“So I guess a date is out of the question.”
“Only if she helps out in the kitchen.”
I caught him up on meeting Jonathan’s brother Butch and his wife. I tried to replay the conversation, but the full sense of it resisted easy description. He listened carefully, working his teeth with a snapped-off kabob skewer to aid concentration. The wind tugged at the bunches of steel gray hair that sprung from under his baseball cap and rippled the slick white fabric of his warm-up jacket.
“I used to play cards with that artist over in Springs,” he said. “They called him a genius, though to me he wasn’t much more than a nasty drunk. Got so fucked up he could hardly talk. Actually, could hardly talk even when he wasn’t all fucked up. Some of the guys we played with were itching to slap him upside the head, but other guys said, lay off, he’s got his brains all churned up from doing art. So you had to give him a pass, something like innocent by reason of insanity. I was never in favor of slapping people upside the head, so that was fine with me. Insane or not, I just thought he was an asshole. Finally managed to wrap his car around a tree. Killed two women. And himself in the bargain, which I guess was the least he could do.”
“Killing yourself is good for sales, but it puts a cap on future production.”
“Sure wasn’t making it playing cards. Hard to be much good when you’re half-stewed all the time.”
“Unlike Walter Whithers, who Burton said was a first-rate poker player.”
“Way out of my league,” said Hodges.
“Don’t sell yourself short. That game in Springs is taught in art school.”
“If you met Joyce you can understand why Whithers needed to get out of the house. Probably motivated his card skills. Which I heard were considerable.”
“You did?”
“The Spoon’s been open for about twenty years. Used to be a regular game there. Serious. All whales.”
“As in the prince or the big fish?”
“Casino talk for high rollers. Big bet boys. At least that’s what you heard from the people who worked there, parking cars, serving drinks, muscling drunks out the door. When you work in the restaurant business, nothing’s private. By the way, whales aren’t fish. They’re mammals. Descended from herbivores. Used to walk on land. Weren’t as big then.”
“Still probably couldn’t fit em in a fry pan.”
I heard some rustling feet up toward the bow and looked in time to see Eddie launch into hysterics over a pair of swans who’d finally decided to glide into view. I don’t know what it was about the big white birds, but they really pushed his buttons. Maybe because, unlike other victims of Eddie’s belligerence toward all things feathered, swans were inclined to fight back, rearing their long necks and spitting out a deep wet hiss, which scared the crap out of me even if it didn’t deter him.
Hodges’s Shih Tzus joined in the clamor, Eddie’s supporting cast, heedless and vocal, black-and-white balls of reckless frenzy. Hodges stood up in the cockpit and yelled something at the swans, who must have understood, because they quickly turned and slid back around the stern of the hulking houseboat next door. Eddie looked like he was about to give chase, but I told him to cool it, so he sat down on the bow of the boat and stared at the water, ready for the next encounter. The Shih Tzus fluttered back into the cockpit so Hodges could acknowledge their audacity. He had a hand for each, to scratch behind their ears.
“I was just remembering those games at the Silver Spoon. Whithers and Charlie Garmin, Edgar Rose, the producer, ah, what’s-his-name, Balducci, Enrico Balducci, developer, vintner—that’s another word for winemaker. Has a place on the North Fork. I don’t remember who else.”
“Good recall.”
“I remember a lot of stuff, Sam. But only stupid stuff. It’s a curse. Can’t remember where I put my checkbook or whether it’s Dotty’s birthday or the day my wife died. But this wasn’t that hard. Big topic of conversation during the late late shift. It’s tough when you’re a waiter or a bartender—where do you go when you’re done work? The guys from the Spoon would come into the Pequot after knocking off, knowing we’d serve them as long as they wanted. I used to consider closing hours sort of an academic concept.”
“A. legal theory.”
“Exactly.”
