Still Soft With Sleep - Chapter 7
by Vincenzo Barney
We resume serializing our second quarterly Contest winner’s novel, Vincenzo Barney’s Still Soft With Sleep. Catch up with the previous chapters here:
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Vincenzo Barney is a Vanity Fair contributor. He wrote Still Soft With Sleep for his senior thesis at Bennington in 2018. He is working on a book about Cormac McCarthy and Augusta Britt, a story he broke for Vanity Fair last year.
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On the boat ride back Elvis and I did not say a word to each other. It was ebb tide and early evening and Elvis looked at the lighthouse that marked the entrance to Edgartown Harbor. It was lost in the fog except for its light and there was a weight and a resistance in returning to Mayflower. His shirt waved against his stomach and he didn’t turn his head to look at his home which seemed to push the same way, back where we came. Included in the mood was the impossibility of it all ending this way and the tension before deciding to scrabble up a high sheer wall with dangerous forces at your back.
Chris tied up to Elvis’s dock and yet Elvis walked away from them into Mayflower. I heard the suction sound of opening the balcony door to the hermetically sealed house and I followed Chris and Caleb as far as the boathouse and then as I watched them walk up the green sideyard of Mayflower to Northwater. I turned and went back to Chris’s boat and I laid there a long time on the floor of it. With the mist it was like the weather of early June and it was the first time I felt cold since the beginning of the summer. I thought of the nights getting drunk in bathwater when we had Mayflower to ourselves. It had become July without my knowing it and the Fourth would come soon and I would have to go home the next day. And then there’d be the final heats of the year and autumn would come clean across the harbor without Her in it, the leaves would change color not above Her head nor in Her eyes and then it would be winter and it would be one year and would She be in it somewhere, on that day.
The boat jostled and I looked up and it was Elvis. He unlooped the rope from the cleats of the dock and turned the engine of Chris’s boat and I stood up and gave us a push off and he reversed almost too far to hit the neighbor’s dock and then put the throttle forward.
He took us a little too fast in the fog and when we were in the lee of Sturgeon Flats and past McConnell’s yacht I yelled at him over the engine. “Where are we going?”
Elvis didn’t respond and over the bumps he took too fast he was trying to turn Chris’s GPS on. He couldn’t position his thumb over it in the chop so I turned it on for him and zoomed us out so we could see the whole island. We were outside of the Harbor now beyond the lighthouse and the seas were eerily calm in the fog. The entrance to the Harbor was often busy and I kept an uncomfortable eye as far as I could see while Elvis brought us to an idle in the mouth of the no wake zone and looked at the GPS. He had found what he was looking for when a boat came decelerating upon us and sounding its horn. I could feel the horn in my chest and I raised my hand in acknowledgement at the other boat and the men on board swore at us.
“Hey fucking dickheads, you’re gonna kill someone! I’m gonna call the Harbor Master on your ass!”
“El, we gotta move.”
He looked over at them and pressed something on the GPS and put the throttle forward and we were up to the boat’s top end speed with the currents pushing against us. We were too close to the Middle Flats and I kept my eye on land so far as I could make it out. I pointed with my thumb, “Go east a bit,” and he listened. We were upon the Eastern tidal rips and their white waves came up fast and Elvis slowed as they cupped us and we took some spray and once we were through them he put the throttle down again and we were in a stretch of sunlight. We passed into it through blindness from the sudden reflection the sun threw off the waves and we were warm and in at the Middle Ground rips in no time. It was a beautiful summer day on the northern shores of the island but as Elvis turned us West toward the Elizabeths we were in mist again.
I knew now where he was taking us and I looked back and forth between the GPS and the water in front of us to see if I could sight any landmarks in the mist. We crossed the ferry out of Wood’s Hole fast enough and far enough away that it didn’t blow its horn. The Holes off the Elizabeths are dangerous for their rocks and I was in tension waiting to see if Elvis would ever slow as we drew closer to them. Stray sunlight lay ahead of us cupped in the trough of waves and the waves broke over the height of the light and the light stayed where it shone with the wind blowing the water through it and the sun we could see now was before us throwing its light from the West behind Pasque and as we drew toward the waters where the Hinckley had gone down the night before the mist played with us and I yelled at Elvis to slow down. “Slow down!” I shouted. He didn’t listen and turned us into Robinson’s Hole in a long curve that bent me down toward the water and I yelled again, “Slow the fuck down!”
