The Best of Sci-Fi-5

She dropped him down, letting him kind of slide with her arms still around him. It hurt and she could see there was a shallow, half-inch piece bitten right out.

“He bit me again,” she shouted, hearing Ben at the door. “He bit me. A real piece out even, and look, he has it in his mouth still.”

“God, what a…”

“Don’t hurt him. I already slapped him good for the floor and three is a hard age.” She pulled at Ben’s arm. “It says so in the books. Three is hard, it says.” But she remembered it really said that three was a beginning to be cooperative age.

He let go and Littleboy ran out of the kitchen back toward the bedrooms.

She took a deep breath. “I’ve just got to get out of this house. I mean really away.”

She sat down and let him wash the place and cross two bandaids over it. “Do you think we could go? Do you think we could go just one more time with a blanket and a picnic lunch? I’ve just got to do something .”

“All right. All right. You wear the wrench in your belt and I’ll wear the hammer, and we’ll risk taking the car.”

She spent twenty minutes looking for bathing suits and not finding them, and then she stopped because she knew it didn’t really matter, there probably wouldn’t be anyone there.

The picnic was simple enough. She gathered it together in five minutes, a precious can of tuna fish and hard, homemade biscuits baked the evening before when the electricity had come on for a while, and shriveled, worm-eaten apples, picked from neighboring trees and hoarded all winter in another house that had a cellar.

She heard Ben banging about in the garage, measuring out gas from his cache of cans, ten miles’ worth to put in the car and ten miles’ worth in a can to carry along and hide someplace for the trip back.

Now that he had decided they would go, her mind began to be full of what-ifs. Still, she thought, she would not change her mind. Surely once in four years was not too often to risk going to the beach. She had thought about it all last year too, and now she was going and she would enjoy it.

She gave Littleboy an apple to keep him busy and she packed the lunch in the basket, all the time pressing her lips tight together, and she said to herself that she was not going to think of any more what-ifs, and she was going to have a good time.

Ben had switched after the war from the big-finned Dodge to a small and rattly European car. They fitted into it cozily, the lunch in back with the army blanket and a pail and shovel for playing in the sand, and Littleboy in front on her lap, his hair brushing her cheek as he turned, looking out.

They started out on the empty road. “Remember how it was before on a weekend?” she said, and laughed. “Bumper to bumper, they called it. We didn’t like it then.”

A little way down they passed an old person on a bicycle, in jeans and a bright shirt with the tail out. They couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, but the person smiled and they waved and called, “Aaa.”

The sun was hot, but as they neared the beach there began to be a breeze and she could smell the sea. She began to feel as she had the very first time she had seen it. She had been born in Ohio and she was twelve before she had taken a trip and come out on the wide, flat, sunny sands and smelled this smell.

She held Littleboy tight though it made him squirm, and she leaned against Ben’s shoulder. “Oh, it’s going to be fun!” she said. “Littleboy, you’re going to see the sea. Look, darling, keep watching, and smell. It’s delicious.” And Littleboy squirmed until she let go again.

Then, at last, there was the sea, and it was exactly as it had always been, huge and sparkling and making a sound like… no, drowning out the noises of wars. Like the black sky with stars, or the cold and stolid moon, it dwarfed even what had happened.

Theypassed the long, brick bathhouses, looking about as they always had, but the boardwalks between were gone, as Ben had said, not a stick left of them.

“Let’s stop at the main bathhouse.”

“No,” Ben said. “We better keep away from those places. You can’t tell who’s in there. I’m going way down beyond.”

She was glad, really, especially because at the last bathhouse she thought she saw a dark figure duck behind the wall.

They went down another mile or so, then drove the car off behind some stunted trees and bushes.

“Nothing’s going to spoil this Saturday,” she said, pulling out the picnic things, “just nothing. Come, Littleboy.” She kicked off her shoes and started running for the beach, the basket bouncing against her knee.

Littleboy slipped out of his roomy sneakers easily and scampered after her. “You can take your clothes off,” she told him. “There’s nobody here at all.”

When Ben came, later, after hiding the gas, she was settled, flat on the blanket in old red shorts and a halter, and still the same green kerchief, and Littleboy, brown and naked, splashed with his pail in the shallow water, the wetness bringing out the hairs along his back.

“Look,” she said, “nobody as far as you can see and you can see so far. It gives you a different feeling from home. You know there are people here and there in the houses, but here, it’s like we were the only ones, and here it doesn’t even matter. Like Adam and Eve, we are, just you and me and our baby.”

He lay on his stomach next to her. “Nice breeze,” he said.

Shoulder to shoulder they watched the waves and the gulls and Littleboy, and later they splashed in the surf and then ate the lunch and lay watching again, lazy, on their stomachs. And after a while she turned on her back to see his face. “With the sea it doesn’t matter at all,” she said and she put her arm across his shoulder. “And we’re just part of everything, the wind and the earth and the sea too, my Adam.”

“Eve,” he said and smiled and kissed her and it was a longer kiss than they had meant. “Myra. Myra.”

“There’s nobody but us.”

She sat up. “I don’t even know a doctor since Press Smith was killed by those robbing kids and I’d be scared.”

“We’ll find one. Besides, you didn’t have any trouble. It’s been so damn long.” She pulled away from his arm. “And I love you. And Littleboy, he’ll be way over four by the time we’d have another one.”

She stood up and stretched and then looked down the beach and Ben put a hand around her ankle. She looked down the other way. “Somebody’s coming,” she said, and then he got up too.

Far down, walking in a business-like way on the hard, damp part of the sand, three men were coming toward them.

“You got your wrench?” Ben asked. “Put it just under the blanket and sit down by it, but keep your knees under you.”

He put his tee shirt back on, leaving it hanging out, and he hooked the hammer under his belt in back, the top covered by the shirt. Then he stood and waited for them to come.

They were all three bald and shirtless. Two wore jeans cut off at the knees and thick belts, and the other had checked shorts and a red leather cap and a pistol stuck in his belt in the middle of the front at the buckle. He was older. The others looked like kids and they held back as they neared and let the older one come up alone. He was a small man, but looked tough. “You got gas,” he said, a flat-voiced statement of fact.

“Just enough to get home.”

“I don’t mean right here. You got gas at home is what I mean.”

Myra sat stiffly, her hand on the blanket on top of where the wrench was. Ben was a little in front of her and she could see his curving, forward-sloping shoulders and the lump of the hammer-head at the small of his back. If he stood up straight, she thought, and held his shoulders like they ought to be, he would look broad and even taller and he would show that little man, but the other had the pistol. Her eyes kept coming back to its shining black.