was way behind him, going down somewhere in Mexico. He had a good two hours to fish before dark. But first, just to enjoy the moment, he dropped his equipment next to the hull and sat down in the sand. He pulled a cigarette out of the pack in his shirt pocket and lighted it, and then he reached for the waders he had been carrying, put his hand down into one of the legs and pulled out a single bottle of beer. He popped the cap on the sweaty, amber bottle and sat back against the bleached hull of the shrimper. Seagulls slid across the sky above him, squeaking, hovering, dipping down to look at him. If this could last forever you wouldn’t hear any complaints from him.
When the cigarette gave out, Besom tossed it away and tucked the bottom of the beer bottle into the sand. He reached for his waders and began pulling them on, stopping a couple of times to work on the beer before it got warm. Standing, he finished buckling the waders and then reached down for the beer and finished it, tossing the bottle in the sand near the hull. He picked up the largest of the two rods-Go for it, he told himself-and checked the shimmering green Ambassador 5500 casting reel. Opening his tackle box he surveyed the trays of lures, having already decided against the shrimp tails in the bucket He selected a Gold Spoon, rigged it, and walked across the beach to the water.
Wading into the water until it was just above his crotch and just below his waist, he spread his legs slightly for balance and began casting. It was a hell of a pleasure, a real pleasure like sex, to hear the reel whine in the casting, to let the lure settle a second and then begin bringing it in, feeling the tug and nuzzle on the line as the surf pulled and pushed at his pelvis.
He had been fishing a little over half an hour with only one bite, something that hit the spoon and screamed away with it and then spat it out, something playing with him, making his adrenaline squirt and his heart hammer as his imagination created a monster redfish way out past the sandbar, when he saw the girl.
She was coming toward him from up the beach, coming from civilization. He caught her out of the corner of his eye as he was casting, and when the lure hit the water and he started reeling in, he looked back at her. A dog was with her, of all things, a greyhound. When he was a kid living on Baffin Bay before the development of Riviera Beach, he used to have a greyhound, him and his best friend, a greyhound each. They would sneak into the King Ranch with them and chase coyotes and jackrabbits in the limitless, empty brush country that stretched all the way to Laguna Madre.
Besom couldn’t see her face, but in the softening light of evening he could see that she had long black hair and that she was damn near naked. It was a bikini, of course, but from where he stood in the surf she was all thighs and bosom, moving along the beach toward him, eating something. Actually she was sauntering, that was the word for it, sauntering, walking leisurely, her long legs as long in proportion to her body as her greyhound’s legs were to his, two graceful creatures coming along the beach as if this were not as deserted a stretch of sand as he could find.
By the time he had cast a couple more times, she was within shouting distance of him, and she had stopped at the edge of the water and was watching him, her head tilted a little, the dog loping around her, in and out of the sand and water like a racehorse. When he reeled in the next cast, he turned and looked at her. She was smiling at him. It was a red bikini… and more tight, tanned flesh than he could ever remember seeing.
“Any luck?” she shouted above the surf. The wind was blowing her black hair, and she shook her head, shook it out of her face.
“Not a hell of a lot, no,” he shouted back. He hesitated, thought better of it, and turned back to the water. Casting again, as far as he could toss the spoon, he began reeling. He tried to be patient with it, tried to concentrate on the action of the lure far out in the gray water, but more than that, he wanted to turn around and look at the girl again. He could feel her still back there.
When the line was back to him, he turned. The girl was closer now and had waded a little way into the water to watch. He smiled at her.
“You like fishing?”
“I like watching,” she said. “They’re not biting, huh?”
“Not yet.”
She had a slight accent. Not Mexican. Something else. Some kind of cute little accent.
She held up what she had in her hand. “Want a few slices of orange?”
Slices of orange? Oh, Mother Machree. Besom cut his eyes up the beach. Not a soul in sight. He hesitated. Shit. He shrugged “why not” to her, nodded, and turned slowly in the water and headed toward her. By the time he got to her she had backed up a little, and the edge of the surf was swirling around her ankles.
“How long you been out there?” she asked as he walked up to her.
He looked at his watch. “Forty minutes.”
“What are you fishing for?” she asked, breaking off nearly half of what she had left of the orange and handing it to him.
She was a little older than a college girl, he saw, now that he was close. Her hair was thick with the humidity of the salt air, and she had that lusty weathered look about her that gave him the impression that she had been on the beach most of the afternoon. The girl had an incredible body, and he just couldn’t help looking at her. She tossed her hair off her shoulders with the back of a bent wrist and when she did her breasts wobbled heavily behind the two small patches of her bikini top.
“Redfish,” he heard himself say, and he broke off the first wedge of orange and tossed it into his mouth, his rod cradled in the crook of his left arm, as his eyes found the little pad of pudendum where the mile of thighs came together at her pelvis. The wild, fragrant buds of citrus burst and squirted in his mouth as he bit into the fruit.
“Redfish,” she said.
He nodded. “What are you doing way down here?” he asked, managing to drag his eyes back to hers.
“Beth,” she said, turning to her dog. “Sometimes we go all the way, right down to the Rio Grande and old Mexico. The walk’s nothing to her, with those legs. And it keeps me in shape, too.”
“No shit,” he said, tossing a second wedge of orange into his mouth. He bit into it, a second burst of citrus, and she cocked her hip and smiled at him.
“You like that.” She grinned.
He was looking at her breasts when the second wedge of orange turned to napalm in his throat, vaporized napalm, a spray of napalm instantly saturating his sinuses, ripping up into the hollows behind his eyes, actually coloring his vision. He saw scarlet everything, bikini, breasts, navel, smile, and as he staggered back into the red surf he knew he was dying. His trachea and lungs and heart were melted, already dissolved by the napalm, and even the murky Gulf water could not extinguish it.
The last thing he was aware of was the girl bent over him trying to open his mouth, but his jaws had locked down tight on his tongue, and she could only grab and pull at his lips and cheeks.
Frustrated, she gave up and stood for a minute watching him convulse, watching him suck in enough surf to drown even though he was past drowning. When he stopped jerking and flailing in the water, she bent down and worked at his mouth again, finally managing to pry it open. She took out the piece of his tongue he had bitten off and fished around in the sides of his mouth for the orange pulp, digging around the base of his gums, sloshing the frothing salty water into his mouth to make sure it was all washed out.
In a few moments she was finished, and she stood and stepped back away from him. She bent and washed her hands in the water, picked up some sand and rubbed her fingers with it and then washed them off again. Then she stepped back out of the water and watched him roll in the tide, watched him finally go face down, and pitch heavily with the slam of each wave in the rolling surf. After a minute or two, she looked up the beach where she came from, and then she called the greyhound and started walking back, her long, tan legs sauntering, her thick black hair blowing in the Gulf breeze.
Some of the seagulls stayed with him, reluctant to leave, sliding along the margins of the water, back and forth, dipping down, squeaking in the wind. Finally they, too, moved on and in a little while they were all gone, the girl, the dog, and the gulls.
Chapter 16
They sat in the car with the windows rolled down, one of only two cars in the small, otherwise empty lot, a niche carved out of the vast Memorial Park that surrounded them like a rain forest. The lot was at the terminus of a
