It was popular to complain about the tourists and so Vance decided to take the opposite approach. He embraced the tourists. He waved to people in the long lines outside the Juice Bar and the Brotherhood, he gave directions to a family on bicycles-the man turning his map every which way, while the mother, with a baby jammed in a booster seat on the back of her Schwinn and three kids behind her, said, “Honey, why don’t you just ask someone if we’re headed toward a beach? Here, ask this nice man.” Tourists, to Vance, meant one thing: money. Vance had been raking in sweet tips from the hotel guests, especially since Jem was constantly screwing up, making Vance look good.
June 21, summer solstice, was also the day the Beach Club opened. This meant that a hundred Beach Club members would now be crawling over the property like ants on a picnic. The members wanted their specific umbrella in their specific spot on the beach. Some members had been sitting in the same spot for forty or fifty years. (Vance did the math: if a person came to the Beach Club four times a week and stayed for six hours a day during the ten weeks of summer over fifty years that meant they had spent twelve thousand hours sitting in the same place.)
One of the good things about the Beach Club opening was that Vance had two more lackeys to boss around. Mack hired beach boys named Kevin and Bruce who looked just like all the other beach boys Vance had seen over the years-pimply, sarcastic prep school kids who somehow lucked into the cushiest job on the island. That morning, Vance wanted to scare the kids so they would not only respect him but shudder a little when they saw him coming. They waited in front of the lobby at eight o’clock sharp, a good sign. Vance parked his Datsun 300ZX, and the two boys looked it over appreciatively, another good sign. As he stepped out of the car, they nervously eyed his shaved head. Excellent. Vance bit his tongue to keep himself from grinning.
“You the beach boys?” he asked.
“Man, could you call us something else?” the taller, skinnier kid asked. “I don’t want to be associated with some washed-up sixties band.” This kid wore a South Carolina Cocks hat, another popular item at the bars this summer. With a lightning-quick motion, Vance hit the bill of the cap and flipped it off the boy’s head. The boy flinched and stepped back; his hair was matted as though he hadn’t even run a comb through it that morning.
“Are you Kevin or Bruce?” Vance asked.
“Bruce.”
“Bruce, let me tell you something. Beach boys have been called beach boys since the Club opened in 1924. And guess what, buddy? We’re not changing it for you. Got that?”
Bruce bent down to pick up his hat while Kevin, who was chubbier with more pimples, stared wide-eyed at Vance. They were off to a good start.
Vance took the boys past Lacey Gardner’s cottage to the umbrella room.
“These are the beach umbrellas,” he said. “They cost a hundred sixteen dollars apiece. If you break an umbrella because you’re negligent, you get docked that much plus the amount it costs to ship these babies back to the south of France where they were made.” This wasn’t true but Vance found that saying this led to fewer broken umbrellas. “The umbrellas come in kelly green, royal blue, and canary yellow. Sometimes members want a certain color. You’re going to have to memorize who those people are and their umbrella color. I’m not taking any crap from a pissed-off member because they got royal instead of canary. Capiche?”
Kevin picked at his chin. “How will we know which ones?”
“I’ll teach you,” Vance said. He hefted seven umbrellas onto his shoulder. “Follow me.”
The sun was out and already hot. Vance raised his face. He’d picked up some kind of crazy sun addiction in Thailand; he couldn’t get enough of it. But practically speaking, a warm, sunny summer solstice was bad news. The Beach Club would be packed, and because the beach boys were brand-new that meant Vance would have to set up all one-hundred umbrellas by himself.
“Now,” Vance said, “this is how you set up an umbrella. Watch carefully.” He held up the spike, as long as a Louisville Slugger. “This is the bottom of the umbrella, the part that gets driven into the sand. It’s sharp, as you can see, and for this reason you have to make sure you drive it deep. I don’t want to tell you about umbrellas I’ve seen that got loose in the wind because some beach boy did a half-ass plant job. Can you imagine catching this spike in the face?” He lowered his voice. “Or the balls?”
Bruce curled his lip, Kevin looked like he was about to lose his breakfast. Vance bit his tongue again. Then he raised the spike in his arms and blasted it into the sand.
“Pretend the sand is your ex-girlfriend,” he said. “Or hell, pretend it’s me.” Plenty of times, Vance imagined the sand was Mack. “Then wag the spike back and forth until it goes even deeper. When you feel there’s no possibility of it getting loose even in gale force winds, pack sand around it like this. Then you’re ready to put up an umbrella.” Vance slid the umbrella pole over the spike and locked it in. He opened the umbrella triumphantly; it bloomed like a big royal blue flower. “There,” Vance said. “That’s how it’s done.”
“Not bad for a bellman,” a voice said.
Mack walked toward them through the sand. Not bad for a bellman? What the hell kind of comment was that? All of Vance’s good work at getting these Romper Roomers to respect him was down the drain with that remark.
Mack shook hands with the two kids and then he put his arm around Vance’s shoulders. Vance tensed, like Mack’s arm was one of the cobras he’d seen at the Snake Farm in Bangkok.
“Vance was a beach boy himself once upon a time,” Mack said. “So maybe someday you too will be a bellman.”
Bruce scoffed. Vance wanted to flip the kid’s hat off again and make him eat it. Vance had half a mind to quit right then and there, and as long as he was at it, he might as well beat Mack to a pulp in front of these two clowns. If the money weren’t so damn good, he would do it.
Vance picked up another spike. He threw it to Bruce, point first. “Here,” Vance said. “You try.”
Bruce lifted the spike the way Vance had done and brought it down with an “Ooomph!” The spike grazed the sand and shot between Bruce’s legs, like he was hiking a football. Kevin giggled.
“Unbelievable,” Vance said.
Mack clapped Vance on the back. “Keep up the good work, Professor,” he said. “By the way, there’s a twelve-knot west-southwest wind.”
Vance thought briefly about how sweet it would be to set all the umbrellas facing east northeast just so he could watch them pop out of the ground and fly down the beach. He thought of the Beach Club members lying impaled and bloody in the sand. But why should he punish the members when the person he was after was Mack? Vance crunched two Rolaids between his teeth. Then he picked up the spike and tossed it to Bruce.