“I wanted to run get help.” The first boy seemed not to want to raise his voice. “But Skip said she was dead and there’s no help for that. Is she?”
“She was never alive,” said Chico. “Sure,” he went on, feeling their eyes on him suddenly. “It’s something left over from a movie studio. Liquid rubber skinned over a steel frame. A prop, a dummy.”
“Oh, no, it’s real!”
“We’ll find a label somewhere,” said Chico. “Here.”
“Don’t!” cried the first boy.
“Hell.” Chico touched the body to turn it, and stopped. He knelt there, his face changing.
“What’s the matter?” asked Tom.
Chico took his hand away and looked at it. “I was wrong.” His voice faded.
Tom took the woman’s wrist. “There’s a pulse.”
“You’re feeling your own heartbeat.”
“I just don’t know… maybe… maybe…”
The woman was there and her upper body was all moon pearl and tidal cream and her lower body all slithering ancient green-black coins that slid upon themselves in the shift of wind and water.
“There’s a trick somewhere!” cried Chico, suddenly.
“No. No!” Just as suddenly Tom burst out in laughter. “No trick! My God, my God, I feel great! I haven’t felt so great since I was a kid!”
They walked slowly around her. A wave touched her white hand so the fingers faintly softly waved. The gesture was that of someone asking for another and another wave to come in and lift the fingers and then the wrist and then the arm and then head and finally the body and take all of them together back down out to sea.
“Tom.” Chico’s mouth opened and closed. “Why don’t you go get our truck?”
Tom didn’t move.
“You hear me?” said Chico.
“Yes, but—”
“But what? We could sell this somewhere, I don’t know—the university, that aquarium at Seal Beach or… well, hell, why couldn’t we just set up a place? Look.” He shook Tom’s arm. “Drive to the pier. Buy us three hundred pounds of chipped ice. When you take anything out of the water you need ice, don’t you?”
“I never thought.”
“Think about it! Get moving!”
“I don’t know, Chico.”
“What you mean? She’s real, isn’t she?” He turned to the boys. “You say she’s real, don’t you? Well, then, what are we waiting for?”
“Chico,” said Tom. “You better go get the ice yourself.”
“Someone’s got to stay and make sure she don’t go back out with the tide!”
“Chico,” said Tom. “I don’t know how to explain. I don’t want to get that ice for you.”
“I’ll go myself, then. Look, boys, build the sand up here to keep the waves back. I’ll give you five bucks apiece. Hop to it!”
The sides of the boys’ faces were bronze-pink from the sun which was touching the horizon now. Their eyes were a bronze color looking at Chico.
“My God!” said Chico. “This is better than finding ambergris!” He ran to the top of the nearest dune, called, “Get to work!” and was gone.
Now Tom and the two boys were left with the lonely woman by the north rock and the sun was one-fourth of the way below the western horizon. The sand and the woman were pink-gold.
“Just a little line,” whispered the second boy. He drew his fingernail along under his own chin, gently. He nodded to the woman. Tom bent again to see the faint line under either side of her firm white chin, the small almost invisible line where the gills were or had been and were now almost sealed shut, invisible.
He looked at the face and the great strands of hair spread out in a lyre on the shore.
“She’s beautiful,” he said.
The boys nodded without knowing it.
Behind them, a gull leaped up quickly from the dunes. The boys gasped and turned to stare.
Tom felt himself trembling. He saw the boys were trembling, too. A car horn hooted. Their eyes blinked, suddenly afraid. They looked up toward the highway.
A wave poured about the body, framing it in a clear white pool of water.
Tom nodded the boys to one side.
The wave moved the body an inch in and two inches out toward the sea.
The next wave came and moved the body two inches in and six inches out toward the sea.
“But—” said the first boy.
Tom shook his head.
The third wave lifted the body two feet down toward the sea. The wave after that drifted the body another foot down the shingles and the next three moved it six feet down.
The first boy cried out and ran after it.
Tom reached him and held his arm. The boy looked helpless and afraid and sad.
For a moment there were no more waves. Tom looked at the woman, thinking, she’s true, she’s real, she’s mine… but… she’s dead. Or will be if she stays here.
“We can’t let her go,” said the first boy. “We can’t, we just can’t!”
The other boy stepped between the woman and the sea. “What would we do with her,” he wanted to know, looking at Tom, “if we kept her?”
The first boy tried to think. “We could—we could—” He stopped and shook his head. “Oh, my gosh.”
The second boy stepped out of the way and left a path from the woman to the sea.
The next was a big one. It came in and went out and the sand was empty. The whiteness was gone and the black diamonds and the great threads of the harp.
They stood by the edge of the sea, looking out, the man and the two boys, until they heard the truck driving up on the dunes behind them.
The last of the sun was gone.
They heard footsteps running down the dunes and someone yelling.
They drove back down the darkening beach in the light truck with the big-treaded tires, in silence. The two boys sat in the rear on the bags of chipped ice. After a long while, Chico began to sweat steadily, half to himself, spitting out the window.
“Three hundred pounds of ice. Three hundred pounds of ice! What do I do with it now? And I’m soaked to the skin, soaked! You didn’t even move when I jumped in and swam out to look around! Idiot, idiot! You haven’t changed! Like every other time, like always, you do nothing, nothing, just stand there, stand there, do nothing, nothing, just stare!”
“And what did you do, I ask, what?” said Tom, in a tired voice, looking ahead. “The same as you always did, just the same, no different at all. You should’ve seen yourself.”
They dropped the boys off at their beach-house. The youngest spoke in a voice you could hardly hear against the wind.
“Gosh, nobody’ll ever believe…”
The two men drove down the coast and parked.
Chico sat for two or three minutes waiting for his fists to relax on his lap, and then he snorted.
“Hell. I guess things turn out for the best.” He took a deep breath. “It just came to me. Funny. Twenty, thirty years from now, middle of the night, our phone’ll ring. It’ll be one of those two boys, grown up, calling long-distance from a bar somewhere. Middle of the night, them calling to ask one question.
It’s true, isn’t it? they’ll say. It did happen, didn’t it? Back in 1958, it really happened to us? And we’ll sit there on the edge of the bed, middle of the night, saying, Sure, boy, sure, it really happened, to us, in 1958.
And they’ll say, Thanks, and we’ll say, Don’t mention it, any old time. And we’ll all say good night. And maybe they won’t call again for a couple of years.”
The two men sat on their front-porch steps in the dark.
“Tom?”
“What?”
Chico waited a moment.
“You’re not going away.”
It was not a question but a quiet statement.
Tom thought about it, his cigarette dead in his fingers. And he knew he would never go away now. For tomorrow and the day after and the day after the day after that, he knew he would walk down and go swimming there in all the green lace and the white fires and the dark caverns in the hollows under the waves. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
“That’s right, Chico. I’m staying here.”
Now the silver looking-glasses advanced in a crumpling line all along the coast from a thousand miles north to a thousand miles south. The mirrors did not reflect so much as one building or one tree or one highway or one car or even one man himself.
The mirrors reflected only the quiet moon and then shattered into a billion bits of glass that spread out in a glaze on the shore. Then the sea was dark awhile, preparing another line of mirrors to rear up and surprise the two men who sat there for a long time, never once blinking their eyes, waiting.
The End
