What Dies in Summer (26 page)

Diana took off her sandals and slipped out of her blue jeans, then got out two small bottles and poured mosquito repellent and sun lotion into her hand, rubbed her palms together and started
spreading the oily stuff over her skin. I stripped down to my own trunks and picked up the fishing rod. I opened the tackle box, pushing aside the damaged muskie lure and finding a perch-colored
River-Runt. I tied it on, then walked over to the other shore to cast into the deeper water on that side. I cast a few times, got a backlash, picked it out and cast again. Then, realizing I
didn’t care whether I caught anything or not, I carried the rod back to where Diana was sitting on one of the beach towels.

“Wanta go swimming?” she said.

I was a little doubtful. The water seemed pretty cold, but then I couldn’t afford to show cowardice either.

“Okay,” I said. “You go first. If you survive, I’ll come in too.”

“You are my hero,” she said. She walked to the edge of the water and stood looking across the sparkling lake for a few seconds. She tested the water with her toe and instantly jerked
it back out. She considered for a while. “I’ll have to wash my hair again, but I don’t care,” she said, and ran splashing out into the lake until she was deep enough to dive
in. When she came back up she shook her head and said, “It’s not too bad once you’re in. But there’s a few weeds under the water. Feels like feathers.”

Having no alternative now, I charged out and dove in too, surprised by how bearable the water turned out to be. I swam out along the spit a little way and then back to where Diana was putting
her face under the water trying to see fish. She raised her head and said, “There’s not anything down there that bites, is there?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, remembering the muskie and the lost fish from our stringer. I was semi-sure whatever was in the lake didn’t attack people. Except possibly
little kids. And dogs. I looked at Diana standing waist-deep in the water in her wet bathing suit. The small valley of her navel showed through the fabric just at the waterline, and all my thoughts
about water monsters melted away to nothing.

Diana bent down to look under the surface again, but almost instantly jerked her head up and screamed. She ran splashing back up to the beach, slapping at her legs. I caught up to her, mental
images of dog- and walleye-eating muskies coming back to me in a blood-freezing rush.

“It’s got me!” she yelled, yanking at a slippery black leech that was attached to the inside of her thigh. “Help me, Biscuit!”

I pulled at the rubbery leech, but it was stuck tight. Diana’s teeth chattered with fear and cold. I said, “Come on over here, maybe we can get it off.” I remembered Don saying
something about leeches in the lake but I hadn’t realized how tough they could be. While I went over to the tackle box, Diana sat on her towel, still trying to get a grip on the leech with
her fingers. In the bottom of the box I found the metal tube filled with waterproof matches next to a little jar of red salmon eggs. I grabbed it and came back to kneel beside her. She lay back
with her eyes shut and her arms at her sides, looking like a pagan sacrifice. Her teeth were clenched and she had goose bumps on her arms and legs. I struck a match and stretched the leech out from
her skin. When I held the flame under it, it let go, and I tossed it away into the grass. Then I sat back and looked at Diana until she opened her eyes.

“Is it off?” she asked, shivering.

I nodded. I couldn’t stop staring at her. I saw that her nipples were pushing up under the fabric of her suit. Her legs were smooth and tanned except for the small pink circle where the
leech had been. There were sparkling drops of water all over her. I was beginning to get a strangled feeling in my chest. I bent down and kissed her, tasting the lake on her lips. She held my
shoulders and kissed me back, groaning under her breath, then pulled me against her, and I felt her whole body tremble. I moved to lie beside her and we kissed again, longer this time, the world
seeming to stop its turning as we held each other. After a while I pulled back and lay on my side looking at her, at her wet hair and the way her swimsuit followed the shape of her body.

Diana watched me for a minute, just breathing. She said, “What are you thinking, Bis?”

I could barely speak. “All I can think about is how much I wish I could see you without your bathing suit,” I said.

She looked at me without saying anything or showing any expression for so long I thought maybe she hadn’t heard me, or I hadn’t really said it out loud. Or maybe she was just
deciding whether to smack me or not. I couldn’t believe what I’d said, myself. I heard the air moving through the trees above us and birds calling somewhere.

