Chiggers had written his phone number on a scrap of paper and I had come across it a few days earlier next to my typewriter, an artifact which was finally getting some use once more now that I was in school. One cool cloudy night in early fall, after my grandmother had stuck her head outside to tell me that she was going to bed, I determined it was time for me to contact my old friend. I waited outside until I thought my grandmother likely asleep, then I stubbed out my cigarette and reentered the darkening interior of the house, dialing those scrawled digits and then leaning against the wall as that distant telephone in San Diego began to ring.

The woman who answered sounded, even in her one-word greeting, exhausted and I worried for a moment that I had called too late at night. I did not even know what time it was. Surely not far past eight. “Uh, hello,” I mumbled in response to her voice. “This is . . . uh . . . this is John Frazier. I’m a friend of Chiggers’.”

“Who?” the woman said.

“Chig—” I began, stopped, said, “Shoot,” and then realized with a start that I could not remember his real name. “I’m his friend from Vietnam. I’m sorry, we called him Chiggers. My name’s John. He called me Flip.”

“Oh Flip, sí,” she said. And then the name: “Hector.”

“Hector, right right,” I said. “This is his mother?”

“Claro que sí.”

“I’m sorry to call so late.”

“Not so late.”

I thought she would tell me to wait then, that she would go find Chiggers or that he was out, but she lapsed into silence again and so I said, finally, “Is he around? Can I speak with him?”

“Oh no, not around.”

“Will he be back soon?”

“No. Se murió.”

I could feel, in that moment, a fierce wild descent, as if I had slipped from some high precipice and was now flailing toward the distant earth, the helicopter blades chopping the air above me, the sawgrass racing up in its vast endless plain. “He’s dead?”

“Walked into the sea.” There was an edge of emotion in her voice but she did not break down, did not fall into weeping.

“He drowned?”

“He was a good boy,” she said. And then, without saying goodbye, there was the faintest click and the phone was silent.

The sound I made was something like a bark or a cry, a sort of explosion that welled up out of my heart like black bile. That morning, I had sat at this very table and had eaten a piece of toast with strawberry jam and drained a cup of Maxwell House with milk from my grandmother’s refrigerator, and all that time Chiggers was dead. When I thought of him then and when I was to think of him in all the years to come and when I think of him now it is of a forest of black pines and a cold, hard surf rolling in upon a gray beach. And Chiggers, tiny against that great sweep of mist, stepping forward into the sea, fully clothed, his body as black as those trees, as gray as the surf, as dark as the sky.