Skeleton Crew

  Rico wasn't bright enough to hold things together by himself, and he fell for assault with intent to kill the very next year.

  I've never been able to get her out of my mind, or the agonized, hangdog way Scollay had looked that first night when he talked about her. But I cannot feel too sorry for her, looking back. Fat people can always stop eating. Guys like Billy-Boy Williams can only stop breathing. I still don't see any way I could have helped either of them, but I do feel sort of bad every now and then. Probably just because I've gotten a lot older and don't sleep as well as I did when I was a kid. That's all it is, isn't it?

  Isn't it?

  Paranoid: A Chant

  I can't go out no more.

  There's a man by the door

  in a raincoat

  smoking a cigarette.

  But

  I've put him in my diary.

  and the mailers are all lined up

  on the bed, bloody in the glow

  of the bar sign next door.

  He knows that if I die

  (or even drop out of sight)

  the diary goes and everyone knows

  the CIA's in Virginia.

  500 mailers bought from

  500 drug counters each one different

  and 500 notebooks

  with 500 pages in every one.

  I am prepared.

  I can see him from up here.

  His cigarette winks from just

  above his trenchcoat collar

  and somewhere there's a man on a subway

  sitting under a Black Velvet ad thinking my name.

  Men have discussed me in back rooms.

  If the phone rings there's only dead breath.

  In the bar across the street a snubnose

  revolver has changed hands in the men's room.

  Each bullet has my name on it.

  My name is written in back files

  and looked up in newspaper morgues.

  My mother's been investigated;

  thank God she's dead.

  They have writing samples

  and examine the back loops of pees

  and the crosses of tees.

  My brother's with them, did I tell you?

  His wife is Russian and he

  keeps asking me to fill out forms.

  I have it in my diary.

  Listen--

  listen

  do listen:

  you must listen.

  In the rain, at the bus stop,

  black crows with black umbrellas

  pretend to look at their watches, but

  it's not raining. Their eyes are silver dollars.

  Some are scholars in the pay of the FBI

  most are the foreigners who pour through

  our streets. I fooled them

  got off the bus at 25th and Lex

  where a cabby watched me over his newspaper.

  In the room above me an old woman

  has put an electric suction cup on her floor.

  It sends out rays through my light fixture

  and now I write in the dark

  by the bar sign's glow.

  I tell you I know.

  They sent me a dog with brown spots

  and a radio cobweb in its nose.

  I drowned it in the sink and wrote it up

  in folder GAMMA.

  I don't look in the mailbox anymore.

  The greeting cards are letter-bombs.

  (Step away! Goddam you!

  Step away, I know tall people!

  I tell you I know very tall people!)

  The luncheonette is laid with talking floors

  and the waitress says it was salt but I know arsenic

  when it's put before me. And the yellow taste of mustard

  to mask the bitter odor of almonds.

  I have seen strange lights in the sky.

  Last night a dark man with no face crawled through nine miles

  of sewer to surface in my toilet, listening

  for phone calls through the cheap wood with

  chrome ears.

  I tell you, man, I hear.

  I saw his muddy handprints

  on the porcelain.

  I don't answer the phone now,

  have I told you that?

  They are planning to flood the earth with sludge.

  They are planning break-ins.

  They have got physicians

  advocating weird sex positions.

  They are making addictive laxatives

  and suppositories that burn.

  They know how to put out the sun

  with blowguns.

  I pack myself in ice--have I told you that?

  It obviates their infrascopes.

  I know chants and I wear charms.

  You may think you have me but I could destroy you

  any second now.

  Any second now.

  Any second now.

  Would you like some coffee, my love?

  Did I tell you I can't go out no more?

  There's a man by the door

  in a raincoat.

  The Raft

  It was forty miles from Horlicks University in Pittsburgh to Cascade Lake, and although dark comes early to that part of the world in October and although they didn't get going until six o'clock, there was still a little light in the sky when they got there. They had come in Deke's Camaro. Deke didn't waste any time when he was sober. After a couple of beers, he made that Camaro walk and talk.

