Clear Water Read online

  Whiskey told Patrick to go up on the deck, and Fly Bait unlashed the boat from the dock and then cast off while Whiskey piloted, heading for a swimming hole upriver.

  “It’s beyond any bad shit being pumped in—at least that we know about—and it’s private.” Whiskey seemed to like the idea of “private,” and Patrick, who had done most of his swimming at the health club pool, the better to show off and hook up, was suddenly a fan of it too.

  Patrick stood at the prow and leaned against the hip-high rail as the boat putt-putted its way through the green waters of the Sacramento River. At some point, he became almost hypnotized by the dark water beneath him, and he leaned forward, fascinated by the hidden world submerged in the water’s reflection. He could see the larger rocks about ten to twelve feet down, he reckoned, and the submerged tree trunks, and even the occasional fish, slow to flee from the noise of the biofuel engine. The putt-putting grew slower, and Patrick raised his head to see a small deserted dock. There was an abandoned gas pump near the water and a wooden quay that was barely sound. Whiskey came out of the cabin, where he’d been steering, and vaulted off the deck and to the dock, lashing the boat to the quay irons with deft, confident movements, and Patrick watched him, envious.

  In all his life, he’d never moved like he owned something. His father seemed to own the entire world, but Patrick hadn’t even felt like he owned his car.

  But Whiskey—Whiskey moved like he owned the air he breathed and earth beneath his feet. That was all he wanted, that was all he needed, and he would master it simply because it was his.

  Patrick wondered what he would master if he could, and then he watched as Whiskey kicked off his battered slip-on tennies and shucked his jeans. Wearing only a pair of boxers, he executed a neat dive off the quay to the water, swimming cleanly under water for at least fifteen yards before surfacing and waving to Patrick.

  “Jump in, kid.”

  Patrick wasn’t about to strip down to his underwear, but hell, all he was wearing was holey cut-offs anyway—he’d been barefoot all day. Without hesitation, he stripped off the ribbed tank top and hit the water.

  It was glorious. No smell of oil or diesel fuel, no vegetation rot from the marshes, just clean water, moving lazily and keeping the cool from the mountain feeds without the fearsome current of rivers closer to the Sierras, like the American.

  Patrick rolled in the water, using his momentum to execute a flip, and came up tossing water from his hair and holding his face to the sunshine.

  “Whooooooooottt!” It was a joyous sound, completely spontaneous, and when he opened his eyes, Whiskey was grinning at him from across the expanse of five yards or so.

  He heard another splash, and both of them turned in time to see Fly Bait jumping in. She was actually wearing a plain bikini, and her stringy, tanned body looked sleek and comfortable arcing through the air and into the natural water. Patrick didn’t have a lot of experience with women in any capacity, but he did admire her grace. She had the same self-assured quality as Whiskey, as if she owned the air she breathed and the ground she walked on, and that was all she needed. He liked that about her.

  Nobody was talking, and he noticed that the current, though slight, was carrying them toward the center of the river. Suddenly, he felt an overwhelming sense of… of freedom, from everything. Without a word, he eyed the horizon upstream and struck out, just swimming. His arms hauled water and his legs kicked and his breathing evened out, and everything—his father, his car, his skeezeweasel boyfriend, all of it—disappeared in the wondrous muscle-pumping bliss of mastering the cool water. He swam until his arms ached and his breath came too short to support him, and then he flipped around and took stock.

  He’d gone a long way—at least 200 yards—and Whiskey and Fly Bait were in the distance. He stopped and treaded water, letting the current bear him back to his beginnings, and for the first time since the conversation with his father, felt like he could breathe.

  He wasn’t anyone here. No one thought he was weak. No one seemed to be drawing any judgments about his medication or his skeezeweasel boyfriend or… or anything. They just expected him to try. God, when was the last time anyone had expected him to try—and given him credit for doing just that?

  He opened his arms and let the current bear him back like thick wind. For the first time in his life, he felt like he could fly.

  HE STARTED out in the berth by himself that night—Whiskey grabbed a sleeping bag and threw it out on the deck and told him not to worry. The next day, Patrick could start with the reorg on the equipment over the convertible dining room table, and that way, Whiskey could sleep on that instead.

