The Dock

THE DOCK





         It is overcast as the car crests the hill.  The sun has just set, but it’s not yet dark, lingering light in the sky.  As I get a glimpse of the sea, I pull the car over and take a deep breath before getting out to stand on the grassy verge, looking down at the bay, grey-blue in the dusk.  A glance to the right and I see the dock, jutting out into the still water, a second mirrored beneath.  My heart jumps and I am instantly consumed by such a barrage of mixed emotions that for a moment I feel like I might have to sit down, then and there, at the side of the road.  Taking a deep breath, I compose myself before looking back at the simple wooden pier.



         This is the first time I’ve been back to the beach house. As I stare at the darkening jetty I can almost see us there.  Five children of varying sizes, all sun-burnished in their ragged cut-offs or bathing suits, hair damp and tangled from swimming, feet bare and filthy from a month without shoes.  I can feel the midsummer sun beating down on my head and shoulders, feel Luke’s hands on mine as he guides them, teaching me to bait a hook.

“Push it through like this,” he instructed, the slippery chunk of fish seeming to slide onto the hook as if by magic. “ Be careful not to get your thumb.  It’s sharp!”  We were so close back then, despite the fact there were ten years between Danny, the oldest, and me.  We were a gang, a tribe, always together through the long summers at the beach.  We often didn’t see our parents until dinnertime.  They slept late in the mornings and by the time they got up we were already out on the dock or on the bay in the patched-but-still-leaky rowboat that was barely big enough to hold five of us.



         I was never happier than I was at the beach house.  We all were.  We looked forward to it throughout the year, eagerly awaiting summer so we could escape the city and the constraints of our day-to-day lives.  At the beach we were free to be ourselves.  The ever-shifting alliances between my siblings settled into a predictable rhythm.  Danny, as the eldest, was the leader.  Shaun and Marty, with less than eighteen months between them, were like twins, and in turn best friends and mortal enemies. Then Luke and I.  He is eight years older than I am so our friendship was unlikely to say the least.  But there it was.  He was patient with me.  Unbelievably patient, always willing to keep pace with me, point things out, teach me things and guide me through.  He would protect me from Shaun and Marty’s merciless teasing and make sure I was included in everything they were doing.



         It is dark as I move back to the car, the sea and the dock devoured by night.  The headlights are bright as they sweep before me on the narrow, tree-lined lane that leads down the hill to the house.  I don’t know what I expect, but am surprised when I pull up outside and find the lawns neatly trimmed, the porch freshly painted.  Just like that last summer.  I remember Luke and Danny painting that porch; their hands splotched white, their hair - Luke’s dark, Danny’s blonde - white flecked.  Shaun and Marty fought over the mower, a ride-on for the long, sloping lawn that stretched down from the house to the water’s edge.  For summers were not all long, languid days fishing off the dock.  There was always work to be done: maintenance on the old wooden house and endless gardening.  My mother took care of most of that as she enjoyed digging in the dirt, planting and weeding.  Such a change from her cerebral everyday life as a philosophy professor.  She was a stranger in her worn blue jeans and cotton shirt open at the neck, hair tied into a loose ponytail to be tossed back whenever it strayed across her shoulder.



         Although I am curious about what state the house might be in, I walk past the loose brick the key is hidden under and head towards the water.  At the edge of the lawn I kick off my shoes to let my toes curl in the butter-soft grass.  Then the pebbles at the water’s edge, and finally the soft, worn boards of the dock, still warm from the day’s sun.  I pause before walking further down the jetty, staring into a night sky strewn with stars.  There is a full moon tonight, just as there was that other night, its light cool and milky.  I breathe deeply as I walk to the end of the dock, my eyes searching out and finding the spot where I sat that night, bobbing on the gentle ripples in the old rowboat as the scene played out before me.



         Louise Passetti.  Falling in age between Luke and Shaun, she was seventeen that summer. Since the previous year she had grown from a gawky, skinny girl into a beautiful young woman, slender and curvy with a mass of glossy black curls pouring like liquid bitumen down her back. As one of the few young people on our side of the bay, and one of two girls, I suppose it was inevitable that she would become involved with one of my brothers. 



And Luke was the chosen one.



         Suddenly he didn’t have time to fish with me.  He didn’t want to play checkers on rainy days.  He just wanted to be with Louise.  Even on days she was not around, the days she went into town with her mother or to shop with one of her friends, he was distracted. 



         Swimming, we teased Danny who, having spent the winter lifting weights, dieting and sculpting his body, could no longer float.  Instead of joining the rest of us who floated starfish-like on our backs watching the clouds shift and change as they scuttled by, he showed off his muscles with his powerful butterfly stroke.

“Can’t catch me!” he taunted across the water.

“Why would we want to?” Luke called back.  He and Danny had, for some unknown reason, started sniping at one another; an argument seemed to underlie even the most innocuous conversation between them. This hostility was something new and unsettling.  While they had never been the best of friends, they had shared an easy camaraderie. 



