“Me too.”
“Hold me, then.”
“I’ve held you enough.” She subsided.
Sitting down was heaven; not having to watch the thing was bliss. He watched LaVerne instead, making sure that her eyes kept shifting away from the thing on the water.
“What are we going to do, Randy?” He thought.
“Wait,” he said.
At the end of fifteen minutes he stood up and let her first sit and then lie down for half an hour. Then he got her on her feet again and she stood for fifteen minutes. They went back and forth. At a quarter of ten, a cold rind of moon rose and beat a path across the water. At ten-thirty, a shrill, lonely cry rose, echoing across the water, and LaVerne shrieked.
“Shut up,” he said. “It’s just a loon.”
“I’m freezing, Randy—I’m numb all over.”
“I can’t do anything about it.”
“Hold me,” she said. “You’ve got to. We’ll hold each other. We can both sit down and watch it together.” He debated, but the cold sinking into his own flesh was now bone-deep, and that decided him. “Okay.” They sat together, arms wrapped around each other, and something happened—natural or perverse, it happened. He felt himself stiffening. One of his hands found her breast, cupped in damp nylon, and squeezed. She made a sighing noise, and her hand stole to the crotch of his underpants.
He slid his other hand down and found a place where there was some heat. He pushed her down on her back.
“No,” she said, but the hand in his crotch began to move faster.
“I can see it,” he said. His heartbeat had sped up again, pushing blood faster, pushing warmth toward the surface of his chilled bare skin. “I can watch it.” She murmured something, and he felt elastic slide down his hips to his upper thighs. He watched it. He slid upward, forward, into her. Warmth. God, she was warm there, at least. She made a guttural noise and her fingers grabbed at his cold, clenched buttocks.
He watched it. It wasn’t moving. He watched it. He watched it closely. The tactile sensations were incredible, fantastic. He was not experienced, but neither was he a virgin; he had made love with three girls and it had never been like this. She moaned and began to lift her hips.
The raft rocked gently, like the world’s hardest waterbed. The barrels underneath murmured hollowly.
He watched it. The colors began to swirl—slowly now, sensuously, not threatening; he watched it and he watched the colors. His eyes were wide. The colors were in his eyes. He wasn’t cold now; he was hot now, hot the way you got your first day back on the beach in early June, when you could feel the sun tightening your winter-white skin, reddening it, giving it some (colors) color, some tint. First day at the beach, first day of summer, drag out the Beach Boys oldies, drag out the Ramones. The Ramones were telling you that Sheena is a punk rocker, the Ramones were telling you that you can hitch a ride to Rockaway Beach, the sand, the beach, the colors (moving it’s starting to move) and the feel of summer, the texture; Gary U.S. Bonds, school is out and I can root for the Yankees from the bleachers, girls in bikinis on the beach, the beach, the beach, oh do you love do you love (love) the beach do you love (love 1 love) firm breasts fragrant with Coppertone oil, and if the bottom of the bikini was small enough you might see some (hair her hair HER HAIR IS IN THE OH GOD IN THE WATER HER HAIR) He pulled back suddenly, trying to pull her up, but the thing moved with oily speed and tangled itself in her hair like a webbing of thick black glue and when he pulled her up she was already screaming and she was heavy with it; it came out of the water in a twisting, gruesome membrane that rolled with flaring nuclear colors—scarlet-vermilion, flaring emerald, sullen ocher.
It flowed down over LaVerne’s face in a tide, obliterating it.
Her feet kicked and drummed. The thing twisted and moved where her face had been.
Blood ran down her neck in streams. Screaming, not hearing himself scream, Randy ran at her, put his foot against her hip, and shoved. She went flopping and tumbling over the side, her legs like alabaster in the moonlight. For a few endless moments the water frothed and splashed against the side of the raft, as if someone had hooked the world’s largest bass in there and it was fighting like hell.
Randy screamed. He screamed. And then, for variety, he screamed some more.
Some half an hour later, long after the frantic splashing and -struggling had ended, the loons began to scream back.
That night was forever.
The sky began to lighten in the east around a quarter to five, and he felt a sluggish rise in his spirit. It was momentary; as false as the dawn. He stood on the boards, his eyes half closed, his chin on his chest. He had been sitting on the boards until an hour ago, and had been suddenly awakened—without even knowing until then that he had fallen asleep, that was the scary part—by that unspeakable hissing-canvas sound. He leaped to his feet bare seconds before the blackness began to suck eagerly for him between the boards. His breath whined in and out; he bit at his lip, making it bleed.
Asleep, you were asleep, you asshole!
The thing had oozed out from under again half an hour later, but he hadn’t sat down again. He was afraid to sit down, afraid he would go to sleep and that this time his mind wouldn’t trip him awake in time.
His feet were still planted squarely on the boards as a stronger light, real dawn this time, filled the east and the first morning birds began to sing. The sun came up, and by six o’clock the day was bright enough for him to be able to see the beach. Deke’s Camaro, bright yellow, was right where Deke had parked it, nose in to the pole fence. A bright litter of shirts and sweaters and four pairs of jeans were twisted into little shapes along the beach. The sight of them filled him with fresh horror when he thought his capacity for horror must surely be exhausted. He could see his jeans, one leg pulled inside out, the pocket showing. His jeans looked so safe lying there on the sand; just waiting for him to come along and pull the inside-out leg back through so it was right, grasping the pocket as he did so the change wouldn’t fall out. He could almost feel them whispering up his legs, could feel himself buttoning the brass button above the fly— (do you love yes I love) He looked left and there it was, black, round as a checker, floating lightly. Colors began to swirl across its hide and he looked away quickly.
“Go home,” he croaked. “Go home or go to California and find a Roger Corman movie to audition for.” A plane droned somewhere far away, and he fell into a dozing fantasy: We are reported missing, the four of us. The search spreads outward from Horlicks. A farmer remembers being passed by a yellow Camaro “going like a bat out of hell.” The search centers in the Cascade Lake area. Private pilots volunteer to do a quick aerial search, and one guy, buzzing the lake in his Beechcraft Twin Bonanza, sees a kid standing naked on the raft, one kid, one survivor, one— He caught himself on the edge of toppling over and brought his fist into his nose again, screaming at the pain.
The black thing arrowed at the raft immediately and squeezed underneath—it could hear, perhaps, or sense… or something.
Randy waited.
This time it was forty-five minutes before it came out.
His mind slowly orbited in the growing light.
{do you love yes I love rooting for the Yankees and Catfish do you love the Catfish ves I love the (Route 66 remember the Corvette George Maharis in the Corvette Martin Milner in the Corvette do you love the Corvette (yes I love the Corvette (I love do you love (so hot the sun is like a burning glass it was in her hair and it’s the light I remember best the light the summer light (the summer light of) afternoon.
Randy was crying.
He was crying because something new had been added now—every time he tried to sit down, the thing slid under the raft. It wasn’t entirely stupid, then; it had either sensed or figured out that it could get at him while he was sitting down.
“Go away,” Randy wept at the great black mole floating on the water. Fifty yards away, mockingly close, a squirrel was scampering back and forth on the hood of Deke’s Camaro. “Go away, please, go anywhere, but leave me alone. I don’t love you.”