When the sun begins to sink into the gold-tipped waves, their mothers call them for dinner. The children leave their plastic buckets on the sandbar, filled with flailing hermit crabs, sea snails, and the honey-colored shells worn thin by tumbling waves so they are gnarled like toenails. That’s what the children call them. Toenail shells.
Sandy arms and legs are toweled off and dressed in long-sleeve shirts to protect from the bite of green bottle flies. As the clouds turn the color of bruises, each family finds their table on the beach, the red-white-and-blue tablecloth weighed down with rocks gathered by the children. They settle down to eat as the sun sets on this last day of summer.
A summer they call unforgettable. What a summer. They talk about the caterpillars instead of the unspeakable things that happened at the Castle.
They pass plates of steaming shellfish—crab, lobster, mussels, and cherrystones—and roasted corn on the cob, red potatoes, and sweet sausage, all of it wrapped in seaweed and burlap and buried deep in the sand with fire-hot stones.
The fathers are proud of the feast. Cooked right there on shore, steps from where the shellfish were harvested, in the way of the Shinnecock tribes of long ago who lived only on what the island offered up. The infinite bounty of the sea. The men roll up their sleeves and flex the muscles they’ve earned at the factory. They paint lines under their sun- and beer-reddened eyes with shards of pink clay their children find on the beach. They whoop like the Indians they watched in spaghetti westerns as kids—white men in face paint. They slap their palms against open mouths until one of the mothers tells them to sit down and eat.
There are no exclamations—Oh, how gorgeous or Look at that color or It’s like the sky is on fire—because all the comparisons were made long ago when they first moved to the island. Or, they were born on the island, and watching the sun rise from and sink into the sea has always been routine. The beauty is their inheritance.
Thanks to the Colonel, the Grudder men think, not that they would mention his name aloud. Not yet. The island needs time to recover. The scant leaves left after the caterpillars’ feast will soon turn color and fall to the ground. The island will go into hibernation, a much-needed respite to recoup its strength. On the third of November, Bill Clinton will win the presidential election with forty-three percent of the vote. Sheriff Stroh and his men will have a hellish week. Seven DUIs. One hostage situation at the Wildcat Café on the west side. A Grudder executive will hang himself in his private cabana at the Oyster Cove Country Club clubhouse. The hanged man will mention, in his suicide note, his disapproval of the first lady, Hillary Clinton, being given an office in the West Wing. He’ll call it “unnatural and perverse.”
Most of the furred gypsy moth eggs lovingly insulated by their long-dead mothers’ body hair will perish during that unusually cold winter, and in the spring, the leaves will return. More plentiful than before. By that time, Julius Simmons will have served nine months for the shooting, in self-defense, of Vinny LaRosa. Vinny will wheel his chair into the courtroom to protest Julius’s pardon and release. The courtroom will echo with islanders’ outraged cries when the two-to-four-year prison sentence (attempted manslaughter and criminal possession of a weapon) is overturned. Judge Harvey Matthews will mention the tragic death of Brooks Marshall Simmons in his final statement, and some of those present, Enzo LaRosa for one, will think of that old biblical saying. An eye for an eye.
But for now, let the people of Avalon Island enjoy the last night of that eventful summer of ’92. The whistling song of Singing Beach calls hundreds of islanders to the shore, sparklers and cold beers in hand, ready to sing “God Bless America” as fireworks light up the sea and a trail of paper lanterns dots the horizon like a ribbon aflame.
Let the girl (almost a woman) with the sun-kissed shoulders run across the smooth wet sand, take her brother by the hand, pull him toward the woods for one more game before night falls. You can play the hero, she promises.
Let the men and women of Avalon Island, East and West, play make-believe—pretend they control life and death, war and peace, their kings and queens and workers and servants and country, and the warbirds they bring to life with aluminum and steel, baptized by fire. Let them believe—for one last night—they are immortal.