Short Story: Minocqua Bats

Short Story: Minocqua Bats

"Let's stop. I have to pee.” Becca was always the first to break the silence after she and Timmy fought. She pointed to two adjacent signs: one for a deer crossing, and the other, a wooden block with carved yellow letters that read “Minocqua 1 Mile.”

Timmy turned into the driveway of the Minocqua Soda and Fudge Shoppe, and Becca glanced at his bowed head before she let herself out of the truck and wended her way toward the store. A large blond woman wearing a suede vest, too much eye makeup, and a name tag that said “Patty,” smiled at Becca. In exchange for Patty's kindness, Becca bought a half pound of walnut fudge and an Escape to Wisconsin T-shirt before heading to the bathroom.

She lined the toilet seat with squares of toilet paper, and only after sitting down did she realize that she didn't have to pee after all. She merely needed a break from the fusty air that hung between her and Timmy. They'd fought hard last night, and she wondered if this could be the argument that broke them, or set them free. She buried her face in her hands. Breathe. She’d turned into this sorry-ass girlfriend who groveled for scraps of love like her parents’ dog Hendrix. He died choking on a wishbone.

She splashed water on her face and smiled at Patty as she exited the shop. Timmy had rolled down the window, and he was flicking his Schlitz key chain back and forth against the dashboard, clearly still smarting from her harsh words. Her friends thought that she provoked the fights for the make-up sex. They didn’t like him; actually, they said they didn’t like her around him.

Becca had a childish urge to walk past the truck, so he'd have to chase her. She'd get hit by a car, something small like a Honda Prelude, and he'd gasp while her body soared through the air and landed in a thatch of black-eyed Susans. He'd run to the side of the road, and his expertise as a fireman would enable him to determine if she had a spinal injury. She wouldn't, so he'd scoop her up in his ropy arms and her calves would dangle in the air. He'd rush her to the hospital and volunteer to donate pints of blood (which wouldn't be a match). She'd be woozy from the shock and blood loss but would periodically pry open her lids and bask in the love in his eyes, blue and round as poker chips. Her life would hang by a fine thread, but he'd do something unfathomably heroic to save her.

Jesus, she was pathetic. She slid into the passenger's seat and handed him the white box with the gold Minocqua Fudge sticker. The blond fuzz on his thighs grazed her bare leg. “Peace offering.”

“I don’t know what you want from me, Becca,” Timmy clenched his teeth. “Should I rent the Goodyear Blimp and fly over Madison with a big sign that says ‘I love Becca Coopersmith’?”

Beats getting hit by a car.

He opened the box and handed her a piece of fudge. They'd said too much in the past day, so during the remainder of their drive to his parents’ cabin “up north,” in the part of Wisconsin shaped like a thumb, they snaked their fingers under each other's shorts. The wounds wouldn't be cauterized until he'd entered her and given her the grin that opened up his face like some kind of flower that he could surely identify. He was an Eagle Scout.

By the time they pulled up to Timmy’s parents’ cabin, they’d eaten the entire half pound of fudge, and her panties were drenched right through to her cutoffs. Both ravenous and carsick, Becca craved something substantial, like a steak or a hunk of cheese.

"I'm nervous." Becca put her hand on Timmy's arm. What if his parents saw how miserable she made their son?

“Just be yourself.” Their equilibrium had officially been restored; Timmy was telling her what to do.

It was still light out, because that’s how it is at nine o’clock at night in northern Wisconsin in June. The lake air smelled fishy and fresh at the same time. Timmy’s dad cupped a sweating can of Schlitz and gave his son a “Well, what have we here?” look. “You must be Becca. Damned glad to meet ya.” He extended his hand.

“Nice to meet you too, Bud.”

His father looked surprised.

Should she have called him Mr. Carver? “You look exactly like Timmy around the eyes,” she said.

Bud gazed off toward the lake in the same way that Timmy did when she complimented him.

Timmy’s mother emerged from the cabin smoothing the waist of her culottes. A visor kept strands of her grayish brown pageboy from falling into her eyes. Timmy and his parents were built like greyhounds, unlike her family members — peasant stock.

Okay, no calling her Dot. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Carver,” Becca said, embracing her. Becca was from a family of big huggers. Dot stepped back and patted her on the back formally. The brisk air chilled Becca, and she folded her arms to cover her nipples.

Becca tried harder over dinner: potato salad, steaks on the grill, and iceberg lettuce. Who ate iceberg lettuce?

“So why the fascination with indigenous people up here?” she asked, spearing a piece of meat, genuinely wanting to learn more about the North Woods.

“Becca's a social worker at a drug rehab center,” Timmy said as if to imply that Becca's inquiry was professional in nature.

