Crying Wolf (9 page)

“This is costing money,” Patti said, sniffling. “I should go. Love you.”

“Have a good Christmas,” Nat told her.

“Nat?” His mom.

“Hi.”

“Have a wonderful holiday. And do something nice for the Zorns, if you can.”

But I should go back to school, Mom. Or maybe home.
Couldn't say it, of course, for a number of reasons.

The maid took the phone away.

“Your mother sounds so nice,” said Mrs. Zorn.

“She is.” He thought he heard that strange, powerful tone in his voice again. Part of it was because she was so much more than that; the rest was the word
nice
itself. Nice, nice, nice: it was starting to grate on him.

“I'm sure of it,” said Mrs. Zorn.

Nat saw that she had finally eaten her little bit of omelet, finished the frothy blue drink.

“What were you saying about Izzie?”

“Izzie? Oh, yes. She dumped Paolo. Or vice versa. Or both at the same time. She's not taking it well. It's a vulnerable age.” Mrs. Zorn looked down at her empty plate. “Like all the others.”

 

H
e said yes.

“ ‘No more exploitation'—that sounds to my ears like promising a life in which there will be no organic functions.” Identify the quotation and discuss in relation to any one organic function. Five hundred words.

—In-class assignment, Philosophy 322

N
o airfare, no hotel: not that kind of thing.

It was the kind of thing where you drove to a private airfield in one of three limousines, sitting beside a friendly-looking man named Andy Ling who asked friendly questions about you; where you boarded a private plane with a big black
Z
painted on the fuselage; where a square-jawed pilot resembling the hero of
Planet of the Apes
—Nat couldn't remember the actor's name—invited you into the cockpit; where you sat around a white-clothed table in the tail section and ate foie gras before you even knew what it was; where you began to develop a preference for Krug champagne over the others you'd been trying; where the maid who resembled a Clear Creek High cheerleader—go Bisons!—plumped up a soft pillow before placing it behind your head; where you slept and dreamed one of those soaring dreams you sometimes had, but for the first time within a soaring reality, soothed like a baby by the hum of jet engines.

To sleep like a baby; to wake over a world of liquid emerald; to land on a tropic isle; to stand in the open doorway of the plane, feeling for the first time that air, smelling those smells; to be aware of all those old boyhood pirate stories stirring in memory, coming to life.

“Welcome to Aubrey's Cay,” said Mrs. Zorn; perhaps a little drunk—Nat saw how Anton discreetly helped her down the stairs. “Our little piece of paradise.”

“That's not true,” Grace said.

Mrs. Zorn, on the black-paved airstrip—it felt soft under Nat's feet—turned quickly, almost lost her balance. “What's not true?” she said. Her eyes were concealed by oversized sunglasses, but he suspected they wore that alarmed look again.

“What you said. It's some kind of lease. We don't actually own it. Do we, Dad?”

Mr. Zorn, talking on a cell phone in the shade of the starboard wing, didn't reply.

“Dad. I asked you a question.”

“Your father is busy,” said Mrs. Zorn.

“Piss on that,” said Grace, and strode toward one of the waiting jeeps.

Nat didn't know what to make of this exchange. Maybe Grace was a little drunk too. All it showed him for sure was that none of this—translucent green sea, white beaches, red-flowering trees by the side of the strip, the air, the smells, not even this tiny orange bird streaking by, which no one seemed to notice—was new to them.

 

N
o hotel. None necessary: The Zorns had a big yellow house with red shutters on the east side of the hill that dominated the island. There were two villas on the beach below the house, servants' quarters in a banana grove halfway down the back of the hill, a boathouse big enough for a cigarette boat and a few smaller ones at the head of the little natural harbor on the west side. Not a big island, but beautiful and all theirs, owned or leased.

Nat's room was at the end of a marble corridor in the big house. It opened onto a balcony with a view of Tortola and some other islands; on a chaise longue lay a bathing suit. Nat hadn't brought one. He tried the suit on; the European kind, skimpier than what he would wear, but it fit.

Nat crossed a huge room with a fountain, cool, although all the windows were open to the hot afternoon, looking for anyone who wanted a swim. But no one was around; the house was silent. He walked outside, down stone steps toward the beach. A bright green lizard skittered away from him; he smelled intoxicating smells; passed a tree bearing an applelike green fruit and a sign on the trunk:
Manchineel—Touche Pas!;
heard a voice drifting down, almost out of range, but clear enough in the still air: “I thought maybe he'd amuse the girls, that's all.” Mrs. Zorn, almost certainly; followed by low male rumblings. At that moment it occurred to Nat that the friendly-looking man in the limousine, Andy Ling, hadn't been on the plane.

