Several days before the water walkers arrived, people started asking Ferris questions. What time would they appear? How many would there be? Would the crowds be huge? How early should people get to the beach to get a good view? What, exactly, would the walkers do? Where, exactly, would they walk? Would they sign autographs? Would they lead a prayer? Would they offer life advice? Would they sing, dance, proclaim? Was it all of the walkers in the world that were coming?
Mostly, Ferris had to stop himself from sighing, though he let himself shrug and say he didn’t know, exactly, the answers to many of those questions, as the water walkers had never come to Surfside before and he was just a lifeguard. Even when he did know something—such as: this was not every walker in the world, no, just those who had come together as a conglomerate to monetize the fact that they had died and come, or been brought, back to life—he feigned ignorance. Sometimes individual walkers did appear on the beach, not to make a spectacle but in an attempt to get away from their daily life just like everyone else setting up on shore, but caused a minor stir anyway when their feet went across, rather than through, the surface of the ocean’s waves. Ferris had only ever caught the sight from afar, and he always made himself look away. He understood the spotlight and not wanting to be in it. After all, he knew things. He’d experienced things. He had secrets, just like everyone else.
*
On Monday, Martin watched workers from city hall deposit pylons near the pier and then tether cord between them, creating a cordoned-off pathway from the pier offices all the way to the water. Disgruntled beachcombers and joggers either splashed into the low surf or stared at the obstacle before ducking beneath the cord and walking through anyway, and Martin didn’t think it was exactly his job to whistle at them for the infraction. What would he do or say, anyway? Tell them not to walk through there again? Suggest that something precious and endangered had burrowed its way into the sand? Everyone knew the water walkers were coming—Surfside had appeared on their tour calendar months ago—and also knew that there was still a day before their Tuesday arrival.
The walkers’ designated spot was between Ferris and Martin’s lifeguard stations, Ferris to the north of the pier and Martin to the south. The major vacation season was at its end—two weeks after Labor Day—and the beach was, in many ways, boring. Yes, some swimmers still got too close to the giant concrete pillars holding up the pier despite the No Swimming signs affixed to traffic cones planted in the sand ten yards from either side of the boardwalk that jutted a football field’s length over the water, and every now and then someone’s flailing in the deep waves far out sent one of them jogging into the surf with their rescue bar, but most of the time their job was to stay limber and avoid sunstroke. Sometimes, they had to tell middle-aged men that they couldn’t have glass beer bottles on the sand, and then had to listen to mind-numbing tirades about freedom this, rights that, bullshit bullshit I pay taxes and I’m on vacation and why don’t you get a real job.
As usual, Ferris arrived with a disposable cup filled with black coffee for Martin. They drank and watched the partition’s construction without speaking. The water walkers kept their website active, and just like pop idols and famous athletes they had their following, people who would chase them up and down the East Coast to whichever beach the walkers were heading to next. Ferris told Martin he had looked at their previous destinations: prior to Surfside, they’d been at Cocoa Beach, and before that Assateague Island in Maryland, then Cape Hatteras in North Carolina and Seabrook.
“Where’s that?” Martin asked, sipping his coffee.
“New Hampshire.”
“So they’re not going north-south or south-north?”
“Doesn’t seem so.”
Martin took another sip. “Stupid.”
Ferris shrugged. “Whimsical?”
They were not in synch when it came to the water walkers. Martin couldn’t give two shits. Ferris, on the other hand, was fascinated by them, these people who had confronted death, tipped over into its precipice—at least, biologically—and returned, their experience marked by becoming able to saunter across the ocean like it was springy shag carpet or a rolling plain. Probably the fact that Ferris’s mother was dead and Martin’s was alive had something to do with it: Martin himself acknowledged—despite his continued caustic attitude about them—that his lack of any personal tragedy whatsoever (at twenty-three, he had both parents and also both sets of grandparents, as well as an army of aunts and uncles and cousins and even nieces and nephews) was a source of his disinterest.
“I like my answer,” Martin said.
“Be nice,” Ferris said, holding out his hand for Martin’s cup. Their fingers touched briefly. This was their way: quiet, brief blips, not driven, at least to Martin, by any kind of fear or shame—after all, they were both tan, muscled lifeguards, with whistles and aviator sunglasses and walkie-talkies that created a direct line of communication to beach security if need be—but by the fact that he liked the tiny brushes with Ferris, and Ferris seemed to respond to them in kind. He watched Ferris depart, taking the long route around the cordoned-off area through the parking lot of the beachfront hotel behind them, passing a trash can where he deposited their coffee cups, to reach his perch on the other side of the pier, where he was invisible to Martin but ever-present, a beacon Martin could neither see nor hear but whose radiating energy he felt in all of his limbs and points of pressure.