  “But it’s your room!” Patrick complained. “Shouldn’t I be the one sleeping on the deck?” The idea made him shudder. Not the outside—that actually sounded cool. He’d never done a campout or anything resembling one. No, what made him shudder was that the prow wall sloped down to the deck level about a quarter of the way down the ship, and although there was a waist high rail that covered the stern, there was a chance (however small) that someone sleeping on the rounded part of the prow might roll down and off the side of the boat. They’d fall either into the water or onto the quay and very likely be just fine, if a little bruised or a lot surprised, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that sleeping without the rail brought Patrick to a cold sweat.

  Whiskey shrugged. “Maybe sometime when it doesn’t make you wet your pants. For right now, take my berth.”

  There was a full moon that night, and it cast sharp shadows through the hatches. The shadows moved with the slight rocking of the boat, and Patrick lay with his head pillowed on his hands and tried to imagine what those shadows could be. He was half-asleep, after swimming for an hour and a dinner of Chipotle leftovers and listening to Whiskey and Fly Bait talk in shorthand about the water quality and chemical composition, and his imagination—usually fairly active—started drawing little mental .gifs in the play of dark and light.

  He saw frogs in the shadows, talking to each other, and dark water rushing in through an open window. He saw a man with an impossibly wide chest holding the world on his back—and then bouncing it on his foot and his knee like a hackey-sack. He saw birds with oily feathers dive-bombing a pool of crumpled clothes.

  He saw Whiskey, his rangy, narrow chest covered with dark hair (it peeked out of the holes in his T-shirt) and wet boxer shorts transparent from the river.

  He was hung like a frickin’ donkey, and uncut, and Patrick had noticed but pretended he hadn’t because it seemed rude, somehow, to make big goo-goo eyes at someone you’d fallen completely apart on.

  So Patrick’s imagination was doing the undressing, peeling down the wet boxers and opening his mouth to take in that lovely cock.

  Patrick started to squirm, both aroused and uncomfortable. He’d never really enjoyed giving blowjobs before.

  He gave them—he sort of had to. You didn’t get a boyfriend without opening your mouth while on your knees. But he’d always hated the feeling of those hands on the back of his head, the expectation that he could take more down his throat, and the way he had to patiently explain that yes, they needed a condom if they were going to shoot in his mouth—and even before, if they hadn’t been cleared of herpes or gonorrhea and any other STDs. (Seriously—had he been the only one paying attention in health class?)

  So he was surprised—more than surprised—when his first thought about Whiskey’s nude body was that he wanted to touch it with his mouth. But the thing was, he wanted to do more than that. He wanted to devour it. He closed his eyes then, Whiskey’s form assembling behind the closed lids, and imagined a prone Whiskey, a patient Whiskey, waiting for Patrick’s mouth, waiting for his touch.

  Even in his imagination, his hands shook.

  He fell asleep right when his mouth had moved from the hard muscles of Whiskey’s chest up the corded, taut neck, along that square jaw, and to a hot, accepting, open-mouthed kiss.

  He woke up when his dream shi
fted, and dream water started to pour in through dream hatches, and dream Whiskey wasn’t there to bail him out.

  IT WAS still dark, and the air outside the quarters had turned cold, with a breeze coming off the river that cut right through the towel Patrick had dragged outside to the ship’s prow as a blanket. Whiskey was shaking his shoulder, and Patrick woke up quickly, knowing that his brain was still about half a block behind his open eyes.

  “Kid—it’s three in the morning. What are you doing out here?”

  “Are there frogs in stars?” he asked, and even he knew that didn’t make any sense. He started counting his fingers to see if he could get to ten and maybe make the connection between stars, frogs, and being out on the deck at three in the morning.

  “Probably,” Whiskey answered. “Amphibians are one of the first forms of life in the evolutionary chain. It’s one of the reasons they’re so open to genetic anomaly. Is that really why you’re sleeping sitting up when I’ve got a perfectly good berth down below?”

