Latex Under the Flood

I'm twenty-eight years old and I've been waiting tables at the Copper Kettle for four years. You do the math on how exciting my life is. So when Marvin called in his favor, I should have said no. Instead I said yes, and that's how I ended up standing in my driveway at six in the morning during flood season.

Here's the deal. Four years ago, back when I was twenty-four and he was twenty-five, we were both at Maurice's Bar on a Friday night. He'd had way too many. I could see it. He kept jingling his keys and looking at the door, and something in my gut said if he walked out to that parking lot, somebody's night was going to end badly. So I took his keys off him. Sat on him, basically, until he agreed to let me drive his truck home. I slipped him my number on a napkin and told him he owed me one.

He never drank and drove again. He also never paid up. Not once in four years. We stayed loose friends, the kind who like each other's posts and run into each other at the gas station. Then last Tuesday my phone rang.

"Melinda. It's Marvin."

"I know. Caller ID exists."

"Right. Well. I need that favor."

I should have hung up. Flood season. The creek at the ford by the old campsite always jumps its banks when we get three days of rain, and that's exactly what the forecast was calling for. Three days of rain.

"What favor? I don't remember any favor," I lied.

"Come on. You know the one. You kept me out of jail. Maybe kept somebody alive."

"And you waited four years to pay it back, and you pick the wettest week of the year."

"I'll explain when I pick you up. Saturday. Early."

"Define early."

"Six."

I said yes. I don't know why. Maybe because his voice did something on the other end of the line, something small and hopeful. Maybe because my life really was that boring.

Saturday morning his truck pulled up, a beat-up Ford that's older than both of us put together. Rain was already coming down in a steady gray sheet. I climbed in with my duffel and my rain jacket and a bad attitude.

"Okay. Explain."

"I'm a process server now," he said, pulling out of my street. "You knew that."

"I knew you had a job with a weird name."

"Serving papers. Court documents. Somebody has to hand them to a person, face to face, or it doesn't count. Usually it's easy. This guy lives out past the ford. Campsite on the creek. Except he's been dodging me for two months."

"So?"

"So he's camping right now. Out there. And I need a witness. Legal thing, some of these need a witness signature. I can't do it alone."

"You need a witness so bad you called in a four-year-old favor."

"You're the only person I trust to sit in the rain with me and complain about it."

That got a laugh out of me, which I hated. Marvin has that way about him. Big shoulders, crooked grin, always looks a little sorry for himself. I'd noticed him back at Maurice's, obviously. I'm not blind. But nothing ever happened, and I'd told myself a hundred times nothing ever would.

"What's that?" I asked, turning around in my seat.

In the truck bed, under a tarp, there was a rolled-up shape. Long. Heavy looking. Like a rug, but thicker.

"Rug," he said. Too fast.

"Nobody brings a rug process serving."

"It's a ground cloth. For the truck."

"Marvin."

"It's a rug, Melinda."

I let it go. The rain got harder. We drove out past the grain elevator and the feed store and then onto the gravel road that winds along the creek, and I watched the water rise in the ditches the whole way. By the time we hit the ford, my stomach was making its feelings known.

The creek was up. Way up. Brown and fast, chewing at the banks, and the low crossing that's usually a gravel ripple you can walk across was gone. Just water, moving mean.

"That's not happening," I said.

"No. It's not!" He pulled into the little campsite on our side. One wooden platform, a fire pit under a lean-to, willows bending in the wind. Our guy was across the water, and across the water was across the water.

"So we drove ninety minutes to stare at a flooded creek."

"Roads upstream flood out first. Water'll drop in a few hours if the rain lets up. If it doesn't, we wait it out here and try tomorrow. I brought the camp stove."

"Great. Camping. With you. In a monsoon."

He got out and I got out and the rain hit my hood like applause. He dropped the tailgate and pulled out that rolled-up thing, and instead of playing it cool he just stood there holding it.

"You're going to make me ask," I said.

