Second Skin

Drag Race on the Beach

Red sun in the morning, sailor’s warning. I knew that much. And hadn’t I sworn off the sea? After my one thousand days and nights on the Starfish hadn’t I sworn off the sea forever? There was my mistrust of the nautical life, the suspicion of my tendency toward seasickness, the uneasiness I had come to feel in the presence of small boats whether in or out of the water. My sympathy for all the young sun-tanned and shrapnel-shredded sailors in deep southern seas would never die, but I was done with the water, the uncomfortable drift of a destructive ocean, done trying to make myself acceptable to the Old Man of the Sea. So what drew me to the Peter Poor? How to explain that dawn in March which was an eastern blood bath, in the first place, and full of wind? Why did I interrupt our Mah Jongg games or my friendly fights with the black Labradors? Having recovered from the indignities of that crippling December dance, and having spent three frozen months in the calm inside the gale — trying a little of the Old Grand-Dad myself now, not much, but just a little, and building the fires, drying the dishes, dragging Pixie down the cow paths on a miniature creaky sled with turned-up wooden runners — why, having watched the snow at the window and having kept my mouth shut during all those Sunday dinners and having learned to sleep at last on those hard cold nights, why, suddenly, did I trot right down to the dock with Cassandra and submit myself to the Peter Poor which was a fishing boat and didn’t even have a head?

“Go on, Skip, don’t spoil the fun. It’s a good way to see the bland. And Skip,” clicking the needles, giving the log in the fireplace a shove with her bare toes, “it’s just what Candy needs. My God, Skip, how could you refuse?”

And toying with the East Wind, watching her: “What about you, Miranda?” I said, “it’s not like you to miss a good time?”

And throwing back her head and twinkling the light in her glass and laughing, “No, no, I’ve already been out sailing with the boys. Besides, every girl deserves to be the only woman on the Peter Poor just once in her life.”

But Cassandra only looked at me and took my hand.

So it was on a red dawn in the month of March that I succumbed to the idea of Crooked Finger Rock and sunken ships and a nice rough ghostly cruise around the black island, succumbed and gave Cassandra the one chance in her life to be the only woman on the Peter Poor. And it was in the month of May that I raced down the beach for my life in Miranda’s hot rod, in May, the month of my daughter’s death. And in June that we got out of there, Pixie and I, June when I packed our flight bag and hurried out of that old white clapboard house and carried poor Pixie off to Gertrude’s cousin in New Jersey. Four months. Four short months. A brimming spring. And of course I know now that there was a chance for Cassandra up to the very moment she swung her foot gaily over the rail of the Peter Poor and stood with her hair blowing and her skirt blowing on the cluttered deck of that water-logged tub of Red’s. But there was no chance really for Cassandra after that. No chance at all. The second of the four seasons sucked her under, the sea was cruel. March, then May, then June, and the last fragments, the last high lights, last thoughts, the time of my life.

Red sun in morning, sailor’s warning. That’s it. And the dawn was lying out there on its side and bleeding to death while I fidgeted outside Cassandra’s door — accomplice, father, friend, traveling companion, yes, old chaperon, but lover and destroyer too — and while Miranda waltzed around the dark kitchen in her kimono and tried to fix an early breakfast for Pixie. Dawn bleeding from half a dozen wounds in its side and the wind blowing and my old bird fighting its slow way across the sky.

“Hurry, up, Cassandra,” I called through the closed door, blowing on cold fingers, stuffing a fat brown paper sack — lunch for two — under my arm and watching the bird, “you’ll have to hurry a little, Cassandra, if the Captain is going to make the dawn tide.” Even upstairs in the cold dark house I could feel the tide rising, feel the flood tide reaching its time and turning, brimming, waiting to sweep everything away. But there was no need to hurry. I should have known. I should have known that Red had been waiting seven months already for this tide, this dawn, this day at sea, and that he would have waited forever as long as he had any hopes at all of hearing her heels clicking on the deck of the Peter Poor, that he would have let the Peter Poor list forever in the green mud for the mere sight of Cassandra coming down his weedy path at six o’clock in the morning, would have sailed the Peter Poor onto rocks, shoals, reefs, ledges, anywhere at all and under any conditions if he could once persuade Cassandra to climb aboard. No hurry. And yet perhaps I was aware of his bald-headed, wind-burned, down-East, inarticulate seagoing licentious patience after all, and fidgeted, marked the stages of the dawn out of the intuitive resources of my destructive sympathy. God knows. But she appeared to me then, unsmiling-unsmiling since the blustery high school dance when I had done my best to tell her everything, make her understand — and wearing a little pale blue silk kerchief tied under her chin.

“I thought you were going to wear slacks, Cassandra,” I said. “Slacks are more appropriate to a boat, you know. Much more appropriate than a full skirt, Cassandra. But of course it’s too late now anyway.”

We went downstairs together — shadows and little playful drafts on the stairs, and if it wasn’t a big prize bow for a high school dance then it was a big billowing rust-colored skirt for a windy day — and in the kitchen she hugged Miranda and kissed Pixie’s forehead. Then hot coffee, standing up, and then another hug, another kiss, and then good-by.

“While we’re gone, Miranda,” I said, “don’t fool around with the nipples or do anything harmful to the child. OK, Miranda?”

“My God, Skip, you’ve got a sore memory, haven’t you? But everything’s forgiven, Skip. Don’t worry.”

The wind, the red sun, and I tried to take her arm under the chestnut tree, but she walked on ahead of me with the kerchief tilted back and her two small white hands pressed down flat against the tiny round abdomen of the orange skirt which lunged and kicked and whirled in woolen fury. The hard thin mature white legs were bare, I could see that, and I tried to come abreast of her again on the empty road.

“That skirt’s going to give you trouble, Cassandra,” I said, just as all at once she turned off the road and began to run lightly down the weedy path with the skirt whipping and fumbling about her legs and the tight kerchief changing color in the dawn light.

“Wait, Cassandra, wait for me,” I called. I wondered what figure of unhappiness it was that I could see plainly enough in the stiffness of the slender shoulders and forlorn abandonment of the little swathed head. Her feet were describing those sad uncomfortable circles of the young female who runs off with wet eyes or uncommunicative smile or tiny cry clutched, held, in the naked throat, and I wanted to stop her, wanted to walk awhile with my arm about her shoulder and her hand in my hand. But it was no use.

“Jomo, good morning,” I heard her say in her best voice, and I saw it all, Cassandra still lightly running and Jomo looking at her from where he was crouched at the gasoline pump and Red watching her from the bow of the Peter Poor and Bub buttoning his pants near the overturned skiff and grinning into the wind and watching her. So I put on the steam then and caught up with her.

And leaning over the tin can with the hose in the hole and peering up at me from under the bill of the baseball cap and shielding his mouth with his hand: “How’s Papa?” Jomo said, and spit through his teeth.

“OK, Jomo,” I said, “I’m OK, thanks.” And softly and under my breath, “Viva la Salerno, Jomo,” I said to myself.

“A little winded, ain’t you?”