  “There was water coming in through the hatches,” Patrick garbled. He knew it had been a dream. Probably even a logical dream—something anyone would dream when he’d been pulled from a drowning car not much more than twenty-four hours earlier. But his words were still half a block behind, and they were winded with the sudden jerking from sleep-thought to awake-thought, and he couldn’t seem to make the word “dream” address anything that had led to his restive walk to the top quarters and the decision that he felt safer on deck.

  Whiskey didn’t look surprised, though. He just nodded his head. “Yeah? Well, if there was water coming in through the hatches, maybe we should go see if it’s gone out again, what do you say?”

  “Will the frogs be gone?” And… he had no idea where that had come from.

  Whiskey shrugged. “Probably not. If you’re like Fly Bait and me, you’ll be dreaming about them for a couple of months. C’mon, kid, gimme your hand.”

  Patrick did and found himself hauled up, stumbling into Whiskey’s solid, warm body.

  Mmmm…. Patrick wrapped his arms around Whiskey’s waist and closed his eyes. “You smell like sweat and river,” he said, and it was true. No soap, no expensive cologne, just sweat and river. Good smells. Not smells he’d ever thought to seek out, but he started burrowing against Whiskey’s skin just to bring them closer.

  “That’s because I’ve been sweating on the river,” Whiskey told him logically, and then, keeping Patrick tucked under his arm, he navigated the way across the deck and down the stairs, across the shadowed living quarters, and to the berth.

  Patrick hesitated at the berth. “Water.”

  “Yeah, don’t worry. I’ll be there with you to make sure the water stays out, okay?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I’m gonna have a woody in the morning, okay, kid? Don’t get any ideas—we’re not doing that.”

  “Damn.” Well, that was disappointing. All of the sort-of-shitty boyfriends who had simply assumed Patrick would put out, and this one, who smelled like sweat and river, was telling him to give it up. But that was okay, because sweat and river were apparently going to lie down with him, and he liked that.

  He barely remembered lying down, and then the smell of river and sweat engulfed him, and he fell back asleep.

  WHISKEY was gone when he woke up. In fact, as he padded out to the kitchen, he saw that Fly Bait was too. There was a note, a list, and a set of keys on the counter.

  1994 Celica, dark red w/primer spots. Get gas at dock pump. We have an account.

  Follow road up to levee. Go right. Walmart eventually.

  Get following: milk (2%), yoghurt—you pick, pasta & sauce, hot dogs, mac & cheese, lunch meat, non-stale bread, three flats of bottled water, fruit that won’t die tomorrow, anything you feel like cooking, flip-flops and tennies to fit you (wear Whiskey’s flip-flops into town), socks, underwear, two pairs of cargo shorts, three T-shirts, Band-Aids, antibiotic ointment, and anything you want with the change.

  Be back by two o’clock, you can help us reorg the kitchen so you can sleep on the fold out.

  Even if you fuck this up somehow, we won’t rip your head off. If you decide not to come back, leave the keys in the car and call us at this number so we can come get it.

  W & FB

  There was $160 in cash under the car keys.

  Patrick looked at the cash for a while, just pondering. It wasn’t that he was thinking about grabbing the $160 and taking off for the hills; it was more like he couldn’t remember ever being given such a simple housekeeping task before. He’d done stuff like this when he was working his restaurant job all the time, but that had been self-motivated. He liked the job, so he did what the manager told him. He couldn’t remember a single time his mother had told him to buy milk or cook dinner or pick up something on his way home from school. His father had employed housekeepers—one to cook, one to clean—and shit had just sort of appeared. Patrick had gotten old enough to buy his own clothes, and the credit cards had appeared too.

  And here he was, with $160 in cash and an injunction to buy stuff to make a household run. To be a part of something. Decide not to come back? God, he wasn’t sure if he ever wanted to leave.

