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A WEEK WENT BY AND nothing of note happened on Marisol Island. P.J. and Dennis continued working at the stand, although at this point, business was nearly grinding to a halt. But the boys were more than okay with that. Rory hadn't shown his face around the kiosk since the incident and P.J. was ready to forget all about it and sweep it under the rug as just a small anecdote to tell. Or rather, maybe never tell. Maybe bottle up and keep to himself. Sometimes the thought occurred to him to tell people – like one does with a fun party story - but it felt like a bag of sand. If he spilled it, it'd be everywhere. He'd never get to pick it up and put it away again. And he'd have to live with it and feel the sand on his skin and under his clothes and that thought scared him. Keeping it closed felt right.
Rory hadn't been around at his own work much either. He showed up and did his job but he was more reclusive than he was before. He spoke less and worked faster as if to get home as fast as possible. He stopped talking to the front desk woman altogether and made even less of a fuss when his name was slowly being assigned to all of the tasks. But other than that, the river of life resumed its natural ebb and flow.
There was a man named Kyle who had a boat and a few guns, and he would take Dennis out far into the water to shoot at floaties and fish. They had met at a sports bar and drank tequila together. Kyle was older. Had a daughter. But he saw something in Dennis he liked – a type of beach bum mentality he tried to never lose in himself. Beyond P.J., this was Dennis's closest friend and they were not that close still. They had a connection over the silence of things. Men being men, Dennis thought. Drinking. Shooting. Talking about women in distasteful ways. But what Dennis really liked in Kyle was that he could take care of himself. Around P.J. he always seemed to be walking on eggshells, comforting him, making sure he didn't get too stressed or anxious about things. In fact, it was in seeing P.J. panic and have anxiety all through life that turned Dennis away from the more ambitious path, but maybe taking care of P.J. was just an excuse he told himself as he lazily dragged his feet to class or back and forth to work. Kyle passed him a shotgun and let him fire it into the water and into the sky.
"How's your brother been?" he asked. He sat back on the helm and drank a can of beer.
"He's good," P.J. said. He pulled the trigger and the shotgun bucked hard. It always shocked him the first time. He pumped it and a shell popped out and clattered to the white floor of the boat. Then he shot again into the water and it erupted on the surface like a cannon blast. "He's okay."
"Have any nightmares recently?"
Dennis turned to Kyle who took another pull of the beer. Then Dennis turned back and fired again at the sky. The smell of gunpowder lingered for a moment before being taken in the breeze. "He's been a little off. He's sleeping through the night but I can hear him tossing and turning. I don't know." He pumped it again. A shell clattered.
"The reason I ask is because I wanna know how you deal with it."
Dennis paused. He put the safety on the gun and set it down pointing away. He turned to Kyle, who offered him a beer.
"Abby's getting them," Kyle started, "Came out of nowhere."
"Is she okay?"
"The first time it happened, I swear to God someone was in the house. You ain't never seen me run so fast. She's screaming and hollering in her room. I wake her up, and then she seems okay, a lot of heavy breathing, you know."
Dennis looked at Kyle. He could relate in a very real way. Having to run into a bedroom and shake someone awake. P.J. seemed plagued with nightmares his whole life, but Dennis never got them. Never in a real scary way when you feel your stomach rise hot and sharp and your shoulders shoot up to your ears. Kyle drank his beer and looked again at the area in the water that Dennis shot at.
"I can't seem to get her in the water anymore," he explained. "She used to be like a little guppy, ya know. You've seen her. She won't even take a bath now. I gotta hold her in the shower while she's screaming crazy."
"I don't know what to say, man. That's awful."
"I think she met someone on the beach."
"How do you mean?"
"I don't know. I can't explain it. But it's like she's afraid of something in particular. Not just the darkness or whatever, but like the boogeyman. Or someone else."
Kyle opened another beer.
"I'm telling you this because I ain't gonna be coming out here for a while. I'm gonna take her to her mother in Tampa and try to get her away from the beaches a little bit. Maybe it's too much commotion, ya know? Too overwhelming for a young girl."
"Do you think someone talked to her on the beach?"
"I don't know."
Dennis looked out at the water and the sky. There were no clouds and the sun shone white in contrast to the light blue. But the water seemed darker. When Kyle took the boat out this far it always amazed Dennis how differently the gulf could feel. It's much calmer by the shoreline, and even then, one can get nervous going out far. It catches you by surprise when you can no longer feel the sand under your feet. And although the waves aren't as choppy and aggressive as, say, the Pacific, they're relentless in their undulations. They're small and medium, but they never let you get your chin above water.
