Chapter 1
Fortier Beach was where it was happening and, for the first time, Angel was going to be there. All of young American would be gathered, sun browned, lithe, happy, mod. They would be with it in spite of the pressures against the annual gathering from school and parents and local fuzz. Angel was going to be with it. Nothing would stop her from being a part of the scene, not family, not her school, not the lack of ready cash. She had only a few dollars, but she would make it last.
Angel's girl friend, Stanley Richmond, tooled the passionate pink Mustang up the Florida Turnpike and the wind whipped her bleached, short, Mia Farrow hair-do and she didn't have to worry about a lack of loot in her pocketbook. The worrying was done, if it were to be done at all, by Angel, a dark, tiny girl with an orange kerchief around her ebon hair.
"Great, God, isn't it just great?" Stanley cried suddenly, still excited, not yet settled down to the rather long drive from school to the big, long, crowded beach where college students from all over the country were gathering.
The small girl turned a dark, even face toward the driver, eyes large, deep black, lashes so long that she would never, never need to resort to false ones, nose a pert appendage on an face which radiated a sort of peaceful, youthful beauty. When old Igor Tomsk named his first born, his only daughter, born in freedom after an escape from Siberian Russia which almost cost him his life, he looked into her tiny face and saw that serene beauty, even in one so young, and he called her Angel.
"Won't it go any faster, Stan?" Angel asked, casting a nervous eye toward the speedometer needle which hovered quiveringly at the ninety mark.
"Okay," the blonde girl said, easing off the accelerator. The wind became a mere hurricane as it sped past the fleeing convertible. Stanley's short hair whipped against her well shaped skull. Even with the handicap of the Farrow cut Stanley was still a dish. Angel was not unaware of the rather glamorous picture the two of them presented, tooling along in the angry little car, taking great bites of the Florida landscape with each passing minute.
"It's great," Angel answered, without having to fake her enthusiasm. "I keep looking over my shoulder to see if there's anyone there to shake his head and say, no, no, don't touch, burn." 'The Prof?"
"I should have told him," Angel said. "And if you had told him, what would he have said?"
Angel laughed. "No. He would have said no in about a total of fifty thousand words with adequate and quite reasonable data against my going."
"So, it's great," Angel said, trying to push the disapproving mental image of her father from her mind, but Igor Tomsk was a difficult man to forget, especially when one had been his daughter for just over nineteen years. She was, however, determined to enjoy her three days at Fortier Beach. Stolen fruit is sometimes riper, richer, more pleasant to the tongue. Knowing that she was going against her father's will, perhaps for the first time in her life, made the trip more exciting. It made the wind seem fresher as it carried to her nostrils the sweet aroma of orange blossoms, made the sun seem more mellow as it warmed the long length of thigh which protruded from her skirt as she comfortable let the material flow back to rest against her taut stomach, almost exposing skin tight leopard skin panties.
"You know what?" Stanley said, having to talk loudly because of the rushing speed of the car. "I think we might just keep going. It's so great! Just think. We wouldn't have to stop anywhere. We wouldn't have to worry about classes or grades or parents or anything. We could just tell them all goodbye and keep going until we hit Jacksonville and then roar through Georgia like Sherman and into South Carolina and then let the wind take us, maybe New York or Washington or, hell, who knows?"
"I think," Angel said, smiling at her friend, "that you'd run out of gas."
The ocean. Fortier Beach on a spring day with the Florida sun sending a soothing message of heat down through a few fleecy, lumpsy cumulous clouds and the salt air already in their noses before they saw the strand, long and low, dotted with cars and people. Stanley found an access road and drove slowly along the hard-packed sand. A city policeman passed them, eyeing them with a hard-faced, uncommiting look. Stanley waved gaily. A group of boys-men really, although Angel still thought of men her age as boys, just as she thought of herself as a girl, not a woman-hoisted beer cans from their reclining positions on the sand and yelled and whistled as the pink convertible went slowly by.
"Ummmm," Stanley said, eyeing the selection of college men, "smorgesbord."
There were hundreds of them and the holiday was only getting underway. They congregated in one area of the long strand, the lean-limbed girls from Massachusetts and Holyoke, the agile young men from Yale and the University of Texas, from Illinois and South Carolina. They came from all over the United States and congregated in groups and, on occasion, threw coke bottles at the local police.
