Monsters
Because it was a Friday night, the very last one of the summer, the boardwalk was shoulder to shoulder, tight enough that the tourists weren’t even making room for Matey. Not that they didn’t notice him, they did, only now it was a few steps later, when they looked down at the back of their hand to see what they’d just rubbed against.
And Matey, of course, the boardwalk was dog heaven to him. He was grinning, his tongue lolling, his eyebrows raised, tail playful like an invitation. He was what I imagined Sid Wilkerson to be like on the inside: totally content with his life, with everything he’d done, and now just enjoying retirement.
Still, though, Elaine kept the leash balled around her fist, just in case a cat darted through the forest of legs. As far as we knew, a hand held palm-out was enough to get Matey to stay until released, no matter what, but part of that was catching his eye, too, which we knew were the makings of some comedy routine we didn’t want any part of, at least not in public.
Another part of being twelve is the certainty that one public embarrassment is enough to ruin the rest of your life.
Since Elaine had Matey — it was her turn — I carried the ten her dad had slipped us so he could feel like a hero.
It wasn’t enough to cut through the three-deep line to the sausage stand, though.
“Well?” Elaine said, the leash between her and Matey tight.
We couldn’t stand in line with him for forty minutes, we knew.
“Other one,” I shrugged, pointing down the beach with my chin to the place that sold sausage and drumsticks and got neither of them right. We’d only been down there once, when my grandparents were insisting on being grandparents. It involved umbrellas and complicated folding chairs and Elaine and me eating ice cream we really probably liked but had to act like we didn’t. Because they were grandparents, too, they were blind to all the natural divisions of the beach that everybody else tuned into without even having to think about. What they didn’t understand was that there was a senior citizen’s part, way down by the parking lot — old people tended to wake up first — and then, for the next four miles, it was alternating sections of girls in bikinis and the guys they attracted and then whole families with complicated coolers and buckets for sand castles and trash bags for lunch. The only bump in all this was around the sausage and drumstick place; it ran right by the boardwalk, which meant whoever was on that beach could duck under to smoke or do whatever. So, it was the bad area, more or less, the part that when you walked through it you became aware of how you were holding your face.
And of course my new granddad, the consultant, plopped his chair right down in the middle of it, and kept telling Elaine and me to go introduce ourselves to these kids, or those kids.
That was the sausage and drumstick place we were at now.
It wasn’t so much Matey that gave us the nerve we needed to go there either, but that neither of us wanted to back out. I mean, it was our last Friday night of the summer too. If we were going to kiss or anything, it was now or never, and the boardwalk was right there, right?
Not that either of us knew how to start such a thing.
The line at this stand, of course, was nothing. We took our sausage on a stick and gave the four dollars it cost, and I held our large coke because Elaine didn’t have enough hands. By then we were sharing a straw, of course.
We sat on a utility pole bench and pulled the heat lamp skin off with our teeth and let the grease run down into our hands, and knew this adventure or romance or mystery we’d been pretending to be involved in was almost over, now. Maybe it would be better by the time school got started, though. Already I was thinking how I was going to describe Elaine to my friends, or, worse, to my dad when he was trying to get even with my mom by talking ‘boy-stuff’ with me. Teaching me about girls, like a secret. Like he knew.
As for the mystery we were supposed to be on, the closest thing the resort town had was that it had misplaced four people over the course of the summer. None of them had washed up, though, so it wasn’t a very pressing thing. Probably they’d just ducked their weekly hotel rates or something, slipped up the Interstate. That was what my new granddad said, at least, and he’d lived here longer than anybody else we knew except maybe Sid Wilkerson. But if Sid Wilkerson were here, he’d have probably already solved the thing. With our help, of course. And Matey’s.
I still smile, thinking of it like that.
And Elaine, God. If I’d have ever got married, I’m pretty sure it would have been to the first girl who reminded me of Elaine, the first girl who looked like what Elaine might have grown up into.
I can still see her, too, sitting at the top of the stairs like she was waiting for me to save her, all the blood still, then, in her body.
I was twelve years old, though.
But that’s no excuse.
This is what happened: we’d found a trashcan to leave our half-eaten sausage sticks in. It was close enough to the boardwalk that people would try to drop drinks down into it, so to avoid getting splashed, we just lobbed our sticks over. Matey was trained-enough that he didn’t snatch them from the air, of course. He was one of those dogs that you could put a treat on his nose and he wouldn’t eat until you told him he could.