“You know what heaven would be?” Zeke said, looking over at Wayne from the diving board, where he was sitting. “Surf ’n’ Turf,” he said. “Heavy on the butter with the Turf, too. And a side of steamers with broth to dunk ’em in to clean out the sand.”
“I think heaven for you would be the certainty of your convictions,” Wayne said. “Not having to check with anyone to see whether they’d bear you out. Not caring if other people felt the way you did. Not caring jack shit, unless you felt like considering their opinion.”
It was more of a response than Zeke expected. It was also a bit puzzling, as many of Wayne’s replies were. It was Wayne’s tone, more than the words: that cold way Wayne pronounced on things, though you could tell by his expression that he didn’t care passionately, at all, about what he was saying. It was almost pugnacious, as though the other person had asked a question looking for a fight.
“Because I think eatin’ what you want is a big part of the pleasure of life,” Zeke said. When he did not know what to make of Wayne’s replies, he usually just ignored them, or reasserted his opinion.
“Stayed in the Army, you’d be eating cow-flop hamburgers and seaweed spaghetti,” Wayne said. “Lift those paddles up. Those things you call feet. Let’s see your marks of disgrace that got you out of the mess hall and into this great society where you can wolf down a steak and chew one of those rubbery lobsters all at the same meal, every time you can pay for it.” Wayne crossed his eyes. His arms were extended and his hands rather convincingly bent to look like lobster claws. He pursed his lips. He could see through his squint that Will was looking at him from the shallow end of the pool, smiling. He turned the lobster claws toward Will. Will did the same imitation of a lobster. A lobster with a little-boy belly that stuck out above his bathing trunks.
Wayne stretched out on the chaise longue — the only one at the pool — groping for the bottle of rum to tilt another splash into what remained of his Hawaiian Punch. That done, he recapped the bottle and sloshed the can a few times before taking a drink. Zeke looked at him, biting the inside of his cheek. Wayne was going to be the tannest person at day’s end. He was the one who never got stung by a bee and was rarely bitten by mosquitoes. His back was muscular and smooth — no pimples, no big smear of a birthmark, just a long, glowing expanse of skin. Even when he was lying on his stomach, you could tell that Wayne was handsome. Still, Zeke thought, not every woman would be attracted to such a strange man. A lot of women liked younger, quieter men, such as himself. Susan, for instance. And he didn’t have Wayne’s track record, either: two divorces, living with more women than you could count, a period in his life when the IRS had put a lien on his bank account, two rounds of clap. Hell, he might even know more about Wayne than Corky did. Working side by side with him for so long, he’d heard a lot of things. Maybe they should know that in the CIA: A person made to plant rhododendron bushes day after day will tell you anything.
Zeke held his breath and slipped off the edge of the diving board into the water. It was chilly and had an oily feel. Where the shadow fell across the pool the surface was inky blue. Zeke smoothed his hand over the top of his head. It was like putting ice on fire. He ducked under the water, came up, and smoothed the hair out of his face. No one had paid any attention to his entrance into the pool except Will, who was butting the inner tube with his belly in the shallow end, talking to himself as he sent it scurrying along. Zeke began to swim toward Will, clowning as he stroked, eyes bulging and jaw dropped. Will stopped playing with the inner tube and looked at Wayne, a hesitant smile on his face. Zeke must be nearer his age than his father’s. Zeke’s teeth sparkled like the big white teeth the Tooth Lady brought into Will’s classroom twice a year so that she could show everyone how to brush their teeth with a whisk-broom toothbrush. Then she poked between the teeth with a piece of rope, making the same sawing motion adults made rubbing their backs as they dried off. As Zeke came near him Will smiled, partly at his approach, and partly because of the memory. The Tooth Lady’s teeth were big enough to be the entranceway to a medium-sized dog’s doghouse. The Tooth Lady herself had small white teeth, and enormous breasts that made the boys laugh. The Tooth Lady, Nancy Spears, was nicknamed Bicycle Pump because of the sixth-graders’ assertion that she pumped up her tits with a bicycle pump. All through her presentation, the boys would push their hands down to the floor and raise them and push them down again, giggling, and the girls would hang their heads in shame. Will did not know, as Zeke neared him, that Zeke’s shiny white teeth were false. Gum disease had necessitated the pulling of all but two top teeth and the molars, though when he was in the Army Zeke had chosen to say that a jealous husband had knocked out his teeth.
“Hop on,” Zeke said, backing up to Will. “King Kong will take you for a swim.”
Will could not imagine Zeke as King Kong. He was too thin and too white. Also, King Kong didn’t hang out in swimming pools.
“You’re not King Kong,” Will said. He came nearer, though. Zeke looked over his shoulder and saw Will take a few steps forward.
“Well, I don’t know the names of any monsters of the deep,” Zeke said. “Just pretend I’m one of those. Oh — wait — I know: I’m the monster from the black lagoon. Black lagoon or blue lagoon. Something like that.” He gestured toward his back.
There was a birthmark on Zeke’s back, shaped like a crescent moon. Haveabud had moles on his back. Will remembered Haveabud rolling out of bed, and the sprinkling of moles across his back — so many that Will had squinted, the way he squinted to see the pattern stars made in the night sky. Haveabud’s moles, though, were more like measles than constellations. Will had only one mole, at the side of his knee. His mother had had the doctor look at it. He wondered what a doctor would think of Haveabud’s back. Though the water was not cold, Will shivered.
“You afraid of monsters?” Zeke said, smiling over his shoulder. You had to coax kids a little, Zeke knew. Kids and women. He had to take Susan to dinner six times before she would even let him feel her up, but the next time he really scored: right from first base home. Now, any time he wanted it. He looked at Susan, stretched out on the towel. From this perspective, her thighs looked like mountains. Will thought that maybe Haveabud’s moles had flown onto Zeke’s back like iron filings attracted by a magnet. Maybe hidden current moved through Zeke’s body, like electricity. It might not be safe to climb on his back. It would be just like Haveabud to find a way to get rid of something he didn’t want. Whenever he dropped anything out the car window, Haveabud always said, “It’s organic.” Kleenex were organic. The crossword puzzle, torn from the magazine in the motel room, was wadded up and thrown out the window once it was finished because the crossword puzzle was organic. Also the tabs Haveabud pulled off cans of Schweppes ginger ale. When they had driven far enough south so that the windows could be opened because it was suddenly so warm, Haveabud had let his socks flap out the window: little lavender-and-green argyle flags, snapping in the wind. Then he had just released them, not looking back to see where they went. “Ya-hoo!” Zeke screamed, as Will mounted his back. Zeke’s cry sounded like Haveabud’s shout when he released the socks. He remembered the look on Mel’s face as he sat in the driver’s seat, turning to look at Haveabud as the socks went snapping out the window. It was the same look his mother got when she found him stamping in two inches of water in the bathtub. Or the look she gave him when he said a bad word. Spencer had paid no attention. He was used to Haveabud’s enthusiastic shouts. He heard them when Haveabud concluded a successful business call. When they watched the Mets play. When Haveabud knocked down all the sand monkeys sitting on a shelf at the carnival and won the stuffed-snake prize — a superlong bright green snake that Haveabud later wound around the coatstand in his office, after moving the philodendrons from the reception area and putting them around the stand, so that the snake appeared to be coiling out of a forest.