“We’re going out for a walk,” I said.
Alissa, our oldest sister, seemed surprised. Checking the time she said, “It’s late though. It’s definitely your bedtime.”
I said, “We’re on vacation. We’re on the beach! If not now, then when?”
Probably I didn’t say it like that. But somehow, my brother Patrick and I managed to smooth-talk our way out of our vacation home so late at night. It was a crampy, and humid beachside rental we shared with our mom, dad, and two sisters. But outside, just across the boardwalk was the Pacific Ocean, all of it wide open and calling to us.
Freedom like that can be suffocating.
Out in the cool summer night, it seemed like anything was possible. There were plenty of other people on the beach, but we didn’t know anybody, and nobody knew us. Strangely, everyone we met and talked to was from Arizona. All the license plates on all the cars along Mission Boulevard were from Arizona. Or Nevada.
In the couple days we’d been in our rental I had met a girl. I was hoping to see her on the boardwalk or on the beach. She was staying in a rental just to the north of us. She was from Phoenix, of course. We kissed on the beach. I asked her if we could meet up later and she said, “Sure, we could. But you should know, I like your brother.”
I was wanting to apologize for making fun of Arizonans.
She’d said everything was too hot in Arizona. In the summer, she said, you could fry an egg on the sidewalk. She saw someone do it once. I thought that sounded dumb. Why would you waste an egg?
“Gee,” I said. “That sounds hot.”
“You have no idea,” she said. “Every summer it gets over 110 degrees. Sometimes it breaks 120.”
“That sounds like a zombie movie,” I said.
She scoffed, “What?”
“We’ll,” I said, losing her. “Maybe not a zombie movie. But in zombie movies, they’re like a plague, right? An outbreak?”
“Yes,” she said, impatiently. “And?!”
“So,” I went on. “The summer—it comes around once a year? It sounds as bad as a zombie apocalypse. Except, it’s not an outbreak. It’s a planned event. From May until September, every year living in Phoenix is like living through a zombie apocalypse.”
She wasn’t following. She said, “What are you talking about?”
“Arizona?” I asked, like a question. “People actually live there?”
We were on the beach. I was nervously grinding my feet into the sand. The cool salty air was rushing in from the ocean, air that’d traveled for thousands of miles before finally crashing into the west coast. I was heartbroken, of course, that my Arizona crush had a thing for my brother. But after learning about Arizona and the kind of people that would live in a place that was actively trying to cook them alive, I was suddenly okay with it. Good riddance, I thought.
Still, I was hoping to see her again on the boardwalk or on the beach and apologize for making fun of Arizonans.
My brother was not as content to hang around on the beach and soak in the fragrant ocean mist as I was. He pressed impatiently, “This is boring!” he said, kicking the sand like a brat. “Come on,” he said, “We’re on vacation. Let’s have some fun.”
And like that, he went skittering off into the night, in sandals and a baggy old pair of shorts he’d stolen from our dad. After I caught up to him, we put our money together. Between the two of us we had ten dollars. That could buy something.
We waited in the hot parking lot of a mini mart, the black tar radiating the pent-up wrath from a whole day’s worth of sun. We were being cooked from below.
It wasn’t long until a man emerged from the shadows of the night and walked right up to my brother. They shook hands cordially introducing themselves and the two of them started talking like old friends. It would have been the strangest thing had I not seen it happen hundreds of times before. Somehow, people were just drawn to Patrick. Most definitely they were a sketchy demographic that I wanted nothing to do with. But still, it was baffling. Who were these people? What strange wavelength were they operating on that they could so easily find one another?
We gave Patrick’s new friend our cash. He snapped it between his fingers and regally clicked his bare heels together. With a little mock salute, he turned and walked into the store, leaving a trail of bloody footprints.
“Oh my god,” I said. “Did you see his bloody feet?”
Patrick hissed, “Shut up! Don’t be such a republican!”
After three weeks, the man finally emerged from the mini-mart carrying a huge paper bag.
“You boys,” he started, offering us the paper bag with a dramatic bow. “Have a hell of a night before you.”
I looked in the bag. In addition to a 24 pack of Keystone Ice, he’d seen fit to buy us a couple pornographic magazines as well.
I asked him, “There was change?!” I was shocked.
He said, “After the beer, there was only enough for the raunchy ones. Bottom shelf.” He continued, “But I thought you boys might want something to keep you company while you’re knocking back a couple beers.”
“A couple,” I noted sarcastically.
