“Get on with it, Grady!” someone yelled, and the grown-ups laughed.
And who was I replacing? According to this scheme, he had to be here on this street, chowing down on some of Mr. Baxter's pork ribs. Was he one of Those Who Didn't Come Out Anymore? Had he been happy out here, or was he out in the world never speaking of this place just as it did not speak of him, the one who did not turn out as expected. Did he find someone? Was he here watching over his kids to keep them safe and reminiscing with the old pals, shaking hands that were cold and wet from beer-snagging dips into coolers, catching the eye of his wife from the other side of the street. She smiles back and they share this moment in the crowd. Maybe he didn't exist and I was the first of my line. The mutant strain. Or I was in his vicinity, but I couldn't recognize him because I didn't believe I could grow into that one day, smiling and assured and at peace. That sleeping part of me finally roused to action. Maybe I saw him every day out here, passing him by, I was looking at him now, and I pitied the very sight of him, too scared to acknowledge how I would turn out.
The pistol sounded. They ran down the street, all the boys 11 to 12, minus the asthmatics, slapping down the pavement in their cheap rubber. The obvious winner, the tallest kid, the most put-together kid, the one who knew how to move through the world, quickly pulled out in front. The kid I put my money on, the one in the green mesh shirt, didn't come in last, but just barely. He hunched over by the finish line, panting. Tough race. The first time we ran it, I remembered, this street was still dirt. They finally put some asphalt down and then people started retiring out here, staying past Labor Day and through the winter. It wasn't their summer place anymore. It was their home.
The winner jumped up and down. Mr. Grady said, “Almost beating Gary Osgood's famous record from 1981, but not quite, is Little Clive of Azurest!” There was a Little Clive? How could there be more than one Clive, it was ridiculous. The recent overlap in Mohammads and Malcolms made sense, times change, but how could there be another Clive?
With the races over, the crowd reclaimed the street after being penned in the sidelines, bumping their butts against the folding tables and old ladies' chairs. I caught sight of my runner as the people hustled in. He turned from his friends and a darkness churned through his features for a moment before he found his mask again. Yeah, he had to be me. That was me all over. The look of fret when he slips up and for a second other people can see it. Sometimes you recognize yourself in other people right off and sometimes it's subconscious. When you get older, you gather friends and lovers for reasons other than the accident that your houses are close together. There's an affinity, stuff you share in common and things you seek out in other people. Something drew you together but you didn't understand that secret undertow until one day after years and years of talking, it comes, the key story that lays it all out. Who could know at the start of that innocent evening that this was the night to make it plain. They tell you what happened and you think, we're more alike than I knew, but of course you did know, it's what brought you together. Incomplete children become incomplete adults. You can see it. You find each other.
Maybe my earlier model, the jolly son of Sag Harbor I was replacing, was looking at me in that moment, a can of Budweiser resting on his paunch, bad mustache shrubbing his lip, thinking, Why is he standing around when he could be out having fun? Such a chump. I can relate. Talking about that summer all this time, sometimes I have to stop and say, I don't know who this Benji kid is, either. Certainly he would not recognize the man he came to be. The poor sap. I need him to figure out how I got where I am, and he needs me to reassure him that despite all he knows and has seen and feels, there is more. I can listen to him. But of course he can't hear a damn thing I say.
“You can run, but can you jump? Look at you. You can run, but can you jump?” Barry David was playing keep-away with Little Clive's First-Place medal. The younger boy grabbed for it and Barry David snatched it higher. Was there anything worse than a bigger kid playing keep-away with your stuff? That dreary rehearsal for adulthood. It wasn't something we'd do to the little kids. Well, some of us, maybe. But never on a weekend, when parents were around. Barry David didn't care who saw. Little Clive's cheeks reddened. “Look at you!”
I was about to say something when Barry David went stiff, like he'd been zapped by one of those mythical fallen power lines we kept being warned about after a storm. An old lady had him, I didn't know her name. She was one of the great shrunken matriarchs of the community, the ones who only came out of their first-floor rooms in the back of the house one day a year. They had seen it all, witnessed the earth cool and the newly amphibious heave themselves onto sand. The uneasy birth of the developments. She snapped Barry David's arm securely in her claw and said, “Stop that this instant! Stop it! Listen to me when I'm talking to you.”
Barry David looked at his arm, confused. His mind couldn't process this interference. I looked around for NP's mother, tensing myself for the spectacle of her disciplining her nephew in front of everyone. He lowered the medal down to Little Clive.
“Where are your parents?” the old lady said.