“Well, yes, Jomo, I’ve been running.”

But he was returning the nozzle to the pump, spitting between his teeth again, catching the wire handle of the tin can in his hook and lifting it, holding the tin can out to Bub: “Here, Bub, take this fuel to the Captain. On the double. Tide’s full.”

I thought of offering Bub a hand and then thought better of it. So I stood on the end of Red’s jetty — mere crumbling slatted catwalk covered with mollusks and broken pots and splashes of old flaking paint — and watched Cassandra balance herself down the plank to the Peter Poor, watched Red take her hand, her elbow, brace one massive palm in the curve of the little sloping rib cage until she had swung her foot, boarded the boat, and I watched Bub lug the gasoline down the plank black with oil and tar and the dawn tide, and wished that he would slip, that he would take a plunge, tin and all. But Bub was steady that morning with chicken feathers sticking to the seat of his pants and the wind in his hair.

And helping her around the anchor and leading her aft: “Sea’s rough,” I heard Red say, “hope you like a rough sea.”

And Cassandra: “I’m a good sailor. Red — Captain Red — really.”

March wind, gulls putting the dawn curse on us, cold harsh shadows breaking apart and scattering and the jetty swaying and shaking and the Peter Poor yanking at the hawsers and now and again smashing into the side of the jetty and spray and chunks of black water and field mice cowering in the white-haired crab grass — it was a malevolent unpromising scene and it was all I could do to keep my feet. The strongest smell was of gasoline; the next strongest smell was of dead fish.

“You’re coming, ain’t you?” Jomo said. “We’re shoving off,” and he indicated with his hook that I was to start down the plank.

“You go first,” I said.

“Can’t,” Jomo said, “the lines.”

“Well,” I said, “no pushing,” and felt the plank bending under me and the black sea beginning to move and just as I found the gunwale with my toe and caught one of the rusted stays in my right hand, I heard the first hawser thundering past my ear and knew the plank was gone. Beneath the floor boards and somewhere toward the stem the engine sounded like an old Model-A with pitted cylinders and water in the exhaust. Rolling, pitching, moody little fishing boat, cold fiery dawn, we left the jetty with a puff of acrid smoke tangled up in the shrouds and the other hawser floating, dragging out behind us on the choppy sea.

“Say, Red,” I called, “is there a place for me to sit down back there?”

And from the black and oily cockpit, and holding a full fifth of whiskey in his right hand, easily, lightly, gesturing with it, and smiling at Cassandra and saying something to her under cover of the wind: “Why, sure,” he called, “we can make room for you. Sure we can.”

“Thanks,” I shouted, and managed to reach the cockpit hand over hand.

Lowering sun, wind that socked us counter to the black waves, cockpit full of salt spray, and Bub at the little iron wheel and Jomo crouching on the stem with the bill of his baseball cap level, unruffled, and his hook in the air, and Red, tall, heavy-set, bald, early morning reddish whiskers wet on his face, and his pale blue eyes hard and bright in the furnace of his desire, Red knee-deep in yellow oilskins in the unsteady dirty cockpit that revealed the old rotten ribs of the Peter Poor.

“Going to be wet when we get out of the cove,” Red said. “Wet and rough.”

I hung on. I had burned my palm once already on a tin chimney, so I hung on to a convenient but slimy cleat and to a thin inexplicable rusted wire that came down from somewhere overhead. “See all the signs, do you,” I said, and let go for a brief moment to wipe my face.

“Yup,” he said. “I see the signs all right.”

The eye that looked at me then was like a pale translucent grape in a wine-dark sea. Kind. Intelligent. Contemptuous. Then he looked away and the arms and fingers and hands kept moving.

Red among the oilskins. Red getting ready. He pulled on thick loose yellow pants, worked himself slowly into a thick loose shiny yellow coat, fastened a jet-black mountainous sou’wester on his sun-colored head. The captain, the tall stately bulk of the sea-wet man. And then he turned and helped Cassandra into One of the yellow coats — too big, charm of sleeves that covered the hands, all the charm of the perfect small woman’s body in the slick ocean-going coat too large — and on her small head and over the kerchief he tied another crinkled black sou’wester, so that she looked like a child, a smiling child, in a captain’s rig. She had a little face that should have been on a box of pilot biscuits. Great black protective helmet and soft wet cheeks and shiny eyes. No hands, no breasts, but wet white skin and plaintive eyes.

And then: “Here’s yours,” he said, and glanced to the wobbling top of the mast and tossed me a bundle, frowned.

“My second skin,” I said, because I had gone out once before in oilskins, and I laughed, ducked, took the flying crest of a wave full in the face. “Which way is up?” I laughed, wiped my eyes, held the thick yellow bundle of empty arms and legs in my own fat arms. “How about it, Red?”

“Oilskins,” he said clearly, patienly through the wind, the spray, the now billowing sun, “better put them on…going to be plenty rough out there.”

So I struggled with the monstrous crackling togs, turned them over, turned them around, lost my footing — shoulder smack up against the ironwood edge of the top of the dirty cabin, sudden quick pain in the shoulder — burned my fingers, finally, on the hard wet skins, felt my cheeks puffing out under the ear flaps of the little tight preposterous sou’wester, felt the chin strap digging in.

“It’s much too small,” I said, but Red was talking.

“That’s Crooked Finger Rock over to leeward,” he was saying, gripping Cassandra’s little shoulder where it was hidden inside the yellow oilskin, gripping her and pointing away with one long red bony finger that was as steady and sure as the big needle of an enormous compass, “and that’s the Dog Head Light — she’s abandoned — over there to windward…

“I see,” I heard Cassandra say softly in her most interested voice, “I see,” as if they were studying an atlas together in Miranda’s parlor, and her eyes, I saw, were fixed on the stately wet red features of Captain Red’s squinting seagoing face.

“What’s that about Crooked Finger Rock?” I said, but Red was telling her about the draft and sailing qualities of the Peter Poor, telling her that the Peter Poor, fish-smothered little filthy scow, was really a racing craft, a little Bermudian racer which he had only converted to a fishing boat a few years ago for his own amusement. And then he gave an analysis of Bermudian racers and then a discussion of nautical miles and speed at sea and the medal the Coast Guard had given him for heroism on the high seas. Steady deep wind-whipped voice. Rapt attention. Bub doubled over in stitches at the little wheel.

But I, at least, made an effort to see the landmarks he thought worthy of our attention, and twisted to leeward and saw a chip of black rock rising and falling in those black crests and hair-raising plumes of spray, and I twisted to windward and a couple of miles away made out the tiny white spire of the lighthouse.

Waves, bright sun, the bow falling, and suddenly I knew what was on my mind, had been on my mind from the first moment I had seen the Peter Poor. “Red,” I interrupted him, cupping my hands, insisting, until the big red face swung in my direction and Cassandra stared down at her feet, “Red, there’s no dinghy. Is there, Red?”

“Nope.”

“But, Red, we’ve got to have a dinghy. Don’t you care about our safety?”