Then in the mist off starboard I could see a stretch of bright mirror laving over its mirror water. It faded as the water dissolved and then it brightened itself with another wave and I realized it must be the western shores of Naushon taking the early evening sun. I looked up and could see Pasque now. We were in Robinson’s Hole and Elvis was heading toward the tidal creek. “It’s too shallow,” I yelled, “we’re gonna hit!” Pasque was coming up fast now and as he drew down our speed I saw the errant wavebreak that plays over submerged rocks and ledges and threw the throttle down all the way with my hands and we slammed the stern into the rocks and it lurched forward over a ledge and I was thrown into the padding of the stern and lay jostled on the floor as the sound of rocks scraping the hull ended in the sound of great metal snapping and we now glided free in silence toward the mouth of the creek.
Elvis had smashed upward into the wheel and the center console and touched his head in the nylon of the teetop but was on his feet as I got to mine. My shoulder was not so hurt but I was in a state of adrenalin and knew that pain could come much later. I looked past the bow. The engine had been stripped and lay in the rocks.
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
“Shit.”
“You ok?”
“Yeah, I’m good. How are you?”
“I think I’m okay.”
The accident brought us back to even and I leapt out of the boat into the shallow water. I walked around it in the shallows and looked up through Robinson’s Hole between Pasque and Naushon toward Buzzard’s Bay. I felt a quick pang of fear, the kind from suddenly seeing too far before you were ready. Whatever we did there was a window where we had to be quick. I walked to the back of the boat to look at where the engine had been. The mounting bolts were snapped in half and the transom was cracked. I looked to the right of where the engine used to be and saw the hull identification number had been gouged out by the crack. It was gone. I stepped around and looked at the mouth of the tidal creek where the abutments and wing walls of a small stone bridge lay unconnected. I walked in the shallows toward the broken bridge and the water was up to my knees. I turned back around and the fog had thickened again and was covering us and Elvis was now in the water looking at the engine in the rocks.
“Fuck,” he said. I waded out toward the rocks and the current was fast so I held onto the ledges and put my hands on the engine which lay in a crooked balance on top of a ledge. I looked North again through the Hole and could not see through for the fog was so thick and climbed between the rocks and with my feet pushing on a ledge I shoved the engine into the water between the rocks and it sunk under out of sight. I walked back to the boat and Elvis was holding onto its sides as it had started drifting in the water and I climbed on board and found new rope and tied it to the front rail and jumped back into the soft sand.
“Here, give it a big push.” We pushed the boat off the sand and it freed into the water and when it had gone out enough I walked it with the rope past the opening of the creek and Elvis and I pulled on the boat slowly. As it drifted near the center of the creek I began to walk it up slowly through the mouth.
“Go on the left side and keep it in the center so it doesn’t beach. Push off if you need but gently.”
We had only a small window with the tide in the middle of its ebb but the boat had a shallow enough draft that we could work it for about a hundred feet. Elvis went to the side and we worked together bringing the boat between the wing walls of the broken bridge and we brought it as far as we could get it beyond them. Then I turned it so it beached sideways, perpendicular to the broken bridge, and pulled on the rope until it stopped and I felt the weight come back into the boat without the buoyancy. I climbed on board and threw the anchor forward onto the beach. Pasque was a private island and no one used its creek except for the family that owned it, and it was too shallow for motorboats. I remembered Chris saying the family was gone until August and I figured this way we could make the now engineless boat look quaint and private and inconspicuous, not crashed. Less likely for people to ask questions or report it if they even saw it, for it was well hidden behind the wing walls. It looked like private property.
I dug around for tools in the hatches of the boat and came up with screwdrivers and tossed one down to Elvis. “Scrape off the registration number there in the front.” I rooted around until I found the second hull identification number in the hatch below the center console and I laid on my sore shoulder and worked for about five minutes with the screwdriver. Halfway through I jumped to the beach and found a rock the size of my palm and I climbed and laid back down again and whacked it against the bottom of the screwdriver wedged under the metal until the identification number came loose and I could pry it off. I took it and the GPS and the registration papers and waded back out to the rocks where the engine was hidden. I smashed the GPS with a rock and I tossed the identification number into the current and I ripped the registration documentation and scattered it in Robinson’s Hole.
