II.

Most towns, however small, make themselves after the pattern of a city. That is, they divide. White from black, straight from gay, wealthy from less wealthy, less wealthy from poor. Palomo Grove, the population of which was in that year, 1971, a mere one thousand two hundred, was no exception. Built on the flanks of a gently sloping hillside, the town had been designed as an embodiment of democratic principles, in which every occupant was intended to have equal access to the center of power in the town, the Mall. It lay at the bottom of Sunrise Hill, known simply as the Hill, with four villages-Stillbrook, Deerdell, Laureltree and Windbluff-radiating from its hub, their feed thoroughfares aligned with the compa.s.s points. But that was as far as the planners' idealism went. Thereafter the subtle differences in the geography of the villages made each quite different in character. Wind-bluff, which lay on the southwest flank of the hill, commanded the best views, and its properties the highest prices. The top third of the Hill was dominated by half a dozen grand residences, their roofs barely visible behind lush foliage. On the lower slopes of this Olympus were the Five Crescents, streets bowed upon themselves, which were-if you couldn't afford a house at the very top-the next most desirable places to live.

By contrast, Deerdell. Built on flat ground, and flanked on two sides by undeveloped woodland, this quadrant of the Grove had rapidly gone downhill. Here the houses lacked pools and needed paint. For some, the locale was a hip retreat. There were, even in 1971, a few artists living in Deerdell; that community would steadily grow. But if there was anywhere in the Grove where people went in fear for their automobiles' paintwork, it was here.

Between these two extremes, socially and geographically, lay Stillbrook and Laureltree, the latter thought marginally more upscale because several of its streets were built on the second flank of the Hill, their scale and their prices less modest with every bend the streets took as they climbed.

None of the quartet were residents of Deerdell. Arleen lived on Emerson, the second highest of the Crescents, Joyce and Carolyn within a block of each other on Steeple Chase Drive in Stillbrook Village, and Trudi in Laureltree. So there was a certain adventure in treading the streets of the East Grove, where their parents had seldom, if ever, ventured. Even if they had strayed down here, they'd certainly never gone where the girls now went: into the woods.

"It's no cooler," Arleen complained when they'd been wandering a few minutes. "In fact, it's worse."

She was right. Though the foliage kept the stare of the sun off their heads, the heat still found its way between the branches. Trapped, it made the damp air steamy.

"I haven't been here for years," Trudi said, whipping a switch of stripped twig back and forth through a cloud of gnats. "I used to come with my brother."

"How is he?" Joyce enquired.

"Still in the hospital. He's never going to come out. All the family knows that but n.o.body ever says it. Makes me sick."

Sam Katz had been drafted and gone to Vietnam fit in mind and body. In the third month of his tour of duty all that had been undone by a land mine, which had killed two of his comrades and badly injured him. There'd been a squirmingly uneasy homecoming, the Grove's little mighty lined up to greet the crippled hero. What followed was much talk of heroism and sacrifice; much drinking; some hidden tears. Through it all Sam Katz had sat stony featured, not setting his face against the celebrations but detached from them, as though his mind were still rehearsing the moment when his youth had been blown to smithereens. A few weeks later he'd been taken back to the hospital. Though his mother had told enquirers it was for corrective surgery to his spine the months dragged on until they became years, and Sam didn't reappear.

Everyone guessed the reason, though it went unadmitted. Sam's physical wounds had healed adequately well. But his mind had not proved so resilient. The detachment he'd evidenced at his homecoming party had deepened into cata-tonia.

All the other girls had known Sam, though the age difference between Joyce and her brother had been sufficient for them to have looked upon him almost as another species. Not simply male, which was strange enough, but old, too. Once past p.u.b.erty, however, the roller-coaster ride began to speed. They could see twenty-five up ahead: a little way yet, but visible. And the waste of Sam's life began to make sense to them the way it could never have made sense to an eleven-year-old. Fond, sad memories of him silenced them for a while. They walked on through the heat, their bodies side by side, arms occasionally brushing arms, their minds diverging. Trudi's thoughts were of those childhood games, played with Sam in these thickets. He'd been an indulgent older brother, allowing her to tag along when she was seven or eight, and he thirteen. A year later, when his juices started telling him girls and sisters weren't the same animal, the invitations to play war had ceased. She'd mourned the loss of him; a rehearsal for the mourning she'd felt more acutely later. She saw his face in her mind now, a weird melding of the boy he'd been and the man he was; of the life he'd had and the death he lived. It made her hurt.

