by Jeff Shelby
Drift Away
( Noah Braddock - 4 )
Jeff Shelby
Jeff Shelby
Drift Away
ONE
“Have you seen my mommy?”
The voice floated over my head and I squeezed my eyes shut tighter, hoping it would go away.
“Have you seen my mommy?”
I reluctantly opened my eyes. A small head shadowed by the massive afternoon sun was staring down at me. Blond hair, green eyes, a worried expression on his face.
I shaded my eyes with my hand. “What?”
“I can’t find my mommy.”
A humid breeze wafted across the sand and I propped myself up on my elbows. I scanned the beach. I saw lots of people. None of them seemed to be looking for a lost kid.
“Where’s she supposed to be?” I asked him.
“I don’t know.”
“Where’d you see her last?”
He was around six, wearing blue and white trunks that were too long for him. No shirt. His torso was dark brown, not sunburnt.
A local kid, I thought.
“By the water.”
“Um, there’s a lot of water.”
“I was building a castle,” he explained. “With a bucket. It has a dragon.”
I glanced at the cheap watch strapped to my wrist. Five till one. Almost time to get back to work.
I sat up. The water in the gulf pounded the shore, small, emerald waves dropping into the sand, one after another. People stood waist-deep in the water, trying to escape the July heat in water that was nearly as warm as the air.
“Where was your castle?” I asked.
He thought for a moment, then pointed westward up the beach. “That way, I think.”
The rental tent was back that way, meaning I had to walk in that direction.
“Down by the water,” he said. “And my mom was on the sand. On her towel. But I can’t find her.”
The sugar-white sand was littered with beach chairs and tents and umbrellas and coolers and blankets. I stared in the direction he pointed, waiting for a mom in a bathing suit to come our way, panicked and grateful to have found her missing son.
But all I saw was Liz. Which was absolutely impossible.
I slipped my sunglasses down over my eyes and stood. I pulled my towel off the sand and shoved it into my nylon backpack. I hoisted the pack onto my bare shoulders and felt two beads of sweat race down my chest.
I didn’t help people. I wasn’t good at it. And I had no desire to do it. All I wanted was to be left alone.
But this was a kid and even I couldn’t justify leaving some little boy alone on a crowded beach.
“Come on,” I said, trudging up the sand. “Let’s go find your mom.”
TWO
“What’s your name?” I asked him as we walked.
“Jackson,” he said, squinting up at me. “What’s yours?”
I hesitated for a moment. I rarely said my own name anymore for a whole bunch of reasons. There was one person in Florida who knew my name. But again-he was a kid.
“Noah,” I said.
“Like the ark?”
“Like the ark.”
“Cool.”
We worked our way through the sunburnt masses, down to the water line.
“I hate the seaweed,” Jackson said, sidestepping one of the piles that littered the sand. “It gets in my shorts.”
“Yeah, that’s a bummer,” I said. “Your mom with your dad?”
“I don’t have a dad,” he said. “It’s just my mom.”
There was no feeling or expression behind it, just a kid making a statement, like it was normal because that was all he knew.
I envied him.
“Do you live here?” he asked.
Again, I hesitated, uncomfortable with any question that pinned me down. “Yeah.”
“Do you actually live on the beach?”
“Where do you live?” I asked, redirecting him.
“Here. In Fort Walton,” he said. “We come to the beach whenever my mom isn’t working.”
“Where’s she work?”
“A restaurant. It’s kinda far from here.” I knew what he was thinking. She wouldn’t be there.
We walked another fifty yards or so. Still no panicked moms. I glanced down at him. His smile was fading, his eyes scanning the faces under the umbrellas.
“We’ll find her, buddy,” I said.
Without looking, he reached up for my hand. His tiny, sandy hand slid into mine, his fingers wrapping around my ring finger.
It made me uncomfortable.
“How’d you find me?” I asked.
Jackson though for a moment before answering.
“I saw you. Renting umbrellas and boogie boards,” he said. “Then I saw you lying down.” He shrugged his small shoulders.
If he’d seen me working, he’d wandered a pretty good distance down the beach. We were still a hundred yards from the stand.
“Where was your mom when you last saw her?”
“She was lying on her towel. Like you were. Sorta by my castle. It has a dragon.”
“You told me that.”
“Do you wanna see it?”
“Maybe after we find your mom.”
“Okay.”
Kids got lost nearly every day on the beach. They’d pour out of the condos above the dunes, just arrived from Alabama or Mississippi or somewhere else in the South, and they’d get disoriented, separated amidst the crowds. I just hadn’t had to help one in the few months I’d been there.
But I knew what it felt like to be lost.
“What is she wearing?” I asked.
“Her bathing suit.”
“What color?”
“I don’t remember. Blue maybe?”
Great. Only about a million of those.
“Oh, man,” Jackson said, his fingers tightening around mine. “Someone smashed my castle.”
“Where?”
His hand slipped out of mine and his legs pinwheeled across the sand. He screeched to a halt in front of what was now an imploded castle, the bucket-designed turrets pancaked and kicked over.
