At the water's slapping, hissing, frothing edge sandpipers scurry. and halt, stab. the foam for some morsel, and scurry on. Their feet and heads are so quick they appear mechanical. Roy cannot catch them, though they seem like toys. When Harry takes off his unlaced Nikes, the sand bites his bare feet with an unexpected chill – the tide of night still cold beneath the sunny top layer of grains. The tops of his feet show wormy blue veins, and his shins are all chalky and crackled, as if he is standing up to his knees in old age. A tremor of flight comes alive in his legs. The sea, the sun are so big: cosmic wheels he could be ground between. He is playing with fire.
Gregg is waiting for them at a but of corrugated Fiberglas on the beach, back from the water near some palms with their roots exposed. He has taken from the but a rudder, a centerboard, and two life jackets of black foam rubber. Rabbit doesn't like the color, the texture; he wants old-fashioned Day-Glo kapok from Thomas Edison's kapok trees. Gregg asks him, "You've done this before?"
"Sure."
But something in Harry's tone leads Gregg to be instructive: "Push the tiller away from the sail. Watch the tips of the waves for the direction of the wind. When the wind gets behind you, hold the mainsheet loose."
"O.K…, sure," Harry says, having not quite listened, thinking instead, resentfully, of Ed Silberstein's bogey on the first hole yesterday and how its being enough for a win got the whole round off to a lousy start.
Gregg turns to Pru and asks, "Your little girl can swim?"
"Oh, sure," she says, picking up Harry's lazy word. "She was the champion in her swimming class at summer camp."
"Mom," the girl pleads. "I came in second."
Gregg looks down at Judy, the sun at his back so bright that the shadow on his face has a blue light ofits own. "Second's pretty close to champ." Still needing to talk to Pru, Gregg says, "I wouldn't advise your little boy to go. There's an offshore breeze today, you can't feel it in the lee of the hotel here, but it takes you out there pretty fast. There's no cockpit, it's easy to slip off."
She gives Gregg Silvers her crooked wry grin and shifts her weight, as if the closeness of this man her own age makes her awkwardly aware of her near-nakedness. She is wearing a tie-dyed brown dashiki over her one-piece white suit with those high sides that expose leg up to the hipbone. The cut means you have to shave the sides off your pussy. What women go through. There's even a kind of wax job you can have done to make it permanent. But suppose bathing-suit fashions change again? Rabbit preferred that pre-Reagan look of the two-piece bikini with the lower half like a little skimpy diaper slung under the belly, like Cindy Murkett used to slosh around in. Still, this new style nicely lengthens Pru's already long legs and keeps her thickening middle in. "He's going to stay with me right on the beach," she tells Gregg Silvers, and by way of emphasis bows down, so her red hair flings forward, and pulls off her dashiki, revealing string straps and white wide shoulders mottled with pale freckles.
"How long do I have it for?" Harry, feeling ignored, asks Ed's son. Those tight little European-style bathing trunks definitely show the bump of a prick.
"One hour, sir." The "sir" just popped in absentmindedly and the boy tries to revert to friendly casualness. "No sweat if you don't bring it in on the dot. There's not much action today, a lot of people don't like taking them out in this much wind. Take number nineteen, on the end there."
As Harry moves off, he hears Gregg ask Pru, "Where're you folks from up north?"
"Pennsylvania. Actually, I'm from Akron, Ohio."
"Hey! You'll never guess where I was raised – Toledo!"
The boats are up on the dry sand in a line, along with some other big water toys – those water bikes, and squarish paddleboats. Harry pulls at the nylon painter attached to the bow and the hull is heavier than he thought; by the time he's dragged it forty feet through the sand his breathing feels shallow and that annoying binding pain has begun to flicker on the left side of his ribs. He gives the boat one more heave and sits down in the sand, near where Pru is settling herself on a beach chaise Gregg has dragged down from the stack for her. Another beachgoer has momentarily called him away. "You like those?" Rabbit pants. "Don't you like feeling the sand under your – you know, like sort of a nest?"
She says, "It gets into the bathing suit, Harry. It gets in everywhere."
This needless emphasis, when he had got the picture, excites him, here in the bewildering brightness. He dimly remembers an old joke in high school about women making pearls. Cunts like Chesapeake oysters. That sly old Fred. He tells Judy, "Give me a second to get my breath, couldja honey? Go for a quick swim in the water so it won't be a shock when we're out on it. I'll be with you in one minute."
He should try to talk to Pru about Nelson. Something rotten there. Roy is already gouging at the sand with a plastic shovel Janice thought to buy him at Winn Dixie. Frowningly the child dumps the sand into a bucket shaped like an upside-down Garfield. Pru says, since Harry seems unable to begin, "You're awfully nice to have arranged all this. I was astonished, how much he charged."
"Well," he says, feeling slowly better as his bare legs absorb heat from the top layer of sand, "you're only a grandfather once. Or twice, in my case. You and Nelson plan any more?" This feels forward, but not in a class with the sand getting in everywhere.
"Oh no, my God," she too swiftly answers, in a trough of silence as one long low wave follows another in and breaks in a frothy cresting of glitter and a mechanical scurrying of sandpipers. "We're not ready for any more."
"You're not, huh?" he says, not sure where to take this.
She helps him, her voice in his ear as he gazes out into the Gulf. He doesn't dare turn his head to look at her bare feet, their pink toe joints and cracked nail polish, and her long legs lifted on the chaise, exposing contrasting white pieces of spandex crotch and soft flesh underside. These new bathing suits don't do much to hold a woman's ass in. She confesses to Harry, "I don't think we're doing justice to the two we've got, with Nelson how he is."
"Yeah, how is he? He seems jumpy, and only half here."
"That's right," she says, too enthusiastically agreeing. That's all she says. Another wave collapses and shooshes up the sand. She has pulled back. She is waiting for him to make an inspired guess.
"He hates Toyotas," he offers.
"Oh, he'd complain if they were jaguars," Pru says. "Nothing would satisfy him, the way he is now."
The way he is. The secret seems to be in that phrase. Was the poor kid with his white-around-the-gills look dying of something, of leukemia like that girl in Love Story? Of AIDS he caught somehow – how, Harry can't bear to think -hanging around that faggy Slim crowd Lyle the new accountant is part of. But it all seems distant, like those islands where pirates hid gold and rich men caught tarpon, mere thickenings of the horizon from this angle three feet above sea level. He can't focus on it, with the sun on his head. He maybe should have brought a hat, to protect his Swedish complexion. His suspicion has always been he looks foolish in a hat, his head too big already. Roy has filled the bucket and pretty carefully, considering he's only four, dumps it upside down and lifts it off. He expects to have a sand Garfield but the shape is too tricky and crumbles on one side. A bad principle, fancy shapes. Stick with simple castles and let the kids use their imaginations. Harry volunteers, speaking into the air, not quite daring to turn his head and face Pru's crotch, and those nameless bits exposed by the way her legs are up, "He was never what you'd call a terrifically happy child. I guess me and Jan are to blame for that."