All I could think of was what a hell of a poor time it was to go skiing.
I was first out of the water, then Dake, then Mickey. As soon as I looked back, I saw the picture, and it was so bad I felt physically sick. There was no sign of Jean Anne. She was on the floorboards, probably knocked out, maybe badly hurt. The Banshee was at full throttle. You could hear her clear, high whine. I cursed Dake and myself for not putting an automatic throttle on her. I knew the steering was tight. It was possible to predict her course after watching her for a few seconds. She was making a big circle to port, maybe a half mile or a little better in diameter, and when she came back she was going head-on into the jumbled rock of the shoreline at fifty miles an hour. You could see the twin towbars leap clear of the surface, dancing in her wake.
And there went Foster Harmon on the skis, behind Sonny Edison’s boat, with Sonny at the wheel. They could do thirty. The Banshee was doing fifty. They were inside the circle, coming around on an interception course.
Dake, beside me, said harshly, “The damn fool can’t do it. He can’t. He doesn’t know how to do it.”
But to me, when the light dawned, it did not look so ridiculous. I had thought Harmon hadn’t realized what had happened. But suddenly I knew he had seen it, and during the time it had taken me to swim ninety yards, he had figured out the only possible way of doing it, had slammed into the skis and gotten the plan across to Sonny before the others, most of them better skiers, could break out of the trance. There was no chance of jumping from Sonny’s boat into the Banshee. The only way it could be done was to kill the speed differential by swinging wide and hard on the skis, and hope to God you’d get somewhere near fifty miles an hour at the right time and place.
One girl was sobbing and another was making little screaming sounds. Both the Turner twins were cursing in choked voices, saying all the dirty words they knew. I knew Harmon couldn’t do it. I knew we’d lift Jean Anne’s broken body out of the rocks, out of the splintered wreckage of the Banshee.
The Banshee had reached her farthest point and was on the way back in. Sonny made his turn way inside her and then, well ahead of her, began to swing wider. He was crouched low to cut wind resistance, and he was doing a masterful job of gauging relative speeds and the proper interception course.
He locked onto a parallel course, a towline length away from the Banshee, and a hundred yards ahead of her. The Banshee was coming on like a rocket, narrowing the distance between them. Harmon swung wide to port and hung out there, edging his skis, looking back at the Banshee. Then he ducked low and came swinging back hard. He was too late. The Banshee would be by. He would have been too late had not Sonny cut perfectly to port at the precise moment to send Harmon scooting like a stone on the end of a string. For a moment he was even with the bow of the Banshee, and then as he dropped back, he let go of the tow bar, and plunged over the gunnel into the Banshee. One ski went high in the air, turned lazily and plunged into the wake forty feet behind the Banshee. We saw Harmon clamber very slowly to the wheel. The whine died. The Banshee slowed abruptly, coasted, and lay dead.
Everybody was jumping up and down, yelling and beating on each other. I looked at Dake. He wore a wide, frozen grin, and the tears were running down his cheeks.
Sonny eased over to the Banshee, grabbed the bow line and towed her to us. Jean Anne sat up, looking very dazed. Right in the middle of her forehead was a lump as big as half a plum, and it was turning to a plum color.
Foster Harmon was a mess. His cheek was laid open. He had a broken wrist and collarbone, a badly sprained ankle and torn ligaments in his foot. He was in a lot of pain, but he was able to look up at Dake and me and give a funny kind of a grin and say, “Jean Anne warned me you guys were going to make it rough, but I didn’t know it was going to be this rough, fellows.”
Well, it isn’t the sort of summer I thought it would be. We ski, but not so much. When we do, Foster Harmon does most of the piloting, because his arm is still in a cast. But mostly we go on picnics on the sand bar out beyond Turtle Pass. We load the Banshee up full. Dake usually brings Sue Lehman and I bring Nancy Riggs. And Jean Anne is, of course, with Foster. No complaints. The way I figure, he’s almost good enough for her. And in a funny sort of way, he earned her. Lately he’s been giving me and Dake the scoop on the fraternity he belongs to at Gainesville.
It sounds all right.
