Once you get going you don't feel how fast you're moving, the water having no landmarks. Harry is toward the front, crouching way over in case the boom swings at his head again. Sitting yoga-style in her stout rubber gasket, the center strip of her bikini barely covering her opened-up crotch, Cindy tends the tiller and for the first time smiles. "Harry, you don't have to keep holding on to the top of the centerboard, it doesn't have to be pulled until we hit the beach." The beach, the palms, the bungalows have been reduced to the size of a postcard.
"Should we be this far out?"
She smiles again. "We're not far out." The sailing gear tugs at her hands, the boat tips. The water out here is no longer the pale green of a honeydew melon but a green like bile, black in the troughs.
"We're not," he repeats.
"Look over there." A sail scarcely bigger than the flash of a wave. "That's Webb and Thelma. They're much further out than we are."
"Are you sure that's them?"
Cindy takes pity. "We'll come about when we're closer to those rocks. You know what come about means, Harry?"
"Not exactly."
"We'll change direction. The boom will swing, so watch your head."
"Do you think there are any sharks?" Still, he tells himself, there is an intimacy to it, just the two of them, the same spray hitting his skin and hers, the wind and water sounds that drown out all others, the curve of her shoulder shining like metal in the light of that hard white sun that makes the sun he grew up under seem orange and bloated in memory.
"Did you see Jaws II?" she asks back.
"D'you ever get the feeling everything these days is sequels?" he asks in turn. "Like people are running out of ideas." He feels so full of fatigue and long-held lust as to be careless of his life, amid this tugging violence of elements. Even the sun-sparkle on the water feels cruel, a malevolence straight from Heaven, like those photons beating on the wings of the airplane flying down.
"Coming about," Cindy says. "Hard alee."
He crouches, and the boom misses. He sees another sail out here with them, Ronnie and Janice, headed for the horizon. She seems to be at the back, steering. When did she learn? Some summer camp. You have to be rich from the start to get the full benefits. Cindy says, "Now Harry, you take over. It's simple. That little strip of cloth at the top of the mast is called a telltale. It tells what direction the wind is coming from. Also, look at the waves. You want to keep the sail at an angle to the wind. What you don't want is to see the front edge of the sail flapping. That's called luffing. It means you're headed directly into the wind, and then you must head off. You push the tiller away from you, away from the sail. You'll feel it, I promise. The tension between the tiller and the line – it's like a scissors, sort of. It's fun. Come on, Harry, nothing can happen. Change places with me." They manage the maneuver, while the boat swings like a hammock beneath their bulks. A little cloud covers the sun, dyeing the water dark, then releasing it back into sunshine with a pang. Harry takes hold of the tiller and gropes until the wind takes hold with him. Then, as she says, it's fun: the sail and tiller tugging, the invisible sea breeze pushing, the distances not nearly so great and hopeless once you have control. "You're doing fine," Cindy tells him, and from the way she sits with legs crossed facing ahead he can see the underside of all five toes of one bare foot, the thin blue skin here wrinkled, the littlest dear toe bent into the toe next to it as if trying to hide. She trusts him. She loves him. Now that he has the hang of it he dares to heel, pulling the mainsheet tighter and tighter, so the waves spank and his palm burns. The land is leaping closer, they are almost safe when, in adjusting his aim toward the spot on the beach where Janice and Ronnie have already dragged their Sunfish up, he lets out the sail a touch and the wind catches it full from behind; the prow goes under abruptly in a furious surging film; heavily the whole shell slews around and tips; he and Cindy have no choice but to slide off together, entangled with line. A veined translucence closes over his head. Air he thinks wildly and comes up in sudden shade, the boat looming on edge above them. Cindy is beside him in the water. Gasping, wanting to apologize, he clings briefly to her. She feels like a shark, slimy and abrasive. Their two foam-rubber belts bump underwater. Each hair in her eyebrows gleams in the strange light here, amid shadowed waves and the silence of stilled wind, only a gentle slipslap against the hollow hull. With a grimace she pushes him off, takes a deep breath, and disappears beneath the boat. He tries to follow but his belt roughly buoys him back. He hears her grunting and splashing on the other side of the upright keel, first pulling at, then standing on the centerboard until the Sunfish comes upright, great pearls of water exploding from it as the striped sail sweeps past the sun. Harry heaves himself on and deftly she takes the boat in to shore.
The episode is inglorious, but they all laugh about it on the beach, and in his self-forgiving mind their underwater embrace has rapidly dried to something tender and promising. The slither of two skins, her legs fluttering between his. The few black hairs where her eyebrows almost meet. The hairs of her crotch she boldly displayed sitting yoga-style. It all adds up.
Lunch at the resort is served by the pool or brought by tray to the beach, but dinner is a formal affair within a vast pavilion whose rafters drip feathery fronds yards long and at whose rear, beside the doors leading into the kitchen, a great open barbecue pit sends flames roaring high, so that shadows twitch against the background design of thatch and carved masks, and highlights spark in the sweating black faces of the assistant chefs. The head chef is a scrawny Belgian always seen sitting at the bar between meals, looking sick, or else conferring in accents of grievance with one of the prim educated native women who run the front desk. Monday night is the barbecue buffet, with a calypso singer during the meal and dancing to electrified marimbas afterward; but all six of the holidayers from Diamond County agree they are exhausted from the night at the casino and will go to bed early. Harry after nearly drowning in Cindy's arms fell asleep on the beach and then went inside for a nap. While he was sleeping, a sudden sharp tropical rainstorm drummed for ten minutes on his tin roof. When he awoke, the rain had passed, and the sun was setting in a band of orange at the mouth of the bay, and his pals had been yukking it up in the bar ever since the shower an hour ago. Something is cooking. They seem, the three women, very soft-faced by the light of the candle set on the table in a little red netted hurricane lamp, amid papery flowers that will be wilted before the meal is over. They keep touching one another, their sisterhood strengthened and excited down here. Cindy is wearing a yellow hibiscus in her hair tonight, and that Arab thing, unbuttoned halfway down. She more than once reaches past Webb's drink and stringy brown hands as they pose on the tablecloth to touch Janice on a wrist, remembering "that fresh colored boy behind the bar today, I told him I was down here with my husband and he shrugged like it made no difference whatsoever!" Webb looks sage, letting the currents pass around him, and Ronnie sleepy and puffy but still full of beans, in that grim play-maker way of his. Harry and Ronnie were on the Mt. Judge basketball varsity together and more than once Rabbit had to suppress a sensation that though he was the star the coach, Marty Tothero, liked Ronnie better, because he never quit trying and was more "physical" around the backboards. The world runs on push. Rabbit's feeling about things has been that if it doesn't happen by itself it's not worth making happen. Still, that Cindy. A man could kill for a piece of that. Pump it in, and die like a male spider. The calypso singer comes to their table and sings a long dirty song about the Big Bamboo. Harry doesn't understand all the allusions but the wives titter after every verse. The singer smiles and the song smiles but his bloody eyes glitter like those of a lizard frozen on the wall and his skull when bent over the guitar shows gray wool. An old act. A dying art. Harry doesn't know if they are supposed to tip him or just applaud. They applaud and quick as a lizard's tongue his hand flickers out to take the bill that Webb, leaning back, has offered. The old singer moves on to the next table and begins that one about Back to back, and Belly to belly. Cindy giggles, touches Janice on the forearm, and says, "I bet all the people back in Brewer will think we've swapped down here."