Spartina (11 page)

Dick said, “You ever hear me bitching and moaning?”

“Sometimes I can just look at you and feel it. Inside you’re sucking on a lemon. You don’t need to
say
it.” Parker sipped his beer. “I want you to consider Schuyler. You look at him, and you despise him for being too rich and too cute and his house is too big. You’d like to show him he’s not salty, not strong, not half the man you are. I’ll tell you, you could do all that, and he would be amused.

“I look at him and I see some of what you see, but I also see he’s
a player. I don’t know where he got his first chunk of dough, but I found out he’s playing. He didn’t pay much cash for the Wedding Cake—it was leveraged. Now he’s in with Joxer Goode, and with Elsie’s rich brother-in-law, and there’s Salviatti too, who’s even richer. When it came time to play, Schuyler threw in the Wedding Cake without blinking. If he’d have blinked, those other three would have known he was a nonplayer and they would’ve bought him out or left him alone. They would have finally offered for the Wedding Cake a lot less than what Schuyler’s buying with it now. He was ready. And another thing is, he acted like any minute he was about to fly high with some other TV-movie deal. He didn’t bitch and moan about how little money he got paid his last time out. He acted like things are moving, he’s moving, and those guys got a sense that he’s a player. When they said they’re each raising a quarter of a million he didn’t say, ‘Jesus! That’s all I’ve got!’ He said, ‘Will that be enough? Will that be enough to do it first-class?’ And that got Elsie’s brother-in-law talking about what kind of a place he had in mind, Schuyler got him on the defensive.”

“How did you get to know all this?”

“A chat here, a chat there. I find out stuff, I put it together. There’s a lot I don’t know, but I got a sense of it. I don’t know what Schuyler’s worth, he may have a couple of hundred thousand somewhere. But I’m pretty sure that he’s winging it on the Sawtooth Point deal. Flying right out in mid-air.”

“You mean he just talked his way in?”

“No. No, you’re missing the point. He held some cards. It’s how he played them is the point. He got the Wedding Cake for a song. I looked up the asking price in the old ads. So I guess all he put down was a hundred grand, which I figure he got by selling his New York co-op. His wife told me they were living in her parents’ house for six months. Before that, all he had of the Wedding Cake was an option for a year before he bought it. He went way out on a
limb to get that card. He
was
going to play it by renting it to some guys to make a sleazo horror movie, get shares in the movie. But then this deal came along. Now, for him to play it, he had to pay off the mortgage. How did he do that? I don’t know for sure, but I can tell you his wife is biting her nails. I think he went down to New York and raised money for the movie he’s making, maybe for the horror movie too, and he used that money to pay off the mortgage. So now he’s got to scramble to get the movie made. But look at him. He’s having a good time. Then look at his wife. There’s a nonplayer, a worried-sick, doing-nothing-about-it nonplayer.”

“So Schuyler’s hot shit in your book. So what?”

“It’s a difference between you and me. You look for ways to put him down. I pay attention. You should pay attention. Apply what you pick up to your own situation. You’re counting on me to take you out so we can bust our asses chasing red crabs and swordfish. If you want your money for your boat, you ought to be ready to play. One thing you got is your acre. The resort could make money putting another cottage in there.”

“For Christ’s sake, Parker! That’s where I live—”

“Another thing you’ve got is Joxer.”

“I got Joxer to say he’d come look at the boat.”

“And I hear from Elsie that Miss Perry thinks you’re a great guy. Get Miss Perry to invest. She’s loaded.”

Dick had made his mind up about that long ago. May had mentioned it when he started the boat. It just felt wrong. Dick looked at Parker and shook his head.

“Another thing you got is a way to make trouble. You’re up Pierce Creek, the resort is going to screw up something for you. Pollute a clam bed. Get a lawyer and find some rights.”

“I couldn’t pay a lawyer.”

