Static!

by Michael R Collings

  Straight ahead, however, a guard booth straddled an adjunct road. Its peeling plywood front supported a hand-lettered sign:

  Parking—$4.00 Per Day

  NO RETURN ON ENTRY TICKET

  On an impulse, Payne pulled alongside the booth and slipped four crumpled bills from his pants pocket. The attendant was a bare-foot, deeply browned kid about eighteen, with bleached hair and faded red trunks fraying at the seams.

  He sauntered alongside the car, barely bothering to glance inside, and grabbed the money Payne held out to him. With his other hand, he reached into the Toyota and tucked a yellow ticket along the inside of the window before returning to the shade of an umbrella hitched behind the booth, hiking his feet up onto an overturned plastic bucket, and burrowing into a newsstand-fresh copy of Playboy.

  The kid hadn’t spoken a single word during the entire interchange.

  Payne drove through.

  On the far side of the booth, the road was rougher than the highway and not as well repaired. At times, it was little better than gravel, with bites of pavement missing on the ocean side, as if storms had washed away more than the county could (or cared to) restore. Undulating dunes alternately hid and framed low waves swirling like frizzled hair against the neck of the beach.

  It must be low tide, Payne decided. The air had a decided pungency to it that suggested more than just salt and sand.

  Every fifteen yards or so, county maintenance workers had thrown down asphalt speed bumps, so Payne drove the mile and a quarter to the parking lot at between ten and twenty miles an hour, grimacing every time the rear end swayed or the front tires thumped against the sun-bleached humps that straddled the roadway. Several bumps were hidden by miniature dunes; when his tires crunched against them, they seemed to hit his car harder than the rest. But he didn’t try to go any faster.

  Finally, the road pulled away from the ocean and widened into a parking lot. The inland side abutted almost vertical cliffs of eroding rock, ferrous-red banded with dingy yellow, cut with frighteningly deep ravines. Every so often, frail wooden stairways led from a back yard above down to the beach, perching their hundreds of worn steps precariously against the crumbling rock face. On the ocean side, Payne saw open beach studded with three lifeguard towers and two cinderblock restrooms.

  He drove on to the far end of the lot before parking next to a chain-link fence. He stopped, turned off the engine, and just relaxed. The air was fresher here, tangy with salt but clean-smelling.

  He raised his arm as if to punch a dial on the radio, then stopped. This part of the beach was almost silent, save for the muted whisper of the waves a hundred yards distant. There were no children here, no families picnicking. All he could see were the outlines of three or four sunbathers stretched out on oversized towels. He savored the silence.

  Finally, though, it grew too hot in the enclosed car, dizzying, headachy hot. He stepped out, rolled up the window, and slammed and locked the door.

  A few steps more and there he was, facing the Pacific where it threw itself against the damp sand of the beach. All thoughts of house and property and Aunt Emilia and bone-white walls fled, leaving him standing in the quiet and the calm.

  Inside and outside, everything was warmth and sunshine.

  He walked straight toward the ocean, stopping just before the waves doused his Adidas®, then looked up and down the beach. Farther northward, where the beach curved out of sight, a few families clustered in knots at the water line, with older kids splashing in the low surf and younger ones dabbling in sand architecture.

  Southward, there were almost no people. An odd precipice of rock jutted outward, ending in collapse as its tumbled boulders cut off the beach. Payne turned southward. It took him only a few moments to reach the boulders. The tide was low enough that it looked possible for him to slosh through shallow pools around the rocks, far enough at least for him to see if there was anything on the other side.

  He started around but had not even gotten his shoes wet when he glanced up along the fragmented face of the cliff. There seemed to be a pathway over the rocks—through them, really. He began climbing. The boulders felt gritty with sand, slippery where the sun dried them and the sand no longer clung. He climbed slowly, carefully, using both hands more than once to retain a precarious balance. Once his foot slipped and he barely avoided gashing his leg open on the shattered remains of a beer bottle. As the path crested, the rocks became more uneven. The handholds were clammy beneath his fingers, and small pockets of sand caught smelled distantly but distinctly of urine.

