Chapter 4
Angel Tomsk was the product of a home dominated by a loving but firm father, a motherless home. An only child, she was, as an almost necessary result of being the pride of her father's heart, somewhat spoiled. Her life had started with drama, Angel being born on a leaking fishing boat in a storm while crossing from Siberian Russia to the northern islands of Japan shortly after her father had been condemned to death after a short period of exile. Angel and her father were lucky. Igor Tomsk survived the ire of Stalin and Angel survived a birthing which destroyed her mother.
However, Angel knew nothing of the hardships of Siberia, nothing of the coldness of the storm during which she was born. Her earlier memories consisted of warm sun and a comfortable home, of being the daughter of a respected member of the faculty of a large university in a sub-tropic climate. She remembered only comfortable beds and cozy rooms and the arms of her father around her as he read to her. She remembered being teacher's pet in the first grade and she remembered how boys started being nice to her when she had her long hair cut at the age of twelve.
Angel was one of those very pretty girls who, at puberty, become women. She had the features and the body to attract stares from both admiring males and envious females. She went through high school gathering the honors and attentions which come to the very pretty ones: office, election to various "queen-ships" of beauty, a constant stream of dates, for she did not believe in going steady.
She was spoiled. She was spoiled as millions of American girls are spoiled by parents who are in a position to grant every reasonable wish, by having that young, vital beauty which assures male attentions. Aside from petty quarrels with friends, Angel had never been exposed to open animosity.
When she saw hate in the eyes of her friend, Stanley Richmond, she was hurt, puzzled, shocked. She started to protest, to cry out against the almost burning look of hate and then it was gone and she wasn't quite sure whether or not she had imagined it. For her head was light. She was confused by flashes of memory from the hectic night past. Her body ached with soreness.
"Why don't you take a fast shower?" Stanley asked, herself again, smiling. "The boys are waiting for us on the beach."
Angel used the few moments of privacy under the shower to try to collect herself. However, try as she might, the night was largely a blank. She remembered the craziest things and decided, finally, with chilling cold water needling into her bare body, that she had become wiped out on beer. Yes, that was it. She had put away too much booze and had really let herself go with Carl.
At least she hoped it was Carl.
"It was Carl, wasn't it?" she asked, coming out of the shower with a large towel wrapped around her.
"It was Carl who what?" Stanley asked. The bleached blonde was in a different bikini, a revealing pair of postage stamp sized panties and a skimpy bra, and was stretched out on the bed doing exercises, lifting her legs to tighten her stomach muscles.
"Whoops," Angel said, laughing. "Maybe I revealed more than you knew by asking that question, huh?"
"It was Carl," Stanley said wearily.
"It sounds silly," Angel said, "when I ask, but was I altogether disgusting about it?"
"You were pretty Goddamned disgusting," Stanley said. Angel frowned. The blonde relented slightly, although her voice was still coldly disapproving. "But so were others. You were not alone."
"No," Angel said. "I think it takes two, doesn't it?" She smiled, trying to make a wan joke. Stanley offered no show of empathy. "What did I drink V Angel asked. "You don't suppose that fellow put something into my beer?"
"No," Stanley said, turning away. "He didn't put anything into your beer."
Angel, feeling the gnawing of guilt, tried to reestablish the rapport she'd felt with Stanley during the course of their brief friendship. "Where were you when the stuff hit the fan?" She winked at Stanley. "You said I was disgusting, but that I was not alone. Were you company for me?"
There was a withering glance as Stanley formed her answer which was short and harsh. "Hell, no!"
There was an awkward silence. Finally, it was Stanley who broke it. "Are you coming?"
"You go ahead," Angel said. I'll be along in a few minutes. I want to do my hair."
"I'll wait."
"No, please. The fact of the matter is I wouldn't mind being alone for a while."
Stanley shrugged. "We're right in front of the motel this time. Look for the tent."
Alone, Angel tried, once again, to reconstruct the events of the night. There were disjointed flashes of memory and an eerie feeling that something important had happened.
