Unimpressed, the dog plopped on the sand. Quint couldn't blame Maggie for disbelieving. For eleven days they'd done the same thing, leaving the cottage quietly before breakfast, before Esperanza Beach got jammed with tourists and beach balls and show-offy lifeguards. The swirling sand made Quint's limp more pronounced. They walked slowly past the sherbet-colored cottages -- eleven lemon, nine mint, seven orange -- around the curve to a deserted stand with an "Eats" sign jiggling in the wind. Now they were in friendly territory. Nobody around. Nothing but sand and a ridge of rocks sloping jaggedly to the water's edge. His rock was to the right of a V-shaped inlet, a big, brown, lumpy rock trailing seaweed whiskers. His rock was special because no one on the beach could see him here. Here he was enclosed and safe. (If a dragon or a sea monster came along, didn't he have a red Swiss hunting knife on his belt -- ten blades and a corkscrew? ) Here was a perfect place to lie down and make believe. He was Canute controlling the waves. He was a knight of the Round Table, "Sir Quintus the Brave", slaying evil spirits and banshees and vampires and witches with warty noses. (One good thing about a suit of armor, his leg wouldn't show. ) He was the first astronaut on the moon, chosen because of his small size and intrepid nature. He was six feet one like his father, with big hands and a hairy chest, a man the weak and persecuted would turn to. Fearless. Every night when he wanted a drink of water, didn't he practice being fearless by not turning on the bathroom light? A dark bathroom can be pretty scary, and he'd creep back to bed, proud of himself, thinking: Tomorrow, for sure, I'll go down to the rock and keep my promise to Dad. He hadn't intended to make the promise. It happened two weeks ago, the night before his father left on a business trip to South America. Every piece of the nightmare was clear, in place; and when he woke up, his father was saying, "Stop screaming, Quint. It's all right. Stop shaking". He could remember the feel of his father's big hands, the thump of his father's heart sending out signals -- regular, like radar. "Let's talk about the beach. Son. While I'm gone you get brown and fat as a pig, hear? Look, I can put two fingers between the cords in the back of your neck. Dr. Fortman says swimming would help your leg. He says you're limping more than you need to". "How does he know? Big dumb nut. He never had polio". In the light from the bedside table his father looked so worried that the promise spilled out. "You just wait, Dad. When you get back I'll probly be swimming better than Victoria. Wait and see, Dad". Victoria was fourteen months younger than Quint, a head taller, and could lick any boy or girl on the beach. He called her "Fatso". She called him "Stuck-up -- that's why nobody plays with you, Mister Stuck-up". Or, what was worse, she prayed for him out loud at bedtime: "Please, Lord Gord, please give my brother the strength to go swimming like he promised". "She's got a nerve". Quint said now to the clouds. Strength began to zip up and down his chest. He felt strong as a giant. He unlaced his high brown shoes and took off the metal brace on his leg. He wadded his sweat shirt into a ball and stripped down to his swimming trunks. "Goolick, goooolick", creaked a sea gull. "Aw, shut up", he said. He stood on the rock, a skinny, dignified boy surrounded by the ocean. The wind bored a hole between his shoulder blades, and when he looked at the choppy waves coming and going and crossing each other he could see his head down there, bleeding, wedged between the rocks and the waves. I can't go in. I'm scared of the nightmare. Shivering, he put on his clothes. And shivering with shame, he crawled to the narrow end of the rock and spat into the water. "Watch it, big shot", a hoarse voice yelled back. She was holding on to his rock with one hand. She smelled of peppermints. She wore a bathing suit like his mother's, no straps on the shouders. "Why didn't you duck"? He snapped. "This is my rock". "Isn't". "Is". "Isn't". "Is". She was sore as a boil. "Ever hear of squatter's rights"? "Sure. They started with the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of eighteen" -- "Mister Big Britches, aren't you"? "I'm Mark Gordon Peters the Fifth. They call me Quint". "Then why don't you stop squinting"? "I said Quint. That's short for Quintus. Quintus in Latin means" -- "I can speak both kinds of Latin, smart aleck". Her cough sounded like cloth ripping. "You shouldn't smoke so much", he said, unconsciously imitating Victoria's holier-than-thou voice. "I don't smoke". She was horrified. "Do you"? "Hell, yes". Not having said "hell" before, he stumbled a bit before gathering momentum. "Sometimes eleven, fourteen a day". "If I was your mama, I'd wop your tail off". "My mother never wops me. I've got this leg brace". She seemed so unimpressed that he was obliged to roll up his blue jeans so she could see his brace. "Dingy-looking", was what she said. "Why don't you paint it red and white like a barber pole"? "Because maybe I won't have to wear it always. Dr. Fortman says if I exercise my leg more, maybe I can use a cane when I'm big". She spouted a mouthful of water into the air. "A cane's mighty handy. Someone's walking past, you want to stop him, zoooop, snag him around the neck with the crook in your cane. Or say a waiter brings you a bowl of soup with a dead fly in it -- all you got to do is bannnnnng, stooooomp your cane on the