  At the top of the rock heap, a weather-beaten bench stood guard over the promontory a dozen feet away. He considered climbing to the bench and then abandoned the idea when he got close enough to see that all of the wooden slats had been ripped off, either by vandals or by winter storms. All that remained were the metal supports cemented to the boulder.

  Instead of going further that way, he followed the pathway down toward an isolated pocket of beach. The path narrowed, transforming before he noticed into little more than a tiny, slippery ledge on a sandstone cliff. Payne moved more carefully now. Twice he almost fell.

  Finally, with a series of short jumps from rock to rock, he thumped onto wet sand, his ankles twinging from the sudden, jarring impact. He looked oceanward to water framed in boulders six-feet high and bearded in seaweed and barnacles. The beach was behind him and to his left as he stared across the breaking waves. Eyes focused on the ebb and swell of the first ocean waves he had ever seen this close, he began walking along the shore.

  Someone ran past him from the beach into the water.

  A man.

  A naked man.

  Surprised, Payne stopped and stared into the ocean. By the time what he thought he had seen registered in Payne’s mind and he could focus on the waves, the man was little more than a knot of head and shoulder jutting out of blue-gray surf. Payne turned away from the water and stared along the beach.

  Angular rocks formed pockets of sunlight and shadow, studding the beach with intricately repeating patterns of white and black over gray-brown sand. Hollows around the rocks were filled with bodies, some nude, some barely covered by bikinis tinier than any Payne had ever seen. Closest to him sat a couple of girls, probably no more than thirteen or fourteen. Even though they had little enough as yet to fill them with, they wore scanty two-piecers—one with blue stripes on a yellow background, the other studded with pink dots on pale green.

  The girls were studiously pretending not to look at a sleeping man of about twenty lying on his stomach not a dozen feet from them. From the tan lines on his waist and thighs, he usually wore Speedos; and from the darkness of his tan where it contrasted with the paler tones of his buttocks, he usually wore them often. Today, he wore nothing.

  No matter how hard the girls struggled to look in other directions, Payne noted with a smile, they always lost the battle. They would stare around for a while then, as if on a silent command, shoot a quick glance at the man, then turn away and huddle shoulder to shoulder and head to head, and giggle. A few seconds later, they looked again.

  “I’d die if Sean knew I was here,” blue-stripe said breathlessly between giggles.

  Payne could only imagine what Sean would have done if the boy were standing where Payne was standing, watching the entire performance.

  “Or Bobby! Gawd!” That came in a stage-whisper from pink-dots. The last sound elongated until it was less a word than an inarticulately strangled response pulled from the center of her pubescent self. They cast another set of darting glances over their shoulders.

  “Think your Mom is looking for us yet?” Blue-stripes asked, probably more out of concern for the time than for Mom’s worry about their well-being. It wouldn’t do for Mom to come searching for the little darlings and find them in the middle of a nude beach.

  Pink-dots shook her head. They stared intently at a spot on the cliffs, then chanced another glance over their shoulders.

  “He looks like Zac Ef
ron, doesn’t he,” Blue-stripe breathed.

  “Gawd,” Pink-dot agreed.

  By this point, however, Payne knew full well that the man under scrutiny was not asleep. Each time the girls turned away, his eyes slit open enough for sunlight to glint off dark pupils. Suddenly, while the girls huddled and whispered, the man rolled casually onto his back, his legs stretched out toward the ocean and his hands cupped beneath his head. Although his eyes were closed tight against the glare, he was smiling broadly.

  If you’ve got it, flaunt it, Payne thought almost admiringly.

  The man had it, and he certainly knew how to flaunt it.

  The girls turned for next their stolen glance…and froze. They went whiter than the sand they were sitting on. Two adolescent jaws dropped with a single snap. Two faces burned a sudden scarlet that spread onto their necks and shoulders. Without speaking another word, they snatched up their towels and ran past Payne toward the path. Payne watched until they disappeared over the crest. By then, the young man had turned onto his stomach again and was, to all appearances, peacefully asleep.

