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hundred yards down the beach yelled “Dumb shit!” at him, but he swam past the rip and beyond. He swam out perhaps five hundred yards before the juices started draining.
    The undertow was much stronger than he’d thought, and the sun was dropping fast. Winnie treaded water and looked toward the sunset, knowing that before he swam much farther against this tide, the fireball would melt into the sea.
    He began stroking desperately. As a young lifeguard, he had patrolled this beach, notching his jeep with esoteric little rabbits to record the heads (tails actually) of all the surf bunnies he’d collected. But this was no time for surf bunnies. Winnie Farlowe was in trouble!
    Too macho to call for help from the teenage surfers who straddled their boards less than a hundred yards away, he continued to stroke. He couldn’t bring himself to do it, not an ex-lifeguard/marine/policeman. But at last he hollered: “Here!”
    Here? The surfers knew he was here. There, actually. There in the surf, churning back and forth in the undertow.
    Winnie finally screamed: “HELP ME!”
    The kid who paddled toward him, and towed him from the skeg of his board, was wearing a wet suit with a yellow stripe. The kid was blond, of course, about sixteen years old. He bitched about missing some rad tubes and said that old dorks shouldn’t be anywhere near a rip, even a baby rip. That was the gist of the conversation, as much as Winnie could understand, in that he was gagging on the last rad tube that whacked him in the back of the skull while the kid’s powerful strokes dragged him through the foam.
    When Winnie’s feet touched sand and he turned to thank the surfer, the kid was already submarining through the nearest breaker, heading back toward the school of others lying still on the blue-black ocean, awaiting nirvana. The Perfect Wave.
    A violent coughing fit struck Winnie when he reached the back stairs leading up to his apartment. By the time he got inside, he was shivering and queasy, tasting brine from his mouth to his belly. A cold beer made him feel better. A shot of Polish vodka helped even more. Another beer and Winnie was half-convinced he could’ve managed just fine without that little son of a bitch. He might even go for a swim tomorrow, rips or no rips, just to prove a thing or two. After all, a former lifeguard never really loses it.
    By eight o’clock, Winnie had devoured a pot of clams at Digger’s Hot Pot, where he “dined” four nights a week. By 8:10 he entered Spoon’s Landing ready to tell everybody how he’d toughed it out in court. How the hanging judge just had to watch helplessly as Winnie slid out of his clutches, like an eel through a gill net.
    He found Spoon glaring at Bilge O’Toole, who was racing his turtle, Irma, across the bar against one owned by a commercial fisherman they called Carlos Tuna, a turtle wrangler who amazed Gold Coast millionaires with the outrageous story that his turtle, Regis, was one hundred years old.
    Bilge O’Toole was already weepy drunk, which was as predictable as investment swindles around these parts, and Spoon was telling him he should take his Irma and go on home. Five young off-duty cops were shooting snooker in the adjoining room, and bitching about the yesteryear music on the jukebox.
    At the other end of the bar, Guppy Stover was sighing mournfully, but everyone ignored her. They knew that to say “What’s the matter?” would get them gaffed for half an hour, during which they’d hear about the U.S. Navy boatswain’s mate who wooed her but left her on the beach when he found a Waikiki grass widow on a refueling stop during his last cruise. Which was in 1945, but seemed like yesterday to Guppy, who still wore her mass of gray hair in the W.W. II, Andrews Sisters shoulder-length style.
    There were about four or five others at the bar, three of them strangers to Winnie, everybody looking