Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,133

neon, despite the early hour. The sky ride and the photo booth, the Ferris wheel and the merry-go-round, the batting cage, the signs for strollers and umbrellas for rent—the antediluvian relics all securely fastened, looking as though nothing short of a flood could remove them. He undressed and entered the water also, and soon his arms were around my waist. I wrapped myself around him. He carried me farther out, just the two of us, and water, water all around.

When I opened my eyes from sleep, I knew where I was but not how long it had been. It had gotten very hot. I could hear a common whirr, a public rustle. My head was heavy from the heat; I could hardly raise it. Through the glare I saw that hundreds of people had settled around us while we slept. I reached for Rourke, but he was gone; alongside me in the sand was the impression left by his body. He must have been waiting for me to wake up, because exactly when I wished for him to reappear, he did, coming from the direction of the water, blocking light and noise like a spread cape or carbon overlay. Moisture traveled from his skin, and cold.

He kissed me. I could taste salt from the sea. He said, “Let’s get out of here.”

I stood and went to the water to cool off. I was glad it was still June. In June, nothing bad happens; old songs sound new again and all of summer remains. Only hours had passed since we’d started, I reminded myself, and hours is not so far in. When I got back, he was in his jeans and shirt, and the towels were draped over his shoulder.

The way we walked was smooth, two of us moving as one. His arm cut across my back, high to low, and his fingers gripped the handle of my hip bone. I observed the things around me—the Mechanical Gypsy Fortune Teller, Jenkinson’s Aquarium, the Daytona Driving Game, and those stuffed cats you knock down with softballs—Three down wins choice. Dolls must be flat. There were the rides that once you died for—the Whip, the Ski Bob, the Swings. There were fat ladies in skirted bathing suits and peddlers hawking baby hats with names in Day-Glo toothpaste script, racks of flexible sunglasses, and raffles—Ten chances to win a red Corvette. And that game with the gun that shoots water into the clown’s mouth with the bell that screeches long and hard and forever-seeming. Through the waves of heat came the nauseating gum smell of honey-roasted peanuts and the greasy snap of sausage and the crack of frying zeppole. Children waving beehives of cotton candy and picking carameled apple from their teeth, going, “Let’s go to the bumpa cauz.”

At a storefront with the sign “Psychic Readings by Diana,” a girl in a tangerine miniskirt and a bikini top leaned in the arch of the curtained door and called to us. “Come, come.” Rourke ignored her, and I felt relieved, though I wasn’t sure what I was afraid she’d say.

It was a Sunday, so adults were everywhere—leather-skinned women squinched into belly shirts and stripped-down guys with chains and nesty chests and meandering scars. All of them occupying the top of the food chain, all of them immune, impermeable, oblivious—the cutting edge of evolution.

We slowed when we approached a low brick corner building with no marking other than faded red letters at the top that were modern and straight and missing in part. C-R-I-T-E-R——N. As we neared the entrance, we saw a couple of guys with gym bags go in. One stopped when he saw us, and he waited at the unmarked door. He was overbuilt so his head appeared smaller than it actually was, and his hands did too, perhaps because of the thickness of his wrists. His eyes were bloodshot. He had red hair and red freckles beneath random bruises, and his ears were knuckled up like knotty growths. His jaw was enormous on the left. It looked as though it had just been broken.

Rourke said, “Looking good, Tommy.”

Tommy ignored Rourke, confining his gaze to me. He checked me out like I was meat and he was shopping. I wasn’t afraid with Rourke there, but still, I didn’t like to think of those freckled hands.

Rourke pulled out an envelope and handed it to Tommy. “Give it to Jimmy.”

“Not goin’ in?” Tommy mumbled. It sounded like gargling.

“Not today,” Rourke said.

Tommy shook the envelope near one