“Well, you’re in Indian country,” Bud said. “Menomonee to be exact. Did you see the reservation --”

She didn’t tell Bud that the preferred term was “American Indian.” Becca was used to expressing herself at the family dinner table. Her mother, also a social worker, and her father, a hippie turned history teacher, would look at her with admiration, and then they’d bait her into an argument until someone would say something irreverent and wickedly funny, and they would all laugh, and that would be that. Bud and Dot were not likely to say anything remotely irreverent or funny.

Timmy dug a serving spoon into a bowl of Jell-O embedded with all sorts of crap, topped off with a layer of cream cheese. “Anybody want the rest of this?”

“You go ahead, Timmy,” his mother said, and they all nodded. “Finish it up.”

After dinner, Becca helped Dot with the dishes, inquiring about Timmy's nephews as she dried a stack of plates. Dot asked Becca nothing about herself, which should have cued Becca to refrain from relating how she had met Timmy.

“It was a year ago this weekend, actually. Timmy and I were both at the Klinc Bar.”

Dot didn’t look up from her dishes, but Becca could tell she wanted to hear more by the way she turned the water down and cocked her head.

“He’d fought a big fire that day, an accident in a chem lab at the U.” Becca paused, remembering his hair, wet and neatly parted to the side, and the powder blue shirt that showed off his reddish tan. Adrenaline oozed out of every pore of his body, sending a current through the whole bar. Everyone wanted to touch him; his buddies couldn’t stop patting him on the back, and she thought she’d die if she didn’t get close enough at least to smell him. Big hero.

“Oh, sure, Timmy’s always been the type to lend a hand.” Dot scrubbed a stubborn glob of red Jell-O from a bowl.

Becca told her about how they'd played darts – and how the next day she'd tracked down him down at his fire station. This was the point of the story when someone who was fond of her and appreciated her moxie would say something like “No way!” Dot raised her eyebrows but still didn’t look at Becca directly. Becca almost added that from that day on, all her friends said that Timmy had become her new religion-- wouldn’t that freak out Dot.

“And here we are,” Becca paused and waited for Dot to say something, maybe offer up the lore of how she had met Bud. But then again, Becca sensed that Dot didn’t want the same outcome for Becca and Timmy. Neither did Becca's mother for that matter.

When the kitchen was spotless, Becca and Dot joined the men in the living room where an assortment of dead animals decorated the walls. Bud and Dot divided the newspaper – sports and business for Bud, lifestyle and coupons for Dot – and settled into overstuffed brown chairs. How long would she have to sit here? She wanted Timmy in the way she'd heard her clients describe their cravings for smack.

Timmy motioned toward the two bedrooms at the back of the cabin. “Long drive.” He stretched and yawned.

“Sleep well,” Dot and Bud replied in unison and returned to their papers. No kiss, no hug.

A rusting claw-foot tub dominated the guest bathroom, and the toilet refilled with water one molecule at a time after flushing. Low water pressure. The last thing Becca wanted was to create some sewage situation; she could hold it in for another day. She changed her panties, washed up with a cracked bar of Dial soap, and crawled into her single bed, pulling the starched white sheets around her chin. She listened for the squeak of the door and Timmy's footsteps while she watched the moon emerge from behind a big pine tree in the backyard. Finally, water swished through the pipes, signaling Bud and Dot's completion of their nightly ablutions.

A shadow appeared in the doorway. She flung back her covers, and Timmy came to her. Soon he was inside of her, his moonlit face so close that she could practically taste the toothpaste on his breath. He always kept his eyes closed when they made love. She studied the purplish veins spidering along his eyelids, and when he collapsed on top of her, she stroked his back, noting the contrast between the olive tone in her skin and the pink in his.

He peeled himself from her body and lay next to her. "Don't leave me," he said, each syllable freighted with love and fear. His words would be enough for now. Soon she'd need to hear them again, and her pursuit would leave them both bloodied and bruised. He kissed her breast through her T-shirt and lay his head on her heart. After he left, in a futile attempt to stave off the insanely cold night, she brought her knees to where he'd placed his lips.

After breakfast, Timmy, Becca, and Bud picked blackberries in a patch of woods behind the cabin. By mid-morning, the waistband of Becca’s shorts strained against her abdomen, bloated from holding in nearly two days’ worth of waste; mosquitoes had feasted on her calves, and Bud had pulled a tick off of her neck.

“Got a treat for you, Timmy,” Bud announced after a lunch of olive-loaf sandwiches on white bread, with potato chips and lukewarm lemonade. “Hank Sawyer gave us a couple of passes to see the Minocqua Bats.”

“Bats?”

“Not real bats, Becca. They’re professional water skiers, and boy, can they fly.”

“Like bats.” Relieved, Becca picked an olive from the loaf.

“You bet.” Bud smiled.

Did that mean that they got to leave the compound? That she’d have a night out with Timmy? That she might find nirvana in a public bathroom? A sense of hope buoyed her, and four hours later, Timmy drove Becca to Minocqua, home of walnut fudge and her new best friend Patty.

“So, how am I doing?” She tried to sound casual, ironic.

