The Last Refuge (2 page)

Joe Sullivan was almost a generic cop. Big in the gut and across the shoulders, liked to wear sunglasses, carried a Smith on his hip and a chip on his shoulder. His hair was blond and cut short. His shirt was perfectly pressed and his shoes polished into porcelain. He was a Town cop. His beat was the North Sea area of Southampton. He’d been doing it too long, I guessed, from his bored, tight-assed look and his fastidious attention to personal detail.

I sat in one of my two Adirondack chairs on the front lawn and waited for him to walk over. There were a half-dozen cars over at Regina’s, most of them with
bubble-gum machines blinking on top. A few people were gathered whispering at a respectful distance, but events like this are all sort of routine and dismal once you find out it’s only an old lady dead in her bathtub.

“Sam Acquillo, is it?” Sullivan asked as he dropped down in the other Adirondack.

“Yup.”

“I knew your folks. Sort of. Your mom, anyway. Played with a kid down the street. Saw you around once in a while.”

I nodded.

He flipped open a little notebook when he saw I wasn’t going to chat. Probably relieved.

I gave him the statistical details of time and place. We’ve learned it all from TV. He wrote it down with deliberate thoroughness.

“I guess you can’t live forever,” he said, looking at me.

“Nobody’s done it yet.”

Eddie trotted over looking alert and lightfooted. All the people milling around and the blinking lights from the cops and EMTs represented high entertainment value. When he wasn’t patrolling the yard, Eddie was usually more than content to just hang around under my feet. But he was never one to pass up on a party. Sullivan made some sort of squeaking sound with his lips and beckoned him to come closer, which he did, and got his ears scratched for the trouble. Sucking up to law enforcement.

“Know if she’s got any family?”

“A nephew in Hampton Bays. Haven’t seen him for a few years. Kind of a meatball. Mows lawns, or
something. Saw him here in a crappy red pickup about the time I started fixing up this house. She didn’t like him.”

“How do you know that?”

“She told me.”

“Name?”

“Don’t remember.”

“Tha’s okay. I’ll find him if he’s still around. Have to notify somebody.”

I was a little distracted watching them roll Regina out in a bag. That was how my mother wanted to go, in her house, but we couldn’t figure out a way to look after her. It was a full-time deal at the end. Her heart and lungs were in perfect shape, but she would take off her clothes and wander around the neighborhood, complaining about the way Harry Truman was running the country.

My sister brought in a succession of live-in nurses to stay with her, but nobody can watch a demented old lady twenty-four hours a day. It made my sister feel guilty that she couldn’t be there herself, but she had a husband and a pair of dopey kids out in Wisconsin. There was never any suggestion about sending my mother out there, ostensibly because she was determined to stay in the house by the Peconic. Of course, by then, she might as well have been living on the third moon of Jupiter for all she knew about it.

“Mind if I get back to work?” I asked the cop.

He wanted to be annoyed by my lack of engagement, but I really wasn’t worth the effort. He stood up and adjusted his belt, sagging under the weight of belly and ordnance.

“Whatta ya do out here all the time?” he asked me, now more curious than friendly.

“Fix that piece of shit car, mostly,” I said, truthfully.

“Early retirement must be nice. I got a lot of time before that.”

“Didn’t retire,” I told him as I went over to the Grand Prix and rolled myself back under to see if I really needed to replace that front universal, or if it had another few years left in its sloppy mechanical soul.

It’s not that easy to find a place to drink in the summer out here, for obvious reasons, but by early October the good places are mostly back to normal. Mine was loosely associated with a working man’s marina on a little cove slightly outside the busier parts of Sag Harbor. The Pequot was such a crummy hard-bitten little joint that even regular townspeople mostly overlooked it. The inside walls were unfinished studs and wood slats that had aged into a charred, light-absorbing brown. There wasn’t even an operable jukebox or Bud sign. There were Slim Jims, and lots of fresh fish year round, since the steady clientele were mostly professional fishermen.

When it got dark the night after I found Regina I drove over there in the Grand Prix. Already autumn leaves were swirling around the streets in little vortices made by passing cars. The Grand Prix rumbled through the tangled whaling village streets of Sag Harbor like a PT boat, and I watched the leaves swoosh up behind me in its wake. The fall is a good
time to be anywhere in the Northeast, but especially good to be out here with the soft-edged light and crystal salt air.

At the Pequot you were rarely menaced by the threat of unsolicited conversation. It was a place where you could sit by yourself at a little oak table and a young woman with very pale skin and thin black hair pasted down on her skull would serve you as long as you stayed sober enough to clearly enunciate the name of your drink. You could almost always get a table along the wall over which hung a little brass lamp with a shade made of red glass meant to simulate pleated fabric. Though the place itself was pretty dim, you could read under those lamps, which I always did. It gave me something else to do besides sitting there raising and lowering a glass of vodka and something to look at besides the other patrons or the wonderful ambiance. You could get a lot of reading done before the vodka had a chance to establish a hold.

I don’t even know why I went there all the time. I guess it was some ingrained impulse to put on a clean shirt around dinnertime, get in the car and drive someplace. To be someplace other than your house, at least for a little while.

“You eating?” the waitress asked, holding back the plastic-wrapped menu till I gave her an answer.

“What’s the special?”

“Fish.”

“Fish. What kind of fish?”

“I don’t know. It’s white.”

“In that case.”

“I could ask.”

“That’s okay. White goes with everything.”

“You get it with mashed potatoes.”

“And vodka. On the rocks. No fruit, just a swizzle stick.”

“We don’t have fruit.”

“Good, then I’m safe.”

