Up Jumps the Devil

We drank champagne and ate grilled sea bass in front of the fire, and later we made love there, too.

Later still, wrapped together in his quilt, we drank the last of the champagne and watched the fire die down to coals while the running lights of boats drifted past, far down on the river.

“Yes,” I murmured sleepily.

“Yes, what?” His lips brushed my brow.

“Yes, I am thankful.”

Thanksgiving Day dawned mild and foggy again with a brightness that promised sunshine by noon. Kidd’s a morning person and when I slid a foot over to his side around nine-thirty, he’d been up so long that my toes found no residual warmth from his body.

But the low murmur of his voice floated up through the open window and I saw him sitting on the porch steps, talking to the dogs as he gave them a good brushing. Occasionally he’d pause to scratch their heads and gaze out over the river where the fog hung in hazy layers.

“Don’t look all the pretty off the morning,” I said. “Save some of it for me.”

“Better hurry up then.”

“I’ll be down in ten minutes.”

Four minutes in the bathroom, one minute to straighten the covers, another two minutes to throw on jeans and my favorite Carolina sweatshirt, and I was down the stairs with three minutes to spare, ready for coffee and juice and for standing in the kitchen with Kidd’s arms around me.

Like the dogs, I need the physical contact of hands and face. I want to nuzzle and be petted, to hug and be hugged back. Next to life itself, having someone to love, having someone who loves you, is the luckiest thing in the whole world. Love doesn’t have to be sexual, but it does have to be physical—touching, kissing, feeling warm skin against my skin. Or like now, standing with my head against his blue flannel shirt, feeling the beat of his heart beneath my fingers.

We seldom plan anything when I come down and we spent the morning lazing on the porch, enjoying the sun when it finally burned away the fog, and talking of this and that.

“How is Amber?” I asked dutifully when he mentioned his daughter in passing.

“Fine. Growing up too fast, though. I’ve got her new school pictures.”

He went inside and brought back a handful of color prints.

The face that looked back at me was truly beautiful: masses of dark curly hair, flawless fair skin that showed no adolescent pimples or eruptions, intensely green eyes that crinkled a little like Kidd’s in the one picture where she was smiling. Otherwise, I gathered that she generally favored her mother, a woman I hadn’t met.

“She’s lovely,” I said truthfully, “but she looks more like eighteen than fourteen.”

“Tell me about it,” Kidd said, shaking his head as much in pride as in rue. “The phone never stopped the whole time she was here last weekend. I told her I didn’t know why she wanted to come out when we couldn’t talk ten minutes without one of her friends or some boy calling.”

I knew exactly why Amber had wanted to keep him from spending the weekend with me, but not by the slightest frown or raised eyebrow would I let him know what she was up to.

So I cooed over her pictures and as Kidd talked of his daughter, I smiled and made appropriately interested noises until the conversation moved on to other topics.

After lunch, we took the dogs for a long walk along the river.

“When I was a boy,” said Kidd, “the Neuse was full of fish up this way. And the brackish water a few miles down used to be so thick with crabs we could catch two or three at a time on a single chicken head.”

Sunlight sparkled on the water, but instead of a fresh woodsy smell, the humid air around us held something vaguely fetid today.

Kidd tossed a pebble and the dogs perked up their ears as it plinked and sent ripples across the surface. “This used to be such a beautiful river, but now it’s dying and it’s killing the estuaries as well.”

The troubled coastal waters were at the root of that murder down at Harkers Island where we first met.

“I see where the state’s just authorized another study on the Neuse,” I said. “Be simpler if we could just bus the whole legislature down here and make them swim for an hour.”

“Won’t happen,” he said. “Too many politicians up there in Raleigh, not enough statesmen. Greed and ignorance. They send us all their mess downriver—raw sewage, hog lagoon spills, runoffs from agri-industries— everything but the laws and the money it’ll take to clean it up. We get another commission to do another study while the state spends millions to shore up the millionaires’ beaches on Bald Head Island.”

He plinked another pebble. We found a low spot almost level with the river and our mood lightened as we began skipping stones. I got six skips, but Kidd’s a show-off and routinely got eight or ten skips out of his pebbles before they sank.

“Some of us have real jobs,” I said, when he teased my lack of proficiency. “You, on the other hand, have clearly wasted too much time working on your rock-skipping skills.”

The day had turned out blue-sky beautiful. As we walked through the trees, we saw several hawks kiting on thermal currents overhead. Down on the ground, the wind was such that we walked right up on a small herd of deer. Unfortunately, the dogs saw them at the same time we did and their sharp barks sent the deer dashing for the underbrush, white tails flying.

“My nephew Reese is dying to bag a nice buck,” I said.

“So what’s stopping him? The deer population’s so swollen he shouldn’t have any trouble. Or is he a bad shot?”

“No time to hunt. Now that his dad’s stuck in a wheelchair, more of the work falls on him.”

“Reese. He’s the one with the fancy truck, right?”