The Keeper of Dawn

by Hickman, J. B.

  “Someone tell me why we’re doing this?” Derek asked, brushing away a spider web.

  “The beach,” was all Chris said.

  “This beach of yours better be worth it.”

  “It will be.”

  The ground became rocky: slate ledges protruded from the dirt; fist-sized rocks jumbled around tree roots; heavy boulders covered in moss lay deep in forest shadow. A mottled green snake the length of my arm basked itself in the sun that shone brokenly through the canopy above.

  Chris rarely spoke. He never once looked back. His silence proved contagious, the only words spoken being muttered curses as we pushed our way on. Roland frequently referred to his compass, nodding to confirm our direction. I took periodic sips from an old Boy Scout canteen covered in green army cloth, the water tasting tinged with metal.

  The trees thinned and the low lying foliage fell away. The sun was over my shoulder now. The verdant landscape became more desolate with each step, the gray rocks turning into the gritty chalk-white of ash left over from a campfire. When the tree line fell away, our feet hurried along the path in anticipation of catching that first glimpse of the ocean. Wind scraped across the rocks. The air tingled with salt. Overhead, a gull circled in an updraft.

  Finally we were there, at the edge looking down. But the beach remained out of sight. A fogbank hugged a succession of unseen cliff-faces, a staircase of mist descending to the ocean. The blue of the Atlantic was visible just beyond, razor-sharp and electric. From below came the rise and fall of the tide washing Raker’s shore.

  “What’d I tell you?” Chris shouted from the edge. “What did I tell you?” He did a shuffling dance, then turned and flicked off Wellington. “It’s great to be alive!” he shouted into the fog. “All’s I need is a hang glider.” He jumped up, arms extended, knocking the rope from his shoulder in the process.

  “Can’t keep you out of the sky,” Roland said. With hands on hips, he surveyed the fogbank that was beginning to recede beneath the glare of the sun.

  “Every angel needs his wings,” Chris replied with a wink, and then leapt off the rock and scrambled into the fog.

  “Hey, your rope,” Derek called after him.

  “Here we go again,” Roland muttered, shouldering Chris’ rope and starting off after his roommate.

  The path down was steep. The sunlight highlighted the fog in a gleaming wall of white. My surroundings appeared in varying shades of light, with only objects close at hand possessing color. It surprised me what materialized from the fog. At the base of the first cliff I found myself among a collection of loose rocks resembling roughly-hewn tombstones. I had lost sight of the others and was alone in this vaporous graveyard, the sun burning a white hole in the sky above. But then Roland appeared, laboring over the rocks, the thick coil of rope slung over his shoulder. We both smiled when Chris howled his excitement from below.

  I drifted on, not knowing what lay ahead. It no longer felt like we were on an island. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Miskapaug’s harbor suddenly appeared, or if the familiar shapes and sights of Long Island burst into view. But I didn’t want that. I would be home soon enough. I was content where I was—obscured in the fog with the Headliners, hiking our way down to the beach.

  Derek and Chris were peering over the lip of a cliff when I caught up to them. A broth of mist churned at our feet.

  “This is it,” Chris said. He was smoking a cigarette, his hair still damp from passing through the forest. “The Big Kahuna. All it takes is one step …” He dangled a foot over the edge.

  “Splat,” Roland said, dropping the rope.

  “This’ll be our anchor,” Chris said, kicking a stout cedar behind him, its gnarled roots dipping into a scarce deposit of rocky soil.

  After arguing over who could tie the best knot, we secured the rope to the cedar’s trunk and threw it over the edge. Overhead, the sun passed intermittently through the receding fogbank.

  “You sure it’s long enough?” Roland asked, peering over the edge.

  “It better be,” Chris said, slipping on a pair of gloves. After giving the rope a few hard pulls, he flicked his cigarette into the air. “Let’s hope I don’t beat that down,” he said, and jumped over the edge.

