The Beach

A man discovers he has robbed a bank

In my beginning is my end.

I was struck by a sense of otherness that was familiar from dreams but that had never before remained with me after waking.

I awoke on a beach with my head playing catch with the incoming waves. I could smell the salt and hear distant gulls. The sky above me was filled with clouds, which looked like passing ships heading to a distant shore. I sat up and noticed a gun lying in the sand next to me, and a wooden canoe beached on the shore not twenty feet away. There was a small scuttling crab, that I felt was me, scraping, hitching, and humping himself along the shoreline. But what had happened? Why was I here?

As I staggered to my feet, my legs like rubber bands, I grabbed the gun out of instinct and went to investigate the canoe. A bulging black satchel sat in the aft of the boat. The sunlight was completely orange now, a burnt orange, no yellow at all, and the high, scattered clouds had now been transformed from white sailing ships into gold and scarlet galleons. Soon, they would turn bloody red. Where was I?

I could not twist free of the dread in which I found myself tangled. My heart sped up, and I began to feel as if my ribs had become a vise that was squeezing my organs. I shoved the gun into my waistband and wiped my face with my hands, pulling off the cobwebs. Nothing.

Maybe the bag could explain what I was doing here. Stepping inside the canoe, I grabbed the satchel. It was heavy. Unzipping it revealed a huge pile of banded one-hundred-dollar bills, and a single daisy resting on the very top.

Memory came rushing back like a massive rock coming down in slow fall; you run and you run...but you can't get out from under it.

I had robbed a bank.

I was with Daisy when it happened, whom I had loved like a sister since childhood. We planned to hit the Key Bank in Seattle, then make our getaway by boat to one of the deserted islands just off the coast. It was a good plan considering there was no hitch, but life always seems to throw a monkey wrench.

Daisy went inside while I drove the getaway car. She was beautiful, and we figured she would never be suspected of an armed robbery and would surprise the bank tellers with her innocent looks. But the next thing I knew, she came running out of the bank with the satchel while being chased by an armed guard. She opened the back door and threw the bag in the backseat. The guard fired his gun.

Daisy caught the bullet in her left eye and went down, so I just stepped on the gas and was out of there before what just happened had even registered in my mind. As I strangled the steering wheel, I headed for the dock where our boat was moored. What I didn't realize was that during the night, unpredicted, the largest storm front ever recorded had formed at sea with impossible speed.

Six hours earlier, before my arrival, a marine research ship had witnessed the sudden birth of a spectacular waterspout. The twister spun down from a clouded mass about three miles off the ship's starboard flank, and grew with astonishing rapidity until the funnel point, sucking at the ocean, broadened to an estimated six hundred meters, more that a third of a mile. A scientist aboard the ship estimated that the tornado-like form measured three miles in diameter, where the highest point of the vertical updraft disappeared into the black clouds.

Behind me were the flashing bubblegum lights of the police. The chase was on.

I weaved in and out of backstreets until I came to a large public park. Exiting my car and grabbing the cash bag, I ran through the trees until I came upon a Boy Scout camp. There were canoes at the water's edge, and I boarded one, almost tipping it, and started paddling for all I was worth. I got about a mile from shore when the storm hit.

The raging storm nearly capsized me. Great claws of lightning tore at the ocean, and it was as if the sea, rocked with anger and pain, let the lightning slash at its great dark hide. The ocean thrashed and heaved in its death throes, and then I fell overboard.

I tried to keep my head above water, but it felt like my head was beneath the surface more than above. I remember swimming, treading water, and then waking up here on the shore.

That's all I remember.

Unable to press from my mind the image of Daisy getting shot, I paddled out from shore in the canoe and headed for the mainland. Although now incredibly rich, I no longer had a desire for wealth. I figured I would just turn myself in to the authorities and spend the rest of my days behind bars, remembering Daisy and how we used to play together as kids. Life always has a way of thwarting your dreams and showing you what is really important. Now my dreams would be filled with my childhood friend and the collapse of the perfect bank robbery. There's no other way of it, but the sight of a huge tidal wave heading in my direction made me realize that not everything goes as you have planned.

I stopped paddling and sat still in the canoe, twirling the stem of the daisy between my thumb and index finger as the approaching mountain of a wave blocked out the sky.

In my beginning is my end.

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