Patrick elbowed me. I elbowed him back because we’d turned our only cash into a gigantic hot potato that was too heavy to carry more than four roasting-hot blocks. It was certainly nothing we could bring back to the rental where our two sisters were sleeping on the pull-out couch in the entry living room and where our parents were staying in the bedroom adjacent to ours. The 24-pack of Keystone Ice would eventually require refrigeration. And it was only a matter of hours before our sisters sniffed out the porn, no matter how stealthily we’d stashed it.
One time, years earlier, I’d decided it was time to get rid of the gamey stash of nudie magazines Patrick and I had stolen out of the suitcase of one of dad’s friends who’d come to stay with us for a while. I’d meant to dispose of them for a long time, but the right opportunity had never presented itself. Until, one day, mom decided we needed to clean and organize the garage—an undertaking that would produce no small amount of trash. I started by putting the magazines in the very bottom of the recycling bin, and then loading heaps of paper and cardboard on top of it until the entire recycling bin was loaded to capacity.
Thing was, Patrick was also helping me clean the garage. When I wasn’t looking, he was merrily loading the recycling with anything he could get his hands on—an almost empty can of paint, a plastic jug of used motor oil, a pair of old shoes—items that mom immediately discovered as she began checking our work.
She said, pulling an old boot from the recycling, “What the hell is this?!”
To my horror, I watched as my mother began frantically pulling everything from the recycling bin, separating its contents into two piles: trash and recycling. She did this until she made it all the way to the raunchy bottom of the bin.
It was this unfortunate discovery—my mom coming up for air with an armfull of pornos—that taught me the moment something is hidden on purpose it emits a tracking beacon that actually draws people to it. How many times have serial killers gone to extraordinary lengths to stash body parts in wild, remote locations, only to have some rando dog-walker trip over the fresh grave?
“No,” I said. “We can’t bring this home.”
“Oh hey!” said Patrick to his new pal. “I have an idea.”
Without consulting me, Patrick offered the man with bleeding feet half the case of beer. The man smiled wide, revealing only a scatter of rotten, orange teeth. He patted my brother on the back, wheezing, “Alright, little dude!”
And then to me he said, “You gotta pay attention to your little brother man. This little dude is fast.” He went on, “My party’s at the beach, just this way.”
My brother hoisted the case of Keystone Ice on his shoulder like a boombox. Skipping down the street, eagerly following a man who was actually a leather belt in jorts with bleeding feet.
The leather man led us across the boardwalk, over the beach toward the water where sand peaked and sloped toward the low tide of foaming ocean. There, on a crest of sand were four or five bonfires. In the middle of the bonfires, digging in the sand was a writhing pile of people. Someone said they were trying to see how far they could dig. They’d dug far enough to strike water and were still at it even as the mushy walls of the hole were closing in on them.
This was the party to which we’d been invited, if only by a finder’s fee for a man who, as soon as we’d arrived at the party, had mysteriously vanished. As had my brother.
Standing on the periphery of the party, holding the large paper bag, I noticed someone staring at me with hateful, cold-fish eyes. They were barely lit by the bonfires and crouching in the flickering shadows like a coiled snake.
“Hi there,” I said, like a happy idiot. “And who are you here with?”
“Who the fuck are you?” they blurted.
Looking around for the leather man, my brother, anybody. I said, “We came with a friend. Would you like a beer?”
A dirty hand reached out from the shadows. Snatching a beer.
In the dark there was a—ksssk!
But from the eyes still watching me, hissed again, “Why are you here?”
“Yeah,” someone else suddenly shouted, gathering the attention of even more people. “You don’t even go here.”
Someone else shouted, behind me, “Why don’t you go back to your vacation rental?” There was laughter.
“Yeah,” shouted another voice. “Go back to Arizona!”
Joining in, I asked. “Does anyone want a beer?”
When my brother had seen how many beers I’d given away, he was immediately furious. With his fits, there was no time for discussion. One moment he was normal, distracted and happy. And the next he was kicking sand and telling me to go home by myself which, of course, was impossible for obvious reasons.
Hours later, like some kind of sad chaperone, I somehow managed to drag him home.
But we still had this bag. Inside the bag was the beer and the educational magazines and a receipt noting the total had come to almost twenty dollars, which didn’t make any sense. But there was a bigger issue, the issue from before: where to stash all this dirty loot? We decided to bring it back to the rental and stash it under our bed. Or, rather, we were so unimaginative that the very worst option was the only one we could think up.
I recalled the magazines I’d masterfully buried deep in the bottom of the recycling container. That had been a great idea, but with the worst outcome. So, I hoped, maybe this time the worst idea would have the best outcome. A more fortuitous?