The path wound past the two villas, both silent, cut through a palm grove—he picked a coconut off the ground, felt its weight, heard the milk sloshing inside—ended at the beach. Nat walked across the white sand, powdery and hot on the soles of his feet, and into the ocean. This green ocean: pale green by the shoreline, so pale it was almost colorless if you looked straight down; which Nat did, and saw a fish swimming by his feet, a fish similar in size and shape to Lorenzo, but not quite as spectacular, simply deep blue with red lips. At first contact, this water—the Caribbean Sea!—felt the same as his own temperature; then it cooled slightly, just enough to tingle against his skin. All his muscles, his whole body, relaxed at once, a more complete release of tension than he could ever remember, as though his physical self had been waiting a lifetime for this moment, his first immersion in salt water.

Nat wasn't much of a swimmer—Clear Creek High had no pool and the river had become too shallow for swimming—but when the water reached his chest, he slid the rest of the way in and swam a few strokes. Maybe more than a few, because when he stopped and glanced around he was surprised at the distance to the beach. Surprised but not worried: with the increased buoyancy of the salt water, he found he could stay on the surface with almost no effort, and besides, there was that perfect, soothing temperature. He turned his face to the sun, closed his eyes, heard the gentle rippling of the sea around him, the call of a strange bird somewhere above, and nothing else. But that nothing else, that silence, was not like any silence he was used to, but somehow powerful, impending, the background sound, new to him, of the air or sky itself.

Then something grabbed his leg.

Nat kicked out sharply, took a thrashing stroke or two in the wrong direction, out to sea. Whatever was beneath him shot to the surface right before his eyes, a strange and terrifying creature. For a moment Nat couldn't put the pieces together. Then he saw: snorkel, mask, and wet golden-brown hair he'd mistaken for seaweed.

Izzie.

She spat out her snorkel and said, “Boo.”

Nat stopped thrashing, tried to tread water in some sort of measured way. Her eyes watched him from behind the mask.

“Did I scare you?”

“No.” But his heart was beating fast.

She took off her mask, turned her head, emptied her nostrils into the sea. “That's the dorkiest thing I've ever seen in swimwear,” she said.

“It's not mine.”

“You stole it from Pee-wee Herman?”

His heartbeat slowed to something a little less crazy. “No need. We're like this.”

She laughed. He laughed. He noticed that she didn't appear to be treading water at all, or to be making the least effort to stay afloat, just rose and fell gently with the rhythm of the waves. He also noticed that she wasn't wearing a bathing suit top.

She noticed him noticing. “Maybe you are a bit like him.”

He tore his eyes away.

“Aubrey's Cay is topless,” she said. “Like St. Bart's.”

“What's that?”

“Just another island. But leads the Caribbean in boobs and baguettes. To quote Paolo.” Her mood changed; he could see it in her eyes, as though someone had hit the dimmer.

“Nat?”

“Yeah?”

“The thing you said to him the other night—‘what's a gentleman called now,' or whatever it was?”

He nodded.

“Thanks.”

“Hey,” said Nat.

“Grace always said he was a jerk. She was his first choice, by the way.”

“She was?”

“She had a boyfriend of her own at the time.”

“And now?”

A wave rippled by, a green wave rippling a green reflection in her eyes. “No. He had personal problems.”

“Like what?”

“He was sort of married.”

“Sort of?”

“You know.”

But he didn't. Out there, offshore and separated from everyone else, Nat asked a question he might not have asked on land. “Have you had any married boyfriends?”

“What do you take me for?”

Nat laughed. She raised an eyebrow—her right, the opposite of Grace. Did it have something to do with the way the egg had split?

“What are you thinking about?” she said.

“Eggs.”

“Eggs?”

“Eggs and you.”

“You're funny,” Izzie said.

They fell silent. There was no sound but that of the sea; the sea, which began moving her a little closer to him. Their legs touched under the surface. Since the water was so clear they could have glanced down easily and seen this contact, but neither did: they pretended it was happening somewhere else, out of sight. But it was happening, all right; Nat felt something new going through him, or perhaps something he'd known before, just magnified by the emerald water, the deep blue sky, the scented air.

