something left over from a movie studio. Liquid rubber skinned over a steel frame. A prop, a dummy.”
“Oh, no, it’s real!”
“We’ll find a label somewhere,” said Chico. “Here.”
“Don’t!” cried the first boy.
“Hell.” Chico touched the body to turn it, and stopped. He knelt there, his face changing.
“What’s the matter?” asked Tom.
Chico took his hand away and looked at it. “I was wrong.” His voice faded.
Tom took the woman’s wrist. “There’s a pulse.”
“You’re feeling your own heartbeat.”
“I just don’t know…maybe…maybe…”
The woman was there and her upper body all slithering ancient green-black coins that slid upon themselves in the shift of wind and water.
“There’s a trick somewhere!” cried Chico suddenly.
“No. No!” Just as suddenly, Tom burst out in laughter. “No trick! My god, my God, I feel great! I haven’t felt so great since I was a kid!”
They walked slowly around her.
A wave touched her white hand so the fingers faintly, softly waved. The gesture was that of someone asking for another and another wave to come in and lift the fingers and then the wrist and then the arm and then the head and finally the body and take all of them together back down out to sea.
“Tom.” Chico’s mouth opened and closed. “Why don’t you go get out truck?”
Tom didn’t move.
“You hear me?” said Chico.
“Yes, but—”
“But what? We could sell this somewhere, I don’t know—the university, that aquarium at Seal Beach, or…well, hell, why couldn’t we just set up a place? Look.” He shock Tom’s arm. “Drive to the pier. Buy us three hundred pounds of chipped ice. When you take anything out of the water you need ice, don’t you?”
“I never thought.”