Finally she said, “You can.”

She didn’t ask me to turn around or anything, just stood up, unhooked the top straps and worked the swimsuit down until she could step out of it, then lay down again on the towel. She was
white where the suit had covered her, and the hair between her legs was almost exactly the same sandy color as the hair on her head. The sun caught the golden fuzz on her arms and stomach and the
perfect curves of her breasts.

“You too,” she said.

I got out of my trunks, found my billfold and tore a condom from its package, remembering what Hubert had told me about how to put it on.

Watching me, Diana said, “Doesn’t that tickle?”

I shook my head and lay back down beside her. We kissed again and I cupped her small soft breast in my hand. The nipple felt firm and warm, exactly as I’d imagined it would. She spread her
legs a little to let me touch her. It was all so much easier and so much better than my daydreams that I felt dizzy. She accepted me between her legs as I moved over her, her breath hot on my
neck.

When I entered her, she yelled, “Yikes!” sucking in her breath and grabbing the hair on the sides of my head, her eyes squinched shut. “
Yikes!
” she said again,
this time her voice only a squeak.

I’d never actually heard anyone say that before and had thought it was only a cartoon word. It scared me a little. “Should I stop?” I said.

“No, dummy!” she hissed through her teeth. “Don’t stop.
Never
stop.”

In a little while I began to feel as if I was drifting, slowly at first but then faster and faster, on a river of pleasure deeper and wider than the Amazon, toward a tremendous waterfall
rumbling over the edge of the universe, with no control over anything and no awareness of anything but the irresistible river. There were colored spots in my eyes and everything sounded far off,
like the time I got knocked out, and then I didn’t hear anything at all. Diana’s skin and hair smelled like the water and the pine needles and the lotion she’d put on, and her
breath was sweet on my face and neck. She opened her mouth wide and wrapped her legs around mine. And then I did go over the edge of the world, because I couldn’t possibly stop myself, and I
fell and fell and fell through soundless white thunder until I knew I’d never breathe again, never even want to breathe again—just keep on falling like this forever.

And then it was over. For what seemed like a long time I just lay next to Diana and tried to catch my breath. The sounds of the birds and the light wind in the tops of the pines came back. I
felt the sun on my skin. I couldn’t believe a feeling like that could happen, or, once it happened, that it could ever end.

Diana lay with her arm over her eyes, breathing a little slower now. Finally she lowered her arm, looked at me for a minute and said, “Wow.” She halfway sat up and looked down at
herself. “There’s just a little blood,” she said without sounding too concerned, as if maybe she’d expected this.

“Does it hurt?” I said.

“Not enough to worry about,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. That makes it sound like you did something bad. Or we did.” She looked at me and then down at herself again. “I’m not exactly sure what bad is, but
I don’t think this is it.”

“Okay,” I said, not completely convinced. It had never occurred to me until this moment that what we’d done might actually be dangerous, that it might involve bloodshed.

She didn’t say anything for a while, both of us floating along on the feeling. Eventually I started wondering how long we could just lie out here naked as babies like this, nothing over us
but the trees and the sky. Surely there had to be some kind of rule against it. On the other hand, I supposed we were in so deep on account of what we’d just done that there was no point in
worrying about secondary misbehaviors like simple nudity.

Then Diana said, “I don’t think Mom’ll be able to tell.” She drew in a deep breath. “But Harpo’s gonna know.”

“How’s she going to know?”

Diana just looked at me.

I nodded miserably. In a way it was the story of my whole life—always saying something stupid before I thought, then hearing myself and realizing what an idiot I was. “You’re
right, she’ll know,” I said unnecessarily, the dread possibilities inherent in this fact beginning to circle like vultures in my mind.

Diana pulled the towel from under herself to use as a blanket, covering her body from her shoulders to her ankles. Thinking it over, calming down a little, I told myself Diana had it exactly
right, we could probably keep our secret from the adults and most, or even with a little luck all, of the other kids except L.A. This limited the problem considerably, but I also understood that
what we’d just done wasn’t over, couldn’t be over until all the consequences were in, and I had no idea yet what they were going to be or when they were coming. Sitting up, I took
a long breath.

