Chapter 1
I WAS FOURTEEN and my cousin Nell was sixteen the summer I peeped through the crack and watched her take off her bathing suit.
I knew I had no business doing so. I worked up a sweat arguing with myself about whether I was going to look or not. The thing was-I was in love with Nell. Or thought I was. To put what I felt exactly, Nell was the greatest girl I knew. The way she was formed and the way she looked in a bathing suit, long, bare legs flashing, big, tight swelling boobs, healthy, clear tan-well, fourteen is not too soon for a guy to get hot and bothered.
The midsummer day was hot and bright. Sunlight glared on white dunes. A gull sailed over our beach cottage. The surf made a steady rumble down on the beach.
Nell and her boy friend, Paul Edwards, and my sister, Debbie, and the rest of the older kids had been swimming most of the afternoon. They were in the cottage, drying off and changing. I sat on the porch railing outside. All I had to do was slip down, go around to the back, press my face against the wall and look through the crack.
I was nervous and my ears felt hot. I had discovered the crack in the redwood wall several days ago. The beach cottage had been bait on pilings. The siding had been nailed on vertically, with battens covering the seams between the boards. If you hunted around you could find small cracks. The one I had my mind on gave someone on the porch a secret view of the bedroom.
I knew I had to have a dirty mind because the first thing that had popped into my thoughts when I had discovered this particular crack had been that now I could have a peep at Nell in less than a bathing suit.
Nell had red-gold hair that tumbled to her shoulders and sparkled like bright copper in the sunlight. Her eyes were blue-green, the color of big water.
I had first met Nell when my parents bought a vacation house on the beach and we came down from the north to spend the summer. Nell comes from a branch of our family we don't associate with much. Nell's father, my mother's brother, had run away from home as a kid to become a seaman. After knocking around the world on tramp steamers for a number of years he had settled here and gone into shrimping.
My father, who was a bluenose to the core, had written Uncle Enoch off as a drunkard and a bum long ago.
But we began spending summers on the coast after my father bought the house. Debbie and I got acquainted with Uncle Enoch and Aunt Bertha and their brood of kids who were our cousins, the oldest of whom was Nell. She and Debbie were about the same age and Nell brought her friends over from the shrimp town down the coast and they had a summer beach crowd going. Every day they were swimming or water skiing or going into town. They let me tag along sometimes, but only because I was Debbie's kid brother.
I had plenty of my own things to do. But the beach drew me like a magnet when Nell was there. I'd look at Nell in her skin-tight white bathing suit, watch her bare arms and legs flashing in the water and I'd get this hot, pounding feeling inside. And my thoughts would make my ears feel they might burn right off.
Here I was now, sitting on the railing, wrestling with the worst temptation I had known. I could almost see old Satan, pointed tail and all, beckoning me toward that crack in the bedroom wall as he grinned lasciviously.
I slid off the railing and went down the stairs. I stood below the cabin with my hands thrust in my blue-jean hip pockets. My bike was under the house, propped against one of the pilings. Not far away were the cardboard boxes I was filling with my shell collection.
None of those things interested me very much at the moment, with the other thing hammering at my brain.
Pete, my dog, came out of the dunes where he had been chasing a ground squirrel. He sniffed around my feet. I felt ashamed to have Pete around me when I was having sinful thoughts. Sometimes I toyed with the idea that maybe dogs were really people reincarnated and that they knew what you were thinking about.
Up in the house I could hear Debbie and the others talking. I heard Nell's musical laughter. She and Debbie must be in the bedroom now.
Man, oh, man, I thought, squeezing my perspiring fingers into fists. Well, it was going to be now or never.
Old Satan gave me an extra hard jab with his pitchfork and back up the steps I went. The cottage had a gallery that extended around all four sides of the square building. I walked to the back, the shady side, glanced around to be sure nobody saw me, and put my face up to the crack.
At first all I saw was a blur. Somebody was standing directly in front of the crack, obstructing my view. Debbie. I felt like yelling at her to get out of the way. Finally she did. Then I was looking at Nell. She had pulled off her swimming cap but she was still wearing the white suit. She picked up a comb and ran it absently through her hair as she talked to Debbie. They were both smoking cigarettes. Boy, Debbie would catch it from Mother for smoking-then I remembered that Mother had gone shopping this afternoon.
Nell put down the comb. She puffed on her cigarette a couple of times, then placed it carefully into a tray. She reached behind her back and opened her zipper. Then she peeled the wet bathing suit down over her hips.
My heart was banging. I thought it would jump out of my throat. It was the first time in my life I had seen a girl all naked. Sure, Debbie was always running around the house in her underwear but she was my sister. Anyway, she was so skinny and flat-chested she didn't have much more than I did.
But Nell looked like one of those models in the girlie magazines. She had big breasts that sagged a bit, wide hips and long, beautiful legs. When she kicked the wet bathing suit from her ankles and straightened, tan and white and naked, I could see everything, even the dark triangle below her soft belly. I thought my heart was going to smash my ribs.
I knew she was engaged to a big guy, Paul Edwards, who hung around a lot. She wore his school ring on a gold chain around her neck. It gleamed and swung like a pendulum between her breasts, bouncing against them.
She dried herself, bending over as she rubbed her legs with a towel. She put her cigarette between her lips again and strolled across the room, talking around the cigarette like a sexy girl in a TV murder play.
She was out of range of my peephole for an instant. She was dressed in her shirt and slacks and had a ribbon around her hair when I caught my next glimpse of her.
I left the porch and sat on the bottom steps. My whole body was sticky with perspiration.
Man-oh-man-oh-man-oh-man-oh-man....
Old Satan was cackling triumphantly in my ears. I was sure to go to hell for what I was thinking. I felt a cramping pain in my abdomen and for the next hour I limped around behind the sand dunes in agony. I figured it was my punishment.