When the tradition began, there were more boys than girls. In the early days college men came to the beach to drink beer and chase local girls and the few coeds who were daring enough to make the trip. In recent years, however, the explosive change in the morals of the young had freed college women of the age-old bonds, had given them the pill. The upheaval in population weight which put parents in the minority; the extablisliment of the cult of youth had made it possible for Betty Coed to joint Joe College in the Easter orgy. Bikinis and one piecers, ruffles and laces over feminine breasts and buttocks did not match in numbers the thousands of sets of swim trunks, but there were enough girls sprinkled through the sea of college type humanity to make life interesting.
There was something about it which made Angel feel warm, an almost-felt empathy. They were in it. Out there was the world with the bomb and the necessity to make grades and the future which stared them in the face with a blank, awesome, threatening face. Here they were out of it for a while and you could feel it. You could feel the spirit of togetherness, boys and girls together, the warmth of understanding. Let a guy take too many beers and no one would be there to say shame and shake a disapproving head. Let a girl slip a little and who, among the great hoard of kindred spirits, would frown?
They drove along the beach to a chorus of calls, greetings, whistles, waves. Stanley, lips spread in a pleased smile, turned the convertible. Tires made little dig marks on the packed sand and the ocean muttered at them with small waves on which a few optimistic souls lounged or knelt on surfboards, waiting in vain for the big wave. The sea was quiet.
Two muscular, tanned crew cut young men stood in front of the car, forcing Stanley to stop. One leaned on Stanley's side, the other leaned to grin into Angel's face.
"I can offer a beach umbrella, a cold can of brew and good companionship," the tall, grinning boy said to Angel.
"Best offer you've had all day," the other one said to Stanley.
"The first offer," Stanley said. "You don't mind if we shop around a bit?"
"I'm Joe Howard," the boy looking into Angel's face said. "If you get lonely, call me at the Chevelier MoteL"
Then they were gone, the two boys looking after them, Stanley laughing deep in her throat, turned on by the masculine attention.
"Time to get our feet wet," Stanley said. She pushed the car to a swifter pace, found a street off the beach, drove to the beachside motel where she, as a veteran of the Easter holiday, had reserved a room months in advance. Angel's share of the rent cut into her pocket money seriously, but the room was nice, new, hard-surfaced and shiny to resist salt moisture, water tracked in on bare feet, the blowing sand and mist of the sea.
Stanley tossed her bag onto a bed, opened it, drew out a shamefully brief bikini and stripped to the buff to show a girl of no angles, only curves. Curved hips and curved breasts and curved, long legs and a mouse-colored bush to contrast with her bleached hair.
"Move it, Gabriel," she told Angel. Stanley having taken the bed beside the huge windows opening onto the terrace and the pool, Angel put her bag on the other one. The room, air conditioned, was cool to her skin as she stripped away the smooth, one piece short dress and stood in leopard skin bra and panties for a moment.
"Damn, you are stacked," Stanley said, watching as Angel lifted a foot to retrieve the dropped panties and twisted the bra around to get at the hooks.
"Nobody shorted you," Angel said, in return.
"We make a sexy pair," Stanley said. "Let's see what we can catch with bait like this." She did a crude grind and bumped her pelvic area forward. The effect was both comic and wanton. Angel squeezed into a modified bikini which snowed a lot of Angel but left more to the imagination than did the bikini of Stanley. Then they were back on the beach, in the passionate pink convertible which had been given the unusual coloration during a complete rebuilding job after Stanley cracked it up with less than a thousand miles on the speedometer.
"You're not going to drive all the way down the beach are you?" Angel asked, when it became apparent that Stanley was not going to stop the car near their motel.
"That's where the action is."
"Looks pretty active anywhere along here to me," Angel said.
"Watch it there," the boy said, turning as the car missed him by inches. His face dissolved into a smile as he looked directly into Angel's face.
"Hi again," he said. "Ready to take me up on that cold beer?"
But the car was moving again.
