pool I could swim in all day for free?
I was glad that Rubin and Mr. Lopez had encouraged Dad to patch things up with Mr. Bollars, but I didn’t want to go off with them by myself. What if Mr. Lopez knew what his son did to me? What if Mr. Lopez was behind it? What if them showing up with a new van and an invitation to the beach was their way of sealing the deal?
“Wesley’s always wanted to go the beach,” Mom said. “I’m sure he’d love to go.”
Rubin smiled and my hands and feet began sweating.
“I don’t want to leave you here all alone, Mom.”
“She won’t be alone,” Mrs. Lopez said. “I’ll stay here. I got enough of the beach back home in Puerto Rico.”
Mom wouldn’t let Mrs. Lopez, an untrustworthy, knife-carrying Hispanic, stay with her, would she?
She answered my silent question quickly enough when she replied, “I’d love the company.”
Rubin smiled again, and I was reminded of Dad’s grin. He was up to something, but how to tell Mom without admitting what happened in the closet? I didn’t want either of us to get into
trouble, and if I told exactly what happened, I knew we would. That was, if anyone believed me, and who’d believe me over Rubin? If no one did, then only I’d get into trouble, and that was a chance I didn’t want to take.
Mom told me to go in the house and get my swimming trunks. I walked slowly, trying to figure a way out of this beach trip; by the time I was in the house, I heard the rest of them coming in and Mom saying she’d make some coffee.
Dad, to keep me quick, still had me swimming non-stop laps for a half hour every day.
But since he’d been gone, I’d been swimming on my own, not laps but just having fun. And Mom, at the end of the day, would even wade into the shallow part while I swam around her and played on the water slide and did cannonballs off the diving board. For all of this swimming, I only had one pair of swimming trunks, and they hung over the shower curtain rod in the bathroom. I kept thinking about the beach itself, full of people, strangers with nice bodies unlike mine. I was afraid to show my chest at the dojo and even to Rubin, and I was petrified of showing it at the beach, where there’d be people who wouldn’t hesitate to laugh at me.
I had to come up with some way of avoiding the beach. Dad had a rule about the swimming pooclass="underline" No one entered in regular shorts. He said that regular shorts were too dirty and ate up the chemicals in the pool, making it more difficult for him to keep the water a pretty blue.
Maybe the same was true for the beach. I knew no one was trying to keep the gulf’s waters blue and clean, but maybe there was a rule that anyone who went to the beach had to wear swimming trunks.
I was no expert at using toilet paper. I never seemed to be able to get myself completely clean with it, so I had developed the habit of using a towel or washcloth from the dirty clothes. Mom was the only one who did the laundry, so I never worried about Dad finding out about this.
Mom questioned me about it the first time she found shitty towels in the wash; but luckily, after I explained how toilet paper didn’t get my butt totally clean, she let me continue my new practice.
I found the towel I had most recently used, which was earlier that morning, and smeared some of the brown contents across the lining of my swimming trunks. Shitty trunks: I couldn’t go anywhere with them.
“Mom, could you come here.” She came in from the dining room, where Rubin and his parents sat waiting on coffee.
“What is it, son?” Mom asked from the other side of the bathroom door.
“Come in,” I said, “I’ve got something to show you.”
I stretched the waistband wide to make sure Mom wouldn’t miss a spot of the brown streak, and once Mom recognized what I was showing her, she shut the bathroom door and asked in a low voice: “What happened?”
“I put them on and had to use the bathroom suddenly, and I didn’t get them off in time. What am I gonna do now?” I tried to act as disappointed as Mr. Lopez seemed when he found
out Dad wasn’t here.
“Put those in the dirty clothes and get another pair of shorts from your room for the beach.”
“But I can’t wear just a regular pair of shorts. What about Dad’s rule?”
Mom made a face and laughed. “That’s only for the pool, son. You don’t have to worry about the pH balance of the gulf. Now hurry up. Don’t keep Mr. Lopez waiting.”
Mom went back and served coffee, the pungent odor of which now filled the house, and she and Mrs. Lopez set in to beating their gums—one of Dad’s expressions for useless talking. I found another pair of shorts and I got two shirts, one for swimming in and one for the ride back. Before I joined them, I got another pair of shorts for the ride home, too.
The parking lot was paved with angled spaces; not what I expected for the beach. I thought we’d pull up to the edge of the sand, not fight for a paved parking spot as if we were at the mall. But unlike a mall parking lot, this one looked down over the beach, with its bright white sand stretching in both directions. The water’s edge was teeming with people: screaming kids, teenagers posing and primping for the opposite sex, young adult couples holding hands, single middle-aged men with guts and tattoos, and old pasty people.
Mr. Lopez didn’t walk down to the beach with us, but sidetracked to an open-air beachfront bar, and ordered a rum and Coke. He had given Rubin the key to the van, in case we needed anything out of it he said, and this convinced me that Mr. Lopez knew what Rubin was doing or was trying to do to me. As soon as his father settled down on the barstool with a drink, Rubin told me that he needed to go back to the van for a minute.
“Let’s walk around first,” I said, “and do some swimming.”
“You’ve got a pool you can swim in anytime,” Rubin held up the key up and dangled it.
“I’ve never been to the beach and I want to check it out.”
“It’s just an island surrounded by water. Nothing special.”
“Then why’d you bring me here?”
“Thought you’d like it. Get you away from the house and your daddy. He’s got to get on your nerves with all that yelling and cursing.”
Although what Rubin said was exactly how I often felt about Dad, I resented hearing him say this. By talking bad about Dad, Rubin showed himself to be like Dad. I walked down the beach, admiring how white the sand was and the passing tanned women in two-piece canary yellow and bubble gum pink bikinis.
“The van’s the other way,” Rubin yelled.
I didn’t look back; I needed time to cool off and think. But I also knew that I couldn’t get separated from my ride, so as I made my way through the ankle-high squeaking sand, I glanced
back every so often to see that Mr. Lopez was still on his barstool. I ventured down into the oncoming surf and let it wash over my feet. The water was cool and I could smell the salt. I liked how the rolling waves wet the sand and packed it firm so my feet didn’t sink in it, and I began leaving my footprint, large thing that it was, and watching frothy water wash it away. I was on one foot, using my weight to make a deep imprint, when I heard Rubin: “I used to like doing that, too.”
In a weird way, I wanted Rubin to come after me. His wanting me, while scary, excited me. In his eyes, I was a valuable commodity, just as oil and ranches had been valuable commodities for Grandfather Royal.