over breakfast on the pa-tee-oh she called them leeches. Can you
imagine? Leeches! And last night it was pimps.
'I am having a hell of a time, I tell you.'
'Lots of good feeling between you and the folks, huh?'
You could have wished it to happen every morning. At least he wasn't
driving like a maniac. We took the coast road out at a nice, easy pace
for a change. A pleasant little drive in the country with a trunk full
of stolen caviar. When we passed the Crouch place he looked at me and
grinned.
'I saw lights.'
'You saw bullshit.'
His mood got us all happy.
Casey said that Kim's straw hat looked like something out of Elvira
Madigan by way of Kate Hepburn. Steve picked it up with peasant-girl
jokes and farm girl jokes, most of which centered on Kimberley's ample
breasts and thighs, her most conspicuous features. Kim countered with
references to the weekend 'orgy' between Casey and me, and the whole
thing got pretty tasteless,
We did plenty of laughing. Finally Casey made some comment about the
inevitability of a discussion of Kimberley's breasts in any social
gathering in which she, Kimberley, was a part, and Kim pulled off the
big wide-brimmed hat and stuffed it under the seat and said, okay, you
want 'em, you got 'em, and proceeded to peel off the powder blue tank
top she was wearing and toss it over her head into the wind.
We watched it flutter down behind us.
We were about a mile from the beach and there she sat, half-naked, her
nipples puckering in the breeze.
'Cute,' said Casey. 'Now what are you gonna wear home?'
Kim giggled. 'You worried about it? You shouldn't be. You better
wonder what you're gonna wear!' There was a brief struggle behind
us.
Moments later Casey's work shirt was observed to waft through the air
and drape itself over a roadside cattail.
So now we had two half-naked women in the backseat. The road ahead was
deserted. Behind us too. But I kept seeing squad cars pulling us
over, officers peering ironically. The girls were laughing so hard
their faces flushed red.
'Well, sh/t!' said Steven.
The car began to weave and halt fitfully as he unzipped his jeans and
worked them over first one leg and then the other over his sneakers. It
took a while but finally he was out of them. I was glad to see he had
his briefs.
He placed wallet, belt, and house keys neatly on the seat beside him
and handed me a fistful of change and then flipped the pants
over his head. We watched them twist away behind us. He looked at
me.
'You next.'
'Not me.'
'Come on.'
I tried to look as serious as possible. 'You know I hate people to see
the catheter.'
We made it to our deserted rocky spot on the beach without incident. We
ate the odd smorgasbord lunch.
'You know,' I said, 'I keep wishing for a ham sandwich.'
Steve nodded. 'Yeah. I got to stop stealing.'
Kim halted in the middle of a bite of cheese and cracker. She looked
at us and then at herself.
'What are we gonna do about going home?' she said.
I laughed the caviar all over my hand.
The day turned sour.
I was lying on my back, half-asleep, letting the sun bake me. By now
my ass was as brown as the rest of me, my modesty having long since
gone the way of caution in anything which was related to them. Kim was
sitting beside me on a towel rubbing oil into her arms and shoulders. I
heard the shout from Steven and the hissing intake of breath from her
simultaneously. Both sounds full of sudden fear.
I was up and on my feet in an instant, while Kim was still reacting to
what she'd seen.
Part of it I understood immediately.
Steve and Casey had been standing atop the same rock she and I had
climbed the first day, that place where gulls had littered the surface
with the shells of crabs and oysters. Now she was alone there. Looking
down at Steven. In her posture there was a strange tension, not of
fear but of anger.
There was something disjointed-looking about his limbs, a loss of skill
in both arms and legs that made me worry not so much about breakage as
concussion.
I ran. I sensed Kim a few steps behind me. When I reached him he was
trying to rise again. He fell back heavily on his chest. There was no
sand where he was, only stones. It must have hurt him. I
heard the breath rush out of his lungs, but that was the only sound
from him. I heard us running and that deep whoosh of breath and the
crying of gulls. And that was all. A strange, quiet chaos.
I went down beside him and put one arm behind his back to support him,
just under his shoulders.
'Relax. Relax.'
He looked at me and his eyes were not quite focusing. I saw a small
scrape just below the hairline over his right eye. It would swell, but
it didn't look too bad. A slight welling up of blood moving slowly to
the surface. I looked into his hair for something worse. There was
nothing. I guessed he was just shaken. I was damned relieved.
Kim squatted down beside me. I saw her glance to the left of him a
little and then heard that intake of breath again. Her face contracted