Elvis had made the registration number unreadable with the screwdriver and I put my hand on his shoulder. “It’s this way,” I said and we took the first curve of the tidal creek. The creek wound in a slalom pattern the water and the tide had given it who knows how many mysterious centuries ago. We walked as high up on the sand as we could and it wasn’t until the second curve that stretches of the creek became deep. Where it grew deep up above our waste the bottom was marshy and our feet sunk into the floorsand and we took our arms out of our sleeves and let our shirts hang around our necks to keep them from soaking. The bottom of my shirt was wet because it had touched the water and it was cold in the fog against my stomach but the water we walked through was warm because it was so shallow and had stood for hours warmed by the sun.
Banked on our sides was soft seagrass and seagulls eyed us curiously from between the grass for they’d never seen men walk through this creek and the sandpipers fluttered in nervous excitement and disappeared in the fog and then we had to swim. It felt good to dip my chest into the water and we balled our shirts and held them above our heads and sidestroked to the next sandbar. We took the last turn and had to sidestroke again in the water warm as bathwater and came upon a stretch of the creek where it narrowed and then opened up again into a final visible pool. We walked out of the narrow trickle to where a beach opened to our left and we took it walked the beach around the pool to the treeline.
“It’s in there,” I said to Elvis. “Somewhere not too deep.” And Elvis walked to the treeline with his back wet and beading with warm water and here I followed him. It was a strange treeline with scrub and saltwater florations and trees that I imagined all Cape beaches must have looked like in their natural state. The beach was shallow enough that in high storms I could imagine the water flooded into the pool of the creek and ran into the scrub of the trees. So this was vegetation and flower that could take the ocean, and grew from flood.
We whacked through the scrub and it was not long before we found in the saltgreen grass silver poking out of the sand. Elvis’s back was scratched with the sharp branches and I saw lines that would soon bleed and as he bent down the cuts reddened on his back. He took the gun in his hands and looked at it. I couldn’t believe how little Chris had done to hide it against the elements. The gun had sand in its crevices and Elvis nervously brushed them and tilted the gun to let the sand run off it.
“Make sure it’s not loaded,” I said.
“How?”
“There, on the left.”
He touched the knurled thumbpiece behind the cylinder with his right thumb.
“Forward?”
“Forward. Now push the cylinder open from the right, with your other hand.”
He felt for the cylinder awkwardly at first and then it gave easily to his fingers and the cylinder swung out smoothly and sand trickled from the gun. The sun was beginning to poke out over our shoulders through the fog and the brass rims of the two remaining bullets took its light gently. One of those empty chambers had been for Rosie.
“What a fucking loser,” I said.
“What should we do.”
I looked at the bullets and his wet pockets. Elvis did not want to hold the gun and with its cylinder open it looked like he was holding a horseshoe crab from the shell with its legs reaching out awkwardly for land.
“I have to think. Just don’t cock the hammer and it won’t fire. Swing the cylinder back in for now.”
We walked down to the shoreline where the tide was still going out and sat a long while looking through the fog toward the Vineyard, the sand sticking to our wet pants and the small of our backs. The fog was wavering and my shoulder glowed only slightly with pain and we looked across the Vineyard Sound until the light of sunset over the island came out in the fading mist. The orange of it was clear in the disappearing fog and then the fog was gone and it was just the island with a wan pink sky above it and the first Atlantic stars. My toes and elbows were bleeding from pushing the engine in the rocks and I had a cut I couldn’t place bleeding down my leg.
“Shit,” said Elvis. “What are we gonna do?”
I didn’t answer. I was thinking about the gun and how close Naushon looked at the tidal creek where we wrecked the boat. The sunset was behind us and I thought too of all the ocean at our backs with the sunset in it. The Elizabeths were like the edge of a world to me and I looked Southwest at Nashawena and Cuttyhunk islands and the lights of the boats far out in the Sound. All we could see of the sunset now was the jet trail of an plane pinking the sky and the waves had grown quiet.
“Jesus man, what is that?”
I turned to look where Elvis pointed. There was a bright orange glow unwinding slowly in the late blue of the sky. It was low to the horizon between Wood’s Hole and West Chop in the mouth of the Sound. The glow was almost wet looking though its shape was clean and did not run. It looked so close yet I couldn’t tell if it was in our sky or was the low orbit of a rocket-trail skimming the outer currents of orbit. Some test out of Otis Air Force base.
