She tried floating on her back but the wind drove the sea up her nose and into her mouth so that she came up coughing and spewing. Had she drifted off? Was she drowning? Giving up? She fought the rising fear with her spent arms and the feeble wash of her spent legs. After a time, she lost all feeling in her limbs and she went down with a lungful of air and the air brought her back up, once, twice, again. She thrashed for a handhold, for anything, for substance, but there was no solid thing in all that transient medium where the dolphins grinned and the flying fish flew and the sharks came and went as they pleased.
And Till? Where was Till? He could have been right there, ten feet away, and she wouldn’t have known it. She closed her eyes, snatched a breath, let herself drift down and let herself come back again. Once more. Could she do it once more? She’d never known despair, but it was in her now, colder than the water, creeping numbly up from her feet and into her ankles and legs and torso, overwhelming her, claiming her degree by degree. Water, water every where. Just as she was about to surrender, to open herself up, open wide and let the harsh insistent unforgiving current flow through her and tug her down to where the waves couldn’t touch her ever again, the ocean gave her something back: it was a chest, an ice chest, floating low in the water under the weight of its burden. A silver thing, silver as the belly of her fish. Sears, Roebuck. Guaranteed for life. She claimed it as her own, and though she couldn’t get atop it, it was there and it sustained her as the wind bit and the sun rose up out of the gloom to parch her lips and scorch the taut white mask of her upturned face.
Rattus Rattus
She had never been so thirsty in all her life. Had never known what it was, what it truly meant, when she read in the magazines of the Bedouin tumbling from their camels and their camels dying beneath them or the G.I.’s stalking the rumor of Rommel’s Panzers across the dunes of North Africa and water only a mirage, because she’d lived in a house with a tap in a place where the grass was wet with dew in the morning and you could get a Coca-Cola at any lunch counter or in the machine at the service station around the corner. If she was thirsty, she drank. That was all.
Now she knew. Now she knew what it was like to go without, to feel the talons clawing at your throat, the tongue furred and bloating in the tomb of your mouth, barely able to swallow, to breathe. There was ice in the chest — and beer, chilled beer, the bottles clinking and chirping with the rhythm of the waves — but she didn’t dare crack the lid, even for an instant. It was the air inside that kept her afloat and if she lifted the lid the air would rush out and where would she be then? The bottles clinked. Her throat swelled. The sun beat at her face. But this was a special brand of torture, reserved just for her, worse than anything devised by the most sadistic Jap commandant, and she kept wondering what she’d done to deserve it — the ice right there, the beer, the sweet cold sparkling pale golden liquid in the bottle that would shine with condensation just inches away, and she dying of thirst.
She swallowed involuntarily at the thought of it, the lining of her throat as raw as when she’d had tonsillitis as a girl and twisted in agony with the blinds closed and the starched rigid sheets biting into her till her mother came like an angel of mercy with ginger ale in a tall cold glass, with sherbet, Jell-O, ice cubes made of Welch’s grape juice to suck and roll over her tongue and clench between her teeth till all the moisture was gone. Her mother’s hand reached out to her, she saw it, saw it right there framed against the waves, and her mother’s face and the dripping glass poised in her hand. It was too much to bear. She gave in and wet her lips with seawater, though she knew she shouldn’t, knew it was wrong and would only make things worse, and yet she couldn’t help herself, her tongue probing and lapping as if it weren’t attached to her at all. The relief was instantaneous, flooding her like a drug — water, there was water inside her. But then, almost immediately, her throat swelled shut and her cracked lips began to bleed.
To bleed. That was the secondary problem: blood. Both her elbows were scraped and raw and there was a deep irregular gash on the back of her left hand, the one the scalding coffee hadn’t touched. How it had got there, she couldn’t say, and she was so numb from the cold she couldn’t feel the sting of it, though clearly it would need stitches to close the wound and there’d be a scar, and for some time now she’d been idly examining the torn flesh there, thinking she’d have to see a doctor when they got back and already making up a little speech for him, how she’d want a really top-notch man because she just couldn’t stomach having her skin spoiled, not at her age. But she was bleeding in the here and now, each wave washing the gash anew and extracting from it a pale tincture of pinkish liquid that dissolved instantly and was gone. That liquid was blood. And blood attracted sharks.
Again the flap of panic. Her legs trailed behind her like lures, like a provocation, like bait, and she couldn’t see them, could barely feel them. If the sharks came — when they came — she’d have no defense. She was trapped in a childhood nightmare, a vestigial dream of the time before there was land, when all the creatures there were floated free amidst the flotilla of shining jaws that would swallow them. She tried to hold her hand up out of the water. Tried not to think about what was beneath her, behind her, rising even now from the lazy depths like a balloon trailing across the sky at dusk. But she had to think. Had to terrify herself just to stay alive.
For as long as the ice chest had been there she’d maneuvered around it, straddling it like an equestrian as it rode beneath the clamp of her thighs, pushing it all the way down to tamp it with her feet and perch tentatively atop the tenuous wavering shelf of it, lying flat with its lid tucked between her abdomen and breasts so that her back was arched and her legs could spread wide for balance. Now she tried to huddle atop it, to kneel beneath the full weight of her limbs and torso as if she were praying — and she was praying, she was — struggling to hold her gashed hand clear of the water and balance there like an acrobat stalled on the high wire, but the waves wouldn’t allow it. She kept slipping down while the cooler bobbed up and away from her so that she had to swim free and snatch it back in a single searing beat of white-hot terror, thinking only of a mute streaking shape lunging out of the depths to snatch her up in its basket of teeth.
She’d seen a shark only once in her life. It was on the Santa Monica pier, just after Till had come home from overseas. They’d walked on the beach for hours and then promenaded all the way to the end of the pier, her arm in his, the stripped pale boards rocking gently beneath their feet and the sea air deliciously cool against their skin. She was so alive in that moment, so attuned to Till and his transformation from the recollected to the actual, to the flesh, to the arm round her waist and the voice murmuring in her ear, that the smallest things thrilled her with their novelty, as if no one had ever conceived of them before. A paper cone of cotton candy, so intensely pink it was otherworldly, seemed as strange to her as if it had been delivered there by Martians from outer space. Ditto the tattooed man exhibiting himself in his bathing trunks in the hope of spare change and the eighty-year-old beauty queen in the two-piece — even the taste of the burger with chopped raw onions and plenty of ketchup they ate standing under the sunstruck awning of the stand at the foot of the pier was like that of no other burger she’d ever had. Her feet weren’t even on the ground. They were there in the flesh, both of them, she and Till, strolling along like any normal couple who could go home to bed anytime the urge took them, day or night, or go get a highball and listen to the jukebox in the corner of some dark roadhouse or drive slow and sweet along Ocean Boulevard with the windows down and the breeze fanning their hair. It was her dream made concrete. But then, right there in the middle of that dream, was the shark.