Fabulous Creature (2 page)

“Jacky. You come here this minute.”

The new arrival was bikini-clad, probably mid-teens and unmistakably female. A girl, in fact, whom James had specifically noticed twice before during visits to The Camp. The first time talking to a goggle-eyed young man in front of the Commissary, and a few days later on the tennis courts wearing a very short white dress. He remembered particularly because on each occasion, several of Max’s favorite comments had run through his mind. The female sex was one of a great many subjects on which Max was an authority, and there were several things about this girl’s appearance that he would certainly have mentioned. But at the moment even Max’s best comments seemed inadequate—or would have if James had been able to remember any of them.

Wading towards the shore, a pink and tan goddess, risen wet and glistening from the dark waters of the lake, the girl was—terrifying. With a sinking sensation James recognized familiar symptoms: a withering tongue and a brain turning to frozen mush. In total violation of the first Maxian Law—
STAY COOL—
he succumbed to consternation as the hot-pink-bikinied apparition stopped a few feet away, tipped her head to one side, scooped scattered strands of wet blonde hair into a coil and began slowly to wring them out, all the while regarding James with a thoughtful frown.

He tried to return the frown, tried to smile, tried desperately to pretend he’d never noticed her in the first place, and wound up croaking a witless, “Hi.” It was obvious, however, that only his speaking voice had been stricken, because simultaneously his interior voice was clearly telling him what an ass he was making of himself. The girl went on wringing and frowning.

After several eternities her eyes narrowed, and biting her lip, she aimed a finger, pistol-fashion, at his chest. “Ka-pow!” she said, cocking her thumb. “Got it.”

“Got wh-what?”

“I got it. Where I’ve seen you before. Weren’t you hanging around the tennis courts the other day?”

Encouraged by the thought that he’d been noticed—possibly favorably?—he regained the use of at least a part of his wits. “Yes,” he said with what he hoped was quiet dignity, “I was at the courts a few days ago.”

Abruptly the girl stopped wringing out her hair, and sitting down, she pulled one of her feet up into her lap and began to examine its sandy pink bottom. “I know,” she said. “I noticed you. The glasses and…” She glanced at him appraisingly, “…and everything. I stepped on something sharp in that crummy lake.”

James, who could function perfectly well without his glasses except when he wanted to see things very distinctly at a great distance, resisted the urge to snatch them off. “I noticed you, too,” he began lamely—and then was suddenly stricken by a truly Maxian inspiration. He was just gathering his wits to comment suavely on how particularly he’d noticed her, and perhaps even on how very noticeable she was in general, when he was stricken even more forcibly—just below the left shoulder blade. “Ow!” he yelled, leaping to his feet and whirling around in an awkward, sand-scattering convulsion.

Completely ignoring his victim, the infant hit-man was chugging through the sand in the direction taken by his self-propelled dumdum. Still in considerable pain, James shocked himself by almost succumbing to an urge to kick the kid’s feet out from under him before he reached his objective. However, the golf ball, after ricocheting off James’ shoulder blade, had rolled in the direction of the girl, and now she quickly retrieved it by uncoiling herself and stretching backward in a startlingly graceful and sinuous movement.

Bellowing indignantly, the infant charged her, but she dexterously stiff-armed him and then, with one hand on his fat middle, calmly held him at arm’s length while he continued to roar and strike at her hand and arm with small fat-padded fists.

“Isn’t he gross?” she said, smiling with surprising tolerance at the kid who was now trying to bite off one of her fingers.

For some reason the little monster helped. James found that he was relaxing. Probably because with all that yelling and slugging and biting going on, it was impossible for even the most confirmed paranoid to go on considering himself to be the center of possibly unfavorable attention. So he could allow a shred of normal curiosity to enter his brain. It suddenly occurred to him to wonder how the kid had gotten from The Camp to the Willowby beach, since the famous fence separated the beaches, extending well out into the deep water of the lake.

“Where did he come from, anyway?” he asked, glancing toward the top of the fence, just visible beyond the headland.

The girl giggled. “Where do you suppose he came from?” she said, rolling her eyes suggestively.

