Her black old lady’s high-heeled shoes were trailing in the water, making small Vs.
Her hair was blue-rinsed, like my mother’s, and done up in those tight, medicinal-
smelling clockspring curls. Her glasses flashed brutally in the sun.
‘Watch your steps, boys,’ she said. ‘Watch your steps or I’ll hit you hard
enough to strike you blind. I can do that; I have been given that power by the school
board. Now, Mr. Chambers, “Mending Wall”, if you please. By rote.’
‘I tried to give the money back,’ Chris said. ‘Old lady Simons said okay, but
she took it!
Do you hear me? She took it! Now what are you going to do about it? Are you going to whack her blind?’
‘ “Mending Wall,” Mr. Chambers, if you please. By rote.’ Chris threw me a
despairing glance, as if to say Didn’t I tell you it would be this way?, and then began to tread water.
He began.’ “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that sends the frozen
groundswell under it -“‘ And then his head went under, his reciting mouth filling with water. He popped back up, crying: ‘Help me, Gordie! Help me!’ Then he was dragged
under again. Looking into the clear water I could see two bloated, naked corpses
holding his ankles. One was Vern and the other was Teddy, and their open eyes were
as blank and pupilless as the eyes of Greek statues. Their small pre-pubescent penises floated limply up from their distended bellies like albino strands of kelp. Chris’s head broke water again. He held one hand up limply to me and voiced a screaming,
womanish cry that rose and rose, ululating in the hot sunny summer air. I looked
wildly towards the beach but nobody had heard. The lifeguard, his bronzed, athletic
body lolling attractively on the seat at the top of his whitewashed cruciform wooden
tower, just went on smiling down at a girl in a red bathing suit. Chris’s scream turned into a bubbling waterchoked gurgle as the corpses pulled him under again. And as
they dragged him down to black water I could see his rippling, distorted eyes turned
up to me in pleading agony; I could see his white starfish hands held helplessly up to the sun-burnished roof of the water. But instead of diving down and trying to save
him, I stroked madly for the shore, or at least to a place where the water would not be over my head. Before I could get there–before I could even get close -I felt a soft,
rotted, implacable hand wrap itself around my calf and begin to pull. A scream built
up in my chest… but before I could utter it, the dream washed away into a grainy
facsimile of reality. It was Teddy with his hand on my leg. He was shaking me awake.
It was my watch.
Still half in the dreams, almost talking in my sleep, I asked him thickly: ‘You
alive, Teddy?’
‘No. I’m dead and you’re a black nigger,’ he said crossly. It dispelled the last of
the dream. I sat up by the campfire and Teddy lay down.
20
The others slept heavily through the rest of the night. I was in and out, dozing, waking, dozing again. The night was far from silent; I heard the triumphant screech-squawk of
a pouncing owl, the tiny cry of some small animal perhaps about to be eaten, a larger
something blundering wildly through the undergrowth. Under all of this, a steady tone, were the crickets. There were no more screams. I dozed and woke, woke and dozed,
and I suppose if I had been discovered standing such a slipshod watch in Le Dio, I
probably would have been court-martialed and shot.
I snapped more solidly out of my last doze and became aware that something
was different. It took a moment or two to figure it out: although the moon was down, I could see my hands resting on my jeans. My watch said quarter to five. It was dawn. I
stood, hearing my spine crackle, walked two dozen feet away from the lumped-
together bodies of my friends, and pissed into a clump of sumac. I was starting to shake the night-willies; I could feel them sliding away. It was a fine feeling.