Corkscrews, sand dollar shards, bivalves, so many broken ones, no value at all.

            Carrie
Struthers didn’t want to sit at the beach by her big brother Rody’s sneakers
and shirt, but all she did was humph her shoulders and look down the south
shore in the hopes that Rody would return soon.

            Rather than proof that
she was heavy, her figure–swayed back, protruding tummy, thicker
ankles–simply revealed that she hadn’t yet lost all her baby fat, typical of a
just-turned-eight-year-old. The wind had whipped several strands out of the
metal barrette that Rody had maneuvered into a slice of her coal, thick hair.
Her bangs were long, and in the middle grew up and away in a widow’s peak,
slightly left center of her forehead.

            Her mother, Marisa Sayers, had left for work before Carrie and Rody got up that morning. Marisa cleaned several motels on the coast farther north, southeast of Myrtle Beach. They lived three streets back from the shore, in a section of older patio homes not yet delivered up to the beach developers who pestered Marisa with letters, thick sheets of bleach-white paper, a letterhead from a whole pack of investment brokers, Dear Ms. Sayers, reduced capital gains, nest egg, children’s education. Marisa, who had inherited the house from the grandmother who raised her there, threw the letters in the trash. The locals stuck together, having cookouts on Saturday evenings, much to the distaste of the vacationers, the car dealers from Asheville, the B-Law professors from UNC, the Fulton County socialites who maintained or rented beachfront property on Pawleys Island.  The vacationers would drive through the two blocks where women in sagging halter tops tended wobbling charcoal grills, youngsters climbed on hoods of cars, and the few men who happened to be hanging around for a while sucked on beer bottles and lolled in lawn chairs. The Sayers home was comfy to Carrie, since she knew nothing beyond saucepans of  oatmeal drying on the table, blotches of dog pee dotting the carpet, perennially damp towels lying on the linoleum.

            She wished she were back at the
house right now. Uncle Terry would be awake, the latest new uncle, been there
about a month. He perched her on his lap, liked to jiggle her as if she were a
toddler. His hands squeezed her in the bend her body made when she sat down.
Terry hung around in the mornings while Marisa worked. With fuzzy hair the
color of a 2×4 board and colorless moles on his narrow cheeks and chin, he took
calls, placed bets, met young adults at the screen door then talked with them
in low tones on the porch a few minutes, after which they left. He had a silver
canine tooth and sunflower-seed-colored whiskers on his neck all the way down
to where chest hair curled up over his T-shirt collar. He gave Carrie sticks of
gum, Juicy Fruit. He also offered them to Rody, but after the first few days,
Rody refused them. Rody wouldn’t call Terry “Uncle” either.

            “Why don’t you like him?” Carrie had
asked one afternoon as they paused at the highway crosswalk on the way home
from school.

            “Wait,” Rody pulled Carrie’s arm as
a motorcycle rider revved his engine. “Don’t expect them to watch out for you.”

            Carrie jerked her sleeve out of
Rody’s grasp. “The light’s about to change.”

            “Doesn’t mean you can go.”

            “What’s wrong with him?”

            Rody peered up and down the street
then stepped off the curb, leading his half sister. “Just don’t go in the house
when only he’s there, okay?”

            “Why?”

            “Just trust me. Don’t. I mean it,
Care.”

            She had always looked up to her
brother, who, though he hadn’t been much of an ally until Terry moved in, had
not let the Foley boys pelt her with their pea shooters, and who didn’t run her
off when he and the Foleys cleaned the redfish they caught surf casting.

            Shivering in the shade on the beach,
she humphed her shoulders again. She set down the library book she’d been
trying to read, Island of the Blue
Dolphins, turned and looked to the north. She had already walked up the
shore off Huntington Beach State Park, past the secretive walkways that snaked
through the myrtles and canes, quiet little pathways that led to a camper park
where old men read the newspaper in lawn chairs while their wives decorated the
camper area, strands of bright Japanese lanterns, a pot with silk daisies on an
oilcloth tablecloth, banners “The Reddings—Lucille, Herb, and Tinker—Waseka,
Minnesota.” There was always a teacup poodle or Yorkie dancing around, yipping
if she happened into its hearing, each little dog conditioned to believe he
were the most important creature on earth.

