Free Swimming Sweet Arrow by Maureen Gibbon Page A

I didn’t think I ever would, but I did.”
    She said she told Luke how, when she was eight and Kevin had just gotten his license, he used to put a sleeping bag in the back of his old El Camino so she could lie down and look up at the sky while he drove. It used tomake her dizzy to look up into the blue, but she loved it, too. She couldn’t reconcile, ever, how the brother who did that for her was the same person who drove so blindly and wildly that he hadn’t even known the man he hit was a person and not a pole on the side of the road. June told that much to Luke, but no more, and Luke didn’t ask her to say more.
    “I never told you those things about Kevin. I hardly ever talk about him.”
    “I know,” I said. I did not ask her if she told Luke the one story she had told me about Kevin: that it was one of his friends who fucked her when she was just a kid.
    “You know what he said, Vangie? When I told him I wouldn’t tell him anything else, ever, about my brothers?”
    “What?”
    “He said, Everybody has some story they don’t need to tell. And that was that.”
    I knew then from the way her voice sounded that she couldn’t explain what she was feeling, or stop it. I didn’t say anything then. I just sat at the table, watching her face.
    “He and I haven’t even screwed yet. If that’s all it was, I wouldn’t be doing it. I wouldn’t put myself in this position. I wouldn’t put Ray in it.”
    I didn’t say anything, but I nodded.
    “I can’t tell you anything else, Vangie. I don’t want to jinx it.”
    We did not have any more drinks after that, because Ray was due home at eleven, and because she had wanted the talk more than anything, not Jim Beam at all. And when Iwas leaving, because I didn’t know what else to say, I said, “Well, I’m around.”
    “We didn’t even talk about you.”
    I said, “It’ll keep.”
    Even if we’d gone on talking that night, I wouldn’t have told her what I’d done with Del’s brother. She probably would have understood—certainly she would have understood now, if not before—but I did not want her to know. When I fucked Frank, I got a brand and a mark and a knowledge, but I did not want to go on fucking him. The brand was enough. It was my scar, the sign of an accident or an illness or an adventure gone wrong.
    June didn’t want a scar. She wasn’t going to fuck Luke just for the feeling of it. She did not want to do the thing once and then keep it secret inside her. She wanted to go on living it. I did not know how a person could do that, if it could be done. But I guessed it could be done, because there she was living in the house with the two of them and talking about love. Love.
    When I went out to my truck that night, I walked by Luke’s pickup, and that’s how I knew he hadn’t gone into town. I figured he was probably up on the mountain—or maybe just out behind the house, waiting for me to leave. When I saw his truck, it made me think about the way men held themselves and the way they talked and moved, and I knew it was a foreign world June was in. After I moved in with Del, I felt like I was in a foreign land as well, but it had to be even more true for June, living out there with the two of them. But June was probably like smoke finding her wayabout that world, because she was nothing if not smart, and smoke always finds a way in and out.
    I didn’t say shouldn’t or can’t to her. Maybe as a friend I should have, but to me, whatever was happening between her and Luke, between her and Ray, had already started. She was in the current of it.

10
    A FTER Del had been working awhile, he started hanging out with the guys he crewed with at Traut’s. They were all older—in their twenties and thirties and forties—and I think they saw Del as a little brother. They usually went out for a beer after work, and for some, the thing turned into a binge that lasted the whole evening. I worked night shift and didn’t get home until midnight or