We stood up and walked towards it along the beach, and as we walked its glow began to fill in and curve and my eyes could push through some depth in its light. Its shape took a more final curve and I saw a bright darkness come into it then. “Wait.” I walked backwards in the sand looking at it and the glow closed up along the same contours and the bright darkness faded from it and it looked how it did when Elvis first pointed to it.
“I think it’s the moon,” I said.
“It looks broken.”
Anything seemed possible and it was not too distant a thought that in the last hours man had stolen something from the moon. That we had denuded its webbing and it began to fall apart in the grip of our orbit. We had wantonly pulled it closer. Some war had taken place there on the far side and we had bombarded the moon and now Elvis and I gazed into nature’s wound before it closed up forever.
“Look, it opens as you walk,” said Elvis.
We walked together and entered the tidal creek. It had dried of water and the sand was harder than before but was still wet enough to take our feet up to our ankles and leave dry footprints. The continuum of water had been broken where we entered as if the creek itself had snapped and here we entered and here the great floodplains of the moon darkened. The creekbank looked tall now that there was no water and you could see the striations of its wet sides that had never taken moonlight. The seagrass was lush and dark green on the banks and we walked deep where the sea grass was above our heads. The moon was bigger than I’d ever seen it and it was a shock to see it so big and so close to Earth and coming closer all the time. It was coming closer and yet still it seemed half in glow and half in clarity as if some part of it were caught in our atmosphere and some part out in space.
As we took the curves of the creek and passed through its bright puddles we gave the moon back to itself and it stretched now to its far side from the Ocean of Storms through its Sea of Islands to the far Sea of Crises where it ended on its edge. Its harbors and channels and shorelines were so bright Elvis and I could have sat down to map them and name all their darker lights and see oceans in the light. There is a place on the moon called the terminator. It is the boundary of darkness that moves leftward across the moon’s face each night and in our walking Elvis and I were like the arbiters of this line, moving the moon between day and night at will. It was like to have some share in the revelation of a secret, that day was a great secret revealed out of night, and we took the darkness that lay through a lunar floodplain and the rim rings of a crater and drew it back and brought light into the lunar face, and abolished a nighttime on the moon.
By the time we reached Chris’s boat at the mouth of the creek the moon’s Southern Hemisphere was still missing and it was shrinking in size as it rose Westward in the sky. Her basins and riverways were as clear as they would ever be and presented to the eye as some far and final wall where the breadth of the iris ends.
The sky was black now and the tide had ebbed dramatically and it looked almost as if you could walk from Pasque to Naushon. In the tide’s contraction was another depth as if there was a secret magnitude the tide could travel beyond the tug of the moon and here then was a new ocean. Or perhaps the moon could tug harder in certain hours, but I could not now tell such an hour apart from the route and power of death that lived within such hours.
“It’s a spring tide.”
“What’s that?”
“Extreme low tide.”
“I thought full moons brought high tides.”
“They do. But they can also make extreme low tides like this.”
We could see the tops of many rocks in the Hole that had not been above the surface probably for several years. There were no waves and in my mind I thought that like the reverse of the moon maybe as we walked closer to the Hole it would shrink to a stream and we could step over it softly to Naushon. The rocks where we wrecked were down to sand. We walked to them and looked at their bases disappearing in the sand.
Elvis looked into the center of the rocks at the engine. “On the rock, huh?”
I laughed thinking of that day long ago on Falmouth with Astana’s father and his whiskey.
The Hole was dangerously shallow now and the ebb was on the edge of slack tide. If we swam across to Naushon at slack with the water this low it would take only the work of ten easy minutes. I thought of a time when I was a child and a spring tide like this had come under a full moon and my father and I walked far out beyond the buoys from our beach in the evening. The water never got past our knees but I was a child and I grew scared being so far from shore. The water was eerily still and my father kept walking and I watched him go until the water was at his waist and he seemed from my vantage to touch the horizon for me.
A deep lowing sound came across from Naushon. My hackles raised and I turned to look where it was coming from. Another lowing came and Elvis squinted out across at Naushon.
