SAIL AWAY
Tom Cardamone
The old man remembered when the shore was wild. When he was a small child the town had just finished being a collection of shacks afraid to cross the bay. He remembered that his grand-father talked of a time before bridges; no one lived on the keys. Mosquitoes moved in clouds along the beach and rattlesnakes coiled in the brush beneath the palmettos. The first bridge was made of wood. The width of the bridge was only one lane. Cars would have to stop and honk twice before proceeding. Bigger bridges of concrete were built. In his teens he would ride his bike over the bridge to the beach, past the parking lots crammed with new Cadillacs, nautical fins ready to cut the air, tops perpetually down. He pedaled past the crowded strip and two-story hotels toward the wooded area. Here the road turned to shell. He swam, chased black snakes between the Australian pines, and watched in wonder as a shifting rainbow of dragonflies hovered overhead.
The old man remembered coming upon his classmate, Jimmy, in the dunes. Jimmy had been swimming and stood naked, smiling in the wind, as his cutoff jean shorts dried stiff in the sun on a large bend of gray driftwood. The driftwood blackened from the water it had absorbed from the shorts. The boy was younger than his classmate and shied away upon seeing his nakedness, so carefree and deserving that cloudless day, but Jimmy waved him over and patted the driftwood for the younger boy to sit. They fell into a natural conversation. The sky was brilliant with dragonflies, each one a shiny gold. As the boys talked Jimmy reclined and slowly spread his legs and flapped his arms and made an angel in the sand. He then motioned with his head for the other youth to join him. The boy blushed deeply and tucked his chin into his shoulder as Jimmy further motioned that he should remove his swimming trunks. His classmate lifted himself on one elbow to watch as he struggled out of his suit, now heavy and awkward with seawater and pockets full of sand. He was worried they would be seen. He was scared because the other boy was bigger than him and would tease him for not having as much hair between his legs, but Jimmy just dropped back into the sand and began working on his angel. The boy did the same, thrilled by the new sensation of hot sand beneath bare buttocks. Exhilarated, he was immediately erect. His prone penis quivered and he felt an impending orgasm rise, so he squeezed his eyes shut and braced himself. A calm hand on his shoulder: Jimmy whispered, “Not yet,” then jumped up and leapt toward the shore. The boy relaxed and inhaled the salt air. Cattails wavered in the breeze and dragonflies hovered.
Jimmy returned with his hands cupped before him. He let ocean water drip between his fingers and splash on the boy’s stomach and bare chest. The boy gasped. He arched his back in the sand and concentrated on the sensation of cool water snaking down his ribs, pooling in his belly button. He dug his heels into the sand, and Jimmy laughed and stroked the younger boy’s hair.
“Have you ever touched another guy?” Jimmy asked.
The boy shook his head no and looked up at Jimmy. The older boy settled back into the rising sand of the dunes, closed his eyes, and spread his legs. The boy understood the question was an invitation and rose on his knees and crawled toward him. Jimmy’s legs were more muscular, his hair dark where the boy’s was frothy and blond. Jimmy sensed his approach and sighed, opening his legs farther to reveal a perfect sac pulled taut by a wide erection. The dark crevice of his plump ass settled over the sand like a pirate’s cave promising treasure. The boy approached, wanting to explore this landscape of suntanned flesh, but he did not know where to begin.
“Touch it,” Jimmy commanded with his hands behind his head, eyes closed. The boy closed his small fist around the totem of muscle and felt as if he were touching himself but not. And he felt right. Desire melted through the fear and his touch became sure, exploratory, exciting for both. Jimmy extended his legs as the young boy developed rhythm and as they sighed in unison overhead a seagull, too, cried and they laughed and slapped and tickled each other and Jimmy chased the boy around the dunes, naked and glorious with sunlight all around. Eventually Jimmy caught the younger boy and pinned him to the sand. Face to face, they bucked and pulled and came in exquisite squirts.
