head like a balloon, his moist eyes shut tight, his swollen lips puckered in concentration. The boy felt cool inside of her. Outside—her skin, the room, the whole universe, it seemed—was crackling hot. But inside, his flesh was smooth and hard and Dolly wrapped her legs around an icicle. And when Jonathan Pink let go inside of her, well, Dolly thought her belly was being flooded with chilly Delta water. She fell asleep on a soft sea of sheets, and when she woke a little while later, she was washed all over with Johnny’s salty sweat. The tides sloshed and churned and tugged inside of her. Dolly licked her arm and she tasted the Pacific Ocean. “Not tonight, Brother,” Dolly said. She was sitting up in her bed of seaweed, under a sheet of foam. “Don’t you take him, not tonight.” She stroked her boy’s damp skin with her fingertips, hummed a song, a tinkling melody that skipped like a spring brook over her tongue. She waited for Brother to go away, but he stood in her doorway, naked and tensed. He meant business. When he reached out for the boy and Jonathan Pink didn’t say a word, Dolly figured it might be alright after all. “Hush now,” said Brother, who was so tall that he had to bend to go out through her door. “Fair’s fair.” And he took Jonathan Pink across the hall into his own bedroom. The boy had left his clothes scattered around her bed, so Dolly scooped them off the floor and folded the sweat-stiffened blue jeans, the white t-shirt into a compact square. Holding it up to her face, she inhaled an ocean breeze. Then she knelt down by the opposite wall, and, wrapping her arms around her bare knees, she leaned all of her weight into her ear. The boys always made more noise in Brother’s room and Dolly enjoyed listening. Brother had let her watch only once, but now she could imagine just as good.as looking, and when she put her own hand to herself, she was sopping wet and it was like reaching down into a dark, bottomless well. n / ake the boy to the highway, t Dolly,” Brother said. “He’ll catch a ride real quick.” Brother stood uneasy, now. He liked them gone soon as he was done with them, right away with no fuss. With his overalls on, Dolly thought he might be going out to plow the dusty fields in the moonlight. She held her arms out to the boy. He didn’t look sad and he didn’t look hurt. He stood there, like a good soldier, his arms held stiff at his sides. Only he was naked and as wet as if he had been running under a garden hose. When he walked over to the bed, Dolly glanced down to where his footprints made a dewy trail on the floorboards from the doorway. “I’ll drive him into town myself,” she said. “It’s late for a boy to be out, even on a Saturday.” And she did, after she washed Jonathan Pink down with a cool washcloth, combed his glistening hair back. “There now,” she said brightly. “Don’t you look fresh.” “Thank you, ma’am,” he said. Not one for words. “Oh, goodness,” Dolly laughed. “You shouldn’t be calling me ‘ma’am.’ After tonight, we’re practically like old friends, isn’t that right?” And she squeezed him playfully in that spot between his legs till he was hard again and she giggled like a young girl. The highway was so straight that Brother often said you could tie the steering wheel down with a length of rope and nap on the way into town. In the truck, she gave the wheel over to the boy and, stretching herself out, she dropped her face right down into his lap, took him into her dry mouth and murmured, “So cool, so cool.” She kept her hands at her sides, pressed them tight against her hip bones, and she rocked back and forth across the seat like a harbor seal stretched out on a slippery rock. Jonathan Pink held tight to the steering wheel, keeping the truck off the gravel shoulder most of the time. There were no other cars and Dolly’s head floated in his lap until the outskirts of town where the streetlamps rose up every quarter mile. Then: “Now, you won’t say anything, will you Johnny? You’re a good boy, I can tell.” Dolly had this feeling about Jonathan Pink and, after a while, so did Brother. The funny thing was, he never brought the drizzles, or even a rain cloud. Each night when Dolly drove him back into town, she waited for the splashes on the windshield, but the sky was always clear and she could count the stars. “One, two, five, six, a hundred, a thousand,” she would count. “Why, there must be a million stars up there tonight, Jonathan Pink.” Sticking with him was like going for the jackpot, Dolly figured. Jonathan Pink was too good for a summer shower. Each time she pulled the boy down on top of her, she could feel a dam burst inside of her, and a shiver ran up her body from the quick chill. When Dolly got him going in her small bed, rocking back and forth, slipping in and out, she could hear the floods coming, and the whole house bobbed up and down on the waves like Noah’s Ark. Jonathan Pink would bring back the rains. She didn’t doubt it. Jonathan Pink could fill up the river bed all by himself. It was a fine deal for him, too. Dolly fed him dinner nights—he liked her cooking—and there were times