With breakfast finished I helped Hodges clean up and get the cockpit of the boat shipshape. I was about to start jogging back to Oak Point when he suggested sailing me back, since he was planning to cruise up to Sag Harbor to relieve Dotty, who’d opened the joint and would be working through lunch. After almost breaking his neck, and succeeding with a stack of ribs, Hodges was having trouble working the eight-, ten-hour days he’d worked for forty years. He’d been lucky enough to find a kid to manage the kitchen, and the rest Dotty could handle on her own, more or less. The medical people had wanted to keep him in physical therapy, but he felt that’s what sailboats were for, and since he already owned one, a cruise up across the Little Peconic, atop Noyac Bay and under Shelter Island to Sag Harbor every once in a while was therapy enough.
We cast off the dock lines and Hodges motored out of the slip and eased along the dock-lined channel and out into Hawk Pond. The light delivered by the Canadian air was hard and brittle, but would deepen as the sun burned up and swept away the morning haze. The tall grasses that filled the marshland bordering the pond swayed in the wind, and cormorants were lining up along the booms of the boats moored in the pond to dry out their wings and crap white graffiti all over the blue-and-tan sail covers. The wind was on our nose through most of the course. Then the channel made a right turn and it hit the port side hard enough to heel us over, an accomplishment given the heavy displacement of Hodges’s stolid old Gulf Star. I checked the wind gauge, which showed around thirteen knots, which was high for the protected reaches of Hawk Pond. Ten minutes later we were through the cut and out into the Little Peconic, beating upwind under power through a succession of buoys that led to the deep water. The boat started to meet a stiff chop shoved up by the northwesterly, but was unperturbed. The gauge showed about fifteen knots of actual wind, which wasn’t much of a challenge for the heavy sea-worn cruiser now that we were underway. Hodges stood behind the wheel and squinted into the light spray that bounced off the dodger, one hand to keep us on course, the other to finish his cup of coffee. I lit a cigarette and followed suit, savoring the bitter concoction like a crystal snifter of vintage brandy. The Shih Tzus were happily stowed below, but Eddie was still out on the bow, face to the wind, fur combed back, legs spread to compensate for the motion of the boat, watchful but otherwise composed.
Once clear of the buoys and into open water, Hodges came up into the wind and I helped him hoist the mainsail. The main halyard winch was in sore need of lubrication, and the halyard itself was bristling with frayed cords, but we got the big sail up and tight behind the mast, so Hodges could fall off toward Sag Harbor and kill the engine. This was my favorite moment, when the sounds of the tightening sails and the gentle slap of water on the hull, the creak and rattle of the rigging replace the chug and rumble of the little diesel, and the vertiginous slant of the boat as she finds her balance and accelerates up into the wind tells you the hand of nature is now engaged in your propulsion, and all pretense of human supremacy is rendered inconsequential.
Without waiting for Hodges to ask, I unfurled the jib and set it a crank or two shy of the lifelines, flattening the chaotic telltales and pulling the boat up close to her hull speed. I knew from a lifetime of plying the waters of the Little Peconic that we needed to be tight to the wind to make decent headway toward a place where he could drop me off and still have a reasonable sail up through the messy race above Jessup’s Neck and on to Sag Harbor. After tightening and tailing off the jib sheets I looked back at Hodges manning the helm and he grinned, as all seaman do under a set of wind-filled sails and a sunny day. I saw him then as a young man, rough and ugly but receptive to the resonance of sun and salted air, and the cruel unpredictability of the water, the way it seduced you into numb devotion, blind to its terrors until it was too late.
“You know, in about four hours we could have this thing clear of Montauk and be on our way to France. Or the coast of Africa,” he yelled over the wind.
“We could see the lions playing on the beach.”
“Or stroll down the Champs Elysees.”
“Fine if you’re into Pernod.”
“All talk and no action. Tighten down that boomvang, will you?”
Eddie worked his way back toward the cockpit down the windward side of the boat on cautious legs, casting occasional glances over the gunwale at the foam churning out from the hull. For a rejected lubber of a mutt he had great instincts for the random kick and pull of sea movement, demonstrated on both Hodges’s old cruiser and Burton’s elegant thoroughbred. I was poised for a leap across the deck if he got into trouble, but as always, he
