High on silent pinions, shining white, three sea gulls flew northward from the distant pier, at first paralleling the shoreline. Then they soared over the shimmering bay and wheeled across the sky.
Eventually Joe glanced back toward the lifeguard tower. The two men were no longer there.
He faced the sea again.
Incoming breakers broke, spilling shatters of foam on the sand. He watched the waves as a willing subject might watch a hypnotist’s pendant swinging on a silver chain.
This time, however, the tides did not mesmerize, and he was unable to guide his troubled mind into calmer currents. Like the effect of a planet on its moon, the calendar pulled Joe into its orbit, and he couldn’t stop his thoughts from revolving around the date: August 15, August 15, August 15. This first anniversary of the crash had an overwhelming gravity that crushed him down into memories of his loss.
When the remains of his wife and children had been conveyed to him, after the investigation of the crash and the meticulous cataloguing of both the organic and the inorganic debris, Joe was given only fragments of their bodies. The sealed caskets were the size usually reserved for the burial of infants. He received them as if he were taking possession of the sacred bones of saints nestled in reliquaries.
Although he understood the devastating effects of the airliner’s impact, and though he knew that an unsparing fire had flashed through the debris, how strange it had seemed to Joe that Michelle’s and the girls’ physical remains should be so small. They had been such enormous presences in his life.
Without them, the world seemed to be an alien place. He didn’t feel as if he belonged here until he was at least two hours out of bed. Some days the planet turned twenty-four hours without rotating Joe into an accommodation with life. Clearly this was one of them.
After he finished the second Coors, he put the empty can in the cooler. He wasn’t ready to drive to the cemetery yet, but he needed to visit the nearest public rest room.
Joe rose to his feet, turned, and glimpsed the tall blond guy in the green Hawaiian shirt. The man, without binoculars for the moment, was not south near the lifeguard tower but north, about sixty feet away, sitting alone in the sand. To screen himself from Joe, he had taken a position beyond two young couples on blankets and a Mexican family that had staked their territory with folding chairs and two big yellow-striped beach umbrellas.
Casually Joe scanned the surrounding beach. The shorter of the two possible cops, the one wearing the predominantly red shirt, was not in sight.
The guy in the green shirt studiously avoided looking directly at Joe. He cupped one hand to his right ear, as if he were wearing a bad hearing aid and needed to block the music from the sunbathers’ radios in order to focus on something else that he wanted to hear.
At this distance, Joe could not be certain, but he thought the man’s lips were moving. He appeared to be engaged in a conversation with his missing companion.
Leaving his towel and cooler, Joe walked south toward the public rest rooms. He didn’t need to glance back to know that the guy in the green Hawaiian shirt was watching him.
On reconsideration, he decided that getting soused on the sand probably
Nearer the pier, the crowds had grown since Joe’s arrival. In the amusement center, the roller coaster clattered. Riders squealed.
He took off his sunglasses as he entered the busy public rest rooms.
The men’s lavatory stank of urine and disinfectant. In the middle of the floor between the toilet stalls and the sinks, a large cockroach, half crushed but still alive, hitched around and around in a circle, having lost all sense of direction and purpose. Everyone avoided it — some with amusement, some with disgust or indifference.
After he had used a urinal, as he washed his hands, Joe studied the other men in the mirror, seeking a conspirator. He settled on a long-haired fourteen-year-old in swim trunks and sandals.
When the boy went to the paper-towel dispenser, Joe followed, took a few towels immediately after him, and said, “Outside, there might be a couple of cop types hanging out, waiting for me.”
The boy met his eyes but didn’t say anything, just kept drying his hands on the paper towels.
Joe said, “I’ll give you twenty bucks to reconnoiter for me, then come back and tell me where they are.”
The kid’s eyes were the purple-blue shade of a fresh bruise, and his stare was as direct as a punch. “Thirty bucks.”
Joe could not remember having been able to look so boldly and challengingly into an adult’s eyes when he himself had been fourteen. Approached by a stranger with an offer like this, he would have shaken his head and left quickly.
“Fifteen now and fifteen when I come back,” said the kid.
Wadding his paper towels and tossing them in the trash can, Joe said, “Ten now, twenty when you come back.”
“Deal.”
As he took his wallet from his pocket, Joe said, “One is about six two, tan, blond, in a green Hawaiian shirt. The other is maybe five ten, brown hair, balding, pale, in a red and orange Hawaiian.”
The kid took the ten-dollar bill without breaking eye contact. “Maybe this is jive, there’s nobody like that outside, and when I come back, you want me to go into one of those stalls with you to get the other twenty.”
Joe was embarrassed not for being suspected of pedophilia but for the kid, who had grown up in a time and a place that required him to be so knowledgeable and street smart at such a young age. “No jive.”
“’Cause I don’t jump that way.”
“Understood.”
At least a few of the men present must have heard the exchange, but none appeared to be interested. This was a live-and-let-live age.
As the kid turned to leave, Joe said, “They won’t be waiting right outside, easy to spot. They’ll be at a distance, where they can see the place but aren’t easily seen themselves.”
Without responding, the boy went to the door, sandals clacking against the floor tiles.
“You take my ten bucks and don’t come back,” Joe warned, “I’ll find you and kick your ass.”
“Yeah, right,” the kid said scornfully, and then he was gone.
Returning to one of the rust-stained sinks, Joe washed his hands again so he wouldn’t appear to be loitering.
Three men in their twenties had gathered to watch the crippled cockroach, which was still chasing itself around one small portion of the lavatory floor. The bug’s track was a circle twelve inches in diameter. It twitched brokenly along that circumference with such insectile single-mindedness that the men, hands full of dollar bills, were placing bets on how fast it would complete each lap.
Bending over the sink, Joe splashed handfuls of cold water on his face. The astringent taste and smell of chlorine was in the water, but any sense of cleanliness that it provided was more than countered by a stale, briny stink wafting out of the open drain.
The building wasn’t well ventilated. The still air was hotter than the day outside, reeking of urine and sweat and disinfectant, so noxiously thick that breathing it was beginning to sicken him.
The kid seemed to be taking a long time.
Joe splashed more water in his face and then studied his beaded, dripping reflection in the streaked mirror. In spite of his tan and the new pinkness from the sun that he had absorbed in the past hour, he didn’t look healthy. His eyes were gray, as they had been all his life. Once, however, it had been the bright gray of polished iron or wet induline; now it was the soft dead gray of ashes, and the whites were bloodshot.
A fourth man had joined the cockroach handicappers. He was in his mid-fifties, thirty years older than the other three but trying to be one of them by matching their enthusiasm for pointless cruelty. The gamblers had become an obstruction to the rest room traffic. They were getting rowdy, laughing at the spasmodic progress of the insect, urging it on as though it were a thoroughbred pounding across turf toward a finish line.
Striving to block out the voices of the raucous group, Joe searched his ashen eyes in the mirror, wondering
