Nothing can make Franco puke. Not ipecac, not salty coffee, not too much beer. Nothing.
          He spent thirty-seven days lost at sea a decade ago, and, since then, he says his stomach can handle anything.
Although it sounds like a made-up story, it’s actually true. I’ve seen the scars myself from where he cut strips of his leg-flesh into bait with a fish hook—just scraped them off the top of his thigh like a block of cheese. With those strips, he caught three sea bass and ate them raw. I’m not sure how much time without food it would take for me to be compelled to do something like that. For Franco, it was two weeks. When they found him, they asked him his name and how long he had been out there, but he couldn’t talk. He’d forgotten how. “It might sound weird,” he said once. “But there were times when I forgot what I was.”
          “Your name?” I asked.
          “No, my species,” he says, his eyes going wild as they sometimes do.
          You might think that such an experience would make a man unafraid of death, but, make no mistake, Franco is very scared of dying.

Tonight I’ve taken Franco out to the bar to meet women, as I think it could be good for him to get out more. “Look at all these girls,” I say after we’ve hidden in the corner for a bit. “Just talk to a few of them. Worst case, their vacation ends, they go back home next week, and you never have to see them again.”
          “Okay, okay, fine,” he says, throwing his hands up in the air. “Which ones?”
          “Them,” I say, scanning the room and finding two women in their late twenties, a blonde and a brunette, somewhere between my and Franco’s age.
          “They look nice,” he says, though he seems uncertain. We get up and approach them. They’re impressed when we tell them what we do for a living: coastal search and rescue. I’ve been doing it two years, Franco nine. In the summer, we are constantly out on the water with the jet skis or the motorboats to handle the crises that go beyond the shore. Broken motor. Tubing accident. Whatever needs doing.
          “So do you save lives?” the brunette asks. Her eyes pass over Franco’s body. He’s a handsome man, after all, tall and lean and even-featured, even if a little off his rocker sometimes.
          “Sure,” Franco says. “It’s not an everyday thing, but sometimes. The other day we had to pull in a couple of swimmers who got caught in a rip tide. They were really far out. It took us forever.”
          “It sounds like an important job,” the blonde says. “Saving people from blowing out to sea.”
          “You’re right,” I cut in. “Franco’s really good at it. He’s got some crazy stories.”
          “Like what?” one of them asks.
          “Okay, so, a few years ago, a bachelor party came through here and rented out a whole fleet of jet skis,” I say.                     “The groom somehow got separated from the group. It was two days before the wedding, and they lost him. And it was winter, right Franco? Total off-season, so no one was on duty.”
          The brunette looks at Franco. “Except you, right?”
          “He searched the whole cape by himself,” I say. “The whole fucking cape! On a jet ski. I couldn’t have done it.” I really mean that, too. Franco had told me this story a handful of times, sometimes in more detail: how his fingers were nearly frozen to the handlebars, how the wind was so strong it was blowing sea foam off the surface of the water. It was catching him in the face.
          “Well, did you find him?” the blonde asks. Franco looks at me like he expects me to finish the story, but I nod for him to go on. He’s good at this part.
          “Flat on his back, four miles out, frozen like a popsicle,” he recites. “The next day the bride called me from the hospital and thanked me for saving her dumbass fiance. Then she married him, right on time.”
          The girls smile. “That’s a nice story,” one of them says. “You must have been so scared.”
          “Maybe a little,” he says shyly.
          “No one else can do what he can do,” I say. Maybe it seems like I’m pushing too hard, but Franco’s a total catch—he just needs a nudge.
          There’s a moment of silence. I’m about to offer up some drinks and ask if they want to find a table, but Franco cuts me off.
          “Do you want to know the secret?” he asks the girls, leaning in. “No, never mind,” he says. “I shouldn’t.” He looks over at me as though I’m in on a joke, but I know that he is dead serious.
          “No, tell us,” the brunette says.
          “Okay, well, I’m swearing you to secrecy,” he says, holding out two pinkies for them to promise. “No one else knows about this.” The girls link their pinkies and swear. I meet his eye and shake my head quickly so the girls won’t see, but he doesn’t stop.
          “Are you sure?” I ask. “We’ve only just met.”
          “So you know the deal with the gods, right?” he says. “In the sea.”
          “Like Atlantis? King Triton?” the blonde says. They laugh.
          “No,” he says. “Gods. There are five of them. I discovered them myself.”
          The smiles fade from their faces. “Really?” the brunette says, now concerned. “Are you joking?”
          “Yeah,” I say, hurriedly. “It’s just some old folklore.”
          “No, it’s not,” Franco says, shaking his head like I’ve disappointed him. “They speak to me. They have for ten years. I pray every day. Like this, see?” He clasps his hands together to demonstrate. “I pray to all five, and as long as I do this once in the morning and once at midday and once at night, everything will go smoothly. If I forget even once, there will be consequences.”
          “What do you mean, consequences?” one of them asks, half a whisper.
          “Oh, you know,” he says, like it’s obvious. “They’d take what they want.”
          “Huh,” the blonde says after a while. She shifts her weight from one leg to the other, then looks to her friend, who is watching Franco with a funny expression.
          “Everything okay?” Franco asks.
          “I have a headache coming on,” says the blonde, looking at her friend again. “Maybe we should go?”