“But I can give you a slice of lime.”

“That’s okay. Save it for the fish.”

“Fried or baked?”

“Fried.”

“Okay. Fried with a lime.”

“Exactly.”

I’d been trying to read Alexis de Tocqueville, and not getting very far. It was okay, though I always felt with translated prose that I was missing all the inside jokes. But since this guy gets quoted a lot, I figured it was worth slogging through.

“I think he would’ve shit his pants,” said the waitress, dropping the vodka with a lime in it on the table.

“Who?”

She pointed to my book.

“If he came back he’d really shit his pants about everything that’s going on now.”

“You read this?”

“At Columbia. American Studies. My dad wants to ask you about your fish.”

I looked past her and saw the owner of the Pequot coming toward my table. For a brief moment I thought I’d managed to turn a simple little dinner order into cause for a fistfight, but the way he was wiping his hands on his apron looked more solicitous than accusatory.

His name was Paul Hodges and he’d been a fisherman himself at one time, among other things, though he wasn’t the kind to talk about what those other things were. He had a face that blended well with the inside of his bar. The skin was dark and all pitted and lumpy, and his eyes bugged out of his head like somebody was squeezing him from the middle. Old salts don’t usually look like the guys from Old Spice commercials, they mostly look like Hodges, kind of beat up and sea crazy. He had very muscular arms for a man his age, old enough, it turned out, to have a daughter old enough to study Tocqueville at Columbia.

“You wanted to know the fish?”

“Yeah, but only curious. I’m sure whatever you got’s gonna be fine.”

“It’s blue.”

I smiled at the girl. She rolled her eyes.

“I told him it was white.”

“Yeah. Blue’s a white fish, sort of. Maybe a little gray. Caught right out there north end of Jessup’s Neck.”

“That’s great,” I told him, relieved he wasn’t mad at me about anything, since I really wanted to keep coming there and had less than no stomach to fight with anybody about anything at all. Ever again.

“Bring it on.”

He kept standing there wiping his hands on his apron.

“You’re Acquillo’s boy.”

I looked at him a little more closely, but no deeper recollection emerged.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Fished with him. You wouldn’t remember.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Yeah, but I seen you around with him before. Weren’t that many around here then. You knew who was who.”

“True enough.”

“Now I don’t know any of these fucking people.”

I kept trying to fix him in that time, but all I saw was the old man behind the bar at the Pequot. I also couldn’t imagine my father fishing. Even though he was always bringing home a bucket of seafood for my mother to clean and overcook for dinner whenever he was out from the City. Even when he wasn’t there we lived on fish because that’s what people without a lot of money did in those days. It was basically free, and plentiful. You wanted to put on a little style you went out for a steak, or something like pork loin. Something that came from a farm, not the old Peconic Bay that was just outside the door.

Hodges didn’t look like he was in much of a hurry to go back to the kitchen. Without asking, he pulled out the other chair at my table and sat down. I suddenly started feeling hungry.

“I heard what happened to him,” said Hodges.

I focused on my vodka, but had to answer.

“That was a while ago.”

“I know. He was a guy with some pretty firmly held convictions, your father.”

“That’s true, too.”

“And wasn’t all that shy about letting you know what they were.”

“So you knew him.”

“Not well. Just came out on the boat a few times. Crewed for me and my boss. Done his job well. Had to keep him away from the customers.”

Hodges sat back to give his belly a little leeway and rested his elbows on the armrests of the chair.

“Never bothered me, though,” Hodges added.

“No. Me neither.”

Hodges nodded, chewing on something in his head.

“Not that I’d let him. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“How’d you want that fish again?”

“Fried.”

He nodded again.

“Better that way. You bake it you got to deal with the parsley, the custom herb mix, the special lemony butter sauce. Fried, it’s just there kind of contained in its lightly seasoned breaded batter, ready to eat. No muss.”

“Next time I’m going baked, no doubt about it.”

He registered that and finally left me alone with my Absolut and Tocqueville. I’d almost started to get a little traction with the thing when his daughter showed up with a fresh drink.

“On the house.”

Apparently, once you actually had a conversation with the Hodges family there was no going back.

The fish was pretty good, especially inside the lightly seasoned breaded batter. I stayed another hour and read, distracted from the packs of malodorous crew coming in off the late-arriving charter boats, and a cluster of kids, probably underage, who piled into the only booth in the place, elbowing each other and goofing on the world in urgent
sotto voce.

I walked the bill over to the girl and asked her if I could bother her father one more time before I left.

“How long you been around here?” I asked him when he came out of the kitchen.

“In Southampton?”

“Yeah.”

He pushed out his bottom lip and thought about it a minute.

“’Bout forty-five years, give or take a few. Came out of Brooklyn. Don’t actually remember why, or why I stayed. Fish edible?”

“Definitely sustain life.”

“Then we done our work here.”

“I was wondering about an old lady.”

“Old lady like ‘old,’ or like, ‘lady’?”

“No, just an old lady. Next door neighbor, wondered if you knew her.”

Hodges picked a piece of something out of his back teeth, popped it back in his mouth and then swished it down with a mouthful of beer from a glass stowed out of sight under the bar.

“At my age, old’s a relative term. Which old lady we talking about?”

“Regina Broadhurst. Lived to the east of me at the tip of Oak Point. Been there as long as my folks were. Maybe longer.”

Hodges smiled at something inside his head before he answered.

“Sure. Seen her around. One of the old bitches down at the Center. Never said anything to me that I can recall. I don’t think she’s all that fond of men.”

“The Center?”

“The old folks hangout, the Senior Center down behind the Polish church.”