  He had hardly brought the car to a stop at the pole fence between the parking lot and the beach before he was out and pulling off his shirt. His eyes were scanning the water for the raft. Randy got out of the shotgun seat, a little reluctantly. This had been his idea, true enough, but he had never expected Deke to take it seriously. The girls were moving around in the back seat, getting ready to get out.

  Deke's eyes scanned the water restlessly, side to side (sniper's eyes, Randy thought uncomfortably), and then fixed on a point.

  "It's there!" he shouted, slapping the hood of the Camaro. "Just like you said, Randy! Hot damn! Last one in's a rotten egg!"

  "Deke--" Randy began, resetting his glasses on his nose, but that was all he bothered with, because Deke was vaulting the fence and running down the beach, not looking back at Randy or Rachel or LaVerne, only looking out at the raft, which was anchored about fifty yards out on the lake.

  Randy looked around, as if to apologize to the girls for getting them into this, but they were looking at Deke--Rachel looking at him was all right, Rachel was Deke's girl, but LaVerne was looking at him too and Randy felt a hot momentary spark of jealousy that got him moving. He peeled off his own sweatshirt, dropped it beside Deke's, and hopped the fence.

  "Randy!" LaVerne called, and he only pulled his arm forward through the gray twilit October air in a come-on gesture, hating himself a little for doing it--she was unsure now, perhaps ready to cry it off. The idea of an October swim in the deserted lake wasn't just part of a comfortable, well-lighted bull-session in the apartment he and Deke shared anymore. He liked her, but Deke was stronger. And damned if she didn't have the hots for Deke, and damned if it wasn't irritating.

  Deke unbuckled his jeans, still running, and pushed them off his lean hips. He somehow got out of them all the way without stopping, a feat Randy could not have duplicated in a thousand years. Deke ran on, now only wearing bikini briefs, the muscles in his back and buttocks working gorgeously. Randy was more than aware of his own skinny shanks as he dropped his Levi's and clumsily shook them free of his feet--with Deke it was ballet, with him burlesque.

  Deke hit the water and bellowed, "Cold! Mother of Jesus!" Randy hesitated, but only in his mind, where things took longer--that water's forty-five degrees, fifty at most, his mind told him. Your heart could stop. He was pre-med, he knew that was true ... but in the physical world he didn't hesitate at all. He leaped it, and for a moment his heart did stop, or seemed to; his breath clogged in his throat and he h
ad to force a gasp of air into his lungs as all his submerged skin went numb. This is crazy, he thought, and then: But it was your idea, Pancho. He began to stroke after Deke.

  The two girls looked at each other for a moment. LaVerne shrugged and grinned. "If they can, we can," she said, stripping off her Lacoste shirt to reveal an almost transparent bra. "Aren't girls supposed to have an extra layer of fat?"

  Then she was over the fence and running for the water, unbuttoning her cords. After a moment Rachel followed her, much as Randy had followed Deke.

  The girls had come over to the apartment at midafternoon --on Tuesdays a one-o'clock was the latest class any of them had. Deke's monthly allotment had come in--one of the football-mad alums (the players called them "angels") saw that he got two hundred a month in cash--and there was a case of beer in the fridge and a new Night Ranger album on Randy's battered stereo. The four of them set about getting pleasantly oiled. After a while the talk had turned to the end of the long Indian summer they had been enjoying. The radio was predicting flurries for Wednesday. LaVerne had advanced the opinion that weathermen predicting snow flurries in October should be shot, and no one had disagreed.

