The Raising: A Novel Part 7

"Huh?"

"Study group?"

"We've been meeting," Perry said.

"When?" Craig asked.

"At the library," Perry said. "Constantly."

"Why didn't anybody tell me?" Craig asked.

"I don't know," Perry said. "I guess we figured if you wanted to study you'd be at the library." The two of them looked at each other blankly, and then Perry grabbed his towel and was basically gone again until Friday night.

Craig's paper looked pretty good, he thought. He'd gone way out of his way to make sure no series of words in any given sentence could be Googled to reveal his source. He also thought his Political Science exam had gone well, though it concerned him a bit that he'd finished it so much more quickly than the other twenty-two students in the cla.s.s, who were still chewing the erasers at the ends of their pencils as Craig handed his test in and grabbed his backpack (making as little noise as possible, but, still, a couple of girls on either side of his seat looked up from their papers and glared at him).

It had been a bright October afternoon. Blue sky, red and yellow leaves, green gra.s.s. A very distant and watery-looking half-moon was hanging over it all.

It was Thursday, so he went looking for Lucas, to get high. On Thursday afternoons they usually met in the arboretum with their stashes and smoked weed until it was time to go back to the hall for dinner, but this Thursday even Lucas seemed to be off somewhere studying, so Craig smoked up what he had alone, and then he went to Village Corners, flashed his fake ID at the fat man behind the counter, bought himself a fifth of Jack Daniels, and headed back to the deserted dorm.

He was feeling, for no reason he could pinpoint, the kind of vague depression he'd felt on and off for years, but which had lifted last summer (forever, he'd hoped). It had been bad, the few weeks right after graduation, when the sense that he should be happy, and proud of himself, somehow made him want to cry all the time (although he never did). It had been June, he'd graduated from high school, he was on his way to college, and his dad kept telling him he was going on to greatness and better things and should be excited, and the fact that he wasn't happy, proud, or excited made his arms feel tired all the time, as if he were carrying around a big block of cement.

The first "episode," as his family doctor would come to call these periods of depression, came on him when he was fourteen, in Belize. A famous movie director was trying to woo Craig's dad into selling him the rights to his most successful novel, The Jaguar Operation, and it was supposed to be his dad's special treat for Craig, taking just him along, leaving Craig's mother and Scar in New Hamps.h.i.+re.

Craig was only partly fooled by this. He knew his mother hated going on these kinds of trips with his father. She hated the drinking, the schmoozing, the phony bonhomie, and the compet.i.tion from younger women smitten with the famous writer, leaning across the dinner table with their silverware held high so that their cleavage practically spilled onto his plate. His mother would have turned down the invitation to Belize anyway, and Scar didn't go anywhere without their mother unless he was forced.

Still, stepping out of the tiny jet that had been sent for them in Miami-just ahead of his father, a breeze wafting around them that was both fragrant and heavy with the smell of dead things rotting in seawater-when the famous director took off his straw hat and whooped, and an actress Craig recognized from a movie he'd seen the week before on HBO smiled with brilliant familiarity, Craig felt privileged, and thrilled.

He was the famous writer's kid.

"Hey," the director said, "you must be the famous kid!"

The Caribbean was an amazing blue backdrop to the director's resort. Twenty thatched bungalows lined the beach, a kidney-shaped pool behind them, and green miles of jungle behind that. Smiling people with beautiful bodies sauntered around the sand paths in bright little bathing suits, sipping drinks. A few fat gray iguanas dragged their tails between the bungalows, and in the jungly distance Craig heard the screaming of crazed-sounding birds. While the director led his father around, Craig sat poolside downing one after another of the rum punches a grumpy Belizean man old enough to be Craig's grandfather brought to him on a tray.

