“Hello-o-o! I wondered if you'd come.”
I didn't locate the source of the voice right away, but I knew it was Helen. I looked around the lake, then spotted some ripples almost at the far edge opposite me, nearly fifty yards distant. Right in the center of the ripples was Helen's head, but she had her silver-blonde hair tucked into a white bathing cap.
She laughed and the happy sound floated across the water. “Come on in,” she called. “This is wonderful!”
“I can't, Helen. No suit.”
She laughed delightedly. “You're one of Raul's prudes,” she shouted, then turned and began swimming toward me, her arms flashing in a smooth, strong crawl. As she drew near I could see that she was wearing a brief, white, two-piece suit that gleamed through the water. When she got closer I could see that it was skin-tight. I remembered Helen's saying something at our first meeting about being darkly tanned except for “two white strips; little narrow white strips.” I took a good look. No wonder it was skin-tight: it was skin.
She stopped swimming about ten yards out in the water, then came in another yard or two till her feet touched the lake's bottom. “Hi,” she said. “Neither do I. Have a suit, I mean.”
“You know,” I said, “I think I find that interesting. I had almost guessed.” I could see the pale gleam of her flesh under the water, distorted by the refraction of light. Not too distorted.
“You coming in?” she asked me. She chuckled. “You don't know how good it feels. You'll like it, Shell.”
“Bet I would. Uh, I dunno.”
“I've been all alone here. Not a soul but me—and you, now. It's like being cut off from the rest of the world. Come on in, I'll race you across.”
I didn't say anything, just looked at her as she smiled at me. She gave a little push with her feet and floated toward me, almost up to the very shallow water extending a few feet inward from the lake's edge. Then she curled around and floated on her back, kicking her feet and pulling her arms slowly through the clear water as she moved away from me again and stopped about where she'd been before. If that was a suit, it was the goddamnedest suit I'd ever seen.
“I hoped you'd come, Shell. Hurry up.” She paused for a long moment. “Hurry up and get undressed. You can't swim in all that. Well? Last chance, Shell. Better hurry.”
She turned and began swimming lazily toward the center of the lake. I thought about all this for a minute. Come to think of it, I'd given this lovely little doll a pretty bad time. I hadn't meant to, but if I ran away again she'd think I didn't like her, that something was horribly wrong with her. She'd start wondering what she'd done to deserve this. She might start thinking she had no sex appeal. She might lose her grip on reality, that was what. Yes, sir, she'd go mad. I certainly couldn't let her go mad.
The water sure did look good. I got up and went over behind my boulder and took off my clothes. I had it figured out now: I owed it to Helen. Hell, I owed it to me.
I was all ready to go, but I still stood behind the boulder. Right then I thought of Sherry, but it seemed a little late to back out now. To be perfectly frank, I didn't intend to back out. Still, I wanted to be sure I had this all figured out logically. I was sure I did, but I was convincing myself. From about twenty yards out Helen called, “Hurry up!" and that finished convincing me.
I ran pell-mell around the boulder and my feet splashed in the water. Helen squealed. I let out some sort of squeal myself. Then I dived in and started swimming toward her.
She waited for me, not swimming away, not racing me across. Five yards from her I stopped swimming and looked at her. She was moving her arms easily, holding herself afloat.
“That's better,” she said. “I was beginning to wonder if you were coming in. Doesn't it feel good?”
“It does.” I paddled slowly toward her.
“Shell,” she said. “I'll meet you halfway.”
The few feet between us melted until we were two feet apart, one foot, and then nothing was between us. Helen's skin was incredibly smooth in the water as it touched against me and flowed liquidly against my hand. She smiled, close to me, holding her head above the water as I reached for her and stroked her skin with one hand, then had to sweep both hands through the water to keep from going under.
Helen laughed and swam backward a few feet from me, then forward again. “I told you it was nice in the water, Shell. Doesn't it feel good?” She laughed again and repeated, “Shell, doesn't it feel good?”
