N3 - Chapter 35

Characters & References

• The N3 narrator is a live-aboard “boat guy.” The Islands is where every boat-guy dreams of going.

 - Chapel 15/”meatball” Rand – both features of “The Swamp” in the story “Lostine”

• Coffin Marsh – the swamp of the story Lostine

  - Fife – a huge Fife Truck Stop along I-5 where the disillusioning notion that Lostine is a “dragon lady” re-emerges in N3

  - Blandings – in N3, Blandings Stand is a big house Lostine is risking it all to restore.

  - Rigo – an N3 Mexican of much the same stamp as Emiliano Zapata

- Jailene – born when Lostine was 17

The Story

Lostine started with my socks. I wasn’t like Clarke. I didn’t wear my socks a week then throw them away, but mine were filthy. With soap and hot water that was cleansing as a freshet of rain, she bathed both my feet. I say bathed, because there was no scrubbing. I closed my eyes. With some sort of oil, I felt her bare hands gently, purposefully undulating and winding over my heels, individually massaging the bottom of each foot then sequentially up each digit, working each jointed length, tugging, lingering - slowly - off the ends of each toe.

Then, beginning to slide one hand up my right Achilles tendon, the other caressing the slope of the metatarsals on top of same foot, pat-drying my skin as her exploring hands climbed me intentionally, she started up my legs.

An electric alertness grew in me as she dismantled what I was wearing, as I heard my pistol clunk to the floor. From basically childhood, I’d dreamed of Lostine, anticipated, wanted, but eternally, we’d remained – not touching. Not now. But not what you’d think, either. As if she felt somehow privileged, her hands stopped short of what I yearned for and I heard her whisper, “Is that OK, Chet?” It was. But I ached for her. What could I possibly do but let her! What could I possibly do but gratefully accept everything Lostine did to me! Now, every private bit of me was getting a patient, tender cleansing and anointing. She was so humbling! She behaved as if I were precious to her, as if I had stumbled home to her from sort of battle – not with just a fingertip bitten off by a woman who was only defending herself from me.

My skin tingled. I felt the muscles of my shoulders vibrate. Surges of intense longing washed over me, tortured me. But dangling desperately in doubt, every private bit of me hung by one hand, my other hand unable to let go of the distant, mythical, safe, seductive promise of The Islands.

  Then, I couldn’t imagine what the fiber was – the softness of the blanket enveloping me!

Suddenly alone, I startled.

I opened my eyes. Standing close to the heat of the fireplace, over her shoulder, she was watching me. I saw orange firelight flood over Lostine’s erect figure. She stood exactly as when we were kids at Chapel Fifteen, half clothed, but now giving her bare back to me instead of toward meatball Rand. It was as if she was playing-out something she had dreamed in her own lonely solitude.

Captivated, I watched her enact almost exactly what she had done in the mosh pit at Fife, what she had done to me in the swamp when she expected to die. I say almost exactly, because there was a difference now. Now, she didn’t hide her face in fear of death. Now, turning toward me, she threw her head back very erect and her hair followed and from her tower, she invited me directly into her eyes as, in her same beautiful, graceful way when we were kids, she twisted her shoulders and let shadows dance and shimmer over her bare chest. Now, I saw every move on her waiting face. Now I saw hope and fleeting doubt, then what I couldn’t resist. Now, I watched her watch so closely my own face as she stripped away the last of what she wore and became just a girl - hiding in nothing. Now, I saw Lostine demurely wrap her chest in her arms and step toward the shadowed opening of the nearly hidden stairway to the left of the fireplace and disappear.

Lostine was always disappearing. I couldn’t stand it an instant. George had called me “unconscious,” but I thought I knew exactly where Lostine had gone. I sprang from the crew’s lounge and started up the stairs after her. But then I stopped in shadow and stood still and looked back. The vivid colors of the flickering, yellow firelight, the ancient, clear-grained fir floor – you could still see the nail-sole imprints of where, long ago a heavy man wearing loggers’ caulks had walked through the front doors. I saw the deep redness of the Honduras mahogany appointments in the walls.  Unexpectedly, the intense beauty of all of Lostine’s dreams leaped at me, dazzled me. I looked back at Blandings’ magnificent old pair of front doors. I knew it. I knew I was enchanted by all that was Lostine, but I wasn’t a bit afraid. I had the oddest, most settled sensation – that I, also, was home - that she was deliberately offering me her home. Home, mind you! The very personal way Lostine would sometimes so glowingly look up at me and invitingly pat a place close beside her where she wanted me to sit.  Much as I loved it, there was a sense of control in that. Not now.

I went back down the stairs and I walked over and I made sure her front doors were locked. I glanced around the room and over at the shadowed black square of the opening at the base of the stairway. I could feel myself being tugged there. I knew that when I stepped through it, I was never coming back.

But I did anyhow.

On the first landing of the stairs, her scent, the hypnotic sweetness of church-wedding incense smoke filled the space of the air I had been breathing. Glowing hot-orange to me through the darkness, its swinging motion slowing as I watched, the tiny embers of Lostine’s burning incense peeked at me from its censer, welcomed me, touched me, heated me. Above, on the brink of the next landing, the yellow beacon of a single, dancing candle flame waited.

