Cat's eye

The sun beats down, the heat comes wavering up off the sand. I wear a cotton kerchief on my head, folded into a triangle and tied behind my ears, the front of it damp with sweat. Around us is the drone of flies. I try to listen through it, behind it, for the sound of bears. I’m not sure what they would sound like, but I know that bears like blueberries, and they’re unpredictable. They may run away. Or they may come after you. If they come you should lie down and pretend to be dead. This is what my brother says. Then they might go away, he says; or they might scoop out your innards. I’ve seen fish guts, I can picture this. My brother finds a bear turd, blue and speckled and human-looking, and pokes a stick into it to see how fresh it is.

In the afternoons, when it’s too hot to pick berries, we swim in the lake, in the same water the fish come out of. I’m not supposed to go over my depth. The water is gelid, murky; down there, past where the sand drops away and it’s deep, there are old rocks covered with slime, sunken logs, crayfish, leeches, huge pike with undershot jaws. Stephen tells me fish can smell. He says they’ll smell us, and keep out of the way.

We sit on the shore, on rocks that poke up from the narrow beach, and toss bits of bread into the water, seeing what we can entice: minnows, a few perch. We search for flat stones and skip them, or we practice burping at will, or we put our mouths against the insides of our arms and blow to make farting noises, or we fill our mouths with water and see how far we can spit. In these contests I am not the winner, I am more like an audience; though my brother does not brag, and would probably do the same things, by himself, if I weren’t there.

Sometimes he writes in pee, on the thin edge of sand or on the surface of the water. He does this methodically, as if it’s important to do it well, the pee arching delicately out from the front of his swim trunks, from his hand and its extra finger, the writing angular, like his real writing, and ending always with a period. He doesn’t write his name, or dirty words, as other boys do, as I know from snowbanks. Instead he writes: MARS. Or, if he’s feeling up to it, something longer: JUPITER. By the end of the summer he has done the whole solar system, three times over, in pee.

It’s the middle of September; the leaves are already turning, dark red, bright yellow. At night when I walk to the outhouse, in the dark with no flashlight because I can see better that way, the stars are sharp and crystalline and my breath goes before me. I see my parents, in through the window, sitting beside the kerosene lamp, and they are like a faraway picture with a frame of blackness. It’s disquieting to look at them, in through the window, and know that they don’t know I can see them. It’s as if I don’t exist; or as if they don’t.

When we come back down from the north it’s like coming down from a mountain. We descend through layers of clarity, of coolness and uncluttered light, down past the last granite outcrop, the last small raggedy-edged lake, into the thicker air, the dampness and warm heaviness, the cricket noises and weedy meadow smells of the south.

We reach our house in the afternoon. It looks strange, different, as if enchanted. Thistles and goldenrod have grown up around it, like a thorny hedge, out of the mud. The huge hole and the mountain of earth next door have vanished, and in their place is a new house. How has this happened? I wasn’t expecting such changes.

Grace and Carol are standing among the apple trees, just where I left them. But they don’t look the same. They don’t look at all like the pictures of them I’ve carried around in my head for the past four months, shifting pictures in which only a few features stand out. For one thing they’re bigger; and they have on different clothes.

They don’t come running over, but stop what they’re doing and stare, as if we’re new people, as if I’ve never lived here. A third girl is with them. I look at her, empty of premonition. I’ve never seen her before.

Chapter 14

G race waves. After a moment Carol waves too. The third girl doesn’t wave. They stand among the asters and goldenrod, waiting as I go toward them. The apple trees are covered with scabby apples, red ones and yellow ones; some of the apples have fallen off and are rotting on the ground. There’s a sweet, cidery smell, and the buzz of drunken yellowjackets. The apples mush under my feet. Grace and Carol are browner, less pasty; their features are farther apart, their hair lighter. The third girl is the tallest. Unlike Grace and Carol, who are in summer skirts, she wears corduroys and a pullover. Both Carol and Grace are stubby-shaped, but this girl is thin without being fragile: lanky, sinewy. She has dark-blond hair cut in a long pageboy, with bangs falling half into her greenish eyes. Her face is long, her mouth slightly lopsided; something about the top lip is a little skewed, as if it’s been cut open and sewn up crooked.