“She moves nice.”

“Now you can see the house good,” Billy Ruiz said.

The house was a brown-shingled, two-story house that seemed as old and permanent as the pines closing in on it. A square of white interrupted the dim look of the house, a sign, a canvas banner strung between two of the porch posts. It became a sign as they drew nearer the house.

ANNUAL ALPHA CHI ALUMNI OUTING-red letters on the white field. There were a few people on the porch, but most of the alumni and their wives seemed to be on the beach; in a gypsy camp of lounge chairs and beach towels or in small groups standing by the beached sailboat and around the cookfire they were building, each one holding, elbow at his side, a paper cup or a bottle of beer.

“I like it,” Ryan said. He squinted toward the house, chewing a little on the end of the cigar.

“We better cut up, uh, before we get there?”

“No, we’ll walk past. Then up through the trees.”

“I wouldn’t mind another beer.”

“Just take it easy.”

They approached the group by the sailboat. Billy Ruiz started to walk out into the water to go around them, but Ryan touched his arm and he followed Ryan past them on the beach side, Ryan pausing to look at the fiberglass catamaran hulls of the boat and Billy Ruiz thinking, God, he’s going to talk to them. When they were beyond the people, Ruiz said, “You want them to see you?”

“I never saw a boat like that,” Ryan said. “You see it? Like two hulls.”

“Man, why don’t you ask them for a ride?”

Ryan grinned with the cigar in his mouth, glancing back at the house. “Come on, this is far enough.” And now they crossed the beach, climbing the rise to a deserted stretch of frontage that was overgrown with brush and young pines. They stopped to put on their shoes, then made their way through the trees to the private drive behind the cottages. They could hear cars passing on the highway, the Shore Road off beyond a stand of trees, but they couldn’t see the cars from here. The private drive was good and private: no cars except for the ones parked near the brown house, parked in the yard and on both sides of the road and in front of the sign nailed to a tree. YOU’RE HERE! the sign said, and something smaller beneath the two words.