when she’d slip a few dollars in the back pocket of his blue jeans when he was off in Brother’s room. And if she ever questioned him about Brother, well, all Jonathan Pink would say about that was this: he didn’t mind it much. nd then the night came when f • she and the boy were in her bed and she felt a damp wind pass over her bare legs. When she opened her eyes, the curtains were slapping against the ceiling and the sky outside was black and full. “Go slow, now, Jonathan Pink,” she cautioned. “Tonight’s no night to rush things.” And the boy smiled down at her as if he knew exactly what she meant. And then he did an amazing thing: he gave her a bath with his tongue, wet down her whole body. And, with the palms of his hands, he massaged his saliva into her skin. Just as they were done, Dolly could smell the rains coming, and she could hear the first drops hitting hard on the barn roof and on the bed of the pickup truck. The cold wind opened up old cracks in the walls and wailed as it found its way into the house from every direction. Suddenly, Brother burst into the room and pulled Jonathan Pink right off of her, held the boy up in the air in his massive arms so that Jonathan Pink looked like a lost bird in a storm, flapping his featherless wings over her head. “Leave him down,” she shouted, but her voice was drowned out by the wind and rain. “Don’t take him from me like that, leave him down.” Dolly looked into her brother’s eyes, then down at his enormous, heaving body, and she wouldn’t look up at Jonathan Pink for she didn’t want the boy to see how frightened she was. Brother turned and left her room with the boy tucked under his arm, the boy’s soft white buttocks shining like a newborn baby’s flesh next to Brother’s dark, muscled back. She ran to her spot by the wall to listen, and it was so cold in the room that she wrapped herself up in a quilt and still, she shivered. Dolly had forgotten to shut the window and now she just watched as a stream of water ran along the floor towards her, lapped at her bare feet. When she looked up, water was coming in through the roof, spots of darkness spread like a rush of blood along her ceiling, crept down her walls like ivy. At first, she couldn’t hear anything above the sounds of the storm. But then, she heard moaning, Brother and Jonathan Pink moaning together, rhythmically. Their cries rose up and joined in with the screams of the gale. Dolly didn’t hear the thunder coming, but all at once, the room lit up and when she looked outside, she could see across the fields as if it were the middle of the day. The hail came. She felt it beating against the ground and the sides of the house, shaking her. She saw hailstones the size of snowballs, rocks of ice smashing through her windows, and she heard glass breaking all through the house. Dolly could hear the world. She heard cattle from the farms down the road bellow in pain, and barn animals all over the country cry out in fear and confusion. Hailstones assaulted the house, hurtled through her window and shattered on the bedroom floor. Shards of ice and glass flew up at her and she fell back onto the wet floor, covering her head with the blanket for protection. The wind grew in pitch, and Dolly heard the t.v. antenna break off the roof. She heard tree trunks snapping up and down the road like twigs. One, two, three, four. They fell in sequence. She heard the telephone poles along the highway going down, electrical wires flailing like tentacles in the rain, wet sparks sizzling in the blackened sky. Giant fists pounded away at the roof of the house, angry hands punched holes in their walls. When she heard the crash and their screams, Dolly pulled herself up against the wall and ran into the next bedroom. The entire north wall was pushed in, the floor pock-marked, and Brother and Jonathan Pink lay together, Brother on top, sheltering the boy like a cocoon, bathed in each other’s sweat and blood. Dolly could see small splinters of glass glistening like rain drops on the back of Brother’s legs. When she bent down and covered them both with her soaking blanket, she felt Jonathan Pink’s arm curl up and under her armpit and around her neck. Brother’s hand pulled her head down to a quiet spot in the curve of his neck. They held onto each other as the whole house came down around them and Brother’s bed tossed about on a lake of icy water. Dolly was being rocked into a deep sleep and when she opened her eyes, she saw the pieces of her life floating by—her clothes, kitchen bowls, picture frames and furniture. Then she became part of the river. She felt herself being swept away and she didn’t resist when she was pulled down to the cold, dark currents. Her whole body dissolved as wave after wave of glacial water splashed over her, and she found herself staring right into the eyes of Jonathan Pink. He smiled at her and Dolly stuck out her tongue to lick his salty face. “Jonathan Pink. With pink, pink cheeks like roses,” she whispered. And she tasted the Pacific Ocean. 38 Clinton St. Quarterly
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