Skeleton Crew by Stephen King

He had hardly brought the car to a stop at the pole fence between the parking lot and the beach before he was out and pulling off his shirt. His eyes were scanning the water for the raft.

Randy got out of the shotgun seat, a little reluctantly. This had been his idea, true enough, but he had never expected Deke to take it seriously. The girls were moving around in the back seat, getting ready to get out.

Deke’s eyes scanned the water restlessly, side to side (sniper’s eyes, Randy thought uncomfortably), and then fixed on a point.

“It’s there!” he shouted, slapping the hood of the Camero. “Just like you said, Randy! Hot damn! Last one in’s a rotten egg—”

“Deke—” Randy began, resetting his glasses on his nose, but that was all he bothered with, because Deke was vaulting the fence and running down the beach, not looking back at Randy or Rachel or LaVerne, only looking out at the raft, which was anchored about fifty yards out on the lake.

Randy looked around, as if to apologize to the girls for getting them into this, but they were looking at Deke—Rachel looking at him was all right, Rachel was Deke’s girl, but LaVerne was looking at him too and Randy felt a hot momentary spark of jealousy that got him moving.

He peeled off his own sweatshirt, dropped it beside Deke’s, and hopped the fence.

“Randy!” LaVerne called, and he only pulled his arm forward through the gray twilit October air in a come-on gesture, hating himself a little for doing it—she was unsure now, perhaps ready to cry it off. The idea of an October swim in the deserted lake wasn’t just part of a comfortable, well-lighted bull-session in the apartment he and Deke shared anymore. He liked her, but Deke was stronger. And damned if she didn’t have the hots for Deke, and damned if it wasn’t irritating, Deke unbuckled his jeans, still running, and pushed them off his lean hips. He somehow got out of them all the way without stopping, a feat Randy could not have duplicated in a thousand years. Deke ran on, now only wearing bikini briefs, the muscles in his back and buttocks working gorgeously. Randy was more than aware of his own skinny shanks as he dropped his Levi’s and clumsily shook them free of his feet—with Deke it was ballet, with him burlesque.

Deke hit the water and bellowed, “Cold! Mother of Jesus!” Randy hesitated, but only in his mind, where things took longer—that water’s forty-five degrees, fifty at most, his mind told him. Your heart could stop. He was pre-med, he knew that was true… but in the physical world he didn’t hesitate at all. He leaped it, and for a moment his heart did stop, or seemed to; his breath clogged in his throat and he had to force a gasp of air into his lungs as all his submerged skin went numb. This is crazy, he thought, and then: But it was your idea, Pancho. He began to stroke after Deke.

The two girls looked at each other for a moment. LaVerne shrugged and grinned. “If they can, we can,” she said, stripping off her Lacrosse shirt to reveal an almost transparent bra.

“Aren’t girls supposed to have an extra layer of fat?” Then she was over the fence and running for the water, unbuttoning her cords. After a moment Rachel followed her, much as Randy had followed Deke.

The girls had come over to the apartment at mid-afternoon—on Tuesdays a one-o’clock was the latest class any of them had. Deke’s monthly allotment had come in—one of the football-mad alums (the players called them “angels”) saw that he got two hundred a month in cash—and there was a case of beer in the fridge and a new Night Ranger album on Randy’s battered stereo. The four of them set about getting pleasantly oiled. After a while the talk had turned to the end of the long Indian summer they had been enjoying. The radio was predicting flurries for Wednesday. LaVerne had advanced the opinion that weathermen predicting snow flurries in October should be shot, and no one had disagreed.

Rachel said that summers had seemed to last forever when she was a girl, but now that she was an adult (“a doddering senile nineteen,” Deke joked, and she kicked his ankle), they got shorter every year. “It seemed like I spent my life out at Cascade Lake,” she said, crossing the decayed kitchen linoleum to the icebox. She peered in, found an Iron City Light hiding behind a stack of blue Tupperware storage boxes (the one in the middle contained some nearly prehistoric chili which was now thickly festooned with mold—Randy was a good student and Deke was a good football player, but neither of them was worth a fart in a noisemaker when it came to housekeeping), and appropriated it. “I can still remember the first time I managed to swim all the way out to the raft. I stayed there for damn near two hours, scared to swim back.” She sat down next to Deke, who put an arm around her. She smiled, remembering, and Randy suddenly thought she looked like someone famous or semi-famous. He couldn’t quite place the resemblance. It would come to him later, under less pleasant circumstances.

“Finally my brother had to swim out and tow me back on an inner tube. God, he was mad. And I had a sunburn like you wouldn’t believe.”

“The raft’s still out there,” Randy said, mostly to say something. He was aware that LaVerne had been looking at Deke again; just lately it seemed like she looked at Deke a lot.

But now she looked at him. “It’s almost Halloween, Randy. Cascade Beach has been closed since Labor Day.”

“Raft’s probably still out there, though,” Randy said. “We were on the other side of the lake on a geology field trip about three weeks ago and I saw it then. It looked like…” He shrugged. “… a little bit of summer that somebody forgot to clean up and put away in the closet until next year.” He thought they would laugh at that, but no one did—not even Deke.

“Just because it was there last year doesn’t mean it’s still there,” LaVerne said.

“I mentioned it to a guy,” Randy said, finishing his own beer. “Billy DeLois, do you remember him, Deke?” Deke nodded. “Played second string until he got hurt.”

“Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, he comes from out that way, and he said the guys who own the beach never take it in until the lake’s almost ready to freeze. Just lazy—at least, that’s what he said. He said that some year they’d wait too long audit would get ice-locked.” He fell silent, remembering how the raft had looked, anchored out there on the lake—a square of bright white wood in all that bright blue autumn water. He remembered how the sound of the barrels under it—that buoyant clunk-clunk sound—had drifted up to them. The sound was soft, but sounds carried well on the still air around the lake. There had been that sound and the sound of crows squabbling over the remnants of some fanner’s harvested garden.

“Snow tomorrow,” Rachel said, getting up as Deke’s hand wandered almost absently down to the upper swell of her breast. She went to the window and looked out. “What a bummer.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Randy said, “let’s go on out to Cascade Lake. We’ll swim out to the raft, say good-bye to summer, and then swim back.” If he hadn’t been half-loaded he never would have made the suggestion, and he certainly didn’t expect anyone to take it seriously. But Deke jumped on it.

“All right! Awesome, Pancho! Fooking awesome!” LaVerne jumped and spilled her beer. But she smiled—the smile made Randy a little uneasy. “Let’s do it!”

“Deke, you’re crazy,” Rachel said, also smiling—but her smile looked a little tentative, a little worried.

“No, I’m going to do it,” Deke said, going for his coat, and with a mixture of dismay and excitement, Randy noted Deke’s grin—reckless and a little crazy. The two of them had been rooming together for three years now—the Jock and the Brain, Cisco and Pancho, Batman and Robin—and Randy recognized that grin. Deke wasn’t kidding; he meant to do it. In his head he was already halfway there.

Forget it, Cisco—not me. The words rose to his lips, but before he could say them LaVerne was on her feet, the same cheerful, loony look in her own eyes (or maybe it was just too much beer). “I’m up for it!”

“Then let’s go!” Deke looked at Randy. “Whatchoo say, Pancho?” He had looked at Rachel for a moment then, and saw something almost frantic in her eyes —as far as he himself was concerned, Deke and LaVerne could go out to Cascade Lake together and plow the back forty all night; he would not be delighted with the knowledge that they were boffing each other’s brains out, yet neither would he be surprised. But that look in the other girl’s eyes, that haunted look—