Jimmy ran into the surf to wash off his stomach. He lingered there, the dark shadow of a promise as the sun neared setting. The boy dressed quickly and grabbed Jimmy’s small, worn, striped towel; he stuffed it in his backpack and rushed back to his unchained bike.
The old man remembered returning to the dunes as a boy and not finding Jimmy but sometimes older men, secretive in the tall grass, exposing themselves, always delighted that he would approach, proudly displaying his own solid member. They taught him different lessons than Jimmy, and were often but not always more serious and hurried. Others were marvels of new knowledge: sailors, dark men from other countries who whispered hotly in his ear. These men taught him that such meetings were universal; all over the world, wherever the land slipped into water, men found each other at dusk in the surf, in the nearby woods, behind rolling hills of sand. They pulled at each other and made quiet demands, and the boy learned that he was obsequious but just so; he bent and bobbed naturally like a cattail in the wind. When he could, he would leave the beach with the man’s handkerchief stiff in his pocket. Occasionally he would be able to claim a shirt. He would breathe its secreted scents in bed at night: sweat, cocoa butter, semen: the salts of the sea.
When he finished high school he went north to pick tobacco. Other boys went to college, some were drafted into the military, but after that initial summer he returned to his hometown. He came back because he desired the beach. But he did not stay long. With his tobacco money he traveled the coast and sampled the dunes. For years he would work a season on the farms and then return to explore the Florida coast. He dove naked for sponges with Greek immigrant boys in Tarpon Springs. Miami was a glorious city of light and breeze. He drifted to Key West and drank his money away and played with other boys in the surf, their backs to Cuba, laughing that if there were a nuclear war they would have the best tans in the world. When he ran out of money, the bar where he spent it all gave him a job and he waited tables and learned the secret language of queens and realized it would never be very useful to him: he didn’t go to the movies. He didn’t like opera, preferring music he could twist to at clambakes. He loved the sun and a good day was one where he never wore shoes. A shirt was something unbuttoned at night, loose, slipping off the shoulder as a sailor embraced him while they were both knee-deep in the midnight surf.
He was working as a fisherman on a trawler off Cape Canaveral and witnessed an early morning moon launch. A group of drunken men beat him up in Daytona. He drifted toward the Panhandle and danced with beery Air Force officers in Pensacola who would pull him into hotel rooms and parade their muscles for him or lie awkwardly on their stomachs and await an assault he would resignedly deliver, and not one of them kissed him in the moonlight like Key West boys. Still, he kept what epaulets and undershirts he could secret away. While working in a rough bar in Apalachicola, making no money and drinking too much, he wondered if his life might be too much without direction.
Mornings he would go for walks on St. George Island. St. George was a magical barrier island where high sugary dunes erased the road on blustery afternoons. The heavenly whiteness of the sand blinded first-time visitors. Scrub and sea oats were sparse, the shifting sand was all. One morning he witnessed a porpoise turning in the surf, glistening purple in the weak dawn light. The perfect circle of his being slid from view only to rise farther down the beach. And then another emerged by its side. They moved with an easy and aimless joy. A third appeared and he thought, “And so it goes.”
He found himself back in his hometown and was surprised that his parents were smaller than he remembered, their hair whiter, the wrinkles on their faces deeper. He washed boats at the marina and walked the shore. Men still gathered behind the same dunes, and he went to them regardless of looks or age. He wanted to roll through the world the way dolphins spin through the sea and was happy to meet anyone who wanted to play in the sun. There was a sadness to living in his hometown, though. Classmates and the older people who knew him as a boy needlessly pitied him, judged him, and he always noticed the same thing—they were pale and tired. Beautiful new homes, fast cars, but rote lives. He wanted to roam again but felt a new sense of duty toward his parents and reluctantly stayed.
He met Dag on Lido Key one summer, a massive shadow against a majestic sunset, orange curls and purple curtains that billowed behind black clouds. Dag approached; both of them were standing in the water, older but fit, deep tans painted them still-young. The silver dog tags bouncing off his chest signaled potential danger. He turned to study the sunset as the other man stood beside him. They stood so still tiny fish schooled at their feet. Finally the man said, “It’s moments like this, the stillness, the setting sun. You can really feel the earth under your feet move.”
