GUARANTEED said the red letters on the bottle. The word flamed in his mind. GUARANTEED!
“Walter,” his mother would say, shocked. “What happened to you? Is that you, son? Why, you’re like milk, son, you’re like snow!”
It was hot. Walter eased himself down against the boardwalk and took off his shoes. Behind him, a hot dog stand sent up shimmers of fried air, the smell of onions and hot rolls and frankfurters. A man with a grained, ropy face looked out at Walter, and Walter nodded shyly, looking away. A moment later a wicket gate slammed and Walter heard the blunt footsteps approaching. The man stood looking down at Walter, a silver spatula in one hand, a cook’s cap on his head, greasy and gray.
“You better get along,” he said.
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“I said the niggers’ beach is down there.” The man tilted his head in that direction without looking that way, looking only at Walter. “I don’t want you standing around in front of my place.”
Walter blinked up at the man, surprised. “But this is California,” he said.
“You tryin’ to get tough with me?” asked the man.
“No, sir, I just said this ain’t the South, sir.”
“Anywhere where I am is South,” said the man and walked back into his hot dog stand to slap some burgers on the griddle and stamp them flat with his spatula, glaring out at Walter.
Walter turned his long easy body around and walked north. The wonder and curiosity of this beach-place returned to him in a tide of water and sifting sand. At the very end of the boardwalk he stopped and squinted down.
A white boy lay lazily curled into a quiet posture on the white sands.
A puzzled light shone in Walter’s large eyes. All whites were strange, but this one was all the strangeness of them all rolled into one. Walter lapped one brown foot over the other, watching. The white boy seemed to be waiting for something down there on the sand.
The white boy kept scowling at his own arms, stroking them, peering over his shoulder, staring down the incline of his back, peering at his belly and his firm clean legs.
Walter let himself down off the boardwalk, uneasily. Very carefully he pedaled the sand and stood nervously, hopefully over the white boy, licking his lips, throwing a shadow down.
The white boy sprawled like a stringless puppet, relaxed. The long shadow crossed his hands, and he glanced up at Walter, leisurely, then looked away, then back again.
Walter walked closer, smiled, self-consciously, and stared around as if it was someone else the white boy was looking at.
The boy grinned.
“Hi.”
Walter said, very quietly, “Hello there.”
“Swell day.”
“It most certainly is,” said Walter, smiling.
He did not move. He stood with his long delicate fingers at his sides, and he let the wind run down the dark economical rows of hair on his head, and finally the white boy said, “Flop down!”
“Thanks,” said Walter, immediately obeying.
The boy moved his eyes in all directions. “Not many guys down today.”
“End of the season,” said Walter, carefully.
“Yeah. School started a week ago.”
A pause. Walter said, “You graduate?”
“Last June. Been working all summer; didn’t have time to get down to the beach.”
“Making up for lost time?”