Last Summer

One: The Gull

We spent last summer, when I was just sixteen, on an island mistakenly named Greensward, its shores only thinly vegetated with beach grass and plum, its single forest destroyed by fire more than twenty years before. There were perhaps fifty summer homes on the island, most of them gray and clustered safely on the bay side, the remainder strung out along the island’s flanks and on the point jutting insanely into the Atlantic.

It was there that the sea was wildest. It was there that we first met Sandy.

She was standing close to the shoreline as David and I came up the beach behind her, spume exploding on her left, pebbles rolling and tossing in a muddy backwash, a tall girl wearing a white bikini, her hair the color of the dunes, a pale gold that fell loose and long about her face. Her head was studiously bent. Hands on hips, legs widespread, she stood tense and silent, studying something in the sand at her feet. It was a very hot day. The sky over the ocean seemed stretched too tight. An invisible sun seared the naked beach, turning everything intensely white, the bursting waves dissolving into foam, the glaring sky, the endless stretch of sand, the girl standing motionless, her pale hair only faintly stirring. We approached on her left, walking between her and the ocean, turning for a look at her face, her small breasts in the scanty bra top, the gentle curve of her hips above the white bikini pants, the long line of her legs.

The thing lying at her feet in the sand was a sea gull.

“He’s still alive,” she said suddenly, and raised her head to meet our gaze.

Her eyes were a vivid blue, set wide, her nose narrow, flaring suddenly at the nostrils, combining with a full upper lip that curled outward and away from her teeth to give her face a feral look. I guessed she was about fifteen years old. We looked down at the gull. He was a large bird, gray and white. His eyes were closed. He kept working his beak, as though trying to suck in air.

“Yes, he’s alive,” David said.

We were standing with the sun behind us. David was taller than I last summer, a strapping six-footer who’d been lifting weights for four years, ever since he was twelve. I’d always liked his looks, from the first day I met him. He had broad shoulders even then, a narrow waist, chest and abdominal muscles as clean as Alley Oop’s. His eyes were blue, flecked with white, his hair a dusty blond. He had good features, too, and a strong jaw and brow; he looked solid and reliable. My own appearance last summer suggested a sort of vague maturity. I was trying very hard to achieve a sophisticated look, so I wore my brown hair long and combed sideways across my forehead, almost hiding my eyes, which were also brown. But my nose was growing faster than the rest of my face, and my mouth was sprinkled with acne at one corner, and it was pretty difficult to maintain a cool against such odds.

“Get out of the sun,” the girl said, “he needs the sun.”

“The bird?”

“Can’t you see he’s dying?”

“What’s that got to do with the sun?”

“What happened to him, anyway?” David asked.

“I don’t know. I was just walking along, and there he was.”

“Which house are you in?” I asked.

“Up the beach. The Stern house.”

“What’s your name?” David said.

“Sandy.”

“I’m David. This is Peter.”

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi. Will you help me take him off the beach?”

“What for?”

“Get him out of the sun,” Sandy said.

David and I looked at each other.

“Gulls are pretty dirty animals,” David said.

“He’ll die if we don’t help him,” Sandy said.

“He’ll die anyway,” I said.

“Never mind, I’ll do it myself,” Sandy said.

She brushed a strand of hair away from her face, getting sand on her cheek, and then walked off toward the dune while David and I watched. She almost fell climbing the dune, but neither of us dared laugh. She disappeared into the tall beach grass and came back with a large weathered shingle which she carried directly to where the bird was lying on his back in the sand. She did not look at us. Her face was very serious as she bent over the bird and started to shove the shingle under him. The bird gave a shriek just then, and tried to flap his wings. Sandy dropped the shingle, and screamed. She started to turn, and then in her haste merely back-pedaled away from the noisy bird, her eyes wide, her mouth still open around the scream.

“You rats,” she said, standing at a respectable distance from the bird, who was now silent, “why won’t you help me?”

“Because we don’t want to get bit,” I said.

“You can get rabies from those damn things,” David said.

“Oh, rabies, my ass,” Sandy said, and walked back to the gull again, frowning. Gingerly, she picked up the shingle and then cautiously edged it under the bird, who remained motionless and silent this time. Holding him out at arm’s length on the shingle, she began walking toward the dune again. We followed her. The bird attempted to flap his wings again, but all he could manage was a weak flutter. All the while, he kept sucking in air, his beak working. When my grandmother was dying of cancer at New York Hospital, she looked the same way. My father said to me in the corridor outside, “Your grandmother is dying,” and I said, “I know,” but all could think of was how disgusting she looked trying to suck in air through her open mouth.

Sandy walked up over the dune and then onto the boardwalk, a narrow path about two feet wide, made up of wooden slats loosely strung together. David and I kept following her at a distance, perhaps ten feet or so behind her. When she reached her house, she climbed up onto the deck, put the gull on his shingle down in the shade, walked to the screen door, turned to us before she opened it, and said, “Watch him. I’ll be right back.”

The screen door banged shut behind her. We turned to watch the bird. Nothing happened. That is, nothing different. He didn’t shriek again, or try to flap his wings, but neither did he die. He simply lay there on his shingle, moving his beak spasmodically, trying to suck in air. The surf was extremely rough that day. The Stern house, which Sandy was living in that summer, was up on a dune perhaps a hundred yards from the shore. I could hear the waves pounding in, and then echoing on the air, a strange vast hollow sound, like voices in an angry argument very far away.

“He’ll die,” David said.

“Mm.” I was thinking of my grandmother. I had never liked her, anyway.

“I wonder what happened to him.”

“Maybe he flew into something.”

“What could he have flown into?”

“Another bird?”

“Maybe,” David said.

We kept looking down at the gull.

“What do you suppose she’s doing in there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe we ought to split.”

“No, let’s see if he dies,” David said.

Sandy came out about five minutes later with an old towel and a bowl of hot soup. She bent over the gull and wrapped him in the towel, holding the poor bird’s wings against his body while she did so. Then she took out a spoon she had tucked into the bra part of her bikini, dipped some soup out of the bowl, and carefully brought it to the gull’s beak.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” David said.

“Shut up,” Sandy said.

“She thinks she’s in a Walt Disney movie.”

“Shut up.”

“You’re only going to kill him quicker,” David said.

“He’s in shock,” Sandy answered, and tilted the soup into his open beak. Naturally, the bird gave another shriek. She backed away from him again, but she wasn’t quite as frightened this time, maybe because he was all wrapped up in the towel and couldn’t move.

“See?” she said, as if she had proved some idiotic point.

“Yeah, he doesn’t like it,” David said.

“Gulls like everything,” Sandy said. “They eat all kinds of crap,” and glanced toward the screen door. I figured her mother was inside the house. “See?” she said, forcing more soup down his throat. “He does like it.”

“He’s going to have convulsions any minute,” I said.

“No, he won’t.”

“Besides, gulls are scavengers. You should let him die.”

“Sure,” David said. “They’re like sharks.”

“He’s a sweet old bird,” Sandy said, and fed him another spoonful of soup.

“Wait’ll that sweet old bird bites you,” David said.

“What kind of soup is that?” I asked.

“Chicken noodle.”

“It smells good.”

“You can have what’s left over.”

“Thanks, from his mouth?”

“What’re you gonna do with that damn bird, anyway?” David asked.

“Make him my pet.”

“What’ll he do, sleep at the foot of your bed?”

“What’ll you name him? Rover?”

Sandy didn’t even look up at us. She merely kept spooning soup into the bird’s mouth. I was sure he would choke at any moment. Finally, she put down the spoon and the bowl, and stood up, and nodded, and walked toward the screen door again. “Watch him,” she said, and again she went inside. We looked at the bird. He didn’t look any better than he had on the beach.

“I give him about ten minutes,” David said.

“Five.”

“Maybe less.”

“That soup sure smells good.”

“Why don’t you finish it?” David said, and gave me an elbow and a grin.

“Yeah, yeah.” I looked at the gull again. “You think its a male?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you tell if it is or not?”

“The males have pricks, same as you and me.”

“Shh,” I said, and glanced toward the screen door.

David shrugged, “When he dies,” he said, “we’ll take a look.”

“If he does.”

“Oh, he’ll die, all right.”

“Not if she has anything to say about it.”

“A sea gull for a pet,” David said, and shook his head.

“I knew a girl at camp had a raccoon for a pet.”

“Raccoons aren’t sea gulls.” He boosted himself up onto the deck railing. The sun was behind him, limning his head. He began humming. The bird gave a little peep just then, as though trying to sing along.

“When he dies,” I said, “let’s go over to The Captain’s for some hamburgers.”

“Okay,” David said.

“You want to ask her to come?”

“She’ll probably have to attend the funeral,” David said.

The screen door swung open.

“Is he still alive?” Sandy asked.

“I figure another three or four minutes,” David said, and winked at me.

“Go to hell,” Sandy said. This time she did not bother to look toward the screen door. She was holding a long piece of clothesline in her hand.

“What’re you gonna do with that?” I asked.

“You’ll see,” she said, and bent down over the bird again. His feet were sticking out of the bottom of the towel, he looked like a consumptive old man at a Turkish bath. Sandy knotted one end of the clothesline around his right leg, and then carried the other end to the deck railing. She looped it swiftly around one of the stanchions, made a double knot in it, stood up, put her hands on her hips and said, “There.”

“Very good,” David said. “You’ve got a half-dead bird tied to the deck railing.”

“All I need now is a box,” she said, and went into the house again.

“I think she’s nuts,” David said.

“I do, too. Let’s split.”

“Look at him.”

We both looked. He was still working his beak, gasping for air, his eyes closed.

“What’s that in his neck there?” David said.

“Where?”

“There, what is that thing?”

“Where? I don’t see...”

“Look at it! Can’t you see it?”

“Oh, God!”

“That’s a fishhook. He’s swallowed a fishhook!”

“Oh, man, that’s disgusting.”

“Sure, that’s the tip sticking out of his neck!”

“God, look at that!”

“What is it?” Sandy said, rushing out of the house. The screen door slammed shut behind her. The deck was suddenly very still.

“He’s got a fishhook caught in his throat,” David said.

Sandy looked down at the gull. She was carrying a cardboard box which she dropped to the deck behind her. Then she knelt quietly beside the bird and stared at the protruding tip of the hook.

“I didn’t see it,” she said, “did you? I mean before?”

“No,” David said.

“I didn’t see it, either.”

“But there’s no blood.”

“No.”

“You’ll have to take it out,” Sandy said.

“Me?” David said. “You’re out of your mind.”

“Please,” she said.

“Absolutely not.”

“I couldn’t do it, really,” she said. “I can’t even take one out of a fish.”

“Uh-uh, not me,” David said.

“Peter?” she said, and looked up. I didn’t answer at first. She kept looking at me, her eyes on my face, one hand extended toward me. “He’ll die otherwise.”

“So what?” David said. “He’s just a crumby gull.”

She did not take her eyes from me. Her voice had sounded doubtful, but her eyes were confident; she knew damn well I couldn’t leave that hook in the bird’s throat.

“All right,” I said, “hold him.”

“Who?” David said.

“Come on.”

“Me?”

“I’ll hold him,” Sandy said.

“Never mind, I’ll hold him,” David said. “I swear to God, if he bites me...”

“He won’t bite you.”

“Okay, let’s do it already,” I said.

“I’ll hold his feet,” Sandy said.

“We don’t need anybody to hold his feet,” David said. “Just get the hell out of the way.” He made a move toward the bird’s head, and just then the beak opened and closed again. He pulled his hand back, watching the bird warily. Then he reached out suddenly with both hands and grabbed the beak, immediately forcing it open. “Hurry up,” he said, “pull the damn thing out.”

