Shining Sea Read online

  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 diffe
rence 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.

  He stuffs the canteen into the top of his pants, bundles the two boxes up with string, and carries them, one by one, out to the car. He didn’t even understand what was so funny about what Luke said. Maybe it didn’t mean anything. Maybe it was Luke making fun of Mike somehow.

  In the kitchen, his mom is trying to get the oven to light. The oven hasn’t worked properly for more than a year. Sissy follows him down the hall to his bedroom. “Read me this?” she says, climbing onto Luke’s bed and sticking the book in her hand between Luke’s face and novel.

  Luke pushes the book’s bright green, red, yellow, and blue cover away. “I’m already reading something. And Goodnight Moon is a baby book. You’re not a baby.”

  “I like it.”

  “It’s a going-to-bed book.”

  “Please, Luke.” Sissy crawls up beside him and tucks her bright head against his shoulder. “Luke, Luke, Lukie-Luke.”

  Luke sighs and sets his book down.

  He shoves the canteen under his mattress. It makes a big lump. His mom should have given the canteen to Mike. Mike plans to join the army in two years, or at least go ROTC. He may be the only one tall enough ever to wear his dad’s suits, but Mike’s the one who will be like their father.

  “A bowl of mush?” Luke says, looking up from his reading. “Why is there mush in the room where the bunny is going to sleep, anyhow?”

  He hastens to lie down over the lump the canteen has made in his mattress, to conceal it.

  “What’s mush?” Sissy asks.

  “Some gross thing Mom probably ate during the war when there was rationing.”

  “What’s rationing?”

  “What you should do with your questions.”

  Sissy purses her little mouth. Her red locks stick up in the air. “So you mean mush is like tapioca pudding?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Hey!” Mike says, marching into the room in his grocery-store shirt, making straight for his piggy bank. Clink-clink goes his tip money. His big brother is saving to buy a car for college. Patty Ann is supposed to be saving her tips for use at college, too, but their mom says she wastes it on buying sodas and hamburgers for her good-for-nothing boyfriend. Luke spent most of his last paycheck on books, including two novels by Kurt Vonnegut. “Why aren’t you listening to the game? The Dodgers are playing the Mets.”

  “That’s it, kiddo,” Luke says, dislodging Sissy. Baseball is one thing Luke and Mike never disagree about. Neither of them misses a game. “I’ll read the rest to you tonight before you go to sleep.”

  “You’re almost done!”

  “I’ll finish what I haven’t read after the game, and then I’ll read it all the way through again. Deal?”

  Sissy smiles and jumps up. For a three-year-old, Sissy knows how to drive a good bargain.

  Alone in the bedroom now, he extracts the canteen from under his mattress. The surface is smooth and silver in his hand, flat on two sides and rounded on the others, with small dents here and there where it must have banged hard against a Far Eastern rock or a ship deck. Only the chain securing the cap is rusted, a little bit along the seam where the curved top joins with the bottom.

  It was once in his dad’s hands. His dad lifted it to his mouth and drank from it. Other soldiers may have, too.

  “Aren’t you going to join your brothers listening to the game?” His mom stands in the doorway, watching him.

  He slides the canteen back under his pillow. His mom is always trying to get him to do stuff with the others.

  “Francis?”

  His mom’s dark hair bounces gently against her chin. She tips her head and smiles at him. He can almost imagine her stepping off the pier herself, throwing herself into the air, way above the water, her sudden grin, the toss of her head. She’d be mighty unhappy if she knew he’d done it, though. People have killed themselves jumping off the pier.

  “Okay, Mom.”

  He follows her into the living room, sprawling on the floor next to Luke. Mike is sitting on the sofa with Sissy stretched out beside him.

  By the third inning, his little sister has begun gently snoring. Even though it’s August, and warm, his mom lays a cotton blanket over her.

  “I can’t believe it!” Mike says when the game ends. Through the open window, they can hear the next-door neighbor cursing: The Mets beat Koufax! The lousy Mets! Son of a bitch!

