The Gentlemen's Hour

157

The Dawn Patrol, or what’s left of it, is already out, paddling toward the small break, their bodies silver in the gathering light. They are mercurial and fluid, timeless and of the moment. Boone watches, admiring their strength and grace, then turns away and walks outside.

He opens the stand-up locker and takes out a long paddle board and a paddle, walks to the edge of the pier opposite the Dawn Patrol, tosses the board over, and jumps in behind it. He climbs up onto the board, balances the paddle, stands up, and rows out, to give himself distance from his former friends, before he turns north and rows parallel to the coast.

Boone has always loved this coastline, each of its distinctive beaches and coves, points and cliffs and bluffs, its black rock, red earth, and green chaparral, but now, as he takes it in, he sees it differently.

It’s his home, will always be his home, but is it fundamentally flawed, built on cracks and faults, on shifting ground that will fall and slide and collapse? And the culture built on top of this unstable earth—the Southern California free, easy, casual, rich, poor, crazy, beautiful life—is it also fundamentally corrupt? Will its cracks and rifts widen to the point where it can no longer stand, its own weight pulling it down?

Boone feels strong, standing and rowing. It’s good to stand on a board, instead of lying or sitting; it gives him literally a different perspective, a longer view. He looks back to where his old friends sit on the line, small now in the vast ocean, dots against the pylons of the pier. What about those friends, the Dawn Patrol? Were those friendships, too, built on a cracked and flawed foundation? Was it inevitable that the fissures of race and sex, ambitions and dreams, would separate them like continents that were once joined and now are oceans apart?

And what about you? he asks himself as he rows on, sweating with the fine exertion of powerful strokes against the current. What’s your life been built on? Uncertain, shifting ground . . . unsteady tides? Has it all come apart now? And if so, can you rebuild it?

Has your life always been based on shaky foundations? Everything you believed been false?

He keeps rowing and only turns around when he has just enough strength to make it back to shore.

By that time, the Dawn Patrol has ended.

It’s the Gentlemen’s Hour.