“Man, they hated me,” he says in the car on the way home.
          “No, no,” I say. “I don’t think it had anything to do with us.”
          “It was going pretty well for a while there,” he says, deflating. “I guess it was too much, too soon.”
          “More of a third date conversation, maybe,” I suggest.
          “I wish I’d known that,” he says.
          Common knowledge to me, but Franco is a little funny. For a while, the search-and-rescue admin was dying to get rid of him. But no one knows the cape like he does, and they can’t deny that. “We’ll come out again tomorrow and try again.”
          But Franco is resolute. “No one is ever going to get it,” he says, and leans his head against the window.

Not two days later, Franco is proven wrong. We are in front of the search-and-rescue station, sitting in deck chairs, when a pretty redheaded woman approaches.
          “Are you two busy?” she asks.
          “Well, sort of,” I say. “We’re on call.” I look at Franco. His eyes are glued to her.
          “What can we help you with?” he asks.
          “My son and I need some help setting up our umbrella,” she says. “It keeps blowing away on us.”
          “The umbrella rental station is over there,” I say.
          “I can help with that,” Franco says shyly, getting to his feet. “Lead the way.”
          Franco follows her down the beach as though drawn by a magnet. I don’t know for the life of me what they could be talking about, but they’re chatting. Several times, she laughs. It doesn’t seem fake.
          He comes back a few minutes later. His eyes are shining. “She’s awesome,” he says.
          “What’s her name?”
          “Sheila.”
          “Pretty.”
          “Pretty?” he says. “More than pretty. Those legs ... man, she’s stunning.”
          “Did you mention the gods?” 
          “No,” he says. His brow furrows temporarily, then relaxes. “I learned my lesson. There is one thing, though.”
          “What?” I ask.
          “She’s married,” he says. “I saw the ring.” The sun passes behind a cloud, and the day turns a shade or two darker.
          “Oh no,” I say.
          “It’s okay,” he says, closing his eyes. “I just liked talking to her.”

The next day, Sheila appears on the beach again. Franco’s face lights up. “Do you think she’ll come over?” he asks.
          “She might,” I say. “Let’s just wait and see.” Sure enough, an hour or two later, Sheila approaches our station.
          “Do you want to come for a drink, Franco?” she asks.
          “Oh!” he says, his body lifting out of his chair as if pulled by a string. “I’d love to, but I’m on the clock.”
          “That’s fine,” I say. “I’ll call you over if something happens.”
          “Sure?”
          “Sure.”
          I watch as Franco walks across the beach with Sheila. He puts up the umbrella to shade them from the sun. Sheila hands Franco a frosty Mexican Coke from their beach cooler, and he opens it with the bottle opener on his keychain. They talk for over an hour. I watch her hand grazing his bare shoulder and her eyes passing over his chest. Could she be into Franco? I’m not always good at interpreting these things, but finally I tell myself yes, she could be.
          At one point, Sheila stands up and shades her eyes with her hand. “Christopher!” she calls up the beach.                           “Christopher?” Her tone becomes shrill and worried, and I can see Franco tense up even from a distance.
          Then: “Mom!”
          Franco jumps, startled. A little redheaded boy, maybe nine, is running up the beach with a hermit crab in hand. He brings it to Sheila, who shrinks away from it, relieved but pretending to be disgusted. The boy shows it to Franco, who puts the crab on his shoulder and lets it walk up and down his arm, impressing everyone.
          When he comes back, he is glowing. “She liked me,” he says. “I really think she did.”
          “That’s what it looked like from here.”
          “Well, maybe not,” Franco says. “She’s married.”
          “Either way, you’ve made a friend.”
          “Maybe.” 