“The fuck?” Elvis put his hands over his brows. “Jesus, there’s horns.”
“What?”
I looked across at the far shore and saw the darkness move. There was a white glint in the throw of living bone.
“They’re fucking cows,” said Elvis.
I plucked my irises from the banks of the moon and focused them on the beach and saw now the shape of Belted Galloway and Scottish Highland cattle with long horns curving from their heads. They had come out in the moonlight in the seagrass to walk the lowtide. They stood at its edge in childish curiosity and lowed at it and at us across the way.
“My God, cows.”
“I have heard there’s a big farm there,” said Elvis.
We walked now to the water’s edge where the new beach dropped into a steep channel to look at the cows. The Scottish Highland with the horns had thick long coats and Elvis made kissing sounds to them across the Hole and they came closer to the water and some waded in it. The water hardly moved. I looked across the moonlight in the Sound at the Vineyard. The still water lay like its own terminator line between the near and the dark sides of the moon. But I had once seen beyond the edge of this edge. Yes, I had followed Her round every bend and I knew the far-away chord beyond the next bend and in this moment I knew I had finally stolen forward and the inner reflex of my ear was faster for a split second than the hidden note and I stole it back. I had once named it and the notes of the name were humming again in my skin and I knew now what to do.
I showed Elvis what I wanted to do on Chris’s map. The tides were in me and I felt we could cross to Naushon in slack and I explained the rest of my thinking and he understood my plan and agreed it was the only option.
We opened Chris’s large cooler and took stock of its contents. There was water and iced teas and beef jerky and peanuts and a bottle of white wine. I tossed in towels from the hatch and our t-shirts and I walked Elvis through stripping the gun in the moonlight.
“Why are we stripping it?”
“I think it’ll be easier to clean later. No trapped water. More likely to fire when we put it back together.”
“Ok.”
I handed him the screw driver and he swung the cylinder out with ease this time. Before he emptied the two bullets I asked him to put a mark with the screwdriver above the chamber of the bullet on the right. This took him about a minute to dig through the paint to the silver below but I could see it. He unscrewed the bottom and lifted the grips off and I held out a plastic bag from the cooler and he put it in with the bullets. I directed him to the crane lock on the left side of the frame and he unscrewed it and pulled the cylinder and crane forward off the gun and put it in the bag. Then he turned the gun over and the screws of the side plate glinted in the light and he removed them from the brightness of the light and lifted the side plates off. They were all in the bag and I tied the plastic handles and pushed all the air out so that it was tight to the components and then tied it again. I then wound tape tightly around the bag and put this in a second bag and taped this too.
We put the gun in the cooler and undressed and put our clothes in it and walked down to the water naked holding the cooler between us. The cooler was heavy and we set it in the water and it floated. I worried about it overturning and made sure to bolt the top down. The water was warm on my feet but that was because my feet were used to the water from walking in it for the last several minutes. When we entered Robinson’s the coolness traveled up my legs and groin and it was not as warm as I’d have liked it but it felt nice on my body. There was hardly a current in the water and we waded as far as we could and were quickly in the depth above our heads. We sidestroked with one hand on the handles of the cooler.
“Aim for the cows,” I said and Elvis laughed.
I tried breastroking with my right hand on the cooler. Even with slack tide we were heading a little off course from Naushon Point and I could feel the cold of the water below and lifted my feet up and went back into a sidestroke. The cows watched us the whole way and were standing in the water bunched together waiting for us. Their horns looked strange in the moonlight and they mooed loudly with real purpose of communication when our feet touched the bottom. Their eyes were pretty and they had the sweet long-lashed look of something that knows that you may kill them but does not know what death is and thinks it could be a sweetness. Their eyes were large and dopey and the moon was in them. One began to lope nervously and spooked the whole group but Elvis and I reached our hands gently and made plaintive sounds to them. One let Elvis and I pet him and the others scattered loudly into the seagrass and then turned to watch us. I ran my hands along the living bone of his horns and the cow threw its head and ran heavily away with his hooves thumping in the packed sand and watched us from the grass and his horns shown against the night sky and open water of Buzzard’s Bay.
