Resting in bed, she’d shove her fat legs in my direction. I knew when she was about to start kicking; she always snorted, then exhaled an angry breath. And I could easily dodge her feet. I was fast. Her legs operated in slow motion. But her hands were another story.
'You’re a bad dog,” I admonished Dickens, who’d just returned from using the bathroom in the Johnsongrass. 'You watered all the fish and seaweeds.'
'No,” he said, shaking his head, 'you’re the bad dog!”
We were sitting inside Lisa.
Or Lisa II, as Dickens now referred to the repaired wigwam; he’d patched the fallen roof, removed the tires and bicycle. On her maiden voyage, we explored the ocean floor together, hoping for an encounter with the shark -- but, as evening approached, we grew tired of the search and surfaced.
‘'What can we play?”
'I’ll think.'
Late afternoon light streamed through the cracks in the submarine, shining on us, illuminating the scant hairs sprouting from Dickens’ nipples. He patted his narrow rib cage, his chest, smooth and fallow, almost appeared translucent.
'Let’s go to the bus,” I said. 'It’s the best place for watching light bugs. They visit me there.”
'Can’t do that.”
'How come? We can play.”
'Can't go there.”
Dickens paused. He looked at his belly button.
'Take the bus for shark bait and drive it on the tracks and it tips over and burns up -- then you get in trouble. Then you can’t ever go there again, ever.”
He glanced at me, gravely. His toes fidgeted in the flip- flops.
'And I’m not supposed to drive anyway, you know. Or steal buses, or steal anything anymore. That’s what gets me in all the trouble -- even if it was a million years ago. Lucky they didn’t send me away forever, all right? Lucky I didn’t burn and die too. And Sheriff Waller said you have to have a license -- and even then you can’t take a bus -- ’cause it isn’t the same as Daddy’s tractor either. You can’t drive a bus on the tracks or it tips and burns, you should know that. That’ll get you sent away, Dickens, so I can’t go there with you.'
'Oh,” I said, confused.
Captain, you’re acting silly, I thought. You’re crazy.
He mumbled, 'Sometimes you just worry about it too much -- just pretend it never happened, okay?”
'Okay,' I replied, uncertain if he was talking to me or himself.
Then he was standing, saying, 'I better go home now and eat, I think. We shouldn’t play no more today.'
It didn’t matter. I was bored with playing. My stomach ached for crackers and bread.
'But you have to save my friend, you said you’d do that.”
'I don’t know how,” he said. 'I make mistakes if I try some things.”
'‘I’ll show you,' I told him. 'You promised.”
And then it was me taking his hand; I wasn’t planning on releasing my grip -- not until he squatted at the hole, not until he used his hand to rescue Classique.
'But-'
'No, you have to,' I said, tugging at his arm.
Soon I walked alongside the embankment with Dickens in tow. Already my head swam, my stomach burbled, a mixture of anticipation and hunger. We passed by Dell’s meadow of bluebonnets and rocks. Then we wandered across the clearing of threshed grain -- clomping on white stalks that had turned golden in the evening rays -- and headed for the shaded footpath, where rnesquite branches crisscrossed overhead. Behind me Dickens’ feet flip- flopped.
And when we arrived at the hole, I loosened my hold on his hand and explained that Classique had fallen from my finger: 'But she’s pretty close. Butmy arms aren’t like yours and I can’t get her, but you can. She’s really close. It isn’t very far, it just looks far in there.”
Dickens knelt. He stared at the hole, pondering the darkness within.
'What is your friend?” he asked.
'A head. A Barbie head.'
'Does she bite?”
'No. Her mouth is like this-”
I pressed my lips together for a moment.
'She doesn’t have teeth.”
'All right,” he said, nodding.
Then his arm sank inside the hole, slowly, all the way to his shoulder. He brought out both parts of the broken branch and tossed them aside -- he slid his arm in again. Then out.
A handful of dirt and pebbles.
In again.
And his face strained as he felt around. My heart began racing.
'Don’t know,' he said. ‘just can’t find nothing.”
I was on my knees, beside him, watching.
'Wait. I got her. It has to be her. It has to be-”
Out.
An oblong stone, bigger than Classique, sat in Dickens’ palm.
'She’s weird,” he said. 'Not a head at all, not like you said.'
I was suddenly tired and dizzy. I lifted the stone and let it drop to the ground.
'No,” I said. 'No, no-'
'That’s all that’s down there,'’ he told me. 'Nothing else, okay? Nothing but dirt and more dirt.”
'She’s dead,' I said.
In the distance, the train whistle blew. Dickens glanced in the direction of the tracks.
'Uh-oh, the monster shark -- it’s coming.'
Then he made the erupting noise with his mouth.
But everything was spinning, so I shut my eyes. My body became heavy. And I slumped forward. And I don’t recall much after that -- except sensing my fall. I was entering the hole, tumbling straight into blackness, disappearing. The earth had swallowed me up.
16
What Rocks had drowned.
I stirred on my father’s bed -- reversed in position, my head resting at the foot of the mattress -- disoriented, lightheaded, and parched; everything around me was tinted in ultramarine, blurry. The ceiling. The lamp glowing at the center of the night table. My dress, my legs, my sneakers. The backpack and small pile of dirty clothes and the Peach Schnapps bottle, all clumped at my feet. Blue and slightly out of focus.
At the bottom of the sea, I thought.
My fingertips touched my face, feeling for wetness. And I opened my mouth wide, expecting a gush of water, but found myself swallowing air instead. Then I realized the goggles were covering my eyes, the frayed elastic band pressed against my ears.
'And then you fly,' Dickens said.
Turning my head sideways, I saw him. He sat on the throw rug, playing with Magic Curl and Fashion Jeans and Cut ’N Style. The heads lounged in his level palm, a flying carpet sailing back and forth above his lap -- and he was underwater, breathing as effortlessly as a goldfish.
'‘We sunk,” I rasped.
Dickens glanced at me, his palm stopping in midair.