  Rachel said that summers had seemed to last forever when she was girl, but now that she was an adult ("a doddering senile nineteen," Deke joked, and she kicked his ankle), they got shorter every year. "It seemed like I spent my life out at Cascade Lake," she said, crossing the decayed kitchen linoleum to the icebox. She peered in, found an Iron City Light hiding behind a stack of blue Tupperware storage boxes (the one in the middle contained some nearly prehistoric chili which was now thickly festooned with mold--Randy was a good student and Deke was a good football player, but neither of them was worth a fart in a noisemaker when it came to housekeeping), and appropriated it. "I can still remember the first time I managed to swim all the way out to the raft. I stayed there for damn near two hours, scared to swim back."

  She sat down next to Deke, who put an arm around her. She smiled, remembering, and Randy suddenly thought she looked like someone famous or semi-famous. He couldn't quite place the resemblance. It would come to him later, under less pleasant circumstances.

  "Finally my brother had to swim out and tow me back on an inner tube. God, he was mad. And I had a sunburn like you wouldn't believe."

  "The raft's still out there," Randy said, mostly to say something. He was aware that LaVerne had been looking at Deke again; just lately it seemed like she looked at Deke a lot.

  But now she looked at him. "It's almost Halloween, Randy. Cascade Beach has been closed since Labor Day."

  "Raft's probably still out there, though," Randy said. "We were on the other side of the lake on a geology field trip about three weeks ago and I saw it then. It looked like ..." He shrugged. ".... a little bit of summer that somebody forgot to clean up and put away in the closet until next year."

  He thought they would laugh at that, but no one did--not even Deke.

  "Just because it was there last year doesn't mean it's still there," LaVerne said.

  "I mentioned it to a guy," Randy said, finishing his own beer. "Billy DeLois, do you remember him, Deke?"

  Deke nodded. "Played second string until he got hurt."

  "Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, he comes from out that way, and he said the guys who own the beach never take it in until the lake's almost ready to freeze. Just lazy--at least, that's what he said. He said that some year they'd wait too long and it would get ice-locked."

  He fell silent, remembering how the raft had looked, anchored out there on the lake--a square of bright white wood in all that bright blue autumn water. He remembered how the sound of the barrels under it--that buoyant clunk-clunk sound--had drifted up to them. The sound was soft, but sounds carried well on the still air around the lake. There had been that sound and the sound of crows squabbling over the remnants of some farmer's harvested garden.

  "Snow tomorrow," Rachel said, getting up as Deke's hand wandered almost absently down to the upper swell of her breast. She went to the window and looked out. "What a bummer. "

  "I'll tell you what," Randy said, "let's go on out to Cascade Lake. We'll swim out to the raft, say good-bye to summer, and then swim back. "

  If he hadn't been half-loaded he never would have made the suggestion, and he certainly didn't expect anyone to take it seriously. But Deke jumped on it.

  "All right! Awesome, Pancho! Fooking awesome!" LaVerne jumped and spilled her beer. But she smiled--the smile made Randy a little uneasy. "Let's do it!"

  "Deke, you're crazy," Rachel said, also smiling--but her smile looked a little tentative, a little worried.

  "No, I'm going to do it," Deke said, going for his coat, and with a mixture of dismay and excitement, Randy noted Deke's grin--reckless and a little crazy. The two of them had been rooming together for three years now--the Jock and the Brain, Cisco and Pancho, Batman and Robin--and Randy recognized that grin. Deke wasn't kidding; he meant to do it. In his head he was already halfway there.

  Forget it, Cisco--not me. The words rose to his lips, but before he could say them LaVeme was on her feet, the same cheerful, loony look in her own eyes (or maybe it was just too much beer). "I'm up for it!"

  "Then let's go!" Deke looked at Randy. "Whatchoo say, Pancho?"

  He had looked at Rachel for a moment then, and saw something almost frantic in her eyes--as far as he himself was concerned, Deke and La Verne could go out to Cascade Lake together and plow the back forty all night; he would not be delighted with the knowledge that they were boffing each other's brains out, yet neither would he be surprised. But that look in the other girl's eyes, that haunted look--

  "Ohhh, Ceesco!" Randy cried.

  "Ohhhh, Pancho!" Deke cried back, delighted.