He was completely plastered by the time his father and the director came back, laughing companionably. The wind had picked up, and the thras.h.i.+ng of the jungle and the Caribbean surf together made a deafening roar around Craig's head, pummeling his ears, making it impossible to hear the conversations taking place around him at the dinner table. The meal itself was one unrecognizable dish after another, spooned up by the same angry-seeming black man, whom the director called Handsome Man.

No one else seemed deafened by the wind. There was a beautiful young woman on either side of the director, and one sitting across from Craig's father, and the conversations they were having seemed both lighthearted and intense, as if they could hear and understand one another. But even when the Belizean man leaned down and spoke directly into his ear, Craig had to ask three times before he understood: "Are you finished? Will you want more? Cream sauce or broth?"

Craig's father shouted across the table to him, "Fred here says if it's not too windy tomorrow we'll go out to the barrier reef and swim with the sharks. What do you think about that?"

Craig had somehow managed to hear this proposition. "Wow!" he said. "Yeah! Sure!"

The director and Craig's father laughed.

"The boy wants to swim with the sharks!" The director raised his gla.s.s. The young women all laughed, and then stared at Craig for several seconds as their smiles faded. It was as if they'd just noticed he was there, that the fact of the writer's adolescent son had just occurred to them, and that they weren't necessarily happy about it.

Craig flushed. One of the women said something to him then, but over the wind he couldn't hear it. He shrugged. She laughed again, even less enthusiastically. He looked down at his plate. It was gone.

He woke the next morning with a throbbing headache and had to lie very still under the thwacking ceiling fan, willing himself not to open his eyes until the bed had stopped spinning. He could hear the wind rattle the thatch overhead and the sound of waves cras.h.i.+ng in the distance. He sat up and heaved, once, dryly, before getting his hand around a bottle of water on the nightstand and drinking it down. After he'd managed to stand for a minute or two on his rubbery legs, he wove his way out of the thatched hut to find his father sitting at a gla.s.s table with the director, the old black man pouring coffee into their cups.

"Are we going to swim with the sharks?" he asked.

Both Craig's father and the director looked up. They had obviously been having a serious conversation, maybe a disagreement. Neither of them looked happy to see Craig.

"Sorry, kid. Too windy to get out there," the director said, holding up his hand as if offering the wind for proof. Over the Belizean man's head, a ferny tree was leaning so far over it looked like it would be torn up by the roots and blown into the sea.

Craig couldn't help it: He was far from home, fourteen, hung over, and exhausted, and the idea of facing a long day alone at the side of the pool being waited on by the black man, deafened by the wind, ignored by the director and his women, eating little muscled things in coconut sauce, hit him like a punch in the gut. (Why had his father brought him here? Maybe, it occurred to Craig for the first time, simply to placate his mother, to make it seem less likely that he was going to the famous director's resort in Belize for the attentions of the young women she knew would be there.) "Oh, man," he whined.

A grim shadow pa.s.sed over the director's face. He said something to Craig that Craig couldn't hear again over the wind, and then looked up at Craig's father and said, more loudly, "Unless the Great American Writer here can do something about the wind!"

Craig's father strained to smile. He looked up to the sky. He tapped his fingernails on the gla.s.s top of the table, something he did when he was being criticized by Craig's mother, and then shouted, "Cease, wind! I command you!" The director guffawed and looked over at Craig with a genuine sneer.

It didn't happen right away, but it happened.

Within a half hour, the air had grown eerily calm. Craig was sitting cross-legged on the beach, staring glumly out at the cras.h.i.+ng surf, when suddenly the churning bath of the wind around his head stopped. A pelican that had been pumping its wings strenuously through the air over the ocean began to glide effortlessly, and Craig could hear again. There was hearty laughter coming from somewhere behind him, and he turned to see the director clapping his father on the back hard enough that the impact of it registered on his father's face as annoyed surprise.

"Let's go, Miracle Guys!"