On a Friday evening, P.J. and Dennis grilled. They were invited over by a friend they made in the beginning of the week. His name was T.J., and part of the reason they were friends was because of their names. Perry James and Timothy Jr., both shortened to initialisms, was reason enough to chit chat after P.J. pointed him in the direction of the nearest and cheapest bar – a small shack to throwback warm tequila shots and listen to a fan whir. They had gotten to know each other, and although they didn't have too much in common, they were both young and attractive and easy. It did not take much for T.J. to extend an offer to the two brothers to join him and his friends there at the Seashell. And maybe, also, P.J. wanted a new friend. Seeing Dennis every single moment reminded him of being young in a way he couldn't quite put a finger on. Made him feel small and back in his bed being shaken awake.
The Seashell has a big brick courtyard that's bordered along the perimeter by a white gate. On the western side of the courtyard is an opening that leads down to the beach. Surrounded on all the other sides is pink hotel, a little drab and worn in age. But still pretty. Still fine in the sunlight. Inside the courtyard is a large pool and three octagonal hot tubs and a few public grills. Simple iron wrought rectangles that sat on stout poles. T.J. had provided his own charcoal and food and paper plates and the group of new friends mingled and ate and drank cheap beer from a cooler. The sun was setting along the ocean rim and the sky was the beautiful purple-pink that Floridians happen to be so fond of. Some girls laughed in a hot tub. T.J., being a good host, served Dennis another burger. Dennis was already drunk but trying not to show it. He ate a lot of food to try and sober up and he and P.J., urged on by Dennis's drunken vigor, approached the hot tub with two girls and a guy in it.
The sun had set completely by now and the sky was dark. The glow from the lights inside the hot tub illuminated everyone's face an ill green-yellow. It was like when P.J. was a boy at camp. When they would sit around the campfire and shine a flashlight beneath their faces, having the angle of the light contort rude shadows and evil marks. The water jets from the tub were strong. Little sprays bounced around. Their reflections in the water were even more distorted though you could barely make them out through the froth.
"It was P.J., right?" the guy asked as P.J. entered the bubbling water.
"Yeah, that's right,” P.J. confirmed. “Wes?" He asked quizzically. And Wes smiled and nodded in confirmation.
"I'm Haley," said a girl in a green strapless top. She was petite and fair. Her bottoms were black. Her skin seemed soft.
"I'm Amanda," said the other girl. She was blonde and busty and had freckles on her cleavage and on her face. Her bikini was white and small. On one of her hands was what P.J. presumed to be a promise ring, although it could've been a ring of any type.
The brothers exchanged their greetings. Dennis’s mouth was full of burger, and the girls laughed at that and Dennis was happy his sophomoric attempts paid off. The five of them made small talk about their own backgrounds. Haley kept making eyes at P.J. and he kept returning them. She had dark brown eyes and her lips were thin. She was from Georgia but she attended the University of Florida. She had an apartment in Gainesville and was only down for vacation with her friends. They were all from up there. She laughed at P.J.'s jokes and she smiled when he smiled and the two had a connection. As she spoke of her life back up there it became clearer and clearer that the odds of their connection becoming a relationship was slim to none. At the very most, they would have sex during her trip down here, and that would be that. Then Wes scooted over and put his arm around her. He pulled her in close, and he kissed her on the head. P.J. didn't look her in the eye again. He felt embarrassed. He felt dumb for fantasizing. He had half a mind to get out and join T.J. at the grill and talk with the others, but he was afraid they’d read that clear as day.
"We thought we made a mistake coming down here when we heard about what happened at the pier the other day," Wes said.
The ghost stories were happening again. Just like back when he was younger, huddled, and afraid with his friends. The way Haley looked at him coupled with the way he was jealous made him feel young and stupid just like that time back then when, seemingly, that's all he felt. Stupid, scared, and wrong. The peat man was back. The waking up at night was back. The wire-thin string tauter than ever.
"What happened at the pier?" Dennis replied, trying not to look at Amanda's breast and instead at her eyes, though she didn't seem to notice either.
"Some guy was on the pier just down the beach," Wes began. "He had a bucket of fish guts, and he was throwing it right over the edge. You know, attracting a ton of sharks and shit. Acting crazy as hell."
"How many showed up?" Amanda asked. It showed what she was afraid of. P.J. put a stake in it.
"Like a lot," Haley confirmed.
"Yeah, like enough to be a problem, I guess. I mean, I don't know if what he did was illegal, but I guess he was causing a scene too. I'm not really sure. How'd you not hear about this, man? Don't you work right by the pier?" Wes laughed.
"God, that's so creepy," Amanda said.