            Carrie and Rody’s mutt Bastrup was
at home now. One of the other uncles had left him when he returned to Mobile. Bastrup, a
Rottweiler mix, sometimes plodded along with Carrie when they walked on the
beach. But this morning Rody had not wanted to fiddle with a bag to pick up the
dog’s droppings, and Carrie had never managed it all by herself, so they’d left
Bastrup baying on the front screened porch.

            She wished she were sitting next to
Bastrup now, watching reruns. She’d pat the slip covered divan, let him jump up
on the seat, only when her mother was working. Carrie and the big dog would
doze, Bastrup occasionally lifting his ears because of a catfight or speaker-banging
music in a car driving by outside, Carrie shifting her legs as they fell asleep
under his head. She could be there now, instead of rubbing her arms in the wind
on this gloomy day.

            It had pattered a couple of times,
but not enough for her to have to move under the boardwalk. This morning she
had walked all the way to the buoys at the northern edge of the island, a good
mile and a half from where they started. She liked to see the boats, imagine
what kind of people were on them, and she always looked for children. It was
also interesting to see what kind of dogs the boating people had; she sometimes
spied a spaniel or bulldog panting on the deck. Usually when she returned, she
would be tired and Rody would walk her home. Those days, after a lunch of butter-sugar-bread,
she’d fall asleep on the divan, cuddled up with Bastrup, until her mom came
home and made pancakes. She felt that tired now, but Rody had said not to go
home.

            This morning during her walk, she’d
had to slide her flip-flops on and off to cross where the water, just receding
from high tide, would pool in lower areas, running in little rivulets turning
into troughs, some places too wide to simply hop over. The sand, ranging in
texture and color from unbleached flour to ground-up corn chips, made
interesting designs, diamond shapes laced with black, shimmers like solid
waves, a smooth buttered-dinner-roll type slope.

            Carrie was hungry, too. She had brought along a cinnamon roll, drenched with white icing, from a package she and her mother had picked up near the checkout at the Stop-N-Shop. This morning she barely had time to grab it when Rody rushed her along.

He had stood by her twin bed and wheedled her as he thumped her ankle through the thin yellow blanket. “C’mon. I told them I’d be there by 8.”

            “It’s Sunday.”

            “I know; we don’t want to miss the
good fishing.”

            “You
don’t. I’ll stay here.”

            “No way,” Rody’s lips contracted.
Terry hadn’t made his usual appearance that morning: no shirt, boxers that
sometimes needed rearranging, shaggy yellow toenails. He would insist Carrie
could stay and watch cartoons if he saw them leaving.

            Rody kept his voice low. “Come on.”

            “Why?”

            He shook his head, squeezed her
forearm. “I’m not going into it with you. You just have to come.”

            “Did Momma say I had to?”

            He jerked her wrist. “I don’t care;
GET UP.”

            And because she was both little and
the sister, he’d persuaded her, still pressing his index finger to his lips and
frowning. Carrie had slipped on aqua Capri pants, the ones she’d pulled on
after school Thursday to go shopping with her mother, plus a white T and
turquoise hooded windbreaker. He helped her wrap the sweet roll in some paper
towel, guaranteeing the loss of half the icing.

            They were almost out the door when
she halted. “Something to drink.”

            Rody rushed to the refrigerator and
pulled out chocolate syrup and milk. He smelled the quart of milk then poured
some in a tumbler from the dish rack. He stirred in the chocolate, trying not
to jangle the spoon against the glass.

“Drink this here. You don’t want to have to keep up with it.”

            “What’ll I do later when I’m
thirsty?”

