Life Penalty (35 page)

She was about to proceed down the steps when she saw the sign. It stood right in the middle of the stairway, and Gail marveled that she had almost missed it. Sharks, the sign proclaimed boldly in black letters, had been spotted migrating south. It was strongly advised that swimmers avoid the ocean and stick to the pool. Gail looked past the sign to the ocean. There were at least half a dozen people cavorting in the high waves despite the dire admonition. Gail studied the white peaks for shark fins but saw none. Overhead, she heard a plane cruising at a low altitude and she looked up, thinking it might be the helicopter shark patrol, but instead she saw a biplane trailing a long advertisement streamer for some product to be used against jock itch. Somehow, it seemed an appropriate enough send-off, and she took the steps down to the ocean two at a time.

If the ocean contained only a handful of people, the beach was unusually crowded. People were everywhere—they lay on towels, on beach chairs and on the sand itself. Children dug great tunnels; adults kept a grudging eye on their whereabouts while trying to maintain maximum
exposure to the sun. Gail walked through the maze of bodies, careful not to step on any of the blue man-of-wars that had been swept up on the shore. It had always amused her that the numbers of these hurtful little creatures seemed to increase directly in proportion to the number of tourists. Gail inched her feet carefully between two deceptively pretty blue bubbles and marched purposefully into the ocean.

It was colder than she had anticipated and very dark. The waves overlapped in furious abandon, crashing against her body and knocking her over. Her foot slipped against a rock she hadn’t seen, and she felt the strong pull of the undertow, immediately surrendering herself and letting her body be carried away from the shore without a struggle. She suddenly found herself reluctantly on her feet again, only to be knocked forward seconds later by another wave and then sucked back farther still. She peered through wet eyelashes at the horizon, wondering how she would feel if she saw the telltale fin.

She didn’t see him until he was almost on top of her.

“What the hell are you doing out here?” Jack was bellowing, his voice incredulous. “Didn’t you read the sign?” He pulled her roughly toward the shore.

“There are a lot of people swimming,” she argued weakly.

“And a lot more sharks,” he answered, dragging her by the elbow out of the water. Gail tripped on the sand and almost fell. “Why would you go for a swim in the ocean today of all days? You haven’t been in the ocean since we got here.”

“I thought it was time,” she told him stubbornly. “I didn’t think there was really anything to worry about.”

“Gail,” he told her patiently, “we’ve been coming down here for years. Have you ever seen a sign like that before? Doesn’t that tell you that there may be something to
worry about?” Gail didn’t answer. “Do you want to walk with me?” he asked. “I think you better,” he said when she didn’t answer.

They skirted the water’s edge for many minutes without speaking. Periodically, she perused the water for sharks but saw none. There were no surfers either, she noticed, feeling cold from the breeze.

“Is your mother all finished packing?” Jack asked, straining for something to say.

“I think so. My father, of course, is determined to get his last few hours in the sun before they have to leave.”

“They stayed with us longer than they originally planned.”

“It was nice to see them,” Gail said. In truth, she was glad they were leaving. While it had been nice in the beginning, their concern had soon become stifling, their bickering oppressive. She felt reduced to her girlhood and for the first time understood how Jennifer must have been feeling. She was glad they would be leaving in a few hours.

“Careful,” Jack cautioned, as she narrowly missed stepping on a large purple-tinged man-of-war. “Now that one,” he said, bending down to examine it more closely, “looks like it could inflict some serious damage.”

Gail viewed the large, ripe bubble with its long, stringy tentacles, trying to imagine what it would feel like to be stung, to feel the poison propelling through her veins. Every apartment building kept a bottle of something-or-other down at the pool for just such an emergency. Supposedly, it relieved the sting. But often, those bitten were rushed to the hospital. It depended on the extent of the injury.

Gail turned her head back to the ocean, following the rhythm of the turbulent waves, noticing that Jack was similarly preoccupied. She glanced back at the sand, at the blue monster to the right of her feet. Then she slowly
lifted her left foot and brought it squarely down onto the middle of the juicy round ball.

