Эд Макбейн - Last Summer

We told her we hadn’t heard of the island, and she went inside and came back with a C.&G.S. chart of the area (which we had aboard the boat, anyway) and pointed out a small island shaped like a fishhook.

“You’ve got a good wind today,” she said, “you could make it in little more than an hour.”

It was my guess we could make it in much less than that, but I didn’t say anything.

“What’s so special about it?” Sandy asked, and the gull on his leash squawked, and she said, “Oh, shut up, bird.”

“I saw you going aboard with snorkeling equipment the other day,” Violet said. “There’s some divine snorkeling there.”

“Well, maybe we’ll give it a try,” I said.

“If you’d like me to navigate...” Violet started, and I quickly said, “Thanks, Vi, but that won’t be necessary.”

“Because I’ve been there, you know, and I could help you find it.”

“Well,” I said, tactfully, I thought, “we’ve got this identical chart aboard, and I’m sure we can find it without any trouble at all. But thanks a lot.”

“Be sure you go in through the channel,” Violet said.

“We’ll be very careful,” I promised.

David came around the corner of the boatel just then, with the two six-packs wrapped in his poncho.

“What’s up?” he said.

“Good morning, David,” Violet said, and moved over close to him with her pumpkin aroma.

“We’re going to try this new island,” Sandy said.

“I’ll come along if you want me to,” Violet said, and smiled at David.

“Gee, thanks a lot, Vi,” David said, “but that won’t be necessary.”

“Do the two of you always give the same answers?” Violet asked.

“The three of us,” Sandy corrected.

“Thanks a lot, though, Vi,” David called over his shoulder, and we all went down to the boat.

It was a gorgeous day, sunny and hot — I had to take off my sweatshirt — but there was a nice breeze, too, and not a cloud in the sky. Standing on the deck of the boat in surfing trunks and a floppy blue hat, I could see for miles and miles, everything so sharp and clear and true, the mainsail billowing out in a good strong wind, David leaning on the cockpit in his white tennis shorts, Sandy at the tiller in a lacy bikini and a straw hat with ragged edges, we were some motley crew. The gull, tethered to his usual cleat just aft of the cockpit, was staring into the wind the way he always did, squawking every now and then, to which Sandy every now and then would say, “Oh, shut up, bird.”

We found the island without any trouble.

The channel was clearly marked on our chart, and it showed a depth of seven feet in the center, which was fine since the boat had a draft of three feet with the stick down. We anchored close in, and Sandy and I put on the masks and fins and jumped over. The bird gave a little squawk as we went over the side, and David told him to shut up. David had opened a can of beer and was serving as lookout.

There wasn’t much to see down there. I was beginning to think Violet had made up the whole snorkeling thing in the hope we’d ask her to come along. Sandy and I dove for about a half hour, and then David went in with her, but all any of us saw were a couple of crabs and some eels, and the usual quota of beer bottles and sneakers and junk. We lay around on deck in the sun afterward, and then had our lunch and decided to explore the island. We left the bird tethered to his cleat, and swam in.

The beach was flat and pebbly where we came ashore, a dune rising up behind it, covered with beach plum and grass. A fisherman’s net, gray and stiff and rotted, hung over the skeleton of a beached rowboat. The charred remains of a fire were near the bow of the boat. A beer can was half-buried in the sand near the fire.

“When we find him,” David said, crouching near the ashes, “we’ll have to give him a name.”

“What’s today?” Sandy asked.

“Monday.”

“Too bad,” she said, and clucked her tongue.

We climbed the dune behind the boat and saw that the island fell away sharply to the south, the land low and dotted with marshes that reflected the sun in a hundred different places, as though someone had spilled a handful of gold coins onto the ground. At the far end of the island, there was a stand of towering pines in dark-green silhouette against the sky.

“It’s a nice island,” Sandy said.

“Mmm.”

“Want to walk it a little?”

“Sure.”

We half-expected to run across someone, I suppose, but we didn’t. The fire near the boat could have been cold for an hour or a day or a week, there was no telling. Traces of humanity were scattered all over the island, though, and it was funny to keep discovering evidence of people without seeing any of the people themselves.

After a while, Sandy said, “We’re Martians who’ve just landed in a spaceship, and we have no idea what human beings are like. All we can do is reconstruct them from their artifacts.”

Then she stooped to pick up a rusty spoon, and a speculated that the people on earth were undoubtedly only a foot high, otherwise why would their shovels be so small? Later, when we found a pair of tattered madras swimming trunks, I said they corrobrated Sandy’s theory since this was obviously a shirt for a creature with a very small chest, and then went on to speculate that earthlings had two heads since there were two neckholes in the garment. But the game was exceedingly difficult to play, and we gave it up after only a few more tries. Linking hands, we shrieked and ran down a sharply sloping, loosely packed stretch of sand that led directly into the pine forest.

It was cool and dark under the trees. I felt, I can’t explain it, I felt a sudden gladness sweep over me, as though my heart were expanding unbearably inside my chest. The forest echoed with life, its luxuriant growth seemed to reach out to me and absorb me so that I felt like a growing thing myself, grasping for the sun. I gripped Sandy’s hand more tightly.

“Listen,” I said.

“I don’t hear anything,” she answered.

“Listen to everything.”

“Neither do I,” David said.

Sandy suddenly pulled her hand away, frowned, and said, “This is creepy.”

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” David said.

They turned and swiftly walked away from me. I could hear the surf far away, the repetition of an insect’s song, the gentle soughing of the wind in the tree-tops. I hesitated only a moment longer and then I followed them.

That night, David got grounded.

This was a full week after the rainy afternoon with the truth serum, and I really thought it was senseless to punish David for something he had done a week before. Besides, when you considered the element of chance involved, the retroactive grounding seemed even more idiotic: if Mr. Porter hadn’t sent his bill on the fifteenth and charged David’s mother twice for the beer, she never would have found out at all. I was disgusted with the whole concept.

The preceding Monday we had each sneaked six-packs of beer out of our refrigerators, this being before we’d made our working arrangement with Violet. Because of the peculiar circular design of David’s house, the storage space was severely limited (not to mention the fact that you couldn’t place anything flush against the curved and sloping walls — maybe David’s father was a lousy architect). So instead of putting one carton of beer in the refrigerator to chill, the way most people do, leaving the spare cartons in the pantry or the closet, in David’s house they would order three six-packs every week and stick all three in the refrigerator. David’s mother always shopped on Saturday, and the truth serum business took place on Monday, and the very next day she noticed that there were only two cartons of beer in the refrigerator instead of three. In fact, there were exactly seven bottles of beer, since David’s father had drunk a few between Saturday and Tuesday, so that was when the first call to Mr. Porter took place. The first call, as it was later revealed, went something like this. David’s mother told Mr. Porter that she was certain he had delivered only two cartons of beer instead of three because here it was only Tuesday and they hadn’t had any weekend guests and yet there were only seven bottles of beer in the refrigerator. Mr. Porter said he had made up the order himself and distinctly remembered putting three six-packs into it, but he would nonetheless send his boy over with an additional carton and, of course, would not charge her for it. So on the following Monday, David’s mother got the bill and, instead of Mr. Porter not charging her for the additional six-pack, he had charged her — and he a millionaire. So David’s mother made the second phone call to Mr. Porter, telling him that he had made a mistake with his bill, and going over the entire incident again, while meanwhile David and Sandy and I were exploring Violet’s island and drinking the beer Violet had sold us.