Face sniffing the salt, eyes clear, big legs spread wide in the cockpit: “Dinghy couldn’t last in this water. Too rough. Might’s well go down the first time when the boat goes down.”

“Good God,” I said, “what a way to talk in front of Cassandra.”

“Candy don’t mind. No, sir. She’s a sailor. Told me herself.”

Tiny face composed under the sou’wester. Water on the eyelashes, flush in the cheeks, eyes down. Modest. No objections. Not a glance for father. Not a smile. So I nodded, felt myself thrown off balance again as Bub laughed and swung the little iron wheel that was clotted now with lengths of bright dark green seaweed. How was it, I wondered, that the others were in league with the helmsman, what signals were they passing back and forth while only I heaved about moment by moment in the hard rotten embrace of that little tub?

“Cassandra gets her sea legs from her mother,” I said, but the sea was against me, the Old Man of the Sea was against me, and the waves smelled like salted fish and the engine smelled of raw gasoline and Jomo was still crouching high on the stem and watching me. And all at once I was unable to take my eyes off him: Jomo going up, Jomo going down, up and down, Jomo swaying off to starboard, Jomo swinging back to port, and holding his hook on high where I could see it and aiming the bill of the baseball cap in my direction and fingering his sideburns now and then but keeping his little black eyes on mine and sitting still but sailing all over the place. Without moving his head he spit between his teeth and the long curve of the spittle, as it reached out on the wind, was superimposed against Jomo’s unpredictable motion and dark anxious face. And then I heard him.

“You don’t look too good,” he said. “Don’t feel good, do you? Why don’t you go below? Always go below if you don’t feel good. Here, let me help you down….”

Even as the Peter Poor pitched out from under me, Jomo spit one more time and then hopped off the stem, carefully, without effort, and approached me, came my way with his quick black eyes and on his forehead a sympathetic frown. Jomo with his hot advice, his hot concern for my comfort.

“You want to try sleeping,” he said. “Try can you get to sleep and see if I’m not right.”

It sounded good. I was bruised, hot, wet, sleepy, and my mouth was full of salt. Salt and a little floating bile. My face and fingers were wrinkled, puckered, as if I had spent the morning in a tepid bath. And the red sun had turned to gold and was hot in my eyes.

“Jomo,” I murmured, “there’s no dinghy, what do you think of that.? But the life jackets, Jomo, point them out to me, will you?”

And roughly, stuffing me into the little wooden companion-way: “You ain’t going to need no dinghy nor no lifejackets neither…. Now put your feet on the rungs.”

So I went down. I went down heavily, a man of oilskins and battered joints, while Jomo stayed kneeling in the open companionway with his arms folded and his chin on his arms—“I got to see this,” I heard him say over his shoulder — watching until my feet touched something solid and I fell around facing the cabin and managed to hold myself upright with one hand still on the ladder.

Pots and pans and beer bottles were rolling around on the floor. Two narrow bunks were heaped high with rough tumbled blankets and a pair of long black rubber hip boots. Little portholes were screwed tightly shut, the exhaust of the gasoline engine was seeping furiously through a leaking bulkhead, and in front of me, directly in front of me and hanging down from a hook and swaying left and right, a large black lace brassiere with enormous cups and broad elasticized band and thin black straps was swaying right and left from a hook screwed into the cabin ceiling.

“Jomo,” I said, “what’s that?”

“Never you mind what it is. Just leave it alone.”

Water on the portholes, stink of the engine, rattle of tin and glass going up and down the floor, long comfortable endless pendulum swinging of her black brassiere and: “But, Jomo, what about the owner?”

“Don’t you worry about the owner. She’s coming back to get that thing. Don’t worry.”

And then: “Jomo. I’m going to be sick…"

“Well, hot damn, just hike yourself up here on deck,” laughing over his shoulder, gesturing, then scowling down at me again through the dodging companionway, “just drag ass, now, I can’t let you puke all over my cabin.”

I got my head and shoulders up through the hole and into the open air in time to see Captain Red and Cassandra sitting side by side on the thwart and opening our brown paper bag of sandwiches, got there in time to see the wax paper flying off on the wind and one white sandwich entering the big red mouth and the other white sandwich entering Cassandra’s mouth. Then they were smiling and chewing and I was hanging my head into darkness that was like the ocean itself and trying to keep the vomit off the fresh yellow bulging breast of my borrowed oilskin coat.

Third occasion of my adult life when my own pampered stomach tried to cast me out. Third time I threw up the very flux of the man, and for a moment, only a moment in the darkness of a cold ocean, I couldn’t help remembering the blonde prostitute on Second Avenue who held my forehead in the middle of the night and shared my spasms, because now I was stuffed into oilskins and slung up in a tight companionway and retching, vomiting, gasping between contractions, and there was no one to hold my forehead now. But it was the sea that had done this to me, only the wide sea, and in the drowsy and then electrified intervals of my seasickness I knew there would be no relief until they carried me ashore at last.

Red was standing in front of Cassandra now, my head was rolling, for some reason Jomo was at the wheel and the sea, the wide dark sea, was covered with little sharp bright pieces of tin and I saw them flashing, heard them clattering, clashing on all sides of the Peter Poor. The drops on my chin were tickling me and I couldn’t move; I felt as if I had been whacked on the stomach with a rolled-up newspaper soaked in brine.

Then blackness. Clap of pain in the head and blackness. Mishap with the boom? Victim of a falling block? One of the running lights shaken loose or a length of chain? But I knew full well that it was Bub because my eyes returned suddenly to tears and sight returned, settled again into bright images of the yellow oilskin, the hook at the wheel, the stern half-buried and shipping water, and somehow I accounted for them and knew suddenly what had become of Bub, could feel him where he crouched above me on the cabin roof and held upraised the old tire iron which they used as a lever to start the engine with.

But no sooner had I worked it out, that Bub had struck me on the head with the tire iron, than I saw the rock. Red, Cassandra, and then behind them the long low shelf of rock covered with a crust of barnacles and submerged every second or two in the sea, and we were wallowing and drifting and slowly coming abeam of the rock which looked like the overturned black petrified hull of some ocean-going vessel that would never sink.

Had it not been for Crooked Finger Rock I might have done something, might have reached around somehow and caught Bub by the throat and snatched away the tire iron and flung it at Red. Somehow I might have knocked Red down and taken over the Peter Poor and sailed us back to safety before the squall could threaten us from another quarter. But I saw the rock and heard the bell and Captain Red and Cassandra were posed against the rock itself, in my eye were already on the rock together, were all that remained of the Peter Poor and the rest of us. So I could only measure the rock and measure Red and wait for the end, wait for the worst.

I didn’t want to drown with Bub, I didn’t want Cassandra to survive with Red, and so I watched the hard black surface of the rock and swarthy bright yellow skin of the man, could only stare at the approach of the rock and at what the old man was doing. Jomo had let go the wheel and was watching too.

