shattered into a billion shards as it played across the Little Peconic Bay.
Late at night, usually after darkness had completely settled in, I’d hear Regina moaning in her sleep. The sound was from the damned, filled with despair. It either expressed the state of her soul, or the lady just made a lot of noise in her sleep. But it wasn’t all that great to listen to, cutting across the black peace of a quiet summer night.
Happily for me, she’d stop after a little while, and I could go back to my agitation without the external soundtrack.
If you spend a lot of time alone you can almost forget how to talk. The language may be forming continuously in your mind, but the mechanics can atrophy. That’s why I got a dog, so I could speak out loud without technically talking to myself. The thought of bumping around inside the little cottage talking to God, or inanimate objects, or my dead friends and family, was disturbing. Eddie was a pound dog on the way to getting gassed, so he seemed willing to listen to whatever I wanted to say without complaint, if not entirely devoted attention. Other sentients have cut worse deals.
The strategy worked most of the time. Though it didn’t entirely stop God or dead friends and family from crowding onto my screened-in porch to hector me with details from my massive ledger of failings and misapprehensions, usually first thing in the morning, with the vodka crackling around my nervous system, jolting me awake, my stomach in flames and my heart pumping up high around my throat.
Eddie’s principal domain was the half-acre of lawn that separated my house from Regina’s, and the thin stretch of pebbly beach beside the Little Peconic. These he monitored on a regular timetable, nose scanning the turf and tail spread aloft like a mainsail. Occasionally he’d shag tennis balls I hit for him with the three-quarter-sized baseball bat I kept by the side door. It had Harmon Killebrew’s signature branded into the rock-hard oak grain. My father had it stowed in the trunk of the Grand Prix, at the ready for incidents of road rage.
Most of the balls bounced out toward the beach. Some went over the flower bed into Regina’s yard. He was mostly indifferent to Regina, though he kept one eye on her whenever she was out there hacking away at her raggedy flowers. She spoke to both of us with about the same degree of warmth. Even so, whenever she caught him retrieving a ball she’d scratch his ears. He’d give her a tentative wag, which I admit I never did.
One afternoon in the fall of 2000 I was out in the drive working on the Grand Prix, which I did whenever the temperature was above freezing and below 850. I was under the car on a wood creeper when I caught a whiff of something. It was strong enough, and strange enough, to stop my work. Then it seemed to disappear, swept away by the clean, dry October air. About twenty minutes later it was there again. Holding the wrench still on the bolt, I stopped turning and took another whiff. There was something primal in the air. It reminded me of a pile of leaves I’d once set on fire that had a dead squirrel hidden inside. Something corrupt, decayed.
I rolled out from under the car and stood up. Eddie stood in the middle of lawn and twitched his nostrils at the air.
I went inside and washed my hands, then walked back out to the driveway and grabbed a heavy cotton cloth. I told Eddie to stay in the yard and walked over to Regina’s house. I rang the doorbell, but she didn’t answer. I went around the house and tried to look in the windows, but they were obscured by sheer, lacy blinds. I went to the back door and pounded hard on the casing. Nothing. I yelled for her. Still nothing.
I wrapped my hand in the wipe cloth and punched out a window in the kitchen door. As I reached in to release the lock I was knocked back by the strange smell, only now it was close by and strong enough to take on mass.
“Goddammit.”
I put the cloth up to my mouth and walked around inside her place. She was in the bathtub. Black and swollen, face down in the water.
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
