Kiss River

  So, anyway, I was in for a surprise last night. I snuck out about eleven and I was pretty nervous walking through the woods, I can tell you that! The moon was nearly full, though, so it was pretty light out, which helped put my mind at ease. When I got to the beach, it looked empty, but I was still quiet as I climbed up to my favorite roost in the branches. Then I saw the sandpounder. I knew right away it wasn’t Jimmy. He was taller than Jimmy and he had a different way of walking. I was so disappointed! I felt as though everything had changed in the past week and no one had told me about it, not that anyone should have bothered to tell a fourteen-year-old girl what was going on. First I thought the new sandpounder might have been Teddy Pearson, but then I realized it was someone I had never seen before at the Coast Guard station and he must’ve been new. From where I sat, it looked a little like his uniform was too small for him. The pants were up above his ankles, practically. I watched him walk up the beach until he disappeared behind the trees, then after a while I saw him walk back. He had binoculars around his neck and every once in a while he would put them to his eyes to look out toward one of the few white lights on the horizon.

  After watching him for a few minutes and feeling really upset that I wasn’t going to see Jimmy, I heard a rustling in the woods to my right. It shook me up at first, because I thought of the murderer, and my imagination immediately started thinking that the murderer might kill the sandpounder and I’d be up in the tree witnessing the whole thing. But then I saw what made the noise. The new sandpounder turned around fast to look in the direction of the sound. A wobbly little foal came out of the woods. I had never seen this foal before, but I knew it was one of the wild mustangs. The sandpounder obviously didn’t know it, though. He started walking toward the foal, his hand outstretched. I thought to myself, what a crazy man. My whole body stiffened up, waiting for what I knew was coming. This sandpounder was so ignorant. I thought of calling out a warning to him but I didn’t dare. Suddenly, just as I expected, a furious neigh and a pounding of hooves came from the woods and the mare leaped out of the trees, heading straight for the sandpounder. He looked up, and even though I was a fair distance away, I could see the look of terror in his face. I had to laugh when he turned and ran straight into the ocean, tripping over his own two feet and falling into the waves.

  I know I wasn’t thinking when I jumped out of the tree and ran onto the beach, waving my arms to distract the mare from the sandpounder. Of course, she turned toward me then, running in my direction, but I managed to climb back up my tree right quick. The poor sandpounder, standing up in the waves, trying to keep his balance, must’ve wondered what hit him. After the mare walked back into the woods with the foal, calm as could be, the sandpounder started out of the water. He didn’t make much progress, though. His uniform had to weigh a hundred pounds with all the seawater in it. He stood there in the water, trying to keep standing up. His eyes were right on my tree.

  “Come down from there!” he hollered at me. “Who are you, anyway?” He took some more steps onto the beach, and fell right on the sand, his wet uniform like an anchor dragging him down.

  I figured I had no choice but to go down to the beach. He was still lying in the sand by the time I got to him but he was struggling to get to his feet and I knew right away it wasn’t only the weight of his uniform keeping him down but also that he was trembling all over from being just plain terrified. I asked him if he was all right and he managed to get to his knees and say, “What the hell are you doing out here?”

  I told him I was the keeper’s daughter, and sometimes I liked to come out and enjoy the evening in my special tree. He looked at me like I was crazy. After all, it wasn’t evening, it was the middle of the night. But what could I tell him? That I sat up in the tree at night so I could watch his fellow sandpounder, Jimmy Brown, walk up and down the beach? But he started laughing. He was such a mess, shaking with cold and covered with a thick layer of sand attached to his uniform. I figured he was laughing from relief that he’d been saved from the wild horses and that I did not turn out to be a killer lurking in the forest. I started laughing with him and brushed at his uniform, surprised that I would be that bold.

  “Are you all right?” I asked him again. “Can you stand up?”

  He got to his feet, but only by leaning on my shoulder, and he tried to brush some of the sand from his uniform but failed terribly. It was stuck to him like it was glued there.

  “You’re freezing,” I said to him.