floor. Hey, will you look at that"? Maggie had shaken himself awake and was licking the sand off his stubby whiskers and his long plume of a tail. "That's some dog. What kind"? "Part collie, part wire-haired terrier". Quint glared. He always did when people asked. "Holy mackerel, that's the most unique dog I ever saw", she said firmly. "His real name's DiMaggio, only we call him Maggie because he has to take tranquilizers. He's braver than he looks. He's been sick lately. Last Tuesday he went on a ham jag". "A what"? He would have told her, but Victoria was yodeling. That meant "Mama wants you Quint. Come home or I'll come find you". "I gotta go. Even though this is my rock, you can use it sometimes. I come early in the morning". "So do I. See you around, Mister Squint". That was how they started being friends. They met next morning and all the mornings thereafter. Same time, early, before the fog burned off, because she didn't like the sun; it made her blister. Her name was Sabella, and the strip of seaweed around her neck was an emerald necklace the King gave her as a token of his undying love. "You going to marry the King"? "No. He's got a long beard and picks his teeth with a fork. My hair is what he's nuts about. Naturally curly hair runs in my family. Personally, I prefer straight hair like yours, but as they say on the Continent, 'What can one do'"? "Which continent"? "Name one, I been there". Japan, she said, smelled pugh because people let dead fish lie on the beaches till the fish got hard as rocks; then they scraped off the mold and made fish soup. Pugh. Camels in Tripoli had harelips. Near Galway the tinkers drove their caravans down to the beach and sang and drank and fought all night. As for dancing -- holy mackerel, he ought to see the gypsies in Jerez; they danced on the sand till your blood got hot and danced with them. "Really". Quint smothered a yawn. She made better pictures than any book he'd read, but he didn't say so. Artfully, as the days went by, he found occasion to tell her that his father had won the Navy Cross in the Korean War; that his baby sister could spit up through her nose when she felt like it; that he personally had an IQ of 141 and was currently reading the Mushr to Ozon volume of the encyclopedia. "Books are for schnooks". She skipped a piece of water at him and laughed, a funny, hoarse laugh he liked to hear. Nobody ever appreciated his jokes as much as Sabella. ("What did one tonsil say to the other tonsil? Let's get dressed up -- the doctor's taking us out tonight". And "What time did the Chinaman go to the dentist? Tooth-hurty". ) Encouraged by her giggles he imitated Maggie who was crazy about ham. He described the ham decorated with pineapple and cherries, cooling on the porch. He snuck up on the ham like Maggie, gumming it with soft, stumpy teeth, then panting with thirst, lapping up the water in the lagoon, swelling up like a balloon, staggering home to be sick, while his mother said, "That does it. That dog has to go". "Say, you're quite a comic", Sabella said admiringly. "Ever thought about going on the stage"? He hadn't. But it was such a nice thought that he nodded his head. "Either that or a veterinarian". "Better make up your mind, son", Sabella said. "You can't serve cod and salmon". Sometimes they argued. She said sharks have no bones and shrimp swam backward. His encylopedia agreed with Sabella. Next morning he tied a bunch of sea daisies with string and threw them across the V-shaped inlet to the rock where she was swimming around. Boy, could she catch! Like Willie Mays in the outfield. "Nobody gave me flowers before. Thank you, Quint". Her face turned pink with pleasure and a smothered cough. "You can always tell a real gentleman -- they got a certain je ne say quok". Sometimes they didn't talk at all. He daydreamed on the rock while she swam and splashed around. Once when she asked why he never went swimming and he answered, "Don't feel like it", he was tempted to tell her about being scared. But Victoria began yodeling just then and he went home, carrying Sabella in the back of his head, not thinking about her, just knowing she was there, smiling, smelling of peppermints. As for his promise -- oh, he had plenty of time, buckets of time. Wednesday morning it happened. They were eating breakfast. "We beseech thee, Lord Gord, to bless this food" -- that was Victoria saying grace while the baby sprayed raisin toast on her plastic bib. Same old breakfast till the phone rang, making his mother's voice shake with excitement. "Your Daddy's in San Francisco", she told them. "He says he'll be here on the one-o'clock plane. Fifteen days early -- isn't that wonderful"? "Yeah, keen". A cave seemed to be opening in Quint's stomach. "Children, we'll have to get organized. The baby can have an early nap. Victoria, I want you to --" Quint closed the screen door quietly so Maggie wouldn't be scared. "Hurry up, we're late", he said, noticing with a chill how gray the sky was this morning, the fog like a rope along the horizon, the choppy waves sending off sheets of blue and Kool-Aid green. The cave in his stomach hurt. He had to go into the water. He'd tell Sabella about the nightmare. It had started two years ago when he was in an iron lung. What caused it, he didn't know. The metal collar gagging his neck? Sweating so much? The unbearable weight on his chest? All of it together meant drowning. The first time the nurse took him out of the lung, she said if he got frightened, she'd put him back for a second.