American Salvage

STORM WARNING

Big Bob stood at the prow of Doug’s sixteen-foot MerCruiser with the rebuilt 302 engine and offered up a cold, dripping can. Doug kept his right hand on the wheel and caught the beer left-handed with a wet smack. He glanced behind him to see if his girlfriend, Julie, had witnessed his fine catch, but she was engrossed in her magazine article about the history of salt. On the other side of the back seat, Bob’s wife, Sharon, clutched a plastic tumbler and stared dully toward the center of Big Foot Lake. At slower speeds, Julie, who’d been on the college swim team before dropping out, had been known to slip over the side without warning, so Doug liked to keep an eye on her. While she read, Doug admired her curving legs and her shoulder muscles and the contours of her face, all of which made him think of Lake Michigan dunes.He had read enough Popular Science to be aware that the universe might be curved and finite, but he didn’t realize until now that the great expanse was probably shaped like a woman. Doug took a crisp draw from the beer and tried to dismiss such a stupid thought, telling himself the universe was just stars and planets and the empty space between them. He looked through his binoculars toward shore. Cocoa-buttered girls were stretched out on the public beach in apparently random alignments, but maybe if a weather satellite zoomed in on one of those bodies and then zoomed back out, the photos would show the curving beach itself was another woman, a fractal image made up of the particulate sunbathers. All the beaches pressed together might form female Storm Warning  landmasses, female continents, female planets and galaxies. No wonder men felt tense. Doug glanced at Sharon, whose skin was peeling around her bikini line from last weekend’s burn. Julie, who was by no means modest, nonetheless always wore a plain tank suit. When Julie looked up from her magazine,Doug was certain she would suggest he stop looking at fifteen-year-old girls on shore and pay attention to operating the boat. Instead, she smiled at him and squinted against the sun. He’d gone out with her for six months, and until that moment he hadn’t loved her. Maybe he’d loved her muscular ass and her long body, and possibly her laugh, which was like waves smacking the beach. But her teeth were crooked, after all, and her feet were big, and her temper was terrible, as bad as his. And sliding over the side of the moving boat was only the most dangerous of her disappearing acts: sometimes she’d get bored at a party and leave without telling him, or else she’d take off her clothes and jump into a strange lake or river. Julie apparently suspected nothing new in the way Doug looked at her; she shook her hair out of her face and went back to reading about salt. Doug tried to breathe normally, tried to tell himself that he could take Julie or leave her, that it was all the same to him. He lifted his binoculars and struggled to focus on the shining bodies on the beach. He considered that this new discovery of his about the female universe would shake up the study of geometry. Triangles would no longer lie flat on math book pages, but would bulge before terrified schoolboys like the sides of Sharon’s turquoise bikini top stretching across breasts too large and soft to be contained by anything in two dimensions. Big Bob had told Doug more than he wanted to know about sex with Sharon,but Doug had known Bob since childhood,and Bob’s generosity and friendship more than made up for his crudeness. Later,Doug would wonder if maybe Bob’s big figure at the front of the boat had created a blind spot and that was why Doug did not american salvage  see a purple Jet Ski approaching,or maybe the boy driving the purple Jet Ski really had come out of nowhere. In any case, Bob yelled, and Doug stood and swerved right, crashing the MerCruiser not into the Jet Ski, but instead into an oil-barrel float covered with artificial grass carpeting, moored for distance swimmers. Julie, Bob, and Sharon flew...