But my quarry was no more trivial than the Heatsburg Hour puzzles. The first time I suggested to Al that we go ahead on the Number Two puzzle without his father, it was a ziggurat. Al thought it was like the side of the quarry, only too regular, but I said it was a ziggurat and probably Babylonian. Al’s father came in and looked at what we’d done and said it was an easy one today. But another time that we went on without him, it was — as I asserted — a minutely detailed Swiss phalanx seen from a low aerial perspective. Then another Friday there was a sub, but seen head-on, which made it difficult, and Al’s father came in as we were finishing and said we didn’t know what we were doing but said he couldn’t be bothered to erase it. He and Al both doubted me when in thecourse of our brief discussion before I had to leave them to their dinner (though my own father wasn’t coming up that weekend), I told them that in ’39 they gassed all the snakes in the London Zoo just in case, though all I knew for sure was that there’d been a plan to.
Halfway through the summer Al’s father finally ceded to us his Number Two puzzle. The immediate cause was the carelessly executed — or anyway sloppily dotted — picture whose solution I didn’t really see how I’d known: an angular cow being milked — but “Cripes! from behind?” asked Al’s father — ah yes indeed, a bell rang in my mind, an ancient custom, milking cows from behind — and Al’s father said he’d be glad to see the paper when we got finished marking it up, but that that wasn’t any milk cow, he bet it was part of a geodetic survey map, probably some place round here.
It was a Thursday that Al had an infected ear and had to stay in. I rode by, looking casually for Gail. Up the hill the barber-postmaster told me what he knew I already knew, that this wasn’t one of her days, but also that she was waiting on for her sister at the tavern. I rode around behind the Blue Grille and saw her through the screen. And remembering her sister’s schedule and from another distance virtually hearing each complex stroke of piano and violin coming from a certain Heatsburg dame’s vanilla-scented chamber four miles away from two to five that very afternoon, I came by our village tavern again when Gail, in her sister’s pale brown uniform and white apron and low white shoes but without the white cap her sister wore, was walking home for a rest till five-thirty.
I asked her to come home with me and play badminton, there was no wind so it would be just right. Instead of a gently serious no, which I could have worked with in one way or another, I saw another mouth and heard a powerful harshness that, had I been vulnerable, I could not have believed: “Well jeez, that all you can say? Yeah’n then we’ll skip up the quarry for a swim, yeah! When I got eight tables at the tavern and a sick brother and sister! Maybe you’ll pay me to play with you, what’ll you pay me?”
Although I calmly mumbled, “Tell it to the Marines,” and coasted off, I was thinking of how the warm, protective warnings I imagined anonymously typing to Gail elicited from their imagined recipient never more than a frail shudder, a brave smile, and a longing look out her bedroom casement to the short road that half a mile north curved past cows and then the goldenrod on the left and the rather remarkable writer’s stone heart house on the right.
It was Friday of another week that we swam at the quarry for the last time. It was getting cold. It is something other than hours I need tonight Dom. (What about years? my father jibes from his grave.) Al’s parents had bought Al new sneakers the night before in Heatsburg, and he wanted to spend the afternoon with me practicing signals pitching to the Red Sox batting order. I don’t know where Al’s mother was but suddenly Gail was at the window of her and her sister’s bedroom upstairs saying quite low to Al Let’s go swimming up the quarry. Her tone struck me funny and I laughed, I guess because we weren’t allowed to go and a certain absurd seriousness was imparted to her by the dusky shimmer behind which she spoke. Then she appealed to me, and I stopped my windup and Al said, “Jesus peezus,” and I said well we won’t have much more chance to go — thinking Gail was making up for her harsh words the day of Al’s infected ear. Well, then I pitched an indecisive let-up that looped right over Al’s head, Dom, if you can believe that, but a tree stopped it, and Gail said louder, “I’m going myself.” I caught a shadow of aquamarine lastex, and as I turned to try to persuade Al, he pitched his mask hard into his mother’s snapdragons. He said he wasn’t letting Gail go alone, but today it’s more puzzling than it was then, and you can perhaps sympathize with my inability to get at last to Al’s drenched sneaker which is merely one passing step toward Bob’s white-knuckled fist, for remember how you ended your Hester Street speech thirsty?
We didn’t say much up there. Al dived his dives and I dived mine, and on the other side of me Gail did a lot of serious swimming. It seemed a long time before she side-stroked over to me at last and asked me to show her the life-saving dive I’d learned at camp.
There was nothing to show her that she hadn’t seen me do every time I began a descent. But I did it anyhow, and this time she started to follow me down and I had one of my finest descents and when I came up, feeling rather magnetic, I said it was fabulous down there. When Al called, “How deep’d you go?” I said without thinking, “Too far down to measure.” The clouds began to move but there were then so many that the sky was simply overcast and the wind seemed to have no effect on this mass above us. But let me go back a second to say what had just been so great I’d gone so far down that Gail had faded back to the top and my eyes had begun to pound; well, I’d thought some lower light had been released — like deep air forced out of a cave trap — or I’d simply reached a depth at which I could see this lower light which maybe was always there. What I thought I’d seen by this new access of lower light coincided with a strange wind in me like some bodily inspiration, that can’t have been as great as I thought but seemed to be a thousand new air-sacs, or like juicy kernels podding power into my linings. (Just your second wind, Al’s dad would have said.) Astounded, I resolved to interrupt myself, go back up, and test this new reserve deliberately with a fresh start from the surface. The parental village and other points were far away, and Al equally far, and in between were Gail and I.
“Southeast wind,” Al said from his ledge. “We better go home. Come on, Abigail.” He’d toweled off, and turning away he changed into his dungarees. “Abigail?”
I said, “I can hold my breath five minutes, maybe ten.”
Gail watched. I did my half-somersault, stuck my legs up into the cool afternoon, and breasted downward. The thousand new sacs were there, but now so was Gail. But in the blue-brown dusk at not more than ten feet, she pulled me around by the knee. She got her feet behind me with a scissor on my hips, and as I winged my arms upward again and again fighting my buoyancy, she kissed me. When I kissed back, she held it, and instinctively in the interests of unforeseen experimental knowledge I tried and tried to keep us down. I won’t say it was a lifetime, because her embrace is so hard to recall all I remember is its permanence, and a small hissing concussion way above us.