17

A while after he left the Loyd Society meeting, Chad was hanging around at quayside, staring wistfully out to sea. Merry's comments still stabbed him in the heart.

No, he thought. That magic box at grandpa's house, it didn't help me at all. Just the opposite. That box told me to do things. I could tell Diane about it, or Chip, but no one would believe me. They'd think I was nuts. That box ruined my life.

He stood listening to the water crashing against tan sand. He looked over his shoulder and saw a cop, parking.

The cop came over the hill and smiled.

Wow! he thought. He gave a silent, respectful whistle. What a pity she's a cop.

"Um, hi," he said.

"Hello," said the cop. She took out her wallet and a long flap of credit cards accidentally fell out. Visa, Mastercard and a few with words in Polish that no one within earshot would have heard of or been able to envision. The plastic cards gently hit sand.

"Ummm," said the cop. "I ummm, I was actually trying to flash my badge ... shit."

Chad just blinked, not knowing how to react.

"Shit ... I'm so clumsy. Would you mind starting that over, just go back to what you were doing?"

Chad shrugged, actually didn't speak, he scuffed some sand with his foot. The cop's visa fell to the sand and Sam could read the words: Angela Whist. It was followed by a sixteen-digit credit card number, but Chad didn't pay attention to that.

Chad actually helped Angela fold the plastic flaps back up, overlapping accordion style, then turned away to pretend he wasn't paying attention. In five minutes he turned his head to the side and nodded slightly in acquiescence to the instant replay.

Angela reached in her pocket and this time, she got her badge. It was gold, and as she held it aloft, Chad could see the woman's eyes were blazing GOLD!

What happened next was a blur to Chad. Basically, one moment he was looking directly into the blazing gold eyes of a woman whose warm round face appealed to him, but whose nasty authoritarian career path did not. The next moment he found he had moved, but not by much. He had moved, somehow, down the beach to the playground with no memory of having walked there, and was now hangin' from a tireswing.

A small child with a plastic shovel was the only other inhabitant of the playground and as Chad sat, legs out straight, hands tightly gripping the loops of sturdy chain, he thought that this tire swing symbolized his life and his luck - one minute, talking to a pretty girl, the next minute, smelling rubber and musing on the little bits of grainy white sand that always collect on the hollow insides of playground tire swings. He scoured the area with his eyes - that cop was long gone, or if she wasn't long gone, she was hiding.

The small happy kid seemed to want Chad to eat dirt. Chad glared at the boy, which made the boy even more happy.

"How do you get out of one of these things?" Chad said. When he tried to get enough leverage to hoist himself out, he just wound up swinging higher and faster and higher and faster, grunting with frustration which delighted the little boy, who shouted, "Again!"

"Gold eyes," Chad said, to the boy and to no one. "She had gold eyes!"