Because Cassandra was sitting on the edge of the thwart with her head thrown back and her hands spread wide inside the puffy tight yellow sleeves, and because the rust-colored skirt was billowing and I could see the knees and the whiteness above the knees which until now had never been exposed to sun, spray, or the head-on stance of a Captain Red, and because Red had thrown open the stiff crumpling mass of his yellow skins and was smiling and taking his hands away.

“There ’tis,” he said.

And that’s when I should have had the tire iron to throw, because there it was and I saw it all while Cassandra, poor Cassandra, saw only Red.

Because she looked at Red, stared at him, and then pulled the string yet gave no sign that she knew the black sou’wester was gone or that she cared — but I did, I watched it sail up, roll over, shudder, actually land for a moment on the rock, slide across the rock, drop from sight — and then she pulled at the knot of the pale blue kerchief and held the idle tip of it between two fingers for a moment and then let it go. Drop of blue already a quarter mile astern and the hair a little patch of gold in the wind, the sun, the spray, and the white face exposed to view.

“No, no,” I said thickly, because she had reached out her hand — bobbing, swaying, undisturbed — and had drawn it back and was extending it again and Red was waiting for her.

“Cassandra,” I mumbled, “Cassandra,” but the buoy began to toll and Bub hit me again with the tire iron. So I went down and took her with me, pulled her down into my own small comer of the dark locker that lies under the sea, dragged her to rest in the ruptured center of my own broken head of a dream. Waxed sandwich wrappings, empty brown paper bag, black sou’wester, kerchief — all these whistled above her, and then I was a fat sea dolphin suspended in the painful silence of my green underseas cavern where there was nothing to see except Cassandra’s small slick wide-eyed white face lit up with the light of Red’s enormous candle against the black bottom, the black tideless root, of Crooked Finger Rock.

The squall came down, I know, because once I opened my eyes and found that I was lying flat on my back in my oilskins on the floor of the cabin, was wedged into the narrow space between the bunks and was staring up at the open companion-way which was dark and filled with rain. The rain beat down into the cabin, fell full on my face, and I could hear it spattering on the pots and pans, driving into the piles of blankets thrown into the bunks. The black brassiere was circling above my head and lashing its tail.

We were offshore, three or four miles offshore in a driving squall. We pitched, reeled, rolled in darkness, one of the rubber hip boots fell out of the starboard bunk and down onto my stomach and lay there wet and flapping and undulating on my stomach. At least something, I thought, had saved us from a broadside collision against Crooked Finger Rock.

And later, much later, I awoke and found that they had hoisted me into the port bunk, dumped me into the bunk on top of the uncomfortable wet mass of blankets. I felt the toe of the other rubber boot in the small of my back, the tight sou’wester was still strapped to my head. And awake I saw the low and fading sun on the lip of the wet companionway, felt the tiny hand on my arm and managed to raise my eyes.

“Skipper? Feeling a little better, Skipper? We’re coming into port now, aren’t you glad?”

Wet, bright. Uncovered. The small white face that had been cupped in the determined hand of unruly nature. Little beads of sea violence in the eyelashes. Wet bright nose. Wet lips. Bareheaded, smooth, drenched, yellow skins open at the little throat, hair still smacking wet with the open sea and sticking tight and revealing the curve of her little sweet pointed skull. And smiling, Cassandra was smiling down at me. But she was not alone.

“Red — Captain Red — has been teaching me how to sail. Skipper.”

And moaning and licking my sour lips: “Yes, yes. I’m sure he has, Cassandra. That’s fine.”

The Old Man of the Sea, timeless hero of the Atlantic fishing fleet, was standing beside her with his pipe sizzling comfortably and the blood running back into the old channels, and I knew that I could not bear to look at him and knew, suddenly, why everything felt so different to me where I lay on the tumbled uncharitable blankets in the wet alien bunk. The sea. The sea was flat, smooth, calm, the wind had died, the engine was chugging so slowly, steadily, that I began to count the strokes.

“Ahoy, Peter Poor!” came the far-off sound of Miranda’s voice, and I knew that Cassandra was right and that we were heading into port, heading in toward our berth at the rotten jetty. Peace at last.

But then: “Skipper? Are you well enough to show Red what you have on your chest? I’d like him to see it if you don’t mind.”

Resisting, mumbling, begging off, trying to push her little hand away, but it was no use of course and she peeled away the layers and smoothed out the hairs with her own white fingers until the two of them leaned down together — two heads close together — and looked at me. Their ears were touching.

“That’s the name of my husband. Red. Isn’t it beautiful?”

He agreed that it was.

“Where’s the Salerno kid?” I asked, and it was a thick green whispered question. “Don’t you want to show him too?”

But Red was already helping her up the ladder and we were coming in.

And then Miranda was waving from the end of the jetty: “Ahoy, Peter Poor, welcome home!” And half a dozen stray young kinky-faced sheep were huddled in front of her on the end of the jetty and calling for mother.

“Boy, oh boy, are you a sight!” Miranda said. And then they kissed, and from where I sat propped on the jetty I looked and saw our skins piled high amidships on the Peter Poor. Our wretched skins. And above the pile with the black strap looped over his steel hook and the rest of it hanging down, Jomo was standing there and holding out his arm and grinning.

“Got something of yours, Miranda,” he called. “You want it?”

And laughing, and arm in arm with Cassandra: “You bet your life,” she cried, “bring it along!”

Silence. Shadows. A moonlit constellation of little hard new blueberries against the picket fence. An early spring. The glider was jerking back and forth beneath me and grinding, squeaking, arguing with itself like a wounded crow. And the bottle of Old Grand-Dad lay at my foot and I sat with glass in hand.

“Now go to bed, will you, Skip? My God. She’s probably gone to the show with Bub. That’s all. What’s wrong with that?”

The Labradors came out of their kennel, one head above the other, and looked at us — at me in the painful shadows of the glider and at Miranda sitting on the porch rail with her head against the post and one big knee beneath her chin — and sat down on their black bottoms and began to howl. The Labradors, Miranda’s blunt-nosed ugly dogs, were howling for my own vigil and for Miranda’s silhouette, because Miranda was wearing her black turtle-neck sweater and a Spanish dancer’s short white ruffled skirt which the raised knee had slipped into her solid lap like a pile of fresh white roses.

“Even the dogs know she’s not with Bub,” I said, cracking the neck of the bottle quickly and gently on the lip of the glass, “nobody can fool those dogs, Miranda. Nobody. They’re not howling for the fun of it.”

Wasn’t she looking at her fingernails in the moonlight? Wasn’t she studying the tiny inverted moonlit shields, one hand curved and fluted and turning at arm’s length in front of her face, and then the other, peering at her enormous hands and yawning? Of course she was. Because it was May and time for Miranda to appraise her big waxen fingernails by light of the moon. And even in the chill of the late May night I knew there would be no goose flesh on her big waxen silhouetted leg, no hair on the smooth dark calf.

“You’re an old maid, Skip. Honest to God.”