  “No kidding,” he said. “And I don’t get picked up until three.” He pulled back the soaking, sandy sleeve of his uniform to look at his watch. “Damn,” he said. “I think my watch’s busted from the salt water. So who are you, again?” he asked me for the millionth time. His accent was somewhere from the South, but I couldn’t say exactly where. I told him my name, and repeated that I was the daughter of the keeper of the Kiss River lighthouse. He looked me up and down and asked me how old I was. I lied and said sixteen even before I thought about it. I knew I could pass for sixteen, especially in the dark.

  I asked him where he was from, and he said, “Vermont,” so I said, “What’s a Canadian doing in the U.S. Coast Guard?” not having any idea how stupid I must’ve sounded. Maybe Dennis is right that the education I’m getting here isn’t all that good.

  He laughed at me. He explained about Vermont being in the United States and I felt like a real dope. Then he said he grew up in Kentucky, but his family just moved to Vermont a year ago. That explains his accent.

  I started right off calling him Sandy. There was no other name for him. He must’ve had five pounds of sand on his uniform, and more inside it. I felt sorry for him. I know how it feels to be in wet, gritty clothes, and it’s even worse when it’s cold out like it was last night.

  “If you’re this shook up by a horse and a dip in the ocean, what will you do if some spies come ashore?” I asked him.

  “Well, I’m human,” he said. “This is my first night out here. My first day at this godforsaken place. They told me I was going to be stationed at a beach resort. Ha! I’ve never seen the ocean before in my life and had no idea it was so damn cold, and big, and rough, and then I get stationed on a beach where someone’s throat was cut a week ago. And then some wild horse comes running out of the bushes, and some girl jumps out of the trees. Do you blame me for not feeling particularly confident at the moment?”

  I wished I could take back my words. Sometimes I speak before I think, and I can be mean. And this was his first night? That meant I had missed seeing Jimmy Brown out on the beach by one night! But I was starting not to care. Sandy made Jimmy Brown look like a kid. Sandy has brown hair about my color, and a beard and mustache trimmed close to his face, and blue eyes I could see the moon in. I don’t mean to sound so fickle, but I guess that’s what I am. I told him I was sorry, that I could imagine how strange it would all seem to somebody who’d never been to the Banks before.

  He looked at me different then. “I like a person who can admit when she’s wrong,” he said.

  I knew there was no way he could stay out on the beach until three without catching pneumonia, so I told him he could come back to my house and I would find him some dry clothes to put on. I could tell he hated leaving his patrol, but he really had no choice.

  Here is where I made a strange decision. I could have woken up Mama and Daddy and explained to them what was going on, and they would have welcomed Sandy into the house and warmed him up and made him some coffee. But that would mean I’d have to explain about being out on the beach at that hour. They would have a fit, especially when they found out it was the beach where the man was murdered. They would never let me out of their sight again and they’d lock my bedroom door at night. But also, I didn’t want to share Sandy with them. I was starting to believe in love at first sight, and Sandy was mine, not theirs.

  So I explained to him about how I had snuck out and he laughed at that and said he understood, he’d snuck out of his house once or twice himse
lf. I snuck him through the back door and over to the stairway that leads to the old assistant keeper’s quarters. It’s empty rooms there now. We haven’t had an assistant keeper here since I was eight or nine. That way, there was no way Mama and Daddy could hear him come up. I left him in one of the empty rooms—it wasn’t much warmer in there than outside, I’m afraid, but at least he was out of the worst of it. I snuck into one of our extra bedrooms, where Daddy keeps some of his clothes. I took an old pair of pants I thought he might not miss, and a couple of old sweatshirts and a slicker that had holes in it. There wasn’t much I could do about his shoes, but I got a pair of my socks out of my own dresser. They were way too small, of course, but better than nothing.

  I took the clothes back to Sandy. His teeth were chattering and he looked at those clothes like they were the answer to his prayers. I left him alone while he changed, then we tiptoed downstairs again. I made him stay on the porch while I went back in and got him one of the doughnuts Mama had made that morning. It was a little on the stale side by then, but I doubted Sandy would mind, and I was right. He gobbled it up.

