want to come around. LaVerne did not want to pass Go and collect two hundred dollars or take a ride on the Reading. LaVerne had seen enough. But Randy couldn’t guard her all night, lifting her like a canvas sack every time that thing moved (and you couldn’t look at the thing too long; that was another thing). He had learned a trick, though. He hadn’t learned it in college. He had learned it from a friend of his older brother’s. This friend had been a paramedic in Nam, and he knew all sorts of tricks—how to catch head lice off a human scalp and make them race in a matchbox, how to cut cocaine with baby laxative, how to sew up deep cuts with ordinary needle and thread. One day they had been talking about ways to bring abysmally drunken folks around so these abysmally drunken people wouldn’t puke down their own throats and die, as Bon Scott, the lead singer of AC/DC, had done.
“You want to bring someone around in a hurry?” the friend with the catalogue of interesting tricks had said. “Try this.” And he told Randy the trick which Randy now used.
He leaned over and bit LaVerne’s earlobe as hard as he could.
Hot, bitter blood squirted into his mouth. LaVerne’s eyelids flew up like windowshades. She screamed in a hoarse, growling voice and struck out at him. Randy looked up and saw the far side of the thing only; the rest of it was already under the raft. It had moved with eerie, horrible, silent speed.
He jerked LaVerne up again, his muscles screaming protest, trying to knot into charley horses. She was beating at his face. One of her hands struck his sensitive nose and he saw red stars.
“Quit it!” he shouted, shuffling his feet onto the boards. “Quit it, you bitch, it’s under us again, quit it or I’ll fucking drop you, I swear to God I will!”
Her arms immediately stopped flailing at him and closed quietly around his neck in a drowner’s grip. Her eyes looked white in the swimming starlight.
“Stop it!” She didn’t. “Stop it, LaVerne, you’re choking me!”
Tighter. Panic flared in his mind. The hollow clunk of the barrels had taken on a duller, muffled note—it was the thing underneath, he supposed.
“I can’t breathe!”
The hold loosened a little.
“Now listen. I’m going to put you down. It’s all right if you—”
But put you down was all she had heard. Her arms tightened in that deadly grip again. His right hand was on her back. He hooked it into a claw and raked at her. She kicked her legs, mewling harshly, and for a moment he almost lost his balance. She felt it. Fright rather than pain made her stop struggling.
“Stand on the boards.”
“No!” Her air puffed a hot desert wind against his cheek.
“It can’t get you if you stand on the boards.”
“No, don’t put me down, it’ll get me, I know it will, I know—”
He raked at her back again. She screamed in anger and pain and fear. “You get down or I’ll drop you, LaVerne.”
He lowered her slowly and carefully, both of them breathing in sharp little whines—oboe and flute. Her feet touched the boards. She jerked her legs up as if the boards were hot.
“Put them down!” He hissed at her. “I’m not Deke, I can’t hold you all night!”
“Deke—”
“Dead.”
Her feet touched the boards. Little by little he let go of her. They faced each other like dancers. He could see her waiting for its first touch. Her mouth gaped like the mouth of a goldfish.
“Randy,” she whispered. “Where is it?”
“Under. Look down.”
She did. He did. They saw the blackness stuffing the cracks, stuffing them almost all the way across the raft now. Randy sensed its eagerness, and thought she did, too.
“Randy, please—”
“Shhhh.”
They stood there.
Randy had forgotten to strip off his watch when he ran into the water, and now he marked off fifteen minutes. At a quarter past eight, the black thing slid out from under the raft again. It drew about fifteen feet off and then stopped as it had before.
“I’m going to sit down,” he said.
“No!”
“I’m tired,” he said. “I’m going to sit down and you’re going to watch it. Just remember to keep looking away. Then I’ll get up and you sit down. We go like that. Here.” He gave her his watch. “Fifteen-minute shifts.”