Devil’s Lake

Cletus is sitting in a lawn chair he has pulled out to the very edge of the pier. The back of his legs are sweating like crazy and keep sticking to the vinyl. He pulls them away every once in a while to get a little breeze underneath, dry them out. Last fall he got jock itch on his jock dick and he’s thinking now about getting it on his jock calves. Today is his sixteenth birthday. Over in the picnic area, his family is grilling a hundred pounds of meat. They are grilling and giving him space. It’s all he wanted for his birthday: space and meat.

He is sixteen now. He will do what he wants. What he wants is to sit by himself on the edge of the pier, eat his plate of meat, and watch the two girls who are swimming across the inlet. They race each other to a buoy, then sit in the sun. Then they get in the water again. One of them is wearing a two-piece. When she slides on her back to do elementary backstroke, he can see the white of her belly, like a trout.

Cletus shifts in the chair. In his lap is a paper plate filled with meat. He has two hot dogs, a bratwurst, split down the middle and looking like a hung pig, four glistening ribs, a chunk of steak that is black on the outside and still a little raw in the middle. He works quickly through it all. His mouth chews and licks and slurps and he keeps his eyes on the two girls across the inlet. All in all, he thinks, it’s not a bad birthday. Not a bad time to be a young man turning sixteen.

He watches the girls practice swan dives while he chews a piece of gristle. He is memorizing a topographic map of their woman bodies, the breast lumps fixed to their narrow torsos. The breasts remind him of military decorations. Earned. He reaches two fingers into his mouth to remove the gristle. The girl in the two-piece has a birthmark on the outside of her left thigh. Cletus has an itch and shifts in his chair. He flicks the gristle into the lake, watching it float for a few minutes until a fish bobs to the surface and takes it into its great sucking vaginal mouth with its great vaginal fish lips. Sometimes, it seems all Cletus can see in the world are vaginas. Every so often, he would look it up in the dictionary, run his hot finger pad over the cool bumps of ink on the silky page: V-A-G-I-N-A, his pulse picking up a little. All he knows about vaginas comes from the black ink of dictionary words, and so, without even a sketched image in his mind, he sees them everywhere, projected upon the world in kaleidoscopic shadows. Formless enough to form in everything.

Cletus has an itch and shifts in his chair.

The girls climb out of the lake and dry their bodies with bright-colored beach towels. Cletus puts his teeth into a rib. Juice running down all across his chin. He has an itch and shifts in his chair. The girls are rubbing white sunscreen into each other’s shoulders. Cletus picks up another rib.

His hands are slick with meat and grease. He imagines both of the girls on the pier, on either side of his chair. They are turning to him, at the same time, mechanical ballerinas, asking for his long-armed hands to reach some secret spot on their bodies that he didn’t yet know about. Didn’t even know existed, this spot. Another frontier, like space travel. Cletus has an itch and shifts in his chair. He thinks this would be a really fine birthday present. He imagines the feel of a girl’s skin under his new sixteen-year-old palms—old enough, now, to grip a steering wheel, to drive a car off, alone, solo, crisscrossing the broad, brown back of America, free as a contrail. Free to drive to a dark, secret place with a girl in a swimsuit in the passenger seat. Free to drive her into the deepest, most shadowy part of the woods around this lake—the kind of place that, late at night, is only lit by the moon and the glow of dashboard lights. His hands can do that now, too. Cletus has an itch and shifts in his chair. He closes his eyes. The empty plastic plate had been balanced on his lap. Now it falls off, a soft plop in the lake water. Cletus is thinking about the steering wheel, car leather under his palm, the look of sunscreen when it’s rubbed into a birthmark.

“Oh my god! What is he doing?”

Cletus blinks. He can’t focus in the bright sun. He feels his pupils contracting. There are the girls. They’ve swum over to his dock and are treading water, a few feet away. He struggles to see.

“Nothing.” He clears his throat. “Nothing. Scratching myself. I had an itch.”

The girls say nothing, treading water. They wrinkle their noses.

“You ain’t never got an itch?” He shifts defensively.

“Sure I’ve had an itch,” says one of them. She unwrinkles her nose, but now she looks haughty. Her shoulders bob in the lake water. They’re brown and spotted, reminding him of eggs from a country farm. “But I ain’t scratching it on some public pier on some public lake with some girls around.”

Cletus doesn’t say anything, his face on fire. The girls stare at him. They look like little birds.

One of the straps of her swimsuit has fallen down. His empty plate floats next to her, face down. A little fish is biting at its edge. His pupils are small, again, clear and narrow, and he can really see that they are there, right beneath him. If his chair tipped over he would fall right into them. Someone would maybe even get hurt a little.

“It’s my birthday,” he says.

“Happy birthday,” says the other girl, the one with the two-piece. The one with the birthmark, he thinks.

Her legs are going slow like ghosts in an egg beater under her body. Cletus is right above her, but the legs are far away, under the water. He’s looking for that birthmark. Either he can’t see it or it’s not there after all.

She tosses his plate up on the pier. “Here’s your trash. You know you’re not supposed to throw trash in the lake.”

“Uh,” says Cletus.

The girls kick up a great splash and swim away, back to their towels. Their stroke is good and even, like they’ve spent a lot of summers at the Y taking lessons. Cletus looks after at them, his face still burning. Through the splashy froth, there’s a little flash of a birthmark on a leg, and he thinks, despite it all, yes. He is sixteen and the rest of his life is waiting there just like a hanging peach.