Acre Under a Green Sky

The days that followed bled into one another like the soft colors of summer madras. We spent nearly all our daytime at the swimming pool. Garry fell in love with an older woman named Angie. She already had nice tits and she put out. Her stepfather taught her how to fuck. She was twelve years old. I didn't see much of Garry anymore except at the pool with Angie; and then just to lend him money, so he could buy her things. She was greedy for everything. You could see it in her eyes –– a longing, wide-eyed look like a starving waif canvassing the streets for a handout. Invariably, I would see her desperately surveying for attention by the side of the pool while he was off buying her hot dogs and cokes at the concession stand. I'd see him making the payoff to Angie, and then the two of them would go off into the woods surrounding the pool area. She was always looking over her shoulder to see if another prospect was watching, waiting, paying the slightest bit of attention.

I saw all this with a new vision; through darker, colder eyes. I was existing on another, more shallow level of consciousness –– self-consciousness. I learned how to lie. And in the same way Angie sought out and provoked lust, I provoked fights. I wasn't even good at it. I rarely won. But ironically, almost all my opponents ended up becoming friends.

There's a string inside the waistbands of swim trunks. They get wet and knotted and impossible to untie especially when you need to take a leak. Sometimes you have to walk home in wet trunks because the string is knotted so tight you need a pair of pliers to loosen it. I had a knot like that in my stomach walking home at the end of each day. Would she be out cold in her chair, or out making a fool of herself in front of the neighbors? You never knew.

My father would come home for supper then take a nap before going off to the office again. We felt secure during those daylight suppers. Then the long night of darkness would begin; culminating with his return very late at night and the fighting.

Danny and Baby Ruth crawled into my bed to escape the shouts and sounds of violent lovemaking that followed. I was ice inside; already learning to put off feeling until it was safe. It would not be safe for some time.

We were never seduced by the heat of fighting the way they were. Night was for shouts and cries and lovemaking that no longer expressed love. It was sex spurred by the hot adrenaline rush of temper, and they came to enjoy it; to long for this new passion often indistinguishable from the fighting. Later I came to realize that they were lusting for each other –– that they loved it. They had stumbled onto a different facet of their love that somehow satisfied a terrible need in each of them. It would be years before I would realize that I had no part in any of it; that it was, after all, their love story; not mine.