places to eat. Prepared food is expensive, but delicious, touristy food, most of all. I exercised a little discipline and pushed onward, eventually arriving at a bridge leaving the island. The sign on the far side, coming back, welcomed all to “Bradenton Beach, Santa Maria Island.” I wasn’t by the ocean at all—I was just off the Gulf of Mexico, in Florida.
A few minutes later, I passed a pricy-looking organic grocery with a bunch of nice cars in front and kept going until I found a barebones, no-frills store that looked like it catered to people who didn’t mind hormones and pesticides and other famine-eradicating marvels if it meant they could feed their family on a tight budget. The kitchen back at the house had plenty of pots and pans, so after much agonizing, I bought a box of spaghetti with no sauce. This would at least keep me from starving. The other thing I bought was a box of frozen shrimp sold as fish bait. But I wouldn’t be dining on shrimp tonight. With luck, there’d be fish to go with my sauce-free pasta.
That left me with a buck and change. I used that to return the car to just above the halfway point on gas. With great effort, I turned my gaze away from all the little pies lined up near the register.
Back at the house, I boiled half the spaghetti and ate it plain, hating it but killing my hunger over the course of the meal. The remaining half would serve in an emergency.
With nothing else to do, I grabbed a towel from the linen closet and went to the beach.
Chapter 13
The beach was packed. The sky hunched, overcast. A good thing, it being summer and the heat and humidity already climbing into the swampy regions. Countless families had staked out claims as far as I could see in either direction. If there had been a mugging the night before you couldn’t tell from the wide sprawl of frolic and leisure. Lots of beach umbrellas and skin and fantastically colored beach towels and bikinis and suntan lotion and tan lines and beach balls and basket balls and softballs and even some tennis balls, each known by various other names, most of them just as inventive and none of them all that polite. These are a few of my fa-vor-ite things.
I didn’t have a beach umbrella or any suntan lotion, but it wasn’t any skin off my back. Literally. Still, I didn’t want to spend the next few days peeling and sore, so I decided to limit myself to one quick swim and no more, just to get it out of my system.
I covered my keys and shoes with the towel, then set off toward the water across some of the smoothest, whitest sand I’d ever encountered. It felt wonderful under my toes. A little like dry mud, if that makes any sense. Molding my skin without scraping, surprisingly soft, yet not clinging any more than your garden-variety scratchy sand. That’s because it wasn’t sand at all, but the ancient skeletons of coral ground up by the tide over thousands of years and deposited here, grain-by-grain to massage the feet and cushion the backsides of the unwashed masses at the public beach. What can I say? Allegory’s a bitch.
The water churned silky and warm and cloudy near the surf—then crystal clear and a shade cooler after I swam farther out. Easily a hundred times more fabulous than that crummy old coral sand. Soft and velvety, lots of little bubbles, inspiring within me a profound sense of what poets call— whoa! Someone just lost their bikini top. I pretended not to stare, and pretty soon the show was over and it was just me and the crummy old saltwater again and I was laughing for no good reason.
Unlike the mere mortals on the beach, I had less to fear from sharks than they did. Sure, I didn’t like the idea of being eaten alive, but I knew the odds of a shark attack were incredibly long. The people on the beach knew it too, but none of them were going out past the invisible “deadly sharks!” line they all seemed to sense. They had something to lose. I sensed the invisible line as I passed it and
A few minutes later, I passed a pricy-looking organic grocery with a bunch of nice cars in front and kept going until I found a barebones, no-frills store that looked like it catered to people who didn’t mind hormones and pesticides and other famine-eradicating marvels if it meant they could feed their family on a tight budget. The kitchen back at the house had plenty of pots and pans, so after much agonizing, I bought a box of spaghetti with no sauce. This would at least keep me from starving. The other thing I bought was a box of frozen shrimp sold as fish bait. But I wouldn’t be dining on shrimp tonight. With luck, there’d be fish to go with my sauce-free pasta.
That left me with a buck and change. I used that to return the car to just above the halfway point on gas. With great effort, I turned my gaze away from all the little pies lined up near the register.
Back at the house, I boiled half the spaghetti and ate it plain, hating it but killing my hunger over the course of the meal. The remaining half would serve in an emergency.
With nothing else to do, I grabbed a towel from the linen closet and went to the beach.
Chapter 13
The beach was packed. The sky hunched, overcast. A good thing, it being summer and the heat and humidity already climbing into the swampy regions. Countless families had staked out claims as far as I could see in either direction. If there had been a mugging the night before you couldn’t tell from the wide sprawl of frolic and leisure. Lots of beach umbrellas and skin and fantastically colored beach towels and bikinis and suntan lotion and tan lines and beach balls and basket balls and softballs and even some tennis balls, each known by various other names, most of them just as inventive and none of them all that polite. These are a few of my fa-vor-ite things.
I didn’t have a beach umbrella or any suntan lotion, but it wasn’t any skin off my back. Literally. Still, I didn’t want to spend the next few days peeling and sore, so I decided to limit myself to one quick swim and no more, just to get it out of my system.
I covered my keys and shoes with the towel, then set off toward the water across some of the smoothest, whitest sand I’d ever encountered. It felt wonderful under my toes. A little like dry mud, if that makes any sense. Molding my skin without scraping, surprisingly soft, yet not clinging any more than your garden-variety scratchy sand. That’s because it wasn’t sand at all, but the ancient skeletons of coral ground up by the tide over thousands of years and deposited here, grain-by-grain to massage the feet and cushion the backsides of the unwashed masses at the public beach. What can I say? Allegory’s a bitch.
The water churned silky and warm and cloudy near the surf—then crystal clear and a shade cooler after I swam farther out. Easily a hundred times more fabulous than that crummy old coral sand. Soft and velvety, lots of little bubbles, inspiring within me a profound sense of what poets call— whoa! Someone just lost their bikini top. I pretended not to stare, and pretty soon the show was over and it was just me and the crummy old saltwater again and I was laughing for no good reason.
Unlike the mere mortals on the beach, I had less to fear from sharks than they did. Sure, I didn’t like the idea of being eaten alive, but I knew the odds of a shark attack were incredibly long. The people on the beach knew it too, but none of them were going out past the invisible “deadly sharks!” line they all seemed to sense. They had something to lose. I sensed the invisible line as I passed it and
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