Cape Cod (81 page)
“Talk about scared straight,” whispered George.
Blue’s first words were “Stupid son of a bitch.”
“Fuck you, Dad. You said to clear an acre before the perk tests.”
“
Before
the tests,” Doug explained gently, “
after
the C.C. walks the ground.”
“Stupid son of a bitch,” repeated Blue.
“It’s quittin’ time, Hump.” Geoff laughed. Someone who had done something this stupid and survived
had
to laugh.
“Fuck you, too.” The Humpster’s big face was turning a medium-rare shade of red. The sweat patch widened on his belly.
“Excuse me, guys.” In the confusion, no one had seen a rental Chevy come down the road. The driver called, “Isn’t Rake Hilyard’s house this way?”
“Who’s asking?” Geoff stepped out of the mess the Humpster had made, just because he was a stupid son of a bitch.
“My name’s Mary Muldowney.” The famous old actress.
Geoff had wondered about her since he found the list.
“Rake asked me to come and visit when I got here.”
“I’m his nephew.”
“He asked me to bring a painting he gave me years ago.” On the seat of the Chevy was
House on Billingsgate
, Number 17.
August 1928
Rake Hilyard swore off love the day Aggie Dickerson sent him a Dear John that would have lifted the stripes off a bass.
“I am writing to tell you that next month I marry Ethan Bigelow.” A potbellied lumber salesman ten years her senior, and Agnes turned over Rake Hilyard for him. What man wouldn’t swear off love after that?
Spark with the local girls, sure. Take a New York divorcée out on the boat and promise to visit her come January. Go to Boston and pay for it when you couldn’t clear your pipes any other way. But no more falling in love.
He had seen this Mary Muldowney gal only once, and he hadn’t even talked to her. When she appeared in her maid’s uniform, dusting and fluttering about the stage, her beauty reached through the darkness and grabbed him right by the belt. This one was for him—at least for the summer.
The play was called
The Barker
, and it was the second time Rake had seen it. Most fishermen didn’t see a play in a lifetime. Who could be bothered when the tide turned at three in the morning and you lost the best fishing of the day if you missed it? But Rake could be lured if someone gave him tickets to the Cape Playhouse.
And tickets came regularly from a Boston gentleman named Mr. Flip. Though they did not know his real name, the Hilyards did business with Flip. They conducted this business on moonless nights, because the business was liquor, and liquor was illegal.
No one knew when the first man fermented a grape. It was probably soon after he met the first woman. Possibly before. But after the Great War, some people decided that a country without drink would be a better place. So they passed the Eighteenth Amendment and called it a Noble Experiment.
Rake called it the work of busybodies and fools. By 1928, few disagreed, and most would say that America wasn’t even as
good
a place as it had been before Prohibition.
People who wanted to take a drink now and then flouted the law from the boweries to the Harvard reunions, and they pumped a flood of illegal cash into the aquifer of America’s economy. The Noble Experiment made a lot of people criminals, made a lot of criminals rich, and put a high premium on dark stretches of beach.
Flip had visited several of Brewster’s seacoast mansions, searching for a place that was secluded and above suspicion, where no coast guardsman or hijacker would ever think to look for liquor. He found Jack’s Island and the shingle-style Victorian owned by Elwood P. Hilyard, who still wore a monocle and called himself a respired businessman.
In their only meeting, Flip presented himself as a man of cultivation who spent more time discussing theater than bootlegging. Afterward, business was conducted by telephone, but whenever a load came in at Jack’s Island, two theater tickets accompanied the landing fee of a dollar a case.
The old Cape Cod, the one that had dozed in the sun the morning that Rake took Agnes to the beach, that Cape was gone. Postwar prosperity had seen to that. Summer people poured onto the Cape in their Model A Fords and poured cash into theaters, hotels, guest houses, and roadside stands where farmers sold butter-sugar corn, beach plum jelly, and bootleg. They paid fools’ prices for whatever Cape wives dug from their attics and called “anteeks.” And they bought land.
But not only did they buy. They speculated. The year round population was still less than it had been in 1850, but ambitious people were buying up woodlots and waterfronts, building cottage colonies and subdivisions, while people whose speculations succeeded were building mansions on the Gold Coast of Nantucket Sound.