*
On the sand, everything was spectacle: shoulders, flat stomachs, the rise of glutes beneath bikini bottoms or water-slicked board shorts. Skin was skin, just another thing to watch like beach towels, umbrellas, the roll of waves. But when it was just Ferris and Martin in the latter’s one-bedroom apartment, everything was different, filled with a magnetism that public semi-nudity lacked. The slow unfurling exposure of pecs trained by pushups rather than massive weight plates attached to a bench, the sight of hip bones and abs tapering toward the groin, the dimple of muscle just above the curve of buttocks: in this enclosed, quiet space that smelled of the fryer oil used in the bar below, such reveals were a thrill to Ferris, every time. But more than that, it was a kind of tethering, a private cinching of the two of them. Ferris felt his blood pulse in his temples and behind his belly button as he and Martin stood face-to-face, Ferris tearing, with a slow exactitude, the Velcro buckle of Martin’s shorts, slipping them down to expose a carefully-manicured thatch of pubic hair. Martin, mouth pressed against Ferris’s throat, did the same, sliding his hands along Ferris’s waist, his fingers tickling at his skin like Ferris was an instrument to be played.
Martin’s rent was cheap in spite of and because of the location, only a block from the water but situated above a noisy drinking establishment that catered to tourists looking to go wild during their vacations. Music rattled the windows until midnight. They still ended up in his bed more often than not simply because they both liked having the windows open to hear the slosh of the ocean so close by and to feel the salty air, even if it was bad for the paint on the walls, the hinges in the doors, the brass on every knob. Martin had affixed bamboo slatted blinds over the windows that he cinched shut when they took off their clothes and fell into bed together, but he always rolled them up afterward, moonlight and the ambient neon glow of the signs in the windows below staining their bodies alien colors that Ferris liked.
They were careful and slow with one another, falling onto Martin’s bed, a feather top mattress that gathered them like a nest. Martin pressed his left hand on Ferris’s stomach, below his belly button. His skin was sticky with sweat, a latent reminder of the sun and sand that surrounded them most hours of the day. Ferris ran his hands down Martin’s spine, the bumps of his vertebrae little mountains under his fingertips. Martin guided Ferris inside him, and Ferris shuddered with pleasure. Something else always gathered in Ferris besides sexual arousal, a kind of lashing, leashing feeling, a tether vibrating at a private frequency that only they could hear and enjoy. It made Ferris swell to a point of near-breaking.
*
Artists arrived at the beach first, before daybreak, before Martin arrived, setting up easels and fishing boxes full of paints and charcoal. They were mostly women in capris and sheer blouses, though a few wore monochromatic one-pieces and shoulder wraps. Martin, who was first-on that morning, watched them from his perch, able to make out the designs they sketched on already-stretched canvases: seascapes, all foam and rolling waves and seagulls, a few with the pier in the corner, none of them yet featuring any water walkers; they were all capturing only what they saw before them, the endless stretch of blue-green ocean that slithered out to the horizon, uninterrupted. Nary a fishing boat or swimmer obscured the view.
Secretly, Martin did feel a kind of excitement about the walkers; they were, if nothing else, a break from routine. Every day—except Sundays—he arrived at the beach at daybreak, clocked in at the Ocean Rescue office, and climbed up his assigned chair, usually the same one for months at a time. It was all the same, a scroll of days as wide and long and deep as the ocean. So he was glad for the distraction of the walkers, even if he didn’t really get what the big deal was.
He watched the crowd begin to grow. The water walkers did not announce when they would appear, which made Ferris find them mysterious and aloof and Martin think they were just inconsiderate assholes. The result, in either case, was that spectators and followers started to arrive shortly after the artists, armed like every other beachgoing family: with blankets and coolers, brimmed hats, sunscreen. Some brought their own chairs, while others held out vouchers to Hans, an Ocean Rescue employee whose primary job duty was to set up rental arrangements of two chairs and a beach umbrella along the sand in a single uninterrupted line but who today had been ordered to recalibrate and afford anyone who wished a set of chairs that could be deposited around the roped-off site.
“Stupid,” Martin said to himself. He felt bad for the artists, whose view was quickly obscured.