“Wonderful,” I said, then added, perhaps a bit ungraciously, “A guy could drown.”
She spun around in the water, still laughing, and swirled in a complete circle, as happy and abandoned and unself-conscious as if she were a child who had never learned one mustn't do this or do that, had never heard which moral or religious taboos were momentarily being observed. It occurred to me that, in her own way, Helen was just as honest as my friend Captain Samson.
She swam up to me again. “A guy could,” she said. “Shell, hold your breath. And then hold me.”
I took a deep breath and held it as her arms went around me and then I pulled her smooth body close against mine and felt her squirming against me, her flesh gliding smoothly against my skin as the water closed over our heads. Under the surface of the water there was shimmering light, and looking through it I could see Helen lean slightly back from me, her eyes open.
Her fingers caressed my back, touched my arms, swept over my body, then she pushed her hands against my chest and wriggled away underwater, swimming rapidly till she arched her body and shot upward. Looking after her I could see the sun-bright ripples spread where she broke the surface and filled her lungs with air, her body seeming suspended from the surface of the lake, and then she curled over and swam downward again, her arms sweeping smoothly ahead of her and then gracefully back to her sides. She was a naked nymph or naiad, lovely and almost unreal, and more graceful here than she had ever seemed before, almost as if this were her natural element, as if she were actually one of those mythical goddesses who lived in fabled waters.
I surfaced and gulped at the air, then dived and swam to Helen again as she watched me and moved her arms only enough to keep her submerged beneath me. It was as though she lay on her back a few yards from me, suspended on an invisible cushion underneath her, her long, curving legs stretching downward toward the bed of the lake. She seemed to hang there in watery dimness as I drew nearer, as if we were swimming in a fluid space that half supported us, and then I felt the touch of her hands again and her yielding flesh against my fingers. Her touch was sometimes light and gentle, almost indistinguishable from the cool caress of the water, and again it was heavy and demanding, and once I felt the sting of her nails.
She swam away from me, surfaced, and stroked for the far shore as I followed her. She reached the edge and walked out of the water until she stood on green grass, then turned and waited with her arms at her sides as I felt the soft earth beneath my feet. She waited for me as I walked toward her, the sun behind her outlining her body and glinting from the bright droplets that clothed her. I reached her and our arms went around each other and finally our lips came together in the culmination of all our play and caresses. For immeasurable time we stood there, pressed close together, and I could feel the red beat of the sun against my closed eyelids, feel the pulse of Helen's heart mingling with mine, and then slowly, with our lips still tightly joined, we sank to the grass at the lake's edge to lie there full length beneath the sun as it moved across the sky and edged closer to the horizon.
We had been talking for quite a while. I had told Helen of my growing up in L.A., going to war, and then settled all the problems of the universe, as men will. She'd told me of her childhood in a small town in Colorado, high-school dramatics, jobs, the movie talent scout. She shifted on the grass and continued talking. “So I made a test and got the part. Had a few supporting roles at Paramount, but then they forgot to pick up my option. After that Genova gave me the starring roles in ‘Jungle Woman’ and ‘Jun
gle Girl.'”
“You can star in my movie when I make one.”
“Oh? You going to make one?”
“No.”
“Well, it was a nice thought,” she said. She looked down the length of her body. “I'd better be careful. I'll get sunburned.”
“Go get some clothes on and you won't. But on the other hand, what's a little sunburn? I'll probably peel all over.” I grinned at her. “I think my back is peeling already.”
She laughed. “Your back? You know, I thought you didn't like me. I thought something was wrong with me.”
“You know better now?”
“Uh-huh. Glad you ... came swimming?”
“That's obviously a rhetorical question.”
“If you ask me,” she said seriously, “I think we're pretty good swimmers.”
“Agreed. And if you don't get dressed I'll take you swimming again.”
