Free Love & Darts (9781937316075) by Nath Jones Page A

their
individual turns for two squirts of the fun foam soap.
    They know the rules. So Mrs. Roth makes no
announcement about how the soccer ball will wait in a newspaper
basket on top of the TV until everyone’s eaten.
    Mrs. Swindan can’t be bothered right now.
She is swirling her hands in the jelly roll pan, smoothing out an
inch-deep layer of coarse sea salt. “Just get another bottle from
the garage,” she says as she scours half the oyster shells and
nests them in the salt. Mrs. Roth wraps each fresh oyster in a
streaky rasher from the deli downtown and lays it out in a shell.
Mrs. Hamel drizzles a mixture of white wine, hot sauce, garlic, and
parsley over the shells. Half go out onto Mr. Roth’s grill. Half go
under the broiler in the kitchen.
    The neighbors, talking loudly after all the
mai tais, white wine, and sangria, line up, each with a heavy paper
plate.
    Summer sets in. Mrs. Swindan calls Christa
over to the oven. There is no ceremony, no kneeling knightship, no
rite of passage for a warrior in the woods, no moment of hesitation
at all. Just, “Here. Take this out.” So as instructed, the young
new wife of one of the older grandchildren carries the most
important platter to the table, elbows her way through the line of
neighbors, and there are the angels on horseback, between the
deviled eggs and Mrs. Hamel’s Christmas fruit salad.

 
DECUSSATION

    The river moves midsummer slow. Two poles are forgotten on
the weathered wood and three bodies roll naked on a raft, moving
over each other but trying not to shift so much they’ll all sink.
There is no crime where there is an agreement. She moves away from
their embrace; lets the men have it for a while. None of them
speaks.
    Canyon walls rise around the three lovers
and their raft floats on the surface of a deep down waterway. She
picks up one of the poles, stands, and pushes them further
downstream. Granite surrounds whatever questions there are and
makes the river seem defined, known, trustworthy in its place.
Trees grow on shelves up high and vines hang down from slippery
cracks so full of life the rock itself seems to chase hanging algae
down its face.
    The woman, she’s twenty-six, poles over
close to one of the river walls, reaches out her hand, and cannot
quite touch the rock without affecting their raft’s balance. The
thick vines droop along the granite, around the saplings on ledges,
and she gives up reaching, choosing instead to pull clay from the
river’s edge onto the raft.
    She sits again, lays the pole down, starts
rubbing wet clay on one man’s legs while he kisses the other.
    Warm skin surrounds three minds that are
always left untouched like piles of sun-warmed clothes on the bank:
a pair of faded, acid-washed jeans; a paper-thin St. Patrick’s Day
t-shirt; a yellow skirt; two halves of an eight-year-old bikini; a
pair of flip-flops; some red shorts; and four forgotten running
shoes. All that stuff’s left piled together in the woods at the
landing by a too-bright yellow Corvette.
    They have choices. They aren’t children.
They each, as consciously as possible, have two more lives taken,
and no more longing, no more wanting, no more reasons to wait, to
beg, to ask for mercy, to respond, to curl long strands of hair
around once-broken fingers and also move whisker-rubbed lips; no,
nothing but skin (under a most private sun) rolled respectful of
their shared precarious balance, each taken, with rising up, with
release, with shifting weight leaning on elbows, on hips, on
shoulder blades with arched breast kinds of calling.
    The river moves them beyond the canyon into
a quiet stand of trees where the waters widen to a knee-deep,
nearly-stopped, unhurried serenity. Why talk? There is nothing to
say. They forget about conversational formalities, about bellies of
laughter, about tsking over amnesty for smokestacks, and
about who should shamefully have to drag the potted spider plant
from room to room.
    Someone must.
    The one man, the one