was docked, to return the machete and borrow a different net. He took off his shirt and shaded his eyes, searching the channel. It was empty. The only boats nearby were fastened to docks, rocking on their lines. It was early afternoon, the sun directly overhead. Westward down the channel, people stood in tight clusters on the dock of another house. Party noises—music, laughter—reached us in muted chirps. The whole world—the houses, the blue water, the still shoreline in the distance—swam in thick white light.
Dennis dove into the channel, sending up a stream of white bubbles. Kyle tossed him the duffel bag with the machete inside. We watched until he arrived at the neighboring house. He climbed up the transom of the cruiser, then stepped onto the dock. “I don’t understand,” said Kyle to Marse. “You used to rip the arms off your dolls.”
“That’s different,” said Marse. She slipped out of her shorts and spread a towel. I took her cue and removed my shirt, revealing the top half of a navy one-piece. It was the only swimsuit I owned. Kyle went to the big boat and returned with sweaty cans of beer. I took a long swallow of mine, then unzipped my shorts and wiggled out of them, frowning at my pale legs. Wasted on the young: I didn’t know how pretty I was, with my smooth skin and strong limbs. I had the habit of slumping to appear smaller and more feminine. Yet I admired the way women like Marse—she was almost as tall as Dennis, nearly six feet—seemed to relish their height. I lay down and put a palm on my stomach. The fabric was warm from the sunlight. “Here he comes,” said Marse.
I sat up. Dennis, returning from the other house, carried a wad of netting above his head as he swam. He struggled to keep the net in one hand while taking clumsy strokes with the other. Every few strokes, a corner of the net dangled and he stopped to gather it up again. “Jesus,” said Marse.
Kyle, who’d been lying with his face over the water, splashing at the eel, moved to stand beside us. His shadow darkened our towels. I scanned the channel, empty of boats. We were quiet. We were, I assumed, all imagining the same scenario: if the net came loose and Dennis found himself under it—what then? Could he keep his head above water without thrashing around? He could lie on his back, maybe, and breathe through a square in the net, and Kyle could swim out or Marse could take her boat.
Dennis inched closer. I kept glancing at the mouth of the channel, certain that a speedboat would come screaming down it, spreading white wake. Dennis’s s stroke was sloppy. I didn’t know him well enough to decide if he would have considered the danger of swimming with a net. Why didn’t he drag the net behind him, or put it in the duffel bag? Maybe, I thought, he was one of the careless but lucky, as so many people are.
Kyle bounced on the balls of his feet, as if preparing to dive in. From where she was sitting beside him, Marse put a hand on his leg. “Don’t,” she said.
A corner of the net dropped behind Dennis’s head; he kept swimming, oblivious. I took a breath and Marse looked at me. Kyle called out to Dennis and Dennis stopped swimming. Kyle gestured. “Pick it up,” he shouted, and Dennis gathered up the net again, then resumed swimming. I could see the light lines of his legs through the water, the white bottoms of his feet. He reached the dock and tossed the net onto the wood. Kyle kicked it aside and braced himself against a piling, then reached down to help Dennis climb out. I sat down beside Dennis on the dock. Kyle handed him a beer and he drank from it. My toes dipped below the waterline and, remembering the eel, I drew them up. “That was kind of dangerous,” I said.
Dennis looked at me. Then he looked at the net, heaped in a puddle on the wood, and up the channel toward the Becks’ stilt house. I saw the notion—the net dropping, his body flailing—enter his mind, but he shook his head. “I made it,” he said. It wasn’t bravado or machismo. He was one of those people, the careless but lucky. He always would be. “Do you want to see it?”