She laughed, got up, and ran into the water. I got to my feet, a bit unsteadily, perhaps, but she shouted, “You stay there. I'm all grassy.” She swam out a few yards, then back, and stood at the edge of the water again. “Look, Shell. September Morn.”
“September Morn was more modest. But, then, I never much cared for September Morn.”
She walked out of the water. “Keep away from me,” she said. “I've got to get back to the set.”
“Where's your stuff? Your clothes, I mean.”
“Over there.” She grinned. “In the bushes. I'm getting dressed.”
I looked far across the lake to a little pebble behind which were my clothes. I wondered if I could swim all that way.
Helen saw where I was looking and said, “I'll meet you over there, Shell.”
“O.K.” She disappeared into the brush. I looked out across Lake Michigan. I looked a while longer and waded into the Atlantic. I was going to have to stop smoking. I was sure going to have to stop something or other.
I swam about thirty yards and stopped and dog-paddled. Be sad if I got stuck here and drowned. Be like they say, though, if a bit indirect: Be a wonderful way to die.
At last I kicked out with my feet and got ready to have at it again, and almost simultaneously with my movement a little waterspout kicked up in front of my nose and I heard a loud bang. That was odd, I thought. That bang had sounded like a gun going off. And that little waterspout was like a bullet might make plowing into the water. It was odd. Hunters? What the hell were they hunting for, fish? I looked to my right and suddenly realized it was open season on Shell Scott. That's what they were hunting.
“They” consisted of two guys at the edge of the lake on my right, maybe forty yards from me. It looked as if one of them had a pistol in his hand, but from forty yards away it didn't worry me much. The guy with the rifle worried me, though. I saw him snap the gun to his shoulder and point the damned thing at me and I started swimming like a fiend. I must have leaped halfway out of the water and my arms started whirling like propellers.
Even with all the noise I was making I heard the sharp crack of the rifle and felt something burn across my back. I nearly fainted. I tell you something in all sincerity: There is almost nothing as disheartening as somebody shooting bullets at you. Those things can kill you.
I was closer to shore now, but the two men were running around the edge of the lake to cut me off. For a moment I didn't know what to do, and the thought flashed through my mind that first it had been the little guy with the bald spot and now it was two gunmen; somebody was working hard at killing me. And unless I did something quick, this time he'd make the grade.
For a long second my thoughts were confused, and then out of nowhere the picture of Helen's shapely body twisting and arching underwater came to me and I saw the obvious way to get away from these guys. Deep underwater they couldn't see me, but I had to come up sometime for sure. If I came up near them, I'd come up with a hole in my skull.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw the two men running on my right, then one of them stopped and dropped to one knee, and I knew he was aiming at me. I didn't dive right then; I just had to hope, if I was going to get out of this at all, that the guy would miss this once more. I swung my body around to my left and took three hard strokes toward the far bank away from the men, angling in toward the shore I'd started for originally, feeling a dozen times in those short two seconds the thud of a metal-jacketed slug plowing into my back. But the thud didn't come, though somewhere in there I heard the rifle crack, and the zing of the bullet ricocheting from the flat surface of the water. I sucked in all the air I could hold and dived. Deep under the water I doubled back and started swimming as fast as I could toward the spot where I'd last seen the two men. If they ran on down toward the far bank I'd be O.K.—if I could last to the lake's edge. But there was no if about it; I had to last.
I swam with my eyes open, forcing myself to stay down beneath the surface, pressure already building up in my eardrums and the ringing starting inside my head. I swept my arms back with all my strength and kept my feet churning frantically—and I still hadn't felt the lake bottom under my fingers. I could feel the pressure swelling at the back of my fingers, getting stronger and almost painful as my blood ate the oxygen out of my lungs. I couldn't last much longer, I knew, but the bank couldn't be far away now.
Then my fingers scraped the lake bottom and I could see, as if through a haze, the surface of the water only four or five feet above me. I gave one more lunge, kicking hard with my legs, then got my feet in the ooze beneath me and straightened up as I thrust myself forward.
