“I haven’t been here for twenty years,” I said. “I don’t know what you do here.”
“It’s a great place to groove on ideas,” Zack said, stretched out whitely in the sun. His ribs dowel under the skin like sticks and his arms and legs were skinny and covered with thin black hair, his body looked obscene, spidery. Beneath the black strip of bathing suit lay a prominent sexual bulge. “I thought it was time we saw each other again.” He spoke like a general summoning his adjutant. “I had to thank you for the books.”
“That’s okay,” I said. I removed my tie and dropped it and the jacket I had been carrying by my side. Then I pulled my shirt out of my trousers and unbuttoned it halfway down to let air enter.
“Miles went to church,” Alison said from the quarry’s edge. “Old Bertilsson preached about him again.”
“Hah hah hah!” Zack exploded with laughter. “That old fart. He oughta be making shitty little doilies, hey? He’s a feeb. I hate that sucker, man. So he thinks you’re the Masked Marauder, huh?”
Alison asked, “Did you bring towels?”
“Hey? Sure I brought towels. Can’t go swimming without towels. Brought three of them.” Zack rolled over on his belly and examined me. “Is that right? Am I right about him, my main man?”
“More or less.” It was too hot for my heavy shoes, and I unlaced them and pulled them off.
The Woodsman said, “Well, if you brought towels, I’m sure going to swim. My throat hurts from all that yelling.” She looked over her shoulder at Zack, who indulgently flipped his hand in a do-what-you-want gesture.
“I’m gonna go skinny,” she said, and glanced at me. She still had not got over her desire to shock.
“You can’t scare him, he’s the Masked Marauder,” said Zack.
She stood up, displeased, leaving dark high-arched footprints on the stone, and pulled the blue shirt over her head. Her breasts lolled large and pink against her chest. She pushed her jeans down unceremoniously, revealing all of her stocky well-shaped little body.
“If you’re the Masked Marauder, haven’t you been busy lately?” asked Zack.
I watched Alison go padding to the edge of the quarry and stand, judging the water for a moment. She wanted to get away from us.
“That’s not actually funny,” I said.
She raised her arms and then used her leg muscles to spring out into the water in a clean dive. When her head broke water, she began to breast-stroke across the quarry.
“Well, what about that guy, anyhow?”
“What guy?” For a moment my mind blurred and I thought he meant Alison Updahl.
“The killer.” He was lying on his side, gleeful. He seemed to be supercharged with sly, flinty enthusiasm, as if secrets were bubbling inside him. His eyes, very large now, appeared to be chiefly pupil. “He kinda turns me on. He’s done something else, you know, something most people don’t know about yet.”
“Oh?” If that were widely known, Polar Bears’ strategy was a failure.
“Don’t you see the beauty of that? Man, that D. H. Lawrence would have. The guy who wrote those books. I been reading those books. There’s a lot in them.”
“I don’t think Lawrence ever sympathized with sex killers.”
“Are you sure? Are you really sure? What if a killer was on the side of life? Hey? See, I looked at that Women in Love book — I didn’t read all of it, I just read the parts you underlined. I wanted to get inside you, man.”
“Oh, yes.” It was an appalling notion.
“Doesn’t he talk about beetles? That some people are beetles? Who should be killed? You gotta live according to your ideas, don’t you? Take the idea of pain. Pain is a tool. Pain is a tool for release.”
“Why don’t you stop talking and come in and swim?” Alison called from the center of the quarry. Sweat poured down my face.
Zack’s intense black eyes focused unblinkingly on me. “Take your shirt off,” he said.
“I guess I will,” I said, and unbuttoned it the rest of the way and dropped it on top of my jacket.
“Don’t you think the people who are just stupid beetles should be killed? That’s why I dig this guy. He just goes out and does it.”
We had left Lawrence a long way behind, but I wanted only to let him rant, so that he would be done earlier. “Has there been another one? Another murder?”
“I don’t know, man, but answer me this. Why would he fuckin’ stop?”
I nodded. Suddenly all I wanted was to be in the water, to feel the quarry’s cold water about me again.
“Maybe my favorite part of the book was about blood-brotherhood,” Zack said. “I dug that nude wrestling part between two men. You underlined almost all of that.”
“I suppose I might have,” I said, but he had switched gears again.
“He’s free, you see, whoever this guy is, he’s free as hell. Nobody’s gonna stop him. He’s thrown out all of the old shit holding him back. And if he thought anybody was gonna stand in his way, bang, he’d get rid of him.”
This conversation was reminding me uneasily of my afternoon with Paul Kant; it was even worse. Where Paul Kant had been low-voiced and depressed, this skinny boy was simply shivering with conviction.
“Like Hitler did to Roehm. Roehm was in his way, and he just smashed him with his foot. The Night of the Long Knives. Bang. Another beetle dead. You see the beauty in that?”
“No,” I said. “There isn’t any.” I had to get away from him, and when Alison shouted to us again, I said, “It’s too hot for this. I think I’ll swim a little.”
“You gonna skinny-dip?” His mad eyes were taunting me.
“Why not?” I said, irritated, and shucked the rest of my clothing. Infuriatingly, Zack stood when I did, and slithered out of his skimpy black bathing suit. We dove into the water together. I felt more than saw the Woodsman watching us from the center of the pool.
The water hit me like an electric jolt. The memories of the last time I had been in the quarry hit me too, with an even greater force, and I could see her as I had seen her then, her hands and feet flashing. Then I recognized that I was seeing not my Alison, but my cousin’s daughter, an altogether more adult female form. Underwater, I frog-kicked away, wanting to experience the rush of emotion away from the other two. It was like a clamp around my chest, and for a moment, fleeing the legs dangling in the water, I thought I would be killed by my own emotion. My heart fluttered, and I kicked away for another second and then surfaced, breathing noisily.
Zack’s grinning face was four feet away, looking absurdly young beneath his streaming black hair. His eyes seemed to have no white at all. He said something inaudible, choked by his own pleasure.
Then he repeated it. “This is where it happened, isn’t it, Miles?” He was exuding crazy glee.
“What?” I said, my stomach frozen.
“You and Alison’s aunt. Hey?” His mouth was lifted in a loose insane smile.
I turned away and began to swim as strongly as I could toward the lip of the quarry. His voice was calling, but not to me.
Water was thrashing behind me. Now he was calling to me. “You don’t talk, do you? You don’t talk, do you?” His voice was loud and brutal.
Eight feet from safety I felt a hand catch my ankle. When I kicked out with my free leg, another hand grasped my calf, and then I was yanked backward and down. While two hands held my legs, other hands pushed my shoulders, and I felt a heavy body riding my back, beginning to squeeze my chest. The one on top leaned forward to wrap arms around my neck, and cushiony breasts pressed against me. I bucked underwater, but she clamped me with greater force, expelling the rest of the air from my lungs. Games, I thought, and breast-stroked, thinking that my breath would outlast hers. Zack still clung to my ankles. I kicked idly, resolved not to give them the satisfaction of a struggle. Then I realized that she was close enough to the surface to raise her head and breathe, and a spurt of fear made me fight.