When Eddie got back, Albie still on his shoulders and the food in saddlebags over the rear wheel, they all went exploring through the salt marsh to the beach. The narrow trail led down into a big area of pickleweed, a lanky plant whose woody segments held water the way ice plants do.
A shadow shot across them, making both Marie and Eddie duck. It struck the ground thirty feet away with a thump, extended claws first, then flapped up again with a tiny rodent wriggling in its talons. It was a foot-long handsome bird with hooked beak and heavily barred tail.
“Daddy! Look!”
“We see, Albie. It’s a...” He turned to Marie.
“Harrier hawk,” she said. “With a harvest mouse.”
“He gonna kill the mouse?” demanded Albie.
“I’m afraid that’s what he does for a living,” Marie said regretfully.
Further in, the pickleweed was replaced by bright orange splotches of parasitic dodder and stiff triangle-leaved salt-bush. Marie broke off a stem so they could bite it and taste the salt.
“Could the hawk kill me?” said Albie suddenly.
“Not a chance, Tiger, you’re too big for him,” said Eddie. “In fact, there’s nobody around big enough to kill you.”
“That’s okay, then,” said Albie.
There had been heavy surf the night before, so out on the beach they found great washed-up strands of kelp, its strange broad indented streamers looking as if they had been stamped out of green tin. The thirty-foot stalks, as big as a wrist, had heads like bulls’ testicles. All smelling of salt and the sea and not unpleasantly of the deaths of the tiny marine creatures clinging to it when the giant seaweed had been washed ashore.
Looking at the shredded, ragged leaves, Eddie was reminded of one of Marie’s favorite poems.
“’Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing,’” he quoted,“ ‘For every tatter in its mortal dress...’”
“Except these tatters are on purpose,” she said. “They split under the force of the waves so the holdfasts won’t be pulled off the rocks down below. But these were anyway.”
Eddie put his arms around her. “Let’s always hold fast,” he said to her in sudden inexplicable fierceness.
She laughed up at him. “Okay, big boy — forever.”
“That’s okay, then,” he grinned, in imitation of Albie talking about the assassin hawk’s activities.
Soaked in Bullfrog-36 to counteract depleted ozone, they sunbathed on a tiny wedge of sand available only at low tide, with occasional forays into the frigid surf. Albie wanted to be carried in each time also, game to their last icy dash back out of the water shrieking with frozen laughter.
Wrapped in towels, they watched a flock of sandpipers run seaward at the foot of each retreating wave, run back up at the lip of each advancing wave, moving almost in close-order drill as they pattered about stabbing sharp slightly up-curved bills into the sand for tiny living things.
Finally, they ate sandwiches and drank hot tea from a thermos, were waked from their nap by raucous western gulls squabbling with two crows over a dead striped bass without any eyes. Sun-dried and salt-crusty, they explored a tidal pool in slanting late-afternoon sunshine, moving down to it gingerly through the so-called black zone caused by lichens and blue-green algae. The gelatinous coat that kept the algae moist between their twice-monthly spring tide soakings made for treacherous footing.
Albie was in his glory here, being a touchie-feelie sort of guy, totally unsqueamish, as usual finding the tidal pools the high point of his day along the water.
“Mommy, what’s this?”
He was squatting on the algae, holding up a tiny, spiral-shelled creature for Marie’s inspection. He had long since learned that Eddie was next to useless in identifying either living or dead things on the beach.
“That’s a periwinkle snail,” she told him. She squatted beside him. “They eat the algae by scraping it off the rocks.” She turned the shell over, pointed. “See? Rows of teeth.”
“Lots of rows of teeth,” said Albie solemnly.
“Thousands of them,” agreed Marie. “When the rocks wear the teeth down, the snail just rolls up a new set, sort of like the teeth are on a conveyer belt.”
The barnacle zone was mostly acorn barnacles, their close-packed flinty white cones making the rocks also look white.
“But when a barnacle dies his shell gets taken over by periwinkles, or little bitty shrimp, or limpets...”
Back at the cabin at dusk, Eddie put briquets on the hibachi and grilled the steaks while foil-wrapped potatoes baked in the coals and sweet corn roasted in its own husks. To Albie’s delight, no crucifers. But there was ice cream and a chocolate Sara Lee with a single candle in it, and the cards and little presents they had picked out for Marie.
Finally, plates scraped and washed and leftovers in the fridge, Eddie started the fire laid in the stone fireplace. Albie was suddenly asleep, tipped over on his side. Marie carried his small sleeping form into his bedroom as Eddie went outside to bury the garbage in the mulch heap. Tree frogs trilled, branches rustled, something of consequence moved through the brush flanking the sandy track leading in from the main road.
He looked back at the cabin under the cold pale blue light of a waning moon. Smoke swirled from the chimney with the night breeze. Light shone from the windows. He shivered, somehow felt lonely even though everyone he truly valued — except for Shenzie — was just inside.
Watchman, what of the night?
He went back into the cabin, hungry for Marie. She held out fisted hands with chess pieces hidden in them.
“Left,” said Eddie.
She opened her hand. “You get black.”
“Black’s good. I can do black.” He sat down at the table and offered her a shameless bribe. “If I win you get your real birthday present.”
She gave him a bawdy grin. “And if you lose?”
He brought out the book, beautifully wrapped by Doug Sherman, and laid it on the table beside the board.
“You get your real birthday present.”
“Ah-hah! Win-win for Marie!”
But when she sat down at the board, her face lovely in the flickering firelight, she was concentrating too hard on her usual pawn first move, and spoke too casually without looking up.
“You know, honey, maybe Randy’s right.” When he didn’t immediately react, she sought his eyes. “Maybe you’re treating the Grimes thing a little too much like just a game.”
“You know that all investigations are just a game, sweetie — move, countermove, just like chess.”
“But what if it isn’t just a game to somebody else?”
“You and Randy.” He shook his head in mock despair.
“You didn’t see Randy’s face when we left. I did. He’s worried, Eddie. Really worried.”
He reached across the chessboard for her hand. “Okay, when we get back I’ll just Close and Bill on Grimes, and forget him. Like Randy says, I was only hired in the first place to find out if he was skimming or not.”
Her eyes glowed at him. She squeezed his hand. He grinned at her and picked up the wrapped package and gave it to her.
“Now that’s out of the way...”
The somber moment had passed. Marie always opened presents in the same way, starting sedately as if to save the wrappings, then suddenly losing control and turning into Albie, ripping the paper to tatters no matter how beautiful it might be.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick...
She went still, staring at the leather-bound Tibetan Book of the Dead. She turned it over and over, her eyes huge stars.