After talking to Sheila, Franco falls asleep in the sunshine, and it’s okay because we get no calls; no one needs to be saved today. When he wakes up, however, the sun has started to dip over the horizon.
          “I forgot to pray!” he says, screeching. His voice echoes up and down the empty beach. “Midday! Why didn’t you wake me?”
          “I’m sorry!” I say. “I thought you could use the rest.”
          “Goddammit!” he yells, frantic, looking towards the spot where Sheila’s umbrella had been. “I should never have gone over there. Don’t you realize they’re coming for me now?”
          “No one is coming for you.”
          “Yes, they are,” he says, gesturing with both hands to the tide, which is rolling in fast. “They’re coming!”
          “That’s just the tide, Franco,” I say. “It’s got nothing to do with the gods.”
          “I’m going to pay for it,” he says. “You watch.”

That night I stick around Franco’s little shack longer than I usually do. He collapses on his cot and prays out loud.
          “I’m begging you,” he says to nobody, crying. “Forgive me, don’t take me. It was only once. Only once.”
          I go to grab a beer from the fridge and when I come back he’s sitting upright. His eyes are bloodshot and locked on me. “All right, Franco?” I ask, trying not to let him see how much he is frightening me. “Did you make everything okay with the gods?”
          “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know.”
          “Well, what are they saying?” I ask, my heart pounding.
          “Nothing,” he says, shaking his head. “Nothing at all.”

He wakes up calmer and in better spirits the next morning. He says his prayers, twice. He forces down a piece of toast and he helps me drag the deck chairs out to their normal position at the station. But all day he shifts in his seat, not taking his eyes off the horizon except when Sheila comes over and invites us for a sandwich.
          “Do you want to go?” I ask him. “I can stay here.”
          To my relief he agrees. I stay by the station, and once again, I watch. They make a handsome couple and the sky seems to open just for them. Today, when they sit down, Franco clasps his hands together and starts praying. Sheila watches him, baffled. I brace myself for an explosion. If she laughs, he’ll be crushed. Instead, she takes his hand and gestures for him to go on. Once again, he starts to murmur under his breath, now with a small smile across his face.

