Shit, woman.

I don’t say this. I get up and stumble to the toilet. How sad is it for a man to look forward so much to his morning piss? When that relief may be as good as his day will get? But it’s such a good feeling. It could have gone another way. God could have made a world where good things feel bad. Pissing, eating, banging. Maybe he would have been doing us a service.

I bike Mayfair to work. I’m hungover as usual from liming at Paulette’s last night. My bike is old and rusted and squeaks with every pedal. When cars pass, they stir up the dust and leave me in it, and I hold my breath until it settles. But this hour, the streets are mostly quiet. The only sounds are roosters and women sweeping and cartoons inside houses. I feel myself on the bike, a big thing on a little thing. I’m of two minds on this ride, always. It’s a mortification, but so peaceful. When I set out, as long as I’m not running too late, the sky is still smoky blue, like something far away. As I ride, it turns the color of an oyster shell. The breeze still possesses some coolness. Dogs wake. The skinny black hound with the white belly trots alongside me sometimes. Early morning feels like church, when I did go.

When I pass Arthur’s father’s store I’m close. I ride past the gas station on George Street where Keithley used to work, past the three-legged goat tied to a post in Daphne Nelsen’s yard, past the clinic where the antimen go when they’re deading. Past Prosser’s School Uniforms—pink for Horatio Byrd, yellow for All Saints, blue for Sir Northcote. Past the scrub that leads to the nameless cliffs. Past the house where my father was born. It’s abandoned now. The roof is more sky than galvanized. Chickens roost there. I crest a hill and the ocean appears, a color nobody can describe. Damien once told me science says mankind came up in the sea—we started as lizards with fur or some shit. It’s only recent we left the sea for land. Maybe that’s why the sea feels so, like a house in a dream you wish so badly to enter, but where’s the door?

Indigo Bay is the last resort on Mayfair Road. When I look at it, I see it twice at once: the white buildings and the clean sand, but also as it was when we were boys, with wild pomme-serette trees and needles and condoms in the seaweed and the antimen who loved this spot. With its stink and sand flies, nobody bothered they. Well, nobody but we.

Morning is morning. Edwin and me carry the lounge chairs out from the storage house and arrange them in a crescent, just so. Next, the chair cushions. I carry them four to a stack on my shoulder. Finally, the umbrellas. A bit later, the early birds arrive. By nine, the beach is crowded. Then it’s towel, bottled water, adjust umbrella, drag chair, fresh towel, fresh water, all morning long. Today, a man with dolphins on his swim trunks and a pretty Asian wifey orders a Red Stripe.

“Peace, mahn,” Edwin says when he sees the bottle on my tray. Edwin thinks it’s fucking daft how Yankees love to order Red Stripe here. But Jamaica’s not so far from here. I see their point. Later, Edwin will chat this daft fucking Yankee up to see what else he likes. Guests who order a drink in the morning often turn out to be good customers.

When I bring his drink, the man reaches in the pocket of his swim trunks, pulls out five dollars, and says, “Get yourself one, too.” He smiles.

“Thank you, sir,” I say. His smile goes flat. He wants me to make some chat, but chat is Edwin’s thing.

Midday, the girl’s daddy asks me where the locals eat. I’m glad he asks me and not Edwin. It pisses Edwin off when guests ask for recommendations for authentic island food. A few weeks ago we had a guest order only curry goat and conch creole for lunch all week.

“Fucking dolt,” Edwin said to me one day after he took the man’s order.

“Last week you say the same about the lady who only ate burgers and pizza. What would you like they to eat? How can they do right by you?” I thought I had him then.

He shrugged. “Maybe they can’t. What I care about it?”

“That sounds fair.” I rolled my eyes.

He snorted. “Gogo, man, you so soft it get you someday.”

When he takes break past the rocks at the edge of the beach I see she, gallivanting down the sand toward he.

