Labor Day

Undertow

Chapter 28: Labor Day

He arrived at the beach at six-fifteen in the morning for the last time.

He did not say the words. He did not think the words "for the last time" as he parked the truck on Ocean Avenue and turned off the engine and sat for a moment with his hands on the wheel, because the words were not the thing, the words were the description of the thing, and the thing itself was the morning, the September morning, the air that was sixty-four degrees and smelled of salt and the particular mineral coolness that the ocean produced when the water was warmer than the air and the surface gave up its heat in a mist that was not quite visible but was present, was there, was the ocean breathing, and James sat in the truck and breathed what the ocean breathed and the breathing was the same breathing he had done on ten thousand mornings and the sameness was the thing, the sameness was what the last time felt like, it felt like every other time, and the feeling of every other time was the feeling of the work, and the work was the thing he was about to stop doing.

The parking meters were dark. The boardwalk was empty except for the joggers and the couple from Bradley Beach, the old couple, the couple whose names he still did not know, the couple who walked from the fishing pier to the convention hall and back with the steady pace that was the marriage's pace, the pace that did not vary for holiday or weather or the condition of the knees, and James watched them through the windshield and he thought: I have watched them for twenty years and I do not know their names and they do not know mine and the not-knowing is the distance and the watching is the closeness and the distance and the closeness have coexisted for twenty years on this boardwalk and will continue to coexist after I am no longer here to watch, because the walking is not for me, the walking is for the marriage, and the marriage does not require my witnessing, and the witnessing has been mine, a thing I took without asking, a thing the mornings gave me for free.

He unlocked the equipment locker. The padlock opened with the brass key, the key worn smooth, the key he had carried for twenty years and that he would leave today in the lockbox inside, the key returning to the locker, the key staying when the hand that had carried it left. He opened the door. The rescue cans hung on their pegs. Six of them. He checked each one. He ran his hands along the shells, checking for cracks. He tested the straps. He inspected the towlines. He had done this every morning of every season and the doing was the same doing and the hands were the same hands and the cans were the same cans — not the identical cans, the cans had been replaced twice in twenty years, but the same cans in the way that the ocean was the same ocean, the particular molecules changing constantly but the thing itself persisting, the form outlasting the material, the function outlasting the form.

He found no cracks. He found no frays. The equipment was sound. The equipment had been sound for twenty years, with six exceptions, and the six exceptions had been caught by this inspection, by these hands, by this morning ritual that was the ritual of attention, the ritual that said: before you sit on the stand, before you scan the water, before you accept responsibility for the lives in the swimming area, you check the things the lives depend on, you verify the tools, you confirm the readiness, because the readiness is not assumed, the readiness is confirmed, every morning, every season, every day of every season until the last day of the last season, which was today, which was this.

He loaded the cans onto the ATV. He strapped the paddle board to the roof rack. He checked the radio. Channel six. The radio was on and the channel was clear and the silence on the channel was the good silence, the silence that meant no one was in trouble, the silence that was the sound of a beach that had not yet opened, a beach that was still the patrol's, still the morning's, still the quiet jurisdiction of the guards and the gulls and the sand that had been raked by the municipal crew at five and that bore no footprints yet, that was clean, that was the blank page before the day wrote itself upon it.

He drove the ATV down the boardwalk ramp to the sand.

He placed the rescue cans at each stand. Stand 1, north end, near the jetty. Stand 2, two hundred yards south. Stand 3, another two hundred. Stand 4, the center. His stand.

He placed the can at Stand 4 last, the way he always did, the captain's stand last, the last to be equipped, the last to be manned. He hung the can on the hook. He positioned it so the strap faced outward, so the grab was immediate, so the hand could take it without adjustment. He had positioned the can this way ten thousand times and the positioning was automatic and the automaticity was the mastery and the mastery was the thing that would leave with him today or stay on the stand, and he did not know which, and the not-knowing was the morning's question, the question the morning had asked in Chapter 1 and that the morning was asking again now, the same question, because the question did not change, the question was the question.

The guards arrived. They arrived in ones and twos, carrying coffee from the Dunkin' Donuts on Cookman Avenue, some still pulling on their red suits, some stretching, the same arriving that happened every morning, the same loose congregation on the boardwalk near the locker, the same faces, though some faces had changed over the twenty years and some faces were new this season and some faces would be here next season when James's face would not, and the absence of his face would be the space, the gap, the way Tommy Raines was the gap between entry 156 and 157, except that James's gap would not be a loss but a leaving, not a drowning but a walking-away, and the walking-away was its own kind of absence, voluntary, chosen, the absence that comes from the living and not from the dying.

