Day Shapes

Most afternoons the boy walks his beagle two miles to where the bluffs meet the shore. There he descends a narrow, zigzagging path to the revetment below, a wall of massive boulders preventing the bluffs from sliding into the sea. Their topmost surfaces have been dynamited flat and create a byway of sorts that runs nearly a full mile from harbor to harbor. Here the dog can run free. He chases mice and pipers and investigates pools of dried blood flecked with fish scales, which shimmer much like the mica beneath.

This is not a swimming hole. There is but one small crescent of sand at the foot of the eastern jetty, and just meters out the seabed plummets into an unforgiving undertow. The boy has only once seen a swimmer dare it, an elderly woman with a blue swim cap and a yellow towel balled up on the shore.

The dog howls, a scent to his liking, but remains within eyeshot. The boy pulls his mother’s gardening spade from the pocket of his cargo pants and scrambles up to a section of crumbling bluff exposed by the most recent hurricane. This is Site A, his archaeological wonder. In the past year the boy has discovered numerous relics here, items of spurious historical import but of immeasurable value to himself, his father, and their neighbors. Each week he has brought home some new find: three pistols of varying style encrusted with rust and beyond salvage; an axe head; a stovetop iron; a buffalo nickel; unidentifiable lumps of iron. He has guarded the site’s location, told no one. All they know is that the boy returns home smelling of seaweed and dirt.

He is about to lift something from the earth when he hears voices below. He did not see the four anglers at the tip of the jetty, three men and one woman. The season is over; they are in violation. They’ve only two rods between them and the tide is coming in. The woman is clinging to the stanchions of the structure topped with a pulsing red light warning vessels of the rocks and shoal. She does a dance: her feet are getting wet.

The boy pockets the spade and summons his dog. Together they sit and wait for the party to clear out. A fishing charter is paused offshore, its day shapes signaling. The boy’s father has taught him how to read the most basic ones, and he discerns that this boat is not in peril, not grounded; it is at work. The surf is exceedingly choppy, as it always is here. Only rarely is this stretch of water placid, though two years prior, in the hour before the hurricane reached land, the waters here were so incandescently blue, like the wall of an iceberg, that the boy could see the seabed.

“Hey kid,” one of the anglers says, ambling toward them with a beer bottle pinched loosely between his thumb and forefinger. “What’s the pooch’s name?”

The boy tugs the dog closer. “Oscar.”

“Oscar. Heh heh.” He turns to the others, now making their way up the path. “The dog’s name is Oscar, like the hot dogs.”

The boy doesn’t follow the logic. Based on their quizzical expressions, nor do the man’s friends.

“Cute,” the man says. “Real fucking cute.” He tosses the bottle onto the rocks where it smashes—future sea glass. He then swings his duffel bag around, the kind of thing one might stuff with clothes for a long weekend. It has four caster wheels along its rigid base, though the nearly empty bag hangs flaccidly from his shoulder. Clipped to the strap is a pink Beanie Baby, the bear character. The man is not tall. He is wearing heavy work boots, jeans, and a long and shiny leather biker jacket belted around his waist. His face is common and unthreatening but puffy with alcohol. He roots around in the bag until he comes away with a small green cube. “The pooch like gum?”

The boy shakes his head.

The man cackles and bites into the cube. It is, the boy thinks, the kind with a gooey center. “Wee-ooo,” the man says, chewing theatrically. His friends call out to him. “Shit. Gotta skedaddle. See ya, hot dogs.”

The boy watches him climb toward the others. The pink bear is reflective, and when the man reaches the top of the bluffs it catches the yellow glow of the streetlights, which have just come on.

At home the boy’s father asks him what he’s found while his mother merely tut-tuts. She has already admonished him for his trips to the rim of the bluffs, citing the wicked terrain, the build-up of algae, the hooks and lines left behind.

“Just some nails,” the boy says. “Junk.”

“Nails can be fun. Show me?”

The boy looks down into his chop suey. “I left them there. I’m afraid everything will rot.”

This is only half a lie. Exposed, the pistols crumbled within months, dissolving into unrecognizable lumps. The handle broke off the iron. The coin simply disappeared, likely stolen by a friend the boy had invited over.

The bluffs are empty the following day. The boy releases the beagle, then follows the revetment to where it meets the jetty. At its end he clings to the structure, wondering if something has been left behind by the anglers, something not ancient and telling of a bygone time—dollars, a metal lighter, another toy. But there is nothing. Down the shore the beagle howls.

He returns home with what he hopes is an arrowhead. “It isn’t,” his father says. “Cool shard though.”

There is a birthday party on Saturday, church on Sunday. His father does not attend. The boy is envious but afterwards his father wants to throw the baseball in the yard, draining the afternoon of potential. On Monday and Tuesday afternoon he must serve detention for a fight with Jimmy Meddick. On Wednesday he all but runs to the bluffs, the beagle howling at the end of his taut leash.