  The rope went taut; the cedar waved its leafless branches in the air. For a split-second I envisioned its shallow roots dislodging and all of it toppling over the edge. But the tree held, and Chris kicked off the wall, letting gravity carry him down. He disappeared into the fog, only his coyote yell signaling he had reached bottom.

  Roland was next. After making the initial jump, he dangled below us, one gloved-hand gripping the rope above his head, the other tucking it beneath him. Though he repeatedly kicked off the wall, he wasn’t really going anywhere. Whenever he looked up—which was often—Derek and I gave him an enthusiastic thumbs-up. During his agonizingly slow descent, I watched his face—afraid but determined—and cringed at the thought of him in the military.

  “You’re on deck,” Derek told me, pulling up the rope. “You ever rappel before?”

  “Never,” I said, my pulse increasing. I was finding it difficult to look away from the edge.

  “Rule number one: keep one hand in front and one behind. To stop, bring the rope to your ass. That’s your brakes. It’ll feel like you’re sitting down.”

  I looked down at the rope as if it were a long snake.

  “Try not to think about it,” Derek said, handing me the gloves that Roland had tied to the end of the rope. “The first step is the worst, but after that it’s smooth sailing.”

  I slid the gloves over my sweaty hands.

  “You could always do it Aussie style.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Headfirst!” Derek laughed wildly.

  Surprisingly, it was Roland who gave me courage. Watching him overcome his fear became my inspiration. I backed to the edge and forced myself to look down. A blanket of fog lay beneath me. Despite my slow, calculated movements, my heart beat like a jackhammer. The rope felt heavy in my hands. I pulled it taut, my muscles tensing in anticipation. I looked desperately at Derek, as if he were forcing me to do this, as if a single word from him could make it all stop. I tried to take that final step, but my muscles understood what my mind did not.

  “Remember, don’t think about it too much,” I heard Derek say.

  Suddenly the image of Benjamin, petrified with fear, forced its way into my mind. Was that how I looked, squeezing the rope with my death grip, unable to take a single step?

  “You don’t have to do this.”

  Had Derek said that, or had I? It didn’t matter. Those merciful words released me, and I relaxed my grip. He was right—I didn’t have to do this. It was only a beach. I could just wait here until they returned.

  But then a yell, wild and energetic, rose out of the fog. Without thinking, I gripped the rope and stepped backwards.

  There was an instant of weightlessness, and then the rope pulled hard against me. I had only dropped three or four feet, but it felt like a mile. I took a deep breath and forced myself to kick off the wall. Derek had been right—the first step was the worst. After the initial drop, the decline became more gradual. Trees began to appear beneath me. As I lowered myself through their branches, the fog lifted, finally giving way to the rising sun.

  “Didn’t think you’d make it,” Roland said, helping me off with the gloves.

  The cliff didn’t look as steep from the bottom. It would be a challenging climb, but manageable with the rope.

  “You hear that?” Chris asked. “Waves are crashing on our beach. Hurry up, Mayhew!” he shouted. “Don’t be keeping me from my beach!”

  As soon as Derek’s feet hit the ground, we were charging through the last of the trees. The beach was triangular in shape, a pennant of sand gleaming in the sun. The horizon was empty save for a second, much smaller island that lay a hundred yards from shore. The size of a large house, its base was corroded a mottled black by the water. An archway
penetrated its left side; to the right was a lone, dead tree, its branches dipping into the water like unmanned oars of some forlorn vessel. A few dozen boulders lay scattered between the beach and the other island, protruding from the water like giant steppingstones.

  “Beats the hell out of going to church,” Derek repeated, taking off his shoes.

  “Amen to that,” Chris said, following his lead.

  The dry sand was hot beneath my feet. The wind that had made hunchbacks out of the cedars on the hill above was absent here. There was no litter, no old men with metal detectors searching for lost jewelry, no footprints but our own.