But when I reached to pick up the aged, brass holder, fully expecting to let the flame guide me up into her heart, Lostine was there. I set the candle back down. I moved to pull her upstairs where I knew she wanted me to take her. My eyes guided up by the candle’s gentle light guttering from the floor, I couldn’t look away from the powerful gracefulness of her aqualine legs, over her left hip, the tattoo of a tiny bunny with two hearts popping happily out of its head, the perfect skin of her tiny belly ascending toward her...I heard her breathing - almost a gasping. She touched my arm. I lost control. I circled her waist with my left. She was shaking. I couldn’t stop myself at all. I started to kiss her – not just her mouth, but her whole, upturned face. I started to kiss every part of her warm face.

But, god! It was wet!

Silently, miserably in darkness, she had started to cry.

Just the way the dark woman at Fife halted Rigo in the streaming crowd, Lostine placed the palm of her hand in the middle of my chest. Her quavering voice deep in pain, she said, “I am nothing much, Chet. Not really.”

Leaden, my arms dropped to my sides. I didn’t know where my voice came from. Somehow, it was easy for me to articulate what I believed. Quite confidently, I told her, “You’re right. You are no being. You are a lightning strike.”

“Do you remember when we were kids, the diamond stud I had in the side of my nose?”

I did. Out at the centerfield fence, when she stood there silently in the sun guarding her first-grade brother, lightning bolts flew from her face to mine. I remembered that.

“That stud was the beginning, Chet. That diamond stud is how my father bought part of my soul. A little while after that, he divorced my mother. It killed her. He didn’t care.

“I knew what he was doing in Coffin Marsh. The boy from Clover Park grade school – the boy that disappeared? For the last time, I fought my father over him.” She sobbed. “I could tell, he knew exactly what happened to that boy. But it was easy for him. It seemed easier to simply let him buy me. He smiled his sly smile and with his grotesque money, he bought me dinner and that diamond stud and I knew I was living a lie, but I so wanted my very own diamond. Chet, no other girl had such a thing! I thought it made me better than...

“When I saw you patiently taming Koz even though he bullied you all the time...it was stupid, stupid...but I loved you.”

I tried to touch her, but she pressed harder with her palm.

“I could tell,” I said.

“How?
            “A look in your eye.”

“Do you know that night on the raft, when you and I and Koz were lost and you undressed me?”

Was she kidding? I did.

“And you were so careful not to touch me?”

I never knew she could tell. I thought she was completely lost in hypothermia. I thought she might die.

“Koz being there, too, in the chapel was the only thing that saved you.”

I couldn’t absorb what she was saying. A feeling was growing in me – a feeling that what I had just said to her was exactly right – that she wasn’t a being.”

“How do you think I met Jailene’s father?”

I couldn’t imagine. Inside, I was boiling over with the slipperiness of how I felt about her.

“I saw him and his friends in a Seven Eleven. His friends diverted the clerk - made a ruckus about the Slurpy machine. When he saw me smiling at him as he stole the store’s microwave and went out the door in the confusion, he took me with him to sell some ‘pills’. I learned what the pills did. I could have walked away, but it seemed easier not to.”

Her voice choked off.

“I sold more bits of my soul. I participated. I even drove him to meet his sources.”

I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I felt my left hand come up. It was her left palm that was pressing firmly to my bare chest. I reached across and with my fingers, circled her wrist gently, but then began to squeeze. I squeezed tighter. I felt the pressure of her hand on my chest relax and her arm sag and she let me suspend the weight of her defense and I carried her left hand to my mouth and I kissed her palm, then the back of same hand and with my thumb and trigger finger, without carrying her hand from my mouth, I began to massage each of her fingers just as she had earlier done with my stinking toes.

She let me. We just stood in one place.

She let me do other things – what with Lostine felt easy and wonderful and natural – things I had been unable to do with Vic or Rhonda. The way the skin of an octopus changes so magically and dramatically, I felt Lostine’s skin alternately prickle over with goose bumps, then smooth, then heat up feverishly. When I crouched and tried to pick-up the candle in its holder, but got confused about what to do because my injured right hand forced me to...when I couldn’t bring myself to also let go of her left, she chuckled in amusement, then giggled.

Lostine was an almost instantly very successful new Architect. She had become used to such a cash-flow, this crazy dream that she had the power to breathe her own life into the dead lungs of Victorian-age Blanding’s Stand had grown in her and carried her up and away like Jack’s bean stalk.

But her own bed was cheap. Small. Bottom half of a thrift-store, little kids’ wooden bunk twin set. Its dinky, mass-production scantlings creaked under our weight. It brought tears to my eyes – the loud self-denialness of its minimal adequation – like her cheazy little tin-can Fiat.

Yet she, of all people, elevated boat-guy me!

There wasn’t room in her bed for us, and she didn’t have an electric blanket, so we had to get close. The feel of her skin! Deep in her chest, she kept repeating, “Ummm!”

The ceiling of her bedroom and Blandings’ roof flew away – I guess that’s what happened. I just know I saw the contrail-like white streaks of darting stars that flared, then burning, burst - and were gone in showers of white-hot sparks that were her finger tips.

But then the night clouded over and she pressed even closer and enveloped me in a blinding electrical storm.

You know what they say about lightning. They all say it is so.

But it’s not.