He digs for an hour and finds some round chunks of rust-encased metal that he hopes are musket balls. They are likely nothing. He pockets them anyway.

Down shore the dog howls. The boy goes to retrieve him, and while he is there he checks on Site B, which one time yielded a shard of dinner plate but little since. This stretch is awash in shadow, the revetment wall steeper, the surf closer.

A few minutes later a voice echoes up to him. “Hey, hot dogs, whatcha doing?”

The man and his wheeled duffel bag are coming toward them. This time he is carrying a plastic bucket. He stands on the flattened plateau of the revetment looking up at the boy and the dog. The bucket is filled with quahogs, also out of season. Another violation.

“You wanna clam?”

The boy shakes his head.

The man removes a quahog, then advances upward. “Poochy. Poochy-pooch.” The dog pulls toward him, sniffing. The boy is unsure if the man is inebriated or merely imbecilic or demented, but he does not want to find out. He does not want to befriend him as he did Paddy the one-legged veteran who swims naked in the lagoon. He does not want this man to coax the beagle into an understanding. He wants to dig in peace, to learn the history of this coast.

“Whatcha digging for?”

The boy extracts himself from his square of soil. “I gotta do my homework.”

“Oh yeah? Whatcha study? Economics? Shades of purple?” He laughs from the bottom of his belly as if wanting the gulls to hear it. “Evolution?” Now he makes a monkey face and hoots. “Nah, nah. I’m just playing with you. Everyone knows we was made in the image of God.” He drops the quahog into the bucket and plucks a large rock from the dirt. “Hey, does the pooch wanna play fetch?”

The boy tries to sidestep the man, but he shifts crablike into their path and hoists the rock high. Misshapen and cratered, it hovers against the backdrop of ocean like a meteor. A fleck of mica, glinting on the rock like a speck of stardust, speaks to the boy. It tells him this man’s intentions are contemptible, the kind executed in the penumbra of eroding hurricane-worn cliffs. This is not a game; that rock is not a curio or bauble. There is only one rule here.

“We want to go home.”

Now the man pouts. “Come oooonnnn, hot dogs.”

“My father is waiting.”

“What were you doing up there? You digging for treasure?”

The boy shakes his head. “Just bones.”

“Bones! Ha ha. The kid is funny.” He pivots toward the dog who is straining at his leash, eager to flee. “Hey poochy. Here’s a stone. You fetch now!” The man lifts the rock higher yet, but his arm is straight, a motion inconducive to throwing, only to slamming.

“Stop.”

“Then play, hot dog.” The rock quivers.

“I don’t want—”

“You don’t want what, hot dog?” The man is still making a monkey face.

“Stop saying that.”

“Hot dog. Hot dooooog.”

“Shut—” the boy swings the spade in a long, arcing motion and brings it down flat on the man’s forehead “—up.”

As the man absorbs the blow he takes a step back to reset his footing, except there is a gap behind him; there are gaps everywhere among the rocks, the ones the boy’s mother has warned him about, where the rats and mice slip in and out, spiders and birds, crabs and beetles. Because the man’s boots are tied loosely, almost haphazardly, in the manner of the elderly and children aching for recess, his ankle hinges strangely. His weight drives into the void and the joint succumbs, something tearing. The rock tumbles from his hand and rolls down his leg. “Please,” he says, his arms making circles in the air as if he were a poor swimmer desperate to keep afloat. “Hot dog.” But the boy does not want to tumble with him. He and the beagle stand watching as the man teeters, the look of madness in his eyes supplanted by pure knowing.

He lands some ten feet below on large, jagged, toothlike rocks begrimed with sea scum and slick with the oncoming tide. His head slaps against an unforgiving surface with a sound like that of a soggy baseball against a wooden bat while his body contorts to the rocks’ multifaceted dimensions, his upper limbs arranging themselves in one grotesque manner, his legs in another. Instantly he goes still.

The boy stares down at him a long while, fighting back the urge to vomit, then sits on the revetment, clutching his dog. Both of them are trembling. Below, the man lays staring up at them. Every now and then he blinks or a finger twitches. The duffel bag is twisted beneath him, the pink bear soaking up seawater.

An hour passes; the sun drops. Boats are racing one another to the harbor. The boy and the beagle grow cold as they continue to sit and watch, waiting for the man to reanimate, but he doesn’t. The tide steadily overtakes him as if drawing him a bath, and a starfish appears, edging up the sleeve of the man’s leather coat.

And the boy thinks, a starfish is not a star at all—it’s shaped more like a hand. He splays his fingers and holds them out, comparing them to the number of arms on the creature: one two three four five.

The man below thinks he is saying goodbye and returns the gesture. “Kid,” he says through a film of frothy blood and saliva. “Hey kid.”