“Ohhh, Ceesco!” Randy cried.
“Ohhhh, Pancho!” Deke cried back, delighted.
They slapped palms.
Randy was halfway to the raft when he saw the black patch on the water. It was beyond the raft and to the left of it, more out toward the middle of the lake. Five minutes later the light would have failed too much for him to tell it was anything more than a shadow… if he had seen it at all. Oil slick? he thought, still pulling hard through the water, faintly aware of the girls splashing behind him. But what would an oil slick be doing on an October-deserted lake? And it was oddly circular, small, surely no more than five feet in diameter—”Whoooo!” Deke shouted again, and Randy looked toward him. Deke was climbing the ladder on the side of the raft, shaking off water like a dog. “Howya doon, Pancho?”
“Okay!” he called back, pulling harder. It really wasn’t as bad as he had thought it might be, not once you got in and got moving. His body tingled with warmth and now his motor was in overdrive. He could feel his heart putting out good revs, heating him from the inside out. His folks had a place on Cape Cod, and the water there was worse than this in mid-July.
“You think it’s bad now, Pancho, wait’ll you get out!” Deke yelled gleefully. He was hopping up and down, making the raft rock, rubbing his body. Randy forgot about the oil slick until his hands actually grasped the rough, white-painted wood of the ladder on the shore side.
Then he saw it again. It was a little closer. A round dark patch on the water, like a big mole, rising and falling on the mild waves. When he had first seen it the patch had been maybe forty yards from the raft. Now it was only half that distance.
How can that be? How— Then he came out of the water and the cold air bit his skin, bit it even harder than the water had when he first dived in. “Ohhhhhh, shit!” He yelled, laughing, shivering in his Jockey shorts.
“Pancho, you ees some kine of beeg asshole,” Deke said happily. He pulled Randy up.
“Cold enough for you? You sober yet?”
“I’m sober! I’m-sober!” He began to jump around as Deke had done, clapping his arms across his chest and stomach in an X. They turned to look at the girls.
Rachel had pulled ahead of LaVerne, who was doing something that looked like a dog paddle performed by a dog with bad instincts.
“You ladies okay?” Deke bellowed.
“Go to hell, Macho City!” LaVerne called, and Deke broke up again.
Randy glanced to the side and saw that odd dark circular patch was even closer—ten yards now, and still coming. It floated on the water, round and regular, like the top of a large steel drum, but the limber way it rode the swells made it clear that it was not the surface of a solid object. Fear, directionless but powerful, suddenly seized him.
“Swim!” he shouted at the girls, and bent down to grasp Rachel’s hand as she reached the ladder. He hauled her up. She bumped her knee hard—he heard the thud clearly
“Ow! Hey! What—” LaVerne was still ten feet away. Randy glanced to the side again and saw the round thing nuzzle the offside of the raft. The thing was as dark as oil, but he was sure it wasn’t oil—too dark, too thick, too even.
“Randy, that hurt! What are you doing, being fun—”
“LaVerne! Swim!” Now it wasn’t just fear; now it was terror.
LaVerne looked up, maybe not hearing the terror but at least hearing the urgency. She looked puzzled but she dog-paddled faster, closing the distance to the ladder. “Randy, what’s wrong with you?” Deke asked. Randy looked to the side again and saw the thing fold itself around the raft’s square corner. For a moment it looked like a Pac-Man image with its mouth open to eat electronic cookies. Then it slipped all the way around the corner and began to slide along the raft, one of its edges now straight.
“Help me get her up!” Randy grunted to Deke, and reached for her hand. “Quick!” Deke shrugged good-naturedly and reached for LaVerne’s other hand. They pulled her up and onto the raft’s board surface bare seconds before the black thing slid by the ladder, its sides dimpling as it slipped past the ladder’s uprights.
“Randy, have you gone crazy?” LaVerne was out of breath, a little frightened. Her nipples were clearly visible through the bra. They stood out in cold hard points.
“That thing,” Randy said, pointing. “Deke? What is it?” Deke spotted it. It had reached the left-hand corner of the raft. It drifted off a little to one side, reassuming its round shape. It simply floated there. The four of them looked at it.
“Oil slick, I guess,” Deke said.
“You really racked my knee,” Rachel said, glancing at the dark thing on the water and then back at Randy. “You—”
“It’s not an oil slick,” Randy said. “Did you ever see a round oil slick? That thing looks like a checker.”
“I never saw an oil slick at all,” Deke replied. He was talking to Randy but he was looking at LaVerne. LaVerne’s panties were almost as transparent as her bra, the delta of her sex sculpted neatly in silk, each buttock a taut crescent. “I don’t even believe in them. I’m from Missouri.”
“I’m going to bruise,” Rachel said, but the anger had gone out of her voice. She had seen Deke looking at LaVerne. “God, I’m cold,” LaVerne said. She shivered prettily. “It went for the girls,” Randy said. “Come on, Pancho. I thought you said you got sober.” “It went for the girls,” he repeated stubbornly, and thought: No one knows we’re here. No one at all.
“Have you ever seen an oil slick, Pancho?” He had put his arm around LaVerne’s bare shoulders in the same almost-absent way that he had touched Rachel’s breast earlier that day. He wasn’t touching LaVerne’s breast—not yet, anyway—but his hand was close. Randy found he didn’t care much, one way or another. That black, circular patch on the water. He cared about that.
“I saw one on the Cape, four years ago,” he said. “We all pulled birds out of the surf and tried to clean them off—”
“Ecological, Pancho,” Deke said approvingly. “Mucho ecological, I theenk.” Randy said, “It was just this big, sticky mess all over the water. In streaks and big smears.
It didn’t look like that. It wasn’t, you know, compact.” It looked like an accident,, he wanted to say. That thing doesn’t look like an accident; it looks like it’s on purpose.
“I want to go back now,” Rachel said. She was still looking at Deke and LaVerne. Randy saw dull hurt in her face. He doubted if she knew it showed.
“So go,” LaVerne said. There was a look on her face—the clarity of absolute triumph, Randy thought, and if the thought seemed pretentious, it also seemed exactly right. The expression was not aimed precisely at Rachel… but neither was LaVerne trying to hide it from the other girl.
She moved a step closer to Deke; a step was all there was. Now their hips touched lightly.
For one brief moment Randy’s attention passed from the thing floating on the water and focused on LaVerne with an almost exquisite hate. Although he had never hit a girl, in that one moment he could have hit her with real pleasure. Not because he loved her (he had been a little infatuated with her, yes, and more than a little horny for her, yes, and a lot jealous when she had begun to come on to Deke back at the apartment, oh yes, but he wouldn’t have brought a girl he actually loved within fifteen miles of Deke in the first place), but because he knew that expression on Rachel’s face—how that expression felt inside.
“I’m afraid,” Rachel said.
“Of an oil slick?” LaVerne asked incredulously, and then laughed. The urge to hit her swept over Randy again—to just swing a big roundhouse open-handed blow through the air, to wipe that look of half-assed hauteur from her face and leave a mark on her cheek that would bruise in the shape of a hand.
“Let’s see you swim back, then,” Randy said.
LaVerne smiled indulgently at him. “I’m not ready to go,” she said, as if explaining to a child. She looked up at the sky, then at Deke. “I want to watch the stars come out.” Rachel was a short girl, pretty, but in a gamine, slightly insecure way that made Randy think of New York girls—you saw them hurrying to work in the morning, wearing their smartly tailored skirts with slits in the front or up one side, wearing that same look of slightly neurotic prettiness. Rachel’s eyes always sparkled, but it was hard to tell if it was good cheer that lent them that lively look or just free-floating anxiety.