At the wake, Julie and I sat in that alcove where the wind smelled of pine. We sparked Julie’s Pall Malls and sat smoking them, watching the long mourners’ line twist away from Caroline’s mother like a cat tail.
I was thinking about a morning the summer before. When Caroline and Julie woke me up at five-thirty–well they didn’t really wake me up because I hadn’t been sleeping. I was just laying there, watching the sky turn from black to veiled gray when I heard rocks cracking against my window.
“Wake up you asshole!” they yelled up at me when I opened it.
Our house was on the lake and that morning the moss-smell was hanging in the air. The mist was so thick, it was like the lake was crawling up the ridge towards us. Their nymph-shapes were blurry, their voices clear and distinct: “Wake up you fuck!” They laughed.
All I could do–still in that dreamy half-surreal world that comes from not sleeping–was murmur, “What the hell…?”
“Come on, wake up, Tim!”–this was Julie’s voice.
Caroline’s voice: “We both had the same dream.”
Julie’s voice: “We did.”
Caroline’s voice: “Exactly the same.”
Julie’s voice: “Get down here. We need you to model so we can write poems about it.”
My brain still not engaged, I shrugged and said okay. I wiped my nose and realized I had never taken my nose ring out.
“Oh, and bring some rope.”
“I still can’t believe we had the same dream,” Julie and Caroline said as we walked around along the lake’s shore, our clothes sometimes catching on the reeds. The water’s surface was green and mossy when we got close to it.
“What was it about?” I asked.
<–nextpage–>
“Oh, we’ll tell you,” Caroline said with a secret titter. Julie fingered the rope I had found in my dad’s garage.
“This is kind of creepy,” I said and felt it.
We climbed over the stumpy crumbling brick wall which marked the edge of the Thicket-Briar. The prickly hemlock branches poked through where the bricks had fallen. We had to be especially careful because there was a big brown-black puddle on the other side. I jumped off the top of the wall (trying to look cool) and landed just passed it, but my feet slipped on the muddy ground and I fell backwards, my butt landing right smack in it, and the dirty black water splashed all over my shirt and jeans, and even on my face and hair–all to the immense amusement of Julie and Caroline.
The clearing at Eeyore’s Gloomy Place was scattered with mud-blackened beer cans, the mud so thick you couldn’t read the labels.
“We need you to pose for us,” Julie said. “Like a model does for a painter.”
“Okay,” I said. I bent back an imaginary longbow and said, “How about this? This good?”
Caroline giggled and Julie said, “Not exactly. Take off your shirt.”
“Oooh,” I said, trying to sound sexy. “I know what you want.” I whipped off my shirt and just dropped it in the mud–it was caked with it anyway–but as I did, I suddenly felt very naked, and I really wanted to snatch it up and put it back on.
“And your pants,” Julie said. Caroline nodded, grimly this time.
“Pants?” I said. I had on baggy navy cords with a thick silver chain running from my belt loop to my wallet. It’s funny now, but at that moment, I just couldn’t remember what underwear I had on or even if I had underwear on. I didn’t always wear it.
“Yeah, come on,” Julie said. “Drop ‘em.” Caroline and Julie each fumbled in their backpacks for their notebooks. I bit my bottom lip; it felt like I had underwear on…
When Julie looked up again, she was annoyed to see me still wearing my pants. “Would you come on? It’s not like you’ve got anything I haven’t seen before.”
I laughed and shook my head. “You haven’t seen shit.”
She smiled. “Except for that little hair under your belly button. You didn’t used to have that.”
I unbuttoned and unzipped my pants. They fell by themselves to the ground, and thank God, thank God, I had on the Calvin Klein boxer briefs my Aunt Connie had gotten me for my birthday in March.
I was relieved but not as relieved as I might have been. First of all, I remembered how uncomfortable I had been when I opened the gift. They weren’t exactly tight, but they were snug. Should Connie have been thinking about what I was wearing under my clothes? Was she thinking when she bought them or when I opened them of how I would look in them?
But more importantly, I was worried about what Julie would say–Bohemian poet/artist–when she saw me wearing the stamp of Corporate America, the white stitched “Calvin Klein” on the waistband. Julie never wore or bought or even looked at anything that had a brand name that anyone else had ever heard of. And to her, something “hip” like Calvin Klein was the worst: the “sign of everything that’s wrong with the world,” she sometimes said.
But: “Calvin Klein, huh?” was all she said that day.
“So you both dreamed about me naked?” I said.
Julie picked up the rope coil and held it behind her back. She frowned and asked me, “You know Saint Sebastian?”
“Yeah, we were in ‘Nam together,” I said.
“Shut up; I mean you know who he was?”
“No.”
“Oh, well, I thought you might; he’s in a lot of paintings.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Well,” she said, beaming brightly (a little too brightly, maybe). “Caroline and I both dreamed last night that you were Saint Sebastian.”
A grinning Caroline was nodding emphatically.
Julie stood up and started uncoiling the rope. She narrowed her eyebrows. “You look so nervous, Mr. Lake.”
“Who the hell is Saint Sebastian?” I asked.
“A saint,” Julie said.
“I knew that much. What did he do?”
“Saintly things.”
“What does that> mean?” I said. I shuffled backwards a few nervous steps, looking back and forth between the two smiling faces. Julie’s feet were bare and the mud was squishing between her toes as she stepped forward.
I smiled and tried not to look so nervous which must have just made me look goofy.
“It’s no big deal, Tim,” Julie said and just like that she whipped off her own shirt and stood there, matriarchal, in the cool morning air in her bra and her long hippie skirt. “Right Caroline?”