Ferris did not stop by Martin’s post before heading to his station this morning, for which Martin knew he couldn’t, shouldn’t, cast any blame but still read as something of a rebuke despite the fact that the crowd between their perches was growing and would be a pain to skirt around. Martin, who would have a better view whenever the walkers arrived, had not offered to change spots for the day, and he imagined that maybe this also frustrated Ferris, even though this was not strictly permitted and Ferris always abided by the rules. But Martin had to admit (and he guessed that Ferris probably knew this, too) that despite his antagonism, a part of him—not a small one, either—wanted to watch, that deep down, even if he claimed indifference, the spectacle called to him. Who wouldn’t, after all, want to see what those who had died and lived to tell the tale would, could, do?
*
Ferris watched the crowd swell as the sun rose, breaking through the cloud coverage that had been coming through every day for the last week, leaving the sand and water looking gloomy and tea-gray until the afternoon breezes sent the cumulus buzzing away. He tried to ignore the clamor, focusing instead on the swimmers wading out into the surf. Twice he climbed down from his seat to gently inform beachgoers that they needed to leave a clear path from his stand to the water, just in case he had to do a rescue of some kind, then watched them trundle ten feet to his right and reestablish themselves.
The general tizzy of noise suddenly sharpened with collective focus. Ferris willed himself not to look, told himself he didn’t care, just like Martin, but then the pull of anticipation, the dragging magnet of other peoples’ excitement, was too much for him. He turned in his seat and squinted toward the action, but the crowd was too thick for him to see through clearly, so he told himself he was only serving to help keep the event under control by climbing down and sauntering closer.
The first walker nearly took his breath. She wore a sheer white outfit, a billowy blouse and loose linen trousers to match, and she looked almost exactly like his dead mother. Same narrow but muscled shoulders, same trim waist, same chestnut hair and narrow nose and prim-set lips like she had an insult in her head but was doing all she could not to share it. Her gait was even the same, a languorous strut as if she had somewhere to be at a certain time but was happy to be late because she knew no one would complain. As she drew closer to the crowd—the walkers were escorted down the cordoned-off path by a trio of local policemen in full gear, which looked silly on the beach—differences settled in and Ferris relaxed: the woman’s nose was crooked whereas his mother’s was straight; her ears were elfin and longer than his mother’s unobtrusive ones; she scowled as she walked, her forehead turning to a maze of crinkles where his mother’s had been smooth even when she frowned in frustration. The woman had painted her toes seafoam green, something his mother would never do. Her wrists were covered in gaudy brass bangles, and her fingernails were pointed and long, as though she thought she might need to rake someone across the throat. Also, she had been brought back; his mother had not been so lucky.
She was followed by five others. Their ages ranged from a young girl who couldn’t have been more than ten, with flaxen hair, a squinched nose, and big blue eyes that scanned the crowd with awe, to an old man who practically slid through the sand, hunched over a cane, forearms trembling. Then there was another man, probably close to Martin and Ferris’s age, wearing aviator sunglasses and an obnoxious smirk, with wild tangles of black hair being tugged by the wind, and two other women, one a teenager who looked annoyed to be there and one who looked like she might be the teen’s mother, their noses the same pinched bulbs, their hair the same onyx.
The walkers marched through their cordoned-off zone, bare feet digging out tiny trenches in the sand, long and deep in the weak-packed dry section furthest from the water, smaller divots when they passed over the thicker, wetter sand moistened by breaking waves. As they closed in on the water, Ferris could feel the tightness in the crowd, which had gone utterly silent aside from a handful of restless children. Someone, Ferris couldn’t tell who, started crying.
His mother’s doppelganger reached the water first. She did not break her stride. There was no fanfare, no grandiose gesture at the miracle of it all. She simply kept walking, her gait keeping its same rhythm as her feet set onto the shifting, slurping water as it rolled in and out. When her feet did not sink, the crowd jolted, a collective gasp like when an athlete makes an outstanding play on the field. Ferris felt his breath catch, a tingle gathering in his ears. The walkers were unfazed, one by one stepping onto the waves. Ferris understood, conceptually, that something had changed in them at a molecular level to allow their bodies to contact the surface of the water without breaking through the surface barrier, but what dizzied him was the fact that the gyrations and swirl, the tide and tug of the ocean, didn’t bother them, not even the tottering old man.
But then he thought: of course not. Because when you faced down death and came back, what could possibly throw you ever again?
*
Martin felt relief once the crowd and the walkers were gone.
He also thought: that’s it? That’s fucking it?
