Cindy's laugh skips girlishly above the others and is quickly followed by her drawled word, "Ronnie." Rabbit is excited amid his disgust, remembering those Polaroids tucked in a drawer.
As the days of the vacation pass, Cindy turns the same mahogany brown she wears in the summer, by the pool at the Flying Eagle, and comes up dripping from the beryl Caribbean in the same bikini of black strings, only with salt-glisten on her skin. Thelma Harrison burns badly the first day, and has some pain connected with that quiet ailment of hers. She spends the whole second day in their bungalow, while Ronnie bounces in and out of the water and supervises the fetching of drinks from the bar built on the sand entirely of straw. Old black ladies move up and down the beach offering beads and shells and sunclothes for sale, and on the morning of the third day Thelma buys from one of them a wide-brimmed straw hat and a pink ankle-length wrapper with long sleeves, and thus entirely covered, with sun block on her face and a towel across the tops of her feet, she sits reading in the shade of the sea-grape trees. Her face in the shade of her hat seems sallow and thin and mischievous, when she glances toward Harry as he lies in the sun. Next to her, he tans least easily, but he is determined to keep up with the crowd. The ache of a sunburn reminds him nostalgically of the muscle aches after athletic exertion. In the sea, he doggy-paddles, secretly afraid of sharks.
The men spend each morning on the golf course that adjoins the resort, riding in canopied carts down sere fairways laid out between brambly jungles from which there is no recovery; indeed, in looking for lost balls there is a danger of stepping into a deep hole. The substance of the island is coral, pitted with caves. At night, there is entertainment, set in a rigid weekly cycle. They arrived on a Thursday, the evening of the crab races, and on the next night witnessed a limbo dance, and on the next, a Saturday, themselves danced to a steel band. Every night there is music to dance to, beside the Olympic-length pool under stars that seem closer down here, and that hang in the sky with a certain menace, fragments of a frozen explosion. Some of the constellations are strange; Webb Murkett, who knows stars from his years in the Navy – he enlisted in '45, when he was eighteen, and crossed the Pacific on an aircraft carrier as the war was ending – points out the Southern Cross, and a ghostly blur in the sky he says is another galaxy altogether; and they can all see that the Big Dipper stands on its handle here in a way never seen in southeastern Pennsylvania.
Oh, that little Cindy, browner at every dinnertime, just begging for love. You can see it in her teeth, they are getting so white, and the way she picks an oleander blossom from the bush outside their bungalow every night to wear in her hair all fluffy from swimming so much, and the swarthiness of her toes that makes the nails look pale as petals also. She wears on her dark skin white dresses that shine from far across the swimming pool – lit from underneath at night as if it has swallowed the moon – when she is coming back from the ladies' room beyond the bamboo bar. She claims she is getting fatter, too: those piña coladas and banana Daiquiris and rum punches, all those calories, shameless. Yet she never turns a drink down, none of them do; from the Bloody Marys that fortify the golfers for their morning on the course to the last round of Stingers after midnight, they keep a gentle collective buzz on. Janice wonders, "Harry, what's the final tab going to look like? You keep signing for everybody."
