Cape Cod (42 page)
“C’mon in, the water’s fine.”
Geoff stripped and joined her. They kissed with wine-tasting tongues, then kissed again and tasted the water caressing their faces. He soaped her breasts and behind. She washed the part of him that grew against the curve of her belly. The water flowed over them, making their skin like a single surface. The steam rose into the sky. The dark embraced them.
She whispered, “If you want to feel your fantasy, you have to give as good as you get.”
A thought fled through his mind:
always negotiating
. But it was a good deal.
He slid to his knees in the gentle spray. He let his tongue play gently over her nipples and follow the moisture toward the dark blond cleft. She hooked a leg over his shoulder, and…
The headlights hit her right in the eyes.
“Who the hell is that?”
“Turn off the water. Maybe they’ll go away.”
The gentle spray stopped. The headlights went out.
Janice peered over the top of the stall. Geoff, still on his knees, poked his head out the side and looked up toward the driveway.
“Whose car is that?”
“Can’t tell.”
The cool night air quickly went cold on wet skin.
The car door opened with an ungreased
thwop
.
“I’d know that sound anywhere.” She shivered.
“Geoff! You about?” Rake’s old voice cracked. “Geoff! Janice Bigelow! Kids!”
“Be right up!” Geoff reached into the locker beside the stall—towels, soap, and two white terry-cloth robes. He offered one to Janice. “To be continued.”
“I’ll finish by myself… the shower, that is.”
Rake was smiling like a fisherman who’d filled his boat while his friends were getting skunked. “Didn’t take you away from somethin’, did I?”
“Just a shower.”
Rake looked toward the sound of the spray. “Showered under a palm tree in the Pacific for two years. Never did it with no pretty girls, though. Always fightin’ two or three other guys for the soap.”
They went inside, and Geoff got out two beers. Before he could ask any of his questions, Rake began to answer them.
“Went cruisin’ this mornin’, out over Billin’sgate. Needed to think.” Rake dropped a large box on the table. Then he took off his hat and scratched through the white hair. The hard old face softened when the hat was removed. “Decided it’s you and your Bigelow wife or nobody…. Too old to have nobody.”
“What’s in the box?”
“Don’t go gettin’ buck fever. ’Tain’t the log.” He lifted the lid off the box, revealing a pile of yellowed, hand-lettered sheets. “Broadsides, written by Serenity Hilyard herself.”
Geoff riffled through them, and a residue of disintegrating paper came off on his fingers. “Writs of Assistance are Rubbage” was lettered across the top sheet.
“Been keepin’ ’em since I was a boy. Tom Hilyard found ’em in the wall of the house on Billin’sgate, in the busted-off barrel of an old blunderbuss. My father kept ’em, give ’em to me.
Was
plannin’ to show ’em to that museum gal—”
Janice came in, looking fresh and not the least bit frustrated in her terry-cloth robe.
“But better off trustin’ my own relatives.” Rake looked at Janice. “Even if she
is
a Bigelow, Clara trusted her.”
“Yes. Yes, she did.” Janice went to dry her hair.
“She’s a little, uh, skeptical about all this.” Geoff tried not make any fast verbal moves. Treat Rake like a nervous deer who had finally decided to trust the salt lick by the back door. “
I’m
ready to listen. I just wish you’d come to me earlier.”
Rake was squinting toward the bathroom and the whine of the hair dryer. “She wants the development, don’t she?”
“Tell me about the log.”
“Takin’ this a step at a time, Geoff. Not givin’ all my trust till you’ve earned a little. That’s my way.”
“Where’d you first hear about the log?”
Rake shook his head. “Not where’d I
first
hear of it. Where’d I
last
hear of it? That museum gal. Someplace, sometime, she seen somethin’ that led her to me.”
“The doorstop?”
He rubbed a hand over the quarter inch of gray stubble on his chin. “Read about Serenity, son. Tell me what you think. Maybe I’ll tell you more.” He went to the door.
“Wait a minute, Rake. You haven’t touched your beer.”
“Don’t want to drink too much, don’t want to say too much, ’specially if there’s somebody here”—he glanced at Janice, reappearing from the bathroom—“who’s skeptical. Read what’s in this box, then say how skeptical you are.”
Janice took Rake’s arm. “We love you, Rake. Geoff and I and the kids, too. We just want to do what’s best for everybody.”
“Somethin’ in that log scared your Great-Grandpa Charles plain shitless back in 1911. It might scare your pa today.” He pulled on his hat and gave the brim a little snap with his finger.
The car door
thwopped;
the valves clattered to life.
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” said Geoff from the deck.
The fog was blowing in from the east on a cooling night breeze. It struck Geoff on the insteps, traveled up his bare legs, under his robe, and made his balls shrivel. He hated when that happened.
iii.
