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makeup, almost primitive, like a mask that made her new. Behind its drama she might be anyone.
    “It’s growing on me,” he said.
    She was a year younger than he — his best friend Smiley’s little sister, or at least that was how he’d thought of her until a school dance in May, when in the heat of the spring evening, among bodies turning in the pulsation of the speakers, she had tugged him onto the gym floor for a Ladies’ Choice. And in the slow maelstrom of couples, with Paul McCartney wailing like there was no tomorrow, they had drifted into a swaying intimacy so easy and natural he felt he had been preparing for it all his life.
    They had been steadies all summer. She wore his school ring, taped to make it fit. His mother disapproved. He’d overheard herresponding on the phone to a friend who had apparently seen him and Sandy together in the Biscayne. “It’s only one of those summer things, quite temporary. I mean, they’ve grown up together — hardly a seedbed for romance.” Then his mother’s friend said something, and his mother had replied, in a tone of infinite knowing and scorn, “Yes, exactly . She’s not really up to his mark at all.” Later, Joe had upbraided her. “She’s a wonderful girl,” he said angrily, wanting to hurt her, “and it’s not temporary.” In fact, he knew it was. His mother’s judgment of Sandy and his own, secret judgment were uncomfortably close. But he hated it when his mother anticipated his thoughts: it made him feel she had stolen a piece of him.
    Sandy slid over, burrowing a place for herself under his arm. Her hair yielded to the pressure of his body like a basket of woven grass. In its teased, complex, slightly sticky depths was mostly air. Her breasts pressed together, their tops rising above her halter: stacked goudas. Under the seat he had brought a flashlight. Later, after they’d swum at the bridge, after they’d eaten a hot dog at the Rendezvous, they’d drive out to their parking place above Coles Rapids. He was planning to leave the flashlight on in some place where it would shed an indirect glow, softer than the overhead light, easier on the batteries too. For him, Coles Rapids was the focus of their date, the exciting endpoint of a journey without which the journey would hardly be worth making.
    At the Fairgrounds, he accelerated. They crested the new bridge, with its fleeting view of the gravel pits that surrounded the town: turquoise, spring-fed craters, too cold for swimming, and farther away, the conveyor belts leading like little elevated roads across a sad, desert landscape littered with boulders and rusted equipment. Finally, they broke out among the farms: the old houses flashed behind windbreaks of poplar and spruce, while the great, weathered barns held their course like ancient galleons riding the seas of green and bronze crops — the long, patrolling wave of summer.
    By four-thirty they had had their fill of swimming and retreated to the flat limestone of Turtle Rock. They lay on their stomachs, on Sandy’s pink beach towel, facing upstream towards the iron span that stamped the sky with its dark trapezoid. Chunks of collapsing roadbed hung beneath it like the innards of a disintegrating mattress, suspended by tortured strands of rusted steel. The bridge had long been closed to cars. Only the pedestrian walkway remained open.
    Directly below, a little rapid flickered and hushed where the river entered the calm of the pool. The water in the pool was opaque, the colour of creamed coffee, brimming with the soil the Atta had picked up in its long, meandering journey through the farmlands to the northwest. The surface scarcely seemed to move, though here and there bits of weed or grass floated along.
    There was only one swimmer in the pool now. Her head moved slowly, edging into the current below the bridge. To their left, the abrupt, sandy bank and the massive, corrugated trunks of the willows lay in shadow. From deep in the recesses