  The peace of the beach had been preserved.

  Payne took another moment to study the beach. In spite of their nudity, he realized gradually, few of the people seemed consciously exhibitionistic. Most were artfully draped by shadows or curves of sand caught by angled boulders. The only exception was a man curled against the cliff. He must have weighed three hundred pounds, and it was obvious that this was his first foray into sunlight this season. His skin was dead-fish white and his mass had all of the appeal of a dead or dying beached whale. Everyone else looked young —in their thirties or less. In spite of his back-East inhibitions, Payne had to admit that most of them, male as well as female, took good care of their bodies and maybe had a right to show them off. It was, he decided at last, a conservative nude beach, if such a thing were possible.

  Still—it was a nude beach.

  Payne unconsciously slipped his thumbs into the waistband of his old trunks—faded, full-cut, and baggy at the legs—and pulled them up tighter around his belly. He angled away from the water and from most of the sunbathers toward an unclaimed outcrop. He settled in the warm sand on the far side, shutting out most of his view left or right but keeping open the lower beach and the expanse of ocean.

  This is a nude beach, he repeated unnecessarily to himself. He had heard about them back home through carefully edited clips on the eleven-o’clock news, late enough that impressionable young minds would long since be in bed. He had heard about them, sure, but he hadn’t expected to stumble across one, certainly not this accidentally. As he sat there, he realized with a mild shock that in spite of what he might have expected he wasn’t necessarily offended by the nudity. In fact, the confrontation with it was so sudden that he had not yet had time to decide whathe thought, but the idea was certainly new and took time to assimilate.

  From where he was sitting, though, he could see no one, nude or otherwise. Nor could he hear anything except the crash of waves against barnacle-bearded boulders. Once, twice, three times an unusually strong wave sent a veil of misty spray over him, cooling his back and shoulders where the sun struck with mid-day ferocity. For all he cared, though, he was alone, the only person for an infinity of miles.

  He pulled his T-shirt off and spread it against the rock behind him. Slipping his feet out of his shoes, he lay back to enjoy the warmth and the breeze and the rhythm of waves meeting rocks and parting again. He slept without even knowing when reverie slipped into dreaming.

  His dream was as dark and confused as the beach was bright and orderly. Aunt Emilia was somewhere in it, or at least that part of her he saw as a spectral figure that ebbed and flowed as if hidden behind a veil that parted with the slightest breeze. He never saw her face, never heard her voice, but she overwhelmed the dream, making it more hers than his. Whiteness played a part, and the house, and other things that Payne could never remember except as shadows and shudders.

  When he woke he was glistening with sweat, and not entirely from the afternoon sun reflecting off the rocks. His trunks were damp along the elastic waistband, clammy, even in the heat. He lay disoriented for a moment, almost lost.

  To his right, beyond the rust-colored boulder that hid him, he heard voices above the thrum of surf. Most of the voices were male, with only one or two women. He couldn’t distinguish any words, just sounds like distant murmurs inside sea shells. The ocean listening to people, he thought, then shook his head to disrupt the image. For a while he felt unusually depressed, frustrated, and oddly but pointedly fearful. His heart still thumped and he felt winded. When he sat up, his head swirled like he was drunk.

  He sat still for a long time. Finally he stood up. The beach was empty except for four or five clusters of people stretched out in the sunlight. The beached whale was gone; so was the sometimes-sleeping young man. Two other men, both nude and sharing a zebra-striped wool blanket, lay on their stomachs where the young man had been. Like him, they seemed to be asleep. Their elbows touched.

  Payne’s stomach knotted, flooded by the darkness and half-remembered threat from his dream. Images flickered through his mind so rapidly that he could not distinguish one from the other. Yet in their totality, they terrified him. And what frightened him even more was that he did not know why. He swallowed. The sun was searing. His eyes burned; they felt gritty and dehydrated. He was thirsty. When he swallowed, his throat felt rough and raw.