And staring out at the chestnut tree that was trying to pull itself into leaf once more, I lifted my chin and smiled and drooped the comers of my mouth: “I’m afraid I can’t say the same for you. Far from it. But I tell you, Miranda,” tasting the iodine taste of the Old Grand-Dad on my heavy tongue, sitting on the head of a spring and holding it under, “I’ll give her five more minutes, just five, Miranda, and then I’m going to Red’s shack and pray to the BVM. that I’m still in time.”

She laughed.

But I meant it. Yes, I meant still in time, because there had been the rest of March and April with no more mishaps, nothing but Cassandra suddenly light on her feet and fresh and helpful around the house, Cassandra spending all our last days of winter walking from room to room in the old clapboard house with Pixie held tight in her arms and some kind of song just audible in her severe little nose. Now it was May and Cassandra had changed again and as I must have felt and was soon to know, it was the last of my poor daughter’s months. So still in time. I needed to be still in time. Because of March and then May and then June and the last thoughts, fragments, high lights of the time that swept us all away.

“Laugh if you want to, Miranda,” I said. “You have nothing to lose.”

“For God’s sake, Skip,” looking my way, plucking the ruffles, resting a long dark hand on the angle of the silhouetted thigh, “and what about you, Skip? What about you?”

She must have known what I had to lose since she destroyed it for me. She must have known since she arranged for the destruction, nursed it, brought it about, tormented both herself and myself with its imminence, with the shape of the flesh, the lay of the soul, the curving brawn that was always gliding behind her plan. And what a vision she must have had of the final weeks in May, since the abortive outcome had already been determined, as only she could have known, on a windy day in March.

So I was about to tell her what I had to lose, was sitting forward on the edge of a broken-down glider and collecting myself against the loud irritating pattern of her asthmatic wheeze — she was still propped on the veranda rail with her long heavy legs exposed, but she was wheezing now, staring at me out of her big dark invisible eyes and wheezing — when the black hot rod shot around the comer by the abandoned Poor House and roared toward us down the straightaway of the dark narrow dirt road, honked at us — triple blaring of the musical horn — and disappeared among the fuzzy black trunks of the larches which were tall and young and mysterious in our brimming spring. And I jumped from the glider and reached the rail in time to see the fat anatomical silver tubes on the side of the engine, the silver disks masking the hub caps, the little fat squirrel tail whipping in circles on the tip of the steel aerial, and, behind the low rectangles of window glass, the two figures in the cut-down chariot for midnights under a full moon. It was traveling without lights.

“You see?” I said, “there she goes! And with Jomo — in Jomo’s hot rod, Miranda — not with Bub. Who’s the old maid now, Miranda?”

Old Grand-Dad flat on the floor. Kitchen tumbler sailing out and smashing, splintering, on the roof of the kennel. And I was off the porch and once more running after my destiny which always seemed to be racing ahead of me on black tires.

“Wait a minute, Skip,” she cried then, “I’m coming with you!”

So once again with Miranda I entrusted myself to the other hot rod that was still behind her house — orange and white and blue and bearing the number five in a circle on the hood — but this time I myself sat at the wheel and this time, thanks to Bub who had worked on the car as Miranda had said he would, this time that hot rod was a racing vehicle with a full tank of high-octane gasoline, and this time it was spring and the tires were pumped up tight and the fresh paint was bright and tacky.

“Now, Cicisbeo,” I muttered, and we swung out onto Poor House Road, took up the chase.

No lights. No muffler. No windshield, no glass in the windows, and I was low in the driver’s seat with my foot pushed to the hot floor and my fat hands slick and white on the smooth black steering wheel. Miranda crouched beside me, long hair snapping out on the wind and white skirt bunching and struggling in her powerful arms.

“If they gave us the slip,” I shouted, “good-by everything! I hope you’re glad….”

Moonlight. Black shadows. Soft silk of the dirt road around the island, and larches, uncut brambles at the side of the road and a dead net hanging down from a luminous branch, and the occasional scent of brine and charcoal smoke on the breakneck wind, and every few hundred feet a water rat leapt from some hollow log or half-buried conduit, dashed under our wheels.

“It’s all your doing,” I shouted. “I hope you’re glad!”

Shaking loose her hair and bunching the white foam of the ruffled skirt up to her breasts, Miranda was larger and whiter and more Venus-like than ever that night, and as we accelerated suddenly onto the silver flats of one of my favorite cow pastures — cows dead and gone, of course, but an open stubbled place in sight of the sea — I knew that in Miranda’s eyes I was not the man to win a hot rod race. So I swerved a couple of times and gunned her, set my jaw. I had taken my chances in this very car before, and Miranda or no Miranda, now I would have my moment of inspired revenge. As we thundered across the bumpy moonlit field I made up my mind: the sea. The black sea. Nothing to do but run the one-handed lecherous Jomo into the black sea.

The road, the wash of stubble, the moonlit mounds of powdered shells, the prow of a beached dory, and off to the right the lighthouse and straight ahead a glimpse of the black-lacquered cut-down car we were chasing. I felt relentless.

“Come on, Skip, do your stuff! Good God! ” Somehow she had gotten her enormous legs onto the seat and was kneeling and holding the skirt above her belly with one hand and with the other was clutching me around the shoulders. Her hot breath was in my ear, I heard the rising and falling roar of the beehives that were laboring away inside her enormous chest.

“No!” I cried, “Stop! You’ll kill us both, Miranda!”

But she hung on, tightened her grip and snuggled her great black and white head down onto my shoulder. Her hair flew into my eyes and even into my open mouth. And tongue, teeth, hair, I was trying to breathe through my nose and gagging, choking, but somehow keeping my grip on the wheel and driving on. But was she trying to comfort me, encourage me, even love me, at least urge me to great daring after all? Had I been wrong about Miranda?

I knew the answer of course. And yet before I could spare a hand off the wheel or risk a glance in her direction, the other car had come into view again and was heading not for the dunes as I had expected but down toward the hard dark sand of Dog’s Head beach which stretched northward about a mile and a half from the abandoned light. I saw him, swung the wheel in time, and followed him, tried to catch him midway between the Poor House Road and the beach. But I had no such luck.

The black car turned northward away from the empty lighthouse on Dog’s Head beach, and for a moment we were close enough to see the silver disks on the wheels, the two silhouetted heads, the aerial in its whip position. Hot rod, driver, passenger, they seemed to crawl for a moment in a slow fanning geyser of packed sand, and I stuck my fist out of the window. “Beware, Cicisbeo!” I shouted this time, and stepped on the gas.

Off again, the black car leading up the wide wet stretch of deserted beach, black car racing close to the dark water’s edge and filling the air with spray, flecks of foam, exhaust, a screen of burning sand. The aluminum exhaust pipes curving out of the lacquered hood were loud, musical, three or four bright pipes of power. Even Miranda lifted her head, leaned forward now and fought the driving wind to see.

“Faster, Skip!” she shouted, and despite winds, sand, uncertain motion, she bounced up and down on the edge of the seat, whacked me rhythmically on fat arm, knee, shoulder.