The old black man drove the boat over the placid pale blue ocean while Craig's father and the director drank beer in the back. They seemed no longer to be on speaking terms. Craig sat up front, and the ocean sprayed him in the face with a fine, spitty mist. The Belizean man cut the engine in what seemed to be simply an undefined spot in the middle of the Caribbean, specific nevertheless, and then he turned to Craig and nodded. "Here," he said. "Put on your snorkel equipment."

"Have fun, pal," the director said, raising a brown bottle to him. "Been nice knowin' ya!"

Craig's father laughed, but looked uneasy. He stood up with his beer in his fist and looked over the edge of the boat, and Craig, struggling to pull his fins over his feet, felt his enthusiasm for swimming with sharks drain out of him as the Belizean man reached into a cooler, pulled out a handful of b.l.o.o.d.y fish pieces, and tossed them into the sea.

The chunks floated along the surface for a few seconds, and then there was a roiling of the water beneath them, and then they were gone, and Craig saw beneath the unearthly aqua blue two long black shadows, side by side, moving in awesome silence, each one longer than a tall man. The Belizean man threw another handful of fish into the water, and it never even floated, just disappeared in an instant into a mob of shadows.

"Is this safe?" Craig's father asked the Belizean man, who shrugged his bony shoulders.

The director said, "I've done it myself a million times. Never even been nipped."

There was, Craig realized now, something sinister about the director.

(Was it possible that the irises of his eyes had no pupils?) Craig looked away from him, swallowed, put on his snorkeling mask, and stood, but his father reached out and took him by the arm. "Whoa, wait a second there, son," he said.

"Let him go!" the director shouted. "The boy wants to swim with the sharks!"

It was then that Craig understood what was going on, that the director had cast him in a role: impetuous, spoiled, foolhardy boy.

The sharks rose closer to the surface of the water again, their shadows made of flesh circling over and around one another, and Craig instinctively took a step back, into his father's arms.

"Forget it, son," his father said. "You don't need to do this. I won't let you do this."

Craig turned around, and the Belizean man was looking at him with an expression that was impossible to read.

"Let's go," his father said, and the Belizean man started the boat, and Craig sat back down and took his flippers off.

Back at the resort, he drank rum punch by the side of the pool until everyone else had gone to bed, and got so drunk that the stars seemed to be blowing around in the completely windless black air over him, like moths or silvery ashes. He got up to replenish his punch only to find that someone had locked up the tiki bar, so he stood with his empty plastic cup under the stars and listened to the calm, distant pounding of the surf against its barriers. He tilted his head back and tried to drink the very last drops from his empty cup, lost his balance in the sand, and fell on his a.s.s with a soft thud, and then he sat there for a few minutes and laughed at himself, held up the plastic cup to the stars the way the director had raised his beer bottle to him back on the boat. "Been nice knowin' ya!" he shouted, and waited for an echo.

It didn't come.

The tropical air was like cotton, soaking up his voice.

Craig shouted again, looking around to see if anyone was there to hear him, and saw then, at the edge of the boat dock, a light. He stood up, leaving the plastic cup on the sand, and stumbled toward it.

It was a kid. Maybe Craig's age. He had a flashlight at his feet and a net. He cast the net off the end of the dock, and Craig stood behind him, watching it float loosely in the clear water and then sink under, and then the kid pulled it out, heavy with thras.h.i.+ng small silver-dollar-size fish, which the kid dumped into the bottom of the boat in which the Belizean man had taken them to the sharks that afternoon.

"Hey," Craig said, feeling suddenly much drunker in the hallucinatory darkness. The boy was so completely ignoring him that Craig felt as if he might be dreaming the boy, or that the boy was dreaming him.

The boy cast his net back out into the water, although there was still a fish in it, caught in the strings, wriggling.

"What are you doing?" Craig asked, and then the kid turned to look at him. His dark skin made his eyes even brighter in the light s.h.i.+ning up from the flashlight at his feet.

"Fis.h.i.+ng," he said.

"Yeah," Craig said. "I guess so."