The front of our rental butted right up against the boardwalk, facing the beach. Behind the rental was an access walkway with a shower and a large trunk for storing beach items, swim noodles, and life vests. Our window faced this small pocket that was accessible from the main alleyway out back by way of a creaky gate. This small secluded space outside our window was fenced-in and somehow amplified noise to the point that even opening the heavy, rusty fence sounded like an air raid siren.
Opening the gate quietly would be a surgical procedure.
The plan was to leave the bag under our window. We’d walk around the block and then right in the front door, with nothing in our hands or pockets. For sure, our older sister would be waiting up for us. She’d give us a talking-to about staying out so late. But eventually we’d retire to our bedroom and once the lights were off and things had settled down we could retrieve the bag through the window from the alley out back and stash it under our bed.
At least, this is what I could’ve sworn I’d explained to my brother who, even though I told him to wait for me out in the main alley, came bounding after me in a randomly playful mood, jubilantly pouncing on my back and shouting at me to be quiet. Together, we careened into the gate, sending the heavy wooden door swinging open on its howling, sea-rusted hinges.
We both froze.
In a panic, I dropped the bag below our window and we ran out to the main alley. Acting casually, we took the main alley to a side street around the corner to the boardwalk. And as we were making our way to the boardwalk I glanced to check our window from a distance, through the small access walkway in the back just as the light in our bedroom flicked on.
I stopped, grabbing Patrick’s shoulder. Together, we watched as a shadow walked up to the windows. The blinds opened, and then the window opened. My older sister stuck out her head. She looked left, right, listening into the night. And then she looked down. She saw something there on the ground. She reached down and picked up the big paper bag that was full of a half full case of Keystone Ice and a scatter of dirty magazines.
This she pulled into the window, shutting the window behind her, then shutting the janky venetian blinds. Her shadowy figure moved away from the window and the light flicked off.
“OH MY GAWD,” roared Patrick, pushing me. “This was all your fault! I told you we should have stayed at the party.”
“My fault?!” I shot back. “This whole night was your fault because you were ‘bored.’ And I told you to stay in the alley.”
“Fuck this,” said Patrick. Turning to the boardwalk, in the opposite direction of our rental. “I’m going back to the party.”
“The hell you are!” I said, chasing after him.
He ran. I ran after him.
I finally caught him on the beach by the back of his shirt, and tackled him into the sand where we could have a proper fight. Each of us were shouting and trading accusations and punching each other in the sand until, like a pair of beached fish, we flopped over gasping for air under the enormous open sky.
After he caught his breath, Patrick said, “There’s nothing between us and the stars besides distance.”
“Goddamnit,” I said, still heaving for air. “I have no idea what that means.”
Helping me up and shaking sand out his ears he noted, “That’s your problem. You’re—”
“Wait!” I said, as a plan for our return home suddenly came to me. “Follow me.”
Still brushing sand out of our hair and dragging a gamey, scandalous night behind us, we returned to the rental, walking right through the front door. Of course, our sister was sitting up. She was waiting to give us hell. So I turned on the light before she could.
“Alissa?” I said mournfully.
Alissa, who was tense as a spring in a chair in the corner of the room, turned on the light next to her. She wanted to know, “Where have you been?!”
I said, digging a toe into the carpet, “We have something to tell you.”
Suspiciously she said, “What?”
I said, “We need to confess to something awful…”
I mean, I was tired. Tired of chasing after my impossible brother. Tired of sand, which was somehow in my eyes and mouth and all of my openings. I was tired and wanting to go to bed. I made up the whole story—none of it was our fault, of course—about how we just wanted to go buy cigarettes but the guy came out of the store with this bag full of beer and nudie magazines and we didn’t know what to do with them so we gave them out to people at a party on the beach but that we came home and suddenly were stricken with a crisis of conscience and just felt just terrible about what we’d done and wanted to confess before anything else terrible could happen.
Alissa was flabbergasted. Collecting herself, she pulled the big brown bag full of party out from under their pull-out bed, “You mean this bag?”
“Oh my god,” feigned Patrick. He was, I thought, laying it on a little thick. “That’s it! Please,” he said dramatically. “Take it away!”
The story was a tall order of course. Neither Patrick I had any morals to speak of so it was inconsistent that we should suddenly be plagued by a tormenting crisis of moral conviction—from out of nowhere. Of course, she wasn’t buying it.
But the thing was, neither of us had any interest in selling it. Again, I was too tired to care. Neither of us could care less. And with that, somehow we cruised right into bed.
Patrick and I were sharing the bed, a beach-worth of sand in our sheets. With the window open I listened to the cooling drum of the Pacific Ocean rolling in and out again and, particle by particle, atom by atom, patiently reclaiming the stardust of the west coast.