Two unlighted hammerheaded cars on a moonlit beach, and three times we raced up and down that beach which had been exposed only hours before by a choppy sea, three times up and down from the north end of low boulders to the south end of tall grass and broken faces of cliff and abandoned lighthouse, and three times he tricked me with his sudden and skillful turns, three times he made his turn and left me driving flat out toward disaster among the sleeping boulders or a crash against the cliff. And wasn’t he leading me on? Leading me toward a nightconsuming accident on the lonely beach?

But I got the hang of it then, so to speak, and made a short turn and cut him off. A surprise blow. Simple maneuver but effective. Quick action of a dangerous mind.

“Got him now, Miranda,” I shouted. “Rapacious devil!”

And we were drifting together, that black hot rod and mine, and I was inching in closer to him and then ahead, fighting for the position from which I would cut him off, sailing out now to the left, now to the right on the treacherous sand and giving her the gun again. Side by side in the sound of speed. Shadows cast by the moon were scudding ahead of us, and there were sharp rocks waiting for us in the cold sea and I could make out the dark slippery festoons of kelp.

“Hold on, Cassandra,” I shouted out of the window, “it won’t be long!” I smelled the night, the salt, the armies of mussels and clams ground under our wheels and the dense smoke of our high-octane fuel. And the excitement touched the backs of my hands, told me the time was near, and I wondered how he could have been foolish enough to trap himself here on Dog’s Head beach, how foolish enough to underestimate my courage, the strength of my love. I was half a radiator length ahead of him and Miranda might have touched that black-lacquered car had she held out her hand.

“Now!” I shouted, “Now!” and swung down on the wheel and smelled the rank sizzling cremation of the brake bands as we stopped short of the moonlit choppy waters — half-spin in the sand but safe, dry, coming to a sudden and miraculous standstill — while the black car went pitching in. It pitched headlong into the rising tide and rocked, floundered, stalled. Smacked one of the rocks.

I fumbled for the ignition and fought the door, using fist, shoulder, heels of both palms. “Get your hook ready,” I cried, “I’m coming after you!” And once more I was running until I too hit the shock of the cold water and suddenly found myself knee-deep in it but running in slow motion, still running toward the half-submerged black-lacquered hot rod wrecked on this bitter shore. Already it was bound in kelp, already the cold waters were wallowing above the crankcase, already the thick white salt was sealing up forever those twin silver carburetors which Jomo had buffed, polished, installed, adjusted beside the battered gas pump in front of Red’s shack. Half-sunken now, wet and black and pointing out to sea in the moonlight.

“Game’s up, Jomo, don’t try anything, …”

And my two hands went under water and gripped the door handle. My soggy foot was raised high and thrust flat against the side of the car. And then I pulled and there was the suck of the yielding door, the black flood and, baseball cap and all, I dragged him out by the arm and shook him, wrestled with him, until I slipped and we both went under.

And then up again and, “You!” I cried, “It’s you!” and I threw him off his feet again and lunged into the car just as Miranda began laughing her breasty deep Old Grand-Dad laugh at the edge of the beach. I lunged into the car and reached out my hand and stopped, because it was not Cassandra. Because it was nothing. Nobody at all. A mere device, a laundry bag for a torso, something white rolled up for a head. Oh, it was Bub all right, Bub wearing Jomo’s cap and driving Jomo’s car. Bub’s trick. Bub’s decoy. And it had worked. Oh, it had worked all right, and while I was risking my neck in Miranda’s blue and white and orange hot rod and making my foolish laps on Dog’s Head beach or standing hip-deep in the biting black waters of the Atlantic, my Cassandra was lying after all in the arms I had tried to save her from, and falling, fading, swooning, going fast.

So I plunged both hands down and collared Bub, held him, dragged the streaming and spitting and frothy face up dose to mine. He had a nosebleed and a little finger-thick abrasion on his upper lip and terror on the narrow sea-white boyish face beneath the dripping duck bill of the baseball cap.

“Where is she,” I said. “Where’s Cassandra?”

And choked and high-pitched and faint but still querulous, still mean: “Him and her is at the lighthouse. Been up there to the lighthouse since sundown. You old fool…"

So for the first and only time in all my lifelong experience with treachery, deception and Death in his nakedness or in his several disguises, I gave way at last to my impulse and put Tremlow’s teaching to the test, allowed myself the small brutal pleasure of drawing blood and forcing flesh on flesh, inflicting pain. Yes, I stood in the choppy and freezing darkness of that black water and contemplated the precise spot where I would punch the child. Because I had gone too far. And Bub had gone too far. The long duck bill of the cap, the cruel tone of his island voice and the saliva awash on his thin white face and even the faint suggestion of tender sideburns creeping down the skin in front of each malformed ear, by all this I was moved, not justified but merely moved, to hit Bub then and there in the face with all my strength.

“Hold still,” I muttered, and took a better grip with my left hand, “hold still if you know what’s good for you,” I said and, keeping my eyes on the little bloody beak in the center of his white face I pulled back my arm and made a fist and drove it as hard as I could into Bub’s nose. I held him close for a moment and then pushed him away, let him go, left him rolling over in the cold black water where he could fend for himself.

I left him, rinsed my fist, staggered up into the moonlight and shouted, “No, no, Miranda, wait!” Once more I broke into my sloshing dogtrot on Dog’s Head beach, because Miranda was in the hot rod and shifting, throwing the blue and white and orange demon into gear, and waving, driving away. So I was alone once more and desperate and running as fast as I could toward the lighthouse. What heavy steps I took in the sand, how deep those footprints that trailed behind me as I took my slow-motion way down that desolate beach toward the lighthouse.

Slow-motion, yes, and a slogging and painful trot, but after a while I could see that the abandoned white tower of Dog’s Head lighthouse was coming down the beach to meet me, was moving, black cliff and all, in my direction. And crab grass, pools of slime, the rusted flukes of a lost anchor, and then the rotted wooden stairs up the side of the cliff and a bright empty Orange Crush bottle gleaming on the tenth step and then the railing gave way under my hand on the head of the cliff and the wind caught hold of me and the lighthouse went up and up above my craning head. The lighthouse. The enormous overgrown moonlit base of it. The tower that had fought the storms, the odor of high waves in the empty doorway, the terrible height of the unlighted eye — I wanted nothing more than to turn my back on it and flee.

But I cupped my hands and raised my mouth aloft and shouted: “Cassandra.? In the name of God, Cassandra, are you there?”

No answer, of course. Still no word for her father. Only the brittle feet of the luminous crabs, the cough and lap and barest moan of the slick black tide rising now at the bottom of the cliff and working loose the periwinkles, wearing away the stone, only the darkness inside the tower and, outside, the moonlight and the heavy unfaithful wind that was beating me across the shoulders, making my trousers luff. But of course she was there, of course she was. And had she climbed the circular iron staircase knowing she would never set foot on it again? Or, as in the case of my poor father, was I myself the unwitting tinder that started the blaze? Could she really have intended to spend the last six or eight hours of her life with Jomo in Dog’s Head light? My own Cassandra? My proud and fastidious Cassandra? I thought she had. Even as I approached the black doorless opening in the base of the tower I was quite certain that she had planned it all, had intended it all, knowing that I would come and call to her and force myself to climb that tower, climb every one of those iron steps on my hands and knees, and for nothing, all for nothing. Even as I thrust one foot into the darkness of Dog’s Head light I knew that I could not possibly be in time.

