I’m in Florida. The gulf, sand, salt, fishing piers and pelicans, all of it always makes me feel a certain type of way but today It has me thinking about working by the sea. You’re scraping by, manning the bait and tackle shop your dead dad left to you, shoving worms and minnows and rental rods out the door, nodding your head back to the converted chest freezers for the more experienced so they can find the right bait for their morning. It sits in the middle of the pier, a halfway point for curious visitors and a quick stop for the others. You’re there before the sun comes up, and leaving after it’s set.
You’re a regular in a world of people passing through. Beach vacations and charter fishing, scuba diving and long days lounging in the sun. Houses painted candy colors line the streets, a far cry from where you live in an apartment on the other side of the island.
But it’s home. And in your home you notice things. Like the Brit.
He comes every morning. Buys a bag of bait and disappears with his rod in tow. It’s not a tourist’s rod either. It’s something respectable, something you see the old heads with at the end of the pier. They’re the ones who speak to him, and vice versa. Short, choppy conversations like midday tide, about fishing, about what’s biting and about… war. All the old heads are vets of one time or another, they wear their hats proudly, their blurred blown out tattoos still stark on their arms, scars aplenty. But the Brit has that look in his eye, the one that matches theirs. There’s some sort of understanding there, a club you’ve never been apart of, all together at the end of the pier, old proud men in their sixties, their seventies, even eighties, and this behemoth who couldn’t be forty yet. Sitting side by side, fishing. Casting. Reeling. Passing around beers and bags of chips.
At lunch, they come back to the shop. They buy the ice cream in the freezer, sodas, forties of modelo or bud. Grown men and their ice cream snickers bars and beers, just like your younger brother. The Brit doesn’t speak but he often pays, even when the crew of old heads put up a fight.
Lately, he looks at you longer and longer. Studies you like you’re a puzzle. You catch him a few times, and others, it’s blatant.
You can’t decide what it’s about. You don’t want to know.
Still, months and he rarely says two words to you. Just the grunting in the morning when he buys bait and a nod. A gesture towards the lunch loot and a gravelly thanks. A question about what bait fish are in the back. A comment about the flimsy window.
It’s not until Jerry makes a comment about how he doesn’t like you locking up and riding your bike home every night on your own that he gives you more than two words.
“Those assholes on vacation are stumbling drunks you know. City folk have no respect, they just take.”
And the words don’t come until after sunset, when you’re halfway down the pier with your bike tick-tick-ticking beside you, and he’s walking your way.
