“And your mind is a muscle,” she repeats in a low inflection, not quite a question.
“That’s right.”
She glances uncertainly at Emerson’s smiling, preoccupied profile. Felice can’t tell if he’s a little bit scary and mental, or maybe a lot smarter than she’d thought. Back at the House, she’d seen him roaring with his stupid friends, ripping open beers and smashing cans on his head. “Where do you get this crap?” She is carefully dismissive.
He shrugs. “Everywhere. All that lifting gives you time to think about how things work. That’s when I do my best thinking. Picking up heavy stuff and putting it back down again? After a while it’s boring.”
Felice and Emerson enter the busier commercial area of South Beach: passing rows of pastel apartment buildings, hotels like old toys, glimpses of azure ocean floating in the distance, the sidewalk filled with tourists. Doddering elderly, like shipwreck survivors. “So… so,” Felice fumbles to redirect things, unwilling to try to keep up with Emerson in his mind terrain. “. So, if you’re thinking about all this smart crap, then why do you hang around with a bunch of skinhead losers?”
The hand returns to the top of his head. “Skinheads?”
“Duh, like Peckham, Earl, Moe,” she goes on in a pitiless, dry voice, surprised that she even cares. “Axe, Derek…”
Emerson frowns. “Naah. Skinheads are a bunch of jackasses — I’m not into that.”
Her laugh is bright. “Well duh that’s kind of exactly what you look like with your head all shaved — those guys in their stupid wife-beaters and tats and piercings and shit. Like a bunch of Hitler Youth assholes.”
He laughs too. “Heil. Right, heil.”
“You do!”
“Yeah, Heil Hitler, man,” he whoops. Two sunburnt tourists slide their eyes in his direction as they pass; one old woman in a floral top and skirt gives him a bright, venomous stare, her face hard as a walnut. “Whoa!” Emerson sputters.
Felice cringes. She’d thought the old woman was going to spit at them. “Why don’t you shut the fuck up, man?” she snaps.
He quiets then, his smile diminished, and shrugs.
“I don’t know if you’re stupid or crazy or whatever you are.”
“Both maybe. I’m whatever,” he says lightly, but his head is ducked.
“Such stupid shit. Stupid fucking-ass thing to say. What are you, twelve years old?”
He doesn’t say anything. She wonders then if she should be more cautious: something comes back to her — something about Emerson being “away.” It occurs to Felice that Emerson was frequently absent from the Green House. Whenever he reappeared, the other skinheads made remarks about him escaping, escaping that place.
They cross the wide busy mess of Seventeenth Street, scrolls of driveways and entrances, pass girls in platform espadrilles, baby doll shirts, shirtless boys with cargo shorts like Emerson’s hanging loose around their hips; a couple pushing toddlers in a wide stroller; two ladies with big, ridged breast implants, Botox-sleek foreheads. Felice studies the women critically as they approach — one looks like she’s had a face-lift, a faintly demonic rise to the outer corners of the eyebrows; both of them are wearing halters and kick-pleat miniskirts; one has a quilted Chanel purse on a chain sinking into her shoulder. They cast intent glances at Felice as they pass and Felice looks away. Youth beats money.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Emerson says as they pass another clutch of tourists; a squat boy goes by on a skateboard wearing a T-shirt that says Lost in Margaritaville and nods at Felice, noticing her board. “Really. I’m not a skinhead. I’m not like that. I’m not a Hitler-guy or anything. I guess some of those guys might be, but they’re morons. I was just goofing around.” His voice lowers. “Stupid.”
“Fine,” Felice pulls the wind-pasted hair from her face. “Get a grip.”
They cross Lincoln Road where Felice recalls — swift drop — she’s supposed to meet her mother today. Fuck. Felice had called her, hadn’t she? What time was that supposed to happen? Noon? She tries to make out the time on a neon clock in one of the shopwindows, but it’s in the shape of a flamingo, impossible to read. They cross Sixteenth and almost get hit by a stretch jeep pulling into Lowe’s; a gang of teenyboppers standing in a Bentley convertible shriek at them, their voices like shredded ribbons. “I so hate this place,” Emerson says.
“It’s fun,” Felice says defensively. She shields her eyes, then relents: “It’s more fun if you don’t live here.”
He glances at her. “Yeah.”
They head back to the smooth brick boardwalk, cutting between hotels, the white cabanas and silver bellhop carts, past cheap jewelry vendors, soap bubbles spiriting over the walkway, to their right, sprinklings of salsa music, oiled bodies on massage tables. Prisms hang in a silvery mist from the hotel fountains. To their left, walls of jasmine and sea grape trees, the beach perimeter plumed and swaying with sawgrass and sea oats. They turn into the Fifteenth Street entrance, set off by keystone pillars, white ropes protecting the sparse patches of sea grass. In the distance, beyond the royal palms, blue umbrellas and awnings flap in the breeze; the sand is already scorching. She can feel it kicking up under her flip-flops. There are kids sprawled on towels all over the sand, listening to radios, drinking beer; a Frisbee arcs through the pale blue.
Turning north toward the Cove, they run into Reynaldo and Berry. They’re lying in a drifting spot of shade under a stand of palms, stretched out on smuggled hotel beach towels, a gold interlocked DH embroidered on the edge. Both of them are so diminutive, with the same blue-black eyes, they look like brother and sister. Sometimes they get hired to do gigs together — they did a series of TV commercials in Spanish for a local car dealer and Reynaldo had to teach Berry how to pronounce everything so she sounded like an authentic chica, not a Jewish girl from Rutherford. They probably spent most of the night there after the beach patrol slacked off. Berry gazes at them languidly, her hair spilling past her shoulders to her elbows. Scents of coconut and apricot drift over from one of the hotel spas. She props herself up on the towel, knobby legs glistening with oil. “Babe,” she says, “what’s going on?”
Reynaldo is yawning hugely; he shakes back his long black hair, catches it up in one hand, finger-combing. “Felix, you should’ve gone with us last night. You’ll never believe — we went to Tantra. Guess who was there. Calvin Klein. He looks like he’s made out of wax. Didn’t he?” He looks at Berry, who lies back on the towel and nods. “Just a teeny white man made of wax. He had slave boys with him. He took us to the Raleigh, then he wanted to go on his yucky boat.” He gives a horrified shudder. “Eugghh!”
Berry smiles again, eyes closed. “I don’t mind boats.”
“I do.” Reynaldo finally seems to notice Emerson. He looks at Felice. “Miss Kitty Cat, what’s going on? Where’d you get this big nasty thing?”
Emerson stares over Reynaldo’s head.
“That’s not nice,” Berry says placidly.
“I’m not a nice boy. I don’t care.”
Felice and Berry are narrow enough to share the board and Reynaldo and Emerson take the towels. Reynaldo produces a thick, half-smoked joint from his pocket, along with a silver lighter. He flicks it open and lights the joint, dragging delicately, then hands it to Felice. She tokes the earthy, grassy smoke, looks up through her exhale to watch a series of tourists filter onto the beach holding Starbucks cups like ritual offerings. A row of frat boys with beat-up surfboards. A young woman with a fat pug on a studded leash. The pug genuflects in the beach grass while the girl checks her cell phone: they stroll away, leaving the glistening droppings. Four girls come down the walkway as far as the line of sand, then stop. They are groomed and painted, hair ironed to surgical linearity, brows waxed clean. Not especially pretty, just beautifully kept. College girls, Felice thinks scornfully. She gazes after them.