“It feels like she already knows,” I said. “It feels like everybody knows.”

I looked off across the water, understanding that now another divide had been crossed, and there was no way back. It was a different lake now. It was a different world.

WHEN WE GOT BACK
to the cabin I felt almost as naked walking up to Marge and Don as I actually had been on the island, but to my surprise and relief
neither of them seemed to sense anything different about Diana or me. By the time we had finished the steaks, yams and buttered onions Don cooked on the grill for supper that evening, I had myself
convinced we were completely in the clear as far as Diana’s parents were concerned. This didn’t solve the L.A. problem, but she was still over a thousand miles away, so at least for the
moment we had some breathing room.

Later we fell asleep in front of the fire again, and of course I dreamed of the—or maybe I should say
a
—dead girl, not necessarily Tricia Venables or anyone in particular this
time, but still as real as ever and still wanting something from me:
She stares at me in silence for a long time, her skin blue-gray, the whites of her eyes not really white, I notice for the
first time, but pink from the small hemorrhages caused by strangulation. She looks down at the big red and white fishing lure in her hand, and then her eyes come back to mine. She lifts the lure to
her mouth, tears off a chunk of it with her teeth and chews slowly, the wood crunching, hooks tearing the bloodless flesh of her lips and tongue, her eyes never leaving mine.

I sat up suddenly, gasping, my T-shirt drenched with sweat, the fading echoes of a scream ricocheting through my mind. I threw the sheet aside, pulled on my jeans and took the stairs four at a
time, grabbing the flashlight from the kitchen counter on my way out the back door and running as hard as I could down the slope to the dock and out its length to the boat. I tore open the tackle
box, scrabbled around in the bottom until I found the muskie lure and shone the flashlight’s beam on its sheared-off end and the grooves cut by the gigantic fish’s teeth, my hands
shaking.

I felt footsteps on the dock behind me, too heavy to be anyone’s but Don’s. “Jim, what’s going on?” he said.

I turned to him, my mouth almost too dry to speak. “It wasn’t Hot Earl,” I said.

THERE ARE A LOT
of ways a thing can become real, especially if you have no defense against it. How it affects you depends on things like who you are,
what you already know, and how strong you are. Sometimes you’re a player in what’s happening, which has its own risks and consequences. But other times, without being any less powerful,
it can be like watching a movie, only with real people: Don Chamfort—looking like what he is, a man who in the last thirty-six hours has driven more than a thousand miles without stopping for
anything but gas and hasn’t slept at all—walking into his kitchen through the door from the garage with three other men, setting the crate of files he’s carrying on the end of the
Formica dinette table and taking off his jacket. Hanging it over the back of one of the kitchen chairs, saying, “Will, Vern, Fergo, y’all want anything to eat or drink? It’s the only supper you’re getting this time, so grab something if you’re hungry.”

Vern saying, “Beer’d be good,” grabbing a chair, loosening his tie and unbuttoning his collar, blowing out a huge breath.

None of them having any idea they are being watched.

Now Will: “Got any coffee?” He wasn’t a drinking man anymore but he was hell on the Luckies and joe, a long-legged brick-red guy with a twinkle in his eye, the kind who wore
cowboy boots every day. His face was long too, and on the rough side, and there was next to no hair on the top of his head. What hair he did have was trimmed close and rust-colored except for the
white sidewalls above his ears.
Semper fi
never wears off, Don had said in that tone of special connection one Marine has with another.

Ferguson pulled on his nose as he looked into the fridge, deliberating, wanting to be sure he got this exactly right. He squatted down and peered around among the pickles and leftovers. Then he
stood back up, finally grabbing a can of tomato juice from one of the door shelves, shaking it and opening it to take a hit.

More coats came off. It wasn’t jacket weather; the coats were to cover the handguns holstered on the men’s hips or at the small of the back, and the badges on their belts. There was
the sound of shoe leather on linoleum, chairs being moved, an ashtray and cigarette lighter sliding across the tabletop. There was Aqua Velva in the air. Don laid his weapon in its holster on the
counter, placed his hands on his lower back and pushed, groaning. His back chattered out a half dozen pops.