Free Killing Time in Crystal City by Chris Lynch Page B

up with them at Crystal Beach right after they are done with church any given morning. It is all casual, and all casual is what I am all about.
    I do not feel casual, as I hotstep it along the canal towpath. The walk is great, cool-ish and quiet with the sluggish water meandering along on my left side and a fair amount of greenery along my right. I’m a little too frothy in the head to slow down and appreciate it just now, but I know that eventually I will. The canal leads down to the beach, and after about a mile and a quarter, I see it opening up before me.
    I am hoping hard the girls are going to show up, and I feel, actually, stunned and stupid about how much I want to see them.
    Yet because this place I’m in is so foreign and new to me, I am something like glad, something like relieved, when I hit the beach and see groupings of folks, characters, who, dodgy though they may be, look familiar to me. The weak wave motion of the water slurps at the shore and I find that inviting. I head for it, scanning for Stacey and Molly as I do. It’s an overcast day, hot again away from the trees, and there aren’t enough people hanging out for them to go unnoticed. They’re not here.
    So I guess for now I’m just like everyone else around here, killing time until they come.
    Crystal Beach could use a cleanup, that’s for sure. It’s not public-health-hazard stuff yet, but it wouldn’t take too many more cigarette packs, junk-food wrappers, or disposable diapers to tip the balance. I walk along it, starting at the canal mouth. It feels like my own personal grand entrance onto the beach as the towpath could pretty much lead me blindfolded straight from Syd’s backyard to here. The path is actually much neater than the beach, looking like somebody is responsible for the upkeep, whacking the invasive greenery back and picking up the litter.
    I did the groundskeeping around our house.
    Nobody does it on Crystal Beach.
    Sprouts of very rugged-looking weeds pop up out of the ground randomly, all the way down to the shoreline. There, some other species climb up out of the bay water, seeming like the gnarly green hands of a bunch of somebodies trapped below and desperately trying to get out. The water itself looks surprisingly clear, though between the unusual odor and sinister sea foliage it would take a braver man than me to swim it.
    We had a pool, back home. It was just a small one. I was responsible for that, too. I did a good job.
    I walk the couple hundred yards of navigable frontage until the marshland gives way to much denser, wildly overgrown grasses, weeds, and vines that serve as a natural break between the wasteland of Crystal Beach and the grubby productivity of the wharves just beyond. The small wavelets lap and slurp all the way, keeping me whispery company, which is certainly welcome. One tugboat crosses the harbor right to left, and one ancient trawler—looking like some mutant, clawed sea creature itself—passes the opposite way. The air does not move at all. The sea and sky are joined in that color moment when stainless and blue steel meet.
    Then it ends. I stand like a dope, waiting for instructions. Unsurprisingly, none come.
    I turn and walk back the way I came, over the same gritty sand, past the same wreckage of a big, double baby stroller, through the same wonderful stretch of about thirty yards that is untouched by any clutter or mess at all, no weeds, no garbage, even the sand itself seems to be of a finer grade than the rest and almost groomed. I walk those thirty yards quite slowly.
    Yet, even as I step again onto the tired sand, the sad sand with the blemishes and dog shit, I listen to the slurping sound this beach produces, and it makes me foolishly happier.
    That slurp is Crystal Beach’s voice. It’s a singular thing. I can think it’s speaking to me directly and I can think we understand one another.
    That is a poetry I can get.
    I don’t think