looking out for herself.

“Dad’s reading his magazines again.” She said, staring up at the light. He expected a dark shape to pass but nothing happened. The tide was low. His feet touched bottom. It was soft.

“Your father pays my father to masturbate,” she said. “Do you masturbate, Charlie?”

“In the mornings,” he said.

“I do it in the evenings,” she said. “Every other night.”

There was a cluster of rocks jutting out of the river at the end of their line of vision.

“Let’s swim to those,” he said. “Then we’ll swim back to the car.”

“It’s pretty far.”

“I’ll carry you partway.” He said, ducking beneath the water and coming up with her legs around his neck. Her knees grazed water.

“Jesus, Charlie, what if my father looks out the window?”

“He’ll see an angel,” Charlie said, “Floating in moonlight.”

After he’d carried her a few feet, the ground dipped off and he slid past his head and into the water. She was squealing as he let her go unintentionally.

“Oh my God,” Nina said as he surfaced, “that was fun. We should probably head back now.”

“Just to the rocks,” he said, regarding them. He wanted to sit on top of them and gaze out at the town, bather, and backdrop. He wanted to seal the evening with a perfect moment, so he would have something to look back on at school: a mild, nude victory.

“Come on,” he said, echoing her, “I’ll race you.”

 He heard the sound of an approaching boat, probably a small shipping boat. They neared the rocks.

             “They’ll see us if we scale them,” she said. “We have to stay low.”

             Charlie noticed that the sky was slowly graying away from midnight black. He felt cold and put his arm around Nina. They stayed that way, halfway up the rocks.

             “I don’t want to have sex,” Nina said.

“Okay,” Charlie said slowly. Nina liked him, he decided, but not for the reasons he wanted her to.

“I’m filling out some applications.” she said, “for an English course at Community.”

“That’s great,” he said.

“Yeah, my dad was getting on my case.”

Charlie couldn’t picture Nina’s father preaching the value of education. It was hard to picture Rudy doing anything but leaning on the warehouse wall during smoke breaks and talking alternately about the new church he’d joined and why full-bodied women were coming back in style.

“Basically,” Rudy would say, “We’re renting space from the VFW as now, but in a couple of years, we plan on raising enough to secure a full time location.”  Then he would skip like a stone to the next point, “And if you’re a man, you want to reproduce. You want to make that part of you go on. A thin woman can’t do it. They’re selling sex without babies. You need babies. But then,” looking flatly at Charlie, “what happens to your soul?”

The tower went dark. Soon after, a toy-soldier sized man, probably Rudy, walked down along the pier to meet the approaching boat. Charlie could make out his beard, unexpectedly dark in the moonlight.

“Let’s climb to the very top,” Charlie said. “It’s not like they’re going to see us. If we stay completely still, we’ll be fine.”

Nina hesitated, then agreed. Charlie admired the way she could make decisions like that. The rocks were rough, filled with crevices and weeds, and as he helped her climb them, he managed to get a better look at her. A few of her ribs were visible, and her legs shook as she climbed.

“Oh my god. Look at them out there, they don’t even know we’re here,” she said, once they’d rested themselves on the largest rock. Its surface was ridged, and they managed to settle their weight evenly, resting half on their hands.

“What do you think they’re doing?” Nina asked.

“Well, you’re dad’s telling the guys on the boat they can’t unload the stuff they have until morning, and it’s still too early to fill out the paperwork. They have to wait for my dad to show up.”

“We have the car.” she said, leaning into him.

“Yeah,” he said automatically, “We should probably think about getting back. I’ve got to get up at six. Long trip.”

“Don’t even think about not writing to me,” she said. “I’ll write you. I’ll tell you how the class is going.”

“I’ll miss your dad,” he said, for something to say.

“You guys talk a lot. He wants to take you to our church when you get back. He thinks you’re pretty smart, but you talk out of your ass sometimes.”

“I’m remarkably brilliant,” he said.

Charlie pictured Rudy’s church as a marriage of loud music and stocking feet, stomping and smelling of sweat, the rows of faithful swaying. Rudy said they were strict constructionists of the Bible. Every word was true.

“We don’t have a priest,” Rudy said. “That probably surprises you, doesn’t it?”

According to Rudy, each member of the congregation took turns standing and preaching. Charlie couldn’t imagine Nina speaking like that, everyone turned toward her.

“Know what you’re going to major in?” she asked.

“Not yet.” He smiled again.

She didn’t return his smile. “I like being here with you,” she said.

“I’m cold,” he said.

“Come here.”

Their foreheads touched, and they kissed each other. He saw a light come on in the Casio Ferry, followed by low voices. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. Then she pulled away, looking at him. The sky was graying considerably. He looked at

her.

“We should go back,” she said.

The voices in the ferry increased and rose. From the rocks, they could see a handful of houses on the nearest hill where several bedroom or kitchen lights shone palely.

“We’ll have to swim past your father,” he said.

“He’ll be back upstairs by then.”

“I don’t know. Let’s stick to the other shore.”

The shore they returned along lay on the opposite side from the warehouses, and its edges were loaded with rusting equipment: a cross between oil rigs and construction cranes. Charlie had never questioned the complex rusting mass. He never wondered what they had been used for, never tried to picture them as they would have looked when they were new, working, whole. He did so now, and couldn’t think of anything.

“What did they do with these?” he asked.

“Shhh!”

Nina was swimming, raising as little noise as possible by moving through the water gently. Slowly, they passed the equipment, passed the docked casino ferry, passed the department of public work’s utility shed, passed the warehouses on the opposite shore where her father’s turret light had flared again, briefly, and switched off.

They shivered in the water beside the car. Charlie convinced himself they would be spotted by the casino ferry’s crew, or the sparse shapes sleeping on benches along the riverfront.

“We’re clear,” she said, and he ran, ducking out of the water, feeling brave. He located his key, unlocked and started the car, and opened Nina’s door. She sprinted out of the water and into the warming car, covering herself with her arms.

He was driving before they started dressing. She’d have just enough time to change, as her father returned from the warehouse, and rush out to the diner where she worked a morning shift. Nina had the remains of a cigarette in her jeans, but she couldn’t light it with the car lighter, so she slipped it into his shirtfront pocket.

“Smoke it first thing when you get to school,” she said. “As soon as your mom leaves you, smoke it. And think of me.”

He’d spent all night trying to think of the right thing to say to her, and now it escaped him. “I can’t believe your dad didn’t see us,” he said.

“Yeah, it was like we were invisible.”

Her skin was pale and she looked tired. There was some glitter on the back of her fingers and the corners of her eyes.