“Do it on a contingency-fee basis. You don’t really want to sue. You just want to have that on hand. Settle for peanuts, the lawyer
gets some of the peanuts. But what you get is a noncash deal—a sweeter loan for your boat. A sweeter deal for your land. The lawyer gets snookered out of that. There’s something in there, I can smell it. You could get hired as a consultant on what the currents are in the breachway and the salt pond, what’ll happen if they dredge a channel. See, if they
don’t
hire you, you could be a witness for the other side. If they hire you, you won’t be called to testify, because you’re their boy. It’s worth something.”

“Jesus, Parker.”

Dick couldn’t say more than that. He was numbed again, but not by anger. He felt as though Parker had picked up his life and squeezed it. His life, but what came out was foul. “Jesus,” he said again. Dick felt he had to get clean. He said, “This is just beer talk.”

Parker laughed. “Yeah. Maybe it is. Still, you go at your boat your way, the numbers don’t work. No way you can make ten thousand dollars this summer just working. In terms of materials alone you got—what?—twenty thousand in your boat. More. Sitting there doing nothing. And God knows what you put in as labor. That’s just like money sitting there doing nothing. You won’t make it through the winter unless you get your boat working by the fall. You and May’ll both be picking crabs come October. You think Joxer’ll lend money to one of his crab pickers? What I’d do if I was him is wait till February, when you’re really down, then offer you thirty thousand for your boat as is. Have the boatyard finish her, then sell her for triple that in the spring. If I couldn’t sell her, then I’d put her to work with a hired skipper. It wouldn’t be you. Joxer could trawl through New Bedford, get a pretty salty skipper, with ten, fifteen years at sea, doesn’t have a reputation for being a sorehead.”

Dick said, “I won’t sell.”

Parker shrugged. “Maybe you won’t.”

Dick said, “Look. You want to go out or not?”

Parker said, “Ah. Well. Sure. Nothing too strenuous.”

T
hey went out in the late afternoon so they could lay the pots at first light way out on the edge of the shelf and get back to the swordfish grounds for the better part of daylight.

Nothing doing for two days. They headed back out and hauled pots. This time they’d done that part right. They took it easy on the way home, zigzagging through the swordfish grounds. Still nothing.

Dick’s share of the crabs was almost four hundred dollars.

Dick gave Eddie Wormsley half of what was left of the black marlin, and Eddie and he worked on the boat for two and half days, until there was nothing more to do without more money.

Joxer was away in Boston. Parker didn’t want to go out again just yet. Just as well, it was Charlie’s birthday. Miss Perry showed up in her beautifully varnished and polished station wagon—the wood trim as dark as the ribs of the old Buttrick canoe. She could have sold it for a fortune. It was almost thirty years old. It was one of the first cars the dealer in Wakefield had sold, and he’d made a point of keeping it going, pointed it out to customers, had a color photo of it in his showroom, which he took down when Miss Perry came in.

Miss Perry rarely drove herself anymore. On Sundays her driver was usually Phoebe Fitzgerald, Miss Perry’s stone-cottage tenant, but when Dick bent down to open the passenger door for Miss Perry, he saw Elsie at the wheel.

Dick had known Miss Perry all his life, her father had had dealings with Dick’s great-uncle and father. He couldn’t remember when she hadn’t seemed old. Miss Perry had called on May and Dick when Charlie was born to bring a present for the baby. And she came again on Charlie’s first birthday, and then Charlie’s second birthday, which was just a week after Tom was born. It became an annual occasion, and it always reminded Dick of the stiff black-and-white formality of his great-uncle Arthur and Pierce family gatherings at the Wedding Cake. There was the same awkwardness at first. May always treated it as an inspection and got the house clean. But the boys didn’t have to dress up, since they always went out fishing in the skiff. Dick couldn’t remember when they started doing that—he remembered Charlie and him and Miss Perry, the three of them, poor little Tom kept home with May that first time, so it must have been eleven years ago. They never went out far, just into one of the salt ponds, or, if it was very calm, just outside the gut. The initial awkwardness was eased by Miss Perry, not by informality, but by her unvarying ritual. She presented Charlie and Tom each with a gift, always a book, and each year she said the same thing. “This is for you, dear boy, it’s a plain reader’s copy and I hope you enjoy it. If you keep it nicely, if you don’t tear the pages or scribble on them, I’ll give you a brand-new book in its place when you’re grown up.”

