“Sade. Her name is Sade and it’s not puppy love,” George replied. “Puppy love is a shallow and transient emotion that can evaporate in a fickle heartbeat.”
“Yes, that’s true.” Mrs. Wiener felt stymied, outfoxed by her son’s precision. “I stand corrected.” Rising from the bed, she left the room and retreated down the stairs.
In the morning, George dug through the compost heap where his parents had been dumping banana peels, eggshells, coffee grounds, fruit and other degradable refuse in a shallow pit. Inside ten minutes he had a can full of writhing worms and night crawlers. Around eight o’clock he headed out to the Brandenberg Reservoir. On the second cast he hooked a largemouth bass. Deftly playing the muscular fish into shore, he removed the hook, threading a nylon rope through the gills and back out the mouth before tossing the tethered fish into the shallow water.
Around eleven o’clock Sade appeared. “Come with me,” George said flatly. “He led the way back out into an open meadow carpeted with cornflowers, chicory, ivory-colored baby’s breath and snapdragon.
“What about the fishing gear?”
George waved the question off. On the far side of the meadow a muddy trail half-buried in undergrowth led back down to the water. “Look over there to your left.”
They were standing on a rock ledge extending out over an algae-choked stretch of placid water. There were rotting tree stumps, cat-o’-nine-tails; and a swarm of dragon flies flitting back and forth in the marshy shallows. “I don’t see anything.”
George raised his hand and indicated a row of blackened stumps jutting out from the murky water. “That flat rock beside the third stump from your left.”
Sade’s body tightened and the breath caught like a jagged bone in her throat. Involuntarily, the girl took a step backward, leaning against his chest. Fifty feet away, sunning itself on the granite rock was a medium-size snake. The body was tattooed with brown, tan and gray crossbands. The broad head jutted out distinct from the neck, the snout blunt in profile with the top of the head extending forward slightly further than the mouth. The body had a heavy build, the tail moderately long and slender. “It’s a water moccasin.” George’s voice hardly rose above a whisper. “I came down here first before going to the cove, but as soon as I saw our friend sunning himself, I immediately left.”
“So what do we do now?”
“Leave,” George replied. “The cove is a good three hundred feet away, but vipers are strong swimmers and that nasty brute could cover the distance in five minutes without even breaking a sweat.”
“I thought snakes were cold blooded.”
“You know what I mean.” George turned and led the way back to the fishing hole, where he collected his gear. Before reaching the street, the woods emptied out into an open meadow speckled with wildflowers, the honey-colored grass in some places waist high. When they were a reasonably safe distance from the water, George threw himself down on the warm earth and Sade snuggled up next to him.
“Did you stop by my house the other day?” There was no reply. George was still thinking about the water moccasin. The mature snake looked to be about three feet long, grown strong on a diet of frogs, small fish and carrion. In the future when he fished the cove, he would have to be more vigilant, sweep the grassy shoreline and underbrush regularly with his eyes for uninvited guests. And, of course, he would warn Sade against joining him in the future. “My father says,” she interrupted his reveries, “you’re the craziest little shithead he ever met.”
George just smiled. Twittering as they careened drunkenly through the early morning sunshine, a scattering of chickadees was flitting through the lower branches of the pine trees that rimmed the meadow. “I’m in love with you.”
She rolled over in the tufted grass, her cheek resting lightly on his chest. “Now tell me something I don’t already know.” The tone was smug, gently mocking.
George told her about his favorite author’s theory of the ‘muddle’ and how life often resembled an impromptu violin performance. Then he told her Forster had suggested that there was only a certain amount of kindness in the world, just as there was only a certain amount of light, and that we throw shadows wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things, because the shadows follows us. George was working himself up into a mild frenzy, which was pretty much what happened every time he got going on the Englishman, not that Sade seemed to mind. She just lay back with her eyes closed, a dreamy smile creasing her plump lips.
“‘Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.’ That’s what Forster said." When the boy finished talking, she snuggled closer draping a leg over his thigh. The sun was almost directly overhead now, the temperature drifting into the low eighties. The sweet aroma of pine sap mixed with wildflowers perfumed the air. “Well?” he pressed.
“Well what?” She rested an arm on his chest, and he brought a hand up around the small of her back.
“Was it worth hearing?”
She caressed his face with a free hand. In no great hurry a turgid bumblebee lumbered by en route to a clump of orangey flowers. “No, like everything else you tell me, it was stupid as hell.” The Chickadees’ chatter was joined by the rhythmic hammering of a woodpecker. A pastel, earth-colored moth was feasting on the nectar in a bell-shaped ivory flower.
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