Shining Sea (4 page)

“All right.” Because what else is she supposed to say? Because how could he run away right now, just when the going gets tough? Because who wouldn't want to run away from this—but how is it conceivable that one of Michael's children would? Michael never ran away from anything in his life. Not running away
was
Michael. She lets her hand drop. There's going to be work ahead. “Okay. Get into the house now.”

The kids file back into the house, Luke following Patty Ann and Mike Jr., Francis following Luke. Molly brings up the rear. This is what it will look like tomorrow, she thinks. All of them behind Michael's casket.

She stops in front of the open door, breathes deeply.

“What will you do?” Jeanne asks in a soft voice.

“That,” she says, “is the question.”

Not today. Not tomorrow. But the day after. And every day after that.

F
RANCIS STIRS HIS FINGERS
through the sand, combing for flat pebbles. It's not so hot as it has been, and the sudden cool feels like a billboard announcing the first day of school. He'll be turning east up Brookhaven, in the opposite direction from the beach, come Monday morning. Another nine and a half months cooped up in a classroom.

“Let's go out onto the pier.”

Eugene shakes his head. “I don't have any money.”

“Doesn't matter. To look at the water.” They have the whole sea in front of them here on the beach, so he adds, “Let's see if anyone's caught anything.”

He needs to get up and move.

They drag their bikes through the sand, lean them against a pillar, and tie their tennis shoes around the handlebars. Then they look at each other and, without speaking, break into a sprint.

He hits the middle of the pier way ahead. It's really not fair to race. After all, Eugene's got the asthma.

“Here,” he says, pulling up short. “I'll buy us Cokes.”

“Boss!” Eugene says, dropping his hands onto his knees beside him, panting.

“Ugh. Don't say that.”

“Why not?”

“Cause it makes you sound like a candy-ass.”

The pier feels empty—they find no fishermen and none of the usual couples, either. Two or three tourists wander around looking sun-struck, although today's almost cloudy. The whole beach is quieter than usual for an afternoon in August, especially for the last Thursday before school starts back up. People are keeping to themselves since that Negro neighborhood went crazy. Even his mom, whom nothing ever scares, told him not to wander too far from home when he left this morning. And not because she thought he might try to run away yet again.

There's only enough change in his pocket for one soda. He pops the top and hands the bottle to Eugene. “Share?”

“Yeah.”

They lean their stomachs against the pier railing, passing the bottle back and forth between them. Up toward Pacific Palisades, surfers bob on the swells, little specks in the distance, like brightly colored seagulls. It takes more than riots to keep the surfers away.

“You think we should learn to surf?” Eugene says.

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

He shrugs. “I don't dig the sea enough.”

“Oh, come on. Who doesn't dig the sea? Well, except David Balfour.”

“Who?”

“You know. In
Kidnapped,
the summer book. The one we were supposed to read.”

“You
read
that? Since when do you do the summer reading?”

Eugene looks sheepish. “My mom made me.”

“Did she read it to you, too?”

Eugene punches him in the arm, but not hard. “It was a good book. Well, not that bad.”

They walk down toward the end of the pier. A collection of trawlers plows slowly through the Pacific a few miles out.

“What do you see?” Eugene asks, squinting. “With those eagle eyes of yours.”

The sun has made its way toward the horizon. It glints off the mast of one of the boats; there is action below, something being pulled onto the deck. The sun-way along the sea's surface makes the water seem even darker, almost metallic.

“Nothing. Boats.”

He has better than twenty-twenty vision. Unlike Eugene, who has to wear glasses.

“Maybe I'll become a sailor,” Eugene says, “when I leave school. Get out of here, see the world.”

“Not me, man. Being trapped out in the middle of the sea on a boat is about the worst thing I can think of.”

“That's stupid. Worse than having your fingernails pulled out? Or being pinned above a bamboo plant until it grows right through you?”

“Shut up, Eugene.”

Eugene picks at a scab on his wrist. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say that.”

He and Eugene never talk about the stuff that was done to prisoners of war in the Pacific. Some of the other boys at school do, though, trading the stories back and forth as though they were baseball cards.

A tern soars by, its sharp orange beak and feet narrowly missing their heads. It flaps its wings hard and dives. He takes one of the pebbles from his pocket and pitches it into the sea.

