A moment later Stanley’s on the curb outside the café, gulping cool air, uncertain of how he got here. Music comes from behind him in a muffled blur, clarifying briefly whenever the door opens. His fingers are curled around his bandaged leg; the gash on his calf has opened again. A brown shadow streaks the middle of the white bandage, wider and darker at the bottom.
Dudley looks deserted all the way to the boardwalk. In the glow of beachfront streetlamps Stanley can see pedestrians in the gap between storefronts, none of them walking a dog. Fog spreads over the ocean, and the full moon slides behind it, smeared and haloed, as if wrapped in a nylon stocking. As Stanley watches, the promenade clears. No one is visible in any direction. The atmosphere is heavy, stagnant, like air trapped in an unlit room. Everything seems unreal: a movie set, built just for Stanley and the ginger-bearded man.
His head swims as he rises from the pavement. He shuts his eyes and waits for the colors that swirl behind his lids to dim and slow. Then he opens them, and begins to limp as quickly as he can toward the beach.
21
The tips of breakers wink in the dark, copper-tinted by the light from shore, and the waves sound like the breath of hidden sleepers. Stanley’s skin is filmed with sweat by the time he’s reached the boardwalk, but his legs are firm beneath him and he’s making good time. The streetlamps shine through the fog—a string of dull rhinestones linking Santa Monica to the oilfield—and beneath them the ginger-bearded man and his dog are nowhere to be seen.
Patchy crowds are gathered at Windward to the south and the Avalon Ballroom to the north, but this stretch of boardwalk is nearly empty. Two dismounted bikers in leather jackets and tight bluejeans come up on Stanley’s right, lapping at icecream cones, and one of them gives Stanley a long look as they pass. Fuck you, Stanley says.
The biker shrugs, walks on, and now Stanley is alone. He wonders what time it is. Late, he guesses: after midnight. He wonders whether he shouldn’t go back to the café. Shoreline Dogs are bound to be in the neighborhood, cruising for trouble, and it’d be ugly to run across them in his current shape. Besides, the ginger-bearded man is probably asleep at home by now.
Stanley takes a long look south, sifting figures on the boardwalk one by one to the limits of his vision. Dim green lights on the crowns of distant oil-derricks poke over the roofs of shops. Stanley hears the drone of twin engines, then sees landing lights angle toward the airport: backward comets streaking the fog. He watches the plane till it’s gone. Then he steps onto the beach, hooding his eyes to expand their pupils. The moon is a blue smudge high over the water, lighting up the whole western sky.
When the sand feels firm and damp beneath his feet he sinks to his knees and sights up and down the shore, scanning the pattern of light at the sea’s edge: the white sand, the black water, the reflections splintered in the waves. This is a trick he has taught himself. As he kneels, he thinks of his long trip across the country, of a simple game he’d play to pass the time in boxcars. He’d look through the narrow gap of the sliding door and try to keep a count of what he saw: bridges, roads, barns, roosting hawks. At first, he played in competition with other bored hobos—it was something everybody did—but the game soon became frustrating, awkward. No one was ever any match for him. In fact, the other tramps were often unwilling to concede that things he spotted with little effort were possible to see at all. Stanley kept playing, but kept the game to himself, and over time he grew more ambitious, trying to count telephone poles, doves startled into flight, bathtub gondolas on passing trains—even, during one particularly slow stretch, all the crossties from Winslow to Flagstaff. The trick was to synchronize his vision to the rhythm of light as it flashed between objects. That pulse became a kind of code for Stanley. With it he could read just about anything.
Early last September, over a Sunday poker game in the bunkhouse of a cattle ranch in New Mexico, or maybe Colorado, it occurred to him that there might be a way to apply this same idea to the shuffle of a deck of cards. So far he’s been lax about pursuing this theory, preoccupied by other concerns.