Read Black Water for Free Online

York, in partial explanation of why
she was not coming home for Thanksgiving this year but going to Old Lyme with
her roommate, I will always love you Mother and Father but I have come
to realize I would not live the lives you live for anything please forgive me!
    Kelly
had been nineteen years old at the time.
    The
wonder of it was , her parents had forgiven her.
    The
Senator was of a social background similar to that of the Kellehers, he too had
gone to Andover just after Arthur Kelleher had graduated, then he'd gone to
Harvard for both his B.A. and his law degree and Arthur Kelleher had gone to
Amherst and then to Columbia and very likely The Senator and the Kellehers knew
many people in common but in their meandering disjointed excitable conversation
that day neither The Senator nor Kelly Kelleher had chosen to pursue the
subject.
    She
knew that The Senator had children her age—a son?—a son and a daughter?—but
neither mentioned this of course.
    She
knew that The Senator was separated from his wife of approximately thirty years
and this fact The Senator did mention, or allude to, very briefly.
    Saying,
with a smile, I'm alone this weekend: my wife's having her family out to our
place on the Cape... his voice trailing off
inconclusively.
    Tasting his mouth on hers. And earlier that day when Kelly had been sitting with her head resting on her
arms at a picnic table apart from the others sleepy and sun-dazed and slightly
ill (why did she drink? when it affected her so
unpredictably? was it simply to be one of a party, as in college? was it simply to appear
to be one of a party, as in college?) when someone came up steathily beside her, she saw through her eyelashes that the person was barefoot, a man,
large white veined feet, gnarled-looking toenails, and there came the lightest
most shimmering touch on her bare shoulder, a touch that ran through her like
an electric shock as she realized it was his tongue on her skin... his warm
soft damp tongue on her bare skin.
    Staring up then into
his face. His eyes. The whites faintly yellowed as with fatigue,
threaded with blood, but the irises startlingly blue. Like
colored glass with nothing behind it.
    And not a word passed between them for
what seemed like a very long time though Kelly's lips twitched wanting to smile
or make a nervous girlish joke to break the spell.
    You know you're someone's little girl,
oh yes!
     
    Recalling this as they sped into the
desolate area southeast of Brockden's Landing as dusk deepened and it began to
look (to Kelly at least) that they would not make the 8:20 p.m. ferry.
    The place was dense with mosquitoes and
here and there fireflies and some of the blond broom-headed rushes grew to a
grotesque height swaying top-heavy in the wind, like human figures grotesque
without faces so she shivered seeing them.
Remarking to The Senator it was strange wasn't it that so many of the trees in
the marsh seemed to be dead... were they dead?... isolated tree trunks in the twilit gloom denuded of leaves,
limbs, bark gray and shiny-smooth as old scar tissue.
    "I
hope it isn't pollution of some kind, killing the trees."
    The
Senator, hunched over the wheel, frowning, exerting pressure on the gas pedal,
made no reply.
    Had
not spoken directly to her, Kelly was thinking, since they'd turned off onto
this damned road.
    Since G-----, last June when it
had finally ended, Kelly Kelleher had not made love with any man.
    Since G-----, when she had wanted
to die, she had not touched any man in desire; nor even in the pretense of
desire.
    Am I ready? ready ? ready ? —a
small mocking voice.
    On
all sides were shrill shrieking nocturnal insects in a frenzy of copulation,
procreation. A din of cries, near-deafening—she shivered, hearing them. So many. You would not think that God would make so many.
Their frenzied cries as if in the very heat of
midsummer sensing the imminent and inevitable waning of the heat, the
quickening of night, and cold, their tiny deaths flying