Whitehead Colson - Sag Harbor

THAT NIGHT, you could almost call it cold, so we eagerly watched Mr. Nickerson arrange the wood of the bonfire while we rubbed our hands together. Clouds overtook the sun late in the afternoon and we were all zipped up now. The bonfires came back to Azurest with the return of the Nickersons. Mr. Nickerson started coming out as a kid, the same time as my mother, then dropped out for a stretch in the late '60s and '70s. California, divorce, regroup. After his parents passed, he reopened his ancestral beach house. “It's good to be back,” Mr. Nickerson kept saying his homecoming summer, to let us know how grateful he was. He reinstituted the bonfires that Labor Day. While we were in Sag Harbor Hills, he was here in front of his house with a shovel digging out the pit, throwing the sand into a mountain beside him. His son Nat used to pitch in, but Nat was in college now.

We'd hid some sixes of Strohs in the woods and made forays back and forth, the cans bulging in the pockets of our Windbreakers. “Can you see it?” we asked one another, tilting into the light to see if the outline was visible. We sipped them with theatrical furtiveness when we thought no one was looking. Me and NP made one more run into the woods before Mr. Nickerson started up the fire. I scraped the leaves off the six-packs, our careful camouflage. “We can each have three,” I said.

“I put in more money than anyone, so I'm going to have four. Nick only put in two dollars.”

“Okay,” I said. I was getting my three. I didn't care what other people were doing. As we walked down the steps to the beach, I said, “You should keep an eye on Barry David.”

“What for?”

“He's acting all wild. He's going to get into trouble.”

NP shrugged. “Can you see it?” he asked, pointing to the beer in his pocket.

The crowd around the fire was smaller than it had been the last few years. There were fewer teenagers in need of an anchor for their night, and not many grown-ups, as the Gardners were having a cocktail party up the street on Walker. That's where our parents were. Unlike us kids, the parents saw a lot of each other in the city, for business, for meetings of their various clubs and fraternal organizations. The Gardners' party was the first item in the new social season while down on the beach the younger set foraged the scraps of the summer. The smaller kids, the ten-year-olds and whatnot, scrutinized every detail of bonfire-construction with dedication, remaining behind an invisible line of safety as if their parents were waiting for an excuse to grab them away from the fun.

Over time I have learned that what makes a man is not his ideas or his words, what makes a man is the ability to squeeze out a ferocious stream of lighter fluid from a can and throw a match on it. Mr. Nickerson was a man. The heat felt good. We spread our fingers out, pushing against the warmth. Sparks twisted on their turbulent currents of heat and dark knots exploded in the wood. As our eyes adjusted, the darkness ate up the world outside the light of the bonfire, the glow of East Hampton over the Point, the white pinpricks from town. Our faces came up out of shadow and you started to learn other people's outlines, the way they walked in the night. You saw a shape, and then it was someone you knew dipping in for a minute. Then they returned to the shadows.

“When are you heading back?” we asked, over and over, chirping it like crickets. The master question of the summer had been replaced with this one, nothing left to wring out of the summer except practicalities. Early tomorrow, late tomorrow, Tuesday morning “to beat the traffic.” Traffic was the entire perversity of the world shrunk down to a long bead of red lights, and if you could beat that, you could do anything. It was a kind of greatness we aspired to.

“Is that one of our beers?” I asked Barry David. He drank it out in the open, without a smidgen of shame.

“What is this,” Barry David said, “Nag-a-Nigger Day? He said I could have one.” He nodded to the darkness. There was no one there. As long as I got my three.

After throwing a final raft of wood into the fire, Mr. Nickerson told us he was going to the Gardners'. “Let it die out,” he instructed us. It wasn't late, but given the turnout, and his son's absence, I gather he was resigned to the fact that this would not be one of the infamous Nickerson bonfires, with shoving matches (“She nearly fell into the fire!”), undying declarations (“I've always wanted to get with you, ever since we were little”), and new lovers slipping away into the night (“I don't think they can see us”). Something about this day was off. No one had even brought out a boom box. That's how depleted it was. The summer of Purple Rain , we kept flipping the cassette over and over, singing at the top of our lungs. Maybe next year.

It was only a matter of minutes before we disobeyed him. The final aunts and uncles and random grown-ups who stopped by briefly to check out the fire were gone. The prepubescent girls disappeared in a huddle, for one last segregated Labor Day evening before things got complicated. Then one of the little boys had a tiny twig in his hand. He ran up to the fire, pretending to throw it in, and scrambled back to his friends, who squealed with joy He did this a few times, the others daring him, and finally he threw it in for real, saying, “It was an accident! It was accidentally!”

Soon it was dried clumps of beach grass, those weird-looking black crabs I've never known the name of, and crinkly fistfuls of seaweed. The little kids stopped retreating after making their contributions, as if they had thrown their fear in, too, standing close to the fire to verify that every last bit turned to ash. They nodded.

“What we need is some fireworks,” NP said, like flint.

“Does anybody got some M-8os?”

We shuddered at this diabolical proposition. To… actually blow up the fire!

“M-8os would tear that shit apart.”

“Place them at strategic points.”

“Holy shit!”

“Wicked!”

“What about this,” one of the kids said. He held up an Eveready nine-volt battery for our consideration.

“You can't throw that in there,” his friend said, full of gleeful hysteria. “It'll explode!”

“It's not going to explode,” Reggie said.

“Shit, I'll do it,” Barry said, swiping it and tossing it into the fire. We jumped back—“She's gonna blow!”—but nothing happened.

I said, “What's next?” I wasn't trying to up the stakes. I was just saying what we were all thinking and feeling. It wouldn't stop there. It was our last night.

Barry David stepped into the light with a thick gray rope. It had nestled in a dirty lump up in the beach grass by the Nickersons' for years, washed up after a nor'easter or discarded after someone's inscrutable mission. He heaved it in, half of it falling into the red heart of the fire and the rest landing at the edge of the pit, launching a plume of sparks. We whooped. We high-fived. We dagged in our fashion. It made rustle-y noises as it went up, it whistled, a chemical inside it producing brief blue jets. Barry David flopped the rest of the rope into the fire with a branch. Then he threw the branch on top of it, too. Barry David said, “What's next? What'll I do next?” He stepped into the darkness.

“That nigger's crazy,” Reggie said.

“Yeah,” I said.

Not long after, we heard a shout and then three loud thumps.

Something on the stairs. The shadow that became Barry David stomped down the bulkhead stairs, dragging a long red bench. Part of someone's patio set.

“He's going to burn up Mr. Nickerson's bench!”

He lugged it across the sand. We told him it was a bad idea and he said, “Don't worry, it's not his bench, shit.” He held it over his head and we shut up and he threw it into the fire. It made a nice light as it went up, opening new stretches of the beach. I looked around, trying to see if there were any grown-ups coming. There was no one but us kids.