Beach Strip by John Lawrence Reynolds Read Free Book Online Page B

We would stroll past the few remaining Victorian-era cottages and the tar-paper shacks and the new prefab homes with goldfish ponds in the front yard and hot tubs in the back, and we would be happy doing it.
    The neighbour with the helicopter on his porch also keeps a Florida swamp buggy in the lane next to the house, in front of an army machine that Gabe said looks like an APC, which he translated as Armoured Personnel Carrier. I don’t know what the man who keeps this stuff looks like, because I have never seen him.
    The beach strip is peppered with misfits and eccentrics living among young professionals winding themselves up and retired people winding their lives down. They start out in Porsches and end up in golf carts.
    If misfits and nonconformists can be catalogued, I do not know any faction that is not represented among our neighbours.
    Hans and Trudy, the German couple down the beach with the schnauzer, have been building their stone castle since Gabe and I moved here. Along with the rooftop parapets, it includes narrow windows set deeply into the walls—the better for archers to aim their arrows, I guess—and a heavy oak door studded with rivets. I expected to see gnomes in lederhosen at work on a moat someday. Most of the neighbours think it’s quaint. Nobody considers it out of place.
    A motorcycle club converted a cottage at the south end of the beach, the scuzzy end, into a clubhouse, adding steel bars to the windows and drawing weekly visits from the police. Near them, over the dusty upholstery shop, lives a woman who for the past month had been stalking the boardwalk and glaring into our garden, her mouth moving without any words emerging.
    Compared with the people, the homes on the beach strip are almost conventional. Some are abandoned, others nearly so. It is a community, as the sociologists say, in transition. A few custom homes are being built among the decaying cottages. The new homes feature cedar shake shingles, bay windows, and something called a great room, which is what you get when you don’t put a ceiling on the living room. They sit among the cheap frame cottages and the trailer park and the retirement homes. There are many distractions on the beach strip. There is little boredom.
    AFTER SPEAKING TO TINA, I looked out the kitchen window and into my garden, where two police officers were standing near the gate. The news reporters had moved on to some other disaster, I assumed. The air was already warm and heavy. It was going to be one of those August days they invented air conditioning for.
    I opened my door and almost tripped over two jars of marmalade and a plastic-wrapped loaf of banana bread with a note taped to it.
Call us if you need to
, the note said. It was from MaudeBlair, of course. There are many people like the Blairs living on the beach strip. They keep no helicopters on their front porch or bars on their windows. They always nod and smile, and they do not gossip. They care for you, but they find no need to tell you about it except when necessary.
    I set the bread and marmalade in the kitchen and returned to look out at the garden shed. The door was closed, but I could see the hook dangling free. “Somebody’s been in our garden shed,” I said to Gabe the first time I found the hook unlatched earlier in the summer. “We should start locking the door.”
    “What’s to steal?” he said. “If we’re lucky they’ll take the old lawn mower, maybe the rusty rake and the bag of topsoil.”
    “You’ll do anything to get out of gardening,” I muttered.
    The shed door was normally held closed with a simple hook and eye. “How much will a padlock cost?” I asked when I found the door open again a day or two later. “Three dollars? Five dollars?”
    Gabe said if we hung a padlock on the door we would have to keep the key somewhere, and he was always losing keys.
    “Get one with a combination,” I suggested.
    Gabe said we would forget the combination and never be able to get