We took the towels out of the cooler and dried ourselves and put our clothes back on, careful to put our sandy feet through our pants without touching. I sat on a rock and dried my feet with the towel and rubbed the sand off and let them dry in the air. I rubbed and smacked my body to circulate the blood. The beach was smooth but every hundred yards a cluster of large rocks stood and then there were the small round rocks just big enough to hurt when you walked over them barefoot. We drank some water and ate the jerky and peanuts. I was afraid of cramps later on so I suggested we eat the food now. We put the empty bags in the cooler and I took the roll of tape from the cooler and we put our shoes on. We walked the empty cooler to the scrubline for the land here was hilly and that of a sea meadow and there were no trees for quite a ways. We stowed it in a bush at the visible roots of a cluster of low trees. The cows followed us with their eyes and some followed us up the hill and I could hear them thumping the knoll and feel their hooves in the ground. Elvis took the bagged gun from the cooler and we turned and a cow had come up close to us when our backs were turned and he stared, heavy and silent. There was a far-off moo at the bottom of the hill on the beach, perhaps calling her back.
The seagrass was soft in the meadow, and we stood in a footpath figuring what was our best route East. The nautical map only charted the water and Naushon was private so there were no maps of its interior nor names we could know for its roads. Pasque may have had no one on it but Naushon was seven miles long with old farm houses hidden in the hillfolds. The sand was soft and I looked at the moon and it was moving ever so slightly over the top of Martha’s Vineyard. We had to move fast and cover as much of Naushon as we could while we still had the flood tide. It would start soon and would run the water East for six hours and we could only spare to lose one of those hours.
We walked down through the sea meadow to the beach and the cows and I looked around the bend of the beach one more time at the large boulders and the sand bright white in the moonlight. It was walkable but even with the low tide it was a thin beach and I remembered there were bluffs along Naushon and large boulders and ledges. I turned and one of the cows was standing next to me looking around the bend of beach.
“Where would you walk?” I asked him.
He looked up at me with his large lashes and blinked at me as a friend.
“Let’s float this guy across,” said Elvis, his arm resting on the cow’s back.
“Dock him at Mayflower.”
“We’ll keep him in the boathouse.”
We could have played in the moonlight with the cows all night and there was a final shape in that mood that waited for us across a daybreak, far away.
“I think we have to chance it,” I told Elvis.
“What, and float him across?”
“No,” I laughed. “We’re gonna have to cut through the island.”
We walked back up the knoll into the green meadow. The light was white. There was a footpath through the seagrass that led through the trees. A light wind poured through the grass and the grass drew a softness out of the sound. The path took us East through a cropping of dwarf beech and every now and then I looked back and watched the cows follow us, bright in the light. It was not a wood so much as a garden of trees and the moonlight drew a whiteness out of the clearing between the trees like bright ejecta drifting from a crater rimmed in seaflowers. I spied across the hummock of the clearing the opening of another trail. The footpath we were on wanted us to loop and follow the long curve of the island itself which would make us walk more distance than we could afford so I began to cut across.
We walked tall in the bright grass and the thorns of the scrub scratched our legs but the entrance to the heavens is riddled with pretty thorns and the blood looked beautiful on my legs. We walked through the scrubthorns until we couldn’t feel their hidden knives on our legs any longer. My legs glowed with numbness and I thought I would need this numbness later.
Big beautiful rocks stood in white light between the trees. I turned and the cows had followed us past the thin treeline. We were at the open door to the moon you could only cross in the ducts of certain dreams. Dreams you had that were secret from you. We mounted the sill of this door and stepped into the next trailhead and the next meadow we walked took a steeper tilt and the shade of taller trees. We kept the moonlight on our right. It poked through the branches and shaped lunar shadows in the sandy grass. We walked the trial until it opened to a rough road with deep car grooves in it. It looked like a dry riverbed and had sharp white rocks shining in the grooves and the crown. The road was not flat but canted down toward the bluffs and I thought how beautiful it would be for a stream or a river to run at this angle without the water falling out.
But we did not take the road. We crossed over it and followed instead where the light shirred through the trees. There was a ripple in the grass and we took the route of another secret meadow to stay off the road. The southern hemisphere of the moon was rounding out now and it was smaller in the sky than it had been. There was a wake in its light in the grass from when it had drawn so close to the world and we walked so that this light fell down upon us on our right. I turned and could no longer see the cows, but there were fireflies where we’d been, bright and then dark like stars half-falling. In the distance beyond the trees there was a clearing and a barn with a light on. We crouched our heads and tried to move quietly but like ghosts there was something in how brazenly visible we were that we could not be seen. We walked over an old stone wall and we were in small farmland and dark shapes moved. We heard the pounding of hooves before we saw what moved. It was a herd of horses and they came up to us in curiosity and wheeled around us and snorted. Horses answer to the mood of man and they let us walk and were not afraid, for the horses of heaven do not spook I thought to myself.