For Carolyn, there were few hurts, at least in her waking life. And today-barring her wishing she'd bought a second ice cream-none. Night was quite a different matter. She had bad dreams; of earthquakes. In them Palomo Grove would fold up like a canvas chair and disappear into the earth. That was the penalty for knowing too much, her father had told her. She'd inherited his fierce curiosity, and had applied it- from first hearing of the San Andreas Fault-to a study of the earth they walked upon. Its solidity could not be trusted. Beneath their feet, she knew, the ground was riddled with fissures, which might at any moment gape, as they would gape beneath Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, all the way up and down the West Coast, swallowing the lot. She kept her anxieties at bay with swallowings of her own: a sort of sympathetic magic. She was fat because the earth's crust was thin; an irrefutable excuse for gluttony.

Arleen cast a glance over at the Fat Girl. It never hurt, her mother had once instructed her, to keep the company of the less attractive. Though no longer in the public eye, the sometime star Kate Farrell still surrounded herself with dowdy women, in whose company her looks were twice as compelling. But for Arleen, especially on days like today, it seemed too high a price. Though they flattered her looks she didn't really like her companions. Once she'd have counted them her dearest friends. Now they were reminders of a life from which she could not escape quickly enough. But how else was she going to spend the time till her parole came through? Even the joys of sitting in front of the mirror palled after a time. The sooner I'm out of here, she thought, the sooner I'm happy.

Had she been able to read Arleen's mind Joyce would have applauded the urgency. But she was lost in thoughts of how best to arrange an accidental encounter with Randy. If she made a casual enquiry about his routines Arleen would guess her purpose, and she might be selfish enough to spike Joyce's chances even though she had no interest in the boy herself. Joyce was a fine reader of character, and knew it was quite within Arleen's capabilities to be so perverse. But then who was she to condemn perversity? She was pursuing a male who'd three times made his indifference to her perfectly plain. Why couldn't she just forget him and save herself the grief of rejection? Because love wasn't like that. It made you fly in the face of the evidence, however compelling.

She sighed audibly.

"Something wrong?" Carolyn wanted to know.

"Just...hot," Joyce replied.

"Anyone we know?" Trudi said. Before Joyce could muster an adequately disparaging reply she caught sight of something glittering through the trees ahead.

"Water," she said.

Carolyn had seen it too. Its brightness made her squint.

"Lots of it," she said.

"I didn't know there was a lake down here," Joyce remarked, turning to Trudi.

"There wasn't," came the reply. "Not that I remember."

"Well there is now," said Carolyn.

She was already forging ahead through the foliage, not caring to take the less thronged route. Her blundering pa.s.sage cleared a way for the others.

"Looks like we're going to get cool after all," Trudi said, and went after her at a run.

It was indeed a lake, maybe fifty feet wide, its placid surface broken by half-submerged trees, and islands of shrubbery.

"Flood water," Carolyn said. "We're right at the bottom of the hill here. It must have gathered after the storm."

"That's a lot of water," Joyce said. "Did this all fall last night?"

"If it didn't where did it come from?" Carolyn said.

"Who cares?" said Trudi. "It looks cool."

She moved past Carolyn to the very edge of the water. The ground became more swampy underfoot with every step, mud rising up over her sandals. But the water, when she reached it, was as good as its promise: refreshingly cold. She crouched down, and put her hand in the lake, bringing a palmful of it up to splash her face.

"I wouldn't do that," Carolyn cautioned. "It's probably full of chemicals."

"It's only rainwater," Trudi replied. "What's cleaner than that?"

Carolyn shrugged. "Please yourself," she said.

"I wonder how deep it is?" Joyce mused. "Deep enough to swim, do you think?"

"Shouldn't have thought so," Carolyn commented.

"Don't know till we try," Trudi said, and began to wade out into the lake. She could see gra.s.s and flowers beneath her feet; drowned now. The earth itself was soft, and her steps stirred up clouds of mud, but she advanced until she was in deep enough for the hem of her shorts to be soaked.

The water was cold. It brought gooseflesh. But that was preferable to the sweat that had stuck her blouse to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and spine. She looked back towards the sh.o.r.e.

"Feels great," she said. "I'm going in."

"Like that?" Arleen said.

