A wave came crashing toward her. She ran away from it as best she could. She escaped the worst, but she got splashed by the white water. She laughed. She jumped down on the sand, rolled over, and sat up facing the ocean. Her clothes were all wet and salty and sandy. Wherever she looked, the ocean went on and on and on and on forever. She wondered where she had left her shoes and socks.
She got up and walked down the beach toward the pier. Her pants felt coarse as they rubbed against her legs. She could taste the ocean water in her mouth.
She had to crawl up a steep sand dune and step over some rocks in order to get onto the pier. She could have gotten to it more easily from the street, but she didn’t want to leave the beach. She had finally found a place where she felt she belonged, and she didn’t want to leave it.
She climbed up onto the pier, slipped under the wood railing, and walked out toward the end. She took a deep breath of ocean air. She wished she hadn’t lost her sneakers. She had to walk carefully on the pier. She didn’t want to get a splinter in her foot. She also had to beware of the rotting remains of dead fish. She didn’t want to step on a fish head, barefoot.
She
watched the fisherman as he tried to reel in a fish. She thought it must have been a big one, the way his line was all bent over. She stood right next to him to get a better view.
He glanced quickly at her. “Howdy,” he said. His voice was high and raspy. A line of sweat dripped down his dirty forehead, under a soggy wool cap. He smelled like stale alcohol. There was half a bottle of whiskey and lots of beer cans, some full, some empty, lying next to him. She thought he was probably drunk.
The fisherman struggled with the rod, using both hands. His muscles bulged. But then suddenly the line reeled in very easily, as if the fish just gave up.
“You caught a boot!” exclaimed Angeline. A boot covered with seaweed hung at the end of his line.
The fisherman laughed. His laugh was high and raspy, too. He pulled in the boot and set it next to his foot. “Looks like my size,” he said. He took a drink from the whiskey bottle. “Maybe I can catch the other one. Do you have a sock I can use for bait?”
“I lost my socks,” said Angeline, even though she knew he was joking. “And my sneakers too. Maybe you can catch those.” She laughed.
The fisherman looked at Angeline’s bare feet. “Too small,” he said. “I would have to throw them back.” He took a long drink of beer and burped.
“What’s your name?” Angeline asked him.
He grinned, looking very glad that she’d asked him that. “Oh, I got a good name,” he said proudly. He said it like his name was the best thing he had, maybe the only good thing. “Cool Breezer,” he told her.
“Cool Breezer,” Angeline repeated. “That is a good name.”
He told her how he got it. When he was in high school, he owned a car that had no back to it. There was no rear window, no backseat, not even a trunk. “A lot of cool breezes used to blow through that car,” he said. Both he and his car were each called “Cool Breezer.” If someone said “Where’s Cool Breezer?” you didn’t know if they were talking about him or his car. Sometimes even he’d say it himself—“Where’s Cool Breezer?”—and you still didn’t know if he was talking about his car or himself.
He tilted his head back and poured the rest of a beer can down his throat, and also some down his shirt. He burped again. “What’s your name?” he asked.
Angeline looked down at her bare feet. “Cool Feet!” she announced.
Cool Breezer laughed. He tipped his dirty wool cap very gentlemanly-like and said, “Miss Feet.” He thought she had the prettiest feet he’d ever seen.
Angeline pretended to tip her imaginary cap, too, and said, “Mr. Breezer.” They both laughed. “My father drives a garbage truck,” she added.
“No kiddin’,” laughed Cool Breezer. However, suddenly he felt very sad and empty inside. He felt envious of Mr. Feet, Cool Feet’s father, who drove a garbage truck. She had spoken of him like he was a hero. He suddenly wished he had a daughter, too, like her, with pretty feet, who would be just as proud of him. All his life, he had wanted to be a hero. “What happened?” he wondered. “Where’s Cool Breezer?”
“Why do you fish off the side of the pier?” Angeline asked him. “Why don’t you fish off the end?”
“Well,” he said, glad that she asked him a question that he could answer, “if I fished off the end of the pier, the current would take the line under the pier. That’s bad. Here at the side of the pier, the current takes the line away from the pier.”
“Oh,” said Angeline. “Well, I’m going down to the end of the pier.” She took a couple of steps, turned, and said, “So long, Cool Breezer.”
Cool Breezer tipped his cap. “Cool Feet.”
She walked to the end of the pier, careful not to step on any fish heads or hooks, and she tried not to get any splinters in her feet.
She sat down at the end of the pier and dangled her legs over the edge. It was about a fifteen- or twenty-foot drop to the ocean. And everywhere she looked, it went on forever.
There were millions of different kinds of fish, thousands of which nobody had even heard of. There were “Gardens of Eels” that covered acres of the ocean floor. There were caves and mountains and valleys, most of which were still a secret.
It was a great, unexplored mystery. Octopuses, sharks, bat rays, sea horses, bumphead hogfish, long-snouted hawkfish, fat innkeepers—the ocean covered more than two-thirds of the Earth’s surface. Great pods of whales could swim around unnoticed, dolphins, angelfish, rainbow fish, clown fish, boots and sneakers.
Her hands gripped the pier as she ducked her head under the wooden railing. Moonfish, goose-fish, flashlight fish, barracudas, she took several long deep breaths. Stonefish, lobsters, paddlefish, glass catfish, her muscles tightened. Tigerfish, scissors-tail fish, the water rocked beneath her.