“LaVerne! Swim!” Now it wasn’t just fear; now it was terror.
LaVerne looked up, maybe not hearing the terror but at least hearing the urgency. She looked puzzled but she dog-paddled faster, closing the distance to the ladder.
“Randy, what’s wrong with you?” Deke asked.
Randy looked to the side again and saw the thing fold itself around the raft’s square comer. For a moment it looked like a Pac-Man image with its mouth open to eat electronic cookies. Then it slipped all the way around the comer and began to slide along the raft, one of its edges now straight.
“Help me get her up!” Randy grunted to Deke, and reached for her hand. “Quick!”
Deke shrugged good-naturedly and reached for LaVerne’s other hand. They pulled her up and onto the raft’s board surface bare seconds before the black thing slid by the ladder, its sides dimpling as it slipped past the ladder’s uprights.
“Randy, have you gone crazy?” LaVerne was out of breath, a little. frightened. Her nipples were clearly visible through the bra. They stood out in cold hard points.
“That thing,” Randy said, pointing. “Deke? What is it?”
Deke spotted it. It had reached the left-hand comer of the raft. It drifted off a little to one side, reassuming its round shape. It simply floated there. The four of them looked at it.
“Oil slick, I guess,” Deke said.
“You really racked my knee,” Rachel said, glancing at the dark thing on the water and then back at Randy. “You—”
“It’s not an oil slick,” Randy said. “Did you ever see a round oil slick? That thing looks like a checker.”
“I never saw an oil slick at all,” Deke replied. He was talking to Randy but he was looking at LaVerne. LaVerne’s panties were almost as transparent as her bra, the delta of her sex sculpted neatly in silk, each buttock a taut crescent. “I don’t even believe in them. I’m from Missouri.”
“I’m going to bruise,” Rachel said, but the anger had gone out of her voice. She had seen Deke looking at LaVerne.
“God, I’m cold,” LaVerne said. She shivered prettily.
“It went for the girls,” Randy said.
“Come on, Pancho. I thought you said you got sober.”
“It went for the girls,” he repeated stubbornly, and thought: No one knows we’re here. No one at all.
“Have you ever seen an oil slick, Pancho?” He had put his arm around LaVerne’s bare shoulders in the same almost-absent way that he had touched Rachel’s breast earlier that day. He, wasn’t touching LaVerne’s breast—not yet, anyway— but his hand was close. Randy found he didn’t care much, one way or another. That black, circular patch on the water. He cared about that.
“I saw one on the Cape, four years ago,” he said. “We all pulled birds out of the surf and tried to clean them off—”
“Ecological, Pancho,” Deke said approvingly. “Mucho ecological, I theenk.”
Randy said, “It was just this big, sticky mess all over the water. In streaks and big smears. It didn’t look like that. It wasn’t, you know, compact.”
It looked like an accident, he wanted to say. That thing doesn’t look like an accident; it looks like it’s on purpose.
“I want to go back now,” Rachel said. She was still looking at Deke and LaVerne. Randy saw dull hurt in her face. He doubted if she knew it showed.
“So go,” LaVerne said. There was a look on her face—the clarity of absolute triumph, Randy thought, and if the thought seemed pretentious, it also seemed exactly right. The expression was not aimed precisely at Rachel ... but neither was LaVerne trying to hide it from the other girl.
She moved a step closer to Deke; a step was all there was. Now their hips touched lightly. For one brief moment Randy’s attention passed from the thing floating on the water. and focused on LaVerne with an almost exquisite hate. Although he had never hit a girl, in that one moment he could have hit her with real pleasure. Not because he loved her (he had been a little infatuated with her, yes, and more than a little horny for her, yes, and a lot jealous when she had begun to come on to Deke back at the apartment, oh yes, but he wouldn’t have brought a girl he actually loved within fifteen miles of Deke in the first place), but because he knew that expression on Rachel’s face—how that expression felt inside.
“I’m afraid,” Rachel said.
“Of an oil slick?” LaVerne asked incredulously, and then laughed. The urge