Эд Макбейн - Last Summer

We had seen some of the friends Sandy’s mother dragged out to the island, however, and it was our opinion — all three of us — that if the gull succeeded in scaring off even a few of them, he’d be performing a great service. The one we particularly disliked, and whom we cut up with regularity every Monday afternoon (he usually spent the weekend and left by helicopter early Monday morning) was a lawyer who had an office on Pine Street downtown. He was a tubby little man who always wore a white tee shirt over his bathing suit, even when he went into the water. “I have very fair skin,” he told anyone who would listen, “I turn lobster red in the sun.” It was Sandy’s opinion that Snow White, as we called him, was sleeping with her mother, and the thought nauseated all of us, Sandy especially. He had a habit of saying “Point of fact” before he began a statement, regardless of whether what he as about to say was really fact. “Point of fact,” he would say, “most people dislike turnips,” or something equally stupid. He drank martinis made only with Booth’s gin; Sandy’s mother kept a bottle especially for him. He hated the gull. When we first began our training program, we toyed with the idea of teaching the bird to bite him. On the ass was where we had in mind.

But because of the pressure from Sandy’s mother, we finally moved the bird from the deck to the back of the house, which didn’t turn out too badly after all. There was a shed back there which was used for storing the garbage cans. Since the bird would eat practically anything we tossed him, it was very convenient being so close to the garbage cans. What we did was drill a hole near the top of a piece of lead pipe and then put a long bolt through the hole, making a cross-piece around which we could loop the end of the gull’s leash. Then we sank three feet of the pipe into the sand near the shed, leaving six or seven inches exposed. Sandy was afraid the bird would be smart enough (a premise I seriously doubted) to figure out how to lift the leash off the cross bolt. David, however, insisted that this was the only way to tether a bird, he naturally having tethered thousands and thousands of birds in his life, so Sandy accepted his judgment, and the training began in earnest.

The gull was much happier with his new surroundings. If you are the type of stupid bird who keeps landing on your head, it’s better by a long shot to have a sand pile to practice on, rather than a wooden deck. Eventually, of course, the leash made its point. The gull was a captive, and he realized it at last and became the first walking bird in the history of America. In fact, Sandy got him to the point where he was almost heeling, though most of the time he just strutted along either ahead or behind. Every now and then, he’d try to take off, forgetting that he wasn’t supposed to fly. But Sandy would give a short sharp snap of the leash, and he’d come back down, squawking a little (he was really a cantankerous old crank) but walking along nonetheless, and waiting for his reward from the small bag of garbage one or the other of us always carried.

We even took him out on the sailboat several times, though the sight of him tied to a deck cleat, staring into the wind, his feathers bristling, always gave me a funny feeling. As though he were an old Greek slave who had been captured by the Romans, faithful to them, but always pining for Athens or someplace. That was the feeling I got whenever I watched him on the deck of the boat, peering into the wind with his yellow eyes.

The boat belonged to my father, but he let us use her whenever we wanted to, except on weekends. She was a fiber-glass auxiliary, a twenty-footer with a mainsail and jib. There were two berths in the cabin, and the cockpit — more than six feet long — provided sleeping accommodations for another two as well. There was a built-in icebox and a concealed head, a sink, and a water tank, a hanging locker and an outboard in a well, an enclosed motor compartment and a canvas dodger that provided full headroom in the galley. She was a nice little boat, and we probably used her more often than my father did that summer. Between the day of the truth serum and the day David got grounded — that was a full week — we had the boat out four times, which was an awful lot considering we were trying to train a bird at the same time.

The boat was moored at the island marina, a combination boatel with twelve cottages, run by a very fat flamboyant old lady who wore pendant earrings even in the morning. Her name was Violet, and she was always surrounded by a lot of fags; David’s father called her the Queen Bee. She had orange hair, and she wore white makeup; she truly was a pretty frightening old dame. But she also knew a lot about boats, and once she helped me locate and repair a broken spring in the engine.

The three of us — four, counting the gull — would go down to the marina early in the morning, stow our gear in the cockpit, buy whatever supplies we needed from Violet, and then go out under power until we hit open water. David and I would then hoist the sails, and off we’d go, skimming the water. Sandy sitting in the stern in a bikini, the wooden tiller tucked under her slender arm, her eyes the color of the blue fiber-glass hull, her grin cracking wide across her face. Sometimes we’d furl the sails and just let the boat drift, lying on deck and soaking up sun, David’s transistor radio tuned to ABC, or sometimes QXR. He was a music major at Music and Art, and he played the flute like an angel, both jazz and classical, but he very rarely foisted long-hair music on us, and usually we just listened to Ron Lundy or Dan Ingram or one of the other great disk jockeys. The gull would give a squawk every now and then, and Sandy would lazily say, “Oh, shut up, bird,” and then roll over to get the sun on her back. We had snorkels and fins and masks, and whenever we found a little cove where the water seemed brighter than the rest of the Sound, we’d go over the side looking for crabs and small fish, but there really wasn’t very much to see.

It was Violet who suggested we try an island some six miles due north of Greensward. She had started selling us six-packs even though it was against the law. I think she had her eye on David. She always used to put her arm around his shoulder when we came in, or stand close to him with her enormous hanging breasts pressed against his arm. David complained that he had never met a more repulsive woman in his life, and he pointed out something we had missed about her, the fact that she smelled of pumpkin.

“Have you ever cleaned out the insides of a pumpkin on Halloween,” he said, “the smell of the gooky seedy pulp inside? That’s what Violet smells like when you get close to heir.”

David was the first one to notice this, of course, because she always seemed to be standing closest to him , but once he told us about it, we got the whiff, too. I thought it was disgusting and surmised it was from hanging around with fags, because they all wear the same secret perfume that goes out on the air to other fags everywhere, the way some species of animals send out musk. Anyway, Violet smelled like a pumpkin, and she liked David very much, and because of him she sold us beer on the sneak. We had to go around to the back door for it. We usually took only two six-packs with us when we went out on the boat. It is very easy to get bombed out of your mind, and on a sailboat it’s important to know what you’re doing at all times.

On this one morning in the third week of July, the four of us marched around to Violet’s marina — the official name of the place was The Blue Grotto — and Sandy and I waited out front while David went around back to get the beer. We were surprised to see Violet because she usually made it her business to be where-ever David was, but this morning she popped out of the front screen door, smelling of pumpkin as usual, and asked us if we had heard about this delightful little island six miles due north. Violet had a way of using words one usually associated with tiny women. She must have weighed a hundred and eighty pounds, and she wore flowered muu muus that made her look even bigger, but she was always using words like “delicious” and “cunning” and “charming” that made you think of a smaller person.