  Sissy jumps up, pretending she wasn’t asleep, shaking her golden red sprouts of hair. She knocks over the framed photo of their family, that last one from Palm Sunday, his dad standing directly behind him with one hand on his shoulder, Sissy still in his mom’s tummy. He gets up onto his knees and rights it.

  Luke clutches a pillow to his stomach and groans. “Who is this new pitcher, anyhow? Tug McGraw? Who’s ever heard of him?”

  “We’re going to hear about him now,” Mike says grimly.

  His mom shuts the living room window against the neighbor’s shouting. “You didn’t hear that, I’m sure.” She looks meaningfully at Sissy. “Dinner is ready. Where has Patty Ann gotten to?”

  “She’s not home yet?” Mike says.

  “Uh…duh,” Luke says. “Like she could have gone through to the girls’ room without your seeing her.”

  Mike ignores him. “I thought her shift was done at four today, like mine. That’s what she told me this morning.”

  His two brothers look at each other. Whole blocks burned down in Watts. People were even killed.

  “Don’t worry, Mom,” Mike adds quickly. “Lee was picking Patty Ann up. Nothing could have happened to her.”

  Lee is Patty Ann’s steady. Skinny and dark-haired, in jeans and boots even when it’s hot out, Lee’s only job this summer seems to be driving Patty Ann to work and taking her parking after. Their mom says the worst part about Patty Ann not getting a scholarship to Vassar is that it means not putting the whole of the United States of America between the two of them. She says if their father were still alive, he’d have sent Lee packing a long time ago. Their mom doesn’t like Lee much.

  She and Patty Ann had a fight about him again just this morning: in fact, Lee is what they mostly fight about. At least CSU will get Patty Ann
to a different part of town, his mom said after Patty Ann went running out the door into Lee’s Dodge Matador. With a different sort of boy.

  “Right,” his mom says now. “She’s with Lee. That makes me feel miles better.”

  There’s no way to reach Patty Ann if she’s left the coffee shop. Maybe she and Lee went to the movies, or maybe they’re just hanging out in Lee’s car—although, normally, Patty Ann would have said if she weren’t coming home for dinner. If anything, Patty Ann seems to enjoy telling his mom when she’s staying out with Lee.

  They go ahead and eat. Afterward Mike does the dishes without protest, even though tonight is supposed to be Patty Ann’s turn. His mom bathes Sissy and tucks her into bed, and Luke goes to read to Sissy as promised while he stays in the kitchen to dry the dishes and help Mike put them away. When the kitchen is all cleaned up, he and Mike return to sit in the living room again, Mike pulling out a deck of cards. Soon, his mom joins them.

  As the night crawls in, his mom gets more and more irritable. She smokes one cigarette, and then lights another. A little before ten, Mike taps the cards neatly into a pile, slides them back into their cardboard box.

  “Good night, Mom,” Mike says and disappears to their bedroom, yawning and stretching.

  The house is quiet around him and his mom now, just the radio, the crickets outside, the low hum of the fridge. She starts folding laundry on the dining room table, something she normally never does at this hour. He sits in his dad’s old armchair, listening to KHJ. The DJ is talking about the Beatles playing the Hollywood Bowl this weekend. His favorite band is the Byrds, though, and he waits patiently for their new song, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” to come on. He knows it will eventually. McGuinn’s voice sounds like no one else’s, and his guitar is reedy and twangy, almost like the little piano-organ at church. He’s never heard a guitar sound like it before. If only he had a record player, he’d buy the 45 for “Mr. Tambourine Man” and listen to it over and over again.

  Maybe he’ll get a job after school this year, so he can buy a guitar and learn to play it himself. So he won’t have to wait for it to come on the radio.

  But what kind of job can he get during the school year that’ll pay enough for a guitar? Could he start bagging groceries on weekends already? Or washing cars after school? Delivering newspapers before school?