            “Shhh. I’ll give you some quarters
for lemonade at the Shake Shack.”

            Rody usually balked at Carrie tagging
along to the Shake Shack, a thatch-roofed beachfront hut offering hot dogs,
soft drinks, and Fudgsicles in the summer. It would be a walk down the south,
but worth it. She knew he was allowing her this privilege because he wanted her
to hurry and because he wanted her to stay away from the house, and that another
time he might not let her go with him. She also figured his offer meant he’d
leave her alone for a long time. But she went along with it for nothing. She
gulped most of the milk, creating brown crescent horns at the corners of her
mouth. He grabbed her library book and a towel. He still had to gather his
tackle in the carport, but he carried her items for her.

            They walked south five houses, Rody
bouncing along, Carrie shambling, sleepy and sullen. The sky remained overcast,
the prospect of showers in the air. The street jogged to the left, where they
continued another three blocks east as the paint jobs on the stucco grew
fresher, the landscaping more tended. They crossed the street, walked up the
common path, then the boardwalk spanning the protected dunes, and there was the
ocean, grand and imposing. In the shadow of the boardwalk he had dropped her
towel and book, his sneakers and shirt in the cool sand.

            “If it rains, wait under the steps.
Don’t go home till I get back.” After trapping the barrette in her hair, he
hurried off, waving and calling to Craig Foley, not even turning around to tell
her when he’d be through. She had sat there long enough to wake up on her
terms, helped along by the brisk wind and shadow. She didn’t feel up to the book
right then. When she’d returned from the long walk north and given up on the
book again, she unfolded the sweet roll, the paper towel gooey with icing.
After she swallowed a big bite, she became very thirsty. She licked the fingers
of her left hand and the wind flicked the limp paper towel and the rest of the
roll out of her grasp. Great, now Rody would gripe at her for littering. She
hopped up and hurried toward the towel, which flitted into the foam. She
stopped short of the surf, watched the paper towel dissolve in the laplets, so
that it didn’t really matter, just a tiny piece of paper in the ocean. It broke
apart in the next few waves. She swallowed, licked her fingers some more, bent
down to the edge of the upcreeping water to shake her stretched-out fingers in
the thinnest layer that would dissolve the sugar.

            The water was very cold, not
surprising for April and the cloud cover. Her fingers slightly blue, she rubbed
her hands together and stamped her feet. The wind whipped her hair again and
she tried to pull it back into the barrette.  Cool salt water left on her fingers dripped
onto her ear. The next spent wave rolled a lump of seaweed onto her flip-flops
and she jumped back. Her mother would be angry if she ruined these sandals, the
straps decorated with big aqua and white silky flowers, not really made for
getting wet. She’d begged her mother for them, while her mother insisted she
needed tan or white.

            “These’ll go with more than you
think,” Carrie pleaded at the shoe outlet.

            “They aren’t durable though.” Marisa
pulled at the strap where it was tucked into the sole, the flowers flapping.
“They’ll have to last you all summer. Besides, those floppy flowers. You’ll
catch them on the screen, or drip something on them.”

            “I’ll go barefoot most of the time.
I’ll take care of them.” Every child’s diligent promise:  I won’t
break it. I’ll be good. It won’t happen.

            She had only gotten them Thursday,
and was so proud of them that, without her mother there to overrule her, she
had worn them this morning, to further console herself for Rody’s dragging her
out of bed. She scampered away from the water and back to his sneakers. “They’ll
dry,” she assured herself as she peeled the seaweed off one of the flowers. The
flip-flops didn’t look brand-new anymore. Her toes were bluish, too. She
decided to walk toward the Shack, and wanted to leave the flip-flops, but with
more people walking the coast, feared someone would take them. That would
really make her mother mad.