"Yeah. I guess I am." He set it on the tailgate. His face had gone red, and not from cold. "It's not a rug. Okay? It's... it's gear. Latex. Sheets. Gloves. A guy I used to see got me into it and I never really..."

He trailed off. The rain filled the silence.

"Latex," I said. "Sheets."

"Sleep sack too, but you don't need to know that."

"And you brought it. On our work trip."

"It lives in the truck. I forgot it was under there, I swear. Or I didn't forget. I don't know."

Something hot went through me, and I recognized it right away, and I didn't like it. Jealousy. Four years of telling myself we were just friends, and here was proof there'd been other people, a whole past I didn't know about, somebody who'd seen him in black rubber and probably done things to him I'd only imagined at two in the morning.

"Who?" I heard myself say.

"What?"

"Who got you into it. The guy or the girl. Whoever."

"A woman. Couple years back. Sonia." He said it like he was spitting out a seed.

Sonia. I filed the name away like a knife in a drawer.

"So that's your thing," I said. "Latex."

"It's a thing. Not the thing. Look, forget I said anything, we'll wait out the rain and..."

"Put it on."

He stared at me. Water ran off the brim of his cap.

"What?"

"You heard me. I'm curious, not mocking. If you want to show me, show me. Put on the latex, right here, in the rain. And if you don't want to, say so and we never mention it again."

"Melinda, that's..."

"What? Embarrassed? You weren't embarrassed with Sonia, were you?"

I don't know what came over me. Yes I do. I wanted to win something I'd never even entered. Four years of a napkin with my phone number on it, and he'd never once called to ask me out, but he'd let some woman dress him up like a seal. I wanted to be the one he thought about at two in the morning.

"You're serious," he said.

"Dead serious."

"And if I do?"

"Then I'll know exactly what I've been missing."

He looked at me a long time. The creek roared behind us. "Okay," he said. "Yes. I do want to." Then he reached down and unrolled the thing on the tailgate, and there it was, black and shining under the gray sky, folded tight as a fist.

"Fair warning," he said, pulling off his cap. "It takes a while to get into."

"Then you better start."

* * *

He peeled his rain jacket off first. Then the flannel. Then he was standing in a t-shirt in forty-degree rain, and I thought, this man is insane, and so am I, because I wasn't going anywhere.

He pulled a black latex shirt out of the roll, along with the sheets and gloves I'd seen. It hung there in the gray light like something skinned off an animal.

"That's not a shirt," I said. "That's a wetsuit's evil cousin."

"It's a shirt." He worked a bottle of something out of the roll too. White. Slick. "You need powder or lube to get into it. It fights back."

"Then fight it."

He got his arms in first. That part went okay. Then it hit his shoulders and just stopped, clinging, squeaking, refusing. He yanked. It won. He yanked again and it gave about an inch and made a sound like a balloon dying.

"Okay," he panted. "Okay. This is the part where..."

"Where you ask for help?"

"This is the part where I ask for help."

I set my duffel down. I'd been holding it like a shield the whole time. I walked over and got both hands on the collar of the thing and pulled down while he pushed up, and the rubber slid over his shoulders all at once and he stumbled into me, chest to chest, both of us grabbing for balance.

"Sorry."

"Shut up. Arms down."

I smoothed it down over him. That's what I told myself I was doing. Smoothing. My palms flat on his chest, dragging the black rubber tight over his ribs, and it squeaked under my hands and his breath went short and mine did too. It was warm already from his body and slick under my fingers and I could feel him through it. All of him. The shape of his chest, the push of it, how fast he was breathing.

"Melinda."

"I'm not done. It's wrinkled."

"It's not wrinkled."

"It's wrinkled right here." I wasn't touching wrinkles. I had one hand flat on his stomach, feeling it rise and fall, and he wasn't saying stop, and neither was I.

His hips pushed forward maybe an inch. Maybe less. I felt it anyway.

"Tell me to stop," he said. Quiet. Almost under the rain.

"You know I won't."

"You sure?"