And there was an overwhelming feeling of guilt. Not because she'd gone to bed with a boy, but because she'd overdone it. She'd been too open about it and, in her generation, sex was a more or less accepted thing but it was still a private thing. Her impression was that she'd been rather immodest.
It was natural, then, that she was a bit reluctant to face the group. She knew that Stanley and Alan and Carl Peurter were waiting for her on the strand with a cold beer and a welcome shade but instead of walking toward the beach directly in front of the motel she angled up the strand to enter the student packed sands a block from the motel, safely out of the sight of those under the canopy tent in front of the motel.
It was mid-morning. Some groups, in defiance of local ordinances, were cooking on the strand. The healthy aroma of coffee assaulted her nostrils. Salt breeze and sun did much to drive the gloom of her spirit away, but she was still not ready to face her friends as she wandered in and out, by-passing knots of students around fires, under umbrellas.
Ahead of her the crowd seemed more dense than usual. She paused, shaded her eyes with her hands. Someone had appropriated a lifeguard stand and was using it as an improvised podium. Curious, she walked through the mussed sand to stand on the fringe of the crowd around the stand. Words began to take meaning as she neared and it brought a gry smile to her lips when she realized that the serious faced boy atop the lifeguard stand was speaking passionately against the Viet Nam war.
In an old country phrase, Angel was not political.
"For politics," her father yould have said, "you have no time, my Angel. You have time only for the study, the living; the strain of being young is enough for you without your mixing in things which are best left to the statesmen and the politicians." Yet, there were movements on campus. Her university, for all of its fun-loving reputation, was a mixture of American young people as was any other university in the country and there were those who felt their importance, who felt it necessary to have rabid opinions on the subjects which preoccupied the world.
She listened to the impassioned speaker for a moment. Her eyes moved over the crowd around the stand it was easy to spot the serious types, the long-faced girls with lanky hair, the long-haired boys, the bearded ones. That it was a sympathetic crowd was evidenced by the posters held by many of the serious young ones. Posters showed burned Viet Nam babies, spread-eagled dead women, American war planes distorted into things of evil. It was not new.
"Vietnicks," her father would have said in disgust.
"You'd think," someone said in her ear, "that they'd leave all this at home over the holidays."
"I was thinking the same thing," Angel said, turning to look into a strong, young man's face. The face, stubbled from lack of a morning shave, seemed familiar. The boy had smiling brown eyes, crew cut, sandy hair, a nice smile, a nose which had been battered in some violence-football, perhaps, from the size of him.
"I know you," Angel said.
"No, but if I have anything to say about it you are going to know me," he said, extending a hand. "I'm Joe Howard." He named a mid-south university famous for its football. "You may think you remember me because I've seen you twice . . . "
"You stopped the car," Angel said, smiling.
"At the risk of life and limb," Joe Howard said. "That blonde driving looked as if she'd just as soon run me down, but I had to risk it, having seen your face."
"Whee," Angel said, "a snow artist."
"Sincere as mother, apple pie, the American flag and the faithful dog," Joe said, grinning from ear to ear. "Are you interested in this politicking?"
"Not in the slightest," Angel said. "What are they going to do? March through the town or something?"
"Or something," Joe said. "I'm not going. Are you?"
"Not a chance," Angel said. "As a matter-of-fact, I'm looking for my friends."
"You've found one of them," he said. "Don't be greedy."
She laughed. He was a big, friendly boy. Under different circumstances she'd have been half way willing to let him pick her up. However, Stanley and the others were waiting.
"Really," she said, "I have to go."
"I'll walk with you," the big boy said, putting his hand protectively on her arm as she started back down the beach toward the area of the motel.
"I can still offer a cold one and some friendly shade," Joe said, waving a big, muscular arm toward a beach umbrella.
'Thanks," Angel said. "Some other time, maybe?"
"like next century? If I let you get away now I'll never see you again."
"Will that make you sad?"
"I might pine away completely."
