[Fiction] Marconi Beach, Cape Cod: Tourists at 6:00 a.m.

By Will Evans

The sign on the wooden railing said, “Be shark smart. Know your risk when entering the water. Recent sightings here. Do not swim with seals.” The two men stood beside it, peering over the empty beach forty feet below the bluff. The sky was a blushing indigo at the far reach of the water, and the waves were small but perfect, lines like endless corduroy stretching over the sea. One man turned to the other. “Nothing,” he said, and shrugged, frowned, chewed his lip. “Well, we didn’t drive from Wisconsin to collect shells on the beach, y’know. We coulda done that in Sheboygan.”

“That’s what I wanted to hear.” They were tan, lean men in wetsuits who looked as if they were brothers, fifty or fifty-five or so, with close-cut graying hair, two or three years at most separating their ages.

The waves broke on a sandbar, translucent green and glassy, on the far side of a gully and thirty yards from shore. The two men stood with their longboards, leashes fixed to their ankles, squinting out at the knee-high waves peeling over the sand in front of them. The older man looked at the younger and back again at the waves. “No worries,” he said. “If someone gets too friendly, I’ll paddle in.”

The younger man smiled. “Go fuck yourself,” he said.

They tested the water with their white feet and waded in to their thighs, then paddled out together through the dark water over the gully and easily over the waves. Just beyond the sandbar, the clear green water grew dark again, and they pushed themselves up on their longboards and sat on them next to each other, so close their knees almost touched, while the swells of those perfect waves rolled empty and silent beneath them. They sat for a while like that, the two men scanning the surface beyond them out on the water. A fish sailed out of the water with another fish behind it, and the two men jumped and held their breath, then looked at each other and grinned.

The sun was a shimmering crest of red when the older man swung his board around, dropped down onto his chest, and stroked into the green swell peaking just to the left of him. He glided into it, waited, and then, neatly and effortlessly, he pushed himself up and stood, then angled across the smooth face high and close to the pocket, the lip of the small perfect wave feathering white beside him, curling around his shins. Fifty yards later, when he reached the water of the gully, he stepped to the tail of the board, snapped the nose around and onto the back of the wave, dropped down onto his chest, and breathlessly paddled back out again, looking toward his friend. The younger man had been watching, and now he was riding too, trimming high and fast in the pocket way off in the other direction, across the shallow sandbar and all the way to the gully.

The younger man let out a whoop as he glided over the back of the wave at the edge of the dark water, and soon they were trading waves, lost in the joy of surfing, while the shifting tide filled in and the sun crept over the indigo at the far reach of the water. The older had paddled out again and was sitting up on his board, bent forward, hands on his knees, sucking air to catch his breath, when he heard what he thought was a yelp, thin and high, like the yelp of a seal, a loud splash, and a silence, and he felt his heart stop like a crash car hitting a pylon. And in that moment of terror, one thought seized hold of his mind—that a shark was killing a seal, and he had to get out of the water. They had to get out of there, now. This wasn’t the beach in Sheboygan. This wasn’t Lake Michigan. He prayed to God, Please. He would— He would be different. He would do anything. Then he heard the thrashing water, and then that silence again.

When he dragged the younger man onto the sand, wavelets lapped around him, the water stained red, the wetsuit torn and shredded, one leg missing from the hip. A small boy and his father stood beside the longboard washed up by their feet, where it bumped against the tide, leash cut clean, the boy pointing out to sea and hopping up and down.

“I saw one, Daddy, I saw it!”

“Hush,” the father said.

Will Evans has previously published stories in YANKEE, NER/BLQ, NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND REVIEW, FLASH FICTION MAGAZINE, and others. His work has been reprinted in THE BEST OF YANKEE MAGAZINE, NEW FICTION FROM NEW ENGLAND, and STREET SONGS 1: NEW VOICES IN FICTION. He was awarded the YANKEE fiction prize in 1987. He recently retired as the Associate Director of Expository Writing at Johns Hopkins University, and has also taught at Harvard, Cornell, and UNH. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.