“That took me forever.” His lower lip quivered.
“So where was your mom when you were building the castle?” I asked, trying to keep the sympathy I felt-for the smashed castle, for his missing mom-at bay.
He stared at the remnants of his castle, dejected. “I dunno.”
“Come on, dude,” I said. “Look around. Where was she?”
He looked up from the castle and pointed. “There.”
He aimed his finger at a striped beach towel and what looked like a wicker beach bag about thirty feet from us.
“That’s your mom’s stuff?”
He nodded.
We walked over to the towel and the bag. I could see sunglasses and a wallet in the bag. A set of keys sat out, visible, the metal glinting in the sun. No shoes.
“You said you come here a lot,” I said.
“Almost every day,” Jackson said. “When Mommy doesn’t have to work.”
“Do you drive here?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Do you remember where she parked your car?”
His eyes lit up. “Yes! We always park in the same spot!”
“Show me.”
We moved up the dunes, toward the line of tall condo buildings. The long stretch of sand was shadowed by seven-story buildings, housing rentals of all types. Expensive, moderate, dirt cheap. Something for everyone.
The wet, wooden ramp took us up and over a large dune and between two of the buildings. We passed an outdoor shower and descended the walkway into an asphalt parking lot, sand scattered around like glitter.
“There she is!” Jackson cried and to
ok off running.
I looked in the direction he was heading. A woman in her late twenties, longish brown hair, light pink coverup over her bathing suit, was talking to a guy a little younger. Muscled up, wraparound shades, dark green tattoos on each shoulder. She looked agitated and he looked like he didn’t care. He had hold of her arm and she was trying to remove it. They both looked at Jackson as he got closer.
“Mommy!” he yelled. “I lost you!”
The guy let go and his eyes drifted in my direction.
She gathered him up and hugged him. “I’m sorry, bud. I was just on my way back. Didn’t mean to scare you.” She looked up at me. “Hi.”
I held up a hand. “He was scared. He couldn’t find you.”
The muscles in her arms flexed as she hugged him a little tighter. “Thank you. For bringing him to me.”
“He knew where your car was parked,” I said, glancing at the guy next to her. He rocked from foot to foot, his arms folded across his chest. “He found you. Not me.”
She kissed the top of his head and set him on the ground, hanging onto his hand. “Well, thank you anyway.”
“Sure.”
We all stood there for a moment, heat rising off the pavement around us.
“You can go,” the guy said, adjusting his sunglasses.
“I know,” I said, not moving.
“Then go.”
I didn’t say anything.
He stepped in closer to me. “Or I can make you go.”
“Colin,” the woman said. “Don’t.”
Colin shuffled his feet. He was shorter than me, a little over six feet, and had his chest puffed out. A small white scar ran lengthwise down the bridge of his nose. He smelled like beer and sunscreen.
I looked past him at the woman. “You okay?”
“She’s fine,” he snarled, exposing perfect white teeth.
She hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah. Fine.”
He stuck a finger in my chest. “You got three seconds.”
A finger in my chest had always been a pet peeve of mine. I hated it. It was rude, invasive, condescending. I could think of a number of times that I grabbed the offending finger and bent it backwards until I felt like letting go. Or it broke. Either way, I’d made my point that I didn’t like it.
I had no doubt I could’ve quickly snapped this guy’s finger in half.
Jackson and the woman stood there, watching, waiting.
She said she was fine.
I stepped back in the direction I’d come.
The guy grinned. “That’s what I thought.”
I looked past him. “I’ll see you around, Jackson.”
Jackson smiled and waved goodbye and I headed back to work.
THREE
Ike was waiting at the tent for me. “Busy today?”
“Nope. It’s kinda dead.”
He nodded. “Yeah. July sucks around here. Too hot for anybody to do anything other than stay inside.”
I handed him the cashbox. He lifted up the metal lid and removed the zippered bank bag. “You can cut out early if you want. Don’t think we’ll miss anything.”
“I’ll stay.”
He smiled, nodded. “Figured you’d say that.”
Ike was somewhere in his fifties. Thick gray hair and skin turned a leathery brown by years in the sun. Always wore a gray tank top and khaki shorts. Never any shoes. He ran a rental company that rented everything from bikes to surfboards up and down the beach. I manned one of his stands on the beach, renting umbrellas and chairs to tourists looking for protection from the sun. Showed up every morning at nine and stayed until four. He made the same offer at least once a week, telling me I could bail early if I wanted. But I always declined. I had nowhere to go.
He handed me a folded-over stack of bills. “For this week.”
I shoved the money in my pocket without counting it. “Thanks.”
He lingered for a moment. “Doing okay in the place?”
“Yep. Thanks.”
“Sorry it don’t have air. Gotta be hotter than shit in there.”
“It’s fine.”
“Well, it ain’t fine. It’s a goddamn dump. But as long as you’re okay.”
“It’s fine,” I repeated.
