Boo Boo found it queerly difficult to keep Lionel in steady focus. The sun, though not especially hot, was nonetheless so brilliant that it made any fairly distant image--a boy, a boat--seem almost as wavering and refractional as a stick in water. After a couple of minutes, Boo Boo let the image go. She peeled down her cigarette Army style, and then started toward the pier.
It was October, and the pier boards no longer could hit her in the face with reflected heat. She walked along whistling "Kentucky Babe" through her teeth. When she reached the end of the pier, she squatted, her knees audible, at the right edge, and looked down at Lionel. He was less than an oar's length away from her. He didn't look up.
"Ahoy," Boo Boo said. "Friend. Pirate. Dirty dog. I'm back."
Still not looking up, Lionel abruptly seemed called upon to demonstrate his sailing ability. He swung the dead tiller all the way to the right, then immediately yanked it back in to his side. He kept his eyes exclusively on the deck of the boat.
"It is I," Boo Boo said. "Vice-Admiral Tannenbaum. Nee Glass. Come to inspect the stermaphors."
There was a response.
"You aren't an admiral. You're a lady," Lionel said. His sentences usually had at least one break of faulty breath control, so that, often, his emphasized words, instead of rising, sank. Boo Boo not only listened to his voice, she seemed to watch it. "Who told you that? Who told you I wasn't an admiral?"
Lionel answered, but inaudibly.
"Who?" said Boo Boo.
"Daddy."
Still in a squatting position, Boo Boo put her left hand through the V of her legs, touching the pier boards in order to keep her balance. "Your daddy's a nice fella," she said, "but he's probably the biggest landlubber I know. It's perfectly true that when I'm in port I'm a lady- that's true. But my true calling is first, last, and always the bounding- "
"You aren't an admiral," Lionel said.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You aren't an admiral. You're a lady all the time."
There was a short silence. Lionel filled it by changing the course of his craft again- his hold on the tiller was a two-armed one. He was wearing khaki-colored shorts and a clean, white T-shirt with a dye picture, across the chest, of Jerome the Ostrich playing the violin. He was quite tanned, and his hair, which was almost exactly like his mother's in color and quality, was a little sun-bleached on top.
"Many people think I'm not an admiral," Boo Boo said, watching him. "Just because I don't shoot my mouth off about it." Keeping her balance, she took a cigarette and matches out of the side pocket of her jeans. "I'm almost never tempted to discuss my rank with people. Especially with little boys who don't even look at me when I talk to them. I'd be drummed out of the bloomin' service." Without lighting her cigarette, she suddenly got to her feet, stood unreasonably erect, made an oval out of the thumb and index finger of her right hand, drew the oval to her mouth, and--kazoo style- sounded something like a bugle call.