It took Jack a minute to realize what happened. Gail said nothing. She didn’t cry out, didn’t grab frantically for his arm. Indeed, at first, she did nothing because she felt nothing. For an instant she thought that all the forbidding tales about these creatures were no more valid than the stories about the old highway.

Then she felt it. It started as a small, prickly sensation on the bottom of her foot, but within seconds, it had engulfed her entire leg, then spread to her torso, until the pain seemed to stretch clear into her brain, ripping at her insides, as if she had swallowed a thousand tiny pins. She felt sick to her stomach and weak at the knees, which, she realized, were about to buckle out from under her. Jack caught her as she was starting to fall.

“Jesus Christ,” he screamed. “What the hell did you do?”

His cries brought forth a few concerned onlookers, and together they sat Gail on the sand and began furiously trying to extricate her leg from the now squashed ball of jelly which clung like a leech to the bottom of her foot.

“Sand,” someone yelled. “Get lots of sand on it.” Gail waited until she saw her foot was free of the creature before succumbing to the urge to faint.

“A fine send-off this is,” her mother was saying when Gail opened her eyes.

“What time is it?” Gail asked, sitting up in bed. She was in her parents’ apartment.

“Almost four o’clock,” her mother said.

“Your plane?”

“It leaves at six-thirty,” her father said from her other side.

“We don’t have to go today,” her mother told her. “We can wait a few days.”

“No,” Gail protested. “I’ll be fine.” She winced at the thought of what had happened, envisioning the squishy blue mass plastered underneath her toes.

“Are you in pain?” her mother asked quickly. “The doctor said he gave you painkillers.”

“I don’t feel any pain,” Gail told her and realized it was true. “What doctor?”

“We took you to the hospital,” Jack said from the doorway. “You were lucky,” he continued, his voice a monotone. “The doctor said it could have been a lot worse, but you’ll probably have to stay in bed for a few days and you might be pretty uncomfortable.”

“You have to be more careful, darling,” her mother cautioned sadly.

Gail felt tears running down her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her mother reached over and grabbed her hand. Her father bent down and patted her shoulder. Only Jack, standing resolutely still in the doorway, made no move to comfort her. He stared at her from across the room, and she knew he didn’t believe her apology.

D
uring the two days she spent in bed, Jack met another couple at the beach who had recently moved to Florida on a permanent basis. He quickly arranged a host of activities—tennis, jogging, even golf, which he had never played. Gail listened as he rattled on about Sandra and Larry Snider with bemused detachment until she realized that he meant to include her in these activities.

“My foot’s still sore,” she protested.

“It’ll be fine by tomorrow,” he told her. “Besides, it’s just doubles. You don’t have to do a lot of running.”

“I’m a rotten tennis player,” she reminded him. “They’ll never play with us again.”

“One game is better than none,” he said, considering the matter closed.

“Who are these people anyway?” Gail asked.

“They’re originally from Toronto. They got tired of the long winters, and his business wasn’t doing too great, so they decided to chuck the whole thing and start over again down here.”

“Children?”

“No.”

“What do they do?”

“He has some sort of roofing company. She works for him, combination bookkeeper-secretary. Very nice people.
They belong to the golf club. I think she comes from a lot of money. At least that’s the impression I get.”

“Does that account for your sudden interest in golf?” she smiled.

“They’ve invited us to their club for a game tomorrow afternoon. Then we’ll be their guests for dinner.”

“Sounds very nice,” Gail told him.

“I think it will be,” he said. “I think it’s a good idea for us to keep busy, get out and do things, get lots of exercise instead of just lying around all day.”

“Just like summer camp,” Gail said. Tennis in the morning, she thought, golf in the afternoon. Everybody out of the pool!

Sandra and Larry Snider were an attractive couple in their early forties. She had short dark hair and the kind of slim but full figure that Gail had always wished for for herself. Her face was unlined and pleasant, and she was obviously careful not to get too much sun.

“I made a decision when we first moved down here,” she told Gail on the way to the tennis courts, “that I was not going to allow myself to look like a shriveled-up old prune after only a few years. So, I only sit out for maybe a half hour a day total, if that. Half the time I don’t go out at all.”