“She let me explain,” Franco says excitedly when he’s come to sit back down. “She even asked questions. No one ever does.” It makes me uneasy to see Franco grow so attached to someone who, by next week, will disappear into her normal life in a normal town far from the sea. But for now, maybe there’s no harm in letting him believe he’s found someone who accepts him for who he is. And the sea gods along with him.
          A few hours later, as the tide starts to come in, a tall man in brown sandals strides down the beach. Sheila’s son runs to him, kicking up a sandstorm, and the man scoops him up in his arms, spinning him in circles. He carries the boy over to the umbrella as though he weighs nothing. This is the husband, I imagine. Franco can’t take his eyes off them.
          As they leave the beach with their hands full of towels and sand toys, Sheila looks up at us. She waves at Franco and smiles, a big bright spot in the dark.
          I drive Franco back to his shack. It isn’t until we pull in the driveway that he finally speaks.
          “I’m going to be alone forever,” he says.
          “Well,” I say. “You’ll have me.”
          “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he mumbles. “You don’t count.”
          He goes to the little house. A little stung, I head down to the beach to clear my head. I dive in the water and swim freestyle out from the shore without taking a breath. When I pop up, I’m above a massive patch of blackened seaweed about the size of an eighteen wheeler. The water is deep enough that I can’t touch the bottom, but everything is still. I tread water, looking out at the ships coming in on the horizon.
          Then something moves under me, something huge.
          The mass is undefined, little more than a shadow. It’s bigger than me, roughly the size of a baby white shark. I’m calm, even fascinated, until it occurs to me that that might be exactly what it is. I stop treading and try to float. I dip my head under the water and open my eyes. They burn from the salt, but if it really is a shark, you’re supposed to make eye contact; you want him to know that he has been seen. But all I can see is that this is no shark. It is massive and round and it inches under me like a shadow, breathing a long, low exhale. Soon it is drowned out by a muffled voice. My head breaks the surface.
          Franco is standing on the shore, screaming. I whirl this way and that, but the mass is gone, back down in the black patch. I swim back to Franco as fast as I can, my heart pounding.
          “What were you doing?” he yells at me. “You never, ever swim over the weeds!” “I didn’t mean to,” I say, panting.
          “The black god lives in there,” he says, his fingers digging hard into my arm like a claw. “Did you see him? Could you hear him?”
          “No,” I say, but suddenly I’m not sure. “Franco, did you see anything on the surface?”
          “Like what?” he asks, dropping my arm.
          “Like a fin.”
          “You saw something!” he explodes. “Something was in there with you!”
          “No!” I say, immediately regretting it. “I didn’t, I swear. I didn’t see anything.”
          “Liar,” he says. He bends over, hands on his knees, and breathes heavily. For a moment I think he is going to vomit, but then I remember that Franco doesn’t do that. He rises back up. “Don’t go in there again. I’m on eggshells with them and I don’t want to lose you.” He gestures to the ocean—to “them”—then returns to his shack. I look back out at the dark patch of seaweed that stains the water black. Nothing stirs, but now that I know something is down there, I can’t stop searching for it. It dawns on me that maybe Franco isn’t crazy after all.

A few days pass. We only see Sheila at a distance from the search-and-rescue station. From afar, Franco notes that her skin is a little tanner each day and that her red hair is lightening in the sun. “She’s beautiful,” he says, sighing, wiping the sweat from his forehead.
          To my relief, he becomes less and less concerned about having missed his midday prayer the one time. Since then, he prays diligently. “Maybe you were right,” he says. “Maybe they forgave me.”
          “Gods can be merciful,” I say, thinking of the big black mass.
          “I guess so.”

