Besides, we had already embarked on a new project.
The day after David was sprung, Sandy came up with an idea for the further training of the gull. It seemed to her that since it had been so easy (ha!) to leash-train the bird, it should be even simpler to teach him something for which he had a natural talent, namely, to fly over our heads wherever we went.
“That’s impossible,” I said.
“It can be done,” Sandy said.
“Not even with a homing pigeon, which he isn’t.”
“It can be done,” Sandy insisted. “And if you won’t help me, I’ll just have to do it alone.”
“Here comes the damsel-in-distress routine,” David said, and rolled his eyes.
“Well, why do I always have to beg you?” Sandy said.
“Where’s your violin, David?” I said.
“What key shall I play it in?”
“You’re both louses,” Sandy said.
We bought a fifty-foot reel of ten-pound nylon fish-line, and fastened one end of it to the metal loop in the bird’s collar. Then we led him out to the point, where we figured there would be fewer distractions than anywhere else on the island — except perhaps the forest — and fastened the other end of the line to a heavy piece of driftwood partially submerged in the sand. The bird didn’t know what we wanted at first. We all kept running up to him and fluttering our hands at him and shouting, “Shoo, bird!” or “Let’s go, bird!” but he was so used to our antics and our presence that he merely sat unblinkingly in the sand without so much as rustling a feather.
“He thinks we’re crazy,” I said.
“We are crazy,” David said.
Sandy walked over to where the bird was calmly observing us. She put her hands on her hips and stood over him menacingly. “Listen, bird,” she said, “we want you to fly.”
“That’s it,” David said, “talk to him. You’re sure to get results that way.”
“Just shut up, David,” she said, without turning. “You hear me, bird? You’re going to fly.”
“He hears you,” David said.
“David, I’m warning you.”
“You hear her, bird?”
“Come on, you damn bird,” Sandy said, and picked him up in both hands and threw him violently into the air. The gull took wing for just an instant, more a braking action than anything else, and then gently fluttered back to the sand again.
“We’ll have to take turns,” Sandy said.
“Doing what?”
“Throwing him up.”
“Look, Ma, I’m throwing up a sea gull,” David said.
“David, today you’re obnoxious,” Sandy said.
“I know.”
“Well, try not to be.”
“I can’t help it. I’ve been without you for too long a time.”
“Oh, boy,” Sandy said.
“It’s true.”
“Yeah,” Sandy said, and walked over to the bird again. Crouching beside him in the sand, she very softly said, “Listen, bird, I’m going to keep tossing you up in the air until you start flying, you hear me?”
“I hear you,” David answered in a high falsetto voice.
Sandy picked up the bird. “Here we go,” she said, and flung him into the air. But he only spread his wings in the earlier braking motion, and drifted down to the ground again.
“He’s the same brilliant bird he always was,” I said, and David laughed.
“You’re a lot of help,” Sandy said.
“What do you think, Wilbur?” I said.
“Orville, you’ll never get that crate off the ground,” David answered.
“You’re both hilarious,” Sandy said. She walked over to the gull again. “Bird,” she said, “you’re getting me sore.”
“You’re frightening me,” David said in his falsetto.
“You are going to fly,” he said.
“Yes, missie,” David said.
“Up there,” Sandy said, and pointed. The gull actually followed her finger; it almost seemed he understood. But when she threw him into the air again, he merely braked and came back down to earth.
We all walked over to him. He looked up at us.
“He’s a goddamn stupid idiot,” Sandy said.
We stood around him in a circle. I think he was a little frightened. Then — I don’t know who it was — one of us suddenly realized we were being watched, and we all turned together to look at the dune behind us. A girl with dark hair was silently standing there. From a distance, she seemed to be about eighteen years old. She was wearing a bottle-green, one-piece bathing suit. She had full breasts and a chunky figure. Her head was tilted to one side as she squinted into the sun. One hand was on her hip, the other rested on the opposite thigh.
“What are you doing to that bird?” she called.
“None of your business,” Sandy called back.
The girl gave a brief nod, and then started down the dune, her heels digging in as she slid toward the beach. She walked toward us purposefully, without any sense of urgency, a steady short-legged stride, her head bent, nodding all the while, as though she had decided to take some sort of action and was now priming herself to perform it. She stopped about three feet from where we were standing, put both hands on her hips, looked up at us, and said, “You’d better leave that bird alone.”
“He happens to be my bird,” Sandy said.
“That doesn’t give you the license to treat him cruelly,” the girl said.
Sandy looked at me, and I looked at David, and then the three of us looked at the girl. She was still facing the sun, her eyes squinted, her nose wrinkled, her mouth lopsided, her entire face screwed up in defense against its glare. She was very white, almost as white as the Pine Street lawyer. She had bands on her upper teeth, and they glinted in the sunshine now as she curled her lip in what I suppose she thought was a fierce manner. Up close, she looked about sixteen or so. She had freckles across her nose and on her cheeks. They seemed strangely out of place on a girl with such dark hair.
“Well?” she said.
“Go lose yourself,” David said.
“Not until you take that collar off the bird,” the girl said. She folded her arms across her chest. We all looked at each other again. Sandy sighed. I put one finger in my ear. David started nodding his head, short little nods.
“Are you going to leave that bird alone,” the girl said, “or do I have to report this to the police?”
“You go report it to the police,” I said.
“Yeah, you go do that.”
“You go suck your mother’s tit,” Sandy said, and the girl’s eyes opened wide for just an instant. Blinded by the sun’s sudden assault, she turned her head aside and then backed a few paces away from us.
“Go on,” Sandy said, “get out of here.”
“It’s a free country,” the girl answered.
“This is a private beach,” Sandy said.
“It is not. None of this beach is private, it’s all dedicated to the public.”
“Go to hell,” Sandy said. To us, she said, “Let’s get back to the bird.”
“Over my dead body,’” the girl said.
Sandy gave her a penetrating look, and she backed off another few paces. The contrast between the two of them was really startling. This was almost the end of July, and Sandy was deeply tanned by then, her hair much blonder than it had been at the beginning of the summer, her blue eyes more vivid, a tiny dazzling tent-like wedge of white showing where her upper lip curled away from her teeth. There was about her a look of lean suppleness, a fluid, long-legged nonchalance in the way she stood or moved. The other girl, standing behind Sandy and perhaps six feet away from her, looked like a distorted funhouse mirror image, reflecting back in negative. Where Sandy was blond, the other girl was dark. Where Sandy’s hair was long and loose, hers was cut close to her head, settling about her ears and the back of her neck like a cast-iron kettle. Her eyes, visible now that she was standing with her back to the sun and had opened them wide, were a deep brown, almost as dark as her hair. She gave the impression of being many years older than Sandy, of being in fact almost middle-aged, with large maiden-aunt breasts, and a clipped no-nonsense voice. I think we all felt a little strange around her. Not because she objected to what we were trying to teach the bird, but only because she seemed like a goddamn grownup.