Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman Page 0,40

were more people there than usual. Tanned young soldiers with buzz cuts and tattooed arms were playing volleyball. Kids were splashing around at the edge of the water, building sand castles and shrieking in delight at each big wave. But there was almost no one in the water; the rafts were deserted. The sky was cloudless, the sun high overhead, the sand hot. It was after two, but the mother and son still hadn’t made their appearance.

I walked out until the water came up to my chest, then did the crawl, heading for the raft on the left. Slowly, testing the resistance of the water with my palms, I swam on, counting the number of strokes. The water was chilly, and it felt good on my suntanned skin. Swimming in such clear water, I could see my own shadow on the sandy bottom, as if I were a bird gliding through the sky. After I had counted forty strokes, I looked up and, sure enough, there was the raft right ahead of me. Exactly ten strokes later, my left hand touched its side. I floated there for a minute, catching my breath, then grabbed hold of the ladder and scrambled aboard.

I was surprised to find someone else already there—an overweight blond woman. I hadn’t seen anyone on the raft when I set out from the beach, so she must have got there while I was swimming toward it. The woman was wearing a tiny bikini—one of those fluttery red things, like the banners Japanese farmers fly in their fields to warn that they’ve just sprayed chemicals—and she was lying facedown. The woman was so obese that the swimsuit looked even smaller than it was. She seemed to have arrived recently—her skin was still pale, without a trace of a tan.

She glanced up for a second and then closed her eyes again. I sat down at the opposite end of the raft, dangled my feet in the water, and looked off at the shore. The mother and son still weren’t under their palm trees. They were nowhere else, either. There was no way I could have missed them; the metal wheelchair, glistening in the sunlight, was a dead giveaway. I felt let down. Without them, a piece of the picture was missing. Perhaps they had checked out of the hotel and gone back to where they came from—wherever that was. When I’d seen them a little earlier, in the hotel restaurant, I hadn’t got the impression that they were preparing to leave. They had taken their time eating the daily special and had quietly drunk a cup of coffee afterward—the same routine as always.

I lay facedown like the blond woman and tanned myself for ten minutes or so, listening to the tiny waves slap against the side of the raft. The drops of water in my ear warmed in the intense sun.

“Boy, it’s hot,” the woman said from the other end of the raft. She had a high-pitched, saccharine kind of voice.

“It sure is,” I replied.

“Do you know what time it is?”

“I don’t have a watch, but it must be around two thirty. Two forty, maybe?”

“Really?” she said, and let out something close to a sigh, as if that might not be the time she was hoping for. Perhaps she didn’t care one way or another about the time.

She sat up. Sweat was beaded on her like flies on food. The rolls of fat started just below her ears and sloped gently down to her shoulders, then in one continuous series down her chubby arms. Even her wrists and ankles seemed to disappear inside those fleshy folds. I couldn’t help thinking of the Michelin Man. As heavy as she was, though, the woman didn’t strike me as unhealthy. She wasn’t bad-looking, either. She simply had too much meat on her bones. I guessed that she was in her late thirties.

“You must have been here a while, you’re so tanned.”

“Nine days.”

“What an amazing tan,” she said. Instead of responding, I cleared my throat. The water in my ears gurgled as I coughed.

“I’m staying at the military hotel,” she said.

I knew the place. It was just down the road from the beach.

“My brother’s a navy officer, and he invited me to come. The navy’s not so bad, you know? The pay’s OK. They’ve got everything you want, right there on the base, plus perks like this resort. It was different when I was in college. That was during the Vietnam War. Having a