Anne Korkeakivi - Shining Sea

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.