SCREAMING WITH THE CANNIBALS

Twenty-Eight

180 Twenty-Eight Sitting beside the Tug River where it slid under the green, tangled overhangs with Crum just up and over the bank and waiting there for me, sitting there on that damp riverbank I would pretend that the Tug River was the ocean and I was sitting on a beach. I had never seen a beach, never seen an ocean, had no idea what they really looked like. The books in the Crum High School library had a few pictures, but I knew that pictures of an ocean, like pictures of the Grand Canyon, couldn’t really show me what it was all about. And now I was a real lifeguard on a real beach with a real ocean just there, at my feet, where I could go down to it and roll in it, no willowy tree limbs in my way, no dead horses floating by, no pig fuckers over there in Kentucky waiting for me to swim across. No cannibals. Well, maybe I wasn’t a real lifeguard. I didn’t know much about what a lifeguard was supposed to do, or how to rescue people, or anything like that. I had the lifeguard chair and the whistle and white ring-float on a hook on the back of the chair and those goddamn people weren’t supposed to go out there and get their asses in trouble in the first place, Banger said. What little I did know I learned from watching the other lifeguards , especially Hugo. Hugo could swim better than anyone I had ever seen, better than any of the guys back in Crum who used to swim every day in the Tug River, better than anyone I ever saw at the beach. I could swim, but Hugo taught me how to really swim, what to do in the surf, how to protect myself, how to hold people and pull them toward the shore, hold them so they couldn’t thrash around and get at my head and arms. 181 Gradually, as the days went by, Hugo and I began to feel that we really were lifeguards. Just maybe knew what we were doing. Now and then I would wander down to Myrtle and hang around the lifeguards down there. I didn’t let them know I was a lifeguard at Cherry, that I worked for Banger. They didn’t like Banger much, thought he was an asshole, thought Cherry Hill Beach was so far out of the action at Myrtle it might as well have been in New Jersey. I stayed out of their way, but I hung around close enough to see what they did when someone had trouble in the water. What I found out was, hell, Hugo knew more than most of those guys. It was Hugo who invented the Jellyfish Rodeo. We were always looking for ways to impress the girls on the beach, make them think how manly we were, we lifeguards, we men who were ready to risk our lives to save those in danger. We worked on our tans, ran up and down the beach, twirled our whistles, stood up on the chairs and stared at the water, apparently on the verge of initiating a risky rescue. And I guess we always tried to be ‘cool’ but we really had no idea what ‘cool’ was. And then one day Hugo found the jellyfish. It was washed up on the beach, a gelatinous mass of some sickening thickness, a glob of sea snot on the sand. It was the ugliest thing I had ever seen. Hugo had been dozing on his lifeguard chair when he heard a small squeal from down near the low surf. He jumped down off the chair and by the time he got to the squealer—a tiny girl with huge breasts, her legs clamped tightly together as she stared at the jellyfish —there were other girls there, all of them dancing from one foot to the other, like people do sometimes when they have to take a piss. Hugo saw the jellyfish. He knew he would have to be cool, he told me, knew this was an opportunity, but didn’t really know what to do 182 about it. So he just let it play itself out. He looked up and saw me in my chair. He gave me the signal. By the time I got down there, Hugo...