“If your father was alive,” Eugene says, “he could show us how to skip it.”

Eugene's dad can't skip stones. Eugene's dad lost his right thumb and can't hold anything properly. Including a job—or so the kids at school like to say. But his own dad was a master at skipping stones. Even from up high here on the Santa Monica Pier. His dad could do anything.

His dad was a
hero
.

Thirty feet below, the Pacific swirls and swells, the water deep green-blue and unknowable. There must be things living inside it, a whole other world, but nothing is visible. The tide is in; the sea is at its highest. He spits as hard as he can. He and Eugene crane over to watch the gob fall.

He starts unbuttoning his shirt. “Let's jump.”

“No way.”

He stuffs his shirt into his back pocket.

“Come on, Francis,” Eugene says, frowning. “I don't want to die.”

The air feels soft on his bare chest. He pulls himself up on the railing and throws a leg over. “So, don't. Meet me back by the bicycles.”

“If the lifeguard sees he'll skin us alive.”

“Not a problem if we've died.”

“If we don't bust into a million pieces when we hit, we still have to swim all the way back to the beach. There are great whites out here.”

“It's not so far. Surfers come out this far.”

“So? You know how your feet look after you've been sitting in a bathtub for a long time? All loose and shriveled? That's what surfers' brains look like.”

“Pff.”

“It's true.”

He swings his other leg over the railing and stands on the thin wooden ledge directly above the water, holding on to the pier with just one hand behind him. The breeze licks the back of his neck and down his thin shoulder blades. The water seethes way below, completely indifferent to him.

Silently, he lets go. His feet slice the air; his heart lifts and rises right out of his body. He doesn't care if he dies, doesn't care if his body explodes into a million pieces when it touches the water. For a moment, he is like the tern—fast, free, soaring.

Slap
.

He goes under, his mouth filling with the Pacific. The water is shockingly cold. His legs begin to kick. They fight his way back up to the light.

“Yeeeee-hawwww!” Eugene hits the water a few feet away, his dark curls disappearing underneath its surface.

He swims over, fumbling in the water to find his friend. The sea really is cold out here, much colder than he expected.

“Aaarugh,” Eugene sputters, emerging, spitting water.

They look at each other and begin to laugh. They roll with the waves, laughing, until their lips start to turn blue. Then they swim as hard as they can back toward the shore.

They bike home through the waning afternoon. Eugene sounds out of breath, so he slows his pedaling. Eugene's glasses, swiftly crammed inside his pants during the dive, are crooked. If their mothers find out what they did, there will be trouble.

“You coming over?” he asks when they reach his house.

“Nah. I promised my mom I'd be home before sundown. You know.”

He does know. Talk about the riots is everywhere. On the television, on the radio, in his house.

Luke at the table, last night:
They have good reason to complain. People treat Negroes like dirt here in Los Angeles.

Mike:
That doesn't give them a reason to tear up their own neighborhood
.

Patty Ann:
Oh, shut up, both of you. We're starting a world war over in Vietnam. Why not set our own backyard on fire?

Which made his mom stand up from the table, sharply enough to rattle the dishes.

Patricia Ann,
his mom said,
that's enough
.
You do not know what you are talking about. I'd like to see
you
live under the Communists.

It's enough to make him want to hide under a rock when they get started like that. Luke with Mike, Patty Ann with his mom. When his dad was alive, no one ever argued. Or at least very rarely. When Luke didn't help wash the car. Or Patty Ann held hands with a boy in grade school. Patty Ann was his dad's, Luke his mom's. Mike was everyone's. That left no one for him, but at least there was a balance in the house. Nowadays, it's like an ongoing game of Chinese checkers, the rest of them jumping over one another, clickety-clack, no one ever winning. His little sister, Sissy, at only three, folds her arms over her chest like a mini Buddha and tut-tut-tuts. Sometimes it makes his mom stop quarreling and laugh. Sometimes no one seems to hear her. But he hears her. He hears everyone.

Sissy is sitting on their mom's bedroom floor as he slips past it to the boys' room at the end of the hall, facing the bathroom. She looks up at him, and he puts a finger to his lips. She won't give him away. For a three-year-old, Sissy's all right.