"Right? Makes me not want to go in the water," Haley said, "Like, there's a guy out there that attracts sharks. That's like supervillain stuff," she laughed.
"Yeah like the evil version of what's his name –
"Aquaman."
"Right."
"That's scary you bring that up," Dennis started. "P.J. had a run-in with a shark guy a few days before that must've happened."
P.J. blushed but the sickly lights in the water painted them away.
"Tell them about it."
The audience agreed that they wanted to hear the story, and P.J. grew uncomfortable. He could feel the sand spilling. Getting under his nails. Getting into his pores. He had almost gotten away with forgetting about it but now he had to re-hash it for them. And with the light of this other news, he felt even worse. But under Haley's gaze he told the story. He spilled the sand and regretted it.
"Yeah, it was absolutely nuts," Dennis chimed in, "Well, at least I heard it was, I wasn't exactly there." They laughed, but P.J. only smiled. Dennis continued, "Didn't you say that he said some weird shit to you after you docked? What did he say again?"
Their eyes were on P.J. His stomach felt weird.
"He said that one smiled to him. And that one knew his name."
And there was a silence from everyone. The bubbles of the hot tub seemed deafening and then they quit altogether. It seemed that even T.J. and the others were muted.
"That's super fucking creepy," Amanda finally said.
"Yeah. Who knows what he meant, though, right? And the guy hasn't done anything violent or anything. He hasn't, like, done anything illegal. Dude just likes sharks. I guess. I don't know," P.J. admitted. "It is weird to know about the pier thing. I didn't hear about that."
There was more silence. Haley's eyebrows were up high and she ran her finger through the water and then looked at Wes. He whispered something to her. P.J. turned from them and said, "I'm going to get another beer," and he stood up out of the tub and he felt embarrassed.
"Hey, on your way hit the timer for another fifteen!" Dennis called out and then, "Sorry, I didn't realize that story would be such a buzzkill." The tub broke into laughter again as P.J. walked away. He switched the timer back on and approached a cooler by the grill. It was long done being used and T.J. was with others in the pool. Some coals still breathed orange. P.J. opened the cooler and grabbed a beer and opened the can and kept his back to the party. He looked up the side of the hotel, now faintly colored from the lights in the courtyard and early moon in the sky. Its pink was barely discernible but its height was evident by the wall of black. Some windows in the side were lit up bright and even some people were out on the balconies smoking silhouetted by the light of their rooms.
Behind him he heard the hot tub change tones and he turned and Wes and Haley were getting out. Dennis shifted over to Amanda's side. P.J. watched the couple walk over to the gate and walk down to the beach. P.J. decided they were cute and that they looked happy. He grabbed another beer and put it into his bathing suit pocket. He thanked T.J. for the fun time and said it was getting late. He figured Dennis would catch up later in the night and he walked out onto the beach as well.
Already Haley and Wes were making their way north. They were holding hands and walking right on the edge of where the waves gave up. The couple was small and fading, soon barely visible in that dark night. There was a strong gulf breeze and the breath of the sea was soothing. P.J. walked in the opposite direction at a slant towards the edge of the water. He drank his beer feeling himself get drunker. He crushed the can and tossed it into the water and opened the other one that was in his pocket. He thought of Haley and wondered if he was allowed to. He didn't know her that well. He had just met her but her face was on his mind and the way she looked at him was too. Her small shoulders and small wrists. He knew there was something there, but with a pull from his sixth beer he acknowledged that it wouldn't ever be anything. What could've been a passionate summer love was now something he'd only masturbate to soon enough. He drank his beer and walked on south to his apartment.
P.J. thought of a girl he knew back in high school when he still lived on the mainland. Near Tampa. She was sweet and blonde with brown eyes and her voice was raspy and her laugh was loud. When they were seniors they drove out to Pass-a-Grille and spent the night looking up at the moonless sky, alone there, two bodies on the sand. The night was dark and if anybody was around they weren't seen or were minding their own business anyway.
Her name was Caroline and they had been attracted to each other since kids started having those feelings. On that beach they spoke about God and she urged him that whatever was out there had it all figured out. P.J. nodded along, but he wasn't sure if he agreed. Occasionally, he snuck a glance at her, at the curves of her profile. She was tan and voluptuous and the attraction he felt towards her was equal parts carnal and romantic. The black shirt she was wearing was unbuttoned and her hair spread out into the sand like a river escaping her skull.
"I love night swimming here. Nobody is ever around and sometimes you can see those glowing things float in the water," she said. She rose to her feet, dropped her shirt behind her, shimmied out of her white shorts and went bounding for the shoreline.