Caroline, still sitting Indian-style, shrugged and pulled off her shirt. The skin around her stomach was creased (and I could tell she was sucking in her belly). Her bra was bright royal blue; Professor Nickelhoffer would find her in that same bra three months or so later, her skin bluish-white.
“Nice bra, Caroline,” I said. “Attention K-mart shoppers.”
“Oh shut up, Tim. You don’t know anything about bras,” Caroline said and flipped her hair in annoyance. She tugged her shirt back on, snatched her notebook back up, and started scribbling fiercely into it. “It’s probably the first one you’ve ever seen.”
“Yeah, Tim, shut up,” Julie said but she was smiling. “It’s a cute bra.”
“Oh, I was just kidding,” I said, but Caroline wouldn’t look at me.
“It’s really a very nice bra,” I said.
She groaned and said, “Shut up, Tim,” with an exaggerated roll of her eyes. When she looked at me, she was blushing, but biting her lip to keep from grinning, trying her best to look annoyed. I smiled at her. She wouldn’t look at me.
“Okay,” Julie said. “Saint Sebastian, for whatever reason, was tied to a tree and they shot him full of arrows–oh, take out your nose ring. I don’t think he had one of those.”
I took out my nose ring.
“And your shoes, too.”
I took off my shoes.
“I was just kidding, Caroline,” I said.
“Now,” Julie said. “I’m going to tie you to the tree.”
“You’re gonna what?”
“In our dream,” she said striding towards me, rope outstretched like the hangman. “You were in the place of Saint Sebastian, you know; you were the one tied to the tree and they were shooting you full of arrows and we thought that was so beautiful. Didn’t we, Caroline?”
Caroline just shrugged. Julie came around behind me. I turned to look at her.
“Stay where you are,” she said. She put her hands on my shoulders and pulled me so that my back rested against the rough white bark of the birch. “Clasp your hands behind your back.” I clasped them. She looped the rope around my wrists several times and pulled it taut.
“Oh,” Julie said, “you brought nylon rope. Good idea.”
“Yeah,” I said, not mentioning that I hadn’t given the slightest bit of thought whatsoever to what kind of rope I brought.
“It shouldn’t hurt you,” she said, then added with a laugh, “as long as you don’t struggle!”
She wrapped the rope around my chest and stomach, walking around the tree in a circle. She tugged on it until it was tight (but not painful) then she knotted it behind the tree.
“How does that feel?” she asked.
“Different,” I said. I tested it; there was no way I was getting loose. Panic stirred up in me and passed just as quickly, the way a lake wave rises and crashes. I was completely helpless, but there’s a freedom in bondage I realized–because I was tied up, there was nothing I could do about anything, so there was nothing I could worry about, because there was nothing I could do. And just to take a tiny breather from worrying about everything was such a relief.
Julie plopped down in the mud and opened her notebook, but instead of starting to write, she bit her pencil’s eraser and stared at me.
“No,” she said. “I think you need your nose ring. The thing is, it wasn’t that Saint Sebastian was played by you. It was that you were in his place. You.”
She jumped up and came towards me. “Don’t you think so, Caroline?” she asked.
Caroline, still mad, just shrugged again without looking up. Julie scooped up the little silver hoop off of my pile of clothes. She put it back in my nose. It wasn’t at all what you’d think, not gross or uncomfortable. It was intimate and kind of nice: her warm fingers on my face, brushing against my lips. I tried to hold in my breath but it came out now and then in soft, gentle bursts.
“Are you going to shoot me full of arrows?”
“No, I’m just going to imagine that part,” Julie said. The two poets were busily scribbling away in their notebooks.
“Why couldn’t you just imagine the whole thing?”
“Oh, Tim, you don’t know anything about art.”
That stung. I was just kidding, and anyway, wasn’t I doing her a favor, out here half-naked tied to a tree?
“Well?” I said. “Do you have something?”
“If you’d shut up for a second,” Julie said, “maybe I would.”
“Yeah, Tim,” Caroline said with a nasty grin. “Shut up or I’ll gag you.”
I did shut up.
“What’s a red wine I could use?” Caroline asked.
“Merlott,” Julie said, not looking up from her notebook, pronouncing the t.
“Merlot,” I corrected her.
“I warned you, Tim,” Caroline said, shaking her head, but she was smiling now. “Do you have a handkerchief or something, Julie?”
“Use your shirt, Caroline,” Julie said.
Caroline made a face.
“Well, do you have something written, Caroline?” I asked.
Caroline blushed a little. “Maybe,” she said.
“Let’s hear it,” Julie said.
“Oh,” Caroline said. “Maybe I will.”
She held her notebook at arm’s length and cleared her throat. Just then the wind picked up and blew through the clearing shaking the tree branches and dancing through our hair.
“Well,” Caroline said, “it’s nowhere near finished, and it’s pretty horrible but this would be the first line–” She smiled before she read:
His blood is a sticky Merlot for the ants to lap up
drop by drop with their tiny tongues
“Oh god,” I said. “Why did you have to say that? Now I’m going to be paranoid about ants crawling up my legs.”
“I think it’s good,” Julie said.
“But are there any ants on me?” I said.
“Tim,” Julie said, “they’re no fucking ants on your legs.”
“Are you sure?”
“Tim! Shut up. Read something else, Caroline.”
Caroline, glowing with pleasure from the attention, proceeded to read us two more poems–”Raka’s Grandmother in India” and “The Beauty of a Self-Inflicted Wound”–Julie and I exchanging concerned glances like worried parents with each passing Butcher reference, until the gray-white sky opened and drenched us.