The sandy roads were now oiled, the oiled roads were now tarred. In Dennis, an old Quaker meetinghouse became the Cape Playhouse, while new houses of worship gave play to Catholicism. And the last of Provincetown’s Grand Bankers had been chased from the sea by the same submarine that shelled Nauset Beach.
Some had seen the voyage of U-156 as comic opera. But to Rake, it had meant that the old ways were ending. The tourist dollar would gain sway in a place where men had always taken their living from the elements. He would not complain, however, if the new ways brought gals like Mary Muldowney to that meetinghouse in Dennis.
She looked at the flowers in his hand and laughed. “Take a hike, Stage Door.”
“Stage Door?”
“Stage Door Johnny.”
“How’d you know my name was John?”
“It’s the lingo, Johnny. Now go on. I got a fella.” She took a drink from the silver flask on the table in front of her, tilting her head all the way back to get out the last drops.
The other girls did not seem bothered that a man was in the dressing room. Rake guessed theater folk were a little different that way. One was tightening her brassiere to flatten her breasts. Another was curling her hair with a hot iron. Another was slipping a flask into her garter. But they all had an eye on Rake, because a young fisherman was something they seldom saw beyond the footlights.
“I thought you were just fine tonight,” he said.
“Everybody’s a critic.” She turned to the mirror and applied the lower half of a red bee sting to her lips.
“I’m a fisherman,” he said.
“That gives us exactly zero in common.”
He put the flowers in front of her and studied her like a man inspecting the hull of a new boat—twenty or twenty-one, marcelled black hair, eyes the color of a summer sky, lower lip as red as a berry in his father’s old bog, and a full, round figure that put the boy-chested flappers to shame. But he’d be damned if he’d say any of that now, the way she was treating him.
“Friends don’t call me Johnny. Call me Rake, Rake Hilyard. Ask at Jack’s Island… if you ever want any fish.”
The other girls snickered, and Mary’s face broke into a grin that looked pretty stupid with one bee-stung lip.
“
Sell
’em to you or, considerin’ what I saw on the stage tonight, give you a job cleanin’ ’em.”
“Say, you dirty—Why, Hank!” Someone had appeared behind Rake, and Mary became Miss Demure, 1928. “Hank, you’re early. I’d be ready now, but this Stage Door Johnny—”
“The name’s John,” Rake said fiercely as he turned. “You can call me… Mr. Hilyard.”
Rake recognized him from the play. He was a bit taller than Rake, with black hair, a gentle face, and a soft, drawling manner of speech. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Hilyard. Hope you liked the play.”
A little warmth softened Rake considerably. “It was fine. Liked it fine. Thanks.”
“I’ll call ya if I need any fish,” said Mary.
When he got to his car, Rake took the program and looked up the name. Hank… Henry Fonda. Another actor. Bet Hank couldn’t bait a tub of line. Bet he didn’t know when the stripers came to Dennis Hole. Bet he wouldn’t be man enough to do what Rake was plannin’ that night. But Hank had the girl… for now.
Rake put the car in gear and headed out to collect the boys.
ii.
An engine… distant voices… The panic snapped Aggie Dickerson Bigelow straight off the pillow. Her first thought was that someone had broken into the boathouse. She elbowed Ethan. His breathing stuttered, then settled back into the rhythm of the waves.
So she found her slippers with her toes and scuffled to the window. The boat could be stolen only at high tide, which meant it was now somewhere between one-thirty and three-thirty.
Then she heard the engine again. A truck… two trucks. One of them shifted, and the grinding of the gears struck her at the base of the skull. She had heard rumors about her old beau Rake Hilyard….
She scurried past the room where her little boys slept, to the room where her father-in-law lay in a codeine stupor. She peered out the front window but could see nothing through the pitch pines in the middle of the island.
So she climbed the narrow stairs to the attic. There an old captain’s glass sat on a tripod by a window. With shaking hand, she swept the glass back and forth until she found the raised shadow of the causeway in the middle of the marsh. And then she saw them, the big, square outlines of two trucks straining into the woods, all lights out. She bolted for her bedroom.
“Rumrunners! Ethan, wake up. Rumrunners!”