            She slipped them off, stashed them
along with Rody’s articles, the towel and the book under a broken beach chair,
one tubular arm bent, beneath the boardwalk steps. She picked up the sandy roll
and tore it into pieces for the seagulls. She wondered what time the place
opened. She might get water since the roll made her so thirsty. Simply walking
home and helping herself to a glass of water out of the sink would be so much
easier.

            It wasn’t that she couldn’t walk
home by herself. She and Rody had zipped between house and beach for months,
usually with other children along. The neighbors they knew were safe, the
tourists they didn’t know wouldn’t have anything to do with them. As she walked
away from the boardwalk, she looked for Rody and his friends. Who was he to tell
her what she could and couldn’t do? And why wouldn’t he talk to her about it?
Rody didn’t usually keep secrets.  Last
summer he had shown her, through a chip in the wood fence of one of the
beachfront cottages, a lady on a lounge chair beside a private pool.

            He had sniggered, put his index
finger to his lips. Carrie peeked. At first she didn’t know what she was
supposed to see. She scoured the screen door, the windows, the pool, finally
saw the light bikini bra, the color of Cocoa Puffs, draped over the back of the
lounger, which was angled away from where they were watching. Carrie recognized
the bare knob of the woman’s shoulder, the breast, a one-third profile of the
sunbather’s nipple.

            She’d turned back to Rody, shrugged,
and whispered, “Miss Vicki lays out like that all the time.”

            Rody scowled. “Hunh-Uh.”

            “Uh-HUNH.” Her eyes widened and she
shook her head and stared back at him.

            “When?” Rody checked to make sure
the sunbather couldn’t hear. He pulled Carrie away by the arm. “You show me the
next time she does, okay? I’ll let you see my float collection.”

            If they shared so many things, why
wouldn’t he tell her what was wrong with being at home on an old Sunday morning
in April?

            She slipped the hood of her
windbreaker over her head, which pulled all her hair forward around her face.
She tried to stuff it back, down below the collar, but if felt itchy. She
walked a little faster.

            When they first arrived on the beach
that morning, she could only walk along an eight or ten foot band of beach
because of high tide. But now, at least a couple hours later, it was twice
that. Earlier, she had been alone by the boardwalk. In fact, by the Huntingdon Beach State Park
she had snuck up one of the walkways past colonies of seabeach amaranth and all
the Protect Species warning signs. She had slowed her pace in an isolated curve
of the trail, jessamine and wax myrtles sprawling toward her and the dusty
walkway. She listened for a moment, hearing only a couple of birds scratching
in the brush. After looking both ways and listening again, she had slipped down
her capris and panties, and tinkled right off the path. Nobody was around and
she had scuttled quickly back to the safety of the beach. But now she would not
have dared, because of the bird watchers, bumping their binoculars against
their sunglasses above the surf line, and the joggers, making deeper
impressions with their shoe prints in the sand as they hustled up the beach.

            Heading toward the shake place, she
studied the varying patterns left by the joggers: wavy designs, a waffle print,
a honeycomb. She swiveled at the hip to look behind at her own prints, and only
saw a mark much smaller, much shallower than the others, her own little foot
shape. She walked closer to the receding tide, where the sand was wetter, more impressionable.

            A couple of seagulls watched her
approach, then swooped away. Shells littered the shore in a line above the
point where the waves collapsed on the sand. Corkscrews, sand dollar shards,
bivalves, so many broken ones, no value at all. 
Occasionally Carrie would happen across a coquina or turkey wing, still
intact, a treasure. She drew near a jelly-like blob which the waves had beached
on the sand. She leaned over, not too close, for fear it were a jellyfish or
man-of-war. Rody had warned her about those demons, how their sting could make
a grown man howl with pain. The blob was clear, all the way to a central
reddish part, full of tiny grayish pebbles. She lingered to see if it would
move, but it sat there dull and mute, waiting for the return of high tide to
deliver it, which would be too late. She skirted it and beyond, turned over a
weak branch of washed-up evergreen with her foot, her senses alert in case the
jellyfish were to try to strike her from the back. She moved away from the
water’s edge.

