the day we cut bait. You want to think twice before calling me a liar.”
That’s the Arney I was looking for. “I’m way past thinking twice.”
Arney takes a step forward. He’s not as tall as Paulie and certainly not in as good shape, but he spends hours in the weight room and he could make it interesting.
Paulie doesn’t budge. “You know the one comfort I’ve always had with our ‘friendship’?”
“Enlighten me.”
“That if it ever comes down to it, I’ll just kick your ass. Go for it.”
Arney holds his gaze a long moment and Paulie thinks, This is gonna feel good, but Arney deflates, then turns for his car. He stops and turns back. “Tell you something else, buddy. If I am lying, you want to be real careful of what I’m lying about. You could be bringing a real shit storm down on a lot of people.” He gets into his driver’s seat and slams the door.
“Hey, Logs,” Paulie says as he and Logs unload their gear. “Remember the other day in P-8 when you started to tell us how your whole perspective changed in the late sixties?”
“I remember.”
“Somebody interrupted you. You never finished.”
The sky is gray, the temperature chilly as they pull on their wetsuits.“December ’68,” Logs says. “First moonshot; the one before we actually landed. Apollo Eight, I think. Practice run to see if we could get them up and back.”
“Sixty-eight. Long time ago.”
“In a land far away,” Logs says. “We’d never seen Earth from a distance. We had drawings, maps, all that, but no one had actually seen us from out there. Those guys were watching Earth rise. Or set, I don’t know which. It was bigger than the imagination of the entire species.
“I remember thinking, that’s a God’s-eye view. God doesn’t see the shit that’s going on, He just sees this thing He gave us to live on, and it’s beautiful from that far out. He wouldn’t even know how badly we messed it up until it was too late; until it turned brown.”
It’s hard to imagine. Paulie has seen deep space pictures all his life.
“It was something. I mean, now we have the Hubble so we not only see great distances, but back in time. But that first look . . . why you asking?”
“Aw, you know, just like to see an old guy go back.”
“Don’t mess with me, grasshopper. They’ll find you at the bottom of the lake.”
“I like that perspective,” Paulie says. “You look at someone and you see the crust, just what the light hits. Kinda the same thing.”
“What’s driving this?”
“I went over to the Wellses place the other day.”
“Whoa.”
“No shit, whoa,” Paulie says. “Man, Mr. Logs, old man Wells has her vigilant as a prairie dog in a pack of coyotes. You look at him, you don’t see it. Watch her around him though, and there’s no doubt. She could be telling you who really killed President Kennedy and from two feet away look like she’s asking about the weather. Always gauging what might set him off. Mary Wells is not who we see.”
Logs is almost into his wetsuit. “Tell me that you are not exploring this romantically.”
Paulie pulls up his back zipper, reaches into the Beetle for his goggles. He stops. “Logs, is there any way for men and women, or boys and girls, to do anything that doesn’t turn sexual?”
“I suppose,” Logs says, “if a man and a woman drive into an intersection, both talking to their sweethearts on cell phones, paying no attention to where they’re going, and crash into each other, that possibly isn’t sexual. If either one gets out of their car, it’s sexual.”
“Got it.”
“So, about Mary.”
“I’m not getting out of the car.” Paulie smiles.
“Do you know the term rebound, as it’s not applied in the game of basketball?”
“Yessir, I do.”
“And do you remember saying that whole encounter with her was strange?”
“I have almost total recall, Sensei.”
Logs says, “Prove it.”
“Relax. It isn’t like that.”
“You do not want Victor Wells catching you with her,” Logs says.
“I know that, believe me.” Paulie stops a second. “You don’t think there’s something going on between him and her.”
“You mean something inappropriate.”
“Hell,” Paulie says, “what’s happened in the last three weeks that’s appropriate? I mean, like, sexual.”
“I do not think about things like that if I can help it,” Logs says. “It’s easy to get suspicious but real dangerous to project. I’ve learned to respond only to hard evidence, and there isn’t any, Paulie, unless you know something you’re not telling