Rescue

breeze from the milky, turquoise bay keeping the bugs off the beach. The sandy waterfront was nearly deserted, plenty of chairs in sun and shade available. There was a thatched-roof bar, unstaffed as Clark had predicted, and a thatched-roof water-sports area with one sleepy-looking attendant in sunglasses, orange laces on the earpieces trailing down the back of his neck. I got a towel from him by showing my courtesy card, then spread towel and T-shirt on a chair. Leaving the key and card in my running shoes, I went for a swim.
    The bay deepened only gradually, and as I walked out to knee height I realized the sand had to have been trucked in and dumped, the floor of the bay feeling marly once I was ten feet from the water’s edge. At mid-thigh, I dived forward, the water refreshing after all the driving. Swimming first toward an L-shaped wharf on my left, I did some imposed laps back and forth, south to north, over and over as exercise. The bay was very saline, but the wind from the north kept the few people out of the water, so it was like having a choppy but limitless pool to myself.
    Back on shore, I noticed most everyone was coupled up, which was fine except that it made me a sore thumb. I lay down on the lounge to drip-dry, watching the bay.
    It was hard not to notice the watercraft. Two windsurfers, keeping track of each other through the plastic windows in their sails. Farther out, a guy and a girl, him sitting on a Wave Runner, her standing on a Jet Ski, doing flashy maneuvers more for our benefit than their own, I thought. Still farmer, a catamaran with HOBIE on the sail, only one hull in the water, the woman who held the tiller extension riding so far hiked out over the other hull that she looked at first like a special effect.
    Then a Para-Sailer crossed my cone of vision, the man “taking off“ from a platform on the stem of the tow boat, a helper playing out line as the guy rose. After some headway was achieved, though, the driver cut back on the throttle, the guy in the chute descending and shifting from a paratrooper position in the harness to a trapeze artist’s, hanging upside down by the crook of his knees. When the boat slowed down enough, he almost did a handstand on the water’s surface. Then he righted himself and the boat took off, a yellow and tangerine streak in the water, the parachute a double blossom in the same colors, a three-hundred-foot line holding him at a forty-five degree angle to the surface, about one-hundred-fifty feet in the air.
    But the watercraft were really just man-made camouflage. The bay was like the hammock that way: If you looked long enough, you saw other things. Seagulls and terns, sure, but also what appeared to be turkey vultures, circling high above, their wide black wings having separate white feathers at the ends, like slightly spread fingers. A bird that I thought was a heron, with zigzagged neck and a strangely graceful way of flapping its wings. In the water itself, some kind of duck, with gray and white feathers and a red beak. The duck would paddle alongside the beach, neatly moving around the few waders, sticking its head vigorously under the water while its tail wagged on top, reminding me of Nancy’s cat trying to push his way under her blanket.
    I was almost the only person still on the beach for sunset. A flaming pink globe, bigger than it seems up north but somehow easier to look at, settled toward the horizon past the L-shaped wharf. The surrounding sky shaded from purple to soft pink, lots of grays at the edges. White buoys in the water looked dark against the glary surface, with boat canopies and light poles and hammock trees silhouetted against the backdrop of low clouds. A couple sat at the side of the wharf next to a post, the man leaning his head into the post, the woman leaning her head into his shoulder as two pelicans necked on the circular platform at the top of the post itself.
    I thought about Beth, and times like these that we’d had, and Nancy, and times like these that we hadn’t yet had, but I hoped would.
    The mosquitoes surged as soon as the sun disappeared, and I realized I was keeping the kid at the water-sports hut. I dropped off the towel with a three-dollar tip, him thanking me profusely and hoping I’d be back the next day.
    In the room, I showered and shaved, noticing that the bath towels smelled like apples. Putting on a Lacoste-style shirt and khaki slacks, I used Pepe’s towel to wipe the Detective’s Special