Angel laughed. Her voice tinkled and she threw her head back to expose her trim, soft throat. "Goodbye, crazy boy," she said. She struck a serious pose. "Go back to your beer and your shade and try to forget about me."
"Not a chance," he said. He scooped her into his arms as if she were feather light. She kicked and squirmed, laughing, but his arms were like steel bands, holding her tightly, yet gently. "The day is young. You can devote hours of it to your friends later, but not now. Now I'm demanding a quarter hour. Long enough for that drink and . . . "
"This is kidnapping," she laughed. "I'll scream."
"You are in my power," he sneered, villain-like. "Your puny struggles are hopeless."
He had carried her to his umbrella. He dumped her unceremoniously onto a large beach towel, flopped beside her. He was not even breathing hard from having carried her through the deep sand. He popped two cans of beer, extended one. She sipped. It was the first time she'd ever had a beer before noon and it was surprisingly good, cold, biting, sturdy tasting.
"Joe," she said.
"Aggg!" He went through a contortion of face and body which she presumed to be overdone ecstasy. "The first time you've graced my name with those beautiful lips."
"You are crazy," she said.
"like a fox. I'm playing on your sympathy. I'm just a lonely little boy underneath all this beef."
"Your beer is fine and your shade is comfortable and I will stay for ten minutes. Then I have to go."
"Fair enough. I work fast." He made a pretense of eating her hand, her hand small and lost in his large one, his lips dry and warm on her fingers.
He was a fun guy, crazy, frivolous. He kept her laughing for twice times ten minutes, during which they took time to notice that the crowd around the lifeguard stand and a few others from the strand had formed into a rough line, two abreast, and disappeared into one of the town side streets.
Angel had broken down and accepted her second beer when she looked up to see her three companions, Stanley, Alan and Carl, approaching.
"Whoops," she said. "I'm caught."
Joe, sprawled on his stomach, weight on his elbows to put his ruggedly handsome face down close to hers, looked up as the three stood over them. He said, "Hi."
"We've been looking for you," Stanley said, smiling in an unconvincing way.
"Here I am," Angel said. "Surprise!"
"I can offer you a beer," Joe said, still making no effort to stand, matching the glares of Alan and Carl with a stiff expression on his face.
"Coming, Angel?" Stanley asked.
"Yeah, sure." She gathered her feet under her and stood. "Thanks for the cold one, Joe," she said, smiling at him.
"Any time," he said. "I'll keep one cold for later, huh?"
"She'll be busy later," Carl said coldly. Joe looked at Angel and raised and eyebrow questioningly.
"We'll see," Angel said. She didn't like being treated as property. She brushed sand from her smooth flanks and stood beside Stanley.
"Take it easy, fella," Carl said to Joe, starting off, managing to kick sand on Joe's towel. Joe, looking after them, brushed the sand away, a mussing smile on his face.
"Shake it up," Alan Govern said, striding through the loose sand, heading for the nearest street opening. Carl's hand was on Angel's arm. She was half running to keep up with them.
"What's the rush?" she demanded, jerking her arm away from Carl.
"We'll miss the excitement," Stanley said.
"I'm not sure I want to be excited," Angel said.
She looked at Carl. There was a certain feeling of coldness about the three who, only the previous evening, had seemed to be so much fun.
Carl, seeming to sense her disease, grinned at her. "Not that kind of excitement," he said meaningfully.
But this, too, hit Angel the wrong way. She didn't like being reminded in such a crude, joking way of her behavior of the past night, especially since she had trouble remembering just what that behavior had been. She trudged along beside Carl, suffering him to have his hand on her arm. Alan Govern looked at his watch and frowned. Ahead of them, around a corner, a crowd broadcast its presence in a low, muttering, growing sound.
"What is it?" Angel asked.
"The demonstration," Carl said. "It's underway."
"I don't want to go there," Angel said, holding back.
"Ah, come on. That's where the action is."
"I don't like that kind of action."
"We're spectators, not participants," Stanley said over her shoulder, her voice impatient. "Hurry up, I don't want to miss it."