trail. The three of them were there.
We were hardly aware of them at first. Rafferty was a lot more
interested in Lydia Davis, lying on a towel a few feet away. And I had
my eye on a couple of tourist girls. Occasionally the wind would slide
down the cliffs and pull the music from their radio in our direction,
but that was all. The beach was pretty crowded, and there was plenty
to look at.
Then I saw this girl walk by me to test the water. Just a glimpse of
her face as she passed. The water was much too cold, of course. Not
even the little kids were giving it a try. You wouldn't find much
swimming here till late July or August. I watched her shiver and step
backward when the first wave rolled over her feet. The black bikini
was pretty spectacular. Somehow she'd already managed a good deep tan.
From where I sat, I could see the goose bumps.
I watched her step forward. The water was up to her calves by
Rafferty was watching too. "More guts than brains," he said. I
mentioned that she was also beautiful.
The dive was clean and powerfi spouting, long dark hair plastered
smoothly back from the high, widow's peaked forehead.
I knew immediately she was not a native.
I remember her face looked so very naked just then, so clean and strong
and healthy. She could not have been bred around here. Not around
DeadRiver.
We're all of a type, you see. Or one of two.
We're all as poor and stunted and miserable as the scrub pines that
struggle up through the thin hard cliff side soil. Or else- like
Rafferty and me you grew up long and lean as the runners that crept
along the ground each spring and tried to strangle them. Either
But this girl showed you nothing. She was all smooth lines and
breeding and casual vigor. With skin most girls just dream of.
Surfacing sleek as a seal, laughing. In water the temperature of which
only a seal could love.
She opened her eyes. And that was another revelation.
They were such as hade of pale, pale blue that at first it was hare to
see any color in them at all. Dead eyes, my brown-eyed father calls
them. Depthless. Like the color of the sea when the sand is coral and
the water's calm and shallow. Reflecting light, not absorbing it
The cold must have been amazing. I watched her roll once through the
water and turn to face us again. Just her head and neck showing. I
could see her tremble, lips parted, blue eyes blinking, blind-seeming.
The sun was warm on me, but I could almost feel the ache in her
bones.
They say that very cold water can make a kind of ecstasy. Bi first
there's pain.
I saw the face muscles contract and knew she had the pain.
I watched the drops of water roll down her body as she wa dec back to
shore, sliding from muscle to muscle across the tight browr surface of
skin. The bikini told you everything about her but the color of her
pubic hair. Mostly it told you she was strong.
She walked right past me.
I kept watching. I saw her eyes flicker and move, and then she was
gone up the beach to her friends. I thought she'd noticed me. And
then I thought that that was wishful thinking.
I knew it wasn't Rafferty. Girls don't notice Rafferty. At twenty his
face was still ravaged by pimples. His hands were stained with axle
grease. His face was red with whiskey. It's not that I'm any great
beauty, but my eyes are clear. I'm in pretty good shape to this day,
and whatever small problem I'd had with zits, I'd lost two years
before, at eighteen. So maybe it was me.
I thought it was me.
And thinking that made something glad and constricting happen
inmythroat. A happy snake coiled there. I drank a beer, and it didn't
go away.
But it was rough just sitting there after that. I wanted to walk up
the beach and talk to her in the worst way. But I was never any good
at approaches.
Besides, I was way outclassed and I knew it.
I worked in a lumberyard.
I sold quarter-inch plywood and pine and two-by-twos to contractors and
do-it-yourselfers.
College was on the back burner for a while and for all I cared it could
fry there. Oh, I'd read a lot and my grades were okay, but I'd had it
with school even worse than I'd had it with DeadRiver. Eventually
that would change. But at the time I was content with three-fifty an
hour and a little barmaid I knew called Lyssa Jean. Nice girl.
After that day on the beach, I never saw her again. Not once. Sorry,
Lyssa Jean.
Anyhow, it was not much fun sitting there after that, but I stuck it
out for another hour or so, hoping she'd get up for another swim. She
didn't. In the meantime Rafferty had struck up a conversation with
Lydia Davis.
Now that the tourists were in town Lydia was a lot more generally
available. Off-season she was just about the prettiest thing we had in
DeadRiver and you could buy her drinks all night long at the Caribou
and hardly get a smile or word out of her. She got nicer with
competition around.
So I couldn't get Rafferty to leave. The dog in the honey pot He kept
baring his crooked teeth at her.
I quit trying.
We had Rafferty's car that day but I figured I could probably hitch a
ride along the coast road. I packed my gear, slipped on my jeans,
shirt and sneakers and headed up the beach to the goat trail.
On the way I passed them. A tall, slim guy with dark skin and dark
hair and as harp straight nose. And a pretty green-eyed blond, a
little on the heavy side for my tastes but still very tasty, looking a
couple years younger than the guy- sort of barely ripe- in her tiny
yellow two-piece.
The other girl's towel was empty.
Climbing the goat trail I did a quick scan of the beach. I couldn't
find her anywhere. About ten feet from the top I turned and looked
again. Nothing.
"I'm up here," she said.
I almost fell right off the trail. It would have been a bad fall.
It was very matter-of-fact, though, the way she said it. As though it
were obvious I'd be looking for her. As though she simply knew. I
turned and saw her standing there above me, and I think I must have
flushed a little, because she smiled.
I climbed the trail to the top. I watched my footing, not because I
really needed to, but because, as I say, it's my habit, and because it
was sort of hard to look at her directly. Bathing suit or no, I don't
think I'd ever seen anybody look so naked before.
Maybe it was the fact that she seemed so comfortable in her own skin,
like a kid who doesn't know about clothes much.
But there was something consciously erotic about her too and a long
haul from innocence. Just in the way she stood there, flicking a
green-and-white bath towel at the hawk seed hipshot.
The breeze had died down long ago.
The sun put red and brown into the still dark hair.
I have seen the Caribbean since then. Toward the end of the day the
sea sparkles with light as the sun goes down, and the color is that
high transparent blue that will turn gray and then finally black by