“Yes, but no heart,” she said.
“Banks are like that. They have a blind appetite and no soul. They?re the robots of our society.”
“Well, I see my friend down on the beach. I?m glad you like the house.”
A skinny young man in cutoffs with long blond hair that flirted with his shoulders was coming up the
beach carrying a bucket. She went down over the boulders to the sand.
“Hey?” I said.
She turned and raised her eyebrows.
“Is your name Jackowitz?”
“It used to be,” she said, and went on to join her friend.
I got dressed and walked back through the surf to the parking lot. I found a phone booth that still
worked and called the number that was on the sign at the house, It turned out to be the Island Trust
and Savings Bank. I managed, by being annoyingly persistent, to get hold of a disagreeable little
moron named Ratcher who, I was told, was “in beach property”
“I?m interested in a piece of land on East Beach,” I said. “It might have belonged to a family called
Jackowitz.”
I could hear papers rustling in the background.
“Oh, yes,” he said, probably after turning up the foreclosure liens. “I know the place.” I could tell he
knew as much about that cottage as I know about Saudi Arabian oil leases.
“Are you in real estate?” he asked curtly.
“No, I thought I might just rent it for the rest of the summer,” I told him.
“The place is condemned,” he said nastily. “And this establishment prosecutes trespassers.” He hung
up. I stood there for a minute or two, then invested another quarter and got Ratchet back on the phone.
“Ratcher?”
“Yes!”
“You?re a despicable little asshole,” I said, and hung up.
I drove back down toward the beach and, by trial and error, found a neglected road that led to the
house and sat there, watching the woman whose name was once Jackowitz and her young man with
the long hair, dragging their seine nets slowly along the water?s edge, picking the shrimp arid mullet
out after each drag and putting them in the bucket. After a while it started to rain and they quit. I
waved to them as they walked off down the beach. I?m not sure they saw me but it would be nice to
think they did and that they knew the house still meant something to someone. Finally I drove back
toward town in the rain, feeling beach-tired but recharged.
I thought about that place a lot in the days that followed, but I never went back. I didn?t have to.
