watch the thing was bliss. He watched LaVerne instead, making sure that her eyes kept shifting away from the thing on the water.
“What are we going to do, Randy?”
He thought.
“Wait,” he said.
At the end of fifteen minutes he stood up and let her first sit and then lie down for half an hour. Then he got her on her feet again and she stood for fifteen minutes. They went back and forth. At a quarter of ten, a cold rind of moon rose and beat a path across the water. At ten-thirty, a shrill, lonely cry rose, echoing across the water, and LaVerne shrieked.
“Shut up,” he said. “It’s just a loon.”
“I’m freezing, Randy—I’m numb all over.”
“I can’t do anything about it.”
“Hold me,” she said. “You’ve got to. We’ll hold each other. We can both sit down and watch it together.”
He debated, but the cold sinking into his own flesh was now bone-deep, and that decided him. “Okay.”
They sat together, arms wrapped around each other, and something happened—natural or perverse, it happened. He felt himself stiffening. One of his hands found her breast, cupped in damp nylon, and squeezed. She made a sighing noise, and her hand stole to the crotch of his underpants.
He slid his other hand down and found a place where there was some heat. He pushed her down on her back.
“No,” she said, but the hand in his crotch began to move faster.
“I can see it,” he said. His heartbeat had sped up again, pushing blood faster, pushing warmth toward the surface of his chilled bare skin. “I can watch it.”
She murmured something, and he felt elastic slide down his hips to his upper thighs. He watched it. He slid upward, forward, into her. Warmth. God, she was warm there, at least. She made a guttural noise and her fingers grabbed at his cold, clenched buttocks.
He watched it. It wasn’t moving. He watched it. He watched it closely. The tactile sensations were incredible, fantastic. He was not experienced, but neither was he a virgin; he had made love with three girls and it had never been like this. She moaned and began to lift her hips. The raft rocked gently, like the world’s hardest waterbed. The barrels underneath murmured hollowly.
He watched it. The colors began to swirl—slowly now, sensuously, not threatening; he watched it and he watched the colors. His eyes were wide. The colors were in his eyes. He wasn’t cold now; he was hot now, hot the way you got your first day back on the beach in early June, when you could feel the sun tightening your winter-white skin, reddening it, giving it some
(colors)
color, some tint. First day at the beach, first day of summer, drag out the Beach Boys oldies, drag out the Ramones. The Ramones were telling you that Sheena is a punk rocker, the Ramones were telling you that you can hitch a ride to Rockaway Beach, the sand, the beach, the colors
(moving it’s starting to move)
and the feel of summer, the texture; Gary U.S. Bonds, school is out and I can root for the Yankees from the bleachers, girls in bikinis on the beach, the beach, the beach, oh do you love do you love
(love)
the beach do you love
(love I love)
firm breasts fragrant with Coppertone oil, and if the bottom of the bikini was small enough you might see some
(hair her hair HER HAIR IS IN THE OH GOD IN THE WATER HER HAIR)
He pulled back suddenly, trying to pull her up, but the thing moved with oily speed and tangled itself in her hair like a webbing of thick black glue and when he pulled her up she was already screaming and she was heavy with it; it came out of the water in a twisting, gruesome membrane that rolled with flaring nuclear colors—scarlet-vermilion, flaring emerald, sullen ocher.
It flowed down over LaVerne’s face in a tide, obliterating it.
Her feet kicked and drummed. The thing twisted and moved where her face had been. Blood ran down her neck in streams. Screaming, not hearing himself scream, Randy ran at her, put his foot against her hip, and shoved. She went flopping and tumbling over the side, her legs like alabaster in the moonlight. For a few endless moments the water frothed and splashed against the side of the raft, as if someone had hooked the world’s largest bass in there and it was fighting like hell.
Randy screamed. He screamed. And then, for variety, he screamed some more.