I got the hook out pretty fast, considering. There wasn’t any blood while it was still in the gull’s throat, but the minute I eased it loose, the blood began to flow, pouring into the bird’s ruff. David got some on his hands; I could just imagine how much that thrilled him. I kept thinking of my grandmother. I was wondering why someone hadn’t stuck his hand down her open throat and pulled out the cancer, just the way I’d pulled out the hook. Sandy ran inside for peroxide and bandages, and finally we got the gull all cleaned up and bandaged and tucked away in his towel inside the cardboard box, with one leg tied to the porch railing.

So we asked Sandy, after all, if she’d like to have a hamburger with us down at The Captain’s.

That Saturday night, they held a dance at the firehouse for all the teenage kids on the island.

The firehouse was down by the bay, the first thing you saw when you came over from the mainland. It was almost directly back of the ferry slip, and on the right of it was the post office, and on the left was the general store run by Mr. Porter, who everyone said was a millionaire, but which probably wasn’t true. The firehouse was built in 1945 immediately after the big fire that destroyed the pine forest in the center of the island. The forest had always terrified me. I had been to it only once or twice, but it was the bleakest spot imaginable, with charred dead Australian pines, a ghostlike silence hanging over the entire place. Just miles and miles of burned-out trees, black and twisted against the sky, surrounded by stunted second growth.

The dance at the firehouse had about forty chaperones to supervise three-dozen kids. A table was set up just inside the door, with Mr. Gorham sitting behind it taking admissions, and with a little cash box near his right hand. We gave him fifty cents apiece (actually, David gave him a buck for both of us, knowing I’d square it with him later), and then we went in and stood close to the table; it’s always difficult coming into a dance, even if you know all the kids there. A tall pretty girl was standing across the room, near the ladders hanging on the cinder-block wall. She didn’t even look at us. She had red hair cut in bangs across her forehead and coming down to about the nape of her neck.

“Who’s that?” I said.

“Where?”

“There. Near the ladders.”

“The redhead?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know.”

We looked at her again, and she looked back at us this time and then let her gaze wander right past us. The expression on her face was very sophisticated and cool, as though she had only inadvertently stumbled into these teenage proceedings and was utterly bored to tears.

“Let’s find out who she is,” I said.

“Okay,” David said, and shrugged, and we started across the room toward her. She was still being very blasé, her eyes smokily and lazily taking in the surroundings, her beautiful red hair clipped sharp and clean like a copper helmet — oh my, she just couldn’t have cared less for all these grubby little children milling around. And then, when we were about three feet away from her, she suddenly turned toward us, her blue eyes snapping, her mouth twisting up into a triumphant little grin. She bent over almost double, the way a fast-draw gunslick does in a Western movie, slapped her thigh with one hand, drew an imaginary pistol, straight-armed it at us, and shouted, “Ha, got you!”

It was Sandy.

She looked great. In addition to the red wig, she was wearing a blue sweater and chinos, and she was barefoot, with a gold bracelet on her left ankle. We walked around her, appraising the wig. She did a little model’s turn for us, with her head and nose tilted up, and then said, “What do you think?”

“Where’d you get it?”

“It’s my mother’s.”

“It’s wild.”

“It cost three hundred and fifty dollars.”

“Where’s your own hair?” I asked.

“I’ve got it up with pins.”

“Under the wig?”

“Where do you think, under my arm?”

“It’s terrific,” I said.

“How old do I look?” Sandy said.

“Seventy-two,” David said.

“Come on.”

“She wants you to say nineteen.”

“Nineteen,” David said.

“Do I really?”

“You look like a fifteen-year-old girl wearing a red wig,” David said.

“Is that a wig?” a boy standing next to me asked.

“No, it’s a locomotive,” I answered.

“Ha-ha,” the boy said.

I didn’t know who he was, but it became immediately plain that he had an excellent sense of humor because the next thing he said was, “Are you bald or something?” which Sandy didn’t even bother to answer.

Something was beginning to happen.

I couldn’t quite understand it. But I felt it came over me all at once, and I sensed that David and Sandy were suddenly aware of it as well. It had something to do with the wig, I knew, the fact that the wig was a disguise. It had something to do with how beautiful the wig made Sandy look, older, and sophisticated, and experienced, somewhat like a college senior. But I suddenly felt that I myself, and David too, looked extremely handsome in the identical light-blue tee shirts we had bought at Mr. Porter’s, so that there was a unity to the trio we formed — Sandy in the center with her red wig and dark-blue sweater, David and I flanking her in light blue — a harmony. This sudden unity, this certain knowledge that each of us was aware of his own good looks as well as the effect we created together, led to an intense feeling of pride, again shared. For a moment I found it difficult to disassociate myself from Sandy and David, to look upon myself as a single entity.

The three of us together had performed a delicate piece of bird surgery two days ago, and now a sense of secret intimacy flashed between us like electricity, hot and bright and feeding on itself, generating new power from its own violent discharge. Every kid in that firehouse was looking at us, I felt, and being dazzled by us, and wishing he could be a part of us. I could actually see kids trying to get near us, as though wanting to be absorbed, longing to be touched by our special glow. We were three very bright and searing, no — one enormously powerful life-giving sun that had suddenly erupted into the universe, diminishing by its brilliance all previously existing stars.

I’m a very bad dancer, but I asked Sandy to dance anyway, and it didn’t bother me at all that I wasn’t as good as some of the other kids on the floor. We got into a conversation about the gull, and we were so very involved in it, so totally involved in the blinding glare that was only ourselves, that there just didn’t seem to be anyone else in the room. She started telling me about the leash and collar she had bought at Mr. Porter’s, both in a bright red which she thought would go nicely with the bird’s gray and white feathers. She hadn’t put the collar on him as yet, she explained, because the hole in his neck still hadn’t healed. She had to time this very carefully because she didn’t want to interfere with the healing, but neither did she want him roaming around loose or flying off when he got stronger.

“Do you think I should clip his wings?” she asked.

“Not unless you want to break that poor bird’s spirit,” I said.

“Peter, please be serious.”

“No, I don’t think you should clip his wings.”

“I don’t think so, either.”

“The leash and collar will take care of the situation fine.”

“Yes, I think so. I’ve still got him tied to the porch railing,” she said. “He won’t fly away, that’s for sure, but he’s beginning to get pretty active.”

“You’d better get that leash on him.”

“I will. Do you think I’ll be able to train him?”

“Yes, gulls are very intelligent.”

“Oh, good.”

“Or crows, I forget which one.”

“You’re a great help.”

“Are you patient?”

“I’m very patient.”

“Training takes a lot of patience.”

“I told you I’m very patient.”

“How do you like the way I dance?”

“You’re terrible.”

“Yes, thank you.”

“But I love you, anyway,” she said, and that was when the fellow who had asked her if she was bald cut in. He did it in a very gentlemanly manner, I thought. I immediately released Sandy, gave a short little bow, and began moving away. But, glancing back, I saw Sandy pull a face over his shoulder, so I walked over to David and told him to cut right back in.

I went outside while they were dancing, over to the Coke machine in front of Mr. Porter’s. I was standing there drinking when the fellow who’d made the “bald” joke walked over. He was wearing sawed-off dungarees, blue sneakers, and a Charlie Brown sweatshirt. He had black hair, which he wore in a very short crew cut, thick black brows, a beefy face. I couldn’t see the color of his eyes because he was standing with the light from the firehouse behind him. He was big, about seventeen years old, I guessed, though not as big as David.

“What are you, wise guys?” he said.

Usually, when somebody makes a brilliant remark like that one, I’ll walk away immediately because it doesn’t pay to get into arguments with morons. But that night I didn’t feel like walking away, I felt like answering him. Even though he was bigger than me.

So I said, simply, “Yes, we’re wise guys.”

“Cutting in like that.”

“Yes,” I said, “cutting in like that.”

I tilted the bottle of Coke and drank a little of it, and then I looked at him, and we just stood there outside the store, staring at each other. Or at least trying to stare, since it was pretty difficult to locate each other’s eyes in the dark. I didn’t know what he had in mind, really I didn’t. Perhaps a fight, and perhaps not. I’ve learned, though, that most guys who come over and sound off do so without any intention of starting a fight unless you push them into one, unless you make it absolutely impossible for them to back away. The truth about this particular situation was that I felt indestructible. This fellow was at least six feet tall, and very burly in his Charlie Brown sweatshirt, but I wasn’t at all afraid of him. In fact, I felt I could knock him flat with a single punch if I had to, walk all over him, squash him into the pier. I felt absolutely courageous and bold and powerful and great. I felt like Batman.

So we kept staring at each other.

“What’s your name?” he said.

“Batman,” I answered.

“You are a wise guy, aren’t you?”

“I am a very wise guy,” I said. “My friend is even wiser. We are the two wisest guys on this whole island, you want to get out of my way?”

He kept staring at me.

“Huh?” I said.

And then he backed off.

Everything exploded inside me, I felt suddenly weak. This was affirmation, you see, concrete affirmation of the fact that I was surrounded by a glow that nothing could penetrate, a magical glow that had somehow been generated by Sandy and David and me, impervious to anyone or anything. With a little fillip, I put the Coke bottle into the crate beside the machine, gave Mr. Charlie Brown Sweatshirt a brief nod, and walked up the pier and into the firehouse without looking back.

“Hey, we were trying to find you,” Sandy said. “We want to go crabbing.”

“In your wig?” I said.

“No, there aren’t any crabs in her wig,” David said.

We borrowed a net from the lobster joint on the pier, and then asked Mr. Gorham to lend us his flashlight, which he did reluctantly. It was a marvelous night, with a silver crescent moon in a sky overwhelmed by millions of stars. A mild breeze blew in off the mainland. We could hear the music from the firehouse, the sound of water gently lapping the rotted timbers of the old pier. Sandy flashed the light out over the water in wide probing arcs. The crabs we were after were blue crabs. Whenever we spotted one, Sandy would lead it in toward the dock, and either David or I would scoop it up into the net. When we caught the first one, we realized we didn’t have anything to put it in, so we had to throw it back. I ran up to the firehouse and borrowed one of the red buckets from the wall, dumping the sand out. My friend was still at the dance. When he saw me come in, he moved over to the other side of the room.

We caught six crabs before the dance ended, and then returned the net to the lobster joint and the flashlight to Mr. Gorham. We could have taken a jitney up the beach if we’d wanted to, but we walked all the way home instead, singing. Sandy cooked the crabs the next day, which was Sunday. They were delicious.

On Monday we drank the truth serum.

The truth serum was beer.

“This isn’t beer,” Sandy said, “it’s truth serum.”

We were sitting inside the tent we’d constructed by hanging David’s poncho from the beach umbrella. Through the open flap facing the ocean, we could see the slanting rain and the gray sea and sky beyond. Each time a wave crashed in against the shore, it left behind it a roiling wake of pebbles and sand, twisted seaweed, splintered rotten wood. The beach looked dirty.

We had walked all the way out to the point in the rain, wearing only our swimsuits; our towels and other stuff were wrapped inside David’s poncho. It wasn’t until we were putting up the umbrella and fastening the poncho to it that we began to feel a bit chilled. The moment we got inside the tent, we dried ourselves and put on sweaters. Then we spread the blanket and opened the beer. That was when Sandy said it was truth serum.

“It looks like beer to me,” David said. “What does it look like to you, Poo?”

“Beer,” I said.

“It’s truth serum,” Sandy insisted. She tilted the bottle to her mouth, drank a little, and then lowered it into her lap. She was sitting with her long legs crossed Indian fashion, a gray sweatshirt covering the top and pants of her bikini. She rolled back her eyes and then intoned, “My middle name is Bernice.”