Later, Caroline drove them back to her house. The seats were sandy and P.J. sat on a towel. It was after midnight and the highway back across the water was lonely and quiet. The South Tampa skyline, though minimal, shown out of the night and Caroline's jeep carried the two. The car was filled with a type of tension. The two had already made up their minds that upon returning to her empty house they'd fulfill some primal promise they made to themselves years ago.
P.J. watched her from the passenger seat. Her breasts were still wet from the water and her top dripped onto her lap. He wanted to have her in her bed. He wanted to hold her and kiss her and love her and he wanted the same from her. After the summer was over the odds of him seeing her again were thin. The odds of this young and starry-eyed love coming to fruition were dropping by the second like pebbles before the mudslide.
She looked at him and smiled a soft sensual one. Then she said, "I want it rough. I want it really dirty. I can't wait."
And those words planted something nasty deep inside him. He felt his lip quiver and his cheeks blush. He wanted to leave the car and run as far away as possible. He felt naive for wanting anything akin to passion. She was an eighteen-year-old girl entering college, why the hell would she want passion or romance, he thought. He was mortified in his silence and mentally tried to reconnect their two train tracks that went whizzing by each other in a glorious misunderstanding.
"I can't wait for you to fuck me so hard."
Her words filled the car like a noxious gas. P.J. crawled inside himself.
"I just want to go home."
Sometimes he'd still think about Caroline in the early morning before getting out of bed. Or at night, drunk and lying down on the couch with all the lights in the apartment still on. He'd stare at pictures of her on his phone and conjure up the memory of the car ride back to her house. Why didn't he fuck her like she wanted him to? Or, more to the point, what was he so afraid of? The truth was that he felt stupid. He thought they were weaving some romance to be young lovers that grew old together, but she didn't think of him that way, which was fair and honest of her, and when she broke the news to him, he couldn't handle it. It was not her intention to challenge his fragile being, the strange and delicate persona he’d crafted for himself, but she did so. Effortlessly. When he realized that his fantasy was just a fantasy, and that immediate real-life actions required decisions and movement and impulse, he was scared and backpedaled away from the situation. It was not uncommon for him to wonder what Dennis would have done. He would've done it, he decided. He decided that a long time ago. He definitely would've done it.
#
HALEY AND WES HEADED north towards the pier and held hands as they walked. Her hand was small in his but she liked that. She thought it felt secure and comforting. They didn't speak that much. Wes was a man of few words when in private. He came out of his shell at gatherings to not be awkward and because Haley always said he could be the life of the party if he wanted to. This was an active effort on his part and Haley appreciated it. They walked on and the sand looked blue stretched out far ahead of them. Soon the girl spoke up.
"That story P.J. told is still on my mind."
Wes tightened his grip on her hand. Haley scared easy, and Wes was reminded of an incident in Gainesville not so long ago. A mutual friend of theirs named Max Gear had scared Haley until she cried and Wes never forgot about it. Later, Haley tried to excuse it by saying she was drunk and emotional and she shouldn't have gotten so frightened at Max. He was being stupid, she insisted, but Wes knew that Max was smart and cunning, but that something in him longed to upset people. Now he was a journalist in St. Pete and Wes wondered if the three of them would ever see each other again. (They would not.)
So Wes held Haley's hand and didn't think he had to say anything more. The action should be reassuring enough, he thought. He wasn't that concerned himself. It was probably just some nut trying to hunt sharks. But soon enough the couple's wandering led them passed the man's ramshackle hut on a small dune unnoticeable in the night, a little more ways back from the water. Most people chalked it up as an outhouse or a random storage unit and in many ways it was those things, but it was also the man's home, or now, mid-transition, his church of sorts.
Rory sat in his lawn chair in the night like a sentinel made of rot. The book was open downwards on his lap and now he just watched and listened and smiled, for he felt there was no reason not to. He saw the couple pass across about forty yards away. He couldn't smell them from where he was but he convinced himself he could. He convinced himself, not only that he could smell them, but also that they smelled appetizing. Then he laughed to himself as if someone told a joke and he looked out at the sea. He recalled the part in the book where the couple fools around before the girl goes naked into the water. Then God came and tugged at the girl's leg and she would be tugged up and down like someone were making her into a candle. Rory beamed at the thought of that happening right now and watched the couple closely. The girl small. The man powerful.
He decided that if they weren't going to feed the sharks of the night he would have to. He got out of his chair and slinked back into his hut. The sand under his feet was cold and gave away in little falls as he marched with divination. "Walk with intent!" He heard the tour guide say again. He shook it out of his ear. He was not a kid anymore.
