Hide and Seek (7 page)

We watched it flutter down behind us.

We were about a mile from the beach and there she sat, half-naked, her nipples puckering in the breeze.

"Cute," said Casey. "Now what are you gonna wear home?"

Kim giggled. "You worried about it? You shouldn't be. You better wonder what you're gonna wear!" There was a brief struggle behind us.

Moments later Casey's work shirt was observed to waft through the air and drape itself over a roadside cattail.

So now we had two half-naked women in the backseat. The road ahead was deserted. Behind us too. But I kept seeing squad cars pulling us over, officers peering ironically. The girls were laughing so hard their faces flushed red.

"Well, sh/t!" said Steven.

The car began to weave and halt fitfully as he unzipped his jeans and worked them over first one leg and then the other over his sneakers. It took a while but finally he was out of them. I was glad to see he had his briefs.

He placed wallet, belt, and house keys neatly on the seat beside him and handed me a fistful of change and then flipped the pants

over his head. We watched them twist away behind us. He looked at me.

"You next."

"Not me."

"Come on."

I tried to look as serious as possible. "You know I hate people to see the catheter."

We made it to our deserted rocky spot on the beach without incident. We ate the odd smorgasbord lunch.

"You know," I said, "I keep wishing for a ham sandwich."

Steve nodded. "Yeah. I got to stop stealing."

Kim halted in the middle of a bite of cheese and cracker. She looked at us and then at herself.

"What are we gonna do about going home?" she said.

I laughed the caviar all over my hand.

The day turned sour.

I was lying on my back, half-asleep, letting the sun bake me. By now my ass was as brown as the rest of me, my modesty having long since gone the way of caution in anything which was related to them. Kim was sitting beside me on a towel rubbing oil into her arms and shoulders. I heard the shout from Steven and the hissing intake of breath from her simultaneously. Both sounds full of sudden fear.

I was up and on my feet in an instant, while Kim was still reacting to what she'd seen.

Part of it I understood immediately.

Steve and Casey had been standing atop the same rock she and I had climbed the first day, that place where gulls had littered the surface with the shells of crabs and oysters. Now she was alone there. Looking down at Steven. In her posture there was a strange tension, not of fear but of anger.

There was something disjointed-looking about his limbs, a loss of skill in both arms and legs that made me worry not so much about breakage as concussion.

I ran. I sensed Kim a few steps behind me. When I reached him he was trying to rise again. He fell back heavily on his chest. There was no sand where he was, only stones. It must have hurt him. I

heard the breath rush out of his lungs, but that was the only sound from him. I heard us running and that deep whoosh of breath and the crying of gulls. And that was all. A strange, quiet chaos.

I went down beside him and put one arm behind his back to support him, just under his shoulders.

"Relax. Relax."

He looked at me and his eyes were not quite focusing. I saw a small scrape just below the hairline over his right eye. It would swell, but it didn't look too bad. A slight welling up of blood moving slowly to the surface. I looked into his hair for something worse. There was nothing. I guessed he was just shaken. I was damned relieved.

Kim squatted down beside me. I saw her glance to the left of him a little and then heard that intake of breath again. Her face contracted squeamishly. I saw what she was looking at. His left arm was out at a right angle from us, the wrist just sort of dangling. The ball of the thumb was cut pretty badly. There was a steady flow of blood rolling down off his wrist and a flap of skin maybe two inches long pulled back toward the palm of his hand.

"Get me something. Something to press over it and stop the bleeding.

Hurry up."

His eyes looked better now, even though the color was still gone from his face. I was pretty sure he'd be all right. He tried to talk to me. The look on his face was one of pure amazement.

"She... she pushed me ..."

I glared up at her. She hadn't moved. The bright sunlight always made her eyes go oddly transparent. Now it was like staring into two bright cubes of ice.

"You want to tell me about it?"

"No."

"What the fuck is this about, Casey?"

Kim came running back with my T-shirt. I helped her wrap it around his hand and showed her how to press it down.

"Hard," I told her. Then I looked back at Casey.

"I asked you something."

I saw her shoulder relax slightly. Her voice was low, contemptuous.

Scary.

"You can go to hell."

She stepped back away from us.

"You both can."

I watched her disappear down the far face of the rock. I covered Kim's hand and helped her press down on Steven's wound. I glanced at Kim.

She was totally concentrated on him.

It was only then that I realized I was shaking.

I never did find out what caused it, though I was pretty sure he'd made some moves on her. His mood was just silly enough for him to try.

Nobody talked about it.

We drove home with the girls in the backseat wrapped in towels and the two of us in front. Same as before. Only this time I was driving and Steve was clutching his hand, squeezing my bloody T-shirt to a wound that would take seven stitches once we got back to town.

All the way home nobody said a word. The freeze between Casey and Kim was a palpable thing. You could hardly blame Kim. I was damned mad at her myself. No matter what had gone on up there, it was clear she'd overreacted, to say the very least. And then I kept seeing that cold unconcern on her face while she stared at us. It could have been a concussion. Yet all we got was anger.

You had to wonder. How well did I even know her?

And despite our weekend together, that kept coming up again. I kept wondering how many more surprises there would be like the one today, and whether I really wanted to be around to see them.