David laughed and said, “I wouldn’t tell my middle name if you tortured me.”

“Peter?” she said.

I drank a little beer and then, imitating her monotone, said, “My middle name is Albert,” and looked surprised, and said, “I think it is truth serum, David.”

“Try it,” Sandy said.

David studied us both solemnly for a moment.

“Go on, David,” I said gently. “Try it.”

David gave a slight shrug. It seemed to me that he was more interested in drinking the beer than in playing games with it. But I knew he wouldn’t spoil the fun, and I wasn’t surprised when he lifted the bottle to his mouth, drank, put it down, and very quickly and softly said, “My middle name is Lloyd.”

“Oh, no!” I said.

“Oh, yes,” Sandy said. “That’s a wonderful middle name, what’s wrong with it?”

“It’s beautiful,” I said, “here’s to David Lloyd,” and I raised my bottle and drank.

“Now you have to tell us another truth,” Sandy said.

“Why?”

“Because you just drank some more serum.”

“Oh, I see, I see.”

“It has to be about yourself,” Sandy said.

“Of course.”

“So?”

“I flunked geometry when I was a soph,” I said.

“Everybody knows that,” David said.

“Sandra Bernice didn’t know it.”

“That’s true, I didn’t,” Sandy said.

“Still and all,” David insisted, “if a person is under the influence of truth serum, he doesn’t tell you something stupid like he flunked geometry when he was a soph.”

“It is stupid to flunk geometry,” I said, trying to rescue it.

“But David is right,” Sandy said.

“All right,” I said. I deliberately took another swallow of beer and then said, “I hate my Uncle Ralph.”

“We don’t even know your Uncle Ralph,” David said.

“What difference does that make? I hate him, and that’s the truth, and how come I’m the only one drinking?”

“Okay, okay,” David said, and drank some beer.

“The truth,” Sandy said.

“The truth is this is a pretty idiotic game,” David said, and then frowned, thinking. Sandy and I both waited.

“So?” she said at last.

“So okay, wait a minute.”

Sandy drank and said, “Major truth: My top is wet.”

I drank and said, “Major truth: I like girls who say things like My top is wet.”

“I only said it under the influence of the serum,” Sandy said.

“I appreciate your honesty.”

“Thank you,” she said, and nodded.

“You’re welcome,” I said, and nodded back.

“But the truth is, it is wet, and also uncomfortable.”

“So take it off,” David said, and shrugged.

“Ho-ho,” Sandy said, and rolled her eyes.

“Since we are dispensing with crap,” I said, and quickly drank, “let me say in all truth...”

“No, wait a minute,” David said, and drank. He lowered the bottle. “Are you ready?”

“We’re ready,” I said.

“This is a major truth.”

“It better be,” Sandy said.

“I hate it when my father swears.”

“Does he?”

“All the time.”

“What does he say?”

“Everything.”

“So what?”

“Well, I think it’s undignified for an architect to swear all the time.”

“Okay,” Sandy said, “that’s a major truth.”

“Actually,” I said, “it’s undignified for anyone to swear all the time.”

“Especially your own father,” David said.

Sandy lifted her bottle and drank. “Here’s another major truth, are you ready?” She paused, and grinned, and then said, “I love you both.”

I drank rapidly and said, “I love you, too.”

“Me, too,” David said. “Let’s drink to it.”

We all drank.

“Now we each owe another truth,” Sandy said.

“I like this truth serum,” I said. “It tastes just like beer.”

“We’re waiting,” Sandy said.

“Why do I always have to go first?”

“You don’t,” Sandy said. “Here’s a truth for you. Mr. Matthews once got funny with me.”

“What do you mean?” I said, thinking I knew what she meant, but really shocked to hear it because Mr. Matthews was an island alderman or something and practically in his forties.

“He put his hand under my skirt,” Sandy said.

“When?” David asked.

“Last summer.”

“What did you do?”

“What could I do?”

“You could have screamed or something.”

“We were in our living room.”

“In your own house?”

“Sure, my mother was out in the kitchen.”

“And he just stuck his hand under your skirt?”

“Well, he sneaked it under.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘You’re a nice little girl, Sandra,’ or some such crap.”

“I can’t believe it,” I said.

“It’s true.”

“My God, how’ll I ever look him in the eye again?”

“Why not?” Sandy said. “It wasn’t your skirt he had his hand under.”

“But he seems like such a nice guy.”

“He’s a dirty old man,” Sandy said, and giggled.

“Isn’t he an alderman?”

“He’s a councilman.”

“An alderman, I thought.”

“Whatever he is, he’s a swinger,” David said, and drank.

“Now you owe us two,” Sandy said.

“Okay,” David said. “One: I think my father is a lousy architect.”

“Boy, don’t let him hear you say that.”

“Well, isn’t...?”

“Of course,” Sandy said.

“I mean, whatever we say here...”

“Naturally.”

“So how can he hear it?”

“He won’t hear it from us,” I said.

“Let’s swear to that,” Sandy said.

“Right, right.”

“Whatever we say to each other...”

“Whenever we say it.”

Sandy raised her eyes questioningly, waiting.

“I mean, not only now. Whenever.”

“Right, right, it’s strictly between the three of us.”

“I’ll drink to that,” David said, and drank.

“More truths,” Sandy said.

“How many do I owe now?”

“How many does he owe, Peter?”

“Two.”

“I’m almost out of beer,” David said.

“Serum.”

“Serum. Where’s the serum opener?”

“Over there.”

“Where?”

“Right there.”

“Oh, good, good.”

“Well, finish what you’ve got in the bottle first.”

“Right,” David said, and drank.

“That makes three,” I said.

“You want them all in a row?”

“Yes.”

“All in a row,” Sandy said.

“Here goes,” David said, and paused. “My mother has a boyfriend.”

“How do you know?” Sandy asked, her eyes wide.

“I saw him.”

“With her?”

“Yes.”

“In bed?”

“Yes.”

“Were they doing it?”

“Yep.”

“When you came in?”

“I didn’t go in,” David said. “They didn’t see me.”

“Who was he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where was your father?”

“In Chicago.”

“Boy,” I said.

“I walked around for maybe two hours,” David said. “We were supposed to have a game that afternoon, you know, but it was called because the field was wet. Which is how I happened to get home early. So I walked around, and when I got back my mother asked me who won. I said we didn’t play. She got this sort of panicky look on her face, you know, and her hand went up to her throat, like in some cheap television show, and she said ‘Well, where were you all this time?’ Just walking around, I said. And we looked at each other.”

“Parents are a pain in the ass,” Sandy said thoughtfully.

“Mmm,” David said, and glanced through the opening in the poncho. It was raining harder now, the sky was blacker. “Where the hell’s that opener?” he said. I tossed it to him, and he opened the second bottle of beer. “One of you go,” he said, “I’m tired.”

We were all very quiet. Outside, there was a streak of lightning, and then a thunderclap. I started biting my lip and wondering what I could tell them. I didn’t want to tell them about the snot.

“Here’s another truth for you,” David said suddenly. “I once broke my grandfather’s watch with a hammer, just smashed in the crystal. Then I threw it down the sewer, and when they asked me if I’d seen it, I said no.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“I wanted to.”

“But why?”

“Because he said there was a little man inside making it tick.”

“Why’d he tell you a stupid thing like that?”

“Who knows? I was only four or five, he probably figured it would thrill me to know there was some little guy inside his watch. Instead, it scared hell out of me. That’s why I smashed the watch and threw it down the sewer.”

“But you didn’t do it maliciously,” Sandy said.

“Oh, sure, I did it maliciously,” David said, and we all laughed.

“Whose turn is it?” Sandy said.

“I don’t know,” I said, and shrugged. I didn’t want to tell them about the snot, and yet it seemed to be the only thing I could think of.

“You go,” Sandy said.

“No, go ahead, I’m thinking.”

“Have some more beer,” David said.

“Okay,” I said, and drank.

Outside there was another flash of lightning. We held our breaths. The thunder came almost immediately, loud, close. A fresh torrent of rain beat noisily on the umbrella top.

“I...”

They both turned to look at me.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Come on, don’t be chicken,” David said.

“No, I was just thinking.”

“About what?”

“About...” I hesitated. “About Sandy’s top.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” David said.

“What’s wrong with that?” Sandy said. “He’s supposed to tell the truth.”

“That’s right,” I said, but I was lying, I hadn’t been thinking about Sandy’s top, I’d been thinking about the snot. Or maybe I’d been thinking about both.

“What about my top?” Sandy asked.

“Nothing,” I said. I shrugged. “Just that it’s wet, that’s all.”

“Would you like me to take it off?”

“No.”

“Tell the truth. If you want me to take it off, I will.”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged again. “David?”

“Oh, take the damn thing off if you want to,” David said.

“Well, does Peter want me to?”

“Yeah, sure, go ahead,” I said, “I don’t care.”

“It’s not such a big deal, you know,” Sandy said, and reached behind her to unclasp the bikini top. She put one hand into her sweatshirt, pulled out the top, and threw it on the blanket. “Oh, man,” she said, “that feels a hundred percent better.”

“Well, sure,” David said, “we’re not kids here.”

“That’s right,” Sandy said, “we ought to get that straight.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, let’s really be honest with each other all the time, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

“You’re blushing.”

“Am I?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I’ve never talked to a girl this way.”

“I’ve never talked to a boy this way,” Sandy said.

“So it’s good,” David said, and shrugged.

“Yes, it is,” Sandy said. “I think it is.”

“He’s still blushing.”

“No, I was thinking about something else.”

“What?”

“Listen, are we really... I mean, it’s never gonna go beyond the three of us, is it?”

“Of course not. If you ever told anyone I took off the top of my bathing suit...”

“Oh, come on, Sandy, why would we do that?”

“Well, boys sometimes...”

“Hey, come on, I thought this was something different.”

“Well, it is.”

“Then...”

“All right, I’m sorry,” she said.

“Well, okay,” David said.

“I said I was sorry.”

“Either we trust each other or we don’t,” David said.

“I trust you both,” Sandy said.

“Well, we trust you, too,” David said.

“Yes, we do.”

“Good,” Sandy said, and we all drank again. “Tell us,” she said to me.

“It’s pretty disgusting.”

“How bad can it be?”

“What’d you do?”

“Well, I made Ritz cracker sandwiches out of cream cheese and snot, and gave them to my cousin to eat.”

David and Sandy both burst out laughing at the same time, surprising me. I’d thought they would kick me out of the tent or something, but instead they were laughing.

“Jesus, that’s a great idea!” David said.

“Well, it was pretty disgusting,” I said, but I was tremendously relieved.

“I’ve got a cousin I’d like to do that to,” Sandy said, laughing.

“Only it wouldn’t be snot,” David said, and rolled over on the blanket laughing, knocking over a bottle of beer, and almost knocking down the umbrella and the poncho. Sandy and I jumped on him and began punching him on the back, and finally poured a full bottle of beer all over him.

We had each sneaked six-packs out of our respective refrigerators. We drank almost all the beer, and buried the rest in the sand, marking off the distance from a telephone pole with the number 7-381 on it on a small aluminum strip. It was still raining when we decided to go into the water. The beach was empty, the waves were still pounding in and dragging up a lot of muck. David and I took off our sweaters. I chased David into the water, and then we shouted for Sandy to come in.

“Just a second,” she yelled from inside the poncho tent, and then she came out, still wearing her sweatshirt, and holding the top part of her suit in her hands. She looked out over the water, gave a shrug, and threw the top back inside. Then she pulled the sweatshirt over her head, and came running down toward the water, shrieking and yelling.

