Destin: Fiction by Joe Kapitan

Ryan is always too far. Today he swims out past the second line of sandbars and breakers, fading from view, his head a black dot amidst the silver sunspots dancing on the waves. Ellie is different. Deliberate. Ellie’s pale skin flares red in the fierce June sun of northern Florida. The wrinkled, orange-haired woman who is supposed to be watching them (Diane? Dorothy?) dozes in the shade of a small beach umbrella, empty beer cans and cigarette butts littering the sand around her. Her skin looks like a patchwork quilt of old footballs. They just met her yesterday. She’s from New Jersey; her husband died nine months ago from cancer. Cancer of the balls, Ryan had whispered to his little sister Ellie, a bit too loudly. The kids’ parents, Carole and Marty, are spending the afternoon indoors with their neighbors, Trip and Stella Gilbert. Why the neighbors joined them on vacation this year, Ellie has no idea. Inviting them along seemed like something Ryan might do, a far-swim.

“You have any sunscreen?” asks Ellie.

The older woman stirs. “Look around, it’s here somewhere,” she mutters, her eyes remaining closed.

Ellie has already looked. There isn’t any sunscreen, the football-skinned don’t need sunscreen, but Dad told her to stay out at the beach until dinnertime. Don’t come back before that.

Ellie squints, catches sight of Ryan in the rippling of the water. Beyond the waves and the riptides, the sky darkens.

…

Destin is a between-place: between Tallahassee and Mobile, between sleepy Montgomery and the hulking oil rig platforms out in the Gulf of Mexico. Culturally, between Latino/tropic south Florida and the redneck Deep South. Audibly, between open-windowed cars trading glares and blasts of rap and country as they pass. The screech of the gulls washed away in the roar of the jets flying training missions out of Naval Air Station Pensacola or Eglin Air Force Base.

In Destin, a clean car means it’s a tourist rental; locals drive pick-up trucks, their nether regions proudly slathered in red mud. Destin is a flea market masquerading as a town. Destin is musty motels with Jeopardy half-names thanks to random neon failures. Destin is sun-bleached seafood shacks stinking of rancid fryer oil, surf shacks stocked with souvenirs instead of surfboards, souvenir shacks packed with cheap Florida-branded baubles handmade by Mexican hands and Honduran hands and Chinese hands and Vietnamese hands, because Florida hands are busy counting the cash.

Along Route 98, there’s a white-sided building where the devil sells liquor to sinners on one side and Jesus forgives them on the other, on their way back to their cars. In Destin, people sell shrimp at the side of the road, from plastic coolers sitting in the backs of their trucks. At night, people sell other people from vans at the side of the road.

It’s best to avoid Destin in August because of the red tide. It’s best to avoid it in September because of all the hurricanes bearing the names of women who are no good for you. At all times of the year, it’s best to assume that everyone is out for themselves. It’s best to not assume anything else but that.

…

From the window of Trip and Stella’s motel suite, Marty searches the dark clouds for signs of clearing. It’s late afternoon; the daily five-o’-clock downpour has just moved through. The wet asphalt glosses in the first rays of sunlight knifing holes through the clouds. Carole sits on the foldaway couch, pushing the cut-crystal ashtrays to one end of the coffee table and the half-eaten bags of Fritos to the other. Under the Fritos bags lay the powdery remnants of thin white lines. A deck of cards separates the lines. An old Love Boat episode plays on television, but the sound is turned down, so no one hears Gopher complain to Isaac the Bartender that he hasn’t gotten laid since the last time the ship docked at Puerta Vallarta.

Trip is busy in the galley kitchen, mixing the drink orders relayed by Stella. Carole can tell their neighbors have poured all their meals today.

“Carole, you uptight bitch, whatcha drinkin’?” slurs Stella. “Rum and Coke? Jack and soda?”

“What kind of beer do you have?” says Carole.

“Jesus, woman, you’re so fucking Midwest. Hold on, I’ll go look.”

Trip’s voice angles in from the kitchen, below the cupboards. “Marty, you’re up. What’s your pleasure, buddy?”

“Rum’n’Coke sounds good.”

“Captain Morgan okay for a liquor snob like you?” laughs Trip.

“Yeah, whatever, asshole,” says Marty.

When Trip finishes mixing, Stella walks to the living room, drinks in both hands. Handing a can of Miller Lite to Carole, she skirts the coffee table and eases up behind Marty, pressing herself against him. She reaches her arm around him and holds his drink tight to his chest. “Your refreshment, Mister,” she says, her cheek tight to his shoulder blade. Marty tries his best not to react, but he can’t control the swell building in his shorts.

Trip comes in from the kitchen, eyeing Stella intently. He drops himself heavily onto the couch next to Carole, spilling part of his drink on the tile floor. He sets his drink down hard on the table and swings himself sideways, laying his feet over the armrest and positioning his head face-up in Carole’s lap. Carole immediately slides over, letting Trip’s head fall to the cushion. He laughs. “And just when I was sure you liked me,” he says.

“What’s gotten into you, Trip? Are you drunk?” asks Carole.

