Beacon

I took my little brother out to the dock to get him high. He’d just told me he got his girlfriend pregnant, so I figured it was the least I could do. Also, he was 14, so I needed time to slow down so that I would have time to think.

We lay on the weathered boards next to each other, shoulders almost touching, and I blazed up. The night sky crawled with big, bloated clouds backlit by the moon, and we watched them roll silently above us. The last time I’d been out on the dock at night was for the Perseid meteor shower back in July. I was stoned then too, and every dim streak across the sky had resonated in my brain with cosmic good will, which I needed at the time, since it had become clear as I headed into my last year of high school that college wasn’t in my cards.

That stoned and star-filled night in July had inspired me to go inside to write a terrible poem about the universe and how big it was and how small we were and something about how nature was where we got our real education, not a classroom. At the time, I probably thought I was some kind of Thoreau, which I could see now wasn’t just sour grapes but also proof that I didn’t deserve to take up space at some college. If I’d spent less time partying and more time paying attention, my grades wouldn’t be in the toilet, and there wouldn’t be a signed enlistment contract on my desk right now.

Stu hadn’t said a word since I put a finger to my lips and indicated he should follow me out of the house and down to the dock, where there was no chance our parents would overhear our conversation. He lay next to me, hands by his sides, staring straight up at the rolling clouds in a daze that I knew wasn’t just from the weed.

I still hadn’t decided what to say to him.

Out on the estuary, something jumped free of its usual watery environment and landed back with a small splash. When Stu and I were little, we used to come out after dark with Maglites, turn them on suddenly, and shine them over the side of the pier into the water to see what was down there. Crabs and mummichogs and walleye. Occasionally, the edge of the light would catch the flash of a northern snakehead, and once, we saw a foot-long catfish wending its slow way across the sandy bottom like some ancient dinosaur with Kardashian lips.

Stu rolled onto his side to face me. I held the joint out and he took it, but he didn’t smoke it. I took it back, took another hit. The smoke tickled my nose as it rose into the air.

“What am I going to do?” Stu said, voice catching. He started to cry. “Mom is going to kill me.”

“She’s not going to get the chance. Madison’s father is going to do it first.”

I heard him suck in his breath and immediately regretted making the joke. But seriously, what a dumbass, worrying about mom instead of how this could mess up his life. I’d seen his report cards. His teachers wrote notes about their big expectations for his future, not pleas to apply himself like I got. It kind of pissed me off that Stu didn’t see my enlistment as an object lesson. But then he made this awful runny-nosed sound and I remembered how, when I was in ninth grade, me and my then-girlfriend couldn’t keep our hands off each other, either. It had been torture not being able to find a place to be alone with each other.

I nudged Stu roughly. “Sorry. We won’t let it get that far.”

And I wouldn’t. Provided Madison kept her mouth shut, I’d be able to get an abortion pill from one of the dealers at school, and no one would be the wiser. And if that didn’t work, I’d ask one of my female friends where girls went now to take care of this sort of thing, and Madison could basically do it the harder way. She’d feel like shit, but not because she was pregnant. I told Stu all this.

He pulled out his cell phone and texted Madison what I’d said. The artificial screen light turned his face a ghastly blue and made the darkness around us three shades darker. In the glare, I could see how hard he was trying to keep it together, and I turned away. It seemed wrong to even know about this moment when he was just a scared kid trying to get a handle on this grown-up thing he’d done.

The weed was kicking in, and I raised my hand in front of my face, bending my fingers slightly so that creases appeared at the joints. There was tiny cross-hatching in the skin that became visible and then disappeared again when I straightened my fingers.

After a minute of texting, Stu put his phone face down on the dock and rolled onto his back. The dark descended around us again. A series of little splashes came from off the end of the pier. Above us, the sky turned, and passing behind the clouds was a mix of stars as old as time and satellites, both natural and man-made.

“Here,” I said, and took the joint from between my lips to hand it to him. He pinched the roach between his thumb and index finger and took it. My eyes were still adjusting to the new dark, so all I could see was the glowing end. It flared and then floated down the length of his body, stopping above his stomach and hovering there like a tiny beacon.

“Kev, can I ask you something?” Stu said. Knowing how sound carried over water, he kept his voice low, and even so, his voice broke. I was stoned enough to think the squeak was funny, and still sober enough not to laugh.

“Sure.”

“Are you afraid?”

“About the Army?” I shrugged. “Not really. By the time I’m through basic training, the most dangerous place I’ll probably have to worry about being sent is the Mexican border.”

“I guess,” Stu said, and threw an arm over his face. The water lapped at the piles underneath us. I went back to watching the clouds.

Actually, I was afraid. I’d seen the homeless vets with missing limbs panhandling outside the Walmart, read the headlines about veteran rates of suicide. But I didn’t have choices like Stu would when his time came. Maybe if there hadn’t been this thing with Madison, I could have told him the truth about being scared, but now there was no way to be honest with him. At least in the military, I could get trained for something that would get me a job when I got out. I watched the distant lights of an airplane crossing the sky. Maybe they’d teach me to be an aircraft mechanic, and my time in the military would end up giving me direction. Maybe Mexico wasn’t as far away from Maryland as I thought it was.

Seeing the little red glow of the joint growing fainter in the dark, I got to thinking about what, if anything, would be my beacon once I was in the Army. Would there be something to guide me home, to let me know the way back to myself, once I had become what the military wanted me to be?

Three little splashes, one after the next, broke the quiet.

“The fish are really jumping tonight,” Stu said.

It was such a stupid thing to say. He began to giggle. I clapped my hand over his mouth to mute the sound, and then his lips vibrating against my palm felt so funny, I started laughing, too. Just for a few seconds, while the weed made the world funnier than it was, we could forget the thing we knew: Fish jump when something bigger is coming for them, something underneath the water that can’t be seen.