The kid turned back to the net, which was sinking into the water again, and the two of them were silent for what seemed like a long time before the kid said, "My father said you wouldn't swim with the sharks." He was looking at his net instead of at Craig. "Even after your own father stopped the winds for you."

Craig snorted with laughter, and began to walk backward, his legs feeling as if they were made of that wiggling fish stuff in the kid's net, and also the b.l.o.o.d.y, inert muscle of stuff the kid's father had tossed by the handfuls into the Caribbean. As best he could, he trotted away on those weak legs, laughing and snorting, back to the hut, where he dropped into bed and a waveful of stars and ocean closed over him. He slept like death. When he woke up, his father had already packed, and they left the resort without saying good-bye to the director.

It was back at home that Craig began to carry the cement block with him. He was so tired every morning from carrying it, and facing carrying it again all day, and utterly unable to articulate to his mother what was wrong and why he could hardly hold his head up at the breakfast table.

She a.s.sumed, of course, that he was on drugs, and she would scowl at him when he woke from the naps that lasted all day on the weekends and stretched from after school to dinner during the week. She sent him to a shrink, who prescribed some pills Craig never took because of the warning that he couldn't get a hard-on if he took them, but after a couple of months, the cement block simply lifted, on its own, returning now and then with a change in seasons but disappearing after he got used to the rain, or the snow, or the falling leaves, or the first brilliant days of summer. He hoped this wasn't the beginning of that again-here at school, in October, during midterm week.

Friday night G.o.dwin Honors Hall was loud, and drunk, and full of good cheer. Girls-even the homely ones he'd never seen wearing anything but sweat pants-had gotten dressed up in short skirts and high heels and lipstick. Guys were stocking their dorm refrigerators with Michelob and Corona, and competing iPod playlists were blaring from speakers aimed toward open windows and into the courtyard.

Craig had woken up in the late afternoon with a hangover, and hadn't even realized that everyone was back from their weeklong absence, and that the beer was already flowing, until he stepped out into the hallway, headed for the shower with a towel wrapped around his waist, and walked right into the party.

Perry was there, leaning against the wall, holding a beer. He and some chick were comparing answers to an essay exam. The girl had buggy eyes but great calves and ankles. She and Perry were so absorbed in the shared vocabulary of their exam that neither one said hi when he pa.s.sed them and said, "Hey."

When he came back out of the bathroom, he had to push his half-naked way through a crowd of guys in gla.s.ses who were silently nodding their heads to some bad old rock 'n' roll blaring from one of their rooms. One of them slapped him on his bare back, and Craig turned fast, ready to punch the a.s.shole, until he realized the guy was just drunk, and happy. Perry was still in the hallway, and he and the buggy-eyed girl were still arguing the finer points of their comparisons and contrasts, and Craig was relieved to close the door to his room behind him. He was in no mood for a party. He was in the mood for some extra-potent stuff with Lucas, and maybe a trip to Pizza Bob's, he thought, and it wasn't until he was bent over, picking his jeans up off the floor, that he noticed a pair of long legs stretched out on his bed.

"Hey, Craig."

"Jesus Christ," Craig said. "How did you get in here?"

"I walked in the door."

Craig let the jeans slip out of his hand, back onto the floor, and stood up straight, hitching the towel tighter around his waist and looking at Josie Reilly, who was lying on his bed with her black hair spread out on his pillow, holding his Maxim magazine open in front of her but looking at him, not it. She was wearing a little skirt with orange flowers on it, and her legs and feet were bare.

"Um, Josie, can I ask what you're doing here?"

"Reading your dirty magazine."

"Oh," Craig said. "Okay. Well, I'm going to get dressed now."

"Okay," Josie said without taking her eyes off him.

"So . . ." He waved his right hand through the air while holding on to the towel at his waist with the left.

