Эд Макбейн: Last Summer

We spent last summer, when I was just sixteen, on an island mistakenly named Greensward, its shores only thinly vegetated with beach grass and plum, its single forest destroyed by fire more than twenty years before. There were perhaps fifty summer homes on the island, most of them gray and clustered safely on the bay side, the remainder strung out along the island’s flanks and on the point jutting insanely into the Atlantic.

It was there that the sea was wildest. It was there that we first met Sandy.

She was standing close to the shoreline as David and I came up the beach behind her, spume exploding on her left, pebbles rolling and tossing in a muddy backwash, a tall girl wearing a white bikini, her hair the color of the dunes, a pale gold that fell loose and long about her face. Her head was studiously bent. Hands on hips, legs widespread, she stood tense and silent, studying something in the sand at her feet. It was a very hot day. The sky over the ocean seemed stretched too tight. An invisible sun seared the naked beach, turning everything intensely white, the bursting waves dissolving into foam, the glaring sky, the endless stretch of sand, the girl standing motionless, her pale hair only faintly stirring. We approached on her left, walking between her and the ocean, turning for a look at her face, her small breasts in the scanty bra top, the gentle curve of her hips above the white bikini pants, the long line of her legs.

The thing lying at her feet in the sand was a sea gull.

“He’s still alive,” she said suddenly, and raised her head to meet our gaze.

Her eyes were a vivid blue, set wide, her nose narrow, flaring suddenly at the nostrils, combining with a full upper lip that curled outward and away from her teeth to give her face a feral look. I guessed she was about fifteen years old. We looked down at the gull. He was a large bird, gray and white. His eyes were closed. He kept working his beak, as though trying to suck in air.

“Yes, he’s alive,” David said.

We were standing with the sun behind us. David was taller than I last summer, a strapping six-footer who’d been lifting weights for four years, ever since he was twelve. I’d always liked his looks, from the first day I met him. He had broad shoulders even then, a narrow waist, chest and abdominal muscles as clean as Alley Oop’s. His eyes were blue, flecked with white, his hair a dusty blond. He had good features, too, and a strong jaw and brow; he looked solid and reliable. My own appearance last summer suggested a sort of vague maturity. I was trying very hard to achieve a sophisticated look, so I wore my brown hair long and combed sideways across my forehead, almost hiding my eyes, which were also brown. But my nose was growing faster than the rest of my face, and my mouth was sprinkled with acne at one corner, and it was pretty difficult to maintain a cool against such odds.

“Get out of the sun,” the girl said, “he needs the sun.”

“The bird?”

“Can’t you see he’s dying?”

“What’s that got to do with the sun?”

“What happened to him, anyway?” David asked.

“I don’t know. I was just walking along, and there he was.”

“Which house are you in?” I asked.

“Up the beach. The Stern house.”

“What’s your name?” David said.

“Sandy.”

“I’m David. This is Peter.”

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi. Will you help me take him off the beach?”

“What for?”

“Get him out of the sun,” Sandy said.

David and I looked at each other.

“Gulls are pretty dirty animals,” David said.

“He’ll die if we don’t help him,” Sandy said.

“He’ll die anyway,” I said.

“Never mind, I’ll do it myself,” Sandy said.

She brushed a strand of hair away from her face, getting sand on her cheek, and then walked off toward the dune while David and I watched. She almost fell climbing the dune, but neither of us dared laugh. She disappeared into the tall beach grass and came back with a large weathered shingle which she carried directly to where the bird was lying on his back in the sand. She did not look at us. Her face was very serious as she bent over the bird and started to shove the shingle under him. The bird gave a shriek just then, and tried to flap his wings. Sandy dropped the shingle, and screamed. She started to turn, and then in her haste merely back-pedaled away from the noisy bird, her eyes wide, her mouth still open around the scream.

“You rats,” she said, standing at a respectable distance from the bird, who was now silent, “why won’t you help me?”

“Because we don’t want to get bit,” I said.

“You can get rabies from those damn things,” David said.

“Oh, rabies, my ass,” Sandy said, and walked back to the gull again, frowning. Gingerly, she picked up the shingle and then cautiously edged it under the bird, who remained motionless and silent this time. Holding him out at arm’s length on the shingle, she began walking toward the dune again. We followed her. The bird attempted to flap his wings again, but all he could manage was a weak flutter. All the while, he kept sucking in air, his beak working. When my grandmother was dying of cancer at New York Hospital, she looked the same way. My father said to me in the corridor outside, “Your grandmother is dying,” and I said, “I know,” but all could think of was how disgusting she looked trying to suck in air through her open mouth.

Sandy walked up over the dune and then onto the boardwalk, a narrow path about two feet wide, made up of wooden slats loosely strung together. David and I kept following her at a distance, perhaps ten feet or so behind her. When she reached her house, she climbed up onto the deck, put the gull on his shingle down in the shade, walked to the screen door, turned to us before she opened it, and said, “Watch him. I’ll be right back.”

The screen door banged shut behind her. We turned to watch the bird. Nothing happened. That is, nothing different. He didn’t shriek again, or try to flap his wings, but neither did he die. He simply lay there on his shingle, moving his beak spasmodically, trying to suck in air. The surf was extremely rough that day. The Stern house, which Sandy was living in that summer, was up on a dune perhaps a hundred yards from the shore. I could hear the waves pounding in, and then echoing on the air, a strange vast hollow sound, like voices in an angry argument very far away.

“He’ll die,” David said.

“Mm.” I was thinking of my grandmother. I had never liked her, anyway.

“I wonder what happened to him.”

“Maybe he flew into something.”

“What could he have flown into?”

“Another bird?”

“Maybe,” David said.

We kept looking down at the gull.

“What do you suppose she’s doing in there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe we ought to split.”

“No, let’s see if he dies,” David said.

Sandy came out about five minutes later with an old towel and a bowl of hot soup. She bent over the gull and wrapped him in the towel, holding the poor bird’s wings against his body while she did so. Then she took out a spoon she had tucked into the bra part of her bikini, dipped some soup out of the bowl, and carefully brought it to the gull’s beak.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” David said.