Cape Cod (87 page)
“That could take days,” said Geoff. “And a restraining order won’t stop Nance.”
“Nance.” Jimmy sat up straighter and looked at his wife. “We can’t forget he’s in the middle of this.”
Now, George came out of the house. A walking bad influence. “I called East Wind marina, pretended I was an old friend, asked for Charlie Balls and the Irish Eye. They took off an hour ago.”
Geoff looked at his friends. “Nance could have people watching the causeway. We’d better take Rake’s whaler.”
“I won’t be here when you get back,” said Janice. “You’re all three endangering yourselves like fools.”
The guys looked at one another. It was near eight o’clock. The sun was setting. The night would soon belong to the mosquitoes.
“Are we fools?” said Geoff.
“The expression,” said Jimmy, “is faggots, Mo-nigs, and fools.”
“Not very nice,” said Geoff.
iv.
“You want a trowel and mortar?” Emily’s voice echoed down the stairs of the big house.
Geoff stood in the foyer. “Arnie does the masonry here, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah. Come on up.”
The house was quiet. No more noise than a few campers flipping through the magazine rack in the library.
Geoff followed the metallic stink of cigarette smoke to Emily. “I have a little work to do on Rake’s fireplace.”
She took a puff and pushed the smoke out the corner of her mouth. “Arnie’s in the parlor watching TV.”
She led him down the hallway. The place felt strange without Clara’s presence. The floors were new-waxed and squeaked against his heels. The usual cloud of urine didn’t waft out when he passed Clara’s room. In fact, something made him stop.
A new mattress and box spring, all shining blue and white rayon, sat like an altar on the bedstead.
“Arnie got rid of the old one last week. Makes the place smell a lot better… the way she wet the bed at the end.” Emily began to cough.
“Didn’t you buy out a whole mattress factory once?”
“We sure did.”
Hack-hack
. Emily could keep a conversation going through the worst coughing fit. “Back in the days when we bought everything by the truckload for the camp.”
Hack
.
“I slept on one when I was a kid.”
She held the back of her hand to her mouth and coughed and laughed at the same time, while the smoke from the cigarette made her squinty-eyed.
Arnie Burr and his friends were watching the Red Sox. His friends were a marlin over the fireplace, a glass-eyed deer head, and a raccoon stuffed like a Halloween cat—back arched, fangs bared, tail standing straight up—on an end table.
“Trowel and mortar. Hammer and cold chisel?” Arnie didn’t take his eyes off the game. “What the hell for?”
Geoff said, “Got a little job to do.”
Arnie squinted over the tops of his bifocals. “What is it that can’t wait till tomorrow?”
“A… a hobby.”
Arnie buckled his pants and tied his shoes. “It’s all in the shed. I’ll show you.”
“I’ll find it on my own.”
“No, I’ll come.”
Geoff no more wanted Arnie Burr along than he wanted the damn raccoon. He plucked it off the table and shoved it into Arnie’s hands. “Stay here. You don’t want your friend to get lonely.”
He patted the raccoon, which gave off a farting little cloud of dust.
“Ah-ah-ah—”
“Here we go,” muttered Emily.
Arnie threw his head back and splattered a sneeze all over the raccoon.
He was still sneezing when Rake Hilyard’s Boston Whaler left the boathouse five minutes later. Aboard were three men, a fifty-pound bag of mortar, and some masonry tools.
v.
How much booze could his father have run in this boat? Whenever he eased the throttle and the powerful inboards began to hum, John M. Nance imagined his father, right beside him, watching for the lights of a Coast Guard boat.
He often wished that old Perez had lived long enough to see what his son had attained. But Perez had died in 1961, when his son was considered no more than a bottom fisher.
Nance ran his cigarette boat up the back shore, from Chatham to Provincetown, in less than two hours. Even a man called Strip-the-Plants could feel the majesty of the dusk-red dunes, the calm beauty of the sea at sunset, a little tug of nostalgia when he tied up at the Provincetown Wharf where his father had once unloaded fish.
P-town was a strange, two-faced kind of place, he thought. And it had been that way even in his youth, a hardworking town where a lot of people seemed to be playing all the time.