Izzie backed away. Nat saw for the first time that she had a speargun in one hand, dangling down in the water.

“What's that for?”

“You like seafood?”

“Yes,” he said, although his mom almost never served it.

Izzie checked the sun, lower over the island now, and pulled down her mask. “Jukin' time,” she said.

“Jukin' time?”

“When the big ones come out, country boy.”

She stuck the snorkel in her mouth and swam off at a speed that amazed him, her fins, not quite breaking the surface, churning away. In what seemed like seconds, she had rounded a stony point at the south end of the beach and disappeared.

He thought of Patti. She'd spelled
incident
wrong. He'd made spelling mistakes too. Maybe Izzie couldn't spell it either. He thought of testing her on the word, a disgusting idea he quashed almost as soon as it left the gate. And Patti had nice breasts too, although she'd never dream of swimming topless. All this led nowhere, and was still leading nowhere when something tickled his toes. He didn't panic this time, but peered down through the clear water and saw a little green fish nibbling at him. He swam a few lazy strokes, turned on his back, floated under a purpling sky.

Did he actually fall asleep? It was close: his mind drifted, drifted, down into one of the seagoing sagas of his childhood. Pirates, pistols, parrots, pieces of eight. Only a slight chill, the difference between the ocean temperature and his own making itself felt at last, brought him back to full wakefulness. He treaded water, gazed out to sea.

The sun had sunk behind Aubrey's Cay, graying the water around him, except for the wave tips, still liquid emerald. In the distance, light still shone bright, blazing on the sail of a lone windsurfer. With the wind at his back, he approached very quickly, skimming toward the point that Izzie had rounded, disappearing for a few seconds, then reappearing, much closer, cutting back toward the beach. With a sound from his board like tearing paper, the windsurfer blew by Nat, about ten yards away: a brown-tanned, barrel-chested, skinny-legged man, wearing a bathing suit even skimpier than Nat's and a look of glee on his face. He ran his board right onto the beach, skipped nimbly off, noticed Nat, waved. Nat swam in.

The windsurfer—older than Nat had first thought, with a trim gray beard and gray hair, long, wild, matted with salt water—was lowering the sail.

“I saw you were in residence,” he said, nodding up toward the house; a white flag with a black
Z
on it now flew over the roof. “And so dropped in. You're the physical trainer, as I recall? Angelo, is it?”

“No,” Nat said, and introduced himself.

“Not the trainer?”

“A friend.”

“Ah. Of the girls.” He gave Nat a closer look, or perhaps actually saw him for the first time. “Or of one particularly.”

“I'm a friend of the girls.”

“As am I,” the man said. “A friend of the girls, indeed of the whole lovely family.” He held out his hand. “May I present myself? Leo Uzig.”

They shook hands. Leo Uzig's was big, out of proportion to the rest of him, except for his head. “Where did you drop in from, Mr. Uzig?” Nat said.

“Excellent question. You see that island? No. The one to the north. Not that. To the right. South, then. Got it. Discovered, and please spare me the politically correct boilerplate, by Drake in 1568, thus the name of the simple but pleasant Sir Francis Inn, where I spend my Christmases. Also explaining, to anticipate your question, my long association with the Zorns, the blanks easily filled in. You, I take it, are a student at some Ivy institution.”

“Not exactly,” said Nat. “I'm at Inverness.”

“What luck,” said Leo Uzig. “We're fellow inmates, then, you a freshman—you are a freshman?”

“Yes.”

“And me chairman of the department of philosophy. If you'll just help me pull my board above the high-tide line, we can be safely inside before the no-see-ums come out.”

“No-see-ums?” said Nat. Something bit him on the back of the neck.

 

D
inner on the terrace: mosquito coils burning on the tile floor, candles burning on the table, more stars than Nat had ever seen shining in a soft black sky, everyone barefoot except the servants. Professor Uzig sat at Mr. Zorn's end of the table, Anton at Mrs. Zorn's, Albert and Izzie on one side, Grace and Nat on the other. They ate the lobsters Izzie had caught, drank something called goombay smash, then Krug, then a Meursault, and more Krug, while a guitarist brought from Virgin Gorda in the cigarette played in the background and the smells of flowers and of the sea took turns drifting by. Could life really be this sweet? Nat had never even imagined it.

“We're taking Phil three twenty-two from Leo next semester,” Izzie said across the table to Nat, her nose pink from the sun. “You should too.”

“A three hundred course?” Nat said.