Elena stood to his right. Slightly behind. The lieutenant's position. The position she had occupied for ten years and that was about to become the center.

"Stand 1, north end. Kyle and Marquez." James read from the clipboard for the last time. "Stand 2, Hernandez and Liu. Stand 3, Thompson and Bell. Stand 4, myself and Vargas."

He paused. He looked at the faces. Twenty-two guards in a loose semicircle on the boardwalk in the six-forty-five light, the light that was September light, which was not July light, which was lower and longer and more amber than the overhead blaze of midsummer, the light that came from an angle that said the season was ending, that the earth had tilted, that the geometry between the sun and this beach had shifted in the way it shifted every year, the annual tilting that was the planet's way of saying: this is ending, this will end, the ending is the design, the ending is not the failure of the season but the season's fulfillment, and James stood in the September light and read from the clipboard and gave the forecast — southwest wind eight knots, swell one to two feet, water temp sixty-eight, air seventy-six by noon, green flag — and the forecast was calm, the forecast was ordinary, the forecast was the forecast of a day that would not test the patrol, that would pass without incident, that would be the kind of day the public imagined every beach day was, the day where nothing happened, and the nothing-happening was the success, was the system working, was twenty-two guards on eight stands keeping eight hundred swimmers alive without the swimmers knowing they were being kept alive, which was the job, which was the invisible thing, the thing that worked best when no one noticed it working.

"Last day of the season," James said. "Last day for me."

He did not say more. He did not make a speech. He had considered a speech. He had considered standing on this boardwalk and saying the things that twenty years had accumulated, the things about the water and the work and the standing-between and the identity and the love, but the considering had ended the way the letter's first draft had ended, with the pen stopping, with the words failing to carry the thing the words were trying to carry, and the failure was not a failure of language but a recognition that some things were not carried by words but by presence, by the twenty years of mornings on this boardwalk, by the ten thousand climbs of the stand, by the 214 entries in the notebook, by the body in the water, and the body was the speech, the body was the only speech that the ocean recognized, and the ocean was his audience, and the ocean did not listen to speeches.

The guards were quiet. They were quiet in the way that people are quiet when they know the thing that has been said is the last of its kind and that the silence that follows is not empty but heavy, heavy with the weight of the thing ending, and some of the guards had been on this patrol for ten years and some for two and one, Davis, for one season, and Davis stood at the edge of the semicircle carrying his rescue can correctly now, the strap across the chest, the weight distributed, the carrying that James had taught him in June, and the correct carrying was the teaching and the teaching was the thing that would remain, the thing that would outlast the teacher the way the ocean outlasted the wave, the individual wave arriving and departing but the ocean persisting, and James looked at Davis carrying the can correctly and the looking was enough, the looking was the speech.

"Radio check in five," James said. "Stands open at seven."

The semicircle dissolved.

James climbed Stand 4. He climbed the four steps — left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, the same four steps, the treads worn into shallow concavities by his feet and the feet of every guard who had manned this stand before him, the concavities that were the record, that were the physical evidence of the climbing, the accumulated weight of all the mornings pressing the wood into the shape of the use, the stand bearing the mark of the bodies it had held the way the beach bore the mark of the water that shaped it. He settled into the chair. The molded plastic. The angle that kept the eyes above the waterline. The posture of vigilance. The ache that would come by three o'clock but that was correct, that was the position, that was the body's testimony to the work.

He scanned.

The water was calm. Green flag. September calm, which was not July calm — September calm was deeper, more settled, the ocean having spent the summer's energy and now resting in the way an ocean rested, which was not stillness but a lower frequency, the waves shorter, the intervals longer, the surface less agitated, the water doing its work at a slower pace, the pace of the season's ending, the deceleration that was September.

The beach filled slowly. Labor Day. The last day. The families arrived with their coolers and their umbrellas and their children and their belief that the day was about barbecue and the end of summer and the return to school and the particular American melancholy of the holiday that celebrated labor by not laboring, and they spread their towels and they set up their chairs and they walked to the water and they entered it with the faith of people who believed the water was safe, which it was, because James was on the stand, because twenty-two guards were on eight stands, because the system was working, because the system had worked for twenty years under James's watch and would work tomorrow under Elena's watch and the day after and the day after, the continuity that was the system's gift, the continuity that did not depend on the individual but on the structure, on the stands, on the cans, on the whistles, on the scanning.

