Lights Out by Peter Abrahams Page B

anything in that heat. By the time they reached the flamboyant tree by the side of the road, his heart was beating the way it would in the last length of the four-hundred free.
    JFK got on his bike. “Don’t be calling it a pig if you run into any tourists. That be the famous wild boar of the islands. Ernest Hemingway he come to hunt them.”
    “Bullshit,” Eddie said.
    JFK laughed and started pedaling. Not slowly this time. Eddie realized that JFK wasn’t intending that he keep up. “Where do I take it?” Eddie called.
    The answer came back, faint: “The kitchen, man. You be bringin’ home the bacon.” JFK was soon out of sight.
    Eddie started walking. There were no tourists, no people at all. There was just the sun, the dust, the pig, still warm. After a while it stopped bleeding and Eddie stopped thinking abouthow soon he could be in the shower. On that empty road on the edge of the banana-shaped island he lost his revulsion for the touch of the pig and began to enjoy what he was doing, began to feel strong—absurdly strong, like a white hunter, he supposed, master of the wild. He ceased to feel the weight of the beast at all; by the time he approached the desiccated clay court he was striding.
    Eddie heard the thump of a tennis ball and looked through the row of scrub pines. He saw a ball hit the backboard, bounce back, saw a racket swing and meet it, saw a tanned arm. A tree blocked his view of the rest of the tennis player’s body, but he knew who it was. He moved a little closer.
    Mandy was working on her backhand. Eddie had played some tennis, enough to know she was good. She wore a white T-shirt and white shorts, both soaked, and white sneakers, reddened by the clay. She grunted softly with every stroke. Without realizing it, Eddie had drawn closer still. Soon he was standing at the side of the court.
    The ball took a bad bounce. Mandy stretched for it, saw him as she swung. The ball flew over the backboard.
    “Oh, my God,” she said. “Look at you.”
    “Don’t call him a pig,” Eddie said. “He’d be insulted.”
    “I know what it is. Where’s your gun?”
    “I didn’t shoot it,” Eddie said, surprised. He’d never shot anything, didn’t want to.
    “Who did? Br—Mr. Packer?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Where is he?”
    “Stalking another one.”
    Her gaze slid down to his chest, moved back up. “You made me lose the ball.”
    “It’s the pig’s fault.”
    “You could help me find it. It’s my last one.”
    Eddie hefted the animal off his shoulders and laid it on the side of the court. They walked around the backboard, into a thicket of sea grapes and low bushes. No ball in sight. Eddie raised a branch to search the undergrowth, pricking his hand on a thorn. The bugs, the thorns, the heat —Muskets and Doubloons had left all that out.
    “Forget it,” said Mandy. “There might be balls in the shed.”
    The shed stood at the end of a short path that began on the far side of the court. It had a window glazed with cobwebs and a doorway with hinges but no door. Mandy walked ahead, her sweaty T-shirt and shorts clinging to her body. Her calves, like JFK’s, bunched and lengthened with every step, but Eddie couldn’t watch them in the same detached way. He felt a tightness in his chest that had nothing to do with the heat.
    They went inside, out of the sun now, but Eddie felt no cooler. At first he couldn’t see anything. He could hear Mandy breathing close by, and smell her too: fresh sweat, in no way repellent. His eyes adjusted to the darkness. The shed had an earthen floor; there was a heavy steel roller in one corner, a wheelbarrow and a mound of red clay in the other. On the walls hung wide brushes and wooden tennis rackets, warped in a way that reminded him of a bent pocket-watch in a painting he had seen somewhere.
    “Don’t see any,” he said.
    “No?”
    There was a silence. Then her hand was between his legs, soft and gentle, but there. Eddie had had a few girlfriends, but