"Of course not." Trudi waded back towards the trio, pulling her blouse out of her shorts as she went. The air rising from the water tingled against her skin, its frisson welcome. She wore nothing beneath, and would normally have been more modest, even in front of her friends, but the lake's invitation was not to be postponed.

"Anybody going to join me?" she asked as she stepped back among the others.

"I am," Joyce said, already unknotting her sneakers.

"I think we should keep our shoes on," Trudi said. "We don't know what's underfoot."

"It's only gra.s.s," said Joyce. She sat down and worked on the knots, grinning. "This is great," she said.

Arleen was watching her whooping enthusiasm with disdain.

"You two not joining us?" Trudi said.

"No," Arleen said.

"Afraid your mascara'll run?" Joyce replied, her grin widening.

"n.o.body's going to see," said Trudi, before a rift developed. "Carolyn? What about you?"

The girl shrugged. "Can't swim," she said.

"It's not deep enough to swim in."

"You don't know that," Carolyn observed. "You only waded out a few yards."

"So stay close to the sh.o.r.e. You'll be safe there."

"Maybe," Carolyn said, far from convinced.

"Trudi's right," Joyce said, sensing Carolyn's reluctance was as much to do with uncovering her fat as with swimming. "Who's going to see us?"

As she stripped off her shorts it occurred to her that any number of peepers might be hidden among the trees, but what the heck? Wasn't the Reverend forever saying life was short? Best not to waste it then. She stepped out of her underwear and started into the water.

William Witt knew each one of the bathers' names. In fact he knew the names of every woman in the Grove under forty, and where they lived, and which was their bedroom window; a feat of memory which he declined to boast of to any of his schoolmates for fear they spread it around. Though he could see nothing wrong with looking through windows he knew enough to know it was frowned upon. And yet he'd been born with eyes, hadn't he? Why shouldn't he use them? Where was the harm in watching? It wasn't like stealing, or lying, or killing people. It was just doing what G.o.d had created eyes to do, and he couldn't see what was criminal in that.

He crouched, hidden by trees, half a dozen yards from the edge of the water, and twice that distance from the girls, watching them undress. Arleen Farrell was hanging back, he saw, which frustrated him. To see her naked would be an achievement even he'd not be able to keep to himself. She was the most beautiful girl in Palomo Grove: sleek and blonde and snooty, the way movie stars were supposed to be. The other two, Trudi Katz and Joyce McGuire, were already in the water, so he turned his attentions to Carolyn Hotchkiss, who was even now taking off her bra. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were heavy, and pink, and the sight of them made him hard in his trousers. Though she stripped off her shorts and panties he kept staring at her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He couldn't understand the fascination some of the other boys-he was ten-had with that lower part; it seemed so much less exciting than the bosom, which was as different from girl to girl as her nose or hips. The other, the part he didn't like any of the words for, seemed to him quite uninteresting: a patch of hair with a slit buried in the middle. What was the big deal about that?

He watched as Carolyn stepped into the water, only just suppressing a giggle of pleasure when she responded to the cold water with a half step backwards which set her flesh jiggling like jello.

"Come on! It's wonderful!" the Katz girl was coaxing her.

Plucking up her courage, Carolyn advanced a few more steps.

And now-William could scarcely believe his luck-Ar-leen was taking off her hat and unb.u.t.toning her halter top. She was joining them after all. He forgot the others and fixed his gaze on Miss Sleek. As soon as he'd realized what the girls-whom he'd been following for an hour, unsuspected- were planning to do, his heart had started thumping so hard he thought he'd be ill. Now that thump redoubled, as the prospect of Arleen's b.r.e.a.s.t.s came before him. Nothing-not even fear of death-would have made him look away. He set himself the challenge of memorizing every tiny motion, so as to add veracity to his account when he told it to disbelievers.

She went slowly about it. If he'd not known better he'd have suspected she knew she had an audience, the way she teased and paraded. Her bosom was a disappointment. Not as large as Carolyn's, nor boasting large, dark nipples like Joyce's. But the overall impression, when she stepped from her cut-off jeans and slid down her panties, was wonderful. It made him feel almost panicky to see her. His teeth chattered like he had the flu. His face got hot, his innards seemed to rattle. Later in life William would tell his a.n.a.lyst that this was the first moment he realized that he was going to die. In fact that was hindsight speaking. Death was very far from his mind now. And yet the sight of Arleen's nakedness, and his invisibility as he witnessed it, did mark this moment as one which he would never quite outgrow. Events were about to occur that would temporarily make him wish he'd never come peeping (he'd live in fear of the memory, in fact), but when, after several years, the terror mellowed, he returned to the image of Arleen Farrell stepping into the waters of this sudden lake, as to an icon.