She had very small breasts.

I thought we did a very good job with the gull, if I must say so myself.

To begin with, he turned out to be a very husky old bird, ready to fly off long before the wound in his neck had healed entirely. The day after Sandy got the collar and leash on him, in fact, he fluttered out of his cardboard box, and immediately crouched over low, beak thrust forward, wings back, like a swimmer about to do a racing dive. He gave a sudden spring into the air, opened his wings wide, flapped them wildly, got pulled up short by the leash attached to the porch railing, and came right down on his head. Gaining his feet again, he looked at the three of us in a hurt, bewildered way, and then gave it another try, going through the same crouching routine, and the springing, and the flapping and fluttering, this time squawking mightily and attracting the attention of several other gulls who swooped low over the house and began squawking back at him. Sandy and David and I sat on the porch steps, watching as he got himself set for another try, crouching, and then coming down the runway for a takeoff and then going into his nosedive again when the leash played out and the collar caught his throat.

I was beginning to think he was pretty stupid.

He must have tried it at least two dozen times before he began to get the feeling that perhaps something was preventing him from taking off as was his usual custom. The gulls circling the house lost interest (they had probably thought food was involved and then realized there wouldn’t be any handouts) and flew off. The bird gazed at them wistfully, it seemed to me, and then glared at the three of us where we sat quietly watching him. Suspiciously, he looked up at the sky again, apparently thinking there was some sort of trick involved here, some unseen force putting the whammie on him, and decided to dispense with his usual preparations for flight, surprising his invisible opponent instead by leaping into the air without a preliminary crouch. His new tactic earned him only another fall. He came crashing down quite hard this time. For a few minutes I figured he might have to go into surgery again, for the brain this time. But he staggered to his feet once more, looked balefully at us, and gave a squawk as if to say You bastards, what’s the secret here, why can’t I fly? Then he began pacing around the deck in the short circle proscribed by the length of the leash, took a cautious flutter up to the deck railing and actually pecked at the leash once or twice before trying to take off from his new perch — which only netted him another crashing blow to the cerebellum.

“He’s gonna kill himself,” David said.

“No, he’ll catch on,” Sandy answered.

I wasn’t so sure.

To my surprise, though, the bird kept trying, seeming to gain a little more knowledge with each attempt, and at last learning that his own force being exerted against the leash was what snapped him back so fiercely each time. Once he understood the phenomenon, he ceased fighting the leash, and fluttered up tentatively to hover on the air instead, simply soared up quietly to the limit the leash allowed and then hung there and stared down at us with, it seemed to me, an altogether unwarranted look of smugness.

“I think he’s got it,” David said.

“By George, he’s got it,” I said.

Whereupon the bird dropped silently to the deck, tucked in his wings, walked to the box, gave a flying leap into it, squawked once, and hunched himself down into the paper scraps Sandy had arranged there for him.

“He’s a smart old bird,” Sandy said. “You’ll see.”

The very next day, the smart old bird zoomed up out of his box again, almost broke his neck against the restraining leash, and came crashing down to the hard wooden floor of the deck. It seemed apparent to me that he had a very short memory and an IQ of perhaps 60 or 70, but Sandy insisted he was the most brilliant bird she had ever seen, and that it was only a matter of time before he understood completely. I thought it would only be a matter of time before he fractured his skull. In fact, I think he managed to survive only because Sandy’s mother began sounding off just then about having a sea gull living in a cardboard box on her sundeck and making a mess.

Sandy’s mother was a divorcée, which meant that she gave a lot of parties and entertained a lot of people, so I guess the gull did at first present a pretty menacing picture, staring with an angry yellow eye from the depths of his cardboard nest, like a phoenix waiting to rise in anger, hardly the proper stimulus for cocktail conversation. It began to be a regular melody and counterpoint, as David described it, the gull banging his head on the deck and Sandy’s mother in the background nagging all the time, get rid of that horrid old bird, get him off the porch, he frightens my friends, look at the mess he’s making, and so on.

We had seen some of the friends Sandy’s mother dragged out to the island, however, and it was our opinion — all three of us — that if the gull succeeded in scaring off even a few of them, he’d be performing a great service. The one we particularly disliked, and whom we cut up with regularity every Monday afternoon (he usually spent the weekend and left by helicopter early Monday morning) was a lawyer who had an office on Pine Street downtown. He was a tubby little man who always wore a white tee shirt over his bathing suit, even when he went into the water. “I have very fair skin,” he told anyone who would listen, “I turn lobster red in the sun.” It was Sandy’s opinion that Snow White, as we called him, was sleeping with her mother, and the thought nauseated all of us, Sandy especially. He had a habit of saying “Point of fact” before he began a statement, regardless of whether what he as about to say was really fact. “Point of fact,” he would say, “most people dislike turnips,” or something equally stupid. He drank martinis made only with Booth’s gin; Sandy’s mother kept a bottle especially for him. He hated the gull. When we first began our training program, we toyed with the idea of teaching the bird to bite him. On the ass was where we had in mind.

But because of the pressure from Sandy’s mother, we finally moved the bird from the deck to the back of the house, which didn’t turn out too badly after all. There was a shed back there which was used for storing the garbage cans. Since the bird would eat practically anything we tossed him, it was very convenient being so close to the garbage cans. What we did was drill a hole near the top of a piece of lead pipe and then put a long bolt through the hole, making a cross-piece around which we could loop the end of the gull’s leash. Then we sank three feet of the pipe into the sand near the shed, leaving six or seven inches exposed. Sandy was afraid the bird would be smart enough (a premise I seriously doubted) to figure out how to lift the leash off the cross bolt. David, however, insisted that this was the only way to tether a bird, he naturally having tethered thousands and thousands of birds in his life, so Sandy accepted his judgment, and the training began in earnest.

The gull was much happier with his new surroundings. If you are the type of stupid bird who keeps landing on your head, it’s better by a long shot to have a sand pile to practice on, rather than a wooden deck. Eventually, of course, the leash made its point. The gull was a captive, and he realized it at last and became the first walking bird in the history of America. In fact, Sandy got him to the point where he was almost heeling, though most of the time he just strutted along either ahead or behind. Every now and then, he’d try to take off, forgetting that he wasn’t supposed to fly. But Sandy would give a short sharp snap of the leash, and he’d come back down, squawking a little (he was really a cantankerous old crank) but walking along nonetheless, and waiting for his reward from the small bag of garbage one or the other of us always carried.

We even took him out on the sailboat several times, though the sight of him tied to a deck cleat, staring into the wind, his feathers bristling, always gave me a funny feeling. As though he were an old Greek slave who had been captured by the Romans, faithful to them, but always pining for Athens or someplace. That was the feeling I got whenever I watched him on the deck of the boat, peering into the wind with his yellow eyes.

The boat belonged to my father, but he let us use her whenever we wanted to, except on weekends. She was a fiber-glass auxiliary, a twenty-footer with a mainsail and jib. There were two berths in the cabin, and the cockpit — more than six feet long — provided sleeping accommodations for another two as well. There was a built-in icebox and a concealed head, a sink, and a water tank, a hanging locker and an outboard in a well, an enclosed motor compartment and a canvas dodger that provided full headroom in the galley. She was a nice little boat, and we probably used her more often than my father did that summer. Between the day of the truth serum and the day David got grounded — that was a full week — we had the boat out four times, which was an awful lot considering we were trying to train a bird at the same time.

The boat was moored at the island marina, a combination boatel with twelve cottages, run by a very fat flamboyant old lady who wore pendant earrings even in the morning. Her name was Violet, and she was always surrounded by a lot of fags; David’s father called her the Queen Bee. She had orange hair, and she wore white makeup; she truly was a pretty frightening old dame. But she also knew a lot about boats, and once she helped me locate and repair a broken spring in the engine.

The three of us — four, counting the gull — would go down to the marina early in the morning, stow our gear in the cockpit, buy whatever supplies we needed from Violet, and then go out under power until we hit open water. David and I would then hoist the sails, and off we’d go, skimming the water. Sandy sitting in the stern in a bikini, the wooden tiller tucked under her slender arm, her eyes the color of the blue fiber-glass hull, her grin cracking wide across her face. Sometimes we’d furl the sails and just let the boat drift, lying on deck and soaking up sun, David’s transistor radio tuned to ABC, or sometimes QXR. He was a music major at Music and Art, and he played the flute like an angel, both jazz and classical, but he very rarely foisted long-hair music on us, and usually we just listened to Ron Lundy or Dan Ingram or one of the other great disk jockeys. The gull would give a squawk every now and then, and Sandy would lazily say, “Oh, shut up, bird,” and then roll over to get the sun on her back. We had snorkels and fins and masks, and whenever we found a little cove where the water seemed brighter than the rest of the Sound, we’d go over the side looking for crabs and small fish, but there really wasn’t very much to see.

It was Violet who suggested we try an island some six miles due north of Greensward. She had started selling us six-packs even though it was against the law. I think she had her eye on David. She always used to put her arm around his shoulder when we came in, or stand close to him with her enormous hanging breasts pressed against his arm. David complained that he had never met a more repulsive woman in his life, and he pointed out something we had missed about her, the fact that she smelled of pumpkin.

“Have you ever cleaned out the insides of a pumpkin on Halloween,” he said, “the smell of the gooky seedy pulp inside? That’s what Violet smells like when you get close to heir.”

David was the first one to notice this, of course, because she always seemed to be standing closest to him, but once he told us about it, we got the whiff, too. I thought it was disgusting and surmised it was from hanging around with fags, because they all wear the same secret perfume that goes out on the air to other fags everywhere, the way some species of animals send out musk. Anyway, Violet smelled like a pumpkin, and she liked David very much, and because of him she sold us beer on the sneak. We had to go around to the back door for it. We usually took only two six-packs with us when we went out on the boat. It is very easy to get bombed out of your mind, and on a sailboat it’s important to know what you’re doing at all times.

On this one morning in the third week of July, the four of us marched around to Violet’s marina — the official name of the place was The Blue Grotto — and Sandy and I waited out front while David went around back to get the beer. We were surprised to see Violet because she usually made it her business to be where-ever David was, but this morning she popped out of the front screen door, smelling of pumpkin as usual, and asked us if we had heard about this delightful little island six miles due north. Violet had a way of using words one usually associated with tiny women. She must have weighed a hundred and eighty pounds, and she wore flowered muu muus that made her look even bigger, but she was always using words like “delicious” and “cunning” and “charming” that made you think of a smaller person.

We told her we hadn’t heard of the island, and she went inside and came back with a C.&G.S. chart of the area (which we had aboard the boat, anyway) and pointed out a small island shaped like a fishhook.

“You’ve got a good wind today,” she said, “you could make it in little more than an hour.”

It was my guess we could make it in much less than that, but I didn’t say anything.

“What’s so special about it?” Sandy asked, and the gull on his leash squawked, and she said, “Oh, shut up, bird.”

“I saw you going aboard with snorkeling equipment the other day,” Violet said. “There’s some divine snorkeling there.”

“Well, maybe we’ll give it a try,” I said.

“If you’d like me to navigate...” Violet started, and I quickly said, “Thanks, Vi, but that won’t be necessary.”

“Because I’ve been there, you know, and I could help you find it.”

“Well,” I said, tactfully, I thought, “we’ve got this identical chart aboard, and I’m sure we can find it without any trouble at all. But thanks a lot.”

“Be sure you go in through the channel,” Violet said.

“We’ll be very careful,” I promised.

David came around the corner of the boatel just then, with the two six-packs wrapped in his poncho.

“What’s up?” he said.