THIS JOB’S not so bad. The Yankees who go to Papa Mango’s and stay at hotels near the Basin and shop in Hibiscus Harbour where the cruise ships dock act like they’re royalty because they bought some budget Caribbean cruise package. The guests here are so rich they can relax about it. They’re polite, mostly. The food trays are heavy, the chairs are heavy, the umbrellas are heavy, but that’s just usual job shit.

One thing I do mind. While I walk the beach, I feel the guests’ eyes on me. It’s like I’m onstage, but at the same time, the audience is not even interested in me. I feel so big under their gaze, like if I open my mouth I may swallow the world by accident and leave myself alone.

Everybody knows Yankees are fat, but at Indigo Bay, most of them are thin. All day they eat and drink and sleep like babies. I walk back and forth carrying trays heavy with they cheeseburgers, coconut shrimp, and conch fritters. Food so oily it shimmers. So how are they thin? It seems like someone somewhere just decided it.

Not all the guests are beautiful, but they all have a certain something. A wellness, maybe. Terrible things may happen to any person, rich or poor, white or brown, and I’m sure terrible things have happened to some of they, but they don’t appear so. They appear like they believe the universe loves them, and maybe it does.

A few guests are not so well maintained. At present, we have a fat woman with skin like cottage cheese and a Frenchie man with a hard round belly. They don’t cover up; they lie out like everybody else. When we’re waiting at the bar for our orders to be ready, Edwin says, “You check the belly on the old fucking Frenchie?” and puts a finger in he mouth like he’s gagging. I laugh. But when I’m not with him, laughing at they, it’s different. These fat, ugly people, almost naked under the sun—I’m amazed by they.

FLEET. I learned this word from Jan, the old Dutchie we used to lime with when we ditched school. One day when Edwin and me were walking to Paulette’s, it started to pour. Edwin took off he shoes and sprinted through the rain and I followed behind, panting all the way. When we arrived inside, all soaked through, our school polos stuck to we, Jan said, “Edwin, how fleet you are!”

English was not Jan’s first language or he second; first came Dutch, then German, then French, then English, but he still knew this word I didn’t.

I never looked it up, but I have the idea of it. Fleet. A thing I’ll never be.

WE HAVE a customer. The man with the dolphin swim trunks. Edwin chats he up after volleyball one afternoon. Turns out his lawyer wifey needs to relax. This morning, after my daily highlight morning piss, I reach under my bed and pull out the lockbox. The combination is Bryan’s birthday. First, so I don’t forget it. Second, to remind me I do this under under business for he. When I open the box, the ganja scent rushes out. Gran must smell it, but she’s given up being up in my business. This is why the lockbox stays at my place. Edwin’s sisters are nosy as shit.

The lockbox is how I do my part. Edwin chats up potential customers. Edwin makes the sale. I keep the lockbox under my bed. We split the profits even. I weigh out ten grams. Most I put in one baggie. Enough for two spliffs, I put in another. This bag’s for we.

I wait in the car park, and when Edwin arrives I hand he the big baggie. In the afternoon, the man with the dolphin swim trunks has a rendezvous with Edwin by the tennis court. The wifey’s there, practicing she serve; she pauses in she little white skirt and watches. The man gives Edwin sixty dollars. Edwin gives me thirty.

Sundown is sundown. Insect coils with their sweet fake smell, last call, a posse of children chasing Edwin around the sand. Girls and boys tug at he legs and tickle he, and finally he lets them take him down. The girl’s pale little sister doesn’t join. She watches. Her finger turns and turns.

When the guests leave the beach we collect the towels, hundreds of they—damp and sandy and smelling of salt. We take down the umbrellas. We drag the chairs across the sand and stack them up. After a day trudging in the sand beneath the hot sun, we uniforms have the same strong, mothy smell as the boys’ P.E. changing room at Everett Lyle Secondary, full of sweaty plimsolls and pinnies. We change out of them and throw them in the bin for the wash lady. In the car park, we roll a spliff with the extra herb we skimmed from we sale.