“Francis!” his mom calls out.

He drops his wet shorts on his bedroom floor and pulls a dry pair out of his dresser drawer. Luke is lying on his bed reading
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,
a novel by Kurt Vonnegut. Luke says Kurt Vonnegut is a genius and his books should be required reading for the whole world.

“Mom called you,” Luke says, turning a page.

“Yes, I did.” His mom is standing in the doorway. “Didn't you hear me? I want you to carry some boxes to the car for the Labor Day church sale.”

He follows her back down the hall. Two boxes of neatly folded clothes stand on the floor of her bedroom. “This, too,” she says, taking one last dress from the closet. He can see his dad's four suits hanging in there, as though waiting for his dad to appear in his undershirt and boxers and black socks to button up a dress shirt and put one of them on for work. His dad's dress shoes, still shiny, wait below them.

The dress in her hand is the one she wore to the wake. Yellow, like the paint they had just put on the house.

It has to be yellow
. Almost the last thing his dad said.

He takes the dress from his mom and stuffs it under the other clothes.

“Come on, Francis. Not like that. It will get all wrinkled.”

His mom pulls it back out, folds it in half, then quarters it. She lays it on top of the box. Then she looks at it.

“Never mind,” she says, picking it up again and shaking it smooth. A calling card falls out of the pocket. “I'll keep this one a little longer.”

He picks up the card and reads it silently:
RONALD M. MCCLOSKEY, PRESIDENT,
MCCLOSKEY AIR CONDITIONERS.

“Oh, look at that,” his mom says, taking it from him. “That man goes to our church. I forgot he gave me his card.”

“Are you going to give away Dad's things, too?”

His mom smiles—not her strong, happy smile, but the other, softer one she's developed since his dad died—and shakes her head. “Just my maternity clothes. I won't need them anymore, but someday you may want your father's things. You're going to be just like him. Maybe even taller.”

He bows his head. Maybe he'll be as tall as his dad. Everyone says he looks like him. But he'll never
be
like his dad. He'll never be brave. He'll never be a hero. He never would have made it out of the Philippines alive, much less helped anyone else survive. He practically got both him and Eugene killed on the pier earlier today, just by being an idiot as usual.

“Oh, don't look so down, Francis. I know it's hard. It's hard for everyone. Here,” she says, rummaging on the shelf above the clothing rack. “Why don't you take this now?”

It's his dad's old army canteen. Once, when he was little, his dad took the canteen out and showed it to him and Luke and Mike Jr., saying:
This canteen meant the difference between life and death for me during the war
.
Without it I would never have made it up Bataan, much less through the three years that followed. Sometimes it's the littlest things, boys.
It was unusual for his dad even to talk about the war, so they all knew what he was telling them was something important.

Shouldn't one of his brothers have the canteen? Wouldn't they be mad if they found out their mom gave it to him? He screws the top off and peeks carefully inside, as though a little bit of his dad might be distilled within.

“Mommy,” Sissy says from where she is lying on the carpet furiously coloring, her hair a shout of red-gold around her round, freckly face. Everything his baby sister does, she seems to do furiously. “Will you read to me now?”

His mom is strangely still, far away. It takes her at least a minute to answer. “Ask Luke, dear. I have to get started on dinner now. Mike and Patty Ann will be home soon.”

Mike has a full-time summer job bagging groceries at the Safeway. Patty Ann is waitressing at Peter B's Galley, in the bowling alley. She got Luke a job in the alley also, on Friday and Saturday nights, plus Luke has taken over mowing the lawn for the church and rectory while Mike is bagging groceries. Next summer, his mom says, he should get a job, too:
With you getting bigger, you're going to want more pocket money.
Anyhow, it's important to learn how to work, as important as book learning.

Francis should get a job bagging groceries like Mike,
Luke said.
All the ladies will head for the register he's working and tip him double if he carries their bags to their cars.
He'll earn enough for his own set of wheels twice as fast as Mike will.

Hush,
his mom said, laughing.
That's no way to talk. He's still a baby.

If anyone can set his mom laughing, it's Luke. But he's not a baby. He's not a man, but he's not a baby, either.