With that a wave larger than the previous slapped their thighs. They staggered and laughed and walked back to shore together.
Dag lived on the beach, in a house on stilts, a house big enough for both of them; he let that be known their first night together. And that first night was different. They joined on the bed with the sliding glass doors open, the sound of the sea matching their rhythm. He lapped the sweat off Dag’s neck as he thrust above him. He stayed the night. Dag had a sailboat and the next day they sailed on Sarasota Bay.
They lived together from that point on. He worked a simple job in a gift shop near the shore. Dag owned a construction company and regretfully built the mansions that were swallowing the southern wilderness of Turtle Beach. Dag helped him bury his parents and sell the small home he had grown up in. Dag taught him to sail. Their travels were always to hotter climes, exotic islands and untamed coasts. They kept each other strong, running on the beach, cooking for each other, driving out to the orange groves to pick their fill, catching fish off the pier.
The old man remembered the beautiful morning they last went sailing. The seas were rough but the wind gave them great speed. With the wind in his face he was thinking back to when they had first met, and then a dark shadow lifted them. Instantly, he knew the angle was too aslant. They would not be able to right themselves. They were going over. He looked for Dag at the tiller and saw that he was lost in thought, looking back toward the shrinking city on the bay. He tried to shout a warning but water filled his mouth and he was over. Plunged into a harsh white swirl, he panicked and lost sense of which way was the surface, which the bottom of the sea. But he kicked and clawed and finally emerged to sputter and gasp and ache for Dag, who was nowhere to be seen in the pitch of the waves. The underside of the boat bobbed benignly, a tatter of sail spread beside it. Distantly, the back and arms of his lover dipped beneath a wave. He swam, and when he reached him rolled him over. His head lolled back, too loose on the strong neck that had always been an anchor of sensibility. The old man recalled the fear and hopelessness and then the struggle to bring the body to the overturned boat; the Coast Guard; the long night in the empty house. He put Dag’s ashes in the sea and kept only a cutting of the sail.
Years of wandering followed. He retraced his youthful voyages south and nearly drank himself to death in Key West. One hungover morning he lumbered onto the pier and looked at the ocean, hoping to draw some sense of peace from the expanse of undulating indifference, when he spotted, far away, a pod of dolphins. They broke the surface irregularly, yet he imagined that underwater they spun with the happy homogeny of a Ferris wheel. And he realized Dag would want him to whirl rather than drown.
He spun back to Lido Key and sold their beachfront home. He danced with devil-masked hustlers at Mardi Gras. He shielded his eyes from the sun, prone on the beach of Baja, as he watched determined surfers cut through majestic ocean. Boys who never came ashore, forever bobbing in the surf, awaiting the perfect wave; occasionally he would find one of their socks stuffed in an overturned sneaker and slip it into his pocket. The old man whirled his way through Asia and tucked the last of his money into the white underwear of grinning Thai boys.
Back in Fort Lauderdale, he tended bar and grew old in the sun. He drank more and more and wandered the shore and watched the sun set and sometimes fell asleep on the beach and woke with the rising sun, happy to at first be unsure on which shore or island he had just slept. He would look out at the sea and think of Jimmy, of Dag, the untouchable boys of Baja, the very touchable boys of Phuket and Pattaya, Key West at night, sailors and soldiers, the arc of a rocket reaching out toward the moon. Men and boys rolled through his memory merrily like dolphins in the surf.
Canvassing the beach for driftwood, he pulled sundry boards back to his shabby bungalow and quietly assembled a raft. He sat on the porch and sewed. He stitched together the coveted underwear and patches of T-shirt and scarves and such. He lovingly mended these scraps into a haphazard sail. When he pushed his rickety craft into the water the morning sun was behind him; the colored quilt of the sail lit up like the wings of a dragonfly, ephemeral and fragile above the waves, but soaring nonetheless.