Joe: "Yeah, soon. What we gonna do with him? With Harry?"
"He knows too much," the woman said, "but does it really matter?"
They were talking about me as if I wasn't there. Or like two grown people will talk about a little child in his presence, or maybe even like two people will talk about a dog, right in front of the dog, feeding the dog a juicy bone, maybe—the day before they take it down to the pound.
They stopped talking. They stood there, waiting. After another twenty minutes or so, I began to hear something. Maybe they were listening too hard. Anyhow, I heard it first. A distant hissing sound. Before I knew it the sky had begun to grow brighter.
"Joe!" the woman cried happily. "Listen!"
"Yeah, and look at it," Joe said.
They ran by me, not down toward the water but back up the beach toward the truck. "Wait a minute, baby," Joe called. "You can't go near it til the changeover. The heat...."
I whirled and followed them. I saw it as soon as I turned, but I couldn't believe my eyes. It was why they had come down to the water's edge. It was why Joe had picked out the untraveled road. I gawked.
The big truck was glowing.
Not burning, not on fire—but glowing. As if it had suddenly gone phosphorescent—say, a million times more so than the plankton-glowing surf. It stood out as clear as day.