Across another wall the trees thickened and we were in tall oak. We had stolen a mile into heaven and had a few more to go through its woods and found ourselves upon the rough road again. The holly and black cherry and American beech were too thick to make good time through and we walked the road close to its outer edge. The trees came steeply down to the road and on the other side was a bluff down to the beach. I wondered if a car might come down and one did, heading in the direction of where we’d landed with its lights off. The light was bright enough to see by. I could not imagine what would bring a car down the road at this hour except to wrap your arms around a woman and kiss her deeply in the sea meadow, or to make a private tour of the moon from the bluff. It was a jeep bouncing softly and running naked and there was indeed a man and woman sitting in the front with their clothes off, their skin bright white. We were close enough that we could have touched them as they passed and the woman’s breasts and her hair falling around them did something to my heart. Elvis and I stood back behind the beech like Indian spirits watching as they passed, for if something could stir the attention of the old dead it would be nights like these when blood is drawn by the bright thorn the soul makes its journey back to on the light of the moon. What a deep breath the soul must hold to return once a month on the full moon. Some proximity of this hour to midnight awoke the lost vertigoes of the old heights of man before he is born. It felt to be just the soul answering to the currents in the light and pouring back into the light along its secret routes and all we had to do now was follow this eddy for there was no wrong step to take. What a deep breath is in the soul.
We went another two miles in a half jog sipping from our waters and tea, sweating gently.
“Imagine living here man,” said Elvis, but it was not a place one could stay past daylight.
The road was now arcing North away from the bluffs and the beach. I knew we were getting close to Tarpaulin Cove and we found a small foot-trail leading down to the beach that branched from the road like an invisible fork. Here we were full in the moonlight and could see across to the Vineyard as we walked. The moon was now full and almost over the center of the Vineyard. The tide was coming in but from up on the bluff you could not hear any waves and the Sound lay like a wet silver plain between us and the Vineyard. The trail took us down to the white beach and past a small pond close to the beach which the map had called French Watering Place. The beach thinned for long stretches so that we could just barely walk abreast. The rocks picked up and the sand was in my shoes and we soon came to huge boulders that we had to climb and crouch through carefully. “On the rock,” we said to each other. The waves were silent but the flood would be coming in strong after the spring tide and I looked around the bending beach, through the silver of curvature, and up above the bluff at a sweeping light. We had reached Naushon Lighthouse and the bend where the Lunet had wrecked hundreds of years ago. Around the bend was Tarpaulin Cove and bunched against its crescent were the whites of yachts and sailboats at anchor. But we would not walk that far.
I took the laces out of my sneakers and tied them tight around my knees. Then I took the role of tape and taped the laces in tight bands. I put a water and iced tea down my pant legs where the shoelaces had closed them and shoved my sneakers in the back of my pants and cinched my belt tight. I handed Elvis the tape and he did the same with the gun and his water and tea and sneakers.
The shoreline was still low. The flood would be pushing us East toward the mouth of the Sound as we swam toward West Chop. I couldn’t predict how long the swim would be but my fear was of us being carried West and missing the island completely. The flood must be at least an hour or more old and I figured it was sometime around midnight. If we timed it right and were East enough in the Sound when the ebb came again we could land somewhere up island.
Elvis had the white wine in his hands. It was only two-thirds full and he opened it. “Here. For the road.” He belted back the wine and wiped his mouth and I took two warm chugs and handed it back. He drank half of what remained and I put away the rest and we left it in a glint only the glass could catch and show was waiting there between a cluster of rocks, wanting to shine. We rubbed and slapped ourselves for circulation and I looked at the sky once more and saw the lost white of Her eyes in the harbor of the moon. The moonlight lay soft in the direction we’d have to have to swim. I had seen the lost white of Her eyes and I was come at last upon the shores of Her voice and it said, here is the Sound Adam, swim it.
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