         Shaun and Marty drifted off and soon became embroiled in an epic hour-long water fight.  Luke and I watched the sky, but I could tell his heart was not in it.  His heart was with Louise, wherever she was that day. And it was like that regardless of the activity: Luke just wasn’t all there.



         Most weekend nights there was a barbeque at someone’s house.  That Saturday it was our turn and all the families with houses on our side of the bay were there.  A wind came up and, seeing that all I had on was my bathing suit and skimpy cut-offs, my mother sent me back to the house for warmer clothes, the sound of adult laughter and clinking beer bottles following me almost all the way.  I searched the room I shared with Shaun and Marty but couldn’t find my sweatshirt, remembering finally that I’d been wearing it the day before when it rained, and that I’d left it on the floor of Luke and Danny’s room where we had retreated to play Monopoly.  Crossing the driveway to the garage above which Danny and Luke slept, my bare feet made barely a sound.  Up the stairs I went, surprised when I reached the top to find light flickering through the open door.  Cautiously I peered around the doorframe and saw candles burning on the dresser.  Danny was in bed, his bare back towards me, sweat trickling between his shoulder blades as he moved in a strange rhythm.  Then I saw the swathe of black curls spilling across the pillow, Louise arching her back as she pressed her mouth to Danny’s.  I backed off, knowing this was not something I was supposed to have seen.  I slipped away without my sweater, running back down to the beach. To Luke.



         After dinner two nights later I was in the rowboat.  Shaun and Marty had decided to camp on the island in the middle of the bay and they asked me to row the boat back for them, wanting to play at castaways.  I was almost back at the mooring when I saw Danny and Luke.  I was in the shadows at the side of the dock, mouth open to call Luke to throw down the rope when I realised he and Danny were arguing. When angry, Danny yelled, went red in the face, and made extravagant gestures.  Luke was the opposite, getting very pale and quiet, his anger seething somewhere deep within him.  The wind was blowing the wrong way and I couldn’t hear much of what was being said.  But I realised pretty quickly that they were fighting about Louise, about what I’d seen the night of the barbeque.

“… bastard!” Luke’s voice.  “You knew…”

“… must’ve wanted… not man enough…”  The fragments floated to me, disjointed but still comprehensible.

“Don’t you ever say that!” Luke again, voice low and furious.



         What happened next I see in slow motion every time I close my eyes: Luke’s left hook catching Danny square on the jaw, Danny stumbling backwards, his heel catching the coiled pile of rope on the dock. Then the metallic thunk of his head hitting the corner of the heavy steel tackle box as he fell, blood gushing from the gash to pool on the wooden boards.  The boneless way his body tumbled into the water, his weight making waves that jounced the boat about so that I had to hold on with both hands. His shape swallowed by the darkening water, disappearing down into the depths.  I held my breath, expecting him to float back up to the surface, but Danny couldn’t float.  With barely any body fat, he just couldn’t float.  Luke’s voice shredded the night.

“Danny!  Danny!  Danny!” He screamed the name over and over before he leaped off the dock and dove down into the water, searching fruitlessly for the place Danny’s body might have come to rest.



         My father came and dragged Luke, still sobbing and struggling, from the water.  I watched him lie on the dock, coughing up ocean as my father dove in after Danny.  Then neighbours arrived in boats, with lights and poles to help search.  Someone draped a towel across Luke’s shoulders and he curled up around his knees, rocking back and forth, his eyes bleak and stunned in the moonlight.  I sat in the rowboat watching everything: my mother’s tears, my father’s desperation as he shone a light into the sea. Finally someone, Mr. Passetti I think, found Danny and he was dragged from the water, colour leached from his face, eyes bulging out.



         Everything was confused after that.  Somehow I ended up back at the house.  Luke was sitting on the couch in dry clothes now, eyes shadowed and haunted, hair still damp and matted around his hollow too-pale face.  The questioning was endless, confusing.

“Where were you?”

“What did you see?”

“Why did this happen?”



         My thoughts lost coherence and I was unable to describe what I had seen. I looked to Luke in desperation, but got nothing except repetition of the same three words: “I killed him.”



         The yard was bathed in blue and red light as they led Luke away.  He was handcuffed, head bowed as they led him to the police car.  But he looked up once, his eyes meeting mine for the briefest of moments or an eternity.  I knew then, in that place where you know such things, that everything was going to be different now.  Something had ended.



It was childhood. 



And it was family.



         Four months after they took Luke away, my mother accepted a visiting professorship in Melbourne. She took me with her, leaving Shaun and Marty at home with my father. When that ended, there was another, this time in Perth.  When a third position was offered, and she accepted, I knew we were never going back.  Family as I had once known it became a distant memory, my mother and I adrift in the world, clinging to one another to keep from being alone.



         I look up and realise I have left the dock, am standing on the soft carpet of lawn before the house.  A square of light spills across the driveway and the car parked on it.  Looking for the source, I find a light on in the room above the garage.  The soft scuff of gravel makes me jump as someone walks towards me in the darkness.



“Luke?” I whisper as our eyes meet once more.



2175 words.