“Good,” he grunted, squinting into the sun.

“Your parents hate me,” she said, hoping he’d deny it.

“You don’t have to try so hard.”

“You think I’m trying too hard?” she answered too quickly.

“Can we just have a good time?”

“I’ll try.”

“Good.”

“But not too hard.”

He grinned. She loved to make him smile.

Becca had never seen anything like the Minocqua Bats. They were all fit, broad shouldered, Nordic-looking people who whizzed off ramps, bodies perched precariously over their sleek slalom skis, like Olympic jumpers, or real bats flying into the freshWisconsinair. Free.

“So why are they called bats and not robins or bluebirds?” Becca took a swig of beer.

“Bats are the only mammal in the world naturally capable of flight.” He also explained how bats saw better at night than any other mammal.

Maybe so, but she still loathed those disease-laden flying rodents, a fact she would never divulge to him. Timmy and Becca drank beer and ate slices of pepperoni pizza on a faded orange blanket that Bud and Dot had probably picnicked on a million times while marveling at the very same feats. Becca leaned her back against Timmy’s chest and relaxed into the rhythm of his warm breath on her hair. She wondered if anybody had ever died doing one of these jumps, but she said nothing. Timmy told her that she worried too much about dying and injuries. Becca's father was Jewish; stories of pogroms and genocide had sullied her emotional DNA.

They lay on the blanket until it got dark. She’d never seen the stars from so far north; she felt like she could reach up and touch them with her fingertips.

“There’s the Big Dipper. People say it looks like a ladle, but I think it looks more like a wagon.” He took her hand in his and pointed it toward the sky. “That’s the handle.”

“I see it.” It did look more like a wagon. Timmy was one of the smartest people she knew. A World War II buff and an avid reader of biographies of obscure scientists, he beat her at Trivial Pursuit every time.

During the drive home, Becca unbuckled her seat belt and slid next to Timmy. He popped in a Grateful Dead CD, a compromise between the jam bands he liked and the folky "chick music" she liked: Laura Nyro, Rickie Lee Jones, and The Indigo Girls. Wanting more of him before they got back to his parents’ cabin, she kissed his temple.

“Cut it out, Becca,” he said, but she could tell that he liked what she was doing.

She nibbled his neck, where he was super ticklish, and he laughed. She could feel his muscles contract against her ribs.

The skinny road wound through stands of tall pines and birches. It was as black as a tunnel, no streetlights or vapor lamps. A station wagon full of drunk kids whirled by them, honking the horn; a girl with an auburn ponytail hung her head out the window and screamed, “Go, Badgers!”

Timmy shrugged. “Badger Country.”

“Man, they’re sloshed,” Becca said, and tickled Timmy’s neck again.

As his stomach contracted with a fresh giggle, a deer darted across the road. Seconds later, the truck hit the animal with a loud thud and the screeching of brakes. Becca flew forward, her shoulder smashing into the vent on the dashboard.

“Jesus Christ,” Timmy muttered. “You okay?”

Becca nodded as adrenaline coursed through her body; she felt numb. “I think so.” Her shoulder felt warm and a little achy.

Timmy’s eyes narrowed into slits, extra alert, wild and calm at the same time, a more concentrated version of the expression he’d worn the night they met, after he’d fought that newsworthy fire. He pulled the truck over to the side of the road and left the engine running while he ran to the spot where the deer lay splayed on the asphalt. The truck’s tail lights cast a dull glow on the animal as it struggled to move its legs. Thank God. He hadn’t killed it.

A flash of Timmy’s sweatshirt disappeared into the forest on the other side of the road. Part of her wanted to chase after him, and part of her wanted to drag the deer from the highway. She froze.

She watched for Timmy through the back window, relieved when he popped out of the woods. He carried a rock the size of a bowling ball, moving awkwardly yet with the certainty of a man who ran five miles a day to keep in shape. A man who would walk into a burning building. He leaned down, lowering his body over the deer’s, as he had over hers so many times and put his lips to the deer’s forehead.

Against the blue-black sky, she could only make out his silhouette as he stood and raised the boulder over his head. Then he brought it down, and sediment met bone.

They drove home in silence, except for the noise of the deer carcass sliding around in the back of the truck. She wadded up some tissue paper from the Minocqua Soda and Fudge Shoppe and mopped up the blood streaking his cheekbone. He reached out to her, and she slid next to him so that their thighs touched. She could feel his body heat through her jeans, but it was more than warmth; it was that current from the Klinc Bar. Now it scared her.

Back at the cabin, he sent her inside while he dealt with the carcass. Bud and Dot were asleep. Becca lay trembling in her cold bed. Finally, Timmy came to her. He pulled back the covers and stood over her. She saw everything in his eyes: tenderness and the violence of their love. She pulled him into her, wondering what would be left of her when they finished making love, when they finished scraping and scratching at the outer edges of who they were, when they were finished with each other for good.