Skeleton Crew (41 page)

The two girls looked at each other for a moment. LaVerne shrugged and grinned. “If they can, we can,” she said, stripping off her Lacoste shirt to reveal an almost transparent bra. “Aren’t girls supposed to have an extra layer of fat?”

Then she was over the fence and running for the water, unbuttoning her cords. After a moment Rachel followed her, much as Randy had followed Deke.

The girls had come over to the apartment at midafternoon —on Tuesdays a one-o’clock was the latest class any of them had. Deke’s monthly allotment had come in—one of the football-mad alums (the players called them “angels”) saw that he got two hundred a month in cash—and there was a case of beer in the fridge and a new Night Ranger album on Randy’s battered stereo. The four of them set about getting pleasantly oiled. After a while the talk had turned to the end of the long Indian summer they had been enjoying. The radio was predicting flurries for Wednesday. LaVerne had advanced the opinion that weathermen predicting snow flurries in October should be shot, and no one had disagreed.

Rachel said that summers had seemed to last forever when she was girl, but now that she was an adult (“a doddering senile nineteen,” Deke joked, and she kicked his ankle), they got shorter every year. “It seemed like I spent my life out at Cascade Lake,” she said, crossing the decayed kitchen linoleum to the icebox. She peered in, found an Iron City Light hiding behind a stack of blue Tupperware storage boxes (the one in the middle contained some nearly prehistoric chili which was now thickly festooned with mold—Randy was a good student and Deke was a good football player, but neither of them was worth a fart in a noisemaker when it came to housekeeping), and appropriated it. “I can still remember the first time I managed to swim all the way out to the raft. I stayed there for damn near two hours, scared to swim back.”

She sat down next to Deke, who put an arm around her. She smiled, remembering, and Randy suddenly thought she looked like someone famous or semi-famous. He couldn’t quite place the resemblance. It would come to him later, under less pleasant circumstances.

“Finally my brother had to swim out and tow me back on an inner tube. God, he was mad. And I had a sunburn like you wouldn’t believe.”

“The raft’s still out there,” Randy said, mostly to say something. He was aware that LaVerne had been looking at Deke again; just lately it seemed like she looked at Deke a lot.

But now she looked at him. “It’s almost
Halloween,
Randy. Cascade Beach has been closed since Labor Day.”

“Raft’s probably still out there, though,” Randy said. “We were on the other side of the lake on a geology field trip about three weeks ago and I saw it then. It looked like ...” He shrugged. “.... a little bit of summer that somebody forgot to clean up and put away in the closet until next year.”

He thought they would laugh at that, but no one did—not even Deke.

“Just because it was there last year doesn’t mean it’s still there,” LaVerne said.

“I mentioned it to a guy,” Randy said, finishing his own beer. “Billy DeLois, do you remember him, Deke?”

Deke nodded. “Played second string until he got hurt.”

“Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, he comes from out that way, and he said the guys who own the beach never take it in until the lake’s almost ready to freeze. Just lazy—at least, that’s what he said. He said that some year they’d wait too long and it would get ice-locked.”

He fell silent, remembering how the raft had looked, anchored out there on the lake—a square of bright white wood in all that bright blue autumn water. He remembered how the sound of the barrels under it—that buoyant
clunk-clunk
sound—had drifted up to them. The sound was soft, but sounds carried well on the still air around the lake. There had been that sound and the sound of crows squabbling over the remnants of some farmer’s harvested garden.

“Snow tomorrow,” Rachel said, getting up as Deke’s hand wandered almost absently down to the upper swell of her breast. She went to the window and looked out. “What a bummer. ”

“I’ll tell you what,” Randy said, “let’s go on out to Cascade Lake. We’ll swim out to the raft, say good-bye to summer, and then swim back. ”

If he hadn’t been half-loaded he never would have made the suggestion, and he certainly didn’t expect anyone to take it seriously. But Deke jumped on it.

“All right! Awesome, Pancho! Fooking
awesome!”
LaVerne jumped and spilled her beer. But she smiled—the smile made Randy a little uneasy. “Let’s do it!”