He scanned the water. He scanned the swimmers. He scanned the children in the shallows and the teenagers in the break zone and the solitary swimmers in the deeper water beyond the sandbar. He counted heads. He tracked the drifters — the swimmers who did not know they were drifting, the swimmers the current was carrying south at a rate they could not feel because the rate was slow and the carrying was gradual and the gradualness was the danger, the danger that was not dramatic but incremental, the danger that accumulated the way the concavities accumulated in the stand's treads, slowly, imperceptibly, until the accumulation was the thing, until the swimmer was two hundred yards from where they had entered and did not know it, and the not-knowing was the guard's responsibility, the guard's knowledge compensating for the swimmer's ignorance, the guard's eyes doing the work the swimmer's eyes could not do because the swimmer's eyes were at water level and the guard's eyes were eight feet above the sand, and the eight feet was the elevation and the elevation was the seeing and the seeing was the job.

Nothing happened.

The day passed. The scans continued. The rotations cycled — ninety minutes on the stand, thirty in the equipment room, ninety on the stand, the rhythm that was the day's rhythm, the rhythm that organized the hours into the units the work required. The swimmers swam. The children played. The waves arrived and the waves departed and the water did its work and the guards did their work and the two works coexisted on the same stretch of coast the way they had coexisted every day of every season, the parallel labors, the human and the hydraulic, the watching and the moving, the still and the restless.

At five o'clock James blew the whistle. Three long blasts. The signal that meant: the water is closed, the swimming is over, the season is done. The sound traveled across the beach at 115 decibels, the triple-frequency tone cutting through the Labor Day noise, reaching the last swimmers, the reluctant ones, the ones who did not want to leave the water because the leaving was the ending and the ending was September and September was the school year and the school year was the not-summer and the not-summer was the loss, and they came out of the water slowly, the way all last swimmers came out slowly, dragging the day behind them, carrying the water on their bodies, the water dripping from their arms and their hair and their suits, the water returning to the sand, the sand absorbing it, the beach taking back what the ocean had lent.

The guards came down from the stands. They collected the cans. They stacked the paddle boards. They secured the equipment in the locker. The motions were practiced, efficient, the motions of a crew that had done this every evening of every season and that did it now for the last time without ceremony, without acknowledgment, because the work did not require ceremony, the work required only the doing, and the doing was the ceremony, and the ceremony was the work.

The stands came down. The municipal crew arrived with the flatbed truck. They unbolted the platforms. They loaded the wooden structures onto the truck, the stands that had held the guards who had held the beach who had held the swimmers. Stand 1. Stand 2. Stand 3.

Stand 4. James watched them unbolt it. He watched them lift the platform. He watched them carry it to the truck, the wood that had been white once, the wood that was now the color of salt and weather, the wood that bore the concavities of his feet in its treads, the record of twenty years pressed into the grain. The stand went onto the truck. The truck drove away. The sand where the stand had stood was flat, undisturbed, as though the stand had never been there, as though the twenty years had left no mark, and this was true of the sand and not true of the man, because the sand forgot and the man did not, the sand's forgetting was its nature and the man's remembering was his.

The beach was empty. The guards had gone. The equipment was locked. The boardwalk was quiet. The September evening was coming in from the east, the light going long and amber, the light that was the season's last light, the light that fell on the empty sand and the empty water and the place where the stands had stood and the place where the swimmers had swum and the place where the watching had happened for twenty years and would happen again next May but not with these eyes, not from this man, not with this particular quality of attention that had been built over ten thousand mornings and 214 saves and two losses and a notebook and a letter and a whistle and a life lived eight feet above the sand in a chair that did not recline.

Elena stood on the boardwalk. She had stayed. She had stayed after the other guards left, after the equipment was locked, after the stands came down, because she knew that the staying was the thing, the staying was the attendance, the staying was the witnessing that the last day required, the way the first day had required the climbing.

James walked to her.

He stood on the boardwalk in front of her and he reached behind his neck and he unclipped the lanyard that held the Fox 40 Classic, the whistle he had worn for fourteen seasons as captain, the whistle that was pealess, that produced its sound from the passage of breath through three chambers, the whistle that had no moving parts and could not fail, the whistle that had reached 115 decibels ten thousand times and that had said the thing the whistle said, which was: I am here, I am watching, the water is open, the water is closed, come in, the shore is this way, the shore is here, the standing-between is holding. He held the whistle in his hand. The plastic was warm from his body. The lanyard was damp from the day's sweat. The whistle weighed almost nothing.

He placed it over Elena's head. He settled the lanyard around her neck. The whistle hung against her sternum, the way it had hung against his, in the place where the weight lived, in the place where the readiness lived, and Elena stood with the whistle against her chest and she did not say thank you and she did not say I'm ready and she did not say anything, because the whistle was not a gift and was not a promotion and was not a ceremony. The whistle was a tool. The whistle was a transfer. The whistle was the thing passing from the hand that had held it to the hand that would hold it, and the passing was the work and the work continued.

"Captain Vargas," James said.

