Kris abruptly maneuvered her small SUV around three cars and a woman in a wheel chair and pulled into the only visible parking spot. We didn't realize the lack of parking spots until we got out of the car. Kris smiled at our good luck and fortune. I, on the other hand, gave all the credit to her pushiness and impatience which made me worry that the force of Karma would make our departure almost impossible by draining the car battery or by giving us a flat tire.
After being hit on by a man with a severe shortage of teeth, we met Clarissa at the restrooms, which had no doors what so ever. It took a bit of courage, team work, and good timing but we managed to use the facilities uninterrupted.
I buried my toes in the warm grainy sand as we walked to meet Clarissa's sister, daughter, and nephew by the shore. The temperature was pleasantly warm and the sun was so bright that I could feel my serotonin level increasing rapidly. I took a long, deep breath of the salty breeze and felt my spirit fill with enchantment. The sounds on the beach were so different than what I was used to. The breeze carried the voices from people a hundred feet away and filled my ear drums with crashes of waves and military aircraft. It was almost deafening but I didn't mind the change.
Kris and I carefully placed our old, cheap, beach chairs in the hot sand. The previous summer we had named these same chairs "the concussion chairs" in honor of their lack of stability, especially when pushed backward by a sibling's trickery. We stripped down to our bikinis and lathered ourselves in tanning oil. I pulled a cold beer from the cooler and passed it to my sister as I sat down to soak up the rays of sunlight.
In between three shared beers and a few single serving red wine bottles, we stuffed our faces with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and fruit snacks. We sat lazily and stared amusingly at a semi obese woman in a string bikini who was dancing to "My Humps" a few feet away. As the empty bottles gathered in the sand, our semi-tasteful conversations turned into giggly stories about menstrual cramps, sharts, penis size, and the sexual abilities of our mates. Our lack of inhibition wasn't solely due to our blood alcohol levels. I assure you, we were in equally vulgar company.
I imagined the beach as one big blanket of sand with a hundred small rooms with invisible walls. It appeared as a grid in my mind. Each room filled with various groups of friends or families and crowded with a plethora of oddity. These groups consisted of several tourists and teenagers sprinkled with your all american freako.
A group of people behind us had clearly spent most of their lives with pipes in their mouths and straws up their nostrils. A woman's skinny body laid lifeless on a beach towel while three scruffy men men flirted with passing females by flashing them coercing looks and rotten smiles.
About twenty feet in front of us was a small family who, obvious to me, had not visited the beach very often, if at all, before that day. An old, frail, man who appeared to be in his sixties sat on a tee shirt next to meek woman who was at least twenty five years younger than him. She was wearing a gray sports bra and cotton shorts that reached her knees. When she turned around, I noticed that she was missing her two front teeth. I laughed and thought of the absurd amount of people with bad oral hygiene on that beach.
In front of the couple sat a skinny, pale, blonde haired boy who looked about four or five years old. I disappeared into thought as I imagined a background story for the family.
She was a single Mom from West Virginia and the old man was her estranged father who lived in Bithlo. The woman and her son had taken their first ever plane trip down to Florida the night before to visit her long lost kin (as the woman would surely refer to him as). They had decided to take the boy on a day trip to the beach since he had never seen the ocean before. The boys name was Bubba Joe Junior.
The story I made up was a pleasant and encouraging story about self discovery and the importance of family. Little did I know then that my story would have a disturbing chapter that would almost surely make me mentally rewrite the whole plot.
With liquid courage up to our eyeballs, Clarissa, Kris, and I decided to venture down to the water and into the cold, choppy, ocean. As we stood up, we all let out simultaneous gasps as Clarissa's one-year-old nephew fell face first into the sand. Our shock turned to laughter as the chubby cheeked toddler sat up and chuckled at our reactions. His face was covered in sand and drool so his mom scooped him up to be cleaned and the three of us stumbled down to the water.
We walked towards the characters of my mental play splashing about and sitting in the edge of the water. The closer we got the more we noticed the sound of hysterical crying and pleading. We investigated the cries and discovered the old man angrily splashing BJ Jr. in the face while his mother held him down in the wet sand. The boys ghostly complexion had turned beet red and his cries were filled with frightened pleas for escape.
We were trying to convince ourselves that we didn't have to interfere when we witnessed the old man grabbing the boys head and smacking him in the face repeatedly. He was yelling and cursing at him to shut up and stop crying. The woman looked very uncomfortable as she tightly held the boy's skinny limbs against her body. The boy continued to cry as he coughed up salt water in between gasps for air. The awkward woman just sat there, stone faced, and did as she was instructed to do. Our shock at the situation was very noticeable. Suddenly, playing in the ocean didn't seem like much fun to us. We didn't know what to do. I had never seen this kind of bizarre and disturbing behavior in such a public place and I was usually one to avoid budding in to another's business. We knew the old man's sanity pool was shallow or possibly empty and that's what made us return to the safety of our four invisible walls.
Without a hint of hesitation or delay, my sister reached into her bag and pulled out her cell phone to call the police. We sat and discussed the incident as the old man instructed the woman to take the child back up to the sand while he stayed in the ocean to play in the crashing waves.
Within five minutes, two men in military uniforms appeared on the boardwalk. My sister walked up to them and explained the situation while she pointed out the culprit. One of the men questioned the old man while the other pulled the woman and boy aside for questioning. It seemed as though they were denying it but we couldn't hear anything. We doubted that they knew we were the ones to call the police until one of the men walked up to us and asked us to make a witness statement. We quickly agreed and waited for the man to call the Cocoa Police to finish questioning the old man.
While we waited, I thought to myself about the situation and wondered if we had done the right thing. Clarissa and her sister being parents, I knew that they gave our actions no further thought and probably wondered if we could have done something sooner. Me, being a Nanny, made the internal questioning of our actions relatively brief. What this Man was doing was wrong and everyone knew it.
It was getting late and the sun had absorbed all of my energy while my blood alcohol level returned to normal. I had to go home and get ready for MMB (MidnightMadnessBrevard.com) so Clarissa agreed to take my sister home after they had given their statements to the police. I slowly walked to the hot car, climbed in and started to drive home.
The memory of the boy's flushed face and tearful cries entered my thoughts between flashes of toothless people and the half naked obese woman. I was exhausted, hungry, and very disappointed with my tan but at least I felt grateful for my reasonably sane parents and my knowledge of the importance of good dental hygiene.
No comments:
Post a Comment