Hide and Seek

To be honest, I wasn't opposed to seeing how the girls reacted,

either.

We turned down an old dirt road and drove half a mile through the

Guiles farmland, then slowed down as the road turned rougher through

the dark pine forest that Van and I used to play in as kids.

Van was my older brother. He died in Nam when I was thirteen. It was

two days after my birthday, November 12.

My father and Mr. Guiles were old friends. But we never came out here

again after Van died. Maybe that was because his own son, Billy, had

the bad grace to survive intact while Van went down in a burning

helicopter over Khe Sanh. Maybe it was just too many memories. But we

stayed away.

I remembered it, though. It hadn't changed much. Forest roads take a

longtime to change. A little rockier, maybe, but just the same. It

gave me a pleasant feeling, like coming home.

Steven cursed the road so hard you'd have thought it was his car and

not Casey's. But it opened up soon and got smoother, and then there

was that familiar little stretch of meadow and the cabin we used to

call the Picnic Basket. Steve pulled over and parked, and we took the

food from the car. Casey was first to discover the view. I walked

over to her.

"Pretty good, isn't it?"

"Wonderful."

We stood thirty feet above as hallow bay with all the Atlantic back

dropped behind it. Directly below was a rocky beach. There were

boulders and crumbled slate.

When the seas were rough the water rose to maybe fifteen feet from

where we were standing. All the contours would seem to change

overnight. If you came here as infrequently as I did, it was never the

same place twice.

I led them down a path to the sea. We found a spot beside a thick

column of slate ten feet from the rock face and deposited our stolen

merchandise and our towels. I climbed to the top of the column.

The gulls had been here, as I'd thought they would. They smashed the

shells of crabs and clams and oysters against the rock to get at the

softer stuff inside. It was littered with tiny corpses^