  He was anxious to get back to the beach, and I really liked that about him, that he cared so much about doing his job right. I thought about what Dennis had said about sandpounders being men who had nothing better to offer the world and I felt angry at him. How dare he say something like that about people like Sandy and Jimmy Brown and all the others?

  I went back in the house one more time and got a wool blanket out of the hall closet and took it out to him. He didn’t tell me to stay behind, so I walked with him back to the beach, me carrying the blanket and him his disgusting, wet, heavy and sand-covered bundle of clothes.

  “I don’t think you should walk your patrol anymore tonight,” I said when we finally got to the beach. “You still have those wet shoes on. You should just wrap up in this blanket and sit on the beach. You can still see quite a bit from here.”

  To my surprise, he agreed with me. He sat down, shivering even though he had the blanket wrapped tight around him. Then he looked up at me. “You’d better keep me company,” he said, “or I’ll fall asleep.”

  Just the invitation I’d been hoping for! I plopped down next to him in the sand. He asked me if I was cold. I really wasn’t, although I almost said I was in the hope that he would share that blanket with me and I’d be right next to him.

  “What’s there to do around here?” he asked.

  “Most people fish,” I said.

  “I meant for fun,” he said.

  I laughed. “Some people do that for fun,” I said, but I knew what he meant. “They show movies some nights at the schoolhouse.” I thought I should probably tell him about the dances at the schoolhouse, but I didn’t want to, because I knew he’d find the older girls there, the ones who danced real close to the Coast Guard boys and gave them anything they wanted. The boys from this area had all left to fight in Europe, and the girls were left behind and dying for some company. The dances at the schoolhouse were where most of the Coast Guard boys spent their free time. Sandy would find out about the dances at the schoolhouse soon enough without me telling him, I figured.

  “I was the one who found that dead man on the beach,” I said.

  He looked at me, then seemed to know who I was all of a sudden. “You’re that Bess,” he said. “I’ve heard about you. You bring cookies and pie to the Coast Guard station on the weekends, right?”

  “Right,” I said, wondering what the boys there said about me.

  “You’re not sixteen,” he said. “They said you were fourteen.”

  I felt exasperated at being found out. “Nearly fifteen,” I said.

  He laughed, more to himself than to me, and I knew he was thinking I was terribly young. “What would your parents do if they knew you were out here right now?”

  “I don’t want to think about it,” I said. And I didn’t.

  “You don’t look fourteen, though,” he said, and he was leaning back to stare at my face in the moonlight. “You’re very pretty.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I felt like he was looking at my face way too hard and I tried not to giggle like a fourteen-year-old.

  “And you’re obviously the adventurous sort,” he said.

  “Yup,” I answered him. “I inherited it. My mother was in the lifeguard service.” I repeated this rumor as though it was a fact, and I doubt he believed me, but it didn’t matter. We started talking. About everything. And I mean everything. He wanted to know all about Kiss River and the Outer Banks, and I told him, adding that he needed to give the mustangs all the room they wanted, though some of the Coast Guard boys have trained them to use on their patrol. He said he didn’t plan to ride any horses out here, thank you very much. I said he’d better watch out for the wild boars, too.

  “The wild boars?” he asked me. “Hogs, you mean?”

  “Right. Livestock used to run wild around here,” I said. “Some of the hogs just took off and now they are mean as molasses.”

  I told him just about everything I know about the Outer Banks, trying to make up for looking stupid when I said that thing about Vermont being part of Canada. I think he was impressed with all I know.

  He told me about Vermont, and how he lives in the capital, I forget its name, and how even in Kentucky he lived in the city, where it’s “civilized.” I’d already figured out he was no country boy.

  “It feels slow and empty here,” he said. But I did get him to admit that if he was in Vermont this time of year he’d be sitting in three feet of snow instead of on a sandy beach.

