“Not at the moment.”
“None of my business,” he said, holding up his hands defensively. “It’s your love life.”
“There’s an oxymoron.”
“Now who’s insulting?”
I stood up and tossed the butt end of the croissant to a skittery flock of chickadees working the sidewalk.
Sullivan looked up at me, squinting behind his tough-cop sunglasses against the sun rising above the storefronts across Main Street. He looked like he wanted to say more, but I left before he had a chance and drove over to Joshua Edelstein’s house, where I worked another ten-hour day. I kept my mind focused on cutting miters, coping inside joints and not shooting myself with my pneumatic brad nailer. It was a nice peaceful day, just me, two other finish guys working in other parts of the house, and a pair of electricians installing switches and wall plugs.
In answer to my quiet prayer, nobody turned on the radio, which was invariably set to the most brainless meatball station Frank’s crew could pull in from Up Island. All you heard were the cutoff saws, the pop-pop of nail guns, compressors turning on and off, and the sound of work boots scraping around the plywood subfloor. We even had heat, since the tapers who came through over the weekend had jacked up the thermostat to hasten drying between coats. I never had to say a word to anybody all day, not even to myself.
After work I stopped off at the cottage long enough to wash my face and hands, change my clothes and feed Eddie. He was free to use his secret door to go in and out of the house, but couldn’t open a can or pour out his own dry food. At least that’s what he wanted me to think. I left him there to chow down and drove over to the Pequot, the crummy little joint next to the marina in Sag Harbor run by Paul Hodges and his daughter Dorothy. It was the only place around where you could avoid the plague of sophistication spreading through the Hamptons, infecting even indigenous dive bars. The clientele was mostly fishermen or mechanics working the marina, so the olfactory ambience alone was enough to frighten off normal people, even if you could stand the smell of Hodges’s cooking.
Dorothy was in her mid-twenties and looked like she’d died recently after being trapped inside a dark closet. Based on seeing other young people around the Village, I guessed the sepulchral disposition was intentional. Something I meant to ask my own daughter when I had the chance.
Tonight she was wearing a wifebeater undershirt, over a black bra, with black polyester slacks and mechanics boots. Her hair, also black, had been forced into angry, slickened spikes. Her skin was so pale you could distinguish between veins and arteries. I thought if you looked closely enough you could see the shadows of muscle, ligament and bone. A tattoo on her left shoulder said “Recriminate.”
“Hey, Sunshine,” I said to her as I pulled up a barstool.
“Vodka on the rocks, no fruit, swizzle stick,” she said without looking up from wiping down the bar.
“Make it two swizzle sticks. Feel like changing things up a little.”
“You want a menu?”
“Bring me whatever you been pulling out of the water,” I told her.
“Not a problem. My father’s been serving fresh snorkelers all week.”
“I thought it was too cold for snorkeling.”
“That’s why they’re so fresh.”
Hodges must have heard me, he came out of the kitchen wiping his hands on the bib of his apron. Somewhere in his sixties, he looked like a guy whose life had shown him some hard treatment. Years of commercial fishing had turned his skin the color and consistency of walrus hide, though the wide shape of his mouth and his bugged-out eyes looked more amphibious than mammalian. He was surely wider around the waist than he’d been as a younger man, but his arms were still thickly muscled and his hands looked capable of squirting clams out of their shells.
“Dotty tell you about the specials?” he asked.
“Dorothy,” she said, though mostly to herself.
“She did. Sounds great. Just hold the flippers.”
“Flippers are the best part.”
He left me alone to drink while he put together my meal. Dorothy talked to me about a story she’d read in the local paper about the rumrunners who used to ply the waters of the South Fork during Prohibition.
“They’d bring the stuff in from big ships that sailed down from Canada and anchored twelve miles off the coast, which was international waters in those days,” she told me while she stuffed beer mugs into the dishwasher behind the bar. “They’d use hot-rod boats loaded to the gunwales. Zip around the forks and make stops all up and down the bay shores. Jacob’s Neck was famous for it.”
“My home waters.”
“I know. That’s why I’m telling you. I think that old factory was in on it,” she said, popping back up and slamming the dishwasher door closed.
“WB Manufacturing. Wouldn’t surprise me. Do anything for a buck.”
“Why not? Can’t stop people from drinking, for Lord’s sake.”
“No argument here,” I said, with conviction. “Though you could drink less, if you know what I mean.”
“And threaten a cornerstone of the Pequot’s revenue stream?”
“Good point. Want another?”
“Sure.”
The company of the Pequot’s owner came with my meal, as it usually did. Hodges had known my father, which made him think of me as a point of continuity with the dead past. A past he remembered as if it were last week, a penchant that caused him comfort and confusion in equal measure.
When I took my first mouthful he looked at me expectantly.
“So, what do you think? Succulent or merely piquant?”
I chewed on the question.
“More abundantly audacious. Exuberant.”
“See, Dotty,” he yelled to his daughter, “Didn’t I tell you?”
She brought him a bourbon so I wouldn’t feel bad being the only one with a drink. We talked about nothing for a while, then migrated into the realm of the merely inconsequential.
Then I made the mistake of telling him about Amanda’s house.
“No kidding. Wow. There’s a pity,” he said. “How’s she taking it?”
I told him what happened after Sullivan woke us up, including what led to my decision to jog home. He maintained a look of neutrality, which I appreciated. I was less sure how Dorothy, who was nearby pretending not to listen to the conversation, took the news.
“At least she can afford to start over,” said Hodges. “Even without insurance, though I guess that’s not much of a consolation.”
“No. Apparently not.”
“That girl’s had more than her share of trouble.”
“There’s something wrong with this drink,” I said, holding the empty glass up to the light.
Dorothy plucked it out of my hand and filled it with a handful of fresh ice. Hodges took the cue and launched down a different conversational byway. I don’t know how it happened, but something led to something that caused me to mention Robbie Milhouser.
“Knew his father,” said Hodges. “Quite an operator.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“Okay, sleazebag. But looked good, you know? Handsome. Like that Bouvier guy. Jackie’s old man. Slick.”
“A dickhead with a pretty face is still a dickhead,” I said.
“Easy to say when you got a nose that’s always signaling a right-hand turn. No offense.”
“Why would I be offended at that?”
The fragrant and boisterous arrival of a pack of fishermen drove Hodges back into the kitchen, giving me a chance to finish off my meal and a few more drinks. Dorothy occasionally slid over to give me an installment of her moonshiner story, trying to persuade me to search Jacob’s Neck for evidence of contraband booze. I told her I’d investigated the WB property personally two years ago and found only abandoned machine tools and bowling