“Deke, you’re crazy,” Rachel said, also smiling—but her smile looked a little tentative, a little worried.

“No, I’m going to do it,” Deke said, going for his coat, and with a mixture of dismay and excitement, Randy noted Deke’s grin—reckless and a little crazy. The two of them had been rooming together for three years now—the Jock and the Brain, Cisco and Pancho, Batman and Robin—and Randy recognized that grin. Deke wasn’t kidding; he meant to do it. In his head he was already halfway there.

Forget it, Cisco—not me.
The words rose to his lips, but before he could say them LaVeme was on her feet, the same cheerful, loony look in her own eyes (or maybe it was just too much beer). “I’m up for it!”

“Then let’s go!” Deke looked at Randy. “Whatchoo say, Pancho?”

He had looked at Rachel for a moment then, and saw something almost frantic in her eyes—as far as he himself was concerned, Deke and La Verne could go out to Cascade Lake together and plow the back forty all night; he would not be delighted with the knowledge that they were boffing each other’s brains out, yet neither would he be surprised. But that look in the other girl’s eyes, that haunted look—

“Ohhh,
Ceesco!”
Randy cried.

“Ohhhh, Pancho!” Deke cried back, delighted.

They slapped palms.

 

Randy was halfway to the raft when he saw the black patch on the water. It was beyond the raft and to the left of it, more out toward the middle of the lake. Five minutes later the light would have failed too much for him to tell it was anything more than a shadow ... if he had seen it at all.
Oil slick?
he thought, still pulling hard through the water, faintly aware of the girls splashing behind him. But what would an oil slick be doing on an October-deserted lake? And it was oddly circular, small, surely no more than five feet in diameter—

“Whoooo!”
Deke shouted again, and Randy looked toward him. Deke was climbing the ladder on the side of the raft, shaking off water like a dog. “Howya doon, Pancho?”

“Okay!” he called back, pulling harder. It really wasn’t as bad as he had thought it might be, not once you got in and got moving. His body tingled with warmth and now his motor was in overdrive. He could feel his heart putting out good revs, heating him from the inside out. His folks had a place on Cape Cod, and the water there was worse than this in mid-July.

“You think it’s bad now, Pancho, wait’ll you get out!” Deke yelled gleefully. He was hopping up and down, making the raft rock, rubbing his body.

Randy forgot about the oil slick until his hands actually grasped the rough, white-painted wood of the ladder on the shore side. Then he saw it again. It was a little closer. A round dark patch on the water, like a big mole, rising and falling on the mild waves. When he had first seen it the patch had been maybe forty yards from the raft. Now it was only half that distance.

How can that be? How
—

Then he came out of the water and the cold air bit his skin, bit it even harder than the water had when he first dived in. “Ohhhhhh,
shit!”
He yelled, laughing, shivering in his Jockey shorts.

“Pancho, you ees some kine of beeg asshole,” Deke said happily. He pulled Randy up. “Cold enough for you? You sober yet?”

“I’m sober! I’m sober!” He began to jump around as Deke had done, clapping his arms across his chest and stomach in an X. They turned to look at the girls.

Rachel had pulled ahead of LaVerne, who was doing something that looked like a dog paddle performed by a dog with bad instincts.

“You ladies okay?” Deke bellowed.

“Go to hell, Macho City!” LaVerne called, and Deke broke up again.

Randy glanced to the side and saw that odd dark circular patch was even closer—ten yards now, and still coming. It floated on the water, round and regular, like the top of a large steel drum, but the limber way it rode the swells made it clear that it was not the surface of a solid object. Fear, directionless but powerful, suddenly seized him.

“Swim!”
he shouted at the girls, and bent down to grasp Rachel’s hand as she reached the ladder. He hauled her up. She bumped her knee hard—he heard the thud clearly.

“Ow!
Hey!
What—”

LaVerne was still ten feet away. Randy glanced to the side again and saw the round thing nuzzle the offside of the raft. The thing was as dark as oil, but he was sure it wasn’t oil—too dark, too thick, too even.

