It was a day later, but Jack Sawyer was no wiser. He had, however, had one of the greatest nightmares of all time last night. In it, some terrible creature had been coming for his mother - a dwarfish monstrosity with misplaced eyes and rotting, cheesy skin. 'Your mother's almost dead, Jack, can you say hallelujah?' this monstrosity had croaked, and Jack knew - the way you knew things in dreams - that it was radioactive, and that if it touched him, he would die, too. He had awakened with his body drenched in sweat, on the edge of a bitter scream. It took the steady pounding of the surf to reacquaint him with where he was, and it was hours before he could go back to sleep.
He had meant to tell his mother about the dream this morning, but Lily had been sour and uncommunicative, hiding in a cloud of cigarette smoke. It was only as he started out of the hotel coffee shop on some trumped-up errand that she smiled at him a little.
'Think about what you want to eat tonight.'
'Yeah?'
'Yeah. Anything but fast food. I did not come all the way from L.A. to New Hampshire in order to poison myself with hotdogs.'
'Let's try one of those seafood places in Hampton Beach,' Jack said.
'Fine. Go on and play.'
Go on and play, Jack thought with a bitterness utterly unlike him. Oh yeah, Mom, way to go. Too cool. Go on and play. With who? Mom, why are you here? Why are we here? How sick are you? How come you won't talk to me about Uncle Tommy? What's Uncle Morgan up to? What -
Questions, questions. And not one of them worth a darned thing, because there was no one to answer them.
Unless Speedy -
But that was ridiculous; how could one old black man he'd just met solve any of his problems?
Still, the thought of Speedy Parker danced at the edge of his mind as Jack ambled across the boardwalk and down to the depressingly empty beach.
2
This is where the world ends, right? Jack thought again.
Seagulls coursed the gray air overhead. The calendar said it was still summer, but summer ended here at Arcadia Beach on Labor Day. The silence was gray as the air.
He looked down at his sneakers and saw that there was some sort of tarry goo on them. Beach crud, he thought. Some kind of pollution. He had no idea where he had picked it up and he stepped back from the edge of the water, uneasy.
The gulls in the air, swooping and crying. One of them screamed overhead and he heard a flat cracking that was almost metallic. He turned in time to see it come in for a fluttering, awkward landing on a hump of rock. The gull turned its head in rapid, almost robotic movements, as if to verify it was alone, and then it hopped down to where the clam it had dropped lay on the smooth, hard-packed sand. The clam had cracked open like an egg and Jack saw raw meat inside, still twitching . . . or perhaps that was his imagination.
Don't want to see this.
But before he could turn away, the gull's yellow, hooked beak was pulling at the meat, stretching it like a rubber band, and he felt his stomach knot into a slick fist. In his mind he could hear that stretched tissue screaming - nothing coherent, only stupid flesh crying out in pain.
He tried to look away from the seagull again and he couldn't. The gull's beak opened, giving him a brief glimpse of dirty pink gullet. The clam snapped back into its cracked shell and for a moment the gull was looking at him, its eyes a deadly black, confirming every horrible truth: fathers die, mothers die, uncles die even if they went to Yale and look as solid as bank walls in their three-piece Savile Row suits. Kids die too, maybe . . . and at the end all there may be is the stupid, unthinking scream of living tissue.
'Hey,' Jack said aloud, not aware he was doing anything but thinking inside his own head. 'Hey, give me a break.'
The gull sat over its catch, regarding him with its beady black eyes. Then it began to dig at the meat again. Want some, Jack? It's still twitching! By God, it's so fresh it hardly knows it's dead!
The strong yellow beak hooked into the meat again and pulled. Strettttchhhhhh -
It snapped. The gull's head went up toward the gray September sky and its throat worked. And again it seemed to be looking at him, the way the eyes in some pictures seemed always to look at you no matter where you went in the room. And the eyes . . . he knew those eyes.
Suddenly he wanted his mother - her dark blue eyes. He could not remember wanting her with such desperation since he had been very, very small. La-la, he heard her sing inside his head, and her voice was the wind's voice, here for now, somewhere else all too soon. La-la, sleep now, Jacky, baby-bunting, daddy's gone a-hunting. And all that jazz. Memories of being rocked, his mother smoking one Herbert Tareyton after another, maybe looking at a script - blue pages, she called them, he remembered that: blue pages. La-la, Jacky, all is cool. I love you, Jacky. Shhh . . . sleep. La-la.
The gull was looking at him.
With sudden horror that engorged his throat like hot salt water he saw it really was looking at him. Those black eyes (whose?) were seeing him. And he knew that look.
A raw strand of flesh still dangled from the gull's beak. As he looked, the gull sucked it in. Its beak opened in a weird but unmistakable grin.
He turned then and ran, head down, eyes shut against the hot salt tears, sneakers digging against the sand, and if there was a way to go up, go up and up, up to some gull's-eye view, one would have seen only him, only his tracks, in all that gray day; Jack Sawyer, twelve and alone, running back toward the inn, Speedy Parker forgotten, his voice nearly lost in tears and wind, crying the negative over and over again: no and no and no.