There was going to be no looking around and trying this a second time. Wherever I came up I had to start running—either away from those two bastards or straight toward them. I couldn't give them time to set up on opposite sides of the lake and make bets on which one would get to shoot me.
My head burst from the water as I straightened up, the water still waist-deep, but I plowed forward through it, forcing my tired muscles and looking sharply around to find the men.
I saw them thirty yards on my left, still looking out toward the middle of the lake. The resisting water dragged against my hips, holding me back, slowing me down as I slashed through it toward solid ground. I heard one of the men yell and then there was the heavy cough of a big handgun and a slug split the air alongside me. As my feet splashed clear of the water I heard another shot and from the corner of my eye saw the two goons start running toward me. I put my head down and sprinted with all my strength toward the protective covering of brush a few feet ahead, then crashed through it and into the gray shadows of the trees.
I ran at top speed for another twenty or thirty strides, then had to slow down. I'd had to hold my breath too long underwater and I was faint and dizzy. Spots swarmed in front of my eyes and my heart slammed solidly inside my chest. I kept running, hardly more than trotting, trying to suck in enough air through my open mouth to clear the fuzziness from my mind. At least I was leading these goons away from Helen. Sure, that's what I was doing: I was running away to protect her. Finally I stopped for a few seconds and listened.
I could hear them charging along behind me, getting closer, and finally I spotted a flash of green from one man's shirt. It was the guy with the pistol and he blazed away at me again.
What the hell; I started running some more.
Even those few seconds of rest had helped, and though I didn't think I could run to L.A. at this pace, I could keep on a while. And I guess I must have gotten a second wind, or a third one or something, because my breathing came a little easier and pretty soon I was flying through the jungle like crazy. Now I was really moving. The two who had chosen me were right behind, though, and I couldn't tell if they were gaining or not; it didn't seem possible. They were still shooting at me, too, and you know how I feel about bullets.
I was scared, all right. I was so scared that if I'd had time I'd have stopped right there in the bushes. But I sure didn't have the time. And, man, I was running. I was running so fast I thought my legs were just going to rip
away from me and go chattering through the woods. I only hoped no tree showed up smack in front of me, because it would have been me or the tree. I was on a 180-degree kick, and I couldn't even veer without busting something.
I was stepping on thorns and pebbles and brambles but I kept on going. Feet, I said, you don't feel nothin'; but finally I started slowing down more and more; I wanted to keep running, I wanted to very badly, but I was wearing down to a nub. I was working just as hard at it, but I wasn't going very fast any longer. The men behind me sounded closer now, though there hadn't been any shots for a while. Then, suddenly and frighteningly, I burst into a familiar spot and knew I'd have to change course.
The cliff I'd looked over earlier this morning was dead ahead now; I was back where I'd started. And I didn't think I could make it more than ten feet farther. I was dizzy, and as tired as I'd ever been in my life, and I was damn near ready to stop and let the boys shoot me. I couldn't have slugged either one of them hard enough to bend one of their whiskers. I was pooped.
But I managed to keep my feet moving, as behind me the crashing sounds got closer and louder. I saw the tree Raul and King had been discussing this morning, and I looked at the little ladder up its side—with no amusement this time. I started to trot right on by, and then I stopped. If I could get up those silly steps into the tree, maybe those bastards chasing me would run right on by and over the cliff, and I'd stand on my platform and listen to them thud, and laugh and laugh and fall out of the tree. It seemed entirely logical, so up I went.
I made it, somehow, and while I crouched in my tree the goons burst out of the brush and went charging around thirty feet below me. They didn't run over the cliff, worse luck, but one of them burst through the brush before it and let out a huge squawk, then came back and babbled something to his partner. They both went out and looked over the cliff's edge, but I knew they didn't see me down there. Then they came back through the brush, saying something I couldn't hear, and standing still while they listened to see if they could hear me.
Way of a Wanton Page 14