“Randy, that
hurt!
What are you doing, being fun—”

“LaVerne!
Swim!”
Now it wasn’t just fear; now it was terror.

LaVerne looked up, maybe not hearing the terror but at least hearing the urgency. She looked puzzled but she dog-paddled faster, closing the distance to the ladder.

“Randy, what’s wrong with you?” Deke asked.

Randy looked to the side again and saw the thing fold itself around the raft’s square comer. For a moment it looked like a Pac-Man image with its mouth open to eat electronic cookies. Then it slipped all the way around the comer and began to slide along the raft, one of its edges now straight.

“Help me get her up!” Randy grunted to Deke, and reached for her hand. “Quick!”

Deke shrugged good-naturedly and reached for LaVerne’s other hand. They pulled her up and onto the raft’s board surface bare seconds before the black thing slid by the ladder, its sides dimpling as it slipped past the ladder’s uprights.

“Randy, have you gone crazy?” LaVerne was out of breath, a little. frightened. Her nipples were clearly visible through the bra. They stood out in cold hard points.

“That thing,” Randy said, pointing. “Deke? What is it?”

Deke spotted it. It had reached the left-hand comer of the raft. It drifted off a little to one side, reassuming its round shape. It simply floated there. The four of them looked at it.

“Oil slick, I guess,” Deke said.

“You really racked my knee,” Rachel said, glancing at the dark thing on the water and then back at Randy. “You—”

“It’s not an oil slick,” Randy said. “Did you ever see a round oil slick? That thing looks like a checker.”

“I never saw an oil slick at all,” Deke replied. He was talking to Randy but he was looking at LaVerne. LaVerne’s panties were almost as transparent as her bra, the delta of her sex sculpted neatly in silk, each buttock a taut crescent. “I don’t even believe in them. I’m from Missouri.”

“I’m going to bruise,” Rachel said, but the anger had gone out of her voice. She had seen Deke looking at LaVerne.

“God,
I’m cold,” LaVerne said. She shivered prettily.

“It went for the girls,” Randy said.

“Come on, Pancho. I thought you said you got sober.”

“It went for the girls,” he repeated stubbornly, and thought:
No one knows we’re here. No one at all.

“Have
you
ever seen an oil slick, Pancho?” He had put his arm around LaVerne’s bare shoulders in the same almost-absent way that he had touched Rachel’s breast earlier that day. He, wasn’t touching LaVerne’s breast—not yet, anyway— but his hand was close. Randy found he didn’t care much, one way or another. That black, circular patch on the water. He cared about that.

“I saw one on the Cape, four years ago,” he said. “We all pulled birds out of the surf and tried to clean them off—”

“Ecological, Pancho,” Deke said approvingly. “Mucho ecological, I theenk.”

Randy said, “It was just this big, sticky mess all over the water. In streaks and big smears. It didn’t look like that. It wasn’t, you know, compact.”

It looked like an accident,
he wanted to say.
That thing doesn’t look like an accident; it looks like it’s on purpose.

“I want to go back now,” Rachel said. She was still looking at Deke and LaVerne. Randy saw dull hurt in her face. He doubted if she knew it showed.

“So go,” LaVerne said. There was a look on her face—
the clarity of absolute triumph,
Randy thought, and if the thought seemed pretentious, it also seemed exactly right. The expression was not aimed precisely at Rachel ... but neither was LaVerne trying to hide it from the other girl.

She moved a step closer to Deke; a step was all there was. Now their hips touched lightly. For one brief moment Randy’s attention passed from the thing floating on the water. and focused on LaVerne with an almost exquisite hate. Although he had never hit a girl, in that one moment he could have hit her with real pleasure. Not because he loved her (he had been a little infatuated with her, yes, and more than a little horny for her, yes, and a lot jealous when she had begun to come on to Deke back at the apartment, oh yes, but he wouldn’t have brought a girl he actually
loved
within fifteen miles of Deke in the first place), but because he knew that expression on Rachel’s face—how that expression felt inside.