Эд Макбейн - Last Summer

“Well, sure,” David said, “we’re not kids here.”

“That’s right,” Sandy said, “we ought to get that straight.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, let’s really be honest with each other all the time, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

“You’re blushing.”

“Am I?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I’ve never talked to a girl this way.”

“I’ve never talked to a boy this way,” Sandy said.

“So it’s good,” David said, and shrugged.

“Yes, it is,” Sandy said. “I think it is.”

“He’s still blushing.”

“No, I was thinking about something else.”

“What?”

“Listen, are we really... I mean, it’s never gonna go beyond the three of us, is it?”

“Of course not. If you ever told anyone I took off the top of my bathing suit...”

“Oh, come on, Sandy, why would we do that?”

“Well, boys sometimes...”

“Hey, come on, I thought this was something different.”

“Well, it is. ”

“Then...”

“All right, I’m sorry,” she said.

“Well, okay,” David said.

“I said I was sorry.”

“Either we trust each other or we don’t,” David said.

“I trust you both,” Sandy said.

“Well, we trust you, too,” David said.

“Yes, we do.”

“Good,” Sandy said, and we all drank again. “Tell us,” she said to me.

“It’s pretty disgusting.”

“How bad can it be?”

“What’d you do?”

“Well, I made Ritz cracker sandwiches out of cream cheese and snot, and gave them to my cousin to eat.”

David and Sandy both burst out laughing at the same time, surprising me. I’d thought they would kick me out of the tent or something, but instead they were laughing.

“Jesus, that’s a great idea!” David said.

“Well, it was pretty disgusting,” I said, but I was tremendously relieved.

“ I’ve got a cousin I’d like to do that to,” Sandy said, laughing.

“Only it wouldn’t be snot, ” David said, and rolled over on the blanket laughing, knocking over a bottle of beer, and almost knocking down the umbrella and the poncho. Sandy and I jumped on him and began punching him on the back, and finally poured a full bottle of beer all over him.

We had each sneaked six-packs out of our respective refrigerators. We drank almost all the beer, and buried the rest in the sand, marking off the distance from a telephone pole with the number 7-381 on it on a small aluminum strip. It was still raining when we decided to go into the water. The beach was empty, the waves were still pounding in and dragging up a lot of muck. David and I took off our sweaters. I chased David into the water, and then we shouted for Sandy to come in.

“Just a second,” she yelled from inside the poncho tent, and then she came out, still wearing her sweatshirt, and holding the top part of her suit in her hands. She looked out over the water, gave a shrug, and threw the top back inside. Then she pulled the sweatshirt over her head, and came running down toward the water, shrieking and yelling.

She had very small breasts.

I thought we did a very good job with the gull, if I must say so myself.

To begin with, he turned out to be a very husky old bird, ready to fly off long before the wound in his neck had healed entirely. The day after Sandy got the collar and leash on him, in fact, he fluttered out of his cardboard box, and immediately crouched over low, beak thrust forward, wings back, like a swimmer about to do a racing dive. He gave a sudden spring into the air, opened his wings wide, flapped them wildly, got pulled up short by the leash attached to the porch railing, and came right down on his head. Gaining his feet again, he looked at the three of us in a hurt, bewildered way, and then gave it another try, going through the same crouching routine, and the springing, and the flapping and fluttering, this time squawking mightily and attracting the attention of several other gulls who swooped low over the house and began squawking back at him. Sandy and David and I sat on the porch steps, watching as he got himself set for another try, crouching, and then coming down the runway for a takeoff and then going into his nosedive again when the leash played out and the collar caught his throat.

I was beginning to think he was pretty stupid.

He must have tried it at least two dozen times before he began to get the feeling that perhaps something was preventing him from taking off as was his usual custom. The gulls circling the house lost interest (they had probably thought food was involved and then realized there wouldn’t be any handouts) and flew off. The bird gazed at them wistfully, it seemed to me, and then glared at the three of us where we sat quietly watching him. Suspiciously, he looked up at the sky again, apparently thinking there was some sort of trick involved here, some unseen force putting the whammie on him, and decided to dispense with his usual preparations for flight, surprising his invisible opponent instead by leaping into the air without a preliminary crouch. His new tactic earned him only another fall. He came crashing down quite hard this time. For a few minutes I figured he might have to go into surgery again, for the brain this time. But he staggered to his feet once more, looked balefully at us, and gave a squawk as if to say You bastards, what’s the secret here, why can’t I fly? Then he began pacing around the deck in the short circle proscribed by the length of the leash, took a cautious flutter up to the deck railing and actually pecked at the leash once or twice before trying to take off from his new perch — which only netted him another crashing blow to the cerebellum.

“He’s gonna kill himself,” David said.

“No, he’ll catch on,” Sandy answered.

I wasn’t so sure.

To my surprise, though, the bird kept trying, seeming to gain a little more knowledge with each attempt, and at last learning that his own force being exerted against the leash was what snapped him back so fiercely each time. Once he understood the phenomenon, he ceased fighting the leash, and fluttered up tentatively to hover on the air instead, simply soared up quietly to the limit the leash allowed and then hung there and stared down at us with, it seemed to me, an altogether unwarranted look of smugness.

“I think he’s got it,” David said.

“By George, he’s got it,” I said.

Whereupon the bird dropped silently to the deck, tucked in his wings, walked to the box, gave a flying leap into it, squawked once, and hunched himself down into the paper scraps Sandy had arranged there for him.

“He’s a smart old bird,” Sandy said. “You’ll see.”

The very next day, the smart old bird zoomed up out of his box again, almost broke his neck against the restraining leash, and came crashing down to the hard wooden floor of the deck. It seemed apparent to me that he had a very short memory and an IQ of perhaps 60 or 70, but Sandy insisted he was the most brilliant bird she had ever seen, and that it was only a matter of time before he understood completely. I thought it would only be a matter of time before he fractured his skull. In fact, I think he managed to survive only because Sandy’s mother began sounding off just then about having a sea gull living in a cardboard box on her sundeck and making a mess.

Sandy’s mother was a divorcée, which meant that she gave a lot of parties and entertained a lot of people, so I guess the gull did at first present a pretty menacing picture, staring with an angry yellow eye from the depths of his cardboard nest, like a phoenix waiting to rise in anger, hardly the proper stimulus for cocktail conversation. It began to be a regular melody and counterpoint, as David described it, the gull banging his head on the deck and Sandy’s mother in the background nagging all the time, get rid of that horrid old bird, get him off the porch, he frightens my friends, look at the mess he’s making, and so on.