  He coughed.

  At the sound, one of the men shifted, turning halfway onto his side to face Payne. He smiled. Payne jerked his head away to the softly curving surf, the yielding golden sand, the line of rocks stretching like a barricade between him and the cliffs and the single cormorant perched above a streak of lime-stained stone.

  Someone moved.

  A figure emerged from the shadows where the cliff cut around, then as quickly disappeared again.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  He squinted against the sun, concentrating on the flicker of movement, consciously turning his back to the men on the blanket. Get thee behind me, he thought. And didn’t know why.

  The figure shimmered, moved closer. Clots of dream-world distorted his vision; for an instant, the figure seemed only a dark lump against the brightness, a night-swathed, crippled figure lurching from behind the rocks. Then the instant passed and the figure stepped out of the shadows into full light.

  It was a girl. She was dressed in almost immodestly short cutoff levis and a T-shirt with something printed on the front. The words were too faded to read; by the time she was sufficiently close for the words to be marginally legible, Payne would have been too embarrassed to stare long enough to read them. She was barefoot.

  She picked her way carefully along the damp rocks, leaning into the cliff when the spray threatened to reach her. She made slow progress, as if she had no particular purpose in following the ridge of rocks bursting through the ocean spray. She was too intent on finding and keeping her footing to notice anyone.

  Behind Payne, two voices joined the muted undercurrent of sound. The two men were awake and talking, their voices blurred by the pounding waves and by Payne’s pounding heart. Payne knew which of the two was speaking and didn’t know how he knew it. Part of him wanted to turn around. He swallowed hard, and for a second he saw the blank white wall of his…of her room back in Tamarind Valley.

  He shook his head violently and the whiteness turned red then disappeared, blending into sandstone cliffs rising cormorant-stained and rain-cut above the girl. She was nearer now, almost ready to drop from the last boulder onto the sand. She crouched down, balanced herself with one hand against a cut in the cliff. As her legs spread wide, he saw a thin ridge of muscle tracing the inside of her thighs. He focused on a deeper shadow.

  Static-twisted blue lightning flared through his mind, crashed against his ears. The dream. He shivered, passed his palm across his eyes, panting in the delicious coolness of the shadow of his own hand. The fingers on his right hand twi
nged with a passing pain.

  The men’s voices rose, fell, rose again in a cadenced counterpoint to the surf. He understood no words but the intonations of intertwined sound grew more intimate, more threatening. He knew that he would turn and instead he looked straight ahead, concentrated again on the smooth line of silken muscle along the girl’s inner thigh. A single drop of ocean spray had caught there and glistened in a perfect droplet.

  She still had not looked up. She had not seen him standing there. The girl jumped. Her feet thudded against wet sand, leaving shallow prints like fading echoes. She straightened and walked along the beach, her feet just inside the tide line where froth curled around her toes and slid over the arch of her foot, licking away glittering sand.

  Payne followed her with his eyes. The men’s voices faded again. The dream struggled to the surface once, then faded also.

  He followed her with his eyes. She continued down the beach, looking neither left nor right. Payne felt dizzy. The sand between them stretched white and unruffled, studded by rock as black as midnight scattered across the whiteness. The cliffs bleached out, whitening to match the lime streaks of generations of sea-birds.

  He swayed, steadying himself with one hand against a rock. The men’s voices rose and fell, sparkling like blue-white static against the stillness. About to faint, he half-turned toward them, then twisted back.

  “Hey,” he whispered to the girl. Then he spoke again, stronger, tossing his voice toward her retreating back. He let his gaze drop from her shoulders to her buttocks, to the clean, neat line of her legs.

  “Hey, there.”

  She paused. For a moment it seemed that she would continue onward, then she glanced over her shoulder. The beach was silent, except for the layering of surf through the air.

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, wait just a minute. Please.” He stooped and retrieved his T-shirt and shoes, then walked down the beach toward her.