Beach
by M.J. Lehr
J-7 skulled a cup of water. It was the last thing he did before turning the lights off and locking the doors to Solina’s. The empty lot was warmly coated by the full moon, and J-7 could make out Marco’s thin body postured up against the side of the brick building. When J-7 reached him, he wrapped his arms around him and held him there for so long that finally Marco started laughing and pushed him off.
As they walked down the side of the road, Marco unwrapped the Kit Kat from his backpack and cracked off one of the sticks for J-7. He ate it, and Marco cracked off another stick for him, then another. When J-7 looked down at Marco for more and Marco held up the empty wrapper, J-7 stopped walking and put his arms around Marco’s neck and pulled his head into his chest.
They turned onto the pine-shrouded gravel path to the employee housing units. When J-7 turned on the lights of his one-room cabin and saw that his dirty laundry had been collected in the hamper, his bed had been made, and the floor had been swept out, he rolled his eyes at Marco, who had already stripped and was now changing into his swim trunks. J-7 tackled him onto the bed and squeezed the sides of his bare abdomen until Marco was crying from laughter and begging him to stop.
Marco slapped at the mosquitoes on his arm as he followed J-7 through the woods to the beach. When J-7 planned the night, he’d seen in his mind an empty beach, privacy, their wet bodies roughhousing in the black water before passing the stolen bottle of Cabernet back and forth while they sat on the shore and looked out at the lighted bridge across the lake. But now he grew apprehensive as he climbed down the slope and saw the glowing fires dotting the beach with all the young, familiar voices gathered around them.
“It’s okay, J,” Marco said, wrapping his hand around J-7’s bicep. “It’s too dark for them to see us.”
“Did I say anything?” J-7 asked.
Marco rested his head against J-7, then buried his face in the armpit of his cotton shirt. J-7 felt Marco’s hot breath through the cotton. He glanced up at the fires and the people around them, and his muscles grew stiff.
“This way,” J-7 said, shrugging him off.
“But we can’t swim there.”
“Sure, we can.”
The fires turned into little distant glow-zones as they made their way down the dark beach. Marco turned his flashlight on, illuminating the rocky waterline before them. In the spread of moonlight, they could see the fat boulders scattered sporadically in the shallow water, the soft waves breaking around them and whooshing smoothly up onto the beach.
“I don’t think we should swim here,” Marco said. “It’s too close to the landing. Can we go back up the beach? Just a little?”
J-7 did not respond.
“Nobody will see that it’s you with me,” Marco added.
“I don’t see what the issue is in swimming here,” J-7 said.
He took off his shoes, then his socks and his shirt, and when he looked up, Marco was standing there with his arms folded and one leg bent inward in that feminine demeanor he could so readily slip into. J-7 walked over to him and gripped the waistline of his shirt.
“Arms up,” he commanded.
Marco kept his arms at his side.
“I said arms up.”
This warmed Marco’s blood. He slowly raised both arms in the air and let J-7 pull his shirt off, as a parent would with their child. Then the two of them waded slowly out into the tide. When they reached the knee-deep drop into the lake, the rocks on the lake’s floor grew larger and more thickly coated with algae. Their steps became tedious and painful.
“This is killing my feet, J,” Marco said.
“We just have to go out a little further.”
It was a quiet scene, and the people around the fires watched these two far-away shadows with a tinge of private wonder. That is until there was a shriek. A shriek followed by another shriek. The piercing sound of the high voice spread excitedly across the surface of the water, rolling up the shoreline and onto the beach.
J-7 jerked around and saw Marco doubled over with his hands on his knees, and as he approached, he could see in the hue of the moonlight that Marco’s foot was polluting the green lake water with inky clouds of blood. He slid his hand down Marco’s leg, over the ankle and out onto the instep where he ran into the piece of rebar that had impaled Marco’s foot.
“FUCK!” Marco screamed. “FUCK!”
J-7 lurched up and covered Marco’s mouth. He felt the tears roll over the back of his hand, and he tightened his grip.
First, it was the spinning red-and-green safety light moving across the lake’s shimmery, kaleidoscopic surface. Then it was the zipping sound of the boat itself cutting down the coastline. It could have been a small freighter leaving late or the Coast Guard doing a midnight round. Most likely it was somebody’s speedboat which had been docked in the harbor and was now, after closing time, being taken for a drunken night ride. It doesn’t matter what or who it was. It disappeared into the darkness as quickly as it came. The only evidence of it ever having existed was the series of waves it sent toward the shore in its wake.
J-7 braced Marco for the first, but the second was larger, and it pushed both of their bodies back toward the shoreline. Marco’s foot yanked against the rebar and the wound stretched. Bones in his feet shifted and crushed. J-7 froze. The noise that Marco let out was unmistakable. The first voice came from the beach.
“Hey! Hey! Are you okay?”
Then another.
“Do you need help?”
Marco heard splashing in the water behind him. When he mustered up the strength to turn around, through his teary eyes he saw that he was now alone.
“J!” He cried out. “J!”
A voice came back to him from the beach.
“Just hold on! We’re coming!”
Along the shoreline, the strangers were all stripping down to their underwear or rolling up their pant legs to begin their tedious wade through the water toward this desperate stranger. Before Marco felt any of their hands on his bare upper body, the blasting shocks of pain and the loss of blood worked with one another to weigh down his eyelids and lighten his head until slowly his vision blurred and a consistent ringing entered his ears. His body collapsed into the water.
Marco was in and out of consciousness as the island’s medical services team stormed the beach. They set up their floodlights along the shoreline and received his body from the strangers holding him there in the water. The rest of the people gathered and watched in the beaming light as the piece of rebar was dislodged from the stones of the lake bottom and Marco, moaning in pain, was carried to shore. The piece of rebar turned at a ninety-degree angle right as it came out the sole of his foot. It was going to have to be bent straight before they could pull it clean through.
From where J-7 stood, up the embankment at the start of the tree line, it all looked like a bunch of little moving black dots. His skin was still dripping lake water, and the mosquitoes were devouring him to oblivion.
Marco was the only one who had ever made his heart knock up against his rib cage in that way. He could not care less about the physicality of it anymore, about everything they had explored with each other, the tying and the crying and the begging and the hurting that had made them addicted to one another. He wanted Marco even if they never touched each other again.
But J-7 never visited. Marco called him every day from the hospital bed, and he never picked up.
Weeks later, following a feverish five-day heat wave, a heavy storm passed through and completely halted the flow of tourists to the island. J-7 locked the doors to Solina’s and headed toward home in the rain. Marco stood braced on his crutches beneath the dripping pines on the other side of the road. He had a garbage bag tied around his leg to protect his cast from the rain. He started crying as he watched J-7.
When he went to bed that night, he blamed everything on himself. He wished he were a woman, just so things might go a bit easier.
M.J. Lehr is a writer from the Midwest.