“We’ll get you, motherfucker!” the mouthpiece said when he and his crew were at a safe distance, pointing at me with a look of fury on his rat face.

“Thanks, guys, you saved me,” I said to the lifters.

“Anytime, bro,” Humongo said. “I don’t like those guys, anyway. Thur always causing trouble around here.”

“Nice moves,” the other one said, giving me a thick-necked nod of approval before rocking back into the weight pen.

I looked around for Mary and saw her standing by a palm tree at the edge of the sand with her hand over her mouth. Her eyes were wide.

“You okay?” I said, walking toward her.

“Yeah,” she said, coming to meet me. “Man! You really laid that guy out!”

“Just a lucky punch,” I said, playing it to the hilt.

“I don’t think so,” she said, looping her arm through mine and walking close beside me as we continued south. Most girls like guys who will fight for their honor, especially when they win, and it felt intimate again between us. But I knew Baba was still lurking in the background, exerting his mystic gravity on the girl.

Ahead of us to our right, a crowd was gathered on the beach, facing a man standing on a temporary stage who was speaking into a microphone. The crowd’s back was to the ocean, the speaker’s to the boardwalk. As we came closer, the sound of his amplified voice clarified into words.

“… lose essential housing and see rents on what’s left go through the roof. It will change our neighborhood so completely that we won’t recognize it anymore. And for what? So a corrupt city councilman and some greedy out-of-town developers can make a killing and rich people can have another fancy hotel to stay at on the weekend? There are plenty of fancy hotels, but not nearly enough affordable housing.”

The speaker was Walt, the artistic Baby Boomer from the ashram. This was the protest I’d read about in the paper. Clearly, Baba Raba’s role in the development was not known or the aging hippie would not have been doing karma yoga for him that morning.

“Hey, that’s Walt,” Mary said.

“Let’s hear what he has to say.”

I stopped beside a concrete wall that bordered the sand and half-leaned, half-sat on top of it with my feet wide enough apart for Mary to stand between my legs. When she leaned back against me, into my arms, I had one of those moments of supreme happiness that Vedanta offers, not just through the channel of meditation but through the aperture of love, a sense of true ananda, escape from the boundaries of both time and self. The feeling made me think of Kim Henner, my first girlfriend, who I was crazy about in fifth grade. I remembered the first time I held her and gave her a tentative kiss out behind the shed in her backyard. That was my earliest taste of the magic that can be in the union of male and female. I had not thought about that moment in many years, but it turned out I had not forgotten it, either.

When I wrapped my arms around Mary, pulling her closer, she snuggled against me, pushing her buttocks into my groin. A dizzy wave of desire washed through me as all the blood in my body rushed to the spot. It felt like my genitals were about to explode. Her sensitive ass felt the change and she turned her head to look back at me over her shoulder, smiling.

“Easy, big boy,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said. “Can’t help it.”

“It’s okay,” she said, shifting her butt slightly from side to side, rubbing it against me. “I like to know a guy has a strong drive.”

“… tax breaks that make it a bad deal for the city, any way you add it up,” Walt was saying as I tuned back in to his exhortation. “The city council is in their pocket. If we don’t organize to stop this, we are going to lose our shops, our homes, and our way of life. Do you want that?”

“No! No! Fuck them! Boo!” the crowd shouted. There were at least a hundred angry people standing in front of the stage, all of them potential opponents of Baba if his role in the resort deal should happen to somehow mysteriously leak out.

One particularly booming boo caught my attention and I looked over to see Budge standing at the edge of the boardwalk. He was wearing his AWOL shirt and carrying a Rite Aid bag.

As Walt resumed his speech, Budge turned away from the platform and saw me. We exchanged a nod and he trudged over.

“Hey, Rob,” he said. He looked hungover.

“Hi, Budge. What’s going on here?”

“They’re trying to fuck up the surfing, same as always,” he said. “Build a big hotel with a marina. Walt’s trying to stop it.”

“How did last night turn out?” I asked him.

He shook his head mournfully. “It got purty drunk out.”

“Your girlfriend spend the night?”

“Was I with a girl?”

“Yes,” I laughed.

“She musta gone home. Who’s this?” His bloodshot eyes had been darting quick looks at Mary while we talked, starting with her ankles and working up to her alert face.

“This is Mary,” I said. “Mary, this is Budge.”

“Hullo, Mary,” he said.

“What are you AWOL from?” she asked.

“It don’t mean ‘absent without leave,’” he said. “Means ‘always west of Lincoln.’ Lot of us down here don’t like to go too far from the shore. Everything we need is right here.”

“Really?” I said. “You don’t go past Lincoln?” That busy avenue was only eight or nine blocks inland. The ashram was just within that boundary.

Budge shrugged. “I might go as far as the 405 a couple of times a year, but that’s about it, bro. There ain’t no point. Everyone in the world wants to come here, and we’re already here.”

Mary saw a girl she knew passing by and went over to say hello. Budge watched her going.

“Damn, Rob,” he said. “Where’d you snag that little hottie? I thought Reggie was the ladies’ man.”

“I get lucky every once in a while,” I said. “What’s in the bag?”

He closed his eyes and shook his head, holding his free hand over his abdomen. “Laxative,” he said.

“Problems?”

He nodded very slightly, like a headwaiter acknowledging a bribe. “I ain’t shit in three days,” he whispered.

When Mary came back, she had Ozone Pacific with her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“Look who I found,” Mary said, putting her hand on Oz’s shoulder.

“Hey, little buddy,” Budge said, exchanging his constipated grimace for an affectionate grin. “What you up to today?”

“Hi, Budge. Hi, Rob,” Oz said, giving us his trademark smile. “I was thinking about taking a bus out to the country today to visit a farm or something. Do they have farms like that, Rob? Where you can see cows and horses and stuff and ride on a tractor?”

“They probably do,” I said. “I’ll find out for you. How’s everything else going?”

“Great,” he said. “It’s a bee-you-tee-full day at the beach!”

“I see you’ve been hanging with Mr. Parker,” I said.

Oz nodded happily. The old parking lot attendant sometimes bought the boy dinner after he knocked off for the day. I had seen the two of them sitting at the counter where Mary and I had Cokes, Ozone devouring a hamburger and french fries while Mr. Parker explained the finer points of backing big cars into tight places and removing scratches with rubbing compound.

“Where’d you get those cock boots?” Budge asked Oz. The boy’s ragged tennis shoes had been supplanted by a pair of brown cowboy boots with black stitching. They were a little bit run-down at the heels but still in good shape overall. The color matched the brown of his two-tone cowboy shirt.

“Mr. Parker gave them to me,” Oz said. “They were his grandson’s but he got too big for them. He’s a six-footer.”

“They’re really nice,” Mary said. “Those are just what you’ll need for a trip to the country.” Then, in a gentler voice, she asked: “Did your mom ever show up?”

The smile fell from Oz’s face, leaving it looking haggard and aged, like the face of a famine victim.