The walkers had lived up to their moniker. They’d walked maybe one hundred yards out, past the tongue of Surfside Pier, avoiding the near-invisible fishing lines of the anglers perched above, trudged over the waves that rose in six-foot swells as if they were nothing but small hills or sand dunes. He did have to admit that their balance was something, as if they’d spent years in gymnastics or ballet. But then all they did was turn around and walk back, not even pausing at the shoreline, offering no waves or words of wisdom to the crowd, no speeches or assurances.
“You’d have hated that, too,” Ferris said.
“Sure as shit,” Martin said, “but at least I’d have understood the appeal. Kind of.”
They were back in his apartment, the window thrust open, their bodies cooling. Unlike most days, they had not had sex; instead, when they fell onto Martin’s bed, all they did was lay there, as if the walkers had put some kind of spell on them that dampened their desire for one another. But Martin was just as content, all of a sudden, to simply be with Ferris, to feel the skin of their shoulders brushing one another, to tinkle his hip with the back of Ferris’s hand. Sometimes a glance was more powerful than a penetration, a brushing better than a thrust. Every dance had its own moves.
“There are different kinds of appeal,” Ferris said.
“I know.” Martin turned onto his side and looked at Ferris, whose eyes were on the ceiling. “Did you get something out of it?”
Ferris sighed. Martin wasn’t sure if he’d made the right or wrong move. Sometimes it was hard to tell. After a year of this, it still sometimes felt like their dance was one they were both learning, the steps unfamiliar and unsure even though they went through them over and over. Though they slept together, they didn’t talk about what that meant; neither one had made any overtures, no promises, offered no definitions or boundaries or terms of engagement. For all Martin knew, Ferris was fucking any number of vacationers looking for one-night stands, travelers unshackled by their daily lives. Or maybe he even had another regular hookup stashed away somewhere.
Martin could tell Ferris had something to say. He laid a hand on Ferris’s sternum, a tight trough between the lean slabs of his muscled chest.
“Well?”
To Martin’s surprise, Ferris said, “Have I ever told you about my sister?”
*
Ferris, staring at the ceiling so he didn’t have to watch how Martin absorbed his story, began with his mother’s death from childbirth, which Ferris knew Martin already knew but felt like he had to tell again anyway. Thirteen years after giving birth to Ferris, she found herself unexpectedly pregnant again, into her early forties and thus a “geriatric” pregnancy, higher risk for genetic disorders, stillbirth, gestational diabetes and, the thing that ultimately took her life, preeclampsia. Despite her doctor’s vigilance, she started showing the symptoms midway through her pregnancy: terrible headaches, blurred vision (she described her sight as “like trying to see out of a windshield pelted with rain”), swollen hands and feet. Despite her doctor’s recommendation that she consider terminating the pregnancy for her own health and wellness, his mother forged on, largely staying in bed all day long, until she had to be taken to the hospital with horrific abdominal pain and spiking blood pressure and shortness of breath. The ER doctor made the call that she needed to deliver, even though she was only at twenty-nine weeks. Something went wrong, and because of blood loss, among other things, she didn’t make it out of the operating theatre where she gave birth.
The piece that Ferris had never shared, not until now, was that his baby sister both died and didn’t.
“Wait,” Martin said. “What do you mean?”
Ferris categorized people when he met them based on how they responded to learning that his mother was dead: there were, first, the people who immediately asked what had happened. Of these, the ones who were bold and inquisitive bothered him the least; he couldn’t stand the ones whose voices went coy, filled with manufactured shyness, as if their curiosity was something they couldn’t control but knew they should at least pretend to hold in check. Then there were those who nodded but didn’t ask for more information and yet clearly wanted to. They annoyed him just as much as the falsely modest: if you wanted to know, he always thought, you should simply ask. Just get it over with, like tearing away a bandage.
And then there were the rarer types, Martin among them, who didn’t ask and didn’t seem interested in knowing the details. The signs separating them from the quietly curious were hard to catch; the former usually offered a head nod and let out some kind of noise, then broke eye contact or were quick to change the topic of conversation to something wildly different, often blasé: the weather, politics, the price of gasoline. The latter looked right at you and let you choose where the conversation went: if you wanted, you were welcome to share the specifics of your tragedy, but the listener wasn’t going to make you, nor going to go out of their way to draw the story from your emotional cellars. Martin had, when Ferris told him that his mother had died when he was fourteen, said, “Bummer,” and blinked twice.
