'Stop that or I'm going to break your jaw,' Deke said, and she stopped—not all at once, but winding down the way a record does when somebody turns off the juice without taking the needle off the disc. Her eyes were huge things.
Deke looked back at Randy. 'You all right, Pancho?'
'I don't know. I guess so.'
'My man.' Deke tried to smile, and Randy saw with some alarm that he was succeeding—was some part of Deke enjoying this? 'You don't have any idea at all what it might be?' Randy shook his head. Maybe it was an oil slick, after all... or had been, until something had happened to it. Maybe cosmic rays had hit it in a certain way. Or maybe Arthur Godfrey had pissed atomic Bisquick all over it, who knew? Who
'Can we swim past it, do you think?' Deke persisted, shaking Randy's shoulder.
'
'Stop it or I'm gonna smoke you, LaVerne,' Deke said, raising his voice again. 'I'm not kidding.'
'You saw how fast it took Rachel,' Randy said.
'Maybe it was hungry then,' Deke answered. 'But maybe now it's full.' Randy thought of Rachel kneeling there on the corner of the raft, so still and pretty in her bra and panties, and felt his gorge rise again.
'You try it,' he said to Deke.
Deke grinned humorlessly. 'Oh Pancho.'
'Oh Ceesco.'
'I want to go home,' LaVerne said in a furtive whisper. 'Okay?' Neither of them replied.
'So we wait for it to go away,' Deke said. 'It came, it'll go away.'
'Maybe,' Randy said.
Deke looked at him, his face full of a fierce concentration in the gloom. 'Maybe? What's this maybe shit?'
'We came, and it came. I saw it come—like it smelled us. If it's full, like you say, it'll go.
I guess. If it still wants chow—' He shrugged.
Deke stood thoughtfully, head bent. His short hair was still dripping a little.
'We wait,' he said. 'Let it eat fish.' Fifteen minutes passed. They didn't talk. It got colder. It was maybe fifty degrees and all three of them were in their underwear. After the first ten minutes, Randy could hear the brisk, intermittent clickety-click of his teeth. LaVerne had tried to move next to Deke, but he pushed her away—gently but firmly enough.
'Let me be for now,' he said.
So she sat down, arms crossed over her breasts, hands cupping her elbows, shivering. She looked at Randy, her eyes telling him he could come back, put his arm around her, it was okay now.
He looked away instead, back at the dark circle on the water. It just floated there, not coming any closer, but not going away, either. He looked toward the shore and there was the beach, a ghostly white crescent that seemed to float. The trees behind it made a dark, bulking horizon line. He thought he could see Deke's Camaro, but he wasn't sure.
'We just picked up and went,' Deke said.
'That's right,' Randy said.
'Didn't tell anyone.'
'No.'
'So no one knows we're here.'
'No.'
'Stop it!' LaVerne shouted. 'Stop it, you're scaring me!'
'Shut your pie-hole,' Deke said absently, and Randy laughed in spite of himself—no matter how many times Deke said that, it always slew him. 'If we have to spend the night out here, we do. Somebody'11 hear us yelling tomorrow. We're hardly in the middle of the Australian Outback, are we, Randy?' Randy said nothing.
'You know where we are,' Randy said. 'You know as well as I do. We turned off Route 41, we came up eight miles of back road—'
'Cottages every fifty feet—'
'
'So? A caretaker—' Deke was sounding a little pissed now, a little off-balance. A little scared? For the first time tonight, for the first time this month, this year, maybe for the first time in his whole life? Now there was an awesome thought—Deke loses his fear-cherry. Randy was not sure it was happening, but he thought maybe it was... and he took a perverse pleasure in it.
'Nothing to steal, nothing to vandalize,' he said. 'If there's a caretaker, he probably pops by here on a bimonthly basis.'
'Hunters—'
'Next month, yeah,' Randy said, and shut his mouth with a snap. He had also succeeded in scaring himself.
