Already lost any chance of staying on her feet.
Crying out with alarm, she flung up her arms. She swayed sideways, shoulder first. For a moment, she stood on her right leg while her left leg lifted like a boy dog about to wet a tree. But her left leg kept rising higher. Then she was plunging down over the side of the dinghy. The gunnel jerked out of my grip and the dinghy scooted off. I kicked to keep my head up.
Thelma’s right shoulder struck the water.
The rest of her followed.
Then came a concussion that buffeted me, shoved at me, and slapped a load of water into my face.
Blind from the drenching, I began to swim after the dinghy.
My goal was to reach it, climb aboard, and take control of the machetes. Once I had them, Thelma wouldn’t dare give me any more trouble.
I’d have nothing more to fear from her or Wesley.
As I swam, I blinked the water out of my eyes. The dinghy was about twenty feet away.
No sweat.
I glanced back. No sign of Thelma. She still hadn’t come up. Though glad she wasn’t hot on my tail, I felt a twist of worry.
Maybe she’d drowned.
I actually thought about going back to see if she needed help. Which sounds nuts. But I had this idea that she might be grateful, might even change her tune and decide to stop fighting me. Maybe we would join forces, be a team…
She grabbed my left ankle.
Stopped me cold and jerked me down.
When her other hand clutched the back of my right leg, it gripped me above the top of my sock—missing the razor, thank God.
I felt myself being dragged backward.
A hand released me, grabbed me higher on the leg.
Knowing Thelma, she’d be going for my nuts. So I squeezed my legs together to stop her from reaching between them. Just in the nick of time, too.
She shoved a hand between my thighs. As she drove it in, prying her way deeper into the crevice, I suddenly tried to fling myself over. Her one hand stayed trapped between my thighs. Her other let go of my calf. I twisted, flung myself about, and kicked with both legs. In seconds, Thelma no longer had me.
I clawed to the surface. Gasping to fill my lungs, I whirled around as her head popped out of the water. She sucked in a single big breath. Then I clutched her shoulders with both my hands and drove her down.
She didn’t go straight down—she went over backward, me on top.
She fought me. When I lost hold of her slippery shoulders, she wrapped her arms around my back. She gave me a hug as if trying to crush my ribcage. My arms were free, so I grabbed her by the hair and one ear, and twisted her head.
Both of us kicked and squirmed.
I quickly lost track of who was on top—or where the top might be. We both stayed underwater, though. Neither of us could breathe.
And neither of us let go.
We stayed in our clinch as if each of us figured we had the upper hand.
It seemed like hours that we struggled under the water in that fierce embrace. It might’ve been as long as a minute.
Finally, Thelma seemed to tire out. Her thrashing and writhing and kicking slowed down. Her arms no longer squeezed my ribcage so hard. Soon after that, she ceased all her struggles. Her arms loosened their hold, then slid away from my back.
I let go of her ear. With the hand that clutched her hair, I eased her away from me.
She seemed limp.
Unconscious, maybe dead.
Maybe faking.
Keeping my grip on her hair, I rose to the surface. I breathed, but held her head under—at arm’s length, just in case she was playing “possum.
I had to tread water furiously to keep my own head up. With so much motion on my part, I might not be able to detect movements by Thelma. Until it was too late.
Unnerving.
I felt like a murderer and a sitting duck.
It became very difficult to keep on holding her down. I thought she might already be dead. But I also half expected to feel her suddenly slide the razor out of my sock. Scared of both things, I gave her head a shove backward and let go.
A few seconds later, her head popped up. I glimpsed her face in the moonlight—eyes abulge, lips tight. I felt sure she must be alive, after all. But she didn’t start gasping and huffing for air. In silence except for the slurping sounds of the water, her head tilted back and the rest of her body came sliding to the surface.
The next thing I knew, she was floating on her back. Sprawled out loose and open, arms spread, legs wide. She looked as if she’d maybe zonked out while relaxing in her back-yard swimming pool.
She sure didn’t look dead.
It was uncanny.
It gave me the willies.
Treading water, I watched her for signs of life.
She just drifted lazily, being lifted and turned a little, now and then, by the motions of the water under her back. After gazing at her for a while, I noticed she was farther off than before.
I didn’t want her to get away.
Not yet.
I wasn’t about to swim after her, though. So I twisted myself around and swam to the dinghy.
I made a stop at its stern. Reaching up, I spent a minute or two untangling my shorts from the propeller. They’d gotten torn up pretty good. I tossed them into the boat, anyway. Then I managed to throw myself aboard without capsizing the thing.
While I put on the shredded remains of my shorts, I checked on Thelma. She was pretty far off, but still spread out on her back, the same as before.
It didn’t seem right.
If I’d drowned her, she should’ve sunk. If I hadn’t drowned her, she ought to be either swimming somewhere or floundering in the water, gasping and coughing.
Just didn’t make any sense for her to be floating like that, as if asleep.
I lowered the outboard back into the water and got it started. Keeping it throttled down, I turned the dinghy toward Thelma. I puttered toward her very slowly.
The prow was aimed between her legs.
I steered to the side a little earlier than I needed to, just to avoid temptation.
I tried to miss her completely.
But the port side of the dinghy gave her left foot a gentle nudge. She didn’t so much as flinch. She simply remained sprawled on her back, and began to swivel counterclockwise.
She reminded me of the knife thrower’s assistant in a circus act. The beautiful gal in a skimpy outfit who gets strapped to a wheel, gets twirled, gets the fun of being the knife target.
Except Thelma wasn’t beautiful and she didn’t have a skimpy outfit on. She was naked. Her huge breasts, shiny and pale in the moonlight, sort of drooped off the sides of her chest like a couple of seasick voyagers getting ready to woops.
The bump by the dinghy made her spin half a turn.
She appeared to resume spinning when I started to circle around her with the boat.
The waves of my wake made her tilt and bob.
She seemed oblivious of it all.
Reaching down between my knees, I grabbed one of the machetes. I picked it up and waved it overhead. “Hey!” I shouted. “Thelma! Look what I’ve got?”
She just lay there in the middle of my wave-circles.
I threw the machete at her.
It was supposed to be more of a toss, really. A gentle, underhand toss—the way you might throw a ball to a little kid.
Intended to startle her, make her flinch or try to dodge out of the way.
It wasn’t even meant, actually, to hit her.
For some reason, the toss went haywire. For some reason, I swung my arm up with more force than I’d planned on. Instead of making a shallow arc through the air so it would fall fairly harmlessly on or near Thelma, the machete went high.
Maybe all “Freudian slips’ aren’t verbal.