I dropped the women off at their respective houses. Then I got a spare pair of pants from my apartment, helped him on with them and took him to Doc Richardson over on Cedar Street. I stood there watching through the injection, the bandaging, the stitching, the swabbing and patching of the head wound while the Doc complained good-naturedly that the times had not been good since Hoover.

By the time we drove back through town Steve was feeling better. I dropped him at his parents' summer house and watched him move slowly up the field stone walk, through the white colonial doors.

I didn't see him again for nearly a week.

The next I saw of Kim she was still angry. But you could tell that the bitterness was wearing off some, eroded by understanding. We

sat in a booth at Harmon's together drinking Cokes. She, too, suspected Steve had made a move on Casey.

She thought he had reasons, though.

"We're alike, Casey and I. The both of us wear a kind of sign, like one of those sandwich boards. The sign says Sex. Now, I don't figure that's so bad. A lot of women wear it. And plenty of us aren't after anything particular except some fun, some pleasure, a little give-and-take. I figure that all things being equal, we're just about the best kind of woman there is. A whole lot better than some dried-up and sad-assed type like Steve's sister. Because we can switch it over to love at the drop of a hat.

"But sometimes I think that Casey uses it, you know? Like it's some kind of dynamite she has so she can blow loose whatever she wants out of life. And I think that's not so good. Dangerous, even. I know that Steve's wanted her since they were kids, even though he wants me too. But I think I'm good for him, basically. And she isn't.

"Maybe she's good for you I don't know about that. But not Steve. Not ever. Though every now and then, he keeps trying.

"And I can't help but thinking that it's not good for her, either, to be that way. What's it for, anyway? Pleasure. Pleasure and affection. But for Casey I think it's something else, something it shouldn't be. Like conquest.

"Or hunger."

"What do you want, Case?"

We were lying in bed at my apartment.

"What's worth having?"

Her face was only inches from mine. Her eyes let me down into the depths of her. I slid there gratefully.

"Pleasure.

"Knowledge. Security. I want to own good things, I guess. Success, eventually. And something astonishing, something that surprises me. Or me, surprising myself."

I didn't question her. I just watched her eyes narrow. She sat up suddenly, catlike, in the moonlight.

"Will is worth having. Power."

^Ah

"How goes it among the rich, stud?"

Rafferty was in his usual corner place at the bar, near the wall with the old crooked print by Frederic Remington overhead. You could see everybody enter and leave from there and you had a clear view all the way back to the jukebox. The clock on the wall said five-fifteen.

"Air's a little thin at the moment."

I told him about Steven and Casey pushing him. He shook his head and grinned at me.

"Line from some Warren Dates movie. I always remembered it. "If they didn't have cunts, there'd be a bounty on 'em.""

"Pretty deep, I guess."

"Too bad you can't just switch tracks. That little blond looks sweet and easy."

"I think she probably is."

"But no banana, huh?"

"Nope."

I ordered as hot of scotch with a beer back from Hank McCarty, the bartender, and he brought it over. My hands were still dusted with a fine brown powder from the saw at the yard. It turned a muddy mahogany when I picked up the frosted glass.

"You got to think about what you're doing, here, Danny boy. What the fuck are you doing? You gonna up and marry the girl? Maybe chase her back to Boston or wherever that school of hers is come September? Work a lathe while she picks up her degree? What are you getting all worried about? Screw her, have fun with her and let it ride."

"Sure."

"I mean it."

"Look, George. I haven't gotten it all mapped out. Things just happen. You know that."

He looked annoyed. "Yeah, well they can just un happen too."

I didn't want to argue. Besides, he was probably right. In a lot of ways I was walking around with blinders on when it came to Casey no past, no future and a very narrow focus on the present. About the length of one summer. That was okay so long as I knew it was a temporary thing by nature, so long as I was prepared to lose it and then go on.

I wasn't. There was a basic mistake operating and I knew it. I was already half-committed to the girl and I didn't know a thing about her except physical things and what you could deduce in the space of a couple weeks, some of which wasn't very good. So what was I getting involved in? She was rich, for god's sake. I was her summer playmate.

It wouldn't be hard to get pretty annoyed with me myself.

It seemed like a good time to tie one on. I ordered another round for us.

"That's right, get a little sloppy. You'll feel better."

"Do me a favor, George."

"Sure."

"If she ever pushes me off a cliff somewhere, kick the shit out of her?"

"Be glad to."

We drank our beers and watched the Caribou fill up steadily with the after-work crowd. I was always interested to see the mix. Jeans, dirty T-shirts, overalls, business suits from Sears. We got salesmen, fishermen, laborers. A smattering of women. All kinds of people.

Bars up here don't cater to a single type of crowd the way they do in

the cities. There's not enough clientele for that. Bar life is about as democratic as we get.

"Jim Palmer was in yesterday. We were talking about you."

"Me? I hardly know the guy."

"Well, not about you exactly. I mentioned that your friend had seen lights over at the Crouch place. Jimmie did all the contracting on the place, remember? Anyhow, he says there's nobody there now. So it must have been kids."

"I guess."

"Found out a few things, though."

"Like what?"

He settled back in the high-back chair and sipped the head off a fresh-poured beer.

"Well, for one thing, that doctor left scared."

"Scared?"

"According to Palmer. Says he was up there maybe a month before the old guy left the place, because there was some patch-up that needed doing on the front porch, but the doc wouldn't let him bother with it.

Had to go down into the basement instead to seal up a hole in the wall.