  Chris walked back and forth through the surf, testing the island’s boundaries. Derek gave chase to a nearby gull, causing the bird to rise into the air with an agitated squawk. When it landed a short distance away, Derek continued pursuing it until the gull flew over to the neighboring island. Roland didn’t seem to know what to do with himself. He eventually fell in behind Chris, matching his roommate’s stride so precisely that only a single set of footprints crossed the sand. I scoured the area for anything of interest, but the beach was washed clean, just sand and sunlight glinting off dark pebbles. Every so often a wave would crash into the far side of the neighboring island with enough force to send water spraying over its top.

  The ocean was spread out before us. This gentle water curling over the damp, hard sand marked the limits of our existence. It felt like we had come to the edge of the world; the edge of our world anyway, as small and well-defined as it was, and we were looking out, not at the sea, but in an attempt to catch a glimpse of life beyond the island, of other lives that weren’t anchored to this shore, hedged in by the small but binding waves.

  “Let me get a picture,” Derek said, reaching for his camera. He had taken several on the way down, including one of himself standing on the rim of the courtyard fountain, positioning the camera in such a way that it made it look like he was pissing the stream of water from one of the frog’s mouths.

  “All right, let’s act like we know each other,” Chris said.

  We congregated around a flat rock at the water’s edge. Chris stood between us, his arms draped over our shoulders. Afterwards we sat on the rock and watched the waves roll in. My father had once told me that the greatest rewards in life were what you strived the hardest to obtain, and it was like that with the beach. We had worked so hard getting down here that it lived up to our expectations.

  Roland and Derek broke the silence by bringing up their physics exam. “Centrifugal acceleration and kinetic energy aren’t my strong points,” Derek was saying. “And I think Doyles has got something against jocks.”

  “You nerds better can it,” Chris said. “No talking shop on my beach.”

  “It’s not your beach,” Derek said.

  “Either way, I don’t want to hear about Wellington. Go find your own beach if you want to talk about that shit. Talk about girls or something, anything, but not Wellington.”

  “Girls, huh?”

  Chris flashed a smile. “I ever tell you how I lost my virginity?”

  “Backseat of your dad’s car?” Derek guessed.

  “Too cliché. It was in the Jetranger.”

  “In a helicopter?” Derek laughed. “No way.”

  Roland rolled his eyes as if to say, here we go again.

  “Back then I didn’t know a cyclic from a collective, but she made a man out of me, right there at the controls of the Jetranger!”

  “That’s phenomenal,” Derek said. Everything with Derek was phenomenal.

  “And I’ve been blowing my load flying ever since!”

  Derek laughed. “That gives a whole new meaning to the word cockpit. Only you, Forsythe. Man, in a helicopter. So who was she? Did you ever see her again?”

  “Julia Newton was her name. Haven’t seen her since.”

  “You only saw her once, and you remember her name?” Roland asked.

  “Everybody remembers their first,” Chris said, causing Roland to look down at his toes wiggling in the sand.

  “Did she have big ones?” Derek asked.

  “A handful.”

  “A handful is good.”

  We all agreed—a handful was good.

  Though I hadn’t thought about her in months, I made a promise to call Shelly Armstrong when I returned home. A friend had told me she liked me, and though I hadn’t been interested at the time, now she seemed distant and wonderful.

  “I’m actually seeing someone in Miskapaug,” Derek announced.

  “I didn’t know you were slummin’ with a townie,” Chris said. “She have any friends?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “Tell them to come out and introduce themselves.”

  “And how exactly would they do that?”

  “They got a boat? They could meet us down here.”

  “We’d sneak girls into the dorms all the time at Eastbridge.”

  “Yeah, but you weren’t on an island,” Chris said. “The only time girls are allowed here is to watch their boyfriends play football. And they make sure anyone even halfway resembling a female is gone by that afternoon. Having sex on this godforsaken heap of dirt—now to me, that would be the ultimate.”

  I smiled; I felt myself growing older just by listening to him. We had been there less than half an hour and Chris was already devising our next conquest. Ringing Iron Lungs, climbing Raker Lighthouse, hiking to the beach—it would never end. Each feat was grander and more daring than the last.

