pleasant little drive in the country with a trunk full of stolen caviar. When we passed the Crouch place he looked at me and grinned.
"I saw lights."
"You saw bullshit."
His mood got us all happy.
Casey said that Kim's straw hat looked like something out of Elvira Madigan by way of Kate Hepburn. Steve picked it up with peasant-girl jokes and farm girl jokes, most of which centered on Kimberley's ample breasts and thighs, her most conspicuous features. Kim countered with references to the weekend "orgy" between Casey and me, and the whole thing got pretty tasteless,
We did plenty of laughing. Finally Casey made some comment about the inevitability of a discussion of Kimberley's breasts in any social gathering in which she, Kimberley, was a part, and Kim pulled off the big wide-brimmed hat and stuffed it under the seat and said, okay, you want 'em, you got 'em, and proceeded to peel off the powder blue tank top she was wearing and toss it over her head into the wind.
We watched it flutter down behind us.
We were about a mile from the beach and there she sat, half-naked, her nipples puckering in the breeze.
"Cute," said Casey. "Now what are you gonna wear home?"
Kim giggled. "You worried about it? You shouldn't be. You better wonder what you're gonna wear!" There was a brief struggle behind us.
Moments later Casey's work shirt was observed to waft through the air and drape itself over a roadside cattail.
So now we had two half-naked women in the backseat. The road ahead was deserted. Behind us too. But I kept seeing squad cars pulling us over, officers peering ironically. The girls were laughing so hard their faces flushed red.
"Well, sh/t!" said Steven.
The car began to weave and halt fitfully as he unzipped his jeans and worked them over first one leg and then the other over his sneakers. It took a while but finally he was out of them. I was glad to see he had his briefs.
He placed wallet, belt, and house keys neatly on the seat beside him and handed me a fistful of change and then flipped the pants
over his head. We watched them twist away behind us. He looked at me.
"You next."
"Not me."
"Come on."
I tried to look as serious as possible. "You know I hate people to see the catheter."
We made it to our deserted rocky spot on the beach without incident. We ate the odd smorgasbord lunch.
"You know," I said, "I keep wishing for a ham sandwich."
Steve nodded. "Yeah. I got to stop stealing."
Kim halted in the middle of a bite of cheese and cracker. She looked at us and then at herself.
"What are we gonna do about going home?" she said.
I laughed the caviar all over my hand.
The day turned sour.
I was lying on my back, half-asleep, letting the sun bake me. By now my ass was as brown as the rest of me, my modesty having long since gone the way of caution in anything which was related to them. Kim was sitting beside me on a towel rubbing oil into her arms and shoulders. I heard the shout from Steven and the hissing intake of breath from her simultaneously. Both sounds full of sudden fear.
I was up and on my feet in an instant, while Kim was still reacting to what she'd seen.
Part of it I understood immediately.
Steve and Casey had been standing atop the same rock she and I had climbed the first day, that place where gulls had littered the surface with the shells of crabs and oysters. Now she was alone there. Looking down at Steven. In her posture there was a strange tension, not of fear but of anger.
There was something disjointed-looking about his limbs, a loss of skill in both arms and legs that made me worry not so much about breakage as concussion.
I ran. I sensed Kim a few steps behind me. When I reached him he was trying to rise again. He fell back heavily on his chest. There was no sand where he was, only stones. It must have hurt him. I
heard the breath rush out of his lungs,