James felt his face beginning to get hot and, no doubt, red—a ridiculous physical characteristic that had always played a part in his lack of social assurance. “I mean…” He pointed limply towards the fence. “How did—”

“My mother got careless, I guess.” With practiced skill she traded arms, shoving the kid backwards and catching him again with her other hand as he charged forward. “Can you imagine anything so gross. After I’d had thirteen years to get used to being the youngest, she has to go and have this monster.”

He actually relaxed enough to laugh. “What I meant was—” he began, but she interrupted again.

“Wait a minute. He’s wearing me out. I’ve got to get rid of him for a minute.” Holding out the golf ball she said, “Look Jacky. Here it is. Here’s your ball. Now, go get it.” She threw the ball as hard as she could down the beach.

Jacky gave a final angry yelp and trotted off, while the girl watched him go approvingly. “He’s a real killer,” she said. “Isn’t he? I mean for barely two years old?”

Wrapping one of his arms around his neck, James gingerly explored his shoulder blade with the tips of his fingers. “You can say that again,” he said grimly.

She glanced at him quickly, as if surprised. “Oh, the golf ball.” She shrugged. “Well, don’t take it personally. He throws it at everyone.”

“Yeah? Why do you let him? I mean, why doesn’t someone just take it away from him?”

“Oh, we couldn’t do that. He has to have it. It’s a psychological thing. My mom did take it away once, when our cook quit because he hit her in the soufflé, but it didn’t do any good. All he did was scream the house down until he got it back. Even when he just loses it—look out!” Making pistols of both her hands she shot them off into her temples. “Ka-pow! He drives everyone crazy until he gets it back. Besides my dad doesn’t want us to take it away. He thinks Jacky’s old golf ball is a real riot.”

“Doesn’t he ever throw it at him? At your dad?”

“Oh sure. He doesn’t mind.”

James shrugged. “Look,” he said. “What I was trying to ask was, how he got out of The Camp?”

“Oh, that. He crawled under. Down there where the fence goes over those flat boulders at the edge of the beach. There’s a place where the rock dips down a little, and he squeezed through. He wouldn’t come back when I called so I had to swim out around the end of the fence.” She sighed. “I’ve been stuck with him all afternoon. My mom is in the tennis tournament. I probably should have just let him get lost or whatever, except then I wouldn’t have gotten my twenty dollars.”

“Twenty dollars? Just for baby-sitting?”

“Sure. For a whole afternoon with Jacky? What it’s really worth is more like a thousand.”

Glancing up, James noticed Jacky stomping purposefully in their direction, golf ball clutched in sandy fist. “Well, now that you mention it…” he said. The girl was crouching slightly preparing to dodge, and he followed her example.

“Look out,” she said. “Here it comes.” The ball whistled between them, and running after it, she scooped it up and headed towards the fence. “I’ve got to go,” she called. “Come over here and help me get him through the fence.”

James followed, wondering how she planned to get Jacky through the hole, which looked as if it would be a tight squeeze, if he didn’t want to go. Would she try to stuff him through it, or—he grinned, contemplating a more satisfying possibility—perhaps, throw him over the top? But when he reached the fence the problem had already been partly solved. The girl had thrown the golf ball through the fence, and Jacky was already frantically burrowing after it. Now all that remained for James to do was to make sure he didn’t come back while his sister was swimming around the end of the barricade.

It wasn’t too difficult. When Jacky tried to crawl back under, James sat down and, instead of vulnerable hands, used a toothproof hiking boot to shove him back to the other side. And when the kid gave up on the hole and threatened to golf ball him through the fence, he simply spoke to him firmly. “You throw that thing over here, you little turkey, and you’ll never see it again.” He wasn’t sure how much of that Jacky understood, but it seemed to be enough. He was still clutching his Spaulding torpedo when his sister rose from the lake like a hot pink mermaid. Grabbing his wrist she towed him, stiff-legged and bellowing, toward the center of The Camp.

James was still peering through the fence, watching them go with very mixed feelings, when she stopped suddenly and looked back. “Hey!” she called. “I’m Diane Jarrett. Who are you?”

“James! James Fielding!” he shouted, and for once his voice didn’t crack at the crucial moment. In fact, it burst forth with surprising resonance. Like the trumpeting of a bull moose in mating season—he would tell Max. Max would crack up.

I
SAID, ‘HOW IS
Leonardo?’ As a matter of fact, it’s the third time I’ve said, ‘How is Leonardo?’ Where are you this morning, James?”