“Cassandra? Don’t play games with me, Cassandra. Please….”

Proud and fastidious, yes, but also like a bird, a very small gray bird that could make no sound. And now she was crouching somewhere in Dog’s Head light — at the top, it would be at the top if I knew Cassandra — or lying in Jomo’s thin brown abrasive arms in the Dog’s Head light. What a bad end for time. What a bad end for the BVM.

“Cassandra? In the name of God, answer me now … Please….”

Iron steps. All those iron steps and on my hands and knees. Bareheaded, sopping wet, afraid of finding her but afraid too of losing her, I started up then and with each step I found it increasingly difficult to pull my fingers loose from the iron steps and to haul the dead weight of my nerveless feet behind me. Up it went, that tower, straight to the top, and the center was empty, the circular iron steps were narrow, there was no rail. Cracks in the wall, certain vibrations in the rusted iron, it was like climbing up the interior of some monstrous and abandoned boiler, and it was not for me, this misery of the slow ascent, this caterpillar action up the winding iron stairway to the unknown.

But taking deep dark breaths and bracing myself now and again and glancing up and at the moonlight fluttering in the smashed head of the light, I persevered until suddenly, and as if in answer to my clenched jaw and all the sweeping sensations in my poor spine, the whole thing began to shake and sway and ring, and I clenched my fists, tucked in my fingers, bruised my head, hung on.

A long soft cry of the wind — or was it the wind? — and footsteps. Heavy mindless footsteps crashing down, spiraling down from above, heavy shoes trembling and clattering and banging down the iron stairway, and behind the terrible swaying rhythm in the iron and the racket of the shoes I could hear the click, click, click of the flashing mechanical hand as he swung it against the wall with each step he took.

He passed me. He had already passed me — Jomo without his cap, poor Jomo who must have thought Salerno was nothing compared to what he had gotten himself into now — when I heard the breathing beside my ear and then the toneless bell-strokes of catastrophe fading away below in the darkness.

The iron gut of the tower remained intact, and I crawled to the top and crawled back down again without mishap, without a fall. But the damage was done. I knew it was done before I reached the top, and I began to hurry and began to whisper: “Cassandra? He’s gone now, Cassandra, it’s all right now… you’ll see. …” I heard nothing but the echoing black sky and tiny skin-crawling sounds above me and the small splash, the eternal picking fingers of wave on rock below. “Cassandra?” I whispered, tried to pull myself up the last few shaky steps, tried to fight down dizziness, tried to see, “you’re not crying, are you, Cassandra? Please don’t….”

But the damage was done and I was only an old bird in an empty nest. I rolled up onto the iron floor in the smashed head of the lighthouse and crawled into the lee of the low wall and pulled myself into a half-sitting position and waited for the moment when Dog’s Head light must tremble and topple forward into the black scum of the rising tide far below.

“Gone, Cassandra? Gone so soon?” I whispered. “Gone with Gertrude, Cassandra? Gone to Papa? But you shouldn’t have, Cassandra. You should have thought of me….”

The neat pile of clothing was fluttering a little in the moonlight and it was damp to the touch. I could not make myself look down. But I felt that I had seen her already and there was no reason to look down again. So I half-sat, half-lay there in the cold, the moonlight, the wind, stretched myself out amidst the broken glass and debris and thought about Cassandra and was unable to distinguish between her small white oval face — it was up there with me as well as below on the black rocks — and the small white plastic face of the BVM.

“I won’t ask why, Cassandra. Something must have spoken to you, something must have happened. But I don’t want to know, Cassandra. So I won’t ask….”

I clutched a couple of the thin rusted stanchions and in the gray moonlight stared out to sea. The shoals were miles long and black and sharp, long serrated tentacles that began at the base of the promontory and radiated out to sea, mile after square mile of intricate useless channels and breaking waves and sharp-backed lacerating shoals and spiny reefs. Mile after square mile of ocean cemetery that wasn’t even true to its dead but kept flushing itself out on the flood tide. No wonder the poor devils wanted a lighthouse here. No wonder.

I turned again, crept back from the edge and started down. I had climbed to the top of the lighthouse and I was able to climb back down again, feet first. It was a matter of holding tight and feeling my way with my feet and dropping down with little terrible free falls through that tower of darkness. But I managed it. I reached the bottom after all, and I sat on a concrete block in the empty doorway with my head in my hands. I sat there with the lighthouse on my shoulders. And somewhere the tide was rising, the moon was going down, the clouds were scudding. And I sat there while the damp grass sang at my feet and the white tower listed in the indifferent wind.

Ducks in June. Baby ducks in June. I could hear them, Miranda’s brood of little three-day-old cheese-colored ducklings, hear them waddling behind the house on this bright early dawn in the first week in June, hear them talking to each other and doing their little Hitler march step as I stood by the bright black stove and coaxed the coffee to reach its rich dark aromatic climax so I could sit down to an early breakfast with Pixie. It was a chilly dawn, but outside the sun was out, and inside Miranda’s kitchen the wood-burning stove was as rosy as a hot brick.

“Hear the ducklings, Pixie? You like the little ducklings, don’t you, Pixie?”

She looked up at me from where she sat on the wide soft boards of the wooden floor — bright pudding face, bright platinum hair, on her finger a little tin ring that I had found in a Cracker Jack box — and opened her mouth for me and kicked her little dirty white calfskin shoes and gave the rolling pin a quick push. I smiled. Pixie always enjoyed the game with the rolling pin.

“Shall we go out and play with the ducklings after breakfast, Pixie? Would you like that?”

Fresh white apron, fresh white shirt, fresh creamy taste of the toothpaste in my mouth, and Miranda’s old tin clock said that it was six o’clock in the morning and already I had ground the coffee in the coffee grinder and put the cereal bowls on the table and finished off Pixie’s cold orange juice. And now the sun was shooting golden arrows through the blistered glass in the kitchen window and the stove was warm. The coffee smelled like the new day and was beginning to bubble up into the little myopic eye of the old percolator.

“Where’s the corn flakes, Pixie? Go find the corn flakes….”

Big square whitewashed kitchen, sharp golden arrows of the new sun quivering on the white walls and on the table set for two, old tin clock pattering and twisting and clicking in the throes of the hour, little ducks marching around and around outside and the light frost was beginning to disappear. I dangled a quilted pot holder from my fingers and tended the stove and glanced every once in a while at the waiting table. Because instead of the usual unopened fifth of Old Grand-Dad on the breakfast table for Miranda, there was a package wrapped in white tissue paper and done up in red, white and blue ribbons and so placed on the table that it could have been meant only for me.

“What do you think is in the package, Pixie? Something for Grandpa? A present for your grandfather, eh, Pixie? Shall we open it after breakfast and then go play with the ducks?”

