As they scuffed down to the rocky beach, Bobbie launched into an involved, unlikely story of how he had once fought a giant octopus while skin diving with his father. The other children listened desultorily. Bobbie was a sullen, unpleasant child, possibly because his father was a notorious drunkard, and his stories were always either boring or uneasily nasty. This one was both. Finally, Eddie said, “You didn’t either. You didn’t do none of that stuff. Your pa c’n’t even stand up, my dad says; how’s he gonna swim?” They started to argue, and Steve told them both to shut up. In silence, they climbed onto a long bar of rock that cut diagonally across the beach, tapering down into the ocean until it disappeared under the water.
Tommy stood on a boulder, smelling the wetness and salt in the wind. The Daleor were out there, living in and under the sea, and their atonal singing came faintly to him across the water. They were out in great numbers, as uneasy as the land People; he could see them skimming across the cold ocean, diving beneath the surface and rising again in the head tosses of spray from the waves. Abruptly, Tommy felt alive again, and he began to tell his own story:
“There was this dragon, and he lived way out there in the ocean, farther away than you can see, out where it’s deeper’n anything, and there ain’t no bottom at all, so’s if you sink you just go down forever and you don’t ever stop. But the dragon could swim real good, so he was okay. He could go anywhere he wanted to, anywhere at all! He’d just swim there, and he swam all over the place and everything, and he saw all kinds of stuff, you know? Frag! He could swim to China if he felt like it, he could swim to the Moon!
“But one time he was swimming around and he got lost. He was all by himself, and he came into the harbor, out there by the islands, and he didn’t used to get that close to where there was people. He was a real big dragon, you know, and he looked like a real big snake, with lots of scales and everything, and he came into our harbor, down real deep.” Tommy could see the dragon, huge and dark and sinuous, swimming through the cold, deep water that was as black as glass, its smoky red eyes blazing like lanterns under the sea.
“And he come up on top of the water, and there’s this lobster boat there, like the kind that Eddie’s father runs, and the dragon ain’t never seen a lobster boat, so he swims up and opens his mouth and bites it up with his big fangs, bites it right in half, and the people that was in it fall off in the water—”
“Did it eat them?” Bobbie wanted to know.
Tommy thought about it, and realized he didn’t like the thought of the dragon eating the lobstermen, so he said, “No, he didn’t eat them, ‘cause he wasn’t hungry, and they was too small, anyway, so he let them swim off, and there was another lobster boat, and it picked them up—”
“It ate them,” Steve said, with sad philosophical certainty.
“Anyway,” Tommy continued, “the dragon swims away, and he gets in closer to land, you know, but now there’s a Navy ship after him, a big ship like the one we get to go on on Memorial Day, and it’s shooting at the dragon for eating up the lobster boat. He’s swimming faster than anything, trying to get away, but the Navy ship’s right after him, and he’s getting where the water ain’t too deep anymore.” Tommy could see the dragon barreling along, its red eyes darting from side to side in search of an escape route, and he felt suddenly fearful for it.
“He swims until he runs out of water, and the ship’s coming up behind, and it looks like he’s really going to get it. But he’s smart, and before the ship can come around the point there, he heaves himself up on the beach, this beach here, and he turns himself into a rock, he turns himself into this rock here that we’re standing on, and when the ship comes they don’t see no dragon anymore, just a rock, and they give up and go back to the base. And sometime, when it’s the right time and there’s a moon or something, this rock’ll turn back into a dragon and swim off, and when we come down to the beach there won’t be a rock here anymore. Maybe it’ll turn back right now.” He shivered at the thought, almost able to feel the stone melt and change under his feet. He was fiercely glad that he’d gotten the dragon off the hook. “Anyway, he’s a rock now, and that’s how he got away.”
“He didn’t get away,” Steve snarled, in a sudden explosion of anger. “That’s a bunch of scup! You don’t get away from them. They drekked him, they drekked him good. They caught him and blew the scup out of him, they blew him to fragging pieces!” And he fell silent, turning his head, refusing to let Tommy catch his eye. Steve was a bitter boy in many ways, and although generally good-natured, he was given to dark outbursts of rage that would fill him with dull embarrassment for hours afterward. His father had been killed in the war in Bolivia, two years ago.
Watching Steve, Tommy felt cold all at once. The excitement drained out of him, to be replaced again by a premonition that something bad was going to happen, and he wasn’t going to be able to get out of the way. He felt sick and hollow, and the wind suddenly bit to the bone, although he hadn’t felt it before. He shuddered.
“I gotta get home for supper,” Eddie finally said, after they’d all been quiet for a while, and Bobbie and Steve agreed with him. The sun was a glazed red eye on the horizon, but they could make it in time if they left now—they could take the Shore Road straight back in a third of the time it had taken them to come up. They jumped down onto the sand, but Tommy didn’t move—he remained on the rock.
“You coming?” Steve asked. Tommy shook his head. Steve shrugged, his face flooding with fresh embarrassment, and he turned away.
The three boys moved on up the beach, toward the road. Bobbie and Eddie looked back toward Tommy occasionally, but Steve did not.