"There." He gave her the bottle.
He was half into the water before she yelled.
"Where are you going! Come here!"
He turned as if she were someone he didn't know. "For God's sake, what's wrong?"
"Why, you just finished your hot dogs and lemonade—you can't go in the water now and get cramps!"
He scoffed. "Old wives' tales."
"Just the same, you come back up on the sand and wait an hour before you go in, do you hear? I won't have you getting a cramp and drowning."
"Ah," he said, disgusted.
"Come along." She turned, and he followed, looking back at the sea.
Three o'clock. Four.
The change came at four ten. Lying on the sand, the woman in the black suit saw it coming and relaxed. The clouds had been forming since three. Now, with a sudden rush, the fog came in from off the bay. Where it had been warm, now it was cold. A wind blew up out of nothing. Darker clouds moved in.
"It's going to rain," she said.
"You sound absolutely pleased," he observed, sitting with arms folded. "Maybe our last day, and you sound pleased because it's clouding up."
"The weatherman," she confided, "said there'd be thunder showers all tonight and tomorrow. It might be a good idea to leave tonight."
"We'll stay, just in case it clears. I want to get one more day of swimming in, anyway," lie said. "I haven't been in the water yet today."
"We've had so much fun talking and eating, time passes."
"Yeah," he said, looking at his hands.
The fog flailed across the sand in soft strips.
"There," she said. "That was a raindrop on my nose!" She laughed ridiculously at it. Her eyes were bright and young again. She was almost triumphant. "Good old rain."
"Why are you so pleased? You're an odd duck."
"Come on, rain!" she said. "Well, help me with these blankets. We'd better run!"
He picked up the blankets slowly, preoccupied. "Not even one last swim, dammit. I've a mind to take just one dive." He smiled at her. "Only a minute!"
"No." Her face paled. "You'll catch cold, and I'll have to nurse you!"
"Okay, okay." He turned away from the sea. Gentle rain began to fall.
Marching ahead of him, she headed for the hotel. She was singing softly to herself.
"Hold on! "he said.
She halted. She did not turn. She only listened to his voice far away.
"There's someone out in the water!" he cried. "Drowning!"
She couldn't move. She heard his feet running.
"Wait here!" he shouted. "I'll be right back! There's someone there! A woman, I think!"
"Let the lifeguards get her!"
"Aren't any! Off duty; late!" He ran down to the shore, the sea, the waves.
"Come back!" she screamed. "There's no one out there! Don't, oh, don't!"
"Don't worry, I'll be right back!" he called. "She's drowning out there, see?"
The fog came in, the rain pattered down, a white flashing light raised in the waves. He ran, and the woman in the black suit ran after him, scattering beach implements behind her, crying, tears rushing from her eyes. "Don't!" She put out her hands.
He leaped into an onrushing dark wave.
The woman in the black bathing suit waited in the rain.
At six o'clock the sun set somewhere behind black clouds. The rain rattled softly on the water, a distant drum snare.
Under the sea, a move of illuminant white.
The soft shape, the foam, the weed, the long strands of strange green hair lay in the shallows. Among the stirring glitter, deep under, was the man.
Fragile. The foam bubbled and broke. The frosted coral brain rang against a pebble with thought, as quickly lost as found. Men. Fragile. Like dolls, they break. Nothing, nothing to them. A minute under water and they're sick and pay no attention and they vomit out and kick and then, suddenly, just lie there, doing nothing. Doing nothing at all. Strange. Disappointing, after all the days of waiting.
What to do with him now? His head lolls, his mouth opens, his eyelids loosen, his eyes stare, his skin pales. Silly man, wake up! Wake up!
The water surged about him.
The man hung limply, loosely, mouth agape.
The phosphorescence, the green hair weed withdrew.
He was released. A wave carried him back to the silent shore. Back to his wife, who was waiting for him there in the cold rain.
The rain poured over the black waters.
Distantly, under the leaden skies, from the twilight shore, a woman screamed.
Ah—the ancient dusts stirred sluggishly in the water—isn't that like a woman? Now, she doesn't want him, either!
At seven o'clock the rain fell thick. It was night and very cold and the hotels all along the sea had to turn on the heat.
THE INSPIRED CHICKEN MOTEL
It was in the Depression, deep down in the empty soul of the Depression in 1932, when we were heading west by 1928 Buick, that my mother, father, my brother Skip, and I came upon what we ever after called the Inspired Chicken Motel.
It was, my father said, a motel straight out of Revelations. And the one strange chicken at that motel could no more help making said Revelations, writ on eggs, than a holy roller can help going wild with utterances of God, Time, and Eternity writhing along his limbs, seeking passage out the mouth.
Some creatures are given to talents inclined one way, some another. But chickens are the greatest dumb brute mystery of them all. Especially hens who think or intuit messages calcium-scrawled forth in a nice neat hand upon the shells wherein their offspring twitch asleep.
Little did we know that long autumn of 1932, as we blew tires and flung fan belts like lost garters down Highway 66, that somewhere ahead that motel, and that most peculiar chicken, were waiting.
Along the way, our family was a wonderful nest of amiable contempt. Holding the maps, my brother and I knew we were a helluva lot smarter than Dad, Dad knew he was smarter than Mom, and Mom knew she could brain the whole bunch, any time.
That makes for perfection.
I mean, any family that has a proper disrespect, each for the other, can stay together. As long as there is something to fight about, people will come to meals. Lose that and the family disintegrates.
So we leaped out of bed each day hardly able to wait to hear what dumb thing someone might say over the hard-fried bacon and the under-fried scrambleds. The toast was too dark or too light. There was jam for only one person. Or it was a flavor that two out of four hated. Hand us a set of bells and we could ring all the wrong changes. If Dad claimed he was still growing, Skip and I ran the tape measure out to prove he'd shrunk during the night. That's humanity. That's nature. That's family.
But like I said, there we were grousing down Illinois, quarreling through the leaf change in the Ozarks autumn where we stopped sniping all of ten minutes to see the fiery colors. Then, pot-shotting and sniveling across Kansas and Oklahoma we plowed into a fine deep-red muck and slid off the road on a detour where each of us could bless himself and blame others for the excavations, the badly painted signs, and the lack of brakeage in our old Buick. Out of the ditch, we unloaded ourselves into a great Buck-a-Night Bungalow Court in a murderers' ambush behind a woods and on the rim of a deep rock-quarry where our bodies might be found years later at the bottom of a lost and sourceless lake, and spent the night counting the rain that leaked in through the shingle-sieve roof and fighting over who had the most covers on the wrong side of the bed.
The next day was even better. We steamed out of the rain into 100-degree heat that took the sap and spunk out of us, save for a few ricochet slaps Dad threw at Skip but landed on me. By noon we were sweated fresh out of contempt, and were settling into a rather refined if exhausted period of familiar insult, when we drove up by this chicken farm outside Amarillo, Texas.