The fishing fleet still tied up here, a row of rusty, smelly old trawlers handled by salt-of-the-earth Portagees and Pilgrim descendants, men who still made their living doing the most dangerous work there was, who still sent their kids to the schools Nance had gone to, who still lived in the houses where their fathers had lived.
But a block from the wharf was that other world, of galleries and restaurants, of chitchat about pesto and Post-Modernism, of gay bars and drag shows, of mobs of tourists swarming on a Sunday afternoon, of midwestern couples looking disoriented and disappointed because they had come to the place where American self-government was born and found that on a Saturday night, they were the only straight people on the street.
Cramped, claustrophobic P-town, surrounded by the eternity of the ocean. A lot of people thought that the contrasts made it a great place. Nance thought the summer frenzy of the streets and the dead silence of the dunes and ocean made it feel as much like the end of things as the beginning. The town with two faces was no longer for Nance, perhaps because he had been called two-faced too often himself.
And what he was doing right now was among the most two-faced things in his career. But it was all for a good cause.
He pulled a wad of bills from his pocket—a hundred wrapped around a fist’s worth of singles—and gave it to Lambeth. “This Bill Rains is the toughest guy on the Conservation Commission. Let’s soften him up.”
“Did you read my report?” Lambeth glanced at the money as though it had teeth. “Every contractor I talked to said Rains is Mr. Honesty. The only thing worse than trying to bribe a guy like that is threatening him first.”
“So threaten him, then offer him the cash.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You don’t have to. Let him think you’re an unemployed construction worker. Tell him a lot of people will be very unhappy if the town Conservation Commission tries to make it tough for the Bigelows on their own island.”
“That will only turn him against you.”
“Just do what I tell you.” Nance watched Lambeth go down the dock to the
Stellwagen Star
, one of the whale watch vessels disgorging passengers after a sunset cruise. It was a few minutes before he saw Lambeth emerge on the upper deck and approach the pilothouse. Then Rains stepped out.
They talked briefly. Lambeth reached into his pocket and pulled out the bills. Then something happened very quickly. From a distance, Nance couldn’t quite tell, but for all his muscle, Lambeth ended up in Provincetown Harbor, and the money went fluttering after him.
Good thing they were mostly singles, thought Nance.
Then the tourists began to jump in. None of them worried much about Lambeth, but one was heard to say, “Two more dives and I can pay for all my photo processing.”
John M. Nance wondered if his father would approve of all he had gone through to work his revenge.
May 1957
The postwar expansion, they called it. Men were working, women were having babies. In jukeboxes, Patti Page sang about old Cape Cod. And the mid-Cape Highway moved toward Orleans.
When people could drive from the canal to the elbow in an hour, the windswept land beyond would turn to gold. And John Nance planned to have plenty of it. Motels, cottage colonies, restaurants, miniature golf—and the tourists to pay for it.
In spring, Nance did his prospecting. The sun, when it managed to burn through, was high and bright and reached into places it would never go when the trees leafed out. He could stomp through the tender underbrush to get the lay of the land, see what to buy, and know where to build.
As he walked on this early May morning, he came upon two surveyors. They wore green uniforms, spoke with hard-edged accents that dug into every
r
like barbed hooks, and their shoulder patches read “U.S. Department of Interior, NPS.”
He met them on a wild knoll of bear oak on Bound Brook Island, a piece of mainland surrounded by small streams. There was land for sale there, and Nance meant to buy it, though it might put him in debt. He approached the surveyors warily. “Hi, fellas.”
“Good morning, sir,” said the older one.
“What are you guys doin’?”
“Surveying, sir.”
Nance looked at the USGS marker in the ground. “I didn’t think that grew from a seed. Surveying
what?”
“Bound Brook Island.”
“What’s NPS mean?”
“National Park Service,” said the older one. “Interior’s considering Cape Cod for a National Seashore. We’re doing the preliminary studies.”
The Cape Cod
Times
had carried the story in the fall. Ever since, the coffee shops and fishermen’s bars had burned with the argument. Would the federal government save the Cape—or destroy it? Until now Nance had not worried. Now he wanted to mount a horse and go riding like Paul Revere. “The Feds are coming, the Feds are coming.”
ii.
But the Pilgrims came first. The
Mayflower II
, a gift from the people of England, had sailed for America in April. In mid-June, she arrived off Cape Cod.
