Silent gulls bank overhead in the clear air; their perfect shadows drift across the pavement with motionless wings, like outlines hung from a child’s mobile. Stanley steps off the boardwalk, onto the sand. Claudio follows him. The wind is cool by the water, the beach all but deserted. Two old ladies pass with bundles of polished driftwood. Farther up the beach, a thin and shirtless man in a black beret stands before an easel, daubing at a canvas. A crowd of sandpipers runs ahead of Stanley and Claudio, then stops until they close the distance, then runs ahead again.
The beach widens as they walk south, and when they’re far enough from the boardwalk—too far to be worth a vag bust for a cop—Stanley sits down. The tide is in: there’s a towering surf, and waves are erasing the domed temples and square towers of an elaborate city built in the sand. A piece of blackened wood is trapped in what’s left of its central plaza, and Claudio stoops to pick it up. It looks like a burnt plank from an old ship, heavily encrusted with dogwinkles and goose barnacles, afloat maybe for years. Claudio lets it drop into the next big wave and it glides away. In the distance, beyond the line of breakers, the sea is featureless, a shimmering silver band.
After a while Claudio sits down next to Stanley. Stanley brushes the sand from his palm and slips it under Claudio’s shirt, against his narrow back. Claudio flinches, then relaxes. You will help me get money, he says.
Stanley studies the horizon, the pattern of flashes there. His eyes are tired. You want to go back to the three-card routine? he says. That made some good money.
Those hoods will bother us again.
We could take the game into town. Back into Hollywood.
No. Hoods are everywhere.
Claudio slides up the cuff of Stanley’s jeans to expose the bandaged cut. He looks at it without comment, then covers it again. Moves his hand to Stanley’s knee. Runs it slowly up his thigh.
Stanley’s leaning toward him when he spots something in the waves off to the right. Did you see that? he says.
What?
Look, Stanley says, pointing.
Three black spheres are floating in the smooth sea halfway to the breakers, appearing and disappearing between the swells. They look like the heads of frogmen, surfacing for a moment to spy on the land.
I don’t see.
Look! There’s three of ’em.
Stanley scrambles to his knees, kneels behind Claudio, rests an outstretched arm on his shoulder, sighting down the length of it. Look, he says. Right there.
They sit like that for a moment. Stanley’s arm rises and falls with Claudio’s breath. One of the spheres vanishes, followed by the second, and the third.
There they go. See?
Claudio is quiet for a moment. There is nothing there, he says.
Stanley slumps backwards, flat on the sand. Closes his eyes. Goddamn, he says. I need some sleep.
The sun is warm on his face, his eyelids. He feels Claudio’s hand on his bare stomach. How did you get money in New York? Claudio asks.
He can feel the crash of the surf through the sand beneath him, rocking him like the engine of the bus. Lots of ways, he says.
What ways?
Ways you need a gang to make work. Ways that ain’t gonna help us here.
No ways that can work with two people? You are certain of this?
Stanley takes a deep breath, lets it out. The seashell hiss of sleep fills his ears. Maybe we can roll lushes, he mutters.
What does this mean?
Lushes. Drunks. You find ’em, and you take their wallets. Simple.
Do you hurt them?
Not unless they make a fuss. Even then they usually fall down on their own. Most times they don’t even know what’s going on.
I don’t think this is a good idea.
Fine. Let me know when you got a better one.
I have ideas, Claudio says.
Stanley thinks he’s only been asleep for a second, but when he jerks awake with the sensation of falling his throat is sore, his lips speckled with sand, and everything is glowing orange. The sun is enormous in front of him, its cool disk split across the bottom by the horizon, and Claudio is gone.
He staggers to his feet, heart thrashing. The tide is going out. Big waves are still breaking a few yards away, and Stanley sees a dark shape—a log, or the trunk of a washed-out palmtree—just beyond the spot where they crest. As he watches, a pair of bright black eyes appears; then the shape jerks, arcs into a bow, and rockets into the depths. A little farther out are two more, rolling and swimming in the black water. Seals. Sea lions. Stanley’s frogmen come to shore. He laughs at himself, shaken.