On Saturday, the day before this week’s vacationers all return home in time for work on Monday, Franco and I are on the clock into the evening. The waves are choppy, and the visitors lament that their last day at the beach was no good for swimming. Most of the families with small children start to leave. Suddenly we hear Sheila’s voice.
          “Christopher?” she calls out. “Christopher!” Her husband joins in. They call up and down the beach, yelling at each other periodically. Sheila begins to cry.
          Franco and I get to our feet. “What’s the matter?” I ask.
          “We can’t find our son,” the husband says, his hands on Sheila’s shoulders.
          “Where and when did you last see him?”
          “Maybe half an hour ago, playing over there,” he says, gesturing to the edge of the water. “He wanders off sometimes, but he never goes far.”
          “The paddleboard is missing,” Sheila says, tears spilling out of her eyes.
          Franco detonates. “What’s wrong with you?” he screams. “You let him go paddleboarding by himself right before sundown? And on a day like this?” Franco pushes Sheila’s husband away from her, hard. He raises his hands to defend himself but Franco has already backed off. He’s pacing back and forth, shaking.
          “I knew it,” he says. “Someone had to go.”
          “No, Franco, no,” I say. “That’s not true.”
          “Excuse me,” Sheila’s husband says, trying to get our attention.
          “They had to take someone,” Franco says. “Someone had to pay. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.” He looks me right in the eyes. His pupils are huge; I can only see the faintest trace of hazel irises.
          “Stop it, Franco,” I say, panicked. “You’re scaring them.” And me, I want to add.
          “They took him,” he says to himself. “It was him for me.”
          “Excuse me!” Sheila’s husband tries again to interrupt.
          “Lay off!” I say, pushing him away. “I’m going now.”
          “Don’t leave!” Franco pleads, his fingers clinging to the hem of my shirt.
          “Go home, Franco!” I say, peeling him off. “I’ll meet you back there. Calm down, all right?”
          I go back to search-and-rescue and after a second’s deliberation, I take the jet ski for speed. As the motor starts up, I look to the sky. No clouds. Darkening rapidly. The moon is waning. My stomach turns. Not a good day for a rescue. I’ve never done it by myself and it would be easier with two people, but Franco’s in no state. I squeezed the throttle.
          It’s summertime, but even so, the water is cold. A hypothermic rescuee is the last thing you want, so I speed up, bouncing on the waves towards a part of the cape to which the tide often pulls. I see a blue paddle board washed up on a bank, but there is no boy. Just black water.
          “Christopher!” I yell to the cape. I scan the surface for signs of him, but I can’t stop thinking of that dark mass and Franco’s sea gods. “Christopher!”
          It takes more than an hour of combing the waves alone but soon I find him. He’s floating on his back. His cheeks hold a bubble of air, exactly what you’re supposed to do. “Christopher?” I ask. I immediately feel stupid. How many little boys are there floating around in the ocean on any given day? He releases the bubble and gasps for breath.           “Hold onto the board,” I say, gesturing to the rescue pad that hangs on the back of the jet ski. He reaches for it, but he’s shaking and can’t get a grip. Instead, I circle around, grab him by the arm, and pull him onto my lap. I put his hands under mine on the handlebars, and we shoot off back towards the search-and-rescue station, where by now there should be an ambulance waiting. Then I start to hear wheezing. I look down, worried for a moment that the boy is losing respiratory function. But he is laughing, giddy from the ride. He is crying, too, big rolling tears that look silver under the moon.
          A few minutes from home, a massive current tugs at us. I try to skirt it, but we nearly capsize. I brake hard until we are completely still and try to turn us against the wake beginning to form. It’s not too late to hit the gas and get away from whatever is forming in the water, but something in me is paralyzed. I can’t bring myself to look away.
          “What is it?” Christopher asks. His teeth chatter so hard I can barely understand. From under the waves, I hear a familiar hiss, an exhale. Something rises out of the water. Franco was right, I think again, losing feeling in my ears. Christopher screams. The jet ski tilts and I’m sure, for a moment, that we are going under. Then the mass breaks the surface.
          It’s a leatherback turtle. I’ve never seen one this big before. Maybe nobody has. It’s massive—longer and wider than I am tall.
          “It’s a turtle,” I say, colder than ever. “It’s just a turtle.”

When we pull up at the dock, there are a few cop cars and an ambulance. Sheila and the husband are there. Christopher is bundled to my chest like a baby, still chattering.
          “Oh, thank God,” Sheila says, sobbing. She hurries up the pier, but I sweep past her and bring him to the paramedics. They take him away. Then they lean me on the hood of one of the cop, where I notice for the first time that I’m trembling. They wrap me up tight in a blanket.
          “Well done,” says one of the cops.
          “Tell Franco thanks, too,” Sheila tells me, weeping.

After I’ve watched the ambulance blast off and give a short statement, I return to the search-and-rescue station, which is empty. It isn’t until then that I remember Franco.
          When I arrive at his shack, the door is hanging open. “Franco?” I say. I already know that there is no one in the house. Still, I search. The living room is deserted. There is no one in the cot or behind the shower curtain or hiding among the shirts hanging in the closet. Foolishly, I open the fridge. I know he isn’t in there, but something about the act of looking soothes me.
          I leave through the back door and scan the sea. There’s no sign of him, and no sign of the sea gods he discovered on that long horizon. I drive back to search-and-rescue, to the dock where we keep the larger vehicles. The motorboat is gone, the little one we use on rough days to haul in broken bowriders. If he took it, he could have gone anywhere.

The day after Franco vanished, Sheila came around with Christopher to say goodbye, but they left disappointed. I told Sheila that Franco would miss her. I wanted to add that he would be back soon. But the boat hadn’t reappeared, and I was sure that I wouldn’t be seeing Franco again. That he had let the sea gods have him once and for all. In the days after he disappeared, I combed the cape over, and over and even on one occasion ventured out into the open ocean to search for him. I knew, though, that Franco was simply gone, and even now, all these months later, I still think of him sometimes.