“Is the skin broken?” David asked.
“No.”
“He was eating,” I said, apologizing for the bird.
“He almost ate me,” Sandy said, and laughed. She turned to the gull. Without a trace of her earlier flaring anger, she cheerfully said, “Come on, bird.”
We began walking up the beach. Behind us, the gull took flight. He followed us all the way to Sandy’s house. When we went inside for lunch, he sat on the deck and waited for us.
The next day, he was gone.
Sandy related the disappearance to me on the telephone, and I immediately called for David and we walked together up the beach to Sandy’s house, speculating on what might have happened. She had reported that the night before, unwilling to take any chances, she had once again put the leash on the bird and tethered him to the deck railing. This morning, when she’d gone outside to feed him, the leash was still attached to its stanchion, but the gull had somehow managed to escape by squeezing his neck and his head through the collar. I thought this was an amazing stunt for such a stupid bird, but David said I wasn’t considering the fact that the bird had once tasted freedom and probably couldn’t bear even temporary bondage any longer. He then told the story of a chain-gang convict who’d freed himself from his manacles by chopping off his right hand. He’d died fifteen feet from where his severed hand lay in the dust, but at least he’d died free. I immediately conjured a vision of a decapitated gull taking wing from Sandy’s porch, only to crash into the nearby bushes, his head and neck still circled by the collar fastened to the leash and the railing. When we got to her house, Sandy seemed calm enough, considering she’d lost the bird after all the time and energy put into his training. We sat around disconsolately for a while, trying to figure out what to do, and finally decided to conduct an extensive search.
We looked everywhere for that damn bird.
We started in the bushes nearest the house because I was still entertaining the notion of a headless bird crash-diving immediately after takeoff, but the gull was nowhere in the vicinity, nor were there any traces of feathers anywhere. We lengthened our radius, swinging out from the house in a widening circle that took us onto the beach at one end and close to the forest on the other. Sandy gave up the search before either David or I were weary. Determined to find the bird and surprise her, we continued looking long into the afternoon, luring flocks of gulls down to the beach with our bag of garbage, hoping to recognize our bird among them.
By sunset, we were on the edge of the forest.
“Do you think he may have wandered in there?” David asked.
“I doubt it.”
“Let’s try it.”
“I don’t think he’s in there,” I said. I was suddenly afraid of the forest again. I knew it was harmless, but something urged me not to enter it, something warned me that whatever horrors it had earlier contained were still in there, ready now to spring full-blown from nightmare into reality.
“Come on,” David said, and began walking toward the black and twisted pines.
The sun was low on the horizon, orange, silhouetting the charred trees, recreating that night so long ago when flames had leapt from branch to branch and the islanders had trembled in fright on the distant shore. The sun drove fire directly into the eye, overpowering the retina, blinding unless a gnarled limb or twisted trunk intercepted its rays, shooting sparks from behind black contorted trees, now and again blocked by large gray boulders that cast long shadows on the forest floor, translating, by collision, pure light into something as dark and as deep as an open grave. There were nameless horrors in this forest, I felt them ooze damp and white from every pore of my body, heard them shriek inside my head with all the crackling terror of a flying spark, saw them materialize in bursting sunfans, a woman in white nylon, her face melting. There was no wind. I followed close behind David, longing for a reassuring word from him. But he was as silent as the forest around us, and I suspected he was as frightened as I.
The black boulder lay just ahead. I recognized it instantly as the one behind which Sandy and I had sat the day we filled out the computer questionnaire. Huge and round, it rose from among the smaller gray rocks like an ancient crypt.
The bird was lying behind the boulder.
He was still wearing the red collar and leash. There was red everywhere. Red in his white wing feathers and ruff, red on his broken yellow beak and crushed skull, red splattered onto the black boulder, red on the forest floor, red that shrieked against the violent orange of the dying sun, the forest was red, the world was red with the blood of the gull.
A rock rested on the ground some three feet from his body. It was covered with his drying blood. We looked at the gull, and we looked at the rock that had been used to crush his skull, and a slow comprehension came to us, but without horror. It was as though, expecting the worst from this place, we were now unafraid of anything less than the worst. And then, I don’t know why, we were both suddenly overcome with rage.
“You dumb bird!” David said, and picked up the blood-stained rock. I had moved simultaneously, and of my own volition, to pick up the nearest weapon at hand, a rock larger than the one David wielded. We threw the rocks as though on signal, and then we gathered more rocks, hurling them at the bird in rising frenzy, rock after rock, finally exhausting the supply at our feet and, sobbing now, seized fallen limbs which we used to club and batter and pound until the bird lay pulverized, a sodden mass of feathers and gristle and pulp.
We stood over him in tears, exhausted. Our hands and our clothes were covered with blood.
As we walked out of the forest, it occurred to me that we had never even given the stupid gull a name.
Two: Rhoda
Sandy’s mother gave a huge cocktail party on the last Sunday in July.
The alleged purpose of the party was to bid farewell to those islanders who had rented for only half the summer, but Sandy’s mother was a person who seized upon any excuse for a party, and probably would have thrown one anyway, if just to herald the coming of the regatta the following Wednesday.
David and I were at the party, which started at three P.M., only because Sandy’s mother had come to the island without help, and Sandy had offered our services free of charge for the afternoon. Her mother didn’t relish the idea at first, primarily because she had read about Greenwich, Connecticut, kids getting drunk at adult parties and causing automobile accidents and scandals, but we assured her we would participate only as waiters, refilling empty glasses, serving hors d’ouevres, and generally helping to ease the flow of traffic in and around the house. Since she had invited sixty-four people (certain disaster if it rained), and since her staff, before our generous offer, was to consist only of Mr. Caudell (the Pine Street lawyer) and her daughter, she eventually came around to seeing things our way, provided we “didn’t get underfoot.”
The day was sunny and clear.
Mr. Caudell had arrived on Friday night to spend the weekend. Sandy’s mother, with commendable propriety, always put up a cot for him in the living room, though it was Sandy’s observation that the bedclothes never seemed rumpled in the morning and many a floorboard squeaked at night in the passageway between the living room and her mother’s bedroom. He greeted David and me on the rear deck, where he had set up his bar. He was wearing a sports shirt with a loud Hawaiian print, over which he had put on a red bar apron decorated with the legend “Don’t Kiss Me, I’m Cooking.” Neither David nor I understood the apron’s connection with Mr. Caudell’s bartending duties, but we made no comment.