  I looked out at the neighboring island as another wave exploded through the archway. White foam rained down; smaller waves rose up and broke on the rocks. Afterward an eerie calm settled over the area, the water that had only seconds before contained the force of a deadly weapon fizzed with tiny bubbles of a carbonated drink.

  “It’s nothing serious,” Derek said. “We keep a low profile. She doesn’t want her friends to know she’s dating a preppy. It doesn’t matter that we’re all the way out here. Everyone at her school hates us.”

  “That’s usually how it goes,” Roland said.

  “The girl of my dreams though, Samantha Woodridge, lives right next door.”

  Derek got up and threw a rock into the waves. Watching Derek with his shirt off was like getting a lesson in anatomy. His athletic physique made it difficult to determine whether he was a student or a teacher. His skin was bruised with a deep-rooted acne, the only evidence he was still one of us. Derek didn’t fit the stereotypes that abounded at prep schools. He was a hybrid of punk rocker and athlete, conforming just enough to fit in with the jocks from Eastbridge—Wellington’s most untouchable clique—while still maintaining his independence.

  “Ah, the girl next door,” Chris said.

  “She is, too. Long hair, a smokin’ bod …”

  “How old?”

  “Our age.”

  “Brunette?”

  “Nope, blonde.”

  “How tall?”

  Chris asked these questions as if assessing the horsepower of a car.

  “Five-five. Maybe five-six.”

  “The real question is, does she know you exist?”

  “Not yet,” Derek admitted. “But she will. I invited her to a party we’re throwing over fall break. Hey, you guys should come. My brothers are known throughout Greenwich for their phenomenal parties. I’d feel more confident meeting Samantha with the Headliners there to back me. And you’d get to listen to my kick-ass sound system. What do you say?”

  Roland and I politely declined, but Chris was intrigued. “If I come, you’re stuck with me all week,” he said.

  “Not a problem.”

  “You can’t go anyway,” Roland said.

  “Give me one good reason why not?” Chris asked.

  “I’ll give you two: Providence and Newport.”

  “What’s in Providence and Newport?” I asked.

  “All part of the campaign trail,” Roland answered.

  “The Governor drags me along every c
hance he gets,” Chris said.

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” Derek said.

  “It’s wretched. I’d rather be here, jerking off to the memory of my social life. The only reason the Governor brings me along is to parade me around like some prized possession.”

  “You don’t know that,” Roland said in a rare contradiction. “It’s another one of your conspiracies.”

  “Of course it’s a conspiracy. That’s all politics is in this country—a conspiracy to deceive the public. You think it’s a coincidence that just when the two-term limit in Maryland is up, he hops over here?” Chris shook his head. “Rhode Island. The day he dropped me off was the first time he ever set foot in this state. Probably hasn’t even seen the house he bought last year. But he owns it, and that’s enough. They used to hang carpetbaggers, now they give ‘em the key to the city.”

  “Why Rhode Island?” I asked.

  “Why not? Mathias and Mikulski are lifers, but over here the Senate is up for grabs. Doesn’t matter if it’s Rhode Island or Alaska. As long as he stays in the spotlight until ’84, ’88 at the latest.”

  “What happens then?”

  “You think Carter will be around forever? He’s always set his sights high. Back home they call him the golden child. Almost convinced him to go head-to-head with Reagan, but a good politician knows when to make his move.”

  Chris got up and paced back and forth. “I stand before you today on the precipice of change, on the high ground where idealism meets practical resolution, where past results lead to a promising future. I have a vision of a public education system that prepares the children of this fine nation for that next important step. And when I say children, I’m talking about all children, children from all neighborhoods, from all walks of life. Where everyone gets an equal opportunity.”

  At that moment a wave swept up the beach, rising all the way to our rock. We lifted our feet to keep from getting wet, but Chris kept right on talking, the water rising to his knees.

  “This is an exciting time for public education, a time of change and innovation. The people of this great state have once again made education their passion. There is a new resolve to overcome the challenges that lie ahead. We need to get serious about providing a quality education. For it is clear to me that the people of Maryland believe, as I do, that education is our future.”