“What? Oh, I’m sorry.” James brought himself back to bacon and eggs and his mother’s anxious frown from across the breakfast table. “Leonardo is fine. I just have the Jenkins book to finish reading, and I’ll be ready to start the actual writing.”

“Well,” Charlotte said, “I should think you’d have to start soon if you’re going to be able to get it in the mail to Mr. Johnson by August.”

Charlotte meant well, but she was just too accustomed to coping with a husband who made your average run-of-the-mill absentminded professor look like an efficiency expert. James’ father did several things extremely well. He was an excellent lecturer, writer, and historical researcher and a real genius at infecting other people with his own passionate interest in history. But he was a total failure at certain aspects of daily life. At the university Professor Fielding was famous for his tendency to misplace such things as his glasses, his lunch, his wallet, his lecture notes, and, on an average of once a week, his 1969 Volvo. Even after Charlotte had it painted bright red. Half the people on campus had a funny story about helping him rummage through all six of the campus parking lots looking for it. There were a lot of other stories, too. One of the most famous dated back to the pre-Volvo days when Professor Fielding used to walk to school in good weather. One morning Charlotte had handed him the garbage pail to deposit on the curb as he left, and some time later he had arrived in the classroom with his briefcase in one hand and the garbage in the other. In fact, James sometimes privately compared his father to a very powerful airplane that had somehow been manufactured without a starter, navigational device, or a steering mechanism. Over the years there would have been a lot of crashes if it hadn’t been for Charlotte.

James, himself, on the other hand, was an entirely different matter. Very early on—perhaps as a reaction to hearing his father chuckled about—he had decided to be famous someday, not only for his creative genius—exact area yet to be decided upon—but also for his brisk efficiency in everyday matters.

“Don’t worry,” he told his mother. “The essay will be done in plenty of time.” The essay on Leonardo da Vinci was the extra credit project that James had contracted to do as a part of his petition to finish high school in three years instead of four. The research was really no problem, since he had been a da Vinci fan for years—ever since William’s sabbatical, which the Fieldings had spent in Italy, near the village where Leonardo was born. There was, however, some reading he’d meant to do. He’d come to the wilderness equipped with a couple of new biographies, which he’d intended to read before he began to write. And, although there was no reason at all for Charlotte to worry, he had to admit that he hadn’t accomplished nearly as much as he’d intended to by now. What had made the difference was the fact that the wilderness hadn’t turned out to be as much of a bore as he’d expected.

At first it had been the forest itself. Before that summer James hadn’t particularly related to trees, having been well acquainted with only the few rather uninspired specimens to be found in backyards and in the scientifically groomed and landscaped groves of the university campus. Not that he had anything against them. It was just that trees, as such, had failed to make any significant impact on his philosophy of life in general. But that state of affairs had begun to change almost the moment the Fieldings moved into a cabin entirely surrounded for miles and miles by almost nothing else. The trees were everywhere, ancient stately trees; ragged shaggy undomesticated giants, possessed of towering dignity and a strange, almost intimidating mystery. From the first day he had been strangely and entirely unexpectedly fascinated. Passing up the more obvious pleasures of the lake, the swimming and boating and fishing, he had taken to the woods, spending most of every day exploring deeper and deeper into the surrounding area, much to his parents’ mystification. Now and then Charlotte took time out from collaborating with William on his third textbook to worry about it.

“What do you do out there in the woods alone all day?” she would ask, or “Your father and I are planning to take the afternoon off and row out to the island. Wouldn’t you like to come along?” James wouldn’t, but he found it difficult to explain why, even to himself.

He had, for a while, considered the possibility that it was a form of regression, that he had suddenly slipped black to his Daniel Boone period. Sifting back through his long history of what Charlotte called hero-worship and William referred to as historical transference, James was able to determine that, if it were true, he must have just lost about seven years. He was sure of the time sequence because he remembered specifically that the Daniel Boone syndrome had followed the Robin Hood phase, both of which had preceded Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, all of which had happened before his tenth birthday—because he definitely recalled that by the time he was ten, he had given up world conquest and decided, instead, to be a universal man. But after further analysis he’d decided that the whole thing had nothing to do with Daniel Boone, or with regression, for that matter. Whatever it was, he was sure it had nothing to do with pretending to be anybody, not even James Archer Fielding.