Val got her legs up on Chaz’s shoulders. Sweat dripped off his chin. “Oh, Chaz, I-” Gil thought she was going to say “I love you,” but she didn’t finish the sentence.
Chaz grunted and pounded harder.
“… and the pitch. Swing and a miss. A curve ball and a beauty. Dropped right off the table. Oh and two. Mardossian steps on the rubber…”
Val pounded back.
“… here it comes. Rayburn swings. And there’s a long drive, deep to left, a looooong drive, deeeeeep to left, it is going, it is going. See. You. Later. Grand slam, a grand-slam ding-dong-dinger for Bobby Rayburn…”
“I don’t believe it,” said Chaz, going still.
That’s when Gil knew the game was real.
“You didn’t come, did you?” Val said.
“No, I didn’t come.” And Chaz started moving again, but Gil could see that the mood had changed. “Can’t you turn that thing off?”
“The controls are in the kitchen. Come on, Chaz, I’m so hot. Don’t leave me here.”
Chaz reached down between them.
“Oh, Chaz, I’m coming.”
“Me too.”
And they did, but the mood had changed.
“… touch ’em all, Bobby Rayburn…”
Chaz and Val rolled into the pool, drifted apart. He paddled around for a while. She got out, wrapped herself in a towel, and went up to the house. A few minutes later, he got out too, dried himself, put on his suit, knotted his tie-red and black, much like the stand-up tie Gil had lost somewhere along the way-and followed, leaving the blown-up shark by the side of the pool.
“… believe we’ve got Jewel Stern down on the field. Can you hear me, Jewel?”
“Loud and clear. I’m standing with Bobby Rayburn, and, Bobby, I think everyone’s asking themselves-”
The radio went off.
It was quiet. Gil sat behind the cedar tree. He thought he heard a car start up, drive away. The sun, lower now, glared huge on the sea, much smaller on the pool. A breeze sprang up, rustling the cedars to life and cooling his skin; like Val and Chaz, he had sweated too, had heated up too, but not just from the voyeur part: he’d had an idea.
At first, his idea seemed full of possibility. In minutes, he began to have doubts. He lacked information: about Chaz, Val, and Bobby, and their various relationships. The idea began unraveling in his mind.
And then, as he had in the steam bath, he got lucky. The French doors at the back of the house opened again, and out came a boy in shorts. A boy younger than Richie, Gil saw as he came closer, but sturdily built, and graceful. He rose, and crouched behind the cedar.
The boy spotted the inflatable great white shark at once and went toward it. A gust of wind came off the ocean, bent the cedars, snapped Gil’s pant legs, and blew the shark into the pool, just as the boy was reaching for it. The shark floated in the water, a foot or so from the side of the pool. The boy knelt at the edge, stretched out his arm, got a hand on the shark’s dorsal fin. The shark slid away under the boy’s weight; and then he was in the water.
The boy went under right away. Gil straightened, stayed behind the tree. The boy came up, but under the shark. One of his hands splashed the surface wildly. There was no other sound. Then he went down again. Gil, still holding the fishing pole, stepped out from behind the tree and moved toward the pool. He looked down, saw the thrashing boy a few feet under, eyes and mouth open wide, bubbles streaming up. Gil dropped the pole, shook off the knapsack, took off his shoes, hesitated over the thrower, leaving it on; then dove into the water. It was the right thing to do, from every angle he could think of.
He got his arms around the boy, still thrashing but weaker now, and kicked up to the surface. Gil flipped the boy onto the pool deck, climbed out. He heard a scream from the direction of the house, but didn’t look up.
The boy had landed on his back. Gil knelt, turned him over. Water flowed out of his mouth, then a little mucus, then nothing. He made a sound, half sob, half cough, sucked in air, and started to wail.
A woman cried, “Oh, God.” Now Gil looked up, saw Val, wearing a pretty dress, running down from the house. She grabbed the boy in her arms, yelling, “Is he going to die? Is he going to die?” over and over.
“He’s breathing, isn’t he?” Gil said, but she didn’t hear him.
After a while, quite soon, in fact, the boy stopped wailing, put his arms around her, said, “Mama.” Then it was her turn to waiclass="underline"
“It’s all my fault.”
For cheating on your husband? Gil thought.
“I didn’t get that fence built.”
She rocked the boy back and forth, back and forth. His wet body dampened her dress, making it transparent. Gil could see her nipples, tiny now, compared to what they’d been before.
“Well, no harm done,” Gil said.
Val stopped rocking, looked at him, seeing him for the first time. The boy looked at him too.
“Lucky thing I happened to be fishing off your spot here,” Gil said. “Never have heard him hollering otherwise.”
The boy kept looking at him.
“But he seems like a tough kid,” Gil said. “Probably would have done okay on his own.”
“Tough kid?” said Val, bursting into tears again. “He’s just a baby.”
“You saved his life,” said the doctor, about fifteen minutes later. The boy sat in a chair by the pool now, wrapped in a blanket and sipping a Coke. “Nice job, Mr.-”
“Onis,” said Gil, right off the bat. “My friends call me Curly.” So much like Onsay, and he remembered Curly Onis’s meager line from the Baseball Encyclopedia; and like Curly, he’d taken just one cut in the bigs.
The doctor smiled. “Your hair looks pretty straight to me, Mr. Onis.”
“It was different when I was a kid,” Gil said.
The doctor left. Val came forward, held out her hand. “Oh, Mr. Onis, how can I ever thank you?”
“That’s all right,” Gil said.
She didn’t let go of his hand. “I’m Valerie, by the way. Valerie Rayburn.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“Sean, this is Mr. Onis.”
The boy’s eyes came up, fastened on him.
“Lookin’ good, Sean,” Gil said.
“Thanks to you, Mr. Onis,” said Val. “Thanks to you.”
Gil sat down, took off his socks, wrung them out, put them back on, and then his shoes. He rose, picked up the knapsack and the fishing pole.
“You’re not going?” said Val.
He looked at her.
“Oh, don’t go. We’ve got to give-I’m sure my husband will want to thank you personally. He should be home any minute.”
“You’ve already thanked me, Mrs. Rayburn.” He got a kick out of saying the name like that, casually, in conversation.
“But not nearly enough, Mr. Onis. There must be something we can… what do you do for a living, if you don’t mind my asking?”
Gil glanced around. “Funny you should bring that up,” he said, “since I happened by chance to notice you could do with a little work around here. I’m a landscaper by trade.”
She clapped her hands. Actually clapped them. “Bobby and I-that’s my husband, Bobby Rayburn-” He registered nothing at the name. “-we were just talking about that. Consider the job yours.”
“That’s very nice, Mrs. Rayburn. But I really couldn’t.”
“But you have to. I couldn’t live with myself if you didn’t.”
Gil shook his head. “It’s asking too much, Mrs. Rayburn. See, I live a ways away. It would mean you putting me up somewhere at the beginning, at least while I got things in order.”
“That’s not asking too much. There’s that apartment over the garage, right, Sean? Just sits empty.”
“It’s full of spiders,” Sean said.
“We’ll have it cleaned, of course,” Val said. “There. It’s settled.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Rayburn, but I really-”