Beneath the glassy surface, the sea bed was laid bare.
‘Those are wild oysters,’ said Conrad, pointing. ‘They’re pretty much gone now.’
‘Why?’
‘Who knows? That’s a horseshoe crab.’
‘Where?’
‘There. And that’s a fluke, over there by the eelgrass, the flatfish.’
‘With the spots?’
‘With the spots.’
Taking up the spear, he slid the barbed head beneath the water and stuck the fluke. He tossed it to the far end of the cockpit, where it flapped wildly in the bilges.
‘A third of that’s yours,’ said Conrad.
‘Only a third?’
‘The boat gets a share.’
‘If I’d known, I wouldn’t have come.’
‘Okay, I’ll go fifty-fifty, but you’ll have to earn it,’ he said, handing over the spear.
They talked while they fished, drifting across the shoals. Conrad explained that he’d learned the technique from Billy, who had learned it from Sam, who in turn had learned it from his father—a family tradition reaching back to well before the arrival of the first white faces on the South Fork.
‘Billy’s an Indian?’
‘He’s dead. But yes, a Montaukett.’
‘I didn’t know…I mean…’
‘There aren’t many of them left,’ said Conrad.
He told her how, within living memory, the Montauketts had been lured off their tribal lands with promises of payments which had never materialized; how they had been chased away at gunpoint, shot at, killed in some cases, by the same men who had assured them they could return to fish and hunt on Montauk whenever they wished; and how the Suffolk County Court had then dismissed their suit against these blatant injustices on the grounds that the tribe had ceased to exist, that it was now extinct.
He told her how Sam had been present in the courtroom when Judge Abel Blackmar handed down his ludicrous verdict, declaring that he saw ‘no Indians there’, apparently blind to the fifty or so Montauketts cramming the public gallery that day, clad in full tribal regalia.
He described how he had stood with Sam and Billy on Signal Hill in Montauk one blustery summer’s day in 1926. The community was in the firm grip of construction fever, with hundreds of workers bulldozing, blasting and building away, racing to bring to life Carl Fisher’s dream of turning Montauk into ‘the Miami Beach of the North’. The centerpiece of his vision was Montauk Manor, an enormous mock-Tudor hotel perched high on the hill above Fort Pond. The location offered unrivaled views to the west, and it was no coincidence that the site was already occupied by an ancient Indian burial ground. The Montauketts always buried their dead on high ground, in a seated position, facing west—the direction of their journey into the afterlife.
Fisher had given his word that the burial ground wouldn’t be disturbed by the construction work. But that brisk summer’s day, with the clouds whipping by overhead and the rush of the wind drowning out the sound of the earthmovers, it became clear that Sam’s advice, and that of the other Montauketts who knew the precise compass of the sacred site, had been ignored.
There were scraps of rough-woven cloth, dank and dirty, in the mounds of earth. And there were bones.
‘That’s terrible,’ said Lillian.
Conrad shrugged. ‘Maybe not.’ He explained how two months later, a hurricane had ripped through Miami Beach, devastating Carl Fisher’s greatest creation; how later that year the headquarters of Fisher’s Montauk Beach Development Company had burned to the ground, blueprints and all; and how the stock market crash in 1929 had then killed off Fisher’s Montauk dream for good.
‘He died poor and unhappy,’ said Conrad. ‘But Sam still said a prayer for his soul when he heard.’
They were heading back to the dock now, the
‘You think there’s a connection?’ asked Lillian.
‘I don’t know. I like to think so. If Fisher hadn’t desecrated the ground, if he’d pulled it off, everything out here would have changed for the worse.’
‘Yes,’ said Lillian, smiling, ‘it’s a pleasing irony.’
Back at the dock, they unloaded the fluke into crates then he ran her back to her house on Further Lane.
‘When do I get my cut?’ she asked as they pulled up.
‘Couple of days, week at the most. I’ll ship them down to Fulton tomorrow.’
‘You know,’ she said, ‘it’ll be the first money I’ve ever earned.’ She glanced across at him. ‘I’m not proud of it.’
‘No, I can see.’
‘But I do think it calls for a celebration.’
They took their drinks to the end of the garden and they sat on the bluff overlooking the ocean.
