Beach Water Bingo
It had been one of those near-perfect vacation days when all the children were getting along so well that they could have been mistaken for someone else’s offspring. The girls, Sarah and Laura, ages fourteen and thirteen, respectively, hadn’t once shouted the “B-word” at each other or shoved six-year-old Ryan for the pleasure of testing his reflexes. In other words, it was a good day at the beach. Sanibel Island, Florida, to be specific.
Laura had been buried to her neck in sugar-white sand, after which the other two kids had granted her most ardent wish. They’d fashioned for her a pair of sand boobs. Though her real ones hadn’t yet arrived, Ryan and Sarah had molded a set of double-Ds using Ryan’s beach pail and Sarah’s vivid imagination. Now Laura looked like a Dolly Parton sand sculpture.
I snapped a picture before insisting the two artists perform a double mastectomy.
Freeing herself from her entombment, Laura left to rinse in the sea. Ryan followed her into the shallows, where he let the waves knock him backward—again, and again, and again.
Acting on information she’d received from an overzealous health teacher, Sarah slathered on her twentieth sunscreen application of the day. She pulled on a T-shirt and adjusted her fishing cap, lest a mutant freckle fall exposed to direct radiation and leave her permanently disfigured before she’d even learned to drive.
Jim and I leaned back on our elbows, sharing an oversized beach towel. If family bonding got any better than this, we’d never experienced it. Well, other than the day we’d first announced we were going to Disney World. That had been a swell time, too, until we’d interpreted further for the children. “We’ll all be riding three thousand miles together in a mini-van,” I’d explained, “without a television.”
So there we were, having spent the previous few days with Disney characters and anxious crowds, de-stressing and enjoying a leisurely afternoon on Sanibel Island.
I gazed at a few beachcombers as they strode by, a half-dozen seagulls skittering ahead of them. Then I noticed my son swallowing what could have been a liter of salt water as he laughed and screamed in the surf. From all appearances, he was taking in the ocean a cupful at a time. “Close your mouth,” I called to Ryan. But he couldn’t hear me for the sound of the waves.
“We probably ought to leave soon,” I said to Jim. The drive back to our vacation condo would take more than an hour to complete. It was time to wrap up.
“Yeah, I suppose so,” he agreed. Jim nodded at Ryan. “I bet he sleeps well tonight.”
Together, we repacked our cooler and gathered our belongings: six bottles of suntan lotion, a Tupperware container filled with shells (which we’d later come to regret), and the boob-maker bucket.
Evidencing their unconcern for cloth car seats, the children pulled their clothes on over their still-wet suits. Well, all but Sarah. She’d never entered the ocean because she didn’t dare rinse off her SPF-50 protection and, besides, seawater contains microbes.
I folded a couple of dry towels and laid them on the van’s back seat where Laura and Ryan were about to situate themselves. Sarah claimed the middle space so she could bi-directionally exercise her elder authority.
The outside air, coupled with the humidity, remained stifling. I kicked on the van’s A/C and twisted the vents. “Can y’all feel that back there?”
“Yes,” the two girls said in unison.
Already half asleep, Ryan responded with only an eyelid flutter.
We’d driven a few miles before I caught a whiff of something foul, a stink that might have been one of Jim’s “pressure releases” or maybe a stowaway lump of dog doo.
I sniffed. “Do you smell something?”
Jim drew in a long breath. “Yeah, what is that?” He looked at me as if I might be the perp. “It smells like dog poop.”
I spun to face the other three. “Did somebody fart?”
No one admitted cutting an “SBD” (silent but deadly). No one ever did.
We continued in silence.
But within the next mile, the stench became too potent to ignore.
“Okay, that’s it,” I announced. “Everybody check your shoes. Somebody must have stepped in something.” I glanced at my flip-flops. “It wasn’t me, either.”
“I’m not wearing any shoes,” Laura protested, “so it can’t be me.”
Sarah scowled and adjusted her headphones. She’d be the last one of us to accidentally track through a germ-infested pile of dung. And if she ever did step in anything that disgusting, she’d probably insist on immediate treatment from the nearest HazMat responder.
Ryan came to life but said nothing. We locked eyes before he finally cried, “It wasn’t me!”
I turned around and shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said to Jim.
“Look, somebody better figure out where that smell is coming from,” he insisted.
Our vehicle reeked like a railroad cattle car. Jim rolled down the driver’s side window to let in some fresh air, but the heat only made the stench stronger. It couldn’t have smelled worse if we’d been locked inside a fertilizer factory with ten tons of fresh cow pies.
Again I looked back at Ryan. I’d try my sweet approach, this time. “Hon, do you need to go to the bathroom? It’s okay if you do. Just tell us and we’ll stop.”
“Noooo,” he whined. “I don’t have to go.”
Jim spotted a city park entrance and whipped in. “We’re all getting out and getting to the bottom of this.”
The van rolled to a stop in front of the park restroom facilities.
“But I don’t have to go,” Ryan insisted.
Exiting the driver’s seat, Jim ordered everyone out of the car. His patience tested, he pulled open Ryan’s passenger door and coaxed free our youngest suspect.
“Oh. My. God!” Jim exclaimed, staring at the bench seat before him. He gave out a choking gasp, bent his head, and covered his nose with the crook of his elbow.
Bingo!
Having suddenly gained superpowers, Sarah bounded over Laura and landed feet first on the opposite side of Sanibel Island. Really, it was the other side of the van—but she’d likely attempted far greater distance.
Laura jumped from the car and fell backward, shrieking. “Ahhhhhh, Ry-an!” she squealed. “How could you DO that and not say anything?”
The towel upon which Ryan had been sitting had failed its absorbency test. Now that he was standing, I could see a river of gastric gravy oozing from his swimsuit.
“I didn’t mean to,” Ryan whimpered, and then he began to cry.
I wanted to console my son, but to do that I needed first to stop retching.
Jim led Ryan into the men’s room, and I was left to imagine the fun that followed—and to appreciate the benefits of my hyperactive gag reflexes.
Twenty minutes later, my valiant and newly shirtless hero returned to the van. He carried Ryan, who’d been draped in what looked like an oversized child’s nightgown. Jim had ditched Ryan’s swim trunks and cloaked the boy in a man-sized T-shirt that read “Never fart and sneeze at the same time.”
A more appropriate slogan might have been, “Never drink saltwater and fart in the same afternoon.”
~