“Good morning, David,” Violet said, and moved over close to him with her pumpkin aroma.

“We’re going to try this new island,” Sandy said.

“I’ll come along if you want me to,” Violet said, and smiled at David.

“Gee, thanks a lot, Vi,” David said, “but that won’t be necessary.”

“Do the two of you always give the same answers?” Violet asked.

“The three of us,” Sandy corrected.

“Thanks a lot, though, Vi,” David called over his shoulder, and we all went down to the boat.

It was a gorgeous day, sunny and hot — I had to take off my sweatshirt — but there was a nice breeze, too, and not a cloud in the sky. Standing on the deck of the boat in surfing trunks and a floppy blue hat, I could see for miles and miles, everything so sharp and clear and true, the mainsail billowing out in a good strong wind, David leaning on the cockpit in his white tennis shorts, Sandy at the tiller in a lacy bikini and a straw hat with ragged edges, we were some motley crew. The gull, tethered to his usual cleat just aft of the cockpit, was staring into the wind the way he always did, squawking every now and then, to which Sandy every now and then would say, “Oh, shut up, bird.”

We found the island without any trouble.

The channel was clearly marked on our chart, and it showed a depth of seven feet in the center, which was fine since the boat had a draft of three feet with the stick down. We anchored close in, and Sandy and I put on the masks and fins and jumped over. The bird gave a little squawk as we went over the side, and David told him to shut up. David had opened a can of beer and was serving as lookout.

There wasn’t much to see down there. I was beginning to think Violet had made up the whole snorkeling thing in the hope we’d ask her to come along. Sandy and I dove for about a half hour, and then David went in with her, but all any of us saw were a couple of crabs and some eels, and the usual quota of beer bottles and sneakers and junk. We lay around on deck in the sun afterward, and then had our lunch and decided to explore the island. We left the bird tethered to his cleat, and swam in.

The beach was flat and pebbly where we came ashore, a dune rising up behind it, covered with beach plum and grass. A fisherman’s net, gray and stiff and rotted, hung over the skeleton of a beached rowboat. The charred remains of a fire were near the bow of the boat. A beer can was half-buried in the sand near the fire.

“When we find him,” David said, crouching near the ashes, “we’ll have to give him a name.”

“What’s today?” Sandy asked.

“Monday.”

“Too bad,” she said, and clucked her tongue.

We climbed the dune behind the boat and saw that the island fell away sharply to the south, the land low and dotted with marshes that reflected the sun in a hundred different places, as though someone had spilled a handful of gold coins onto the ground. At the far end of the island, there was a stand of towering pines in dark-green silhouette against the sky.

“It’s a nice island,” Sandy said.

“Mmm.”

“Want to walk it a little?”

“Sure.”

We half-expected to run across someone, I suppose, but we didn’t. The fire near the boat could have been cold for an hour or a day or a week, there was no telling. Traces of humanity were scattered all over the island, though, and it was funny to keep discovering evidence of people without seeing any of the people themselves.

After a while, Sandy said, “We’re Martians who’ve just landed in a spaceship, and we have no idea what human beings are like. All we can do is reconstruct them from their artifacts.”

Then she stooped to pick up a rusty spoon, and a speculated that the people on earth were undoubtedly only a foot high, otherwise why would their shovels be so small? Later, when we found a pair of tattered madras swimming trunks, I said they corrobrated Sandy’s theory since this was obviously a shirt for a creature with a very small chest, and then went on to speculate that earthlings had two heads since there were two neckholes in the garment. But the game was exceedingly difficult to play, and we gave it up after only a few more tries. Linking hands, we shrieked and ran down a sharply sloping, loosely packed stretch of sand that led directly into the pine forest.

It was cool and dark under the trees. I felt, I can’t explain it, I felt a sudden gladness sweep over me, as though my heart were expanding unbearably inside my chest. The forest echoed with life, its luxuriant growth seemed to reach out to me and absorb me so that I felt like a growing thing myself, grasping for the sun. I gripped Sandy’s hand more tightly.

“Listen,” I said.

“I don’t hear anything,” she answered.

“Listen to everything.”

“Neither do I,” David said.

Sandy suddenly pulled her hand away, frowned, and said, “This is creepy.”

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” David said.

They turned and swiftly walked away from me. I could hear the surf far away, the repetition of an insect’s song, the gentle soughing of the wind in the tree-tops. I hesitated only a moment longer and then I followed them.

That night, David got grounded.

This was a full week after the rainy afternoon with the truth serum, and I really thought it was senseless to punish David for something he had done a week before. Besides, when you considered the element of chance involved, the retroactive grounding seemed even more idiotic: if Mr. Porter hadn’t sent his bill on the fifteenth and charged David’s mother twice for the beer, she never would have found out at all. I was disgusted with the whole concept.

The preceding Monday we had each sneaked six-packs of beer out of our refrigerators, this being before we’d made our working arrangement with Violet. Because of the peculiar circular design of David’s house, the storage space was severely limited (not to mention the fact that you couldn’t place anything flush against the curved and sloping walls — maybe David’s father was a lousy architect). So instead of putting one carton of beer in the refrigerator to chill, the way most people do, leaving the spare cartons in the pantry or the closet, in David’s house they would order three six-packs every week and stick all three in the refrigerator. David’s mother always shopped on Saturday, and the truth serum business took place on Monday, and the very next day she noticed that there were only two cartons of beer in the refrigerator instead of three. In fact, there were exactly seven bottles of beer, since David’s father had drunk a few between Saturday and Tuesday, so that was when the first call to Mr. Porter took place. The first call, as it was later revealed, went something like this. David’s mother told Mr. Porter that she was certain he had delivered only two cartons of beer instead of three because here it was only Tuesday and they hadn’t had any weekend guests and yet there were only seven bottles of beer in the refrigerator. Mr. Porter said he had made up the order himself and distinctly remembered putting three six-packs into it, but he would nonetheless send his boy over with an additional carton and, of course, would not charge her for it. So on the following Monday, David’s mother got the bill and, instead of Mr. Porter not charging her for the additional six-pack, he had charged her — and he a millionaire. So David’s mother made the second phone call to Mr. Porter, telling him that he had made a mistake with his bill, and going over the entire incident again, while meanwhile David and Sandy and I were exploring Violet’s island and drinking the beer Violet had sold us.

Mr. Porter calmly explained to David’s mother that yes, he had charged her for the extra carton of beer because upon checking further, he remembered something about the order but had not had a chance to call her back. What he remembered was that he’d had only three cartons of Heineken (David’s father’s brand) in stock when he’d gone to the refrigerator, which fact had caused him to write a memo to reorder, which memo was now in front of him, would David’s mother care to have him read it to her on the phone? Yes, David’s mother said. Very well, Mr. Porter said, Reorder Heineken Beer, and it’s dated Saturday, July the eighth, and right here in the corner are my wife’s initials, MJP for Mary Jane Porter, meaning she has already taken care of the reordering. So that’s how I know I gave you three cartons and not two, and that’s why I charged you for the extra one I sent over, which you may have noticed was Löwenbräu and not Heineken, because the Heineken still hasn’t come in yet. Thank you, David’s mother said, and hung up.

She then, naturally, called in the maid, whose name was Eudice, and asked her whether she remembered how many cartons of beer she’d put into the refrigerator last Saturday when the order came from Mr. Porter’s — was it two or three? Eudice, who was raised in North Carolina, and who had difficulty counting past the number five, examined her fingers and told David’s mother that she had put three cartons in the refrigerator, and then went on with amazing if not total recall to itemize the exact number of times David’s father had gone to the refrigerator for beer, as for example the two bottles he had drunk with the barbecued spare-ribs they’d had that Saturday night, and the one he’d had on Sunday afternoon after fixing the water pump, and the two he’d had with those funny clam things—

The marinated clams, David’s mother said.

— yes, on Sunday night, Eudice went on. As a matter of fact, she herself had been surprised last Monday, what with it raining so hard and all, to find only a carton and a little bit more of beer, instead of there being two cartons and a little bit more.

When did you discover this? David’s mother naturally asked.

It was just after your son left the house, Eudice the rat answered.

So that’s what was waiting for David when he stepped through the door after the day on Violet’s island. His father went through the outraged older party routine, the shame of learning that his own son was drinking behind his back, what other things was David doing that his father knew nothing about? Are you smoking, too? he asked, are you?

David denied drinking, he denied smoking, he almost denied breathing. If only you had asked, his mother said, we would have given you the beer (which was a bald-faced lie). But no, you had to steal it, oh David, I’m so ashamed of you, and so on, as if she had just cracked the Brinks robbery.

So they grounded him.

For three days.

The grounding was a full-dress one, too. He wasn’t permitted to leave the house, of course, but neither was he permitted to have friends there or to talk to them on the telephone. He was allowed only one phone call (as soon as he hung up, Sandy said to me, “Do you think we should get him a lawyer?”), which was how he managed to let us know what had happened. All in all, it looked as though a desolate few days lay ahead.

The first day was very difficult.

We had gone out to the point on Tuesday morning, searching for our cache of beer near the telephone pole with the aluminum strip marked 7-382 on it, and practically digging up half the beach until we remembered we’d buried it at the foot of 7-381. We unearthed two bottles and carried them into the tall beach grass because there were some other kids around, and also some adults playing volleyball without a net. Sandy took the bottle opener out of her bikini top, removed the Kleenex she had wrapped it in, opened both bottles, said, “Here’s to the prisoner of Zenda,” meaning David, winked, drank, and then reached into her canvas beach bag for what looked like a railroad timetable.

“Did you see this?” she asked, and handed it to me.

The brochure was perhaps eight inches long and three inches wide, folded in half lengthwise and then in half again. It was printed in blue ink. The headline read: INTRODUCING SELECTA-DATE.

“What is it?” I said.

“Read it.”

I read it quickly. The first page explained that this was a new scientific method of meeting people who were specifically suited to one’s own tastes and needs, all of it made possible through the modern miracle of electronic data processing. It went on to explain that the answers to this questionnaire (which comprised the remaining pages of the folder) would be fed into a computer programmed to discover “that perfect date who will complement your personality, your likes and dislikes, your outlooks and ideals, your physical tastes.”

“What do you think?” Sandy asked.

“What do you think?” I answered.

“I think we ought to screw up the machine,” Sandy said.

I’d noticed that a registration fee of ten dollars was required for each applicant, and I immediately wondered whether it was worth that much to screw up a machine. She saw my hesitancy and said, “What’s the matter?”

“It costs ten bucks to join,” I said.

“That’s only a little more than three dollars each,” Sandy said. “David’ll go along with it, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know.” I hesitated again. “I wish he was, here.”

“I do, too. Let’s fill it out, Peter. Just for fun. We don’t have to mail it in if we don’t want to.”

“Okay,” I said.

We sipped a little more beer. Sandy took a ballpoint pen from her beach bag, and propped the folder on a copy of McCall’s, which she supported with her knees. It was a very hot day. A fine sheen of sweat was on her chest above the bikini top. I thought fleetingly of that day she’d run into the water naked above the waist. Sandy immediately said, “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Peter,” she said warningly.

“I was thinking of the day you went in the water without your top,” I admitted.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, and grinned. “Some show, huh?”

“Well, I think it was,” I said, and shrugged.

“Shall we fill this thing out or not?” she said.

“Yeah, sure, let’s fill it out.”

