In Summertime Saga

My shoulder hurt and I wanted to see the ocean. School let out and instead of walking home I walked south, past the neighborhood, past the strip of road where the shops thinned out and the houses got smaller and the air changed. Gradually. The heat loosened. The smell shifted from asphalt and grass to salt and kelp and the ocean being nearby.

The beach was rockier than I expected. In the game it had been a smooth crescent of yellow sand with blue water behind it, a postcard beach. The real version had sand mixed with pebbles and a strip of dark seaweed at the tide line and a jetty of rough dark stone that stuck out into the water like a broken arm. Seagulls were on the rocks screaming at each other about whatever seagulls scream about. The water was grey-green and choppy and it hit the shore in uneven waves that didn't match any rhythm I could follow.

I walked along the sand. My shoes sank. The pebbles crunched and shifted under my feet and some of them were sharp enough to feel through the soles. A couple was sitting on a blanket near the tide line and the woman had her head on the man's shoulder and they were watching the water and I walked past them and kept going.

The pier started where the sand ended and the rocks began. It was old. Wooden planks, grey and splintered, wood that had been wet and dry and wet again so many times it had given up on choosing. The railings had fishing line snarled around the posts in knots that nobody had bothered to cut, and the wood was salt-stained and rough and the whole structure creaked when the waves hit the pilings. I walked out on it. The planks were uneven and one of them shifted under my weight and I stepped over it. At the end, a kiosk.

The kiosk was a wooden shack with a counter and a hand-painted sign that said FRESH FISH - BAIT - COLD DRINKS and the paint was peeling and the shack leaned slightly to the left like it had given up on being level years ago. Behind the counter, a man was sitting on a stool with a glass in one hand and a fishing rod propped against the wall behind him.

"You buying bait or just blocking my view?"

His voice was rough and loud and carried over the waves. He was old. Sixties, maybe older. Sunburned face with lines cut deep around the eyes and mouth, the tan so permanent it had stopped being a tan and become the color of his skin. He was wearing a captain's hat that was grey instead of white and had a stain on the brim. A white undershirt. Cargo shorts. Sandals with a toe missing from the left foot.

I looked at the missing toe. Looked at the hat. Looked at the glass, which held tequila from the smell of it.

"Just looking," I said.

"Looking's free." He took a drink. "Sitting costs a story."

There was a stool on the other side of the counter, the customer side. It was wooden and cracked and had a fishing magazine sitting on it. I moved the magazine and sat down.

"I'm new in town," I said. True enough.

"New." He said the word like he was checking it for damage. "Where from?"

"Somewhere else."

He looked at me over the rim of his glass. His eyes were blue and watery and sharp underneath the water. "That's a shit story. Told better ones to fish."

"Give me a minute. I just got here."

He laughed. It was a big laugh, too big for the kiosk, and it startled a seagull off the railing. "All right. I'll give you a minute. I'm Terry. Captain Terry, if you want to be formal, but nobody wants to be formal at the end of a pier." He held up the glass. "Tequila?"

"I'm eighteen."

"So's the tequila." He grinned. The grin was missing a tooth on the left side. "Suit yourself."

I sat on the stool and looked at the water. The ocean was right there, close enough to spit into from the end of the pier, and it was different from every other thing I'd seen in this town. Everything else had been smaller in person than the game had suggested. The mall was bigger, sure, but the houses were ordinary and the school was just a school and the people were just people. The ocean was bigger. The game had drawn it as a flat blue background with a horizontal line where the sky started and I'd looked at it while navigating the pier screen and thought nothing.

There was nothing flat about it. The water moved constantly, in every direction, and the surface was messy with chop and reflected light and floating debris and the color changed depending on where you looked and how deep the water was and whether a cloud was covering the sun. Near the shore it was green-grey and murky. Near the pilings it was darker. Out past the end of the pier it was a deep blue-black that kept going down to a place I couldn't see. The water went down. It went a long way down. And down there was dark and cold and I didn't know what was in it.

"Hell of a thing," Terry said. He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the water too. "I've been staring at it forty years and it still does that."

"Does what?"

"Makes you look." He finished his tequila. Set the glass down. Poured another from a bottle under the counter. "Most people come to the beach, they look at the sand. At the girls. At the ice cream stand. They look at everything around the water and they never look at the water. You're looking at the water."

I was looking at it the way you look at a fire, because it moves and doesn't repeat and your eyes can't land anywhere so they just keep following.

"There's a fish out there," Terry said. He leaned forward on his stool and pointed with the glass. Tequila sloshed. "Named him Tigger. Big bastard. Carnivorous. Took my toe in '09." He wiggled the foot with the missing toe. "I've been trying to catch him since. He's been trying to eat the rest of me since. We have an understanding."

"Sounds personal."

"It is personal. Everything worth doing is personal." He leaned back. "You fish?"

"No."

"Good. Fishing is terrible. Don't start. You'll end up at the end of a pier talking to teenagers about a fish that ate your toe."

I sat with him for a while. He talked about the tides and when the blues were running and a boat he was fixing that had a hole in the hull and a woman named Sara who was either his wife or his girlfriend depending on which story he was telling. He poured himself two more tequilas. A pelican landed on the railing and sat there looking offended about something and Terry threw it a piece of dried fish and it caught it and flew away and Terry said "ungrateful bastard" without any heat.

The sun moved. The light on the water changed from white to gold and the shadows of the pilings got long on the surface. My shoulder was still throbbing where Judith had bitten me. The bruise was forming and it throbbed when I shifted on the stool, a dull ache under my shirt, and the bite mark was connected to the locker room and the locker room was connected to a girl with sliding glasses who had bitten me to keep from screaming and I was sitting at the end of a pier with a drunk sea captain watching the light change on water that went deeper than I could see.

I sat on the cracked wooden stool and watched the ocean move and the seagulls scream and the sun go orange and I breathed the salt air and for a while that was the whole thing. Breathing and sitting and looking at water.

Terry poured himself another drink and didn't say anything and the quiet sat between us and neither of us touched it.

After a while I stood up. The stool creaked when I got off it.

"Same time tomorrow?" Terry said. He was leaning back with the tequila and the captain's hat and the sunset behind him and he looked like a painting a drunk person would make of a sea captain.

"Maybe."

"Bring a story next time. A real one."

"I'll work on it."

I walked back down the pier. The planks creaked under me and the water was dark now, the blue-black everywhere, and the seagulls had gone quiet. At the beach I took off my shoes and walked through the sand barefoot and the sand was cool now that the sun was low and the pebbles were smooth under my feet. The salt was on my skin and in my hair and on my lips when I licked them.

I walked home. It took a while because I wasn't walking fast. The town looked different in the gold light, the buildings warmer, the shadows longer, and a kid was riding a bicycle on the sidewalk ahead of me going the same direction and we were both heading somewhere and neither of us was in a hurry.

At home, Debbie had dinner on the table. I washed my hands and sat down and she said "you smell like the ocean" and I said "yeah" and she smiled and it was closer to right than it had been last week. I ate dinner and the salt was still in my hair and the bruise on my shoulder was still there and the ocean was still out there at the end of the pier going down into the dark.

I went to my room. Lay on the bed. Stared at the popcorn ceiling.

The ocean went down a long way. I didn't know what was down there. The game hadn't told me much about it and what it had told me I'd skipped because I was looking for the next sex scene. There was a cave. An underwater cave. A girl who lived in it.

I'd get to that eventually. Everything in this town was a route and every route had a beginning and the ocean's beginning was a pier and a drunk captain and a fish named Tigger.

I closed my eyes. The sound of the waves was still in my ears, or I was imagining it, and either way I fell asleep to it.