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 with clay on his legs, the one who reaches out to the second man with something just beyond brotherhood when he knows that other’s gentle heart so desperately, deeply loves him. Neither can do much about his feelings. So one with clay on his legs pulls away from the two strong hands that hold him close. His leaving the caress is something they all notice. With a kind willingness if not with plunging joy he’s off the raft and ridding himself of that clay in the water for a minute.
Even with all the maturity of their agreement, the man left with his feelings is not so relaxed. He wants both lovers for himself, now if not forever, and having to share he is angry from the neck up.
She is numb from the waist down. She doesn’t love either of them. Not like she should. She lets her legs drag in the cold river water. And she wants to rid herself of knowing either of them. She stands again and pushes the raft downriver. The man left with his feelings stands, too, and picks up the second pole. They move downstream more quickly, more effortlessly, and without the rise and fall that happened when only she was pushing.
But. The man lets go of what’s real and picks up what’s nonexistent to help propel them all. It’s hard for the woman to understand why he keeps making such an effort. But he does. He’s working diligently at something she doesn’t understand. He kneads what’s in front of them with yearning, longing, love, and his twin pangs of hope and despair, sweetness and embittered grace.
There is an elegance as though he wants to draw them more near to something impossible. She turns her mind away from his work and keeps pushing her pole into the river bottom.
The man in the water notices none of the others’ unseen exertion and swims behind them both, holding onto the edge of the raft, kicking out with fun frog-legs, blowing bubbles, pushing them all downstream his way, keeping his distance, waiting a few more minutes to get back on.
She likes that he’s pushing, helping her make them go, because she doesn’t like that—doesn’t understand why—the other man laid down his pole and just gave up. The reflections she gathers up from the water exist almost, but they aren’t real enough to distract her from the work that’s necessary: pulling the pole up, planting it into just a reach ahead, pulling her body closer to that place, bringing the raft along with her feet until her body is past that pole, and then methodically pulling it up, and dipping it again, sometimes twisting from one side of the raft to the other to keep their heading.
The man on the raft is still angry from the neck up. He doesn’t understand why they don’t know he’s laid down the pole and picked up the current instead. Hand-over-hand he pulls the nothing rope that’s frayed and twisted as if caught in the teeth of a gar that swims through the shallows of a faraway, nearly unimaginable delta, through brackish silt avoiding the sea. The man left with his feelings on the raft just wants the man in the water to love him; no, not only him, her too. So of course he lays down his pole and pulls the invisible rope and so they move forward. Hand-over-hand the blisters rise. He is pulling them toward an open end where the river gives up like Sunday afternoon onto the flat forgotten parts of the Gulf and they will be there, soon maybe, if he keeps ever-pulling.
Hand-over-hand he is angry from the neck up. Pushing her pole into the mud she ignores his pouting pathos and looks back at the man in the water blowing bubbles, kicking with fun frog-legs. She watches him and he likes it. He notices her gaze and rolls onto his back to let go a belly of sunlight warmth. He wears the silver river lining like a glass ornament blown full of mercury and rises endlessly against impossibility.
She wants him, puts the pole down, starts to climb into the water, but he comes up to her instead, pulls himself onto the raft. With water sheeting down his body and the clay gone he lies in the center of what they’ve lashed together. They aren’t quite callous that the other man pulls them hand-over-hand toward the delta with his whole mind and heart. They just make their love like joint checking used to be.
The man making love to her thinks, “You can love her. Or you can know. But you can't love her and know. It's too much.” So he pretends he knows. It’s enough.
But the man pulling them all toward an open end with a nonexistent rope made of what’s felt is exhausted. It is not quite an interruption of their union when he says, “I’m hungry,” as he pulls and pulls and pulls. But he gets tired, bored, lonely, sad, and ties a knot in the rope no one can see.
The other two know he is angry from the neck up.
Agreement or not, the unforgiving middle of a heart cannot be quieted. They do not ignore him but do not include him either and their sweat comes together in places to trickle down off their backs past the hairs and over the muscles.
The other clenches his cringing repetitive curse. “I’m hungry.”
Between kisses, between dives, twists, caresses, and unfolded origami car commercial double magazine pages one of the two of them acknowledges him with minimum courtesy, “We know. God, we know.”
His bare feet are burning. He wonders about the knot that holds them there being beaten by the sun.