The first question (as indeed the entire first page of questions) was multiple choice, the applicant being asked to circle his or her age bracket. Since the youngest bracket listed was 17–19, Sandy was clearly ineligible to begin with. But in order to screw up the machine, she circled the listing for 20–22. I was still thinking about that day, and was getting a little annoyed by her refusal to discuss it. We’d promised to tell the truth at all times, hadn’t we? So why had she just brushed me off? She went down the questionnaire now, reading the questions and the choices out loud, circling her height as 5′3″ to 5′5″, a good two inches less than her real height, and then describing herself as “of ample build.” She claimed to have a masters degree, black hair, and blue eyes — she did have blue eyes, of course. But she further claimed to be Oriental, and Jewish, and fluent in Chinese and Greek, and Republican in outlook.

She then came to a question that asked whether she considered herself Very Bright, Bright, or Averàge, and immediately circled Very Bright. Since I was annoyed, anyway, I coughed politely and looked up at the sky.

“I am,” she said. “I have an IQ of 157.” She lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry, that sounds like boasting. Shall I cross it out and circle Bright instead?”

“Do what you want to do,” I said. I couldn’t stop thinking about that day last week, and I blamed her for what I was thinking, figuring if she’d only discuss the damn thing, we could forget it. At the same time, I was embarrassed by the memory of how she’d looked, and ashamed of myself for feeling so horny. Finally, I blamed David for having stupidly got himself grounded, though I couldn’t really imagine what that had to do with any of it.

“Should my date be Negro, Caucasian, or Oriental?” Sandy asked.

“Negro,” I said.

“No, let’s say Puerto Rican. That’ll really screw ’em up.”

“Is there a listing for Puerto Rican?”

“No, I’ll write it in.”

“Okay,” I said. My mouth was dry.

“Peter, what the hell is it?”

“Well, if you really want to know,” I said, “I was pretty interested that day.”

“What day?”

“The day you took off your top.”

“Oh,” Sandy said.

“If you really want to know,” I said, “which I guess you don’t.”

“Sure I do,” she said. “I appreciate your telling me, I do, Peter.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s perfectly all right that you were interested. I don’t mind.”

“I’m glad you don’t mind.”

“In fact, I’m flattered.”

“Yeah, well.”

“I mean, I’m so little, Peter,” she said, and laughed. Nervously, it seemed to me.

“You’re not so little,” I said.

“Thank you, Peter,” she said, “that’s very sweet of you.” She hesitated, and then smiled and said, “Shall we finish this?” and tapped the questionnaire with the tip of her pen.

“No, I want to settle this other thing first.”

“But what’s there to...” she started, and then turned to stare at me.

“It’s still on my mind,” I said.

“Oh, come on, Peter.”

“Well, we promised to tell the truth, and that’s the truth.”

“Well... I...” She gave a brief puzzled shrug. “Well... well, what about it?”

“I want you to do it again.”

“Do what? Take off my top?”

“Yes,” I said, and swallowed, and looked away from her.

“Oh, boy,” she said.

“Well, that’s the truth. That’s what’s on my mind, and that’s the truth.”

“Oh, boy,” she said again.

“Well,” I said, and was silent.

Sandy stared at me. “There are people around,” she said at last.

“Yeah.”

“I’d take it off if there weren’t.”

“Sure.”

We were silent again.

“You don’t believe me,” Sandy said.

“I believe you.”

“Peter, it doesn’t mean a thing to me. I’d take it off in a minute if we were alone.”

“Sure.”

“I would.”

I did not answer her. She began tapping the pen on the magazine cover. Down on the beach I could hear the volleyball players shouting.

“I just don’t understand you,” I said at last, shaking my head. “Didn’t you know David and I would...” I shrugged.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Well, what’d you expect?”

“I don’t know, but I didn’t once think you’d...” She shook her head angrily. “We can’t even talk straight anymore, see what you did?”

“I can talk straight,” I said.

“Oh, sure.” She picked up a tiny beach shell and, studying it, said, “Did... did David, too?”

“How would I know?”

“Didn’t you discuss it with him?”

“Behind your back?” I said, shocked.

“I thought...”

“Of course not!”

“Peter, you’re getting me very confused.”

“It’s just that I don’t know what’s supposed to happen here.”

“Happen?”

“Yes, between us.”

“Between us?”

“Jesus, Sandy, must you repeat...?”

“I don’t understand you, damn it. I don’t understand!”

“Are we supposed to... are David and I supposed to... to...”

“What?”

“Do things?”

“No,” she said immediately.

“Then... then what do you expect us to do, if you take off your top like that?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why’d you do it?”

“Because... because I didn’t think it would matter, one way or the other.”

“Well, it got me excited,” I said quickly, and turned away in embarrassment.

“Well, I don’t know what to do about that,” Sandy said.

“Well, I don’t know, either.”

“If you’re going to be thinking about my breasts all the goddamn time...”

“I don’t think about them all the goddamn time. I just happen to be thinking about them now.” In defense, I said, “That bikini’s hardly anything at all.”

“Well, then, I’ll just stop wearing bikinis, that’s all.”

“Everybody wears bikinis.”

“Then go think about them a little.”

“I never saw them without their tops.”

“And you won’t ever see me again, either!” she said angrily, and threw the shell into her beach bag.

“I thought you said...”

“Never mind what I said, the hell with what I said.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.” She was silent for a long time. I kept wondering why she didn’t get up and walk away. I dreaded the thought of facing David. How could I possibly tell him about this?

“If only we could...” she started, and then shook her head. “I thought you understood,” she said.

“I do.”

“No, you don’t,” she said, and fell silent again. She was thoughtful for a long time. Then she sighed and put the magazine and the questionnaire and the pen into her beach bag. She rose, tugged at the bikini pants, adjusted the bikini top, brushed sand from her thighs, and held out her hand to me. For a moment she stood against the sun and was faceless.

I looked up at her and tried to see her eyes.

“Come,” she said.

I took her hand, and she pulled me to my feet. I felt very clumsy. I felt I should apologize to her. We began walking. We walked in silence, the beach bag hanging from her shoulder, thudding against her thigh with every step she took. The sun was hot. We were climbing up and away from the beach. The sound of the volleyball game was far behind us now. We continued to climb. I realized suddenly that we were heading toward the center of the island, where the fire had been.

“Listen,” I said, “let’s forget it.” Inexplicably, I had begun trembling.

“No,” she said.

“Sandy...”

“I want you to see me,” she said. “Don’t be afraid.”

“I’m not.”

“Peter, you’re lying.”

“All right, I am afraid.”

“Of what?”

“That I’ll do something to you.”

“You won’t.”

“How do you know?”

“I won’t let you.”

We were approaching the forest. The burnt pines were gnarled and black against the sky. I was trembling violently now.

“It’s too open,” I said, “they’ll see us.”

“Who?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I feel...”

“No one will see us,” she said.

We found a huge boulder, as black as the skeletal trees surrounding it. Still trembling, I sat with my back to it on the side away from the distant ocean. Sandy stood before me silently and solemnly, and reached behind her to unclasp the top of the suit. Her nipples looked exactly the way they had that day she’d rushed into the water, that day the icy water touched them.

She smiled and sat down beside me. Then she reached into the beach bag again, and began filling out the questionnaire, reading the questions and possible answers aloud to me.

Eventually, I stopped trembling.

The fire, of course, had taken place long before I was born. The way it was told to me, it had started in the only house on the edge of the forest, a modern structure with sliding screens and a wide deck that faced the rising sun. The man and woman living there had been having trouble for a good many years, constantly threatening divorce, even coming to blows one night in public at The Blue Grotto. On the night of the fire, they’d had a terrible argument, and the man had seized the nearest object at hand, a lighted kerosene lamp, and thrown it at his wife. Her nylon gown had gone up in flames. Shrieking in terror, she had raced outdoors, dropping tatters of fire into the adjacent brush. It had been a dry summer, and there was a high wind that night. The flames leaped from bush to bush, eventually reaching the forest itself, where the wilting pines supplied fresh fuel for the blaze. The summer people stood in panic on the beach, watching the flames billow up into the sky, a dense black cloud of smoke hanging over the forest, the strong wind and the flying sparks threatening to spread the fire everywhere. The only thing that saved the island was a sudden crosswind that turned the flames back upon themselves.

Before that day with Sandy, I could never think of that ancient fire without scaring myself. Whenever the wind was unusually high, I would look southward from the back porch of our house and visualize those billowing flames, that hanging black cloud, the slender woman rushing in terror through the brush. Oh yes, the islanders had since built a firehouse and supplied it with a shining engine and a siren that could be heard all the way over on the mainland. And yes, there was a volunteer fire department now, and everyone had been alerted to and understood the possible danger. But it had happened once, and my constant fear was that it might happen again — and this time no lucky crosswind would spring up to prevent a total holocaust. The fear was unrealistic, I guess, but that didn’t make it any less frightening. On particularly anxious days, I would find myself hating those long-ago people who had allowed such a thing to happen. Why did I have to tremble now for something they had been unable to prevent? Why did I even have to consider the possibility of another fire?

And then, the day Sandy sat beside me, everything seemed suddenly all right. Smiling encouragement, inviting me to look and admire, she forced from my mind all previous knowledge of that horrible place. There beside her, I was able to dismiss the evidence of devastation all around me and consider the fire a legend passed from generation to generation (Have you heard of the terrible fire of ’45, horrible, we hope and pray it will never happen here again), but only a legend. Besides, legend or not, we’d had nothing to do with that ancient fire — and so, guiltless, we could sit in the sunshine with the burnt and stunted trees all around us, secure in the knowledge that what we did now was also quite innocent: Sandy showed me her breasts. That was all. So, we concerned ourselves only with the present. The present was figuring out the answers to a questionnaire that would later be electronically computerized in an attempt to find the perfect date for Sandy. The present was Sandy herself sitting half-naked beside me in the ruins of the forest.

When David was finally sprung and we told him what had happened, he agreed with us that we’d done nothing wrong, and said he was only sorry he hadn’t been there. In fact, he said, hadn’t we all seen at least that much in the pages of Playboy? This was a point neither Sandy nor I had considered before. We agreed now that there was great validity to it, and immediately stopped arguing the morality of what had happened. In dismissal, Sandy mentioned that she’d also seen a picture of the highly respectable Countess Christina Paolozzi in Vogue, naked to the waist, “and she has even smaller breasts than mine, so there,” she said, and stuck out her tongue. We all laughed and said the hell with it.

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.

She stood in spread-legged chunkiness now, her arms folded across her chest, as Sandy picked up the bird again and flung him into the air. She watched as the bird opened his wings, braked, and came down to the sand again. She made no comment until Sandy had tried the same thing unsuccessfully three times in a row. Then she said, “What is it you’re trying to do?”

Sandy didn’t answer.

“What’s she trying to do?” she asked David.

“Train him,” David said briefly.

“To do what?”

“To fly.”

“Doesn’t he know how to fly?”

“Of course he knows how to fly,” Sandy snapped.

“It’s just that he’s forgotten how to fly,” I said.

“A bird cannot forget how to fly,” the girl said. “It’s instinctive.”

“What are you, an ornithologist?” David said.

“No, but I have a canary.”

“This bird has been walking for a long time, you see,” I said.

“That makes no difference.”

“He also happens to be a very dumb bird,” I said.

“He’s very bright,” Sandy said.

“Yes, he’s very bright,” I said, “but he’s forgotten how to fly.”

“Perhaps he prefers walking,” the girl said.

“Who asked you?” Sandy said.

“I’m merely offering an opinion.”

“We don’t need opinions,” Sandy said.

“Yeah, why don’t you get lost?” David said.

“Big shot,” the girl said, and pulled a face.

“No one prefers walking to flying,” I said.

“How’d he learn to walk, anyway?”

“We taught him.”

“Perhaps you’ve crushed his spirit,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Perhaps he’s lost all emotional kinship.”

“What?”