He tells her, "Relax. Might as well spend it as have it eaten up by inflation. Did you hear Webb saying that the dollar now is worth exactly half what it was ten years ago in 1970? So these are fifty-cent dollars; relax." The expense in his mind is part of a worthy campaign, to sleep with Cindy before their seven days are over. He feels it coming, coming upon all of them, the walls between them are wearing thin, he knows exactly when Webb will clear his throat or how he will light his cigarette, eye-glance and easy silence are hour by hour eroding constraint, under sun and under stars they stretch out their six bodies on the folding chaises, with vinyl strapping, that are everywhere. Their hands touch passing drinks and matches and suntan lotion, they barge in and out of one another's bungalows; indeed Rabbit has seen Thelma Harrison bare-assed by accident returning their Solarcaine one afternoon. She had been lying on the bed letting her burned skin breathe and hustled into the bathroom at the sound of his voice at the door, but not quick enough. He saw the crease between her cheeks, the whole lean sallow length of her fleeing, and handed the Solarcaine to Ronnie, himself naked, without comment or apology, they were half-naked with each other all the day long, but for Thelma huddled under the sea-grape: Janice rubbing Coppertone into the criss-crossing creases of Webb's red neck, Ronnie's heavy cock bulging the front of his obscene little European-style trunks, sweet Cindy untying a black string to give her back an even tan and showing the full nippled silhouette of one boob when she reached up for her Planter's Punch from the tray of them the boy had brought. These blacks down here are silkier than American blacks, blacker, their bodies moving to a gentler beat. Toward four o'clock, the shadows of the sea-grape coming forward like knobby fingers onto the sand, the men's faces baked red despite the canopies on the golf carts, they move their act from the beach (the rustling of palm trees gets on Harry's nerves; at night he keeps thinking it's raining, and it never is) to the shaded area beside the Olympic pool, where young island men in white steward's jackets circle among them taking drink orders and the hard white pellet of the sun slowly lowers toward the horizon of the sea, which it meets promptly at six, in a perfunctory splash of purples and pinks. Stupefied, aching with pleasure, Harry stares at the way, when Cindy rolls her body into a new position on the chaise, the straps have bitten laterally into her delicious fat, like tire treads in mud. Thelma sits among them swaddled and watchful, Webb drones on, Ronnie is making some new friends at the bamboo bar. It's the salesman in him, he has to keep trying his pitch. His voice balloons above the rippling as a single fair child, waterlogged and bored, dives and paddles away the time to dinner. Janice, much as he loves her now and then, down here is a piece of static, getting between Harry and what signals Cindy may be sending; luckily Webb keeps her entertained, talking to her as one member of the lesser Brewer gentry to another, about that tireless subject of money. "You think fourteen per cent is catastrophic, in Israel they live with a hundred eleven per cent, a color television set costs eighteen hundred dollars. In Argentina it's a hundred fifty per cent per year, believe me I kid you not. In Tokyo a pound of steak costs twenty dollars and in Saudi Arabia a pack of cigarettes goes for a fin. Five dollars a pack. You may think we're hurting but the U.S. consumer still gets the best deal to be had in any industrialized nation." Janice hangs on his words and bums his cigarettes. Her hair since summer has grown long enough to pull back in a little stubby ponytail; she sits by his feet, dabbling her legs in the pool. The hair on Webb's long skinny legs spirals around like the stripes on a barber pole, and his face with its wise creases has tanned the color of lightly varnished pine. It occurs to Harry that she used to listen to her father bullshit this way, and likes it.
By Sunday night they are bored with the routine around the resort and hire a taxi to take them across the island to the casino. In the dark they pass through villages where black children are invisible until their eye-whites gleam beside the road. A herd of goats trotting with dragging rope halters materializes in the headlights of the taxi. Shuttered cabins up on cinder blocks reveal by an open door that they are taverns, with bottle-crammed shelves and a sheaf of standing customers. An old stone church flings candlelight from its pointed windows, which have no glass, and the moan of one phrase of a hymn, that is swiftly left behind. The taxi, a '69 Pontiac with a lot of voodoo dolls on the dashboard, drives ruthlessly, on the wrong side of the road, for this was an English colony. The truncated cone-shapes of abandoned sugar mills against the sky full of stars remember the past, all those dead slaves, while Janice and Thelma and Cindy chatter in the surging dark about people left behind in Brewer, about Buddy Inglefinger's newest awful girlfriend with all that height and all those children, Buddy's such a victim-type, and about impossible Peggy Fosnacht, whom rumor has reported to be very hurt that she and Ollie weren't asked along on this trip to the Caribbean, even though everybody knows they could never afford it.