He rolled over like a lazy wave flopping onto the beach. The middle button on his pajamas had come undone, revealing a slice of luminous white skin. She poked it with her fingernails.
“Huh? Rum…”
“We have to call the Coast Guard.”
“Why? Who? Coast Guard? Is someone in trouble?”
“No! Rumrunners! Right here on Jack’s Island!”
Ethan sat up. “Get the keys to the gun case.”
“They’re rumrunners, not ducks! They’ll shoot back. Call the Coast Guard.” She was shouting and whispering at the same time, so as not to wake the children or Grampa Charlie.
But Grampa Charlie was awake and wandering the hallways in search of more codeine. “
Who’s
callin’ the Coast Guard?”
Aggie was startled by the voice, still strong and certain, coming from the withered old silhouette. Charles Bigelow’s daunting bulk was gone. His belly sagged beneath the tie on his robe, and the fringe of white hair around his head looked like the disheveled halo he was trying on for size.
“I think the Hilyards are running rum,” she said.
“Scotch, more likely.” He flipped on the light in their room.
“You
know?”
Ethan squinted like a bat caught in the beam of a lantern.
“Scotch, if we’re lucky.” He smoothed his hand over his upper lip, but even the mustache was gone, shaved by some orderly in the hospital where his death sentence had been pronounced. “Maybe a few bottles of beer.”
“Grampa, that’s illegal.”
“You like a glass of wine, don’t you, girl? Where do you think I get that? Out of a seed catalog? Elwood brings it after every run.”
“You stocked your cellar before the law passed.”
“That was
eight years ago
. Get back to bed.” He flipped off the light and went shuffling toward the bathroom. A moment later a medicine bottle shattered and the old man cursed.
“Go on,” said Ethan. “I’ll take care of him.”
She climbed under the covers and, with her conscience churning her stomach, listened: another truck, several passenger cars, then a muffled boat engine. She got out of bed again and went to the window that looked out at the bay. No running lights showed, but the phosphorescence of the wake glittered eerily, like a snake in the darkness.
iii.
Perez “Iron Axe” Nance puttered past the Coast Guard cutter at the end of Town Wharf in Provincetown.
“Catch anybody this week?” he shouted to the Lieutenant at the stern.
“Gonna catch
you
this week.”
“Whatchew wanta with us?” called Perez’s cousin, Manny Souza. “They gots prohibition on halibuts, now?”
“Don’t be ridin’ ’em.” Perez laughed. “No good gettin’ the Coast Guard mad.”
“Eh, they mad awready,” said Manny out of the corner of his mouth, “ ’cause they got no chance to catch the Iron Axe.”
Perez guided his boat through the harbor and around Wood End. In his boyhood, he had stood on that barren sandspit and watched the Grand Bankers, with their clipper-trim hulls and cloudlike spreads of canvas, sweeping majestically toward the fishing grounds. But beam trawlers and draggers had replaced the beauties of the past. Independent men now put to sea in thirty-foot gasoliners like the
Pilgrim Portagee
.
A little gasoliner for a big man. That’s what they said about the
Portagee
, because after the boat, everything about Perez Nance was big—big voice, big belly, big arms, big black mustache, a highliner who always filled his hold.
He had long ago forgotten Dorothy Dickerson, though not her father’s insult. He had enlisted in the Great War, in spite of a slight limp and, when he came home, had fallen in love with an East End Yankee girl named Helen Tinker.
And it was the same old story. Her father objected, because the Tinkers descended from the
Mayflower
and Perez came from the West End. But instead of pocketing a pistol, Perez put on his Purple Heart from Belleau Wood and went courting. And the medal worked its magic.
He and Miss Tinker were married at the Catholic church in 1920. Though out of the ordinary, this was not the first Provincetown wedding of Protestant and Portuguese. The old order accorded a grudging respect to the newcomers, because the Portuguese had proved themselves where it mattered most in a seafaring town—at sea.
Few knew that Perez’s grandmother had passed from slavery to freedom, that he had passed from the dark brava to light-skinned Portagee, or that he dreamed of seeing his son pass into any port of American life he chose. Perez named his boat the
Pilgrim Portagee
, for the mingling of the stocks, and those who didn’t like it could go to hell.