  He told me about how they were trained in the Coast Guard, how they had to watch for any signs of strange activity on the beach at night, how we should really be dimming the lights on the beach, just like Mr. Hewitt said. But no one was officially telling people to do it, and people just hadn’t gotten the message yet. Americans can be selfish, he said. They want to keep their lights and their cars and all and not sacrifice anything, and all the while the German U-boats are attacking our ships, which are lit up from behind by the lights on shore. I argued with him, telling him that my family and my neighbors cared very much what happened, and if someone told us we had to dim our lights, we would do it in a heartbeat. I asked him if he hated the Krauts and the Italians and the Japs. I never use the word Kraut, but it slipped out and I know it was because I wanted to sound older and more worldly, but he didn’t like it.

  “Don’t use that word,” he said. “They’re Germans. Don’t use Kraut or Heinie or Wop or slant-eyes or any of those words. It brings us down to their level.”

  I was glad he couldn’t see how my cheeks were burning. “I don’t usually use that word,” I said. “I’m not sure why it came out.”

  I told him about Mr. Sato living in the house over on the sound and he looked very interested in the fact that we had a real Japanese man nearby. He asked me if I knew about the internment camps, where we were locking up Japanese people who live in the United States. I was so glad Dennis had taught me about the internment camps. I said I thought it was wrong to lock them up, since I know that’s what Dennis believes and he’s made me believe it, too. But Sandy said it’s necessary.

  “It seems unfair,” he said. “I know most of those people are innocent. But we can’t take the chance that they’re not. Look at Pearl Harbor.”

  I thought about Mr. Sato, how I used to see him fishing, looking content in his wheelchair on his deck, how I’d sometimes wave to him and he’d wave back. Even though he’s Japanese, I hate the thought of someone coming to take Mr. Sato away from his home and his daughter-in-law and lock him up. The thought actually put tears in my eyes and Sandy noticed that.

  “You’re a nice girl,” he said to me. He touched my forehead, I think to move some hair or sand off it, but I’m not sure. I wanted to tell him I thought he was nice, too, but I couldn’t make the words come out, so I just smiled back. He didn’t try to kiss me, but I really wanted him to. I would have let him.

  Arou
nd three, we could hear the jeep coming up the beach and so I said goodbye and ducked into the woods. I watched him climb into the jeep and heard someone say, “Hey, what happened to you? Where’d you get those clothes?” and I wondered what he would say back, but I couldn’t hear his answer. I was sure he would make up something that wouldn’t get me in trouble. I watched until the jeep disappeared around the curve in the beach, then I headed home, grinning a silly grin, and thinking how if I’d come out the night before, it would have been Jimmy I’d seen on the beach.

  “Jimmy?” I said to myself as I was walking. “Jimmy who?”

  CHAPTER 14

  The light faded from the sky above the ocean as Gina sat down on the top step of the lighthouse. This had quickly become her private haven. She’d climbed the spiral staircase every evening since starting to work at Shorty’s three days earlier. Although she still held tight to the railing as she ascended those last few steps high above the craggy rim of the tower, she no longer suffered from vertigo up there. Once she was seated and looking out to sea, the small frustrations of the day disappeared and she felt her body begin to relax. It was not peace she found at the top of the lighthouse; there was no peace for her anywhere. But sitting up there, awed by the vastness of sea and sky, she became keenly aware of both her insignificance in the world at large, as well as her importance to one small child.

  If it was not peace she found up there, at least it was rest. Working at Shorty’s was even more exhausting than teaching, and her feet were on fire by the end of her shift. She’d taken no time off yet, and didn’t plan to until Monday, wanting to get into the rhythm of the job and put some money in her pocket. The tips were surprisingly good for such a seedy-looking place. But tips would not be enough to help Rani, the child whose picture was, now and always, in the pocket of her shorts.

  As usual, she’d taken off her sandals to walk through the swirling waves toward the tower, and the cool water had felt wonderful on her feet. She’d forgotten to leave the sandals at the bottom of the stairs this evening, however, and now she leaned over to drop them, one at a time, over the side of the railing into the core of the lighthouse. She watched them fall through the spiral of stairs until they disappeared in the darkness, and she listened for the echoing thunk as they hit the tile floor far below her.