There was a card tucked under the ribbon and I had already allowed myself a look at the card—For Skip—in a bold black handwriting, nothing more — while Pixie was busy with the rolling pin I had slipped it out of the envelope and read it and then put it back where I had found it in such a way that not even Miranda could tell the difference. A quick look at the card was one thing, but the present itself, I knew, would have to wait. Perhaps I could even hold off until I had done the dishes though I suspected not.

Corn flakes and cold milk and the bowl of sugar. And then the usual fight with Pixie until I made her drop the rolling pin and was able to pick her up and strap her into the pink enamel chair and give her the jam jar and little silver spoon to play with. And then the coffee. The heat of the spicy beans. The first heat of the day. Better than bacon. But just as I was pouring the coffee and sniffing it and watching the sensual brown metamorphosis in my thin cup, just as I was smiling and getting ready to sit down to breakfast with Pixie, I smelled the sudden odor of a lighted cigarette and felt a movement at the door. I waited and then raised my eyes.

“Miranda,” I said. “Good morning! Have some coffee?”

At six-fifteen in the morning she was standing in the doorway with her long legs crossed and her shoulder leaning against the jamb. Black eyes and sockets, uncombed hair, white face. And after all these months she was wearing the canary yellow slacks again.

“Come on,” I said, “have some coffee. First pot’s the best, isn’t it, Miranda?”

She puffed on her cigarette, exhaled, shook her head.

“Well, Miranda,” and I was stooping, still holding the pot, smiling up at her, “there seems to be some sort of present on the table. We don’t have so many presents around here, do we?”

And then: “That one’s got your name on it, Skip.”

“Really?” I said. “Well, come on, Miranda, tell me. What is it?”

And slowly and keeping the big formless black eyes on mine and sucking the gray smoke back into her nostrils: “Fetus,” she said, and the big mouth slid down a little as if it might smile.

I turned, set the coffee pot on the edge of the stove, faced her again, took hold of the back of the chair with both my hands. The arrows were quivering on the walls but she was watching me.

“What did you say, Miranda?”

“Fetus. Two-months-old fetus in a fruit jar, Skip.”

I pulled out the chair then, slowly, and sat down. I pushed away the corn flakes, folded my hands. Miranda was smoking more quickly now, was taking deep rapid puffs. And she was wheezing now. There was a little grease on her face but no lipstick, powder, rouge. Only the uncombed hair and spreading black stains of the eyes.

“I don’t understand you,” I said at last, watching her, smelling the smoke, noticing that under the blouse she was naked. “I really don’t know what you mean, Miranda. What kind of fetus?”

“Just a fetus, Skip. Two months old. Human.”

Pixie, I saw, was holding the jam jar on its side and had given up the spoon and had thrust her little hand into the neck of the jar. Strawberry jam. Coffee fast cooling off. Baby ducks still marching. And the white tissue and the card and the ribbon. Red, white and blue ribbon. And I wondered, asked myself, if it could possibly be true. How could it possibly be true? Wasn’t it only Miranda’s whim? Knowing full well that I would never open it, wasn’t it only Miranda’s cruelest way of tormenting me at six-fifteen on a morning in the first week in June? But why? What was she trying to tell me? And then suddenly I knew the first thing I had to do, and I did it. I simply reached out my hand, picked up the package, put it to my ear and shook it. But there was no sound. And I could tell nothing by the weight. It was a fruit jar, just as she said, but whether it contained anything or was empty, I did not know.

“All right, Miranda,” I said, still holding and weighing the jar and looking at her and seeing the mouth slide down deeper, seeing the breasts heave, “all right, Miranda. What is it?”

She waited. The cigarette was a white butt pinched between her two long fingers. Her legs were crossed. And then her lips moved, her mouth became a large quivering lopsided square: “I mean it, Skip. And just as I said, it’s got your name on it. And it’s hers,” throwing the butt on the kitchen floor where it lay burning out and smoking, “Candy’s, I tell you. Why do you think she jumped, you old fool?”

I looked at the mouth, the shadows that were her eyes, I looked at the bright package in my hand. Slowly, slowly I shook it again. Nothing. Full or empty, did it matter? There were tiny arrows of sunlight now on the backs of my hands and Pixie had her mouth full of strawberry jam.

“Cassandra’s?” I said then. “You mean it was Cassandra’s? But surely that was no reason for Cassandra to kill herself?”

And thrusting her head at me and slowly shaking the black tangled hair and with both hands clutching her enormous white throat: “Reason or no reason,” she said, “there it is. Good God!” And she was laughing, wheezing, exhaling dead smoke from the rigid lopsided square of her mouth, “Good God, I thought you’d like to have it! Sort of makes you a grandfather for the second time, doesn’t it?”

I waited. And then slowly I stood up and unfastened the strap and gathered Pixie into one arm — Pixie covered with strawberry jam — and in my other hand took up the package again and slowly, gently, pushed past Miranda in the doorway.

“I think you’re right, Miranda,” I said as softly as I could. “I’m sure you’re right. But, Miranda,” gently, softly, “you better step on the cigarette. Please.”

And I knew then exactly what I had to do, and I did it. I went upstairs and took my white officer’s cap off the dummy and put it on my head where it belonged and packed up our tattered flight bag. And with my arms loaded — Pixie hanging from one, bag from the other, bright smeared package in my right hand — I went back down to the kitchen and asked Miranda for a serving spoon. I asked Miranda to take a serving spoon out of the drawer and slip it into my pocket.

“Well,” she said, “you’re leaving.”

“Yes, Miranda,” I said. “I’m going to the cemetery first, and then Pixie and I are leaving.”

“Good riddance,” she said and grinned at me, fumbled for the cigarettes, struck a match. “Good riddance, Skip….”

I smiled.

So I carried Pixie and the flight bag and the present from Miranda out to the cemetery, carried them past the sepulchral barn of the Poor House and down the deeply rutted lane and through the grove of pines and onto the yellow promontory where the expressionless old gray lichen-covered monuments rose up together in sight of the sea. Yellow stubble, crumbling iron enclosure, tall white grizzled stones and names and dates creeping with yellow fungus. And the sky was like the stroke of a brush. And of course the wind was only the sun’s chariot and the spray was only a veil of mist at the end of land.

I kicked open the gate and let Pixie crawl around in the stubble between the stones while on my hands and knees once more at the side of the fresh mound I dug a little hole at the top of Cassandra’s grave with the serving spoon and stuffed the package in, covered it over. Empty or not it was a part of me somehow and belonged with her. Under a last handful of loose black earth I hid the ribbons — red, white and blue ribbons— and stood up, brushed off my pants. Even from here, and standing in the windy glare of that little Atlantic cemetery, I could smell the pines, feel the pine roots working their way down to the things of the sea.

I threw the spoon out onto the black rocks.

Then off we went, Pixie and I, and I smiled at the thought that the night I found Fernandez on Second Avenue was the first night after the day they stopped the war, and that all my casualties, so to speak, were only accidents that came when the wave of wrath was past. But how can I forget what lies out there in that distant part of my kingdom?