Amy came down the stairs, an overnight bag slung over her shoulder.
“What’s up?” she said, reading their faces, sensing it wasn’t just Clyde with his usual crap. He told her the deal, Amy nodding, taking it in.
“Okay, we’ll go get her,” Amy said. “Thanks for the warning.”
“You’ve got eighty-five minutes,” Clyde said. “We’re going in sharp.”
“She won’t be happy about it,” I said.
“I don’t really care. I’m not letting my daughter get arrested,” Amy said, dropping her bag on the couch. I imagined the local cops, all that pent-up Dirty Harry machismo, and texted Uncle Dan, hoping the cops might check their brutality if a local businessman was on scene to observe. He responded with three words: To the barricades!
“If anyone ever asks, I was never here,” Clyde said.
“Can we take it a step further and say you were never born?”
He shot me a raised middle finger. “Oh yeah, you’ll need to take the Santa Fe,” he said, meaning Amy’s SUV. “Your rental car has two flats. Looks like somebody slashed your back tires.”
“Are you serious?”
“Sorry, buck-o. Hope you paid extra for the insurance.”
I rushed past him and checked out the tires, the back two deflated, dead rubber sinking into the pavement. A cigarette butt lay nearby, just like the one I’d found the night Amy shot out the window. Obviously it wasn’t Ronan, who was ten hours away in Ohio and wanted nothing to do with us. So who was it? Scrawled on the rear bumper, in black magic marker, was Fuck You. Maybe it was random, but it felt personal. Yet if not Ronan, then who?
It’s just some teenagers looking for trouble, I thought. Stop being paranoid.
Clyde stepped over and chuckled. “We’ll check the video later. If you’re lucky, the cameras picked up something and we can nail the jerk. But do it later—get over to the beach and get Jill home.”
Inside, Amy waited by the door with her keys and purse.
“There goes my night at the Beach House,” she said. “Maybe Jill can stay at Maddie’s tonight and we’ll still have time, but you heard Clyde, we need to get her out of there. You need to get her. She’ll give me all kinds of crap, but she’ll do anything you say. Tell her an arrest will keep her out of Actor’s Equity.”
She pulled on her sweater and gave me a look. “Just don’t fall asleep on me, okay?”
-20-
The guy with the beard had me and wouldn’t let go.
“This spot, this exact fucking spot …” he said, jabbing his finger toward the sand in case it wasn’t clear. “In twenty years it’ll be under water. I dare you to find a legitimate climate scientist who disagrees. Go ahead, I dare you.” He paused, as if there might indeed be a scientist hidden in my pocket, ready for debate. “Submerged, flooded, completely sunk—if we stood here, we’d drown.”
Welcome to the occupation. Tall, thin, and heavily inked, he walked one step ahead of me, the true believer; even under the cloud-filtered moonlight his eyes blazed, frustrated and indignant because shit, you just don’t get it, dude.
As soon as we’d arrived, he’d latched onto us like some radical maître d, making sure we understood the menu before offering us a seat. He wasn’t there for a party or to have a good time. This was serious shit. Amy spotted him immediately, his long, looping strides angling toward us, and being three steps quicker than me, or maybe just more willing to blow people off, she dodged his approach and went to find Jill while I made the dual mistakes of eye contact and an affable head-nod. Snagged—the fish on the hook squirms but never escapes. A simple “Hi, how’s it going?” was all it took for him to launch into his shopping list of inconvenient truths. The guy knew his stuff, citing sources and data like they were song lyrics, and his points were powerful and depressing, but what did he want me to do about it? Shove the polar ice caps into the freezer at the Jaybird?
“The goddamn mainstream media …They never report the truth. The Koch Brothers!”
“Look, I agree with you,” I said, which should have appeased him, but no, my agreement was problematic because of my privilege.
“Aren’t you a white guy, too?”
“For now,” he said. “But I’m developing an app to correct for it.”
“Good luck,” I told him, knowing that Clyde’s psycho partner and his itchy nightstick were less than an hour away. Hopefully they wouldn’t beat his ass too badly. “Peace.”
He sneered as if I’d just told him to fuck off—peace, apparently, being too white Gen-X male middle class. “Justice?” I offered. “Fight the power?”
He shrugged and checked his phone. “Hey man, it’s your world.”
“Has anyone told the world that?”
As I headed off to find Amy, a barefoot college girl in a white peasant skirt ran up to me, her left arm ringed with dozens of orange glow sticks.
“You’re with us, right?” she asked, and when I nodded, she grabbed one of the glow sticks and snapped it around my neck.
“With enough people we can light up the world,” she said, which was hokey and beautiful, and she grabbed the glow stick around her own neck and started spinning it like a hula hoop, the orange neon reflecting across her long slender shoulders. Around the beach the glow sticks were ubiquitous, the only lights except for the moon and the light pollution from Ocean Avenue. Clusters of people gathered in scattered pockets, most in the vicinity of the ten-foot lifeguard chair—on which someone had stuck a homemade white flag reading “Occupy the Beach – Now and Forever!” the letters stitched carefully in red and blue thread. To its left were folding tables
