Free The Fisher Boy by Stephen Anable Page A

town.”
    He was kneeling now, exuding the scent of warm skin and tanning butter, flipping through Arthur’s book with his beach-greasy, damaging fingers. “They’re having a retrospective on Thomas Royall at the museum. Here in Provincetown.”
    He actually seemed eager to talk, but, having been slighted the entire day, I felt less than flattered being the center of attention now that the beach was empty except for gulls, sandpipers, and some tiny figures in the distance by the bath house.
    “Would you like to borrow it?”
    He doesn’t want to carry it back, I thought. He wants me to lug this heavy book back to the parking lot, then drive him to Arthur’s.
    “I’ll take a rain check.” A joke that year, what with the drought.
    “Are you leaving now?”
    “Actually, I’m not.” I’d been ready to go for more than an hour.
    “I’ve got to get back to Arthur’s.” Suddenly Edward was all responsibility. “I mean, those security people will be leaving pretty soon, and he won’t want to be all alone.”
    He knew there was a shuttle between the bath house and town, costing all of one dollar.
    “Hey,” he said, giving me his widest smile, “thanks for the ride to the beach.” Then he quickly dressed and packed up his things, Arthur’s things, and walked away.
    I was picking the icing from an oatmeal cookie, worrying that my shins had gotten sun-burnt, when I heard someone call my name. It couldn’t be Edward, he was already miniature, far down the beach toward the parking lot.
    “The other way!” the voice shouted.
    Looking back toward Long Point, I saw Ian Drummond in the dunes.
    “C’mere!” he called as dread flooded my system.
    He was kneeling, his body hidden by the dunes and clumps of beach grass, that coarse grass that cuts your legs and stays green like conifers all winter. I hesitated, knowing I should yank on my pants, but if I did that, I’d just leave, head for the parking lot and ignore him. Exactly what most people would have done in my circumstances. After what had happened, after what he’d done.
    “Come as you are,” Ian shouted, as if reading my mind.
    He’d been drinking but didn’t sound completely polluted, the way he had the night of our show. He exerted a pull, not entirely due to his saving me in Gloucester. We were equals here on this naked sand and had unfinished business with each other that only we, alone, could conclude. This time there was no one to referee us, and Ian owed me contrition, an apology, for insulting my mother in public. As I walked across the sand that separated us—one of the longest walks of my life, even though it was two hundred feet or less—I actually wondered if this were some sort of ambush. Ian, after all, was the ambushing type.
    “Mark, my man, welcome to my world.” He was as naked as I was, sitting on a towel in one of those hollows in the dunes that look like sand traps on golf courses. Hidden from the National Park rangers who sometimes patrolled the flat parts of the beach.
    We hadn’t been naked together since prep school, in our pungent old gymnasium. For all his athleticism, for all his money and the ease it gave him, Ian had always been modest about his body, but it seemed that had changed now that he’d pumped himself up.
    His chest was muscular in an exaggerated way, like some idealized ditch digger or dock worker in a WPA mural. He’d crossed his legs so that I couldn’t see whether he was aroused, but I confirmed my suspicion that he’d been drinking. A bottle of Russian vodka with St. Basil’s Cathedral on its label was propped against a wicker picnic hamper. Ian’s latest reading was an oversized paperback,
Chorus Against Fascism: The Greek Resistance During World War Two,
by Stavros Zarefes.
    “Still reading about war?” I asked breezily, then regretted it. War was a poor opener, given our recent fight.
    “It isn’t very good. He makes the Germans all but sub-human. The author obviously has an axe to grind.