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of puffy look to it. His hair was sandy blond, cut short but not so short that a little of it couldn’t flutter on his forehead when the wind blew, which it did pretty much constant.
    “Nancy says, ‘Mister, are you asleep? If you’re asleep, you better wake up.’
    “Johnny Gravlin says, ‘He’s not asleep, Nancy, and he’s not unconscious, either. He’s not breathing.’
    “She said later she knew that, she’d seen it, but she didn’t want to believe it. Accourse not, poor kid. So she says, ‘Maybe he is. Maybe he is asleep. You can’t always tell when a person’s breathing. Shake him, Johnny, see if he won’t wake up.’
    “Johnny didn’t want to, but he also didn’t want to look like a chicken in front of his girlfriend, so he reached down—he had to steel himself to do it, he told me that years later after we’d had a couple of drinks down at the Breakers—and shook the guy’s shoulder. He said he knew for sure when he grabbed hold, because it didn’t feel like a real shoulder at all under there but like a carving of one. But he shook it all the same and said, ‘Wake up, mister, wake up and—’ He was gonna say die right but thought that wouldn’t sound so good under the circumstances (thinkin a little bit like a politician even back then, maybe) and changed it to ‘—and smell the coffee!’
    “He shook twice. First time, nothing happened. Second time, the guy’s head fell over on his left shoulder—Johnny had been shakin the right one—and the guy slid off the litter basket that’d been holding him up and went down on his side. His head thumped on the sand. Nancy screamed and ran back to the road, fast as she could…which was fast, I can tell you. If she hadn’t’ve stopped there, Johnny probably would’ve had to chase her all the way down to the end of Bay Street, and, I dunno, maybe right out to the end of Dock A. But she did stop and he caught up to her and put his arm around her and said he was never so glad to feel live flesh underneath his arm. He told me he’s never forgotten how it felt to grip that dead man’s shoulder, and how it felt like wood under that white shirt.”
    Dave stopped abruptly, and stood up. “I want a Coca-Cola out of the fridge,” he said. “My throat’s dry, and this is a long story. Anyone else want one?”
    It turned out they all did, and since Stephanie was the one being entertained—if that was the word—she went after the drinks. When she came back, both of the old men were at the porch rail, looking out at the reach and the mainland on the far side. She joined them there, setting the old tin tray down on the wide rail and passing the drinks around.
    “Where was I?” Dave asked, after he’d had a long sip of his.
    “You know perfectly well where you were,” Vince said. “At the part where our future mayor and Nancy Arnault, who’s God knows where—probably California, the good ones always seem to finish up about as far from the Island as they can go without needing a passport—had found the Colorado Kid dead on Hammock Beach.”
    “Ayuh. Well, John was for the two of em runnin right to the nearest phone, which would have been the one outside the Public Library, and callin George Wournos, who was the Moose-Look constable in those days (long since gone to his reward, dear—ticker). Nancy had no problem with that, but she wanted Johnny to set ‘the man’ up again first. That’s what she called him: ‘the man.’ Never ‘the dead man’ or ‘the body,’ always ‘the man.’
    “Johnny says, ‘I don’t think the police like you to move them, Nan.’
    “Nancy says, ‘You already moved him, I just want you to put him back where he was.’
    “And he says, ‘I only did it because you told me to.’
    “To which she answers, ‘ Please , Johnny, I can’t bear to look at him that way and I can’t bear to think of him that way.’ Then she starts to cry, which of course seals the deal, and he goes back to where the body was,