It was not the moment that he first knew he was going to die; but it was perhaps the first time he understood that ceasing would not be so bad, if beauty was there to escort him on his way.

The lake was seductive, its embrace cool but rea.s.suring. There was no undertow, as at the beach. No surf beating against your back nor salt stinging your eyes. It was like a swimming pool created for the four of them only; an idyll that no one else in the Grove had access to.

Trudi was the strongest swimmer of the quartet, and it was she who headed from the sh.o.r.e with the greatest vigor, discovering, as she went, that contrary to expectation the water was getting deeper all the time. It must have gathered where the ground dipped naturally, she reasoned, perhaps even in a place where there'd once been a small lake, though she could remember no such spot from her ramblings with Sam. The gra.s.s had now gone from beneath her toes, which brushed instead bare rock.

"Don't go too far," Joyce called to her.

She turned. The sh.o.r.e was further than she'd estimated, the glaze of water in her eyes reducing her friends to three pink blurs, one blonde, two brunettes, half submerged in the same sweet-tasting element as she. It would be impossible to keep this fragment of Eden to themselves unfortunately. Arleen would be bound to talk about it. By evening the secret would be out. By tomorrow, thronged. They'd better make the most of their privacy. So thinking, she struck out for the middle of the lake.

Ten yards closer to sh.o.r.e, sculling along on her back in water no more than navel-deep, Joyce watched Arleen at the lake's edge, stooping to splash her belly and b.r.e.a.s.t.s. A spasm of envy for her friend's beauty went through her. No wonder the Randy Krentzmans of the world went gaga at the sight of her. She found herself wondering what it would be like to stroke Arleen's hair, the way a boy would, or kiss her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, or her lips. The idea possessed her so suddenly and so forcibly she lost her balance in the water, and swallowed a mouthful as she tried to right herself. Once she had, she turned her back on Arleen, and with a splashing stroke headed into deeper waters.

Up ahead Trudi was shouting something to her.

"What did you say?" Joyce yelled back, subduing her stroke so as to hear better.

Trudi was laughing. "Warm!" she said, splashing around, "it's warm out here!"

"Are you kidding?"

"Come and feel!" Trudi replied.

Joyce began to swim out to where Trudi was treading water, but her friend was already turning from her to follow the call-of the warmth. Joyce could not resist glancing back at Arleen. She had finally deigned to join the swimming party, immersing herself till her long hair spread around her neck like a golden collar, then starting an even-paced stroke towards the center of the lake. Joyce felt something close to fear at the thought of Arleen's proximity. She wanted some leavening company.

"Carolyn!" she called. "Are you coming?"

Carolyn shook her head.

"It's warmer out here," Joyce promised.

"I don't believe you."

"Really it is!" Trudi shouted. "It's beautiful!"

Carolyn seemed to relent, and began to splash her way in Trudi's wake.

Trudi swam on a few more yards. The water was not getting any warmer, but it was becoming more agitated, bubbling up around her like a Jacuzzi. Suddenly unnerved she tried to touch bottom, but the ground had gone from beneath her. Mere yards behind her the water had been at most four and a half feet deep; now her toes didn't even graze solid earth. The ground must have slid away violently, at almost the same spot that the warm current had appeared. Taking courage from the fact that three strokes would take her back to safety she ducked her head below the water.

Though her eyes were bad at a distance her short-range sight was good, and the water was clear. She could see down the length of her body to her pedalling feet. Beyond them, solid darkness. The ground had simply vanished. Shock made her gasp. She breathed water in through her nose. Spluttering and flailing she threw her head up to s.n.a.t.c.h some air.

Joyce was yelling to her.

"Trudi? What's wrong? Trudi?"

She tried to form some words of warning, but a primal terror had seized her: all she could do was throw herself in the direction of the sh.o.r.e, her panic merely churning the water to fresh and choking frenzy. Darkness below, and something warm there, waiting to pull me down.

In his hiding place on the sh.o.r.e William Witt saw the girl struggling. Her panic made him lose his erection. Something odd was happening out on the lake. He could see darts on the water's surface, circling Trudi Katz, like fish that were only just submerged. Some were breaking off and sliding towards the other girls. He didn't dare cry out. If he did they'd know he'd been spying on them. All he could do was watch with mounting trepidation as the events in the lake unfolded.

