Empire Falls

finished their dinner and Charlie Mayne made the bill simply disappear, with no money changing hands, he asked if they’d seen the rest of the island. Grace explained they hadn’t left the grounds of Summer House except to walk to the village, and Charlie (as Miles now thought of him) consulted his watch and then proclaimed there might still be time if they hurried. When they asked what he was referring to, he just smiled and said they’d see .
    They hurried. Or, rather, Charlie hurried. He drove a little bright-yellow sports car with just enough room for himself and Miles’s mother in the two front seats, a stick shift between them, and Miles squeezed into a narrow space behind them. They flew across the island, Charlie taking the curves at thrilling speed. With the top down, his longish hair flowed out straight behind him like a wild white mane. He offered Grace a canvas sailor hat, which she managed to keep on only by clamping it down with one hand. Miles kept expecting her to ask Charlie to slow down. She had a fit whenever Max sped, but for some reason she didn’t object now. At least Miles didn’t think she did. With the top down, the wind was roaring so loudly that he couldn’t hear anything being said in the front seat. It felt like the corners of his eyes were actually being drawn back along his cheeks by the speed, and he wondered if he’d look Chinese by the time they arrived at wherever they were going .
    Eventually the pavement came to an end, and Charlie Mayne pulled the little car onto a dirt road that ended a hundred yards farther on in a sandy lot, where he parked by a log fence at the very edge of a sloping beach. The sun, incredibly large and orange, sat inches above the calm waters of Vineyard Sound, and when the engine died, Miles heard his mother say, “Oh, Charlie, look!” And when Miles asked what it was that they’d hurried to see, both she and Charlie laughed, making him feel foolish, though he noted that he wasn’t the only one not paying strict attention to the sunset. Half a dozen other cars were in the lot, and Miles could see a couple kissing in the nearest one. To his surprise, when he asked his mother if he could go down to the beach, she said sure, so long as he took his shoes and socks off and rolled up the cuffs of his pants and promised not to wade in the surf. “And no more than ten minutes,” she warned him. “It’s going to get dark fast.”
    It did, for which Miles was grateful. The patches of rough skin he’d scratched raw in the shower were now pulsing, and he’d been too cramped in the backseat to really get at them. Once he got out of sight, he intended to scratch himself into ecstasy. So when he scrambled over the dunes he was both surprised and discouraged to discover that the beach wasn’t deserted, as he’d expected. Spaced evenly, as far into the distance as he could make out, were fishermen casting way out into the gentle waves, then furiously reeling in, then casting again. Miles watched them for a few minutes, trying to make sense of it. Max had taken him fishing on the lake once, but there you just dropped a line over the side of the boat and waited for something to pull on it . These men seemed almost to be in a competition to see who could cast the farthest into the waves, and since every cast was a disappointment, they reeled in and tried again. The closest one called out a warning, and Miles saw why a second later when the man drew back his long rod and something silver flashed and whistled through the air behind him and then shot far out into the waves .
    Keeping what he hoped was a safe distance behind the casters, Miles trudged up the beach until he came to a secluded spot among the dunes and the tall sea grass. There he lowered his pants down around his ankles and began scratching. It was too dark to tell for sure, but the splotches of rough, red skin seemed to have doubled in size since his shower. Digging at them with his fingernails was midway between intense pleasure and pain, and he would have kept at it until he bled had he not heard a sound nearby, and then low voices. He quickly pulled up his trousers and hurried away .
    Back up the beach he heard another sound, more like flapping this time, and when he looked down he was surprised to see a large silver fish, bloody at the gills, flopping in the sand at his feet. “Careful,” said a voice a few feet away, where a man crouched, tying a silver lure onto his line. “They got