“Carter would probably kick my ass if he saw the place,” he said. “Tell me I coulda come up with something better.”
I squinted into the sun. “Ike, it’s fine. I appreciate you letting me use it. I’m good.”
He studied me for a long moment, then shrugged. “You say so. Cement guys are coming to pour tomorrow, by the way.”
“Okay.”
“Supposed to be there around seven. Can you show ’em where they need to pour?”
“Sure.”
“And then if you wanna start trenching for the sprinklers, you can do that.”
“No problem.”
“Unless it’s this hot again. Then don’t.”
I shifted my feet in the sand. “I’ll do it.”
He frowned. “Yeah. I know you will. I’ll be damned if you don’t do everything you say you’re gonna do, kid. I may find you dead on that lot with a shovel in your hand, melted by the sun, but you’ll probably have it all done.”
I gave him a faint smile. I liked Ike. He was a good guy. And he didn’t ask a lot of questions, even when I knew he wanted to.
“You find that six footer I told you about?” he asked.
“Nah.”
He raised a thick eyebrow. “Carter said you’d probably need a board.”
I sat down in the beach chair. “I don’t.”
“You bring one with you?”
“No.”
“Well, you can use that…”
“I don’t surf anymore, Ike,” I said, cutting him off. “So I don’t need it. But thanks.”
Ike nodded. “Alright. Good enough. You’ll holler if you need something?”
“Yep.”
He headed up the dunes toward the parking lot and I watched him disappear.
I listened to the small waves crash against the shore. The wind had turned, blowing hard off the gulf, the blue-green water choppy and rough. The sun was high in the sky, beating all of us outside into a sweaty submission.
I hadn’t talked to Carter in several months. The last time we’d spoken, I was on a pay phone in Oklahoma, putting as much distance between me and California-and the memories of Liz-as I could. He’d called in a favor and told me to head to Florida. Gave me an address in Fort Walton Beach, told me Ike would know what to do. I didn’t ask what the favor was in return for. I didn’t need to know.
Ike had taken care of me. Got me a place to live and gave me a job. I was surviving.
Carter and I agreed that we shouldn’t talk for awhile, part of that whole plan to lay low. I had an email address that I checked once a week from a coffee shop or the library. If there was anything he thought I should know, it would show up there.
So far, it had remained empty.
I watched the vacationers bounce in the water, yelling and screaming and smiling. You could find a sunburn in every shade of pink and red if you strode down the beach. They didn’t notice me unless they wanted to drop twenty bucks on a big blue umbrella, thirty if they wanted the chair, too. They were there on the Panhandle because they’d chosen to be, to escape their everyday lives and enjoy a few days in the sun and water.
I was there because I had no place else to go.
FOUR
Colin was waiting for me as I carried the last two umbrellas back to the stand.
“Hey,” he said, lifting his chin. “Tough guy. I need to talk to you.”
I stepped around him and laid the two umbrellas on the pile of others inside the small box shed. I pulled the cable across them and snapped the lock into place. I closed the door on the shed and locked that. I picked up my backpack and started up the dunes toward the lot.
“Are you fucking deaf?” Colin growled from behind me.
I said nothing.
&nbs
p; “I said I need to talk to you.”
I stepped off the sand and onto the planked wooden walkway.
“You need to mind your own fucking business, tough guy.”
I nodded at a couple heading the opposite direction on the walkway. I passed the shower and descended the stairs to the parking lot.
Colin scurried around and set himself directly in front of me. “Hey. Stop walking, asshole.”
I took a step to my right and he slid in front of me, blocking my path.
I exhaled and stared at him.
“You need to mind your own business,” he repeated. His chest was puffed out again like it had been earlier. His arms were at his sides, exaggerating the distance they needed from his body to show off his muscles.
“You should move,” I said. “Now.”
An evil slit creased his mouth. “Oh, good. You do talk.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You see that girl or that kid again,” he said. “Stay away. Got it?”
I didn’t say anything.
“I said do you got it?” he snarled again and poked his finger in my chest.
I grabbed his finger and bent it straight back. He swung at me with his free arm but I already had my arm up to block it. I stepped forward with my right leg and swept it quickly back into him. He went straight down to the pavement on his back and I dropped hard onto him, my knee smashing into his chest.
His sunglasses were gone and his eyes bulged. He opened his mouth but nothing came out of it, not even when his finger snapped and went limp. I loosened my grip and tears formed in the corners of his eyes but he still didn’t make a sound. I rose off him and then jammed my knee into his sternum again. He gasped, for air or because of the pain, I didn’t know.
I stared at him, months of rage bubbling in my system, begging to be released. The hair on my arms stood at attention and the heat on my skin had nothing to do with the air temperature.
Colin’s eyes squeezed shut in agony, his mouth open, eager for oxygen to find its way into his empty, compressed lungs.
I stood.
He coughed and wheezed as he whimpered over his finger. He rolled onto his side, hugging the broken finger to his chest, his eyes still closed.