  He took off immediately, which was a mistake. No breakfast, no yoga, no meds—fighting his way through his brain jungle was interminable. He must have consulted his list in Walmart about six-dozen times to make sure he got everything just right. He bought the clothes first, then the groceries and cleaning supplies so he could buy extra groceries right up to the limit, including tax. He shopped carefully—for one thing, he wanted to be trusted again, and for another, he didn’t want to live off of the yuck that was currently in their refrigerator anytime soon, and he knew that what he bought now could possibly be yuck later. He was pretty proud of himself, actually, and that feeling of good will lasted right up until he was pushing his cart past the electronics department to the register.

  There, on at least forty televisions, half of them big screen, was his car getting pulled out of the river.

  The sound was off, but the caption read “Business Owner’s Son Missing, Foul Play Suspected.”

  Oh shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. His father thought he was dead?

  A sub-zero ice floe settled beneath his skin, and his stomach cramped with anxiety. Oh, crap. He knew better. Here he had been, playing house, and he hadn’t taken care of his shit. He needed to call his dad.

  If you fuck up, we still won’t rip your face off.

  Silly words, really, but for some reason they settled him. He could bring back the groceries to Fly Bait and Whiskey and then leave a message on his father’s machine. He didn’t need to face the world just yet. It would be okay.

  That was his mantra, through checkout, through packing the groceries back into the tiny Celica, through the trip back down the levee to the quay. (He knew where he was now—about forty-five minutes down I-5 from Cal’s bar. Jesus, Cal—where were you taking me?) It would be okay. It would be fine. He would be fine. He’d tell his father that he was fine and that Shawn Cleary didn’t have to worry about Patrick ever again. Shawn would probably be relieved. It would be okay.

  He didn’t stop to think about the future or that he couldn’t live with Whiskey and Fly Bait forever—but then, long-term planning had never been Patrick’s strongpoint. He just pulled the car up into the parking lot for the boat dock and grabbed his environmentally friendly blue Walmart bags and flip-flopped his way down to the quay.

  As he neared the boat, he was startled to see Whiskey and Fly Bait on the deck, talking to a man standing on the dock whom Patrick didn’t recognize.

  The man was wearing slacks, worn leather shoes, and a short-sleeved polyester button-up shirt with a cheap tie. He was talking to Fly Bait intently, taking notes on a little pad of paper, and he didn’t see Whiskey’s intent look at Patrick. Patrick did, and when Whiskey darted his eyes to the little fish/bait/gas shop at the other end of the quay, Patrick didn’t even hesit
ate to change his direction and walk straight for it.

  He had enough change to buy a soda and some ice cream bars, and by the time he’d thrown his little bag in with the rest of the groceries, the guy had moved on down the docks. Patrick hurried over to them, his arms cording with the strain of $160 of Walmart food and groceries.

  “Whowazzat?” he asked, taking the step from the dock to the boat so quickly he tripped. He would have gone sprawling, but Fly Bait steadied his shoulder and Whiskey caught him around the waist. He didn’t even acknowledge he’d almost gone over, and the two of them started taking the bags from him gently while he tried to talk to them with his hands.

  “Whowazzat? Did my dad send him? Because I’m all over the fucking news! There was even a picture!” It had been his senior portrait. Six years ago he’d had a little bit of baby fat, and his hair had been really lame, but people might still recognize him. “I’m on the news and my dad thinks I’m dead and whothefuckwazzat?”

  Whiskey and Fly Bait exchanged looks as Patrick started bouncing so hard on his toes that the boat began to rock.

  “My dad thinks I’m dead! I’m sorry… I’m sorry… I… it’s just my dad thinks I’m dead and I probably have to pay for the guard rail and the salvage and I didn’t want to scare anyone I just wanted to fucking disappear. Oh Jesus…. It’s not like he gives a fuck anyway, why did he have to put me all over the fucking television?”

  Whiskey was suddenly there—river and sweat (today was about ninety-eight and humid, so the emphasis was on sweat) and heat—and he clapped his hands on Patrick’s shoulders and held him there while he vibrated with the need to bounce some more.

  “Patrick,” he asked, calmly, like he was talking about breakfast cereal, “did you by any chance forget your meds this morning? And your yoga? You’re back awfully early—did you, maybe, skip a little part of your morning routine?”

  “I can’t take them without food—there was nothing to eat. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Who was that? I need to call my dad—who was that?”