tember sky and its throat worked. And again it seemed to be looking at him, the way the eyes in some pictures seemed always to look at you no matter where you went in the room.
And the eyes . . . he knew those eyes.
Suddenly he wanted his mother—her dark blue eyes.
He could not remember wanting her with such desperation
since he had been very, very small. La-la, he heard her sing inside his head, and her voice was the wind’s voice, here
for now, somewhere else all too soon. La-la, sleep now, Jacky, baby-bunting, daddy’s gone a-hunting. And all that jazz.
Memories of being rocked, his mother smoking one Herbert
Tareyton after another, maybe looking at a script—blue
pages, she called them, he remembered that: blue pages.
La-la, Jacky, all is cool. I love you, Jacky. Shhh . . . sleep.
La-la.
The gull was looking at him.
With sudden horror that engorged his throat like hot salt
water he saw it really was looking at him. Those black eyes (whose?) were seeing him. And he knew that look.
A raw strand of flesh still dangled from the gull’s beak. As he looked, the gull sucked it in. Its beak opened in a weird but unmistakable grin.
He turned then and ran, head down, eyes shut against the
hot salt tears, sneakers digging against the sand, and if there was a way to go up, go up and up, up to some gull’s-eye view, one would have seen only him, only his tracks, in all that gray day; Jack Sawyer, twelve and alone, running back toward the inn, Speedy Parker forgotten, his voice nearly lost in tears and
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wind, crying the negative over and over again: no and no and no.
3
He paused at the top of the beach, out of breath. A hot stitch ran up his left side from the middle of his ribs to the deepest part of his armpit. He sat down on one of the benches the town put out for old people and pushed his hair out of his eyes.
Got to get control of yourself. If Sergeant Fury goes Section Eight, who’s gonna lead the Howling Commandos?
He smiled and actually did feel a little better. From up
here, fifty feet from the water, things looked a little better.
Maybe it was the change in barometric pressure, or some-
thing. What had happened to Uncle Tommy was horrible, but
he supposed he would get over it, learn to accept. That was what his mother said, anyway. Uncle Morgan had been unusually pesty just lately, but then, Uncle Morgan had always been sort of a pest.
As for his mother . . . well, that was the big one, wasn’t it?
Actually, he thought, sitting on the bench and digging at
the verge of the sand beyond the boardwalk with one toe, actually his mother might still be all right. She could be all right; it was certainly possible. After all, no one had come right out and said it was the big C, had they? No. If she had cancer, she wouldn’t have brought him here, would she? More likely they’d be in Switzerland, with his mother taking cold mineral baths and scoffing goat-glands, or something. And
she would do it, too.
So maybe—
A low, dry whispering sound intruded on his conscious-
ness. He looked down and his eyes widened. The sand had be-
gun to move by the instep of his left sneaker. The fine white grains were sliding around in a small circle perhaps a finger’s length in diameter. The sand in the middle of this circle suddenly collapsed, so that now there was a dimple in the sand. It was maybe two inches deep. The sides of this dimple were
also in motion: around and around, moving in rapid counter-
clockwise circuits.
Not real, he told himself immediately, but his heart began
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to speed up again. His breathing also began to come faster.
Not real, it’s one of the Daydreams, that’s all, or maybe it’s a crab or something . . .
But it wasn’t a crab and it wasn’t one of the Daydreams—
this was not the other place, the one he dreamed about when things were boring or maybe a little scary, and it sure as hell wasn’t any crab.
The sand spun faster, the sound arid and dry, making him
think of static electricity, of an experiment they had done in science last year with a Leyden jar. But more than either of these, the minute sound was like a long lunatic gasp, the final breath of a dying man.
More sand collapsed inward and began to spin. Now it was
not a dimple; it was a funnel in the sand, a kind of reverse dust-devil. The bright yellow of a gum wrapper was revealed, covered, revealed, covered, revealed again—each time it showed up again. Jack could read more of it as the funnel grew: JU, then JUI, then JUICY F. The funnel grew and the sand was jerked away from the gum wrapper again. It was as quick and rude as an unfriendly hand jerking down the covers on a made bed.
JUICY FRUIT, he read, and then the wrapper flapped upward.
The sand turned faster and faster, in a hissing fury. Hhhhh-haaaaahhhhhhhh was the sound the sand made. Jack stared at it, fascinated at first, and then horrified. The sand was opening like a large dark eye: it was the eye of the gull that had dropped the clam on the rock and then pulled the living meat out of it like a rubber band.
Hhhhhhaaaahhhhh, the sand-spout mocked in its dead, dry voice. That was not a mind-voice. No matter how much
Jack wished it were only in his head, that voice was real. His false teeth flew, Jack, when the old WILD CHILD hit him, out they went, rattledy-bang! Yale or no Yale, when the old WILD
CHILD van comes and knocks your false teeth out, Jacky, you got to go. And your mother—
Then he was running again, blindly, not looking back, his
hair blown off his forehead, his eyes wide and terrified.
4
Jack walked as quickly as he could through the dim lobby of the hotel. All the atmosphere of the place forbade running: it
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was as quiet as a library, and the gray light which fell through the tall mullioned windows softened and blurred the already faded carpets. Jack broke into a trot as he passed the desk, and the stooped ashen-skinned day-clerk chose that second to emerge through an arched wooden passage. The clerk said
nothing, but his permanent scowl dragged the corners of his mouth another centimeter downward. It was like being caught running in church. Jack wiped his sleeve across his forehead, made himself walk the rest of the way to the elevators. He
punched the button, feeling the desk clerk’s frown burning
between his shoulder blades. The only time this week that
Jack had seen the desk clerk smile had been when the man
had recognized his mother. The smile had met only the mini-
mum standards for graciousness.
“I suppose that’s how old you have to be to remember Lily
Cavanaugh,” she had said to Jack as soon as they were alone in their rooms. There had been a time, and not so long ago, when being identified, recognized from any one of the fifty movies she had made during the fifties and sixties (“Queen of the Bs,” they called her; her own comment: “Darling of the
Drive-ins”)—whether by a cabdriver, waiter, or the lady selling blouses at the Wilshire Boulevard Saks—perked her
mood for hours. Now even that simple pleasure had gone dry
for her.
Jack jigged before the unmoving elevator doors, hearing
an impossible and familiar voice lifting to him from a
whirling funnel of sand. For a second he saw Thomas Wood-
bine, solid comfortable Uncle Tommy Woodbine, who was
supposed to have been one of his guardians—a strong wall
against trouble and confusion—crumpled and dead on La
Cienega Boulevard, his teeth like popcorn twenty feet away in the gutter. He stabbed the button again.
Hurry up!
Then he saw something worse—his mother hauled into a
waiting car by two impassive men. Suddenly Jack had to uri-
nate. He flattened his palm against the button, and the bent gray man behind the desk uttered a phlegmy sound of disapproval. Jack pressed the edge of his other hand into that magic place just beneath his stomach which lessened the pressure on his bladder. Now he could hear the slow whir of the descending elevator. He closed his eyes, squeezed his legs together.
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His mother looked uncertain, lost and confused, and the men forced her into the car as easily as they would a weary collie dog. But that was not really happening, he knew; it was a