Cape Cod

When Andy peeled out of the Burger King parking lot, we were going to be able to get out the bikes and get down to the ocean before sundown. If we didn’t mess around.

Talking through mouthfuls of chicken fingers. High on Dr. Pepper.

The other cars were bright wind. But: traffic.

We were still going to the ocean an hour later, five miles closer, twenty to go, the sun swelling and drifting down, behind us. Andy angled the light in the mirror away from his eyes.

“Fuck,” he said, and pressed hard against his temples with the heels of his hands, as if it was more than the first night of a long summer weekend that was nearly ruined. As if we’d lost something.

The evening itself was perfect, dry and warm and clear, and the cool breeze smelled of the ocean. The sun gleamed from the backs of cars ahead of us in the jam.

We would miss the first real night of summer. We smelled of our day’s work, earth and oil.

We would not be washed clean that night. We would dig out the lawn chairs and sit on the little dark balcony and get drunk on warm Bud and talk about tomorrow and not look up too much at the stars.

Imagine a girl in the arcade, hair tied back, watching a friend’s game of Ms. Pac Man, leaning against the machine because she is exhausted with sun — the smell of suntan lotion, vanilla ice cream and cut grass. She is wearing pink flip-flops and has freckles on the back of her neck and she is carrying a bottle of water.

See her in the golden last light of the first night of summer. A lightning bolt not flashing and disappearing but instead fading, like sunset.

Now feel the weight of our town pressing down on us in the stuck car: the bent mailbox, the painful curl of the perm on the checkout woman in the grocery store, our fat, angry fathers who we didn’t want to become who also, when they were young, did not want to be who they became. Our fathers, when they were young, drove out that same highway to an uncle’s beach condo to get drunk and look at girls.

Our fathers who got stuck in the same traffic. I was thirsty but did not want a beer and there was nothing else in the car.

The air from open windows was sweet with exhaust. But the sky was higher, wider, bluer.

Dark seeping up from the earth. We’d die before we got to the ocean.

We’d grow old, become our fathers, in Andy’s car with the ripped up seats and broken mirrors thinking always only: a few more miles. Just ahead, another Burger King.

Andy had to take a whiz. Came out with apple juices.

Andy threw one to me through the window from twenty feet and I caught it. From my blind side, a bubbling of laughter.

On the white hood of the car there where there had been no one, two girls. As young as we were.

One, a blonde in a blue bandanna and cutoffs, sat halfway up, clutching her smooth tanned knees, squinting past me to Andy, to the setting sun. The other, long pale brown hair and robin’s egg blue eyes, leaning against the side of the car, barefoot on the hot pavement, white T-shirt and bathing suit the color of her eyes.

She watched me see the color of her eyes. She did not smile, but her lips were just barely open so I could see her white teeth.

I looked away to open the apple juice and to pretend I wasn’t buzzing — the highway was still a parking lot. The sun was still setting.

When I looked back at her she was watching me look back at her. Andy got in and started up the car and I found myself saying: “You all break down? Or what?”

“Naw,” said blue eyes. “We live here.” Andy was more interested, at first, in the fact that I had spoken at all to a girl than in the girls themselves.

Then he saw them. He turned off the car — a little obvious, I thought.

But blue eyes was still watching me. “You wanna ride?” I said.

Her hand fluttered up to her ear, then down where it came to rest on the bare knee of the blonde girl sitting on the hood of the car behind her. The blonde girl leaned into her ear and whispered.

“Are you going to the ocean?” said blue eyes. “I hope so,” I said.

The blonde closed her eyes and turned away from the sunset and slid off the hood and stretched her body, as if she was just waking up. Blue eyes slipped her hand beneath her shirt and I felt my fingertips brush her warm dry stomach.

They were in the backseat. They carried nothing but themselves.

I smelled something burning. “There’s beer back there,” said Andy.

The girls looked at each other. Blue eyes watched me watch her in the rearview mirror.

I am thirty years old. I smell something burning.

I have never since seen eyes the blue of robins’ eggs. They must have been some kind of costume contact lenses.

Andy eased us into traffic. “We’re the same age,” he said.

The girls looked at each other. It was night.

The blonde was leaning forward and whispering into Andy’s ear. Her whispering was metallic, a song played backwards.

Andy pulled us over and the sand crackled beneath the tires. I was very thirsty.

A smooth path into dark woods. Behind us, traffic froze.

I smelled something burning. Blue eyes, one step ahead, opening her hand to me without turning.

A clearing of moonlight. The tips of my fingers against the warm skin pulled over the hard ridge of her hip.

The tips of my fingers underneath the elastic of her bathing suit. She takes off her shirt and I’m shivering and she’s pulling golden threads from the pit of my stomach out through my throat, my armpits, my belly.

I can’t close my eyes. She has long sharp teeth.

Now when I see a swimming pool in certain sorts of late afternoon summer light. After a thunderstorm.

I’m standing at the edge of the highway. Andy is standing next to me, watching me carefully, as if I could attack.

He’s soaking wet. “Where did you go?” he said.

“Just down there,” I said. “Oh,” he said.

The highway is empty except for Andy’s car on the shoulder. “I’m really drunk,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I can’t believe how drunk I am.”

We got into the car. There was someone in the backseat.

A deer. We’d left the windows open.

Without a word we got out of the car and I opened the door to the woods and Andy opened the other door and pushed. Black eyes.

She bounded away into the night. Blood on my fingers.

We drove to the ocean.

The ocean was the same as it always is.