Nebraska

A rowboat had scraped bottom, and two adolescent girls with jammy lipstick, Gordon's sister and her girlfriend, motioned for him to come over. Gordon waded to where the water was warm at his calves and climbed darkly up his pant legs. “What're you doing, Sis?”

“Having fun. Where's Bijou?”

“On the beach, Goofy.”

His sister strained to see around him. "Where?"

He turned. Bijou and Frankie had disappeared.

Frankie strolled the hot white sand with his cousin and sipped orange soda through the straw. Hecklers repeatedly whistled at Bijou and Frankie winked at them. “Hear that? You're the berries, kid. You're driving these wiseacres off their nut.”

“Oh, those wolves do that to any female.”

“Baloney!” He was about to make a statement but became cautious and revised it. “What am I, nine years older than you?”

“I think so,” Bijou said.

“And what about GI Joe?”

Bijou glanced over her shoulder and saw her boyfriend hunting someone on the beach. Gordon squinted at her and she waved, but he seemed to look past her. “He's twenty-one,” she said.

“Four years older. What's he doing with a kid like you for his bim?”

“He's mad about me, Stupid.”

Frankie snickered. He crossed his ankles and settled down in the bathhouse shade. Bijou sat next to him. Frankie pushed his cigarette down in the sand and lit another, clinking his lighter closed. “Do you and Gordo smooch?”

Bijou prodded sand from bet

ween her toes. “Occasionally.”

“How shall I put it? You still Daddy's little girl?”

“You're making me uncomfortable, Frankie.”

“Nah, I'm just giving you the needle.”

The corporal was confused. His nose and shoulders were sunburned and his legs ached and Bijou and Frankie had flat out evaporated. His sister and her girlfriend stroked the rowboat ahead and Gordon sat on the rim board near a forward oarlock, scouting the immeasurable Playland beach. Soon his sister complained that she was tired and bored and blistered, and Gordon said, “All right already. Cripes—don't think about me. Do what you want to do.”

After a while Frankie clammed up and then decided he wanted a little exercise and removed his tie and pink coat as he walked past the USO stand to the gym equipment. He performed two pull-ups on the chalked high bar, biting his cigarette, then amused a nurse in the first-aid station with his impressions of Peter Lorre, Ronald Colman, Lionel Barrymore.

“I love hearing men talk,” the nurse said. “That's what I miss most.”

“Maybe I could close this door,” Frankie said.

“You can't kiss me, if that's what you're thinking. I'm not fast.”

“Maybe I should amscray, then.”

“No!” the nurse said, and shocked herself with her insistence. “Oh, shoot.” She turned her back and walked to the sickbed. “Go ahead and close the door.”

Anchored in Playland's twenty-foot waters were five diving platforms fixed as star points radiating out from a giant red diving tower with swooping steel buttresses and three levels, the topmost being a crow's nest that was flagged with snapping red pennants. It reached one hundred feet above the surface and was closed off except for the professionals paid to somersault dangerously from the perch at two and four in the afternoon, nine o'clock at night.

And there Gordon had his sister and her girlfriend row him after he'd wearied of looking for Bijou. The boat banged into a steel brace, and the corporal left his cane and walked off the board seat to a ladder slat. He ascended to the first elevation and saw only shivering children who leaned to see that the bottom was unpopulated, then worked up their courage and leapt, shouting paratrooper jump calls. At the second elevation was a short man with gray hair and a very brief suit and skin nearly chocolate brown. The man paused at the edge, adjusting his toes, and then jackknifed off, and Gordon bent out to see him veer into the water sixty feet down. Gordon wanted to recoup, to do something masculine and reckless and death-defying. He yelled to the platform below him, “Anybody down there?” and there was no answer. Then he saw a woman in a white bathing suit like Bijou's underwater near the tower. Her blond hair eddied as she tarried there below the surface. Gordon grinned.

His sister and her girlfriend were spellbound. They saw Gordon carefully roll up his pant cuffs and yank his belt tight through his brass buckle clasp. They saw him simply walk off the second level into a careening drop that lasted almost two seconds. A geyser shot up twenty feet when he smacked the water, then the surface ironed out and his sister worried; finally he burst up near the boat.

“Something's down there!”