Vic parks the car at the Gulf State Park just as the sky is gaining a bit of yellow. Ray wakes up blinking, and looks around quietly, like waking into a dream instead of from it. He smiles to himself but doesn’t say anything. Silently, he puts his seat upright and gets out of the car, the pain in his knee back from the numbness of the aspirin, though he doesn’t reveal its presence in his actions. Vic picks up some garbage from the floor of the Camaro, and gets out.

They walk up a set of wooden stairs in a peculiar dance of avoiding each other so that nothing will be said, the quiet respected. As they walk, they look around them at sand as white as sugar, tinged blue, with sparse brush straining to hold it all together and keep it from washing away. Their footsteps thump along the boardwalk, up over the dunes, and their eyes level on a body of blue that stretches itself out into the fading night. At the bottom of the stairs, in unison, Vic and Ray take off their shoes and leave them in the sand by the stairs. They walk down the beach aways, looking at the first bit of sun coming up over the horizon, the sandpipers dashing, and ghost crabs running in crab desperation from the tide.

Ray sits down first, plunking his heavy ass in the sand, and lights a cigarette. Vic, who’d been unconsciously chewing on his unlit stub of a stogie, keeps chewing and sits down next to his friend. After a moment, he pulls the brown roll from his mouth, observes it thoughtfully, and then sets it beside him to be removed later. In the midst of something so beautiful, it could not be tossed idly aside.

“You know, it’s Saturday,” Ray said.

Vic closes his eyes with a silent, knowing laugh, and nods.

“Sabbath used to be on Saturday.”

Looking at his friend, unsure of the implication, Vic just stares at Ray, and then looks back to the sun.

Laughing a little, Ray looks back at Vic, that secret pooling in his irises. “You ready to head back now?”

Vic smiles genuinely. He can feel the skin pulling back on his sagging cheeks. He can feel muscles he hadn’t used in a while. Kiddingly, he replies, “I thought there was no goin’ back?”

Ray chuckles and shoves his feet into the cool sand, “That’s just a sayin’. It don’t matter what they tell ya’, you can always go back.”

“Yeah, but I don’t want to.”

“I guess you don’t hafta’ then.”

“Ah,” Vic says, looking into a clear bright blue sky, dismissing everything—the swing, the strike, the store, the drive, all meanings. There are pelicans overhead. There is a coolness nearby. There is water everywhere and the slow, quiet morning rush of waves. “We’ll go back when we damn well feel like it and I don’t care if that’s never.”

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