Icebergs by Rebecca Johns

Author:Rebecca Johns
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2010-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

One time, riding in a car with some friends, Sam saw a kid younger than himself riding a blue Cook County Correctional bus with his face pressed against the glass, looking so sad that he might have been crying. It was winter, and the kid's breath had fogged the window. The bus and Sam's car were going the same speed, and for a minute the kid seemed to hang in midair. He caught Sam's eye. They stared at each other. Then, using his finger, the kid wrote backward on the fogged window, in letters so perfect they were unmistakable: "Fuck You." Sam sped up, leaving the bus behind, and the kid slipped away.

His first day at Fort Polk, Louisiana, it was the kid's face he was seeing when the bus stopped in the yard. It was the same kind of bus, blue with metal grates over the windows. They were already waiting. They pounded the walls of the bus and shouted to the recruits inside: "Wake up, you pussies, wake up! Every swinging dick had better be out here on the count often!" Sam took his things and stood on the line where they told him to, and though he heard them say, "Eyes front!" he couldn't resist looking when he heard the sergeant screaming down the line. The next second he was on his knees, and the sergeant was unclenching his fist. "When I say eyes front, you better believe I mean it."

At night in his bunk, awake to the sounds of eighty guys snoring or farting or jerking off, exhausted and homesick, he thought about Caroline, the way her skin looked golden under the mercury lights at night when he took her to the Polish cemetery, the way her mouth opened just a little when he touched her, her mismatched lips—the top one thin, the bottom one full and thick. How he had pulled that lower lip into his mouth. The soft backs of her knees as he moved them apart. He fell asleep thinking of her, and in the morning he woke feeling bruised and exhausted, as if he'd run some kind of race, but he could never remember what his dreams were about or what she'd said to him in them.

He'd loved her since he could remember, since the morning she and her mother arrived in the States, in the middle of an Easter snowstorm. She was at his front door, but he would not say hello. His mother took him by the shoulders and marched him toward the girl at the door because she thought Sam was being rude. Caroline was wearing a red coat, and snow was melting in her hair and on her eyelashes. She had a round face and long, dark eyelashes that threw shadows over her cheeks, which were pink and splotched from the cold. She was not a stranger—he remembered her, barely, from when they lived in Windsor—but it was as if he had never seen her before. He was

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