            The roof of her mouth and her tongue
felt dry. She churned her cheeks in and out to work up some spit. She stuck her
hand into the flat square of her pocket, right front, for the change to buy
lemonade. No quarters clinked. She plunged her left hand into her left pocket.
No change. She tried the pocket of her windbreaker. Empty. She whirled around,
as if she’d dropped the money on the ground behind her like crumbs,
Hansel-and-Gretel style. She patted the outsides of the seat of her pants to
see if she were mistaken about there being no back pockets. She wasn’t. Rody
had forgotten to give her the change. She kicked at a knot of pine needles,
slowed down. No point in getting thirstier walking that far.

            She plopped down in the sand,
moisture seeping into the seat of the capris. She turned around and looked at
the condos behind her on the beach. What would it hurt for one of them to give
her some water? What would it hurt for her to go home? She could be there in
less than thirty minutes. She wouldn’t have to share the TV with Rody, and
Terry would let her watch what she wanted. She could lie there on the sofa,
Bastrup at her side, peaceful and relaxed. That old Rody, he had just rushed
off with his buddies, leaving her. She looked for him up the surf, but the only
fishermen she saw were two old men, each holding a rod, with another rod stuck
in the sand. They too wore windbreakers and stood well above the chilly tide break.

            A cooler rested behind them, along
with their tackle. Perhaps they had water and would give her a sip. Carrie
stood, dusted the sand from her seat. As she ambled toward them, she could see
a thermos and a plastic bag with chips and cookies tumbling out of it. She
slowed down even more. One of the men turned and saw her, his head tilted back
so he could see her better from under his fishing hat. She was close enough to
address them and the man watched her a minute.

            “Hi there.” He smiled.

            “Do you have any water?”

            “No, sweetheart, I don’t. All I have
is coffee.”

            Carrie slumped. The man shifted his
feet toward her. “You want some? It’ll warm you up.” He stuck the rod in a hole
in the sand next to the other one.

            Carrie shrugged and waited. The man
knelt, picked up the thermos and unscrewed the red cup top and lid. He covered
the bottom of the cup and handed it to Carrie.

            “Thanks.” She shivered but took it.
The thin cup warmed her hands, and steam and a strong comforting smell arose
from it. She tried it, but it tasted so bitter that she spewed it out.

            The men laughed.  The other man turned to her. “You can have
some ice from the cooler.” He opened the cooler lid, looked at his hands.
“Here, you pick up a couple cubes.”

            Carrie leaned over and grasped an
ice cube. Three fish were stuck in the ice, and the whole cooler smelled of
fish. The cube was very cold, and she slipped it in her mouth to get it out of
her fingers. It made her shiver more.

            “You out here with someone?” The
first man replaced the lid and cup top on the thermos.

            She spurted the cube into her hand
to speak. “My brother, but I can go home if I want to.” Then she returned the
fishy cube to her mouth.

“Why don’t you run along home, then.” He had picked up his rod again and spoke over his shoulder.

“Thanks.” Carrie wiped her hand on her pants, turned back the direction of the boardwalk. When they had resumed their fishing, she spit the cube onto the sand. From all the walking, even her arms were tired.

Rody would probably give in if he knew how thirsty, how bored, how lonely she felt. He’d jerk his chin up quick, then click his tongue while he watched her from the corner of his eyes, if she could just explain. What did he know anyway. Wouldn’t even give her a good reason. Probably had hidden the vanilla wafers and didn’t want her to find them. Besides, he wasn’t the boss of her.

Well, he should be here now, and he wasn’t. Couldn’t stop her. She trudged toward the boardwalk and her little pile. She would leave his there and collect her own things. He’d be mad at her, but he’d get over that. She could see the boardwalk in the distance. She would wear the windbreaker and flip-flops, wrap the towel around her waist, and all she’d have to carry home was her book, no burden at all.

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