Then she asked each boy if he’d liked the last book. They always said “Yes, ma’am.” She asked each boy if he remembered any of it. “Yes, ma’am.” And then each boy in turn would recite a little bit of poetry or prose.

Miss Perry would praise the recitation and the choice of the passage, and shake each boy’s hand.

When the boys got older, this ritual became a joke between them and Miss Perry. One year Miss Perry forgot, or chose to
forget, to ask them to recite, and the boys, then thirteen and eleven, brought it up. Now that Charlie was seventeen and Tom fifteen, it seemed to Dick that this rite was kind of silly, especially in front of Elsie Buttrick.

But Elsie kept herself well to the rear during the presentation and recitation. Charlie and Tom both laughed at “If you don’t tear the pages or
scribble
on them,” which Miss Perry said in a way that made fun of herself, and then both boys recited with good grace and an easy detachment.

Elsie stepped forward with her present for the boys, but stepped back when she saw that there was a final stage—opening the glass doors of the bookcase and admiring the collection as a progression of the boys’ reading. Dick enjoyed this part—each book standing for a year in the boys’ lives, marking transitions. May and sometimes Dick had read the books aloud to the boys until they were nine. And then the second, more subtle transition to full-fledged adult books. This year Charlie got Bowditch’s
American Practical Navigator.

It was a peculiar little library. All the books were by New Englanders, except some of the very early children’s books such as
A Child’s Garden of Verses
(Charlie’s) and a complete set of Beatrix Potter (Tom’s). Among the ten-to-fourteen-year-old books there were Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s
Story of a Bad Boy
, Hawthorne’s
Twice-Told Tales
, several books by Louisa May Alcott, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and a book by one of the boat-building Herreshofs about boys learning to sail.

And then, more recently, Thoreau, Melville, more Hawthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett, Francis Parkman’s
History of the French in North America
(all nine titles for Charlie’s fifteenth birthday), and Prescott’s
Conquest of Mexico, Conquest of Peru
, and
Ferdinand and Isabella
(for Tom’s fourteenth birthday). Joshua Slocum, although he hailed from the Maritime Provinces, had been included
as a Rhode Islander, since he acquired the boat in which he sailed alone around the world here in Rhode Island, just on the other side of Narragansett Bay.

Miss Perry had said—not annually, only once or twice—that the collection was a history of New England thought and attitudes, but, given the enterprise of New England thought and of her whaling, fishing, and merchant fleets, that that history touched a great part of the world.

Miss Perry now repeated this to Elsie, as a way of bringing Elsie in. Elsie gave Tom and Charlie each a rigging knife, and Miss Perry said they should pay Elsie a penny, because a present of something sharp was unlucky and might cut the friendship.

The boys got the fishing poles out. Elsie asked Miss Perry when she should come back for her. Charlie said, “Aw, come on, Miss Buttrick. Be a sport.”

Dick said, “Pretty tame stuff, after swordfishing. At least there’s no sharks in the salt pond.”

Dick found the flounder hole after some drifting around, getting their hooks cleaned by little scup. They started pulling in flounder, about a half-pound apiece. A couple of smaller dap.

They were alone in a deep cove. They could hear the rustle of the spartina. Tom had set the anchor and sat straddling the bow, dangling his bare feet over the water. Charlie was in the stern, Miss Perry in a folding chair in front of him, Dick and Elsie on the rowing thwart.

Miss Perry got a heavy strike. As she reeled in she chanted, “ ‘A minnow, a minnow! I have him by the nose!’ ” The boys had heard this line too. Elsie looked at Charlie. Charlie said, “It’s from one of the books.”

Dick leaned over past Elsie, caught Miss Perry’s line, and swung the fish in. It was a sea robin, its pectoral fins spread like wings. Dick held the sea robin up to Miss Perry’s ear so
she could hear it croak. “My gracious,” Miss Perry said. “It’s prehistoric.”