"So . . . ?" she said. She tossed the magazine onto the floor, and then swung her legs off the side of the bed and stood up. He felt the perfumey breeze of her pa.s.s him as she made her way barefoot to the door and locked it before turning back around. She stumbled sideways then, but caught herself on the edge of Craig's desk, and laughed, and then slid down it and sat hard on the floor with her ankles tucked under her b.u.t.t.

"How drunk are you?" Craig asked.

"Just a"-she held her thumb and index finger an inch apart-"drunk," and then she held her arms up to him like a little kid wanting to be picked up.

"Josie," Craig said. "I'm wearing a towel."

"Take off the towel!"

"I think you're more than a little drunk," he said.

"I flunked," she said. "I know it. Didn't even study." She made the motion of erasing something on a blackboard in front of her. "Shupe."

"Probably you didn't," he said. "You probably did better than you think you did." He had no idea if this was true or not, but what else was he going to say?

She started moving toward him on her knees then, and he backed up a couple of steps, but then she got on her hands, too, and scrambled toward him, grabbing his ankles.

"s.h.i.+t, Josie," Craig said, sort of dancing away from her, but she was holding on tight. "Cut it out. It tickles. s.h.i.+t."

He couldn't help laughing. It really did tickle. She was laughing, too, and spidering her way up his legs to his towel, and then she was standing with her whole clothed body pressed against his whole naked one, with her tongue in his mouth and his hair in her hands, and despite his reservations (honestly, he just wanted to find Lucas and get stoned), his d.i.c.k was fully into it within half a second of the kiss, and then she had her hand on that and her mouth on his neck, and she was pulling him backward onto his bed.

14.

Perry saw her coming out of Starbucks with a cup in each hand, and he ducked around the corner. The last person he wanted to see right now was Josie Reilly. The last time he'd seen her was in May, the end of the semester, at a memorial tree-planting ceremony for Nicole.

An entire orchard of cherry trees paid for by Omega Theta Tau had been planted around the sorority in Nicole's honor. A backhoe dug the holes, and then dropped the trees one by one into the soft earth. A crowd gathered to sing and pray all day, and then there was a candlelight vigil all night. There were eighteen trees, one for each of Nicole Werner's years. Their branches were actually in bloom.

("Do you know how expensive it is to plant an orchard of almost full-grown trees in bloom?" he'd overheard one student at G.o.dwin Hall say to another over soggy pancakes that morning. There were a few bad jokes made about cherries, and the whole virgin rumor, with regard to the Omega Theta Tau house in general, and Nicole in particular.) Somehow, in the crowd during the candlelight vigil, Josie had found him, snuggled up to him, and whispered dramatically, "She's still with us, Perry. Can you feel it? She isn't dead."

He'd backed away.

"What's with you?" she'd asked, offended, but he just shook his head, and she moved on to someone else. The candle some sorority girl had handed him in a waxed cup sputtered out. A few minutes later, when they started singing "The Wind Beneath My Wings," he tossed the waxed cup into a trash can and headed back to G.o.dwin Hall.

Josie had hardly known Nicole, but you wouldn't have known that from all the mileage she got out of having been the dead girl's roommate and sorority sister for six months. She'd read a putrid poem at the memorial service, been interviewed for the newspaper, worn a tight T-s.h.i.+rt with Nicole's photo on it and a black armband all through April and into May, and managed to be excused not only from finals but also from having to turn in her essay for Cla.s.sical Sources of Modern Culture because she was organizing the pet.i.tion to expel Craig Clements-Rabbitt from the university: "Drunk + Driver + Death = Murder."

She went to Houston, Perry learned from the school newspaper, to speak to the annual SADD convention "in memory of my best friend, who was murdered by a drunk driver."

To Perry, she apologized for whoever had splashed his and Craig's door with red paint and plastered that sad senior portrait of Nicole at the center of it: "n.o.body blames you for anything, Perry," she'd said. "We all know you just had the bad luck of being his roommate."

"He's not even here," Perry said. "Why are people messing with my door?"