Эд Макбейн - Last Summer

Eventually, I stopped trembling.

The fire, of course, had taken place long before I was born. The way it was told to me, it had started in the only house on the edge of the forest, a modern structure with sliding screens and a wide deck that faced the rising sun. The man and woman living there had been having trouble for a good many years, constantly threatening divorce, even coming to blows one night in public at The Blue Grotto. On the night of the fire, they’d had a terrible argument, and the man had seized the nearest object at hand, a lighted kerosene lamp, and thrown it at his wife. Her nylon gown had gone up in flames. Shrieking in terror, she had raced outdoors, dropping tatters of fire into the adjacent brush. It had been a dry summer, and there was a high wind that night. The flames leaped from bush to bush, eventually reaching the forest itself, where the wilting pines supplied fresh fuel for the blaze. The summer people stood in panic on the beach, watching the flames billow up into the sky, a dense black cloud of smoke hanging over the forest, the strong wind and the flying sparks threatening to spread the fire everywhere. The only thing that saved the island was a sudden crosswind that turned the flames back upon themselves.

Before that day with Sandy, I could never think of that ancient fire without scaring myself. Whenever the wind was unusually high, I would look southward from the back porch of our house and visualize those billowing flames, that hanging black cloud, the slender woman rushing in terror through the brush. Oh yes, the islanders had since built a firehouse and supplied it with a shining engine and a siren that could be heard all the way over on the mainland. And yes, there was a volunteer fire department now, and everyone had been alerted to and understood the possible danger. But it had happened once, and my constant fear was that it might happen again — and this time no lucky crosswind would spring up to prevent a total holocaust. The fear was unrealistic, I guess, but that didn’t make it any less frightening. On particularly anxious days, I would find myself hating those long-ago people who had allowed such a thing to happen. Why did I have to tremble now for something they had been unable to prevent? Why did I even have to consider the possibility of another fire?

And then, the day Sandy sat beside me, everything seemed suddenly all right. Smiling encouragement, inviting me to look and admire, she forced from my mind all previous knowledge of that horrible place. There beside her, I was able to dismiss the evidence of devastation all around me and consider the fire a legend passed from generation to generation (Have you heard of the terrible fire of ’45, horrible, we hope and pray it will never happen here again), but only a legend. Besides, legend or not, we’d had nothing to do with that ancient fire — and so, guiltless, we could sit in the sunshine with the burnt and stunted trees all around us, secure in the knowledge that what we did now was also quite innocent: Sandy showed me her breasts. That was all. So, we concerned ourselves only with the present. The present was figuring out the answers to a questionnaire that would later be electronically computerized in an attempt to find the perfect date for Sandy. The present was Sandy herself sitting half-naked beside me in the ruins of the forest.

When David was finally sprung and we told him what had happened, he agreed with us that we’d done nothing wrong, and said he was only sorry he hadn’t been there. In fact, he said, hadn’t we all seen at least that much in the pages of Playboy? This was a point neither Sandy nor I had considered before. We agreed now that there was great validity to it, and immediately stopped arguing the morality of what had happened. In dismissal, Sandy mentioned that she’d also seen a picture of the highly respectable Countess Christina Paolozzi in Vogue , naked to the waist, “and she has even smaller breasts than mine, so there,” she said, and stuck out her tongue. We all laughed and said the hell with it.

Besides, we had already embarked on a new project.

The day after David was sprung, Sandy came up with an idea for the further training of the gull. It seemed to her that since it had been so easy (ha!) to leash-train the bird, it should be even simpler to teach him something for which he had a natural talent, namely, to fly over our heads wherever we went.

“That’s impossible,” I said.

“It can be done,” Sandy said.

“Not even with a homing pigeon, which he isn’t.”

“It can be done,” Sandy insisted. “And if you won’t help me, I’ll just have to do it alone.”

“Here comes the damsel-in-distress routine,” David said, and rolled his eyes.

“Well, why do I always have to beg you?” Sandy said.

“Where’s your violin, David?” I said.

“What key shall I play it in?”

“You’re both louses,” Sandy said.

We bought a fifty-foot reel of ten-pound nylon fish-line, and fastened one end of it to the metal loop in the bird’s collar. Then we led him out to the point, where we figured there would be fewer distractions than anywhere else on the island — except perhaps the forest — and fastened the other end of the line to a heavy piece of driftwood partially submerged in the sand. The bird didn’t know what we wanted at first. We all kept running up to him and fluttering our hands at him and shouting, “Shoo, bird!” or “Let’s go, bird!” but he was so used to our antics and our presence that he merely sat unblinkingly in the sand without so much as rustling a feather.

“He thinks we’re crazy,” I said.

“We are crazy,” David said.

Sandy walked over to where the bird was calmly observing us. She put her hands on her hips and stood over him menacingly. “Listen, bird,” she said, “we want you to fly.”

“That’s it,” David said, “talk to him. You’re sure to get results that way.”

“Just shut up, David,” she said, without turning. “You hear me, bird? You’re going to fly.”

“He hears you,” David said.

“David, I’m warning you.”

“You hear her, bird?”

“Come on, you damn bird,” Sandy said, and picked him up in both hands and threw him violently into the air. The gull took wing for just an instant, more a braking action than anything else, and then gently fluttered back to the sand again.

“We’ll have to take turns,” Sandy said.

“Doing what?”

“Throwing him up.”

“Look, Ma, I’m throwing up a sea gull,” David said.

“David, today you’re obnoxious,” Sandy said.

“I know.”

“Well, try not to be.”

“I can’t help it. I’ve been without you for too long a time.”

“Oh, boy,” Sandy said.

“It’s true.”

“Yeah,” Sandy said, and walked over to the bird again. Crouching beside him in the sand, she very softly said, “Listen, bird, I’m going to keep tossing you up in the air until you start flying, you hear me?”

“I hear you,” David answered in a high falsetto voice.

Sandy picked up the bird. “Here we go,” she said, and flung him into the air. But he only spread his wings in the earlier braking motion, and drifted down to the ground again.

“He’s the same brilliant bird he always was,” I said, and David laughed.

“You’re a lot of help,” Sandy said.

“What do you think, Wilbur?” I said.

“Orville, you’ll never get that crate off the ground,” David answered.

“You’re both hilarious,” Sandy said. She walked over to the gull again. “Bird,” she said, “you’re getting me sore.”

“You’re frightening me,” David said in his falsetto.