SCREAMING WITH THE CANNIBALS

Twenty-Seven

170 Twenty-Seven Banger had swung his magic baseball bat and decreed that I was a lifeguard. He said I could start any time I wanted. He didn’t even take me down to the water to see if I could swim. He didn’t even ask me if I could swim. I spent the morning looking around the pavilion. Banger told me the pavilion was actually named the Sha-Boom, said he named it after the song by the Crew Cuts, but he told all the tourists that he named it after the sound the waves made when they piled up the beach and smashed into the side of his pavilion. Only the waves never did that. Not in anyone’s memory, anyway. And I found out later that Banger re-named the pavilion almost every year. Didn’t matter. No one ever called it anything but “the pavilion.” Banger was full of shit. The preacher had said there was some stuff in the back room I might be able to use, so I poked around in there for a while. I rummaged through some boxes of junk, old towels, mostly-empty bottles of suntan lotion, broken beach chairs, punctured inflatable floats and other beach stuff I had never seen before. On a nail by the door I found the whistle Banger said was there and I took it and slowly shuffled my way out onto the beach, not knowing exactly how to act, now that I was a lifeguard. At the moment, it didn’t matter much how I acted. The only people on the beach seemed to be more interested in walking than in swimming or sitting in the sun and none of them paid any attention to me. It was still early but even in the weak light I could feel the heat of the sun beginning to focus on the beach, beginning to sear the color out of everything it touched. 171 Banger told me there was a white wooden chair down there, not too far from the restrooms, a chair not much higher than a baby’s high chair. It was my chair, he said. The other guys had chairs up and down the beach, chairs they had staked out, chairs they had carved their names into. Most of them had their chairs on parts of the beach where their favorite girls stayed nearby in beach cottages, Banger said. One of the benefits of the job. But don’t carve my name in a chair he said—I probably wouldn’t last long enough to stake an actual claim to it. He told me to check out the restrooms and the beach rental shack, a tiny plank structure that stored the umbrellas and floats that the lifeguards rented to the tourists. I was halfway to the chair before I realized I didn’t have any swimming trunks; I was still wearing my jeans. Back at the storage room I found three pairs of men’s swimming trunks I thought I could wear. One of them had the ass ripped out; another had some sort of stain down the front, right over the crotch. The third pair looked okay. It had a sort of jock strap sewn right inside the trunks, a net-like sling that kept your balls from falling down and out the leg. The trunks were a little large but I took them anyway and changed my clothes there in the storage room. There were no windows and the light switch didn’t work, but if I opened the outside door I could see just fine. As it turned out, I would change my clothes in that storage room for as long as I worked for Banger. I sat stiffly in the lifeguard’s chair, staring at the water, the whistle lanyard around my neck, my hands gripping the chair arms, wondering what I would do if I saw something I was supposed to blow the whistle at. Or something I was supposed to rescue. In the middle of trying to figure that out, I dozed off. 172 I heard them giggling before I opened my eyes, the sun burning against my eyelids, my legs dangling over the front of the chair, my chin fallen down against my chest. I pretended to stay asleep, straining to hear more. Very slowly I eased up one eyelid, like you did when you...