Joyce felt the warmth next. It ran over her skin and inside her too, like a swallow of Christmas brandy, coating her innards. The sensation distracted her from Trudi's splashing, and indeed from her own jeopardy. She watched the darting water, and the bubbles breaking the surface all around her, popping like lava, slow and thick, with an odd detachment. Even when she tried to touch bottom, and couldn't, the thought that she might drown was a casual one. There were more important feelings. One, that the air breaking from the bubbles around her was the lake's breath, and breathing it was like kissing the lake. Two, that Arleen would be swimming this way very soon, the golden collar of hair floating in the water behind her. Seduced by the pleasure of the warm water, she didn't forbid herself the thoughts she'd turned her back on mere moments before. Here they were, she and Arleen, buoyed up in the same body of sweet water, getting closer and closer to each other, while the element between them carried the echoes of their every motion back and forth. Perhaps they would dissolve in the water, their bodies become fluid, until they mingled in the lake. She and Arleen, one mixture, released from any need for shame; beyond s.e.x into blissful singularity.

The possibility was too exquisite to be postponed a moment longer. She threw her arms above her head and let herself sink. The spell of the lake, however, powerful as it was, couldn't quite discipline the animal panic that rose in her as the water closed over her head. Without her willing it, her body began to resist the pact she'd made with the water. She began to struggle wildly, reaching up to the surface as if to s.n.a.t.c.h a handhold of air.

Both Arleen and Trudi saw Joyce go under. Arleen instantly went to her aid, shouting as she swam. Her agitation was matched by the water around her. Bubbles rose on all sides. She felt their pa.s.sage, like hands brushing her belly, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and between her legs. At their caress the same dreaminess that had caught Joyce, and had now subdued Trudi's panic, took hold of her. There was no specific object of desire to carry her under, however. Joyce was conjuring the image of Randy Krentzman (who else?) but for Arleen her seducer was a crazy quilt of famous faces. Dean's cheekbones, Sinatra's eyes, Brando's sneer. She succ.u.mbed to this patchwork the same way Joyce and, a few yards from her Trudi, had. She threw up her arms and let the waters take. her.

From the safety of the shallows Carolyn watched the behavior of her friends, appalled. Seeing Joyce go under she'd a.s.sumed there was something in the water, dragging her down. But the behavior of Arleen and Trudi gave the lie to that. She witnessed them plainly giving up. Nor was this simple suicide. She'd been close enough to Arleen to observe a look of pleasure crossing that beautiful face before it sank. She'd even smiled! Smiled, then let herself go.

These three girls were Carolyn's only friends in the world. She could not simply watch them drown. Though the water where they'd disappeared was becoming more frenzied by the moment she struck out for the place using the only stroke she was faintly proficient in: an ungainly mixture of doggy-paddle and crawl. Natural laws, she knew, were on her side. Fat floated. But that was little comfort as she saw the ground falling away beneath her feet. The bottom of the lake had vanished. She was swimming over a fissure, which was somehow claiming the other girls.

Ahead of her, an arm broke the surface. In desperation she reached for it. Reached; s.n.a.t.c.hed; connected. As she took hold, however, the water around her began to churn with fresh fury. She made a cry of horror. Then the hand she'd grasped took fierce hold of her, and dragged her down.

The world went out like a pinched flame. Her senses deserted her. If she was still holding somebody's fingers she couldn't feel them. Nor, though her eyes were open, could she see anything in the murk. Vaguely, distantly, she was aware that her body was drowning; that her lungs were filling with water through her gaping mouth, her last breath leaving her. But her mind had forsaken its casing and was drifting away from the flesh it had been hostage to. She saw that flesh now: not with her physical eyes (they were still in her head, rolling wildly) but with her mind's sight. A barrel of fat, rolling and pitching as it sank. She felt nothing for its demise, except perhaps disgust at the rolls of blubber, and the absurd inelegance of her distress. In the water beyond her body the other girls still resisted. Their thrashings were also, she presumed, merely instinctual. Their minds, like hers, had probably floated out of their heads, and were watching the spectacle with the same dispa.s.sion. True, their bodies were more attractive than hers, and thus perhaps more painful in the losing. But resistance was, in the end, a waste of effort. They were all going to die very soon, here in the middle of this midsummer lake. Why?