Sometimes, Ferris liked to lie about the details of his mother’s death just to see what he could get away with. He chose radical but believable scenarios: that she’d been killed on a blind date; that she broke her neck skiing in Europe; that she drowned in a boating accident. That she’d been poisoned, sometimes on purpose, sometimes through culinary failure, some disaster with sushi or rhubarb or blowfish. Other times he cited more plebeian fare: breast cancer, a car accident, that she choked on a piece of steak at a fancy restaurant where everyone was too snooty to know what to do. Or she was an alcoholic who drank herself to death (though he’d only tried that last one once, because afterward he felt gross for creating a version of his mother who was terrible, which she did not deserve).
“She flatlined,” Ferris said to Martin of his sister. “Doctors thought she was gone. And then she wasn’t. They managed to get her back.” A sour taste filled his throat. Get her back, as if she’d been sold off and they reversed the purchase.
“So she’s—”
“Yes,” Ferris said. “She can walk. On the water.”
*
Martin pretended to sleep as Ferris gathered his clothes, slipped on his shoes, and was careful with the door. Once he was gone, Martin looked out the window, watching Ferris disappear into the gloomy pre-dawn. Martin checked his phone: not quite five. He had over two hours before he had to be at the beach but he tore the sheets away and got out of bed anyway, feeling a momentary dizziness as he stood, the blood shifting around in his body. He took several breaths and resisted the urge to turn back to the window to find out if Ferris was still visible. A part of him remained in the apartment, a flavor hovering in the air as if the story of his sister had atomized into a cloud that Martin might be able to touch. Ferris had spoken slowly, in a near-whisper. Martin had not asked any questions, not in interruption, not for clarification at the end. The story concluded with Ferris leaving home, back in the Midwest, his sister eight years old, Ferris a recent college graduate, ready to be somewhere else. He didn’t know whether or when, or if, she stepped onto bodies of water. If she even could. If the way she’d come into the world even counted.
Martin had not offered any secrets of his own in return. Not that he thought of his background as containing such things. He was typical enough: after growing up in Mullins, a small inland South Carolina town whose most exciting attraction was the duel between the Center Christ Church and Gapway Baptist, the former in the eastern plains and the latter to the south of town, each one fighting with increasing furor and fire and brimstone to save the souls of the residents, he’d moved east, to the ocean, escaping into a life of waterfront work, first as a server at a cantina in Ocean Isle while he paid for CPR certification, then as a lifeguard here in Surfside. His parents were still married, his three younger sisters were alive—never dead, never water-walking—and had all gone to Coastal Carolina and now had jobs as a marketing director, in a nursing home, and doing something with taxes, respectively. They made far more money than he did; they had husbands, all three, and a quartet of kids between them. No tragedies, no burdens that he knew of. Surely they were there, but they were invisible, as so many were.
He wished he’d had something to give Ferris, something that would reset the balance. Martin had immediately felt how things swayed off-kilter as soon as Ferris had told his story, how Ferris had hoped to be freed of something by giving Martin this interior look, but then when Martin had nothing to say or do in return, they were both tossed out of rhythm.
Martin left for work early. On his way to the beach, he realized he should have said something about the last artist. After the crowd had vanished once the walkers were gone and clearly not making an encore of any kind, one of the painters stayed behind. She righted her easel and unfolded a second one from a duffel bag at her feet. On the first, she set the painting she’d finished before the gawkers had swarmed the space like an army of ants. On the second she placed a fresh canvas. Without looking once at the first, she started sketching the ocean again, in pencil initially and then with thick blue and white and seafoam paints, using heavy brushstrokes. The woman worked quickly, but the painting she produced, from where Martin sat, looked identical to the first. The walkers, Martin thought, had not changed the landscape at all.
Martin wasn’t sure if Ferris would like that story. But it would have been something.
At the beach, the barriers were already gone, the pylons vanished as if having never been erected, the ropes cordoning the walkers’ path poofed out of existence. Martin couldn’t even remember exactly where they’d trekked, couldn’t have followed their footsteps if he wanted to. The sky was still half-gloom, the beach barren except for Hans and a single sand sculptor finishing a freakishly realistic replica of a dead whale, the cage of rib bones like a huge orchestral instrument rising from the sand. Martin glanced at Ferris’s empty chair only briefly, then headed toward his own to wait for the rise of the sun, the gathering of vacationers, the thrum of the world that would continue just as it always had.
Joe Baumann is the author of five collections of short fiction, most recently Tell Me, from Curbstone/Northwestern University Press, and the novels I Know You’re Out There Somewhere and Lake, Drive. His fiction and essays have appeared in Third Coast, Passages North, Phantom Drift, and many others. He possesses a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction. He can be reached at joebaumann.wordpress.com.
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Photo by: Steve Doig