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.”
