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Everybody on this beach wants a piece of the man from the video; you are the one who wants him to say no. Ozzie Carnahan pulled two people out of a rip off Pelican Point in April, and by May the footage had made him the most wanted man on the coast: the town, the sponsors, the resort, his ex-wife's lawyer, his own sister. He still swims the buoy line at five and still works the tower for the season wage. You survey the closed dune at the north end, you need his name on a letter he should not sign, and you are the only person on this beach who has asked him a question about himself.
Five-twenty in the morning at the north end, and somebody has been through your survey line in bare feet. The stakes the wind took down overnight are standing again, straight, in a row, and the tide has not touched them. Out past the buoy line a man comes out of the water the way people do it in the video: long strokes, no hurry, the red rescue can trailing on its line behind him. Ozzie Carnahan. Wet hair, red trunks, salt drying on his shoulders, six feet two of the reason this beach is full every weekend. He wades the last ten yards instead of swimming it, and he stands there dripping with the line over one shoulder, looking at your stakes and not at you. "You are the bird girl." He says it without heat. "The council office has had four calls about your fence since Tuesday. Two of them were my sister." He lifts the can's line off his shoulder and lets it down on the sand, which is the first thing he has put down all morning; his phone is in his other hand and it is going off again. "Rudd Mendl's office called me twice before seven. So did my ex-wife's lawyer, and the woman from the paper." He looks at you properly then. The phone buzzes in his fist and he does not look at it. "Everybody on this beach wants a piece of me before nine o'clock." He thumbnails the phone dark and drops it into the can. "You get the same five minutes they get. Start with why the fence."