“With gulls. Perhaps he doesn’t know he’s a bird anymore.”

“That’s idiotic,” Sandy said.

“Look at him squatting in the sand there,” the girl said. “He probably thinks he’s a crab.”

“He knows exactly what he is,” Sandy said. “He’s a bird.” She turned away from the girl in dismissal. Walking to the gull, she crouched beside him again and said, “You’re a bird.”

“Yes, missie,” David piped.

“And birds fly.”

“Yes, missie.”

“And you are going to fly.”

“Yes, missie.”

“Now fly!” she shouted, and threw him into the air.

He flew.

He soared up into the sky almost exultantly. The nylon line began to play out, uncoiling as the bird went higher and higher and finally wrenching up tight against the piece of driftwood.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Now we yank him down,” Sandy said.

“Don’t you dare!” the girl shouted. “You’ll break his neck.”

“We’ll play him in gently,” Sandy said, “like a kite,” and she began easing the bird down, pulling in the line hand over hand, forcing him lower and lower until at last he spread his wings wide and flapped them in the now familiar braking motion, and dropped again to the sand.

“Good bird,” Sandy said, and patted him on the head. “Give him some garbage, somebody.”

I was in charge of the garbage detail. I reached into the oily bag and tossed the bird a moldy piece of orange. He swallowed it whole. It was easy to see how he had once managed to get a fishhook caught in his throat.

“Okay,” Sandy said, “here we go again.” She lifted the bird, and, holding him tightly between both hands, swung him back and then forward again in a wide arc, releasing him suddenly.

The bird opened his wings.

He braked and fluttered down to the sand.

“You goddamn stupid bird,” Sandy said.

“Let’s go for a swim,” David said.

“I don’t know how to swim,” the girl said.

“I wasn’t asking you.”

“Are you still here?” Sandy asked.

“Yes, I’m still here. I want to see what happens.”

“He’ll fly, that’s what’ll happen.”

“Maybe he’ll try it himself if we leave him alone,” David suggested.

“What’s the point of that?” Sandy said. “We want him to know we approve.”

“You’re only going to make him more neurotic than he is.”

“Approval never made anyone neurotic,” the girl said.

“Let’s take a dip anyway,” I said. “It’s hot as hell.”

“I don’t know how to swim,” the girl said again.

“How’d I ever get involved with such quitters?” Sandy said. But she came into the water with us.

The dark-haired girl sat on the shore and watched us swim for a while. When it became apparent we were going to ignore her, she got to her feet and walked down to the water’s edge, testing it with her toes, glancing at us every now and then. At last, she wandered off up the beach, looking back at us only once before she climbed over the dune and disappeared.

“Good riddance,” Sandy said.

When we came out of the water, we were all too tired to try with the bird again. We rolled up the line, put the leash back on his collar, and walked up the beach to Sandy’s house. There was a note waiting for her on the kitchen table.

“I’ve got a great idea,” Sandy said. “Let’s go over to the mainland for chowder and lobster.”

“I don’t think my folks would let me,” David said. “Not so soon after being grounded.”

“Give it a try.”

“Where’s your phone?”

He called his parents, and to his surprise they said it would be all right. We both went home to change our clothes, and then met Sandy on the dock in time to catch the six o’clock ferry over.

The dark-haired girl was sitting on one of the pilings, watching us.

We had lobster and chowder at a place called Lambert’s, and then we walked over to the movie house to find out what was playing. The feature was scheduled to start at 8:10 and break at 10:20, which meant we could see the show and still catch the last ferry back to Greensward at eleven o’clock. We stood on the sidewalk under the marquee and counted our money. A few hulking townie kids were nudging each other over near the glass cases where the movie posters were, ogling Sandy’s miniskirt and bare feet. We ignored them completely. We had just enough money to pay for our admission, but we had already bought round-trip tickets on the ferry, so we decided to go in.

The movie was exceptionally good.

It was about man’s alienation from his society, we decided later on. It was also about the difference between illusion and reality. A sign at the box office warned that the picture was recommended for mature audiences, but nobody questioned our maturity, so we didn’t bring up the matter either. The film was made by a French director and was set in the city of Los Angeles, California. The first shot was of a young man surfing in at Malibu. He comes ashore onto this empty beach where a girl surfer is waiting for him. They begin making out like mad, and then the titles come on, and the guy and the girl get into a red T-bird, and he drops her off someplace and then continues driving out through those brown California hills, the air all shimmering around him, almost as if the hills themselves are a mirage, the photography was really quite excellent.

It turns out that the young man is really an actor working in a weekly television series. He makes a great deal of money, and he’s very efficient at what he does, which is portraying the owner of a small nightclub in Santa Monica. The weekly series was gone into in great detail because it expressed the contemporary confusion between illusion and reality. As the owner of this nightclub, the hero becomes involved in the lives of everyone who comes into the place, usually helping them to resolve their problems before the hour is over. The irony, of course, is that the man playing the hero of the series is incapable of solving his own real-life problems, whereas he is portraying a level-headed, sensible person in the film within the film.

The television series, too, provides the opportunity for some sex stuff, because naturally there’s a chorus line and some strange, disreputable LSD and surfing types, all part of the film within the film, which shows the actor at work as the hero in some very exciting footage in the dressing room of one of the dancers. Then the director calls “Cut,” and we’re left with the impression that this love-making with the girl was all make-believe. In fact, the actor’s life in that studio out in the Valley someplace is all make-believe, and we begin to wonder where the reality lies, it was very interesting.

In order to make contact in this impersonal world where his days are full of phony fistfights and love scenes with the director calling “Cut,” the actor belongs to a legitimate theater group at night, and he goes there to try acting seriously. But even there (in his real life now and not in the weekly television phony life) he finds himself surrounded by people who are more interested in the plays they’re doing than their own very real and personal problems. Also, in addition to the hero’s fake television work and his even phonier nighttime acting, he’s involved in some very suspicious comings and goings to San Diego and the naval base there — in short, he’s a spy. This was not as far out as it sounds because the spying was made to seem like an extension of this man’s estrangement, spying being a job without a product, a detached sort of work in which even the old slogans like patriotism and freedom become lost in all the double-crossing done by both sides, boy what a picture.

Then, at rehearsal of the theater group one night, after the hero has taken detailed pictures of a nuclear submarine in San Diego, something happens that causes him to reconsider his entire way of life.

He finds a baby in his T-bird.

He goes inside to where everyone is rehearsing a scene from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and he asks if anyone left a baby in his car. Nobody seems to know anything about the baby, and besides they’re more interested in exploring the intense reality of Martha and George. So he goes out to the car again and, instead of calling the police (on the ferry ride home, we tried to figure out why he didn’t call the police — probably because he was a spy), he takes the baby home with him. This is the first time there’s been anything real in his life, you see, an innocent baby, who incidentally symbolizes hope for the new generation.

Well, to make a long story short, he doesn’t know anything about child care, and when the baby gets sick one night, he fails to call the doctor in time because he’s making out with two Chinese starlets in the bedroom upstairs, and the baby dies, which symbolizes the death of all hope for even the new generation, pretty grim. I know it sounds rather confusing in synopsis, but it was really crystal clear when you watched it.

The end of the film was a masterpiece. Even the New York critics said it wrapped up the entire story and gave added meaning and dimension to everything that had preceded it. You have to remember that the film was about illusion and reality and alienation, and you have to remember that everything in this man’s life was false, except the spying. The spying was illusory and unreal, yes, but it was not false. That is to say, he was really taking pictures of submarines, and he was really passing these pictures on to the enemy, and he was really receiving money for this undercover activity, even though the money was nowhere near what he earned as a television actor. There was a sense throughout, right up to the end, of a basic truthfulness to this dirty work: however filthy and horrible and double-crossing it may have been, it was at least down to earth and honest. And then came the zinger, wow, it zipped in there like a lightning bolt, it actually sent chills up my spine. This man — now hold onto your hats — this man didn’t even know he was a spy! That’s right! He’d been brainwashed to believe his cover occupation, and he didn’t have the faintest inkling that he was passing secrets to the enemy! Why, if you had tortured him and hung him by his thumbs he would not have been able to tell you he was a spy, because all he knew was that he was a television actor. So the point was triumphantly made that even in this very dirty business of spying, there was no involvement. In short, there was no involvement anywhere. That was the end of the picture, and it was a very exciting picture. Sandy let us feel her up all the way through it.

It started during the scene at the movie studio out in the Valley, where the actor who is a spy is portraying the nightclub owner and is in the dancer’s dressing room, where she is wearing only a robe. Sandy was sitting between us, her right hand in David’s, her left hand in mine. She suddenly gave a slight startled gasp and tightened her hand on mine. I thought she was responding to what was happening on the screen, because the actor portraying the nightclub owner was at that moment lowering the dancer’s robe to her waist, her back to the audience, of course. I squeezed Sandy’s hand and glanced at her and saw that she had turned to whisper something to David, who now shook his head. Sandy giggled. I looked back at the screen and was startled to discover that the actress playing the dancer had turned to face the camera with her breasts fully exposed. I wondered for a moment why an actress would allow this, and then I remembered that Sandy had done exactly the same thing for me in the forest, and then, suddenly, she squeezed my hand again and brought it swiftly to her breast.

On the screen, the actor and the dancer were kissing, he was brushing her hair away from her ear, his hand came up to fondle her breast, the camera showed him caressing her. Sandy clasped her hands in her lap, sitting very still, watching the screen, the dancer’s lips parting, filling the screen now, the actor’s mouth joining hers, and it was then that I realized David’s hand was under her sweater. I dropped my own hand to her waist, remembering she had not allowed me to do this to her when we were alone together in the forest, found the bottom edge of her sweater, and eased my hand under it and up over her ribs to her bra. On the screen, the director yelled “Cut!” to illustrate the alienation. Sandy crossed her legs, and I looked down at the short skirt and wanted to put my hand on her thigh, but was afraid to. I glanced sidewards at David, hoping he would do it first. The actor walked off the set and took a Coke handed to him by one of the grips or somebody, and then went straight off the sound stage and out onto the studio lot where the sunshine was bright and cowboy extras smoked against the sides of buildings painted gray. A tall blond girl carrying a clipboard came out of one of the studio cottages and smiled at the actor, who waved at her as he got into his red T-bird. He looked up at the sky, a white California sky, squinting, and then revved the engine. Sandy uncrossed her legs, and leaned toward David, and then leaned back toward me. She did not look at either of us. Her eyes were on the motion picture screen.

The Santa Monica hills were brown, and roadside signs warned that this was a Fire Area. The hero drove through it with his eyes squinted, smoking a cigarette, squealing around every curve in the freeway. He drove up onto a wide avenue identified as Sunset Boulevard, continued driving onto Sunset Strip and then pulled into a hamburger joint where a redheaded carhop in a short skirt and boots came over to take his order. I looked at Sandy’s legs again. I kept wishing that the hero of the movie would find another girl and undress her. He found another girl soon enough: there were girls sprinkled everywhere through the picture. When he pulled in for gas, in fact, I expected the station attendant to be a tall brunette in skin-tight slacks, but she wasn’t. The next girl didn’t appear until the hero went to his evening dramatics group someplace on Wilshire Boulevard, I believe it was, and she was an aspiring actress of about seventeen, just a little older than Sandy, with breasts very much like Sandy’s when they were finally revealed in a scene outdoors under the eucalyptus trees where she and the actor wrestled playfully for a while until he stripped her down naked, she giggling all the while and Sandy’s nipple growing hard. I began to feel terribly grubby about what we were doing because the theater was very brightly lighted for a little hick theater, and I was certain everyone knew exactly what was going on. Once, when my fingers brushed David’s, I smiled and then idiotically thought I had laughed aloud, and quickly looked over my shoulder to make certain no one was watching us. The interesting thing about it all was that the people on the screen were actually doing much more than we were in our seats, which possibly was the point of the film, after all: our hang-up with illusion, our put-down of reality. In other words, was the play-acting on the screen more exciting than what was really going on with Sandy? I don’t think I actually wondered that at the time, in fact I’m sure I didn’t. I was too caught up in what was happening, you see, too thoroughly bombarded by images flashing in beautiful color sequence before my eyes, the two young starlets in the bedroom with the hero, the baby writhing in fever downstairs, Sandy’s smooth brown legs crossing and recrossing, the now familiar feel of her breast, the awareness of my own immense masculinity, and the further knowledge of our secret, the secret we three shared, we could do this, she would allow us to do this.

