A little way down they passed an old person on a bicycle, in jeans and a bright shirt with the tail out. They couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, but the person smiled and they waved and called, “Aaa.”
The sun was hot, but as they neared the beach there began to be a breeze and she could smell the sea. She began to feel as she had the very first time she had seen it. She had been born in Ohio and she was twelve before she had taken a trip and come out on the wide, flat, sunny sands and smelled this smell.
She held Littleboy tight though it made him squirm, and she leaned against Ben’s shoulder. “Oh, it’s going to be fun!” she said. “Littleboy, you’re going to see the sea. Look, darling, keep watching, and smell. It’s delicious.” And Littleboy squirmed until she let go again.
Then, at last, there was the sea, and it was exactly as it had always been, huge and sparkling and making a sound like… no, drowning out the noises of wars. Like the black sky with stars, or the cold and stolid moon, it dwarfed even what had happened.
Theypassed the long, brick bathhouses, looking about as they always had, but the boardwalks between were gone, as Ben had said, not a stick left of them.
“Let’s stop at the main bathhouse.”
“No,” Ben said. “We better keep away from those places. You can’t tell who’s in there. I’m going way down beyond.”
She was glad, really, especially because at the last bathhouse she thought she saw a dark figure duck behind the wall.
They went down another mile or so, then drove the car off behind some stunted trees and bushes.
“Nothing’s going to spoil this Saturday,” she said, pulling out the picnic things, “just nothing. Come, Littleboy.” She kicked off her shoes and started running for the beach, the basket bouncing against her knee.
Littleboy slipped out of his roomy sneakers easily and scampered after her. “You can take your clothes off,” she told him. “There’s nobody here at all.”
When Ben came, later, after hiding the gas, she was settled, flat on the blanket in old red shorts and a halter, and still the same green kerchief, and Littleboy, brown and naked, splashed with his pail in the shallow water, the wetness bringing out the hairs along his back.
“Look,” she said, “nobody as far as you can see and you can see so far. It gives you a different feeling from home. You know there are people here and there in the houses, but here, it’s like we were the only ones, and here it doesn’t even matter. Like Adam and Eve, we are, just you and me and our baby.”
He lay on his stomach next to her. “Nice breeze,” he said.
Shoulder to shoulder they watched the waves and the gulls and Littleboy, and later they splashed in the surf and then ate the lunch and lay watching again, lazy, on their stomachs. And after a while she turned on her back to see his face. “With the sea it doesn’t matter at all,” she said and she put her arm across his shoulder. “And we’re just part of everything, the wind and the earth and the sea too, my Adam.”
“Eve,” he said and smiled and kissed her and it was a longer kiss than they had meant. “Myra. Myra.”
“There’s nobody but us.”
She sat up. “I don’t even know a doctor since Press Smith was killed by those robbing kids and I’d be scared.”
“We’ll find one. Besides, you didn’t have any trouble. It’s been so damn long.” She pulled away from his arm. “And I love you. And Littleboy, he’ll be way over four by the time we’d have another one.”
She stood up and stretched and then looked down the beach and Ben put a hand around her ankle. She looked down the other way. “Somebody’s coming,” she said, and then he got up too.
Far down, walking in a business-like way on the hard, damp part of the sand, three men were coming toward them.
“You got your wrench?” Ben asked. “Put it just under the blanket and sit down by it, but keep your knees under you.”
He put his tee shirt back on, leaving it hanging out, and he hooked the hammer under his belt in back, the top covered by the shirt. Then he stood and waited for them to come.
They were all three bald and shirtless. Two wore jeans cut off at the knees and thick belts, and the other had checked shorts and a red leather cap and a pistol stuck in his belt in the middle of the front at the buckle. He was older. The others looked like kids and they held back as they neared and let the older one come up alone. He was a small man, but looked tough. “You got gas,” he said, a flat-voiced statement of fact.
“Just enough to get home.”
“I don’t mean right here. You got gas at home is what I mean.”
Myra sat stiffly, her hand on the blanket on top of where the wrench was. Ben was a little in front of her and she could see his curving, forward-sloping shoulders and the lump of the hammer-head at the small of his back. If he stood up straight, she thought, and held his shoulders like they ought to be, he would look broad and even taller and he would show that little man, but the other had the pistol. Her eyes kept coming back to its shining black.
Ben took a step forward. “Don’t move,” the little man said. He shifted his weight to one leg, looking relaxed, and put his hand on his hip near the pistol. “Where you got the gas to get you home? Maybe we’ll come with you and you might lend us a little of that gas you got there at your house. Where’d you hide the stuff to get you back, or I’ll let my boys play a bit with your little one and you might not like it.”
Littleboy, she saw, had edged down, away from them, and he crouched now, watching with his wide-eyed stare. She could see the tense, stringy muscles along his arms and legs and he reminded her of gibbons she had seen at the zoo long ago. His poor little face looks old, she thought, too old for three years. Her fingers closed over the blanket-covered wrench. They’d better not hurt Littleboy.
She heard her husband say, “I don’t know.”
“Oh, Ben,” she said, “oh, Ben.”
The man made a motion and the two youths started out, but Littleboy had started first, she saw. She pulled at her wrench and then had to stop and fumble with the blanket, and it took a long time because she kept her eyes on Littleboy and the two others chasing.
She heard a shout and a grunt beside her. “Oh, Ben,” she said again, and turned, but it was Ben on top attacking the other, and the small man was trying to use his pistol as a club but he had hold of the wrong end for that, and Ben had the hammer and he was much bigger.
He was finished in a minute. She watched, empty-eyed, the whole of it, holding the wrench in a white-knuckled hand in case he needed her.
Afterward, he moved from the body into a crouching run, hammer in one hand and pistbl, by the barrel, in the other. “You stay here,” he shouted back.
She looked at the sea a few minutes, and listened to it, but her own feelings seemed more important than the stoic sea now. She turned and followed, walking along the marks where the feet had swept at the soft sand.
Where the bushes began she saw him loping back. “What happened?”
“They ran off when they saw me after them with the other guy’s gun. No bullets though. You’ll have to help look now.”
“He’s lost!”
“He won’t come when you call. We’ll just have to look. He could be way out. I’ll try that and you stay close and look here. The gas is buried under that bush there, if you need it.”
“We’ve got to find him, Ben. He doesn’t know his way home from here.”
He came to her and kissed her and held her firmly across the shoulders with one arm. She could feel his muscles bunch into her neck as hard almost as the head of his hammer that pressed against her arm. She remembered a time four years ago when his embrace had been soft and comfortable. He had had hair then, but he had been quite fat, and now he was hard and bald, having gained something and lost something.