Trip struggles to sit up. Marty and Stella, amused, turn from the window to face them.

Trip looks at Stella. “Well, we,” he says, winking toward her, “thought that you two might be up for some, um, vacation adventure.”

“Adventure?”

“Yeah, adventure. Experimentation. A little game of switcheroo.”

For a long moment, there’s no sound but the thwack thwack thwack of the ceiling fan.

“So, hey, how about we play some cards. Maybe pinochle?” says Carole, the pitch of her voice higher than normal. She lunges for the deck of cards on the coffee table.

“Carole, sweetheart,” says Stella. “You know the saying: what happens in Destin…”

“Just one time and never again,” says Trip. “It’ll be fun. Carole, please. Relax. Pick a card, any card.”

“What for?”

“You pick a card and then Stella picks one. High card gets the bedroom. Losers get the pullout,” Trip said, patting the cushion next to him.

Carole glances at Marty. The Marty that Carole needs will say hell no, that’s a fucked-up idea, no one touches my wife but me. That version of Marty scoops her up by the arm and leaves, winning her forever. That Marty rewrites the future. That Marty’s been gone a while.

The other one, the Marty that came to Destin, just shrugs, an impish look on his face. With one hand, he gently massages Stella’s ass behind the worn motel curtain. Carole doesn’t have to see it; she feels it, like vital membranes stretching and rupturing inside her. She lurches from the room, stumbles out onto the covered breezeway. She doesn’t remember opening the door. Maybe she didn’t; maybe she’s just threadbare enough to have passed right through it.

…

Ellie walks a half-mile down the beach to the public bath house to use the restroom. When she returns, Ryan is nowhere in sight. Diane/Dorothy is gone too. Ellie stacks the empty beer cans on the older woman’s beach chair so she can’t ignore her small, shiny pile of responsibility. Ellie squeezes herself under the edge of the umbrella just as the raindrops start to fall. She doesn’t know what time it is, but by her father’s measure, it can’t be dinnertime. She closes her eyes.

…

Carole wanders for hours, to the center of town and back again, watching as the sun dips below the pinked horizon. She follows the weathered wooden walkway as it climbs over a single line of dunes covered by sea oats, then doglegs left to the beach. A crescent moon rises, washing the shore in a cobalt light. The soft swishing of the rollers meeting the sand makes a sound like breathing—advancing, retreating. She kicks off her sandals, peels down her skirt to her ankles and steps out of them. Carole pulls off her top and stands facing the darkening gulf in white panties and a black bra. She walks toward the sound, the breeze in her face. The water is warmer than she expects. The first of the stars, the boldest, ignite like votives. She marches out ever further, until the saltwater rises above her chin and finds her entrances, begins to fill her, taking the shape of her skin, a fluid cast of her emptiness. She stretches to the tips of her toes, dances against the push of the surf. 

Years later, she will tell the story of the angel who appears in a blinding burst of light, riding on the waves, pulling her to safety. The truth of that moment is malleable, flowing in multiple directions like water through outstretched fingers. The truth of the scene is whatever the actors need it to be. In the eyes of the old Cuban American fisherman trolling the incoming tide for cobia that evening, the truth is this: that the half-naked, sputtering woman he pulls from the water is worth saving, regardless of what she herself may think, and that makes him an angel of sorts, doesn’t it? And for Carole, he must be an angel—in fact, she’s counting on it, because angels only save the salvageable.

…

Marty arrives at the airport early, yet not early enough to catch Carole. He hasn’t seen her all night. Marty learns from the gate agent that she’s changed her reservation and taken the six AM flight home. By the time he, Ryan, and Ellie make it back home, there’s a decent chance she’ll have packed her bags and left for good.

The kids, barely awake, shoot him spiny looks, grunt their responses to his questions. Ryan sits along the windows, hidden under headphones. Ellie lounges a few rows away, skimming a magazine, enduring the pain of her sunburn.

Trip and Stella decide on a later flight, probably nursing hangovers, possibly regretting their overture, and Marty is privately relieved. He wants to be home. He wants to forget this vacation. The best thing about Destin (someone told him once) is how easily you leave it behind. Destin memories have short lifespans, puddles on a hot tarmac, overlooked like a cheap souvenir refrigerator magnet pushed to the back edge of the side panel where you almost never see it, the grinning cartoon alligator that doesn’t need to be linked to Florida at all because maybe its sole purpose is to remind him that it’s possible to grow old in this world. That it’s possible for some things to survive, ancient and scarred, while most everything else is pounded by surf, ground into sand. Ah, to be an alligator, Marty thinks, ancient and scarred–but then again, he knows better. The alligator is the freak of evolution, the exception. The opposite of the alligator is the beach. The beach is a carpet of dead things, the dust of a million arrangements that reached the end of usefulness.

A voice from the speaker above announces their flight is boarding. Ryan looks at Ellie, Ellie looks at Marty. One by one, they stand and shuffle toward the open mouth of the jetway, all lesser somehow.

The beach, immeasurably larger.

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