Gail wondered why, that being the case, they had chosen to move to Florida, but she didn’t ask and only smiled in agreement.

Larry Snider was very tall, well over six feet, Gail estimated. He was neither slim nor fat, and he looked distinctly nonathletic, but he moved with surprising grace on the tennis court. He had a friendly voice and an engaging manner, and Gail found herself liking him immediately.

She and Jack were paired against the Sniders and they lost, six games to four. Gail was pleased in spite of herself
at their good showing. She was surprised too when she found no small degree of satisfaction in smashing the hapless tennis ball.

They left for the golf club at just after one o’clock, taking South Ocean Boulevard to Southern Boulevard and then to Dixie Highway. Dixie Highway was an unimaginative and flat street, lined on both sides with a series of drab fast-food chains and gas stations, windowless bars and one-story shops and clinics. There was nothing about it to suggest the ocean to its east.

Normally, Gail would have closed her eyes to such a drive, but Larry and Sandra kept them regaled with a continuous series of amusing anecdotes about their respective in-laws—they never asked Gail about her family, and she concluded that Jack had already informed them of their “tragedy”—so Gail kept both her eyes and ears open.

They were stopped for a red light when Gail became aware that the store she was staring at across the inter section, a store without windows whose surface was covered with brightly colored lettering, was a gun store.
MOTHER’S
, the blood-red letters spelled gaily, and just underneath, in equally large lettering of black and blue,
WE SELL, BUY, TRADE. GUNS, GUNS, GUNS. OLD, NEW, USED. THE BIGGEST, BEST SELECTION IN FLORIDA.
And still more:
GUNS, GUNS, GUNS.

The store sold other items. These too were listed on the outside walls of the squat white building. Camping equipment, fishing gear. Hard-core hardware, Gail thought as the car advanced with the green light. She noticed as they drove past that the front door, hidden in a small alcove, was covered in wire mesh. A fortress, she thought, straining her neck to catch a last look. Mother’s, she repeated silently to herself, a name she was unlikely to forget.

“That’s quite a store,” she said aloud.

“Great store,” Larry agreed. “They have everything in there. Every type of gun imaginable.”

“Do you have a gun?” Gail asked him, genuinely curious.

“Bought one as soon as I got down here,” he answered.

“Why?” Gail sat forward in her seat.

“You’ve got to have a gun these days. It’s common sense. The good guys have got to start fighting back.”

Jack chuckled. “Then how will you be able to tell the good guys from the bad?” he asked.

“Whoever’s left standing,” Larry told him, and Gail found herself smiling at his response.

“The gun regulations down here are such a joke anyway,” Sandra said. “It’s like going into a supermarket and picking whatever you like off the shelf. You fill out a form that says you’ve never been convicted of a felony, you hand over your money, and you walk out with a gun.”

“There’s no waiting period?” Gail asked.

“They keep trying to introduce a law to bring in a three-day waiting period, but it keeps getting defeated,” Sandra laughed. “I mean, just think of all the spur-of-the-moment hunting trips you’d have to pass up if you had to wait three days for a gun.”

“So anyone can just walk in off the street and buy a weapon,” Gail reiterated.

“Anyone can just walk in off the street,” came the reply.

The golf club was typical of the genre—rolling green hills, jaunty little golf carts being wheeled around by even jauntier people in bright Lilly Pulitzer prints and Lacoste T-shirts. Gail and Jack were properly outfitted with the correct shoes and bag of clubs from the pro shop, and out they went to the putting green.

Jack, a natural athlete, picked up the rhythm in short order; Gail never did seem to catch hold of it, and after endless delays—there were others lined up to get on the tee—she offered to drive the cart and ferret out the wayward balls. Though this decision was gallantly protested by all, it was quickly accepted, and she became the official driver and ball collector for the balance of the afternoon.

On one of Sandra’s subsequent shots, the ball went wide of its mark and splashed into one of the many water traps. Gail ran forward to retrieve it.

“No,” Larry called after her. “Just leave it. Never try to get a ball out of the water down here. Believe it or not, there are crocodiles in some of these traps.”