Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley Read Online Free Page B

make her more there.
    Nathan passed the joint again. The opaque river water under them, its slow, invisible poisons. The coal barges silently sliding. And then he was taking off his clothes. The leather jacket, the black T-shirt, his engineer boots, his Levi’s. He stopped at his briefs. They had not had sex yet, and Janie’d never seen him strip down, although the truth was, even after they did begin having sex, she’d never see him completely naked in light. He slipped over the dock edge and into the river before either of them said anything.
    Janie stared, his body vanishing under the charcoal-colored water, surfacing, him whipping his bangs out of his eyes with a violent shake of his head. Janie watched, the pot continuing to dissolve the hard holding in her, burning away at her self-doubt. Nathan broke surface again, gulped, and dove, the white briefs soaked translucent, the skin of his buttocks visible through them. And as she watched him, Janie understood she wanted to undress, too, and a part of her was surprised and a little scandalized. But then she was untying her shoes, rolling off her socks. She hesitated, glanced up and down the river, then unbuttoned her blouse. She was standing on the dock in her jeans and her bra, her shirt wadded against her stomach, herhunched a bit forward, when Nathan came up and turned towards her again.
    He treaded water, a little too far away for her to clearly see his face. He called, “You better not get in here. It’s nasty. I always shower soon as I get home.”
    Then he was pulling his sleek, filth-rimed body back up on the boards. Janie’s fingers already stumbling to rebutton the blouse. She wondered if the tugboat captains had seen. And at first, along with that embarrassment, a sting that Nathan hadn’t wanted her in the water with him. But right after that she told herself he’d warned her not to come in because he cared.
    After two weeks of motorcycle rides and one week of sex, she guessed they were a couple, but she didn’t know how to find out for sure. Uncle Bobby seemed to think they were a couple, too. “Nathan came over and asked me, he asked me, ‘Bobby, do you think I should ask her out?’ But I didn’t tell you.” He nodded to himself, solemn. “Because I know how to keep a secret. I know how to keep a secret, Janie. Did you know that?”
    She knew that. The story of Nathan’s consulting Uncle Bobby became an immediate favorite in Uncle Bobby’s anecdote repertoire, and after he’d told it three or four times, Janie realized he interpreted it as Nathan asking his permission for her, much like a suitor asking a father for his daughter’s hand in “one of these old movies.”
    Now she lived listening always for the comings and goings of the Yamaha, of the Scout. Her life a hover of anticipation of the next journey through those mysterious backways, not country, not city. Her grandfather muttered his displeasure, but mostly kept it to himself, while her grandmother, who carried indestructible, if unfounded, faith in Janie, found the romance charming. When Janie and Nathan thundered through the metal canyon, Janie couldn’t help but think of hergrandparents. A few of the factories still operated, at least parts of them did, and in shot-spattered signs, Janie, even stoned, recognized some names from her grandfather’s tales.
    Her grandfather’s narratives were more résumés than stories. Recitations of his jobs since age thirteen, when he delivered on his bicycle empty bottles from a drugstore to a bootlegging apartment on Third Avenue. The bootlegging was the first step in his bootstrap chronology, through the glass factory, Owens Illinois, the nickel plant (how Janie’d always pictured this as a child, a flower blooming nickels), the job teaching welding, all arduous rungs in his hand-over-hand pull to the American Dream. Which he did attain, in his late