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Show Blue Run/22 Renee drifts. She goes to her brother and the big table overflowing with gifts wrapped in surfboard print paper. Everybody wears a bikini or tank top. A boatload are buzzed already, a couple flying these big careening kites into neighboring cabana roofs and the beach between dune grass and surf. Bet's a born again, right-wing, ex-college-surfer girl, shrimper, army corps of engineer dope-smoker who loves to fight and talk Jesus. She's got that glint in her eyes. She once argued a man to death. At a family reunion, she just kept at him till the poor bastard had a heart attack and died on the sand She sips Corona-mas fina cerveza-flashes teeth at me, and talks to Anti-girl, the Republican groupie FIT secretary whose managed to get her claws into one of Rocky's Marine Biologist Engineer buddies. A looker, now she's with a pharmaceutical company, in charge of wining and dining doctors, pitching all the new anti-depressants, so she calls herself the Anti-girl, matches mini-skirts to her dirt-colored eyes, only now she's pregnant and looks real sick. I have the urge to walk out past the second sand bar, out to the weedline and beyond, get swallowed by sea and shark, let the rip tumble me where it will. The smell of cooked fat pours over us. I now know I'll die now. Hell, maybe Lara'll take the call after midnight, isn't that how it happens? The phone rings in the dark. Laughter on the answering machine's breath. I've read that everything that humans find funny-especially ducks and predicaments involving the number three or K sounds or anything resembling the sound of a fart-arises from the knowledge that we will die. The famously fat poet writes about how the undertaker sewed bits of plastic into his mother's gums, so she grinned at you from her casket During the viewing everybody could tell that she was happy with Jesus and holy ghost in heaven. The one authentic, redneck here, a Jacksonville native in yellow Bermuda shorts, hands me a |