The college people were scattered mainly along a half mile length of the strand. Stanley had driven that length once, before going to the motel to change. Now she drove it again, looking at the hoards of lounging young people with a calculating eye. She had made a turn at the far end of the accumulation of college students and was halfway back down toward the motel when she turned the car, drove to a high part of the strand out of reach of the tide and stopped. "This is it," she said.
Angel laughed. "What makes this spot any better than any other spot?"
"By calculating the velocity of the wind along the horizontal vector and allowing for a maximum rise of the tide and the pre-calculated fall of the sun toward the skyline I decided that this particular spot offers the best tanning sun on the Florida coast."
Angel giggled happily at the double-talk. She reached into the back seat for her beach basket containing towel, suntan oil, shades, make-up. They spread a blanket in front of the car, arranged useful items around them, set to protecting their skin from the sun with liberal applications of oil. This action quickly attracted an audience of three tipsy college men who offered advice and active participation.
"Thanks," Angel said, "but we'll manage."
"That's what I fear," one of the boys said dolefully, as the girls took turns doing each other's back and shoulders with oil. Then they lounged on their stomachs, sun warm on their backs, the boys kneeling in the sand, horsing around, trying to make clever chatter. It was nice, warm, sleepy. Male attention was not new for Angel. She'd been the object of male attention from a very early age. Too early, she sometimes thought. Male attention sometimes interfered with her studies, as witness the dismal marks she had turned in after the last quarter, as witness the almost assured fact that she was going to flunk flatly in two of her subjects in the spring quarter. But it was nice to know that boys were attracted to her. She liked boys. She liked boys a lot better than she liked most girls-Stanley excluded-because boys were so, well, so opposite. She liked the way they talked, the way their minds worked, the way they looked at her, the feel of a boy's hand on her. She liked to be kissed and she liked!-well, that, too; but mostly she liked boys because they were more interesting. The things boys were interested in, she was more Interested in. She liked diving in the sea and her biggest fight with her father had been when he tried to stop her from scuba diving with the boys, spear fishing around a World War n freighter which had been sunk by a German submarine within sight of the populous beach near the University.
The sun sank, the afternoon lengthened. The three boys who had been drawn to them, like flies to fresh meat, chattered and laughed and were not discouraged by the short, disinterested replies of Stanley, by the distant smile of the darker, smaller Angel.
"Go away, little boys," Stanley said, at last, when it was apparent that the three were not going to take no for an answer.
The belittling remark killed the smiles. "My, my," one of the tipsy boys said, "Listen to Grandma. Grandma says we should go away."
"Come on," another said, "Let's shove off."
"Not before a little kiss," the third boy said. He, the more tipsy of the three, leaned toward Angel. She rolled away, sat up.
"Come on, fellows," she said. "Give us a break, huh? We want to soak up some sun."
"Kiss me goodbye, then," the tipsy one insisted. Angel pushed against him. He sprawled across the blanket, strewing sand everywhere.
"Oh, damn," Stanley said, leaping to her feet. "Get the hell out of here, will ya?"
Angel scrambled off the blanket to escape the reaching hands of the tipsy boy. His companions reached for him, laughing, but they did not suc-cede in pulling him back before a tall, thick-shouldered young man seized the boy by the nape of the neck and the seat of his trunks and tossed him off the blanket
"Beat it," the newcomer said, standing menacingly over the fallen lover. The other two blustered. For a moment it seemed that trouble would develop. Then the tall young man was joined by an equally muscular companion and the three tipsy underclassmen folded their tents and snuck away without honor, but with skins intact
"Thanks," Stanley said, picking things off the blanket so that it could be shook to be desanded.
"I don't think they'll bother you again," the largest of the two newcomers said. "Want me to help you spread the blanket?"
"We'll manage," Angel said. "But thank you."
"No sweat," the other young man said, brushing a long hanging mass of hair back from his forehead. "We make a specialty of rescuing damsels in distress."
"Gaa," Stanley said, spitting sand as she shook the blanket.
"What you need," one of the young men said, "is a cool one to wash the sand out of your teeth."
"I dig," Stanley said. "You, Angel."
"Suits," Angel said.
"Our palace," He pointed to a canopy tent pitched higher up on the strand.
"First," Stanley said, "who are you."
"Alan Govern."
"Carl Feurter."