Elena looked at him. The look was the look of ten years of mornings on the boardwalk and ten years of afternoons on the water and ten years of the seeing-what-he-saw and the knowing-what-he-knew, and the look said: I have it. The look said: the beach is mine. The look said the thing that the whistle said, which was: the standing-between will hold.

She nodded.

She walked to her truck. She drove away. The taillights went south on Ocean Avenue and disappeared and Elena was gone and the whistle was gone and the captain was gone and the boardwalk was empty and the beach was empty and the sand was flat where the stands had stood and the evening was coming and the water was still there, the water was always still there, the water that did not care about seasons or whistles or the changing of captains, the water that did its work without ceremony, without audience, without the eyes on the stand.

James stepped off the boardwalk. He walked across the sand. The sand was cool now, the day's heat already leaving it, the September sand that did not hold the warmth the way July sand held it, the September sand that let go easily, that released the day without resistance, the sand that had learned what James was learning, which was that the letting-go was not the loss but the next thing, the thing that came after the holding, the thing the holding had made possible.

He walked to the waterline. The foam reached his feet. The water was sixty-eight degrees and it touched his ankles and the touching was the ocean's greeting, the greeting the ocean had given him every day for twenty years, the greeting that did not distinguish between the guard and the swimmer, between the uniform and the skin, the greeting that was the same greeting it gave to everyone who entered, the democratic greeting, the greeting that said: you are here, the water is here, the rest is between you.

He walked in. He walked past the shallows. He walked until the water was at his waist and then he stopped and he stood in the ocean at the place where the swimming area had been, the place where the swimmers had been all day, the place he had watched from eight feet above the sand for twenty years, and he was in it now, he was in the water he had watched, he was at the level of the thing he had guarded, and the level was different from the elevation, the level was the water's level, the water's perspective, the perspective of the swimmer and not the guard, and from this level the beach looked different, the beach looked like a place he had never seen, the beach seen from the water and not from the stand, the beach that was the same beach and a different beach, the way the last day was the same day and a different day.

The water moved around him. The current pressed against his legs, the slight southward drift, the same drift he had tracked from the stand, the drift that carried swimmers who did not know they were being carried, and he knew it, he felt it, he let it press against him without correcting, without swimming against it, because he was not guarding, he was not working, he was standing in the water as a man, not as a guard, standing in the medium he had worked in for twenty years as a body, not as a function, and the standing was the answer, the standing in the water without purpose was the answer to the question the morning had asked.

The identity came with him.

It came with him the way the salt came with him, the way the salt was in his skin and in his cells and in the permanent residue that no amount of showering could remove. The identity was not on the stand. The identity was not in the whistle. The identity was in the body that had been in the water, in the eyes that had done the scanning, in the hands that had done the reaching, in the twenty years that had shaped the body the way the water shaped the shore, and the shaping did not stop when the water receded, the shaping was permanent, the shaping was the thing the body carried, and the body was walking out of the water now, walking back across the sand to the boardwalk and the truck and the drive to Neptune Township and the house on Tenth Avenue where the notebook sat on the kitchen table with the letter inside it, and the body was carrying the identity the way it carried the salt, in the skin, in the cells, in the thing the twenty years had made.

He walked out of the water. His clothes were wet. His shoes were full of sand and ocean. He did not change. He walked across the beach in wet clothes, the way he had walked across the beach a thousand times after a rescue, the walk from the water to the sand that was the walk from the saving to the standing, from the doing to the waiting, from the water's world to the land's world. He walked to the truck. He got in. He sat in the driver's seat with the water dripping from his clothes onto the upholstery and the sand falling from his shoes onto the floor mats and the salt drying on his skin in the way that salt dried, slowly, in crystals, the residue of the immersion, the evidence that the body had been in the water and that the water had been on the body and that the two had met and the meeting was the thing, the meeting was the twenty years, the meeting was the career and the life and the labor that the day was named for and that the day had ended.

He started the engine. He drove home. The road from Ocean Avenue to Neptune Township was seven miles through Asbury Park and across the creek and past the houses and the strip malls and the gas station where he had filled the truck every Monday for twenty years, seven miles that he had driven ten thousand times, the route that was the route, the road that connected the water to the house, the beach to the bed, the work to the rest.

Outside, the ocean did what the ocean did. The waves arrived at the shore. The waves departed from the shore. The arriving and the departing were the ocean's only work. The water did not know about Labor Day. The water did not know about last days. The water did not know about the guard who had watched it for twenty years and who had walked into it at the end and who had stood in it without purpose and who had walked out of it with the salt on his skin and the identity in his body and the twenty years in his hands.

The water did its work.

The water did not stop.