Christopher Tilghman

The boy’s name is Cecil Mayberry; he is twelve, white, and he knows something. He knows what his mother is going to make for supper, pot roast and green Jell-O salad; he knows that the Russians have put a Sputnik in the sky. But these are not the items that are just now on Cecil’s mind. He is thinking about a man, a waterman, lying face down in a tidal pool two hundred yards from where he sits. Cecil knows the man’s name, Grayson “Tommie” Todman, and he knows that two .22-caliber bullets have made a mess of Tommie’s head. He knows the first one entered just below the right cheekline, cutting short Tommie’s last Fuck You to the world, and the second one grazed through his hair before nipping in at the peak and blowing out a portion of Tommie’s unlamented brain.

In fact, this is going to be the first time in Cecil’s life—but not the last—that he is an undisputed expert on a certain subject. He knows who shot Tommie, and why.

And now, when he looks back on the sixties, this is where Charlie Martin remembers himself, standing on that discarded spot, held by something in him from birth, or something remaining from that joyful crossing home six months earlier. When he came back from the next cruise Julie was not on the pier; she had left Norfolk, and him, by then. When his three years were up, he thought fleetingly, but hard, about staying in for three more, but there was never any chance that he would make a career in the Navy, just as there was never any chance that he would throw rocks and balloons full of pig blood at the Justice Department walls. The time for such choices was soon past, and the middle of the road widened enough for Charlie to leave behind the painful discoveries of youth and first love. What remained of Julie, and Norfolk, and the sixties was the sea, boundless and inexhaustible, the mystery and the source.

Six hours ago Lonnie took one last look at Grant, at the oily flowered curtains and the kerosene heater, the tangled bed and the chipped white stove, at the very light of the place that was dim no matter how bright and was unlike any light she’d ever known before, and she ran. She ran from that single weathered dot on the plains because the babies that kept coming out of her were not going to stop, a new one was just beginning and she could already feel the suckling at her breast. Soon she will cross into Montana, or Minnesota, or Nebraska; she’s just driving and it doesn’t really matter to her where, because she is never coming back.