For a second there, I thought he was going to whop her. It was a bizarre idea. Such a thing would never happen. But what he did do was almost as improbable—he wrenched his arm free and disappeared into the people and I didn't see him until the bonfire. The old lady harrumphed and lowered herself into her chair. She picked up her fan and waved it across her face and breast. It wasn't that hot. She smiled.
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 wh
at 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.
“That's one patio set–burnin' motherfucker,” NP said.
“With his monkey ass,” I added, because the insult would have been naked just sitting there, on this chilly night.
“Where'd he go?” Nick asked.
Soon after, we heard the thumps again, but this time the light from the renewed fire was such that we had no problem seeing it clod down the steps. It was the twin of the first bench. I pictured the picnic table desolate in the middle of blue-and-pink paving stones, mourning its fallen brothers. I'd told myself that Barry David had raided somebody's garbage out on the curb, stuff they were getting rid of at the end of summer, but obviously that wasn't true. The benches were new, fresh from the Outdoors section of Caldor, discounted for End-of-the-Season Savings. He held the bench over his head, tottering, and he let out a Tarzan yell and tossed the second bench into the fire. It banged against the first one and slid off, knocking apart Mr. Nickerson's careful edifice in a blazing cascade. The little kids loved it and hopped up and down amid the sparks. Little Clive high-fived Barry David, his new hero. He threw his medal in the fire. It curled up on itself and became a black spot.
Barry David picked up a beer from the sand and took a big swig. He started up the steps.
This time we followed him, all of us, the kids satellites around him and our crew keeping a little distance, as if we'd be able to disavow being accomplices if someone caught him. Who was this gang of little kids cheering him on? Were they more bloodthirsty than us, or just less scared and more dumb? If there was a Little Clive, then why not a Little Nick, Little Reggie, and of course Little Me, skinny body shivering in his Azurest sweatshirt and not so glum in the light of the fire, energized by this escapade. Me and my gang should have stopped Barry David, but it was hard to resist the pleasure of watching someone fuck up so colossally Can you believe this guy? What's he thinking? What's wrong with him? As if we didn't know. As if we weren't jealous of someone who just didn't give a fuck.
Reggie said, “He's going to get into a lot of trouble.”
I told NP, “You should really stop him.”
“What for?”
“He's your cousin.”
“He's not my cousin,” he said. “I thought he was your cousin.”
“I've never seen him before in my life.”
“That's what Nick told me,” he said. We dashed ahead to catch up.
He'd taken it from the Gardners'. Everybody's parents' cars stretched up and down the street in front of the house. The music was loud, the '70s soul classics everybody knew by heart because of nights like this, when they played in a holy loop. A big glass wall overlooked the patio on the side of the Gardners' house and we could see them all in there, laughing, bobbing to the music, sipping cocktails. Everybody's paren
ts, all the parents enjoying themselves behind the glass as if it were a TV screen. I saw my father talking to Mrs. Greene, with his sly smile, and my mother deeper in the room, carrying an ice bucket. She placed it on the table and tucked her hair behind her ear. We kept ducked down behind the cars so they couldn't see us. Barry David walked up to the edge of the patio, just inside the square of light cast from the room, and he lifted the edge of the red wooden chaise lounge to test its weight. It had wheels on one end, and he pulled it off the patio and onto the grass. The music didn't skip a beat. No one inside noticed him at all.
He maneuvered it around the parked cars and dragged it into the middle of Walker, singing “Darling Nikki.” The wheels squeaked hideously. The little kids clapped their hands and giggled. He could go all night. Sure, there was a finite number of patio sets in the developments, but more than enough to keep the fire going. Unless someone stopped him. There was a serious lack of supervision, you could say. I heard Nick tell NP, “He's no family of mine, shit.” The cushion fell off, and the little kids picked it up, holding it between them like pallbearers. Barry David, the ghost kid who was all of us and none, everybody's cousin and no one's, pulled the red chaise down the street.
When we got to the Nickersons' driveway, I tapped Reggie's shoulder. “Let's get a beer,” I said.
Reggie stopped. The group left us behind, marching ahead to the beach. He said, “Okay.” Usually we had to bicker over stuff like that, me making him miss out on something. As we walked away, we heard it thumping down the stairs to the beach. The kids counted off every crash and screamed when it hit the sand.
There were still a few beers left. I'd already had my three. I took another and gave Reggie one.
“That was crazy,” Reggie said.
“Yeah.”
He took a big sip. “I like Miller better.”
We heard them shout down on the beach, the loudest cheer yet.