Aa I angles northeast across the strand, the soft sand sucked at my shoes and made every step a chore.

Wearing wet jeans and T-shirt on the central coast on a January night can test your mettle.  Five weeks ago, however, I had been in the Sierra during a blizzard.  This felt balmy by comparison.

I wanted a bottle of aspirin and an ice bag.  When I touched the throbbing left side of my head, I wondered if I needed stitches.  My hair felt sticky with blood.  I found a lump the size of half a plum.

When I left the beach, I was at the north end of the shoreside commercial area, where Jacaranda Avenue dead-ended.  From there, a mile of oceanfront houses faced the concrete boardwalk all the way to the harbor.

For its ten-block length, Jacaranda Avenue, which ran east from the boardwalk, was lined with ancient podocarpuses.  The trees formed a canopy that cooled the street all day and shaded the streetlamps at night.  Not one jacaranda grew along its namesake avenue.

Wisteria Lane boasted no wisteria.  Palm Drive featured oaks and ficuses.  Sterling Heights was the poorest neighborhood, and of all the streets in town, Ocean Avenue lay the farthest from the ocean.

Like most politicians, those in Magic Beach seemed to live in an alternate universe from the one in which real people existed.

Wet, rumpled, my shoes and jeans caked with sand, bleeding, and no doubt wild-eyed, I was grateful that the podocarpuses filtered the lamplight.  In conspiracy with the fog, I traveled in shadows along Jacaranda Avenue and turned right on Pepper Tree Way.

Don't ask.

Three guys were hunting me.  With a population of fifteen thousand, Magic Beach was more than a wide place in the highway, but it did not offer a tide of humanity in which I could swim unnoticed.

Furthermore, in my current condition, if an alert policeman spotted me, he would be inclined to stop and chat.  He would suspect I had been the target or the perpetrator of violence - or both.

I had no confidence in my ability to convince him that I clubbed myself over the head as punishment for a wrong decision I had made.