He reemerged with a bucket of chum in one hand and in the other he held a large hunk of raw meat wrapped in butcher paper. He waddled out to the shore and stepped in the cold water and let it chop and crash against his bare legs. He stood pale and tall in the moonlight like a skeleton wading out into the water. Something from a nightmare, to be seen only out of the corner of your eye. About waist deep, he began tossing the chum out in random directions. Soon the red slick, not perceptible at all by color, only by stench, began to spread and flow with the current. He waited a couple moments and turned towards the couple, now further down, and waved them goodbye. Then he unwrapped the meat and washed it around in the water to get the smell out there and then he tossed it into the waves as well. It splashed loudly and he lost sight of it. He turned around and trudged back to shore, proud of himself. His feeding strategy was weak, but it was all he could do at this time. His fathers would understand his struggle.
Turning from the black horizon he climbed the sandy path to his little hut. He saw the couple returning back in his direction. He put his hands on his hips and smelled the air for an answer. And the answer he got was Yes. It was carried in the wind and the brine and the breeze. It spoke from the tide. He smiled and laughed. In that night sky some stars disappeared but he didn't notice. Some more stars fell in the back and streaked downward leaving a blur of indigo in their wake and they fell far down away from the earth and disappeared at the bottom of the universe where a maelstrom spun violently. Had been spinning for eons.
He had an increasing strength about him. He knew when his masters were fed and they returned the favor when they were satisfied. With each morning he woke up feeling stronger than he had felt the day before. The way his veins would bulge more out of his skin and the way his gait seemed faster and more direct. His flesh started to feel smoother and more like leather with each passing day and he started to grow hungrier and hungrier, at times his own stomach surprising him with its rumbling and quaking bile. It would be too easy to sum up that he was becoming like his masters, because he was not. But he was becoming something. Perhaps he was just being molded to better fit their needs. It seemed that he was just donning the appropriate garb for his new line of work, the way a butler has a uniform or the way a slave has chains or a priest his alb. But it hardly mattered what was happening to him. Like the Catholic boy he was raised to be, Rory did not question the good things God brought him. He was wholly happy with the changes that were occurring and often went to sleep wondering what would change next.
As a boy, just as a man, Rory was empty. He was raised incorrectly by his mother who was a drinker and by his father who was too much of a God fearing man to be anything else. He was pushed into the church every Sunday morning and pushed into a Catholic school and pushed into every decision he had ever made. Of the four holy sacraments he had done none of them he was present for. Everything was a white blur of crucifixes and pews and the purple and green colors of church candles. His mother left when he was ten and he would never see her again. The last thing he remembered of her is when he stood on the porch of their house back in Miami. So hot and so humid and so late at night. And while crying, she slapped his father and then drove away in their car. The roar of the engine made little Rory cry on that porch and he clutched the wooden beams of the banister tightly. They were weather-worn and greenish. It looked as though he were looking through the bars of a jail cell, pining to get out, to go anywhere. He would never forget the look of his father on that driveway. The way the headlights of the car threw his shadow on the garage door changed Rory. His father wore big wide framed glasses and when crying – which he was one to do – he would put them on his head and wipe his eyes freely. Because of the glasses on his head, the shadow appeared to have horns, rising up, wicked and contorted. And his fingers looked long and spindly and his shadow was tall and bent up the slant of the driveway, over the wall of the garage door, and even twisted up a little on the roof. Rory screamed and even still he never fully knew how evil his father was.
He was expected to find solace in the church but he never did. The white-cloaked fathers seemed to hover around like wraiths and every Sunday afternoon, during confession, he would sit in his private booth and wait for the father to ask him to leave because if he didn't have anything to confess then he should just leave, just leave and get out, and if he couldn't confess to the lord then he couldn't confess to anyone. So Rory bottled up everything that had happened to him and everything that would happen to him. He would keep it all inside his frail chest. And when he was sixteen, his father killed himself with a pump-action shotgun. A long and heavy weapon, but his father was tall and managed it. Rory woke up in the middle of the night to the loudest bang he'd ever heard and his father was dead in his bedroom and scrawled on a piece of paper was a note that said, "Sorry." And his head looked like a halved cantaloupe and the room smelled like so much smoke. And from the ceiling dripped pink and skull.
So now since Rory had found a master he didn't mind serving he gave it his all. He had a vacant space right in the center of his concave chest. He gave all the space to these beasts of the water and in doing so they filled him up to the brim. And because there was no more room inside of him they moved to the outside of him. The same outside that has never felt right or comfortable. The same skin that he outgrew years ago time after time, each new flesh as disappointing as the one before until now. Now he was happy with this pallid gray and rough exterior. He was happy with losing his facial hair and his body hair and he didn't care about anything at all except for being accepted- suffered to come unto thee.