Alan Govern was well over six feet. He wore a Beetle cut, but he was big enough to guarantee that no one would question his manliness. His face, dark, almost pretty, featured sensitive eyes and full, voluptuous looking lips. Carl Peurter was of a size, perhaps half an inch taller, standing with one leg thrust forward, thigh big as a barrel and very muscular. His hands were the most striking thing about him, huge, capable looking, work-hardened. His hair was not long but full, well groomed, dark, growing luxuriantly to lower what would have been a high forehead. When he spoke it was with a surprisingly soft voice, deep, full, yet so astoundingly gentle to be coming from such a rugged man.
"I'm Stanley."
"You're mine," Alan Govern said.
"By right of conquest?" Stanley asked, smiling suggestively.
"This is Angel," Stanley then said, turning, to Carl Peurter, who stood without a trace of awkwardness staring into Angel's face.
"I believe. Lord, I believe," Carl said. "I believe."
The move was made. Carl gathered the scattered items of the girls' possessions into his huge hands while Alan folded the blanket.
Under the canopy were: a cooler of beer, the brew chilled to perfection by melting ice; two bedrolls; another cooler box containing iced food; an expensive radio; two folding chairs and two dissimiliar traveling bags.
"Home," Carl said, putting the girl-things down atop the food cooler.
Angel looked at Carl Peurter and wondered how it was going to be to feel Carl's big hands on her, for she had known immediately, back there when Carl was tossing her teaser away from her blanket, that it would come to that. It was as sure as if it had been written in the stars a century ago. She would make love with Carl Peurter. When? Where? She didn't know. She knew only that it would happen.
A beach, seen from a comfortable chair under a shade, takes on a different aspect. The hot glare of the sun is pushed to a comfortable distance. One looks out on sun and sand and is not a part of them. Yet the sea breeze is there and the sea smell and the rushing fall of the surf and the voices of the hundreds of people who are there is a sort of a Lemming-like rush toward a moment or two of empathy.
Carl sat on the blanket at Angel's feet He talked. A cold beer in her hand-delicious, outdoorsy taste hitting the spot nicely-Angel listened, asked questions, gave information in return. Small information. School. Age. Major. (She hadn't decided yet, having not finished her sophomore year, but she thought it would be something to do with the marine sciences, if she could ever master chemistry and biology). The kind of talk which takes place between young people everywhere, get acquainted talk, the surface excavation as one tries to discover the personality of the newly met. But underneath it all was the sensuous, delicious feeling of togetherness, the awareness in Angel that this boy, this man, had the power to rouse her, had the power to take her without struggle at any given place or time, the question of where, where, causing little neuromuscular tensions to develop in her, causing her to drink with gusto and feel the little tingle of intoxication begin.
Then he told her he knew by placing his huge, tender, hard hand on her ankle, closing his fingers around it, squeezing lightly and holding her as she caught her breath at the quick thrill of his touch.
She was not wanton, not promiscuous. She was a healthy, normal girl of nineteen, college trained for a year and almost two, a product of the changing times which condemned more the people who were hung up on sex than those who knew it and used it as a part of living, a necessary and sometimes wonderful thing which had to have more meaning than a handshake but was, could be, as natural. Her father, with his old country morals, would not understand, but then he would never be asked to understand because she was discreet. She was not loose enough with her libido to risk exposure. Her affairs, and they were easily numbered on one hand with two fingers left over, were-had been-with boys who thought as she did, who were discreet as she was. And, as she felt the lubricous flow of glandular action in her aroused body, she was sure, just from her couple of hours of talk with Carl Peurter, that he would make as ideal a cohort as the three previously chosen lovers whom she had allowed herself.
There was only the question of where and when.
The sun, low, showed no signs of driving any of the college throng from the beach by its absence. It was clear to Angel, now, that the two boys, Carl and Alan, were living on the beach-at least until the local fuzz came and drove them away. She thought it sounded adventurous and fun to sleep on the beach for three days, to cook and eat in the open. Warmed by her passion, intoxicated slightly by the deliciously cold beer, she voiced the wish to be able to sleep on the beach like the boys.
"Why not?" Carl asked, his huge, hot hand still on her ankle.
