"Bastard," the third member of their party, silent till now, said. He looked as if he was brooding, but the other two knew he wasn't.
"Bastard yourself," Bill said, and then he hugged the other, holding him out then at the shoulders. "How are you, Jimmy?"
"Good enough." The thin, sour features turned wry. "Better than you, you drunk bastard."
"Hah! And more of that to come! I want to hit Harbor Road."
Paul began, "I thought we'd go back to my place for a while, have a couple of beers—"
"Beers, bullshit. I want to see the Bay, relive old times. Four friggin' years..."
He looked down at his shoes, shiny black, trying to remember something, feeling around his memory.
"Four friggin' years..."
"Come on," Paul said, taking him by the arm. "We'll do it your way. I know just where to start."
"Oh?" Bill said, and then he smiled and held out his hand to take the pint of Jim Beam from his friend.
It was late and grey. It had been warm in the afternoon, the thermometer crawling up from the damp thirties to hover, exactly at midafternoon, near fifty. But now the mercury was falling again, and the sky was falling with it. It had been a damp October and now a damp November, and the weak try at Indian summer the weather had given the past couple of days looked now to be losing out to the inevitable cold. It would be chilly tonight, and there was already, out over the edge of the Bay, a hint of mistiness that would turn to thick fog by morning.
They walked east, toward the water. A movie marquee said HALLOWEEN FRIGHT WEEK, but the K in week was already down and an attendant on a ladder was carefully removing the other letters one by one; the posters in the window now showed two lovers in a close-up 1940's-style embrace. They walked past a couple of bars, but even Bill didn't turn his head; this wasn't their section.
"The Sirens?" he asked. "To see Snooky again."
Jimmy nodded dourly, and Bill smiled.
A hard left onto Harbor Road, and there was the water to meet them. Their legs carried them on, but suddenly Bill stopped short, staring out at the Bay.
"What is it?" Paul asked.
"Nothing," Bill answered, staring into space. Again he seemed lost, searching for something. He shook his head. "It's just that I haven't seen that water in a long time, but it seems like I never left it."
The Seven Sirens looked barricaded against winter's advent. The green and white striped awning was rolled flat against the front, and the take-out window, open wide in the summer to serve clams and shrimp to the tourists who didn't know about the back room or were too shy or polite to barge in on the regulars, was pressed down tight and caulked. The porthole in the door was steamed; there was an untidy pile of late-season discards—paper cups and napkins—that swirled like a miniature leaf storm on the boardwalk out front.
Jimmy was pushing open the door when Bill held back. He was looking out over the water again.
"Okay if we stay outside?"
Paul looked at the two round picnic benches yet to be stored; the seats were up on the tables and the beach umbrellas—again, green and white striped—were missing from their holes. "Little cold to sit out, Bill." Then he added, "Sure."
He disappeared inside, returning with a tray of shrimp and paper cups of beer. "This stuff's on Snooky," he said. The other two had set up one of the tables, and Bill was once again smiling, holding the open bottle of liquor under Jimmy's nose.
"Come on, puritan. Just a sip." He turned to Paul, beaming. "Goofball still won't drink, will he?"
"Been trying to break him down for years."
Bill took one of the beers and drained half of it in a gulp. His back was to the Bay. The open bottle was in front of him, nearly empty. He was quiet for a few moments and then said, "I don't know why I came back."
"That's not what your letter said," Paul offered.
Bill shrugged. "All that stuff about being with your pals, the guys you grew up with, the places you know..." He shrugged again, then grinned. "I was drunk when I wrote that."
"That wasn't hard to figure out," Paul said.
"You misspelled pals four times," Jimmy said, straight-faced. "Spelled it with an I."
"That's what you guys are," Bill said, and suddenly he stood up, looking down at them. "My pils." He sat down again. "Hey Paul, you still teaching at the old school?"
Paul nodded.
"Why did you come back?" Jimmy said, and now there wasn't a hint of anything but seriousness on his face.
Bill was staring down at his hands, working his fingers over the knuckles. For a moment they thought he wasn't going to say anything. He reached for the bottle, then let his hand fall back on the other one again. "I truly don't know."
He looked up at them, and now there was a kind of pleading in his eyes. There was something he wanted them to tell him, some word or phrase to make him say what he wanted to say. Suddenly he blurted out, "Do you know what a shit I feel like coming back here? Do you? I was the big mouth, the one who always said that this wasn't the place to be, that there was a big world out there, that I was..." His hands were fists and he knocked them one against the other. ...That I was going to grab the world by the balls." He laughed. "That's what I said: grab the world by the balls. You know what I did?" He laughed again, a snort. "I grabbed myself by the balls."
"Hey, Bill." Paul began.
"No, let me. You knew this would happen. The two of you knew that if I really did come back I'd go on like this."
"We knew you'd come back," Jimmy said quietly.
"That's a really flicked-up thing to say."
Abruptly the hands unclenched, resting on the picnic table. There was a small plate of shrimp in front of him untouched, and as if his hands now saw what his eyes didn't register, his hands moved the plate away from him.
He went on, his voice lowered. "Do you know that two weeks ago, when my hitch was up, I had every intention of signing back up? I'd never even thought of doing otherwise. They were paying for computer school. I was up for a promotion in rank in a few months—shit, I was even getting along with the hard-ass sergeant I wrote you about. Things were going great with Julie too."
"You wrote about her," Paul said. "Said she was okay."
Anger crept into Bill's voice. "Did I write that I wanted to marry her? That was up the line too. And then—" He made as if he were holding a pen, poised above the table, frozen. "And then I had that paper in front of me, and suddenly I didn't want to sign it anymore, I wanted to come back to Greystone Bay. More than anything else in the world, I wanted to come back here."
"You remember your early letters? They were full of homesickness," Paul said.
"Come on, that was three years ago! I told you later on I washed this place out of me. What the hell is there for me here except you guys? After my old man died and the bank took the house—shit, there's nothing here at all." Once again anger came. "Do you know what my long-range plans were? Another hitch, then boom, out of the army with all that computer training behind me. I was going to go to Boston, get a job with one of those big computer places on Route 128, be set for life. And with Julie. And then suddenly, none of it means anything anymore. I had a fight with her just before I got on the bus, and ended up telling her to go to hell. We'd never even had a serious argument before."
"You can never go home again," Jimmy quoted laconically.
"Thomas Wolfe my ass. I'm here, aren't I?"
The anger had drained out of him, leaking away to the water behind him, and now he saw the bourbon bottle in front of him and he finished it with one swallow. Another sip of beer and suddenly he smiled, washing everything else from his face. "So I'm here, I came home, and, well, I guess it's all right." The smile trailed a bit and his eyes wandered. "I guess it's all right..."