“Except your daddy!” Tad sung out. Giggling, he brushed past me on the stairs and raced down to the beach. “He calls you …”
“Don’t start, Tad!” I ran, caught up with him, tackled him to the sand.
“Ow! Big meanie.” Laughing, Tad got me in a chokehold, pinned my back to the sand, one arm behind me. The buttons of his shirt were plucking at my nipples. They swelled. I got my legs around Tad’s body. Men have the upper body advantage; women have the lower. I twisted, flipping Tad like a turtle. I sat astride him. Jamal ran up and stood there, watching us both with a shit-eating grin on his face.
“Now,” I said to Tad, “what does my dad call me? Tell me.” And I started tickling.
Tad wriggled helplessly under me. “Bitch! Stop it! No!” He giggled, tried to slap my hands away, but I kept moving them, kept digging my fingers into his tummy, his sides, the bit along the bottom of his belly.
“Here, let me help,” said Jamal. He knelt at Tad’s head, grabbed his arms. Laughing, Tad struggled, but Jamal held him fast. I kept tickling. Tad started to squeal.
“I think you men need to go to the other part of the beach,” said a firm woman’s voice.
I looked up. She was pointing to where the gay men usually hung out. She looked part Asian, part something I couldn’t identify. She was completely naked, all soft curves, about fifteen years older than me, with a relaxed, amused grin. Just the way I like ’em. I stood up off Tad. “Yes, ma’am!”
“Oh,” she said, hearing my voice. “Maybe not.” She’d pegged me for a woman.
“Where is it?” Jamal asked her.
She pointed, but I said, “I can show you.” I took Tad’s hand, pulled him up off the sand. The woman raised an eyebrow at me, but only said, “I’m sure you can,” and sauntered off.
I watched her departing behind: chubby and round, like two oranges. I bet that ass felt good in the hands. It was bouncy, too. “Gotta be jelly,” I muttered.
“Cause jam don’t shake like that!” Jamal finished. We laughed, punched each other’s shoulders.
I led the boys further out on to the beach, to a nice patch of sunlight. Sunlight, like black people, was a rare and precious occurrence in Vancouver. Tad and Jamal stared around them. Even in early fall, some people still came down to the water. There was a mound of sand, human height, with a sand sculpture of a naked woman carved into its side. Over to our right, someone had stuck bleached fallen logs into the sand, angling them together into the shape of a teepee. Over to our left an elderly Asian woman and man, nude, sat on towels with their chess game on the sand between them. Three ruddy children and their dog played with a bright green ball. The children’s laughter and shouting and the barking of the dog ascended into the cool autumn air and were thrown back from the forest behind us.
“Water? Pop? Smokes?” The vendor strolling the beach was male, stocky, white. He swung a bright red cooler from either hand. He wore sturdy rubber sandals, a money pouch around his waist, a sun visor on his head and a bow tie around his neck, all in the same red as the coolers. Nothing else. Tad’s face as he spied him was a picture.
“We don’t have anything like this in Seattle,” he murmured.
“Hey, Philip,” I called out.
The vendor smiled when he saw me, and came over. “Hey, Shuck,” he said. “Nice day, eh?”
“Beauty,” I agreed.
Tad quirked an eyebrow at me. “Beauty?”
I shrugged. “Been here three years. Starting to talk like the locals.” Philip snickered.
“You guys thirsty?” I asked them. They nodded. So I bought some pop from Philip.
“Smokes?” Philip asked again. “I got tobacco and, um, herbal.”
“Reefer?” asked Tad. “You selling reefer out in the open like this?”
Philip just grinned.
“Shuck,” said Tad, “we’re the only black people as far as the eye can see. You know that if some shit goes down with the cops, we’ll be the ones doing jail time, not him.”
“Just chill, man,” Philip told him. The borrowed black phrase sounded odd in a white Vancouverite’s mouth. But hell, probably no odder than me saying, “beauty”.
“This is Vancouver,” I told Tad. “And it’s Wreck Beach. If the cops start picking people up here for smoking weed, the jail’ll be overflowing in an hour.”
Tad shook his head. “S’all right anyway, man,” he told Philip. “Thank you.”
“You guys have a good day, then,” Philip replied. He nodded at me and continued down the beach.
I turned to hand a can of pop to Jamal, and my mouth went dry. He’d kicked off his sandals. As I watched, he stripped off his tank top and shorts and slipped out of the skimpy black jock he was wearing underneath. When he bent, the hollow that muscle made at the side of his butt cheek was deep enough that I could have laid my fist inside it. Graceful as a dancer, he flicked the jock off, tossed it on the pile of his clothing, rolled it all up into a cylinder, and stood. Tad gave his lover’s body an admiring gaze. Jamal took the can of pop I held out towards him; somehow managed to do so without looking directly at me.
For a while we all just stood, uncomfortably silent. Sucking on the drinks gave us something to do with our hands. I led them to a pile of flat rocks, comfortable as armchairs. We sat and looked at the people around us, looked out to sea, anywhere but at each other.
Not too many people out today; it was early fall, and a little bit chilly for the beach. Two more nudists were playing frisbee not too far from us; both appeared to be in their sixties. He was tanned with a fall of long white hair tied into a ponytail, and elaborate mustachios. Both forearms a rainbow of tattoos. He carried his firm pot belly on his sturdy thighs like a treasure chest. She had long, blonde hair, a beautiful and weathered face, a toughness and pride to her movements. She had knotted a burgundy lace shawl around her hips, not that it hid anything. It seemed to be just for pretty. And she was pretty. Her breasts bounced and jiggled as she leaped, laughing, for the frisbee. She caught it, went and took the man by the hand. Together they walked over to a group of three children frolicking by the rocks. They had a family picnic over there, spread out on towels.
“There are kids here,” said Tad.
“Yeah. Everybody comes.”
“Doesn’t it get a little … racy for them to be out here?”
“No. Anybody starts to make out in public, people will stop them.”
“Oh.” He looked a little disappointed.
“Of course, what happens in the bushes isn’t exactly public …”
Jamal snickered.
“… I’m sure there’s a lot that goes on that we don’t see.” Hell, I’d played my own reindeer games here. That night with Sula and the mosquitoes, for example. No one was allowed down here at night, but we’d managed.
Over to our right, a young woman sat fully clothed on the sand, her knapsack beside her. She had a sketchbook. She seemed to be drawing the mountains in the distance. The two surfer dudes we’d seen earlier were skimming wake boards in the shallowest part of the water, hopping on to them and riding parallel with the shore.
“There’s nobody in the water,” Jamal said.
“Nah, not much. It’s cold and there aren’t any waves. That’s not the attraction of this beach.”
“No?” Jamal replied, a teasing tone to his voice. “Then what is?”
Tad gasped and grabbed my arm. “What’s that?” he hissed. He pointed out into the water.
Jamal looked where Tad had pointed. “Shit. Is it a dog?”
I smiled. “Seal. Harbour seal.”
“For real? A live seal?”
“For real.”
The seal had surfaced not twenty feet off shore, only its head visible. Its fur was black and shiny, its eyes large and curious in its big, round head. It was staring at the surfer dudes.
“It’s just curious,” I said. “Don’t make eye contact with it …”
Too late. The seal had turned to look at us and had seen us staring. Shy and cautious, it disappeared back into the water.