and Magdalena can look over and see the girl, lying on her side… and her bare bottom has the woven stringlike thong of a G-string bikini in the cleft and the boy, wearing baggy board shorts, has one arm under her head with the hand grasping her shoulder. It looked damned uncomfortable, trying to lie down in the bottom of a kayak… Half the girls dancing on the decks, all the decks, had on thongs… cleaving their buttocks into pairs of perfect melons just ripe enough for the picking… and that girl right there, not ten feet away, climbing out of the water up the ladder of that two-deck motor launch—her buttocks, her backside, her… her… her ass—no other word comes right out and says it—her ass has swallowed her sling-low red thong so completely, Magdalena can hardly see that it exists at all… The water has furled the girl’s hair into a wet mass that hangs down her back far below her shoulder blades, and the water makes it dark, but Magdalena would bet anything that it’s actually blond—las gringas!—so many of them on those decks! Their blond hair bounces when they dance. It flashes when they throw their heads about to squeal… to flirt… to laugh laugh laugh laugh on the decks where things are happening… at Elliott Key… at this sexual regatta she finds herself enclosed in, making her want, despite sane thinking, to show them all—all those gringas!—what she’s got. She makes herself sit up very erectly in her cigarette boat chair and pulls her abdominals in and flexes her shoulders back to make her breasts stand up perfectly, and she wants all esos gringos y gringas to stare at her and she wants to catch them staring… that one!… that one?… that one over there?—
Norman feeds another gulp of fuel to the engines, and they really ROAR this time, and he starts smiling a comradely smile and pointing at nobody in particular and waving at—empty spaces, so far as she can tell, and gunning the big engines with a bigger louder roar than ever, then cutting back as quietly.
Magdalena said, “Norman—what… are… you… doing?”
A knowing smile: “You’ll see. You just keep looking luscious, the way you do right now.” He thrust his own chest out in an admiring pantomime of hers. Magdalena was pleased in spite of herself.
They were trolling ::::::for what?:::::: along the biggest lineup yet. Magdalena counted thirteen boats—or was it fourteen?—all of them on the large side, and at one end, two sailboats, one of them a schooner with enormous sails. This huge lineup excited Norman. He began going all out with the sound-offs, from growl to ROAR… the broad confident grins… the waving at imaginary people…
They were halfway down the lineup when a boy up on a deck shouted, “Hey, man! Didn’t I just see you on TV?”
Norman put on a big congenial smile and said, “Could be!”
The boy shouted, “60 Minutes, right?”
Now Magdalena could see which boy. “You were on fire, man! You really had that little fucker… you had him like I mean all fucked up!”
From what Magdalena could tell from down here, he was a good-looking boy—early twenties?—with a head of long, thick hair brushed back into great sun-bleached brown leonine locks like Tarzan’s and a perfect tan that made his long white teeth light up every time he smiled. He smiled a lot. He was tickled pink to have a noted TV schloctor doctor looking up at him… whatever his name might be.
“I got it!” shouted the boy. “Dr…. Lewis!”
“Norman Lewis!” shouted Norman. “I’m Norman… and this is Magdalena!”
“I would!” said the boy. He sounded drunk. He had a jumbo container in one hand.
“Me, too!” said another boy.
Magdalena didn’t go for that. It came across as mockery.
Ironic whistles… Quite a little cluster of people had gathered at the railing. The suntanned boy with the teeth shouted down, “Hey, Dr. Lewis—Norman—why don’t you and Madelaine—”
“Magdalena!” said Norman.
“I would!” said the boy. Obviously he was very proud of this rhetorical leap of vaguely sexual logic.
“Me, too!” said the other boy, and all the kids laughed. There was a real throng of them up there on the deck.
“Why don’t you and Magdalena—”
“I would!” two of the boys at the railing shouted in unison, and others took up the cry, “I definitely would!”
“—come up and have a drink!” the first boy continued.
“Well…” Norman paused, as if such an invitation had never occurred to him… “Okay! Great! Thanks!”