wonder what you're gonna wear!" There was a brief struggle behind
us.
Moments later Casey's work shirt was observed to waft through the air
and drape itself over a roadside cattail.
So now we had two half-naked women in the backseat. The road ahead was
deserted. Behind us too. But I kept seeing squad cars pulling us
over, officers peering ironically. The girls were laughing so hard
their faces flushed red.
"Well, sh/t!" said Steven.
The car began to weave and halt fitfully as he unzipped his jeans and
worked them over first one leg and then the other over his sneakers. It
took a while but finally he was out of them. I was glad to see he had
his briefs.
He placed wallet, belt, and house keys neatly on the seat beside him
and handed me a fistful of change and then flipped the pants
over his head. We watched them twist away behind us. He looked at
me.
"You next."
"Not me."
"Come on."
I tried to look as serious as possible. "You know I hate people to see
the catheter."
We made it to our deserted rocky spot on the beach without incident. We
ate the odd smorgasbord lunch.
"You know," I said, "I keep wishing for a ham sandwich."
Steve nodded. "Yeah. I got to stop stealing."
Kim halted in the middle of a bite of cheese and cracker. She looked
at us and then at herself.
"What are we gonna do about going home?" she said.
I laughed the caviar all over my hand.
The day turned sour.
I was lying on my back, half-asleep, letting the sun bake me. By now
my ass was as brown as the rest of me, my modesty having long since
gone the way of caution in anything which was related to them. Kim was
sitting beside me on a towel rubbing oil into her arms and shoulders. I
heard the shout from Steven and the hissing intake of breath from her
simultaneously. Both sounds full of sudden fear.
I was up and on my feet in an instant, while Kim was still reacting to
what she'd seen.
Part of it I understood immediately.
Steve and Casey had been standing atop the same rock she and I had
climbed the first day, that place where gulls had littered the surface
with the shells of crabs and oysters. Now she was alone there. Looking
down at Steven. In her posture there was a strange tension, not of
fear but of anger.
There was something disjointed-looking about his limbs, a loss of skill
in both arms and legs that made me worry not so much about breakage as
concussion.
I ran. I sensed Kim a few steps behind me. When I reached him he was
trying to rise again. He fell back heavily on his chest. There was no
sand where he was, only stones. It must have hurt him. I
heard the breath rush out of his lungs, but that was the only sound
from him. I heard us running and that deep whoosh of breath and the
crying of gulls. And that was all. A strange, quiet chaos.
I went down beside him and put one arm behind his back to support him,
just under his shoulders.
"Relax. Relax."
He looked at me and his eyes were not quite focusing. I saw a small
scrape just below the hairline over his right eye. It would swell, but
it didn't look too bad. A slight welling up of blood moving slowly to
the surface. I looked into his hair for something worse. There was
nothing. I guessed he was just shaken. I was damned relieved.
Kim squatted down beside me. I saw her glance to the left of him a
little and then heard that intake of breath again. Her face contracted
squeamishly. I saw what she was looking at. His left arm was out at a
right angle from us, the wrist just sort of dangling. The ball of the
thumb was cut pretty badly. There was a steady flow of blood rolling
down off his wrist and a flap of skin maybe two inches long pulled back
toward the palm of his hand.
"Get me something. Something to press over it and stop the bleeding.
Hurry up."
His eyes looked better now, even though the color was still gone from
his face. I was pretty sure he'd be all right. He tried to talk to
me. The look on his face was one of pure amazement.
"She... she pushed me ..."
I glared up at her. She hadn't moved. The bright sunlight always made
her eyes go oddly transparent. Now it was like staring into two bright
cubes of ice.
"You want to tell me about it?"
"No."
"What the fuck is this about, Casey?"
Kim came running back with my T-shirt. I helped her wrap it around his
hand and showed her how to press it down.
"Hard," I told her. Then I looked back at Casey.
"I asked you something."
I saw her shoulder relax slightly. Her voice was low, contemptuous.
Scary.
"You can go to hell."
She stepped back away from us.
"You both can."
I watched her disappear down the far face of the rock. I covered Kim's
hand and helped her press down on Steven's wound. I glanced at Kim.
She was totally concentrated on him.
It was only then that I realized I was shaking.
I never did find out what caused it, though I was pretty sure he'd made
some moves on her. His mood was just silly enough for him to try.
Nobody talked about it.
We drove home with the girls in the backseat wrapped in towels and the
two of us in front. Same as before. Only this time I was driving and
Steve was clutching his hand, squeezing my bloody T-shirt to a wound
that would take seven stitches once we got back to town.
All the way home nobody said a word. The freeze between Casey and Kim
was a palpable thing. You could hardly blame Kim. I was damned mad at
her myself. No matter what had gone on up there, it was clear she'd
overreacted, to say the very least. And then I kept seeing that cold
unconcern on her face while she stared at us. It could have been a
concussion. Yet all we got was anger.
You had to wonder. How well did I even know her?
And despite our weekend together, that kept coming up again. I kept
wondering how many more surprises there would be like the one today,
and whether I really wanted to be around to see them.
I dropped the women off at their respective houses. Then I got a spare
pair of pants from my apartment, helped him on with them and took him
to Doc Richardson over on Cedar Street. I stood there watching through
the injection, the bandaging, the stitching, the swabbing and patching
of the head wound while the Doc complained good-naturedly that the
times had not been good since Hoover.
By the time we drove back through town Steve was feeling better. I
dropped him at his parents' summer house and watched him move slowly up
the field stone walk, through the white colonial doors.
I didn't see him again for nearly a week.
The next I saw of Kim she was still angry. But you could tell that the
bitterness was wearing off some, eroded by understanding. We
sat in a booth at Harmon's together drinking Cokes. She, too,
suspected Steve had made a move on Casey.
She thought he had reasons, though.
"We're alike, Casey and I. The both of us wear a kind of sign, like one