All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [73]
And the next day I walked up the bay, through the streets of the town, and on beyond till I came to the little half-moon-shaped cove off the bay, where the pine grove came down close to the white sand. I walked just under the shelter of the pines, my heels deep in the needles, then I came out on the sand. There was a place where a half-charred log lay, very black with the wetness and around it the sudden ashes and black butts of driftwood, blacker for the white sand. People still came here for picnics. Well, I had come here for picnics, too. I knew what picnics were like.
I knew what a picnic was like, all right.
Anne and Adam and I had come here years before when we were kids, but it was not raining that day. Not till the end. It was very hot and very still. You could look down the bay, beyond the cove, toward the Gulf, and see the water lifting up into the light as though the horizon had ceased to exist. We swam, and ate our lunch, lying on the sand, then fished some more. But we didn’t have any luck. By that time clouds had begun to pile, working in over the whole sky, except toward the west, beyond the pines, where the light struck through the break. The water was very still, and suddenly dark with the darkness of the sky, and away across the bay the line of woods looked black now, not green, above the whiteness of the line which was the beach way over there. A boat, a catboat, was becalmed over in that direction, nearly a mile away, and under the sky and over the dark water and against the black line of the woods, you never saw anything so heartbreakingly white as the sharp sail.
“He better get in,” Adam said. “It’s going to blow.”
“Not quick,” Anne said, “let’s swim again.”
“Better not.” Adam hesitated and looked off at the sky.
“Let’s,” she insisted and pulled at his arm. He didn’t respond, still scanning the sky. All at once she dropped his arm and laughed and began to run toward the water. She didn’t run directly to the water, but up the beach, toward a little spit, with her bobbed hair back loose on the air. I watched her run. She ran with her arms not quite outspread, crooked at the elbows, and with a motion of her legs which was graceful and free, and somehow awkward at the same time, as though she hadn’t quite forgotten one kind of running, the child’s running, and hadn’t quite learned another kind of running, the woman’s running. The legs seemed to be hung too loose, somewhat uncertainly, from the little hips, which weren’t quite rounded yet. I watched her and noticed that her legs were long. Which I had never noticed before.
It wasn’t a noise, but instead, a stillness that made me turn suddenly to Adam. He was staring at me. When I met his eyes, his face flushed, and he jerked his eyes off me, as though embarrassed. Then he said, “I’ll race you,” huskily, and ran after her. I ran too, and his feet threw the sand back at me.
Anne was out in the water swimming now. Adam plunged in after her and swam hard and straight, outdistancing me. He was a wonderful swimmer. He hadn’t wanted to swim but now he would swim straight out, hard and fast.
I came up to Anne, and slowed down, and said, “Hello.” She lifted her head high for an instant, with the gracile motion a seal has, and smiled, and curled over forward in a clean surface dive. Her sharp small heels, side by side, flickered for a second above the water, then drew under. I caught up with her, and she did it again. Every time I caught up with her she