  They slapped palms.

  Randy was halfway to the raft when he saw the black patch on the water. It was beyond the raft and to the left of it, more out toward the middle of the lake. Five minutes later the light would have failed too much for him to tell it was anything more than a shadow ... if he had seen it at all. Oil slick? he thought, still pulling hard through the water, faintly aware of the girls splashing behind him. But what would an oil slick be doing on an October-deserted lake? And it was oddly circular, small, surely no more than five feet in diameter--

  "Whoooo!" Deke shouted again, and Randy looked toward him. Deke was climbing the ladder on the side of the raft, shaking off water like a dog. "Howya doon, Pancho?"

  "Okay!" he called back, pulling harder. It really wasn't as bad as he had thought it might be, not once you got in and got moving. His body tingled with warmth and now his motor was in overdrive. He could feel his heart putting out good revs, heating him from the inside out. His folks had a place on Cape Cod, and the water there was worse than this in mid-July.

  "You think it's bad now, Pancho, wait'll you get out!" Deke yelled gleefully. He was hopping up and down, making the raft rock, rubbing his body.

  Randy forgot about the oil slick until his hands actually grasped the rough, white-painted wood of the ladder on the shore side. Then he saw it again. It was a little closer. A round dark patch on the water, like a big mole, rising and falling on the mild waves. When he had first seen it the patch had been maybe forty yards from the raft. Now it was only half that distance.

  How can that be? How--

  Then he came out of the water and the cold air bit his skin, bit it even harder than the water had when he first dived in. "Ohhhhhh, shit!" He yelled, laughing, shivering in his Jockey shorts.

  "Pancho, you ees some kine of beeg asshole," Deke said happily. He pulled Randy up. "Cold enough for you? You sober yet?"

  "I'm sober! I'm sober!" He began to jump around as Deke had done, clapping his arms across his chest and stomach in an X. They turned to look at the girls.

  Rachel had pulled ahead of LaVerne, who was doing something that looked like a dog paddle performed by a dog with bad instincts.

  "You ladies okay?" Deke bellowed.

  "Go to hell
, Macho City!" LaVerne called, and Deke broke up again.

  Randy glanced to the side and saw that odd dark circular patch was even closer--ten yards now, and still coming. It floated on the water, round and regular, like the top of a large steel drum, but the limber way it rode the swells made it clear that it was not the surface of a solid object. Fear, directionless but powerful, suddenly seized him.

  "Swim!" he shouted at the girls, and bent down to grasp Rachel's hand as she reached the ladder. He hauled her up. She bumped her knee hard--he heard the thud clearly.

  "Ow! Hey! What--"

  LaVerne was still ten feet away. Randy glanced to the side again and saw the round thing nuzzle the offside of the raft. The thing was as dark as oil, but he was sure it wasn't oil--too dark, too thick, too even.

  "Randy, that hurt! What are you doing, being fun--"

  "LaVerne! Swim!" Now it wasn't just fear; now it was terror.

  LaVerne looked up, maybe not hearing the terror but at least hearing the urgency. She looked puzzled but she dog-paddled faster, closing the distance to the ladder.

  "Randy, what's wrong with you?" Deke asked.

  Randy looked to the side again and saw the thing fold itself around the raft's square comer. For a moment it looked like a Pac-Man image with its mouth open to eat electronic cookies. Then it slipped all the way around the comer and began to slide along the raft, one of its edges now straight.

  "Help me get her up!" Randy grunted to Deke, and reached for her hand. "Quick!"

  Deke shrugged good-naturedly and reached for LaVerne's other hand. They pulled her up and onto the raft's board surface bare seconds before the black thing slid by the ladder, its sides dimpling as it slipped past the ladder's uprights.

  "Randy, have you gone crazy?" LaVerne was out of breath, a little. frightened. Her nipples were clearly visible through the bra. They stood out in cold hard points.

  "That thing," Randy said, pointing. "Deke? What is it?"