"I'll tell you why not," Stanley said. "Mosquitoes. That's why not"
"No pioneer blood," Alan Govern said. He was not contenting himself with a mere touch of Stanley's ankle. He had long since pulled Stanley out of her chair to lie beside him on the blanket, their bodies side by side, Stanley's smallness contrasting with his muscular build.
"But it would be fun," Angel said.
'Tell you what," Carl said laughingly, "you girls sleep on the beach and we'll sleep in your room."
"I have a better idea than that," Alan said. "Let's all sleep in the girls' room."
"Naughty, naughty," Stanley said. "Besides, those tightwads will probably be spying on us to see that we don't slip anyone in to beat them out of a few bucks."
"Guess we're stuck," Carl said. "But wouldn't I like to have a shower. This salt bathing is fine, but it leaves you kind of sticky."
"I suppose we could sneak you in for a shower," Angel said.
"Give you a pretty if you will," Carl grinned.
Just before darkness closed down, Angel and Stanley, using a tiny grill and supplies from the food cooler, cooked hamburgers and beans, warming the beans in the can after Carl sawed the can open with his pocketknife. The food was good, better than good, with appetites stimulated by salt air and beer. Angel ate voraciously, taking seconds on everything, wiping her hands and lips on her towel, grinning, talking, having a wonderful evening, liking the beach, the food, the company.
There was one incident during the meal. Stanley, seated cross-legged on the blanket beside Alan, dropped a bite of hamburger onto her thigh, close up to the very brief bikini bottom. She reached for a towel.
"Hold it," Alan said. "We don't have so much food that we can afford to waste it."
"It's yours, then," Stanley laughed.
It was one of the most sensuous things Angel had ever seen. At least it struck her that way. Bending, Alan closed his opened mouth over the morsel of food and kissed Stanley's bare thigh, close up, where the skin was smooth and sensitive. He did it quickly. He did it openly. Angel held her breath and glanced upward to see a shock of awareness appear momentarily on her friend's face. Then the moment was past.
In the darkness, after a quick swim in the surf to clean hands and mouths of food and to allow basic processes of nature to rid their bodies of the accumulating beer, although no one was crude enough to admit that the swim was for such a purpose, they sat under the canopy tent and watched the stars come out into brightness and heard a really good folk singer from a few yards away.
Carl was curled on his side. Angel sat on the blanket, leaning her back into the fold of his body, feeling the hard-muscled firmness of him. It wasn't polite to look, but Alan and Stanley had progressed to open petting, lying full length, bodies staining against each other. Now and then Angel could hear one of them sigh or whisper something in a sultry, sleepy sounding voice. Carl talked quietly about school and about how he was thinking about becoming an active member in a protest group which was being formed there.
"I don't know much about those things," Angel said.
"But you must have some opinion about the war," he told her, moving to put one big arm around her waist, flat of his hand covering the midriff between the two-piece bathing suit.
"Oh, I don't know," Angel said. "I leave politics to you men. I know so little about spheres of influence and communism and things like that."
"But everyone must think about those things," Carl sighed, his voice sounding serious, thoughtful. "They affect all of us. They will affect our children. We owe it to future generations to stand up and be counted, to let our voices be heard."
"My voice will be heard," Angel said. "I want a beer, now."
She leaned forward to allow him freedom of movement as he stretched to reach the beer cooler. Then she leaned back with a sigh of comfort to feel the hard heat of him, the muscles of his chest, the rise and fall as he breathed.
The beer was cold and fine and she was not drunk, just pleasantly light headed. She felt very, very good. Her father thought she was spending the weekend with Stanley and her people in Jacksonville and she had no worries and the wind was cool and her body felt young and alive and was waiting, waiting. "Angel?"
She turned her head and looked down at him. His face was on his hand supported by his elbow in the sand. "Hummm?"
She bent, bringing her face close to his, prepared for the first kiss. Instead, he whispered to her.
'That shower?" His voice was low, intimate.
"Hummm?"
"Take me to the room so that I can have that shower. "Now." '"But . . . "
"It's time, isn't it?" His hand closed over her arm, big, all powerful, warm, commanding.
"Yes," she whispered back. "It's time."
"I don't think they even heard us leave," she said, as they walked away from the closely huddled forms of Stanley and Alan.