On the way to the ferry slip, we talked about the film. The street bordering the bay was silent and dark. Most of the business district was built inland, of course, and as a result there never was too much action along the bay front. But this was still comparatively early on a Saturday night, and you didn’t expect the sidewalks to be pulled in right after dinner. It was sort of eerie. Here we were in the midst of what was supposed to be civilization, but the only sign of life came from a fisherman’s bar spilling orange and blue neon into the street up ahead.

“He wasn’t involved with any of them,” David said, “that was the point. None of the people in that picture ever really touched each other.”

“There was something very phony about that picture,” Sandy said. “I mean, if the point was that all that running around and fooling around was so unattractive, then why did the director make it so exciting?”

“That’s exactly what I thought,” I said.

“On the other hand,” Sandy said, “maybe the excitement had nothing to do with the movie.”

David and I said nothing. We both knew what she meant, but we were somewhat startled that she was willing to talk about it, even though we’d agreed to be completely honest with each other.

“Maybe it had to do with touching me,” she said. “And getting me so hot I thought I would faint,” she said, and that was when the three boys appeared on the sidewalk ahead of us. We had just passed the bar, and we were bathed in an eerie disharmony of vivid orange and blue, surprised by Sandy’s frankness, more than a little unsettled by the sudden appearance of the trio ahead. They were standing in a loose-hipped imitation of every teenage hoodlum pose they had ever seen, the perfect stereotype of black leather-jacketed youth, except that they were wearing tee shirts and levis. The image was identical nonetheless, a trite reproduction of evil intent. And because we had been exposed to it so many times before, and recognized it immediately, our response was clichéd as well: immediate fear coupled with a pounding sense of imminent danger, a rising excitement at the prospect of a rumble. We turned without a word to each other and began running. The boat was supposed to leave for Greensward at eleven sharp. It was now close to 10:45, and we had no doubt that the boat was already in and loading passengers. It occurred to me, as we ran up the street away from the ferry slip, that we could very easily miss the boat and be trapped here on the mainland with three specimens who, it was fair to surmise, were not overly interested in discussing illusion, reality, or alienation. I had no idea whether or not they were the same boys who had been ogling Sandy outside the theater before the picture began. But there was an urgency in the clatter of their chase, and I began to think we were making a mistake by running deeper into a town they undoubtedly knew well, rather than heading for the protection of the ferry waiting room and the civilized people boarding the boat for Greensward.

And then — I don’t know what caused it, perhaps it was the influence of the film, perhaps we were all still deeply caught up in the film’s message — a sudden giddiness came over the three of us. As we ran through the deserted streets of the town, we began giggling, and then laughing aloud. Behind us, one of the townies yelled, “Hey, Long Legs, wait up!” and another one shouted, “Give us a peek at you, honey!” and rather than striking terror into our hearts, their words absolutely broke us up. The laughter was a curious thing in that we recognized it might affect our ability to run, and yet we couldn’t stop it. I was developing a stitch in my side, partly from running, partly from laughing, and Sandy was gasping for breath as we rounded a corner and cut across a vacant lot behind the drugstore. “Come on, Long Legs,” one of the townies shouted, “we ain’t gonna hurt you,” and David said, “Not much,” and we all burst out laughing again. “Get rid of them two queers,” one of the boys yelled, and I said, “Hit him with your purse, David,” all of this while we were tearing across the lot and avoiding bottles and piles of ashes and bags of garbage and trying to figure out a way to circle around back toward the ferry slip, laughing wildly. They must have thought we were crazy. Maybe we were. It seemed to me, though, that the reality of the chase, even the reality of the menace it represented, had been diminished by the fact that we had lived it too often before, if only vicariously. How real could these hoods behind us be when they were shouting banalities like, “Come on, honey, we got something for you,” or “Slow down, baby, you’ll love it?” How real could any of this idiotic chase be when we had already witnessed wilder chases on motion picture screens? Laughing, stumbling, our eyes tearing, we came out onto a long dark street flanked on one side by a closed supermarket and on the other by a closed dry-cleaning store, a closed bookshop, and a closed Italian restaurant with a sign announcing the house specialty as veal parmigana. The misspelling on the sign caught my eye as we rushed past, commenting beyond any doubt on the quality of the house specialty and further adding another dimension of fantasy to the chase, an Italian restaurant that could not spell in Italian. Out of breath, David said, “Do we stand and fight?” and Sandy said, “Shit, no,” which caused more laughter, while behind us the hoods were getting more and more agitated. And then, through luck or intuition, we made an abrupt right turn and found ourselves once again on the street with the open bar, its blue and orange neon flashing ahead like some gaudy oasis. “Let’s go, gang!” David shouted, and we began running faster and in dead earnest, though still chuckling with recognition of the absurdity of it all. Behind us, the cleverest of the townies shouted, “Aw, baby, don’t be mean,” and Sandy shouted, “Goodnight, lover,” as we saw the ferry slip ahead. The boat was already in. We boarded it rapidly just as the three hoods came panting onto the dock, standing again in stereotyped tough-guys-hands-on-hips postures while we mingled with the other passengers, and then tauntingly thumbed our noses at them from the quarterdeck. Sandy laughed then, a high blaring hoot that caused some of the other passengers to turn and stare at us, a derisive challenge to the gangsters below. Tossing her golden hair in the light of the pilot house, she looped her arms through ours and led us aft.

We stood on deck all the way out to the island. It was a marvelous night, and we huddled close together and sang songs in very low voices, and once David interrupted to ask Sandy whether she had really almost fainted, and she nodded briefly and quietly and with an odd embarrassment, and we kissed either side of her face spontaneously.

The very next day, the gull flew over our heads without a tether.

The extraordinary thing about it was its simplicity.

It was no secret that I didn’t exactly agree with Sandy about the gull’s intelligence. It seemed to me, in fact, that any number of other birds could have been leash-trained more quickly than he was. And the experience of the day before, when Sandy had succeeded in getting him to fly once — but only once — seemed to back up my earlier findings: the bird was stupid.

Nevertheless, bright and early on the morning of July 23, which was a Sunday, the four of us marched out to the point again, and again wrapped the end of our fishline around the heavy piece of driftwood half-submerged in the sand. It was while we were fastening the other end of the line to the bird’s collar that Sandy got her brilliant inspiration.

“Why do we need the line at all?” she asked.

Without waiting for an answer (we were, in truth, incapable of giving an answer, since this was only eight o’clock in the morning and we were both accustomed to sleeping a bit later that summer, especially on Sundays), she marched directly to the bird while he and we blinked stupidly and together, removed the collar from around his throat, and then backed away from him. David was the first of us to come to his senses.

“Goodby, gull,” he said.

“Shhh,” Sandy said, and signaled to us with her hand, the palm flat, patting the air. The gull peered up at us, unaware for the moment that the collar had been taken from his neck, completely oblivious to his freedom. We backed still further away from him, and he began following us up the beach, walking with that curiously proud gait of his, but never once attempting to fly.

“He is by far the stupidest bird in the world,” I said.

“Shh,” Sandy said again.

“Let’s rush him,” David said.

“No, just be quiet,” Sandy said.

We squatted in the sand.

It was a gray day, heavy with mist that hovered over water and beach, a mist that would undoubtedly be burned off by midmorning. The sand was cool and damp. Far out on the water, a trawler made its slow way north toward Violet’s island. There was a stillness to the point that morning, intensified by the hanging mist. The surf was gentle, washing in against the shore in endless whispering repetition, as tranquil as the water on the bay side. I thought of the film we had seen the night before, and I thought again about reality and illusion, and it seemed to me that even the flat ripples out there were only imitations of real waves. And then I thought about estrangement, not in the movie’s sense, but instead as something you deliberately chose, an isolation you wanted and needed. And I thought, as I sat there between David and Sandy, that the three of us would go on this way forever, in a soft and misty landscape, understanding each other completely without having to say a word. Sitting on the edge of the shore, I was struck by a sense of eternity, the ocean stretching endlessly to distant places I had never seen, the mist wafting in to insulate and protect a very special universe, the nucleus of which was the three of us alone,

The bird suddenly took wing.

The beauty of his flight was breathtaking, it almost brought tears to my eyes. Wings flapping, he soared up into the mist, gray merging with gray, white underbelly and ruff looping upward, beak thrust into the sky. His wings — angled, long, graceful, tapered — went suddenly motionless. He swooped low in a descending arc, wings wide, and then flapped them again effortlessly, nudging himself higher and higher, until at last he was lost completely in the mist. We waited. The mist shifted soundlessly around us, the ocean whispered in against the shore.

“He’s gone,” David said.

“No, wait,” Sandy said.

I don’t know how long we waited. We stood almost shoulder to shoulder, gazing up at the sky, listening. The only sound was the incessant stroke of ocean against shore. And then, suddenly, the bird broke through the mist, his wings wide, emerging from the grayness as if a piece of it had suddenly broken away and was falling swiftly earthward, swooping lower and lower, more clearly defined now, the white startlingly explosive against the background of gray, the yellow of his beak and eyes, his legs tucked back against his body, closer and closer to the ground, the wings suddenly rising in eaglelike majesty to fan the air and brake his fall as he dropped silently to the sand at our feet.

“Feed him, quick,” Sandy whispered.

David threw him a piece of bread. The bird gobbled it down at once.

“Now head up the beach. Fast! Run!”

We all began running, Sandy in the lead. She headed into the mist with long steady strides, was swallowed by it, disappeared into it, emerged again on a clear patch of beach, and was once again overwhelmed by the clinging tendrils of fog. I stopped and looked behind me. The gull was still sitting.

“Come on, bird!” I shouted, and on signal he ran several steps forward with his head thrust low, taking flight again and following us into the fog. Breathless, we clung together, waiting. He appeared above our heads at last, wings wide, circling, swooping, and then dropping to the beach at our feet. David immediately gave him an apple core.

“He knows,” Sandy said.

We ran back and forth along the beach until we were exhausted. Each time the bird took off into the air and followed us, and then descended again, and waited for his reward. The real test came when he was joined by a flock of gulls that came in suddenly off the fog-swathed water, shrieking and cawing in anticipation of food. The bird joined the flock, swooping and diving and circling and darting, raising his voice with theirs, and then coming to rest on the beach when the other birds did. But when we fed none of them, they all took wing again, except our bird, who waited patiently until David pulled another scrap from the bag of garbage.

Sandy grinned and said, “He’s trained.” Walking to the bird, she reached out her hand to pat him on the head — and he bit her.

She yanked back her hand. A look of startled rage crossed her face. “You fucking idiot!” she shrieked, and reached for him again, lips skinned back, teeth bared as if to return the bite. Something slid into her eyes. Intelligence or guile, cunning or concern, it jarred her to an immediate stop. Trembling, she forced a smile onto her mouth and airily said, “It’s only a scratch, men.”

“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.