"So, you think you might be OK, now? A different perspective, I hope?"
"Yes, yes, thank you, . . . You know I haven't gotten your name. I feel so . . ."
"No need to, son. You can just call me Dingle. And I won't be seeing you up here again, I do hope."
"Umm. I kinda hoped that—"
"Oh, I didn't mean it that way. Of course you can come visit me whenever you have a hankering to. I meant I hoped I wouldn't see you climbing around on the cliff top again. It's mighty dangerous over there."
"No . . . no, sir, I don't think you'll see me . . . walking around there anymore."
They looked at each other, both knowing what was meant but not said.
They were standing, awkwardly, at the door to the lighthouse in the evening mist so heavy now that, although the structure stood at the edge of a precipice over the entrance to the harbor and they could hear the surf pounding on the rocks at the base below, they couldn't see the water.
Dingle watched the young man as he, mercifully, took the path leading down to the shore rather than the one that ran precariously out along the top of the cliff. Then Dingle sighed a satisfied sigh and withdrew into the base of the lighthouse, which was also his living quarters—his bedroom the next level up and then the bath and a small laundry. Two smaller floors of storage rooms rose above that in the narrowing tower, with his "operations" room at the top, capped only by a strobing light chamber bulbing out over the whole, erect structure.
You had to be in great shape to manage the stairs in a lighthouse, and Dingle was, even though he was well into his fifties. He was in great shape. Working out was his second favorite activity. There wasn't much else he could bide his time with on this isolated promontory jutting out to sea over the entrance into the harbor. It was a solitary life, and the requirements of the lighthouse weren't onerous. The harbor town, such as it was, was a good twenty miles inland, the harbor being long and narrow, and the shipping and fishing industry hereabouts not being what it used to be.
There were moments when Dingle was afraid they might close down this lighthouse. But the passage through the straits here was treacherous and there was a more modern, bustling, and heavily populated harbor city beyond here just up the coast requiring an assurance of safe passage through this patch of difficulty.
Dingle didn't know what he'd do if they closed him down. This had been his life for nearly fifteen years now.
There were no working family farms or sheepherding ranches out this way anymore. A large conglomerate had bought just about everyone out with the stated intention of putting a power plant out here and also going into cattle raising for the market down at the big city in a big way. But the downturn in the economy had put that on hold.
"Thank the gods for that," Dingle mused as he puttered around the semicircle of kitchen cabinetry that followed the curve of the wall on the first level. He hadn't had time to put the tea things away before they'd gone up the ladder. He thanked the gods for the delay in settlement around here, because it would surely put this good thing—his whole life—in peril.
It was only Dingle and this lighthouse for miles about—with the exception of the young men's military school on the shore just inside the entrance to the harbor.
An isolated, foreboding chunk of fearsome concrete, it was. Placed there to intimidate the young men sent there—of college age and great athletic program material, most of them. But recalcitrant, lazy, slow learning, or, worse, criminal young men. Some of them young men who just didn't fit—who had chosen what was not acceptable. It was an institution of last resort for most of them—shape up and meet the specifications for getting on that football team on a scholarship at Big U or shape up and take one last chance to stay out of prison or a life of unacceptance. Or else.
They weren't coddled at that school, no sir. And, being young men coming in with chips on their shoulders or fears in their hearts into a regimented institution that naturally formed its survival cliques and pecking orders, it was a stressful environment for any young man who couldn't fit the mold—or couldn't convince others he did. The only difference between the Hansen Military Academy and a prison for hardened criminals was that more of the inmates at Hansen were not hardened—in fact were quite vulnerable—young men, and that the students at Hansen had periods in which they could leave the school grounds. Of course, not many left very often, because there wasn't much of anyplace to go.
There was, though, a path leading up to the high cliffs overlooking the perilous entrance to the harbor—and there was the lighthouse.
* * * *
Young Daniel wasn't headed in any particular direction when he left the barracks. He'd just known he had to get out of there. They'd been teasing him again. Left that DVD on his nightstand so that any of the other guys who passed by—and a lot did—could see the photo on it, would know instantly what it was. And would assume he put it there—like he was advertising or something.
Why had that Jack Tangier from his neighborhood been sent here too? In truth, it was Jack who came here first—and he, Daniel, was only here because his parents had found out about the place from Jack's parents.
But for the same reason Daniel's parents had sent him here, they shouldn't have sent him where another guy from the neighborhood was sent. Jack's issue was that he and some others had stolen a car one night and gone for a joy ride. He'd been slated to start his second year down at Florida State this year, with a guaranteed spot on the basketball team. But the drunken escapade with the car had scotched all of that. Still, he was good enough on the basketball court, that all of that had been hushed up and the worst he got was a year here at Hansen to straighten himself—and his faltering grades—out.
Daniel had been sent here for another reason. And Jack Tangier had known what that reason was. And even before Daniel had arrived at Hansen, so did nearly every other young man in the school.