It was the nicest time of year, but on the day she approached Provincetown, the clouds lowered and the mist came in on a nasty northeast wind. Still, ten thousand people lined the beaches and wharfs to watch the ship arrive.
“Looks like they’ve come back to start the whole bloody mess all over again,” said Perez Nance when he saw Rake Hilyard on Commercial Street.
“Everyone wants to see history.” Rake was still rod-thin but nearly all gray. Perez’s hair remained the color of coal, but arthritis had crippled his joints and set him ashore, where he had grown as fat as a monkfish.
Time had been gentler to the woman on Rake’s arm. She hennaed her hair to keep down the gray, and her skin had a deep-tan wrinkle, but there was a regality about her that she could not hide with sunglasses or ugly orange kerchief. Rake introduced her as an old rumrunning pal. Mary Muldowney enjoyed her privacy, because now that she played a regular character on one of the Warner Brothers’ television westerns, she was recognized all the time.
“Rumrunnin’,” said Perez. “Great days, Rake. Big money days.”
“Depression got mine.”
Perez clapped Rake on the shoulder. “Best place to keep your money in them days was in the mattress. That’s what I did. Had enough when it was over to send the boy to college, set him up in business, too.”
“How’s he doin’?”
“Good. Wish I could do as good when I was twenty-nine. But he don’t like this National Park talk at all.”
“Better get used to it.”
A welcoming party had gathered at the wharf. It included politicians, customs officials, Indians wearing feathered headdresses, and, of course, members of the Pilgrim Association, including Dickerson Bigelow, who had been elected to carry a copy of the Mayflower Compact to the ship, and John M. Nance, who had learned at Harvard that a Pilgrim heritage could go a long way toward gaining a little acceptance.
But the
Mayflower
was out at Race Point, having one hell of a time with wind and ebbing tide. So the welcoming committee was still ashore.
“Hey, Johnny,” Perez called to his son, “you remember Rake?”
John Nance wore the costume of a seventeenth-century sailor—high stockings, loose trousers, leather jerkin, red stocking cap—in which he seemed quite comfortable. He gave them a disinterested smile that Rake didn’t like right off.
“You know, Johnny,” Perez went on in a loud voice, “Rake been tellin’ me how he thinks this National Park—”
“Seashore.”
“—is some good idea to protect Cape Cod.”
Now Rake felt a much colder gaze from John Nance.
“And,” Perez continued, “he thinks it’s gonna happen, no matter what we say.”
“We’ll have plenty to say!” boomed Dickerson Bigelow. He wore a black cape, buckled shoes, a buckled plug hat, and for once, his fringed beard did not look plain silly. He said hello all around and ushered forth his daughter, Janice, a cute little blonde wearing Pilgrim apron, cap, and hand-sewn cape. “She’s coming out with me to the ship.”
Rake crouched down and shook her hand. “My nephew’s one of the little boys who are going out.”
“Is his name Geoffrey?” asked Janice.
“Yeah.”
“Well, when he saw the boats rockin’ up and down, he turned kinda green. Don’t think he’s goin’.”
“Hope he’s not some kind of sissy,” said Dickerson.
Rake stood. He didn’t like Dickerson. He especially didn’t like Dickerson’s big mouth.
“You better watch out.” Perez laughed. “No sissies in Rake’s family.”
“But some damn strange notions,” answered Dickerson. The wind blew up under his cape and made him look like he might lift into the air. “The way he’s goin’ around talkin’ about this National Park—”
“Seashore,” corrected Rake.
“Say, why are you callin’ it a good idea?” asked Dickerson.
“It is.”
Dickerson threw an arm around John Nance, who did not look pleased. “Here’s two Pilgrims who think it’s a
terrible
idea. As past president of the Cape Cod Association of Planning Boards, I can tell you it’s not going to happen.”
“That’s good,” said Perez, “ ’cause Johnny, he’s so worried, he’s thinkin’ of selling what land he has and gettin’ off the Cape altogether.”
“Guileless”—a good word for Perez Nance, thought Rake. “Stupid” was another one. Or maybe his brain had gotten old faster than the rest of him. Because he was standing there, spilling his son’s secrets, and Dickerson Bigelow was drinking in every drop.
