It was a still night with the stars very brilliant overhead. You could see them shining through the fronds of the tall slender betel palms like diamonds set in filigree against the dark velvet of the tropical sky. The two boys, one stripped to the waist, the other clad only in a pair of bathing trunks, sat leaning against the trunks of two of the palm trees.
One of them was fair. He looked a little like a Swede, young, tall, good-looking and fresh with rather large features. The other boy was small and dark, tough and wiry. The tall blond boy was the one who wore the bathing trunks. In the tents under the coconut palms behind them someone was playing a banjo. In the stillness of the night the only other sound came from the lazy beating of the surf on the beach a little way off.
The air was hot but here on the knoll beneath the betel palms there was a breeze which kept off the mosquitoes. Sometimes the two boys talked and sometimes they merely sat there, relaxed and silent. They were both fighter pilots on rest and the stillness of the night was like a sedative. Every now and then the boy in the bathing trunks would go down to the edge of the Pacific, throw himself headlong into the warm water and swim lazily for a while and then in a circle return to the white beach.
They both knew what it was like to be close to death but they were young and much of their talk was very young. And now in the stillness of the night they had time to think lazily and they were homesick. I used to go down on Saturdays to Long Beach and go swimming and kind of wonder how far it was to the other side but that's about as far as it went.
The other boy laughed, "I never thought anything about it. I was just going to work in my father's garage when I grew up and some day inherit it It was just always there, about half an hour from the house. Sometimes when it was foggy in winter we wished we lived a little farther away.