The right thing to do. Had to give ’em that stuff, and if they read it right, give ’em more. But no sense in tellin’ too much, and never tell how little you
really
know.
Past the gas stations in Wellfleet… fog gettin’ thick… Hunch forward. Always good to hunch forward, get closer to the windshield, easier on the eyes. Night drivin’ got harder and harder….
Had to get home and study the list. Get old, need to make lists. Otherwise, forget your asshole if it wasn’t drilled in.
Fog so thick, couldn’t even see what Indiana Jones was doin’ on the drive-in screen.
There
was a guy you could use. Archaeologist with a bullwhip. Show
him
the list. Let him figure what Tom Hilyard meant by “The book of history will set us free from the evil that bricks us up.”
Fog even thicker… No matter. Don’t give a damn about strip malls and motels in Eastham…. Should slow down, but the nitwit on your tail, why don’t he pass?
Comin’ up on the rotary now. Not many brake lights. Fog too thick, and not many out at this hour, but
still
that jerk behind you, pushin’ you along… Be an old bastard and put on your brake.
That
backed him off…. Hated rotaries, especially in the summer, with all the tourists who’d never seen one before… Stop, go, start, stop… Accident every day. Even worse in the fog.
Off the rotary, into the dark, and…
good
. No lights ahead. Nervous damn stretch—two lanes runnin’ straight and flat through pine woods for thirteen miles, speed limit fifty, and damn-you-straight-to-hell if you were an old man who didn’t go over forty. Somebody always itchin’ to pass. Tourists comin’ the other way. No wonder they called it Suicide Six.
Damn that bastard… Right up on your tail, and flashin’ his lights! Put your foot on the brake. Make him pass… but they’ve put up those rubber stanchions. He
can’t
pass.
Three flashes, then one, then three… Morse code? For what? “Get off the road you old bastard”?
Well, foot to the brake and fuck him… forty, thirty-five. High beams in the rearview… Three flashes, then one, then three. Fuck him, let’s fight about it! Twenty-five—
Bang!
Son of a bitch bumped you! Slow down—no, speed up. Thirty, thirty-five, forty… Right on your tail, high beams still flashin’.
Bang!
Swerve to the right and grind on the shoulder, curve to the left and
thwump-thwump-thwump-thwump
. Rubber stanchions against the rocker panel and…
bang!
Hold on, hold on, the overpass is comin’. Can’t swerve if he hits you there. Hold
on!
Think of a followin’ sea, a followin’ sea and a high wind… Now, deep breath, to calm the churnin’ gut, deep breath.
Bang!
Three-one-three, three-one-three. Faster now, faster.
Eyes on the rearview, eyes on the road. Here he comes.
Bang!
And now a flash to the left—a reflector. A bicycle! At eleven o’clock! Shooting out of the fog like a PT boat at a Jap destroyer. Can’t hit a bicycle!
Hard a-starboard… Rake’s 1968 Oldsmobile Cutlass bounced over the shoulder. The grill struck the bridge abutment, and the engine burst through the dash.
iv.
The glow had faded. The wine was wearing off, there were dirty dishes to wash and mussel shells to bundle before they began to stink, and Rake had reminded them both that this problem wasn’t going to go away because Geoff had drawn a few sketches.
It was just as well. Geoff’s balls hadn’t relaxed yet. A cold wind or a good scare always pulled them tight. He was still cold and now a little scared of this Serenity and what she might pull him into.
There were broadsides on the Stamp Act, the king, the coming of rebellion, and one called “Tar and Feathers and Comeuppance.”
Begin at the top of the pile. “Hey, history major,” he called to Janice, who was still banging around in the kitchen, “the Writs of Assistance? What and when?”
“They were 1760 or ’61….”
April 1760
The great whales were gone.
It was true that the blackfish still came. Cape Cod farmers rowed after them and slapped the water with their oars and drove them, in great lowing herds, onto the beach. But a blackfish carried no more than a barrel of oil while the humpback and finback were huge living casks—thirty, forty, even fifty barrels in a single beast—and they had been hunted from the bay as surely as the wolf from the woodlands.
To men weaned on thundering flukes and cedar-boat sleigh rides, herding pilot whales was a landlubber’s life. But there was another whale—faster, meaner, far more powerful—who took the whole Atlantic for a feeding ground and in whose battering ram of a head was an oil so white it resembled sperm. Sometimes he rode the sea currents close to the back shore, and sometimes he sailed as far as the African coast.
And Cape Codders were the first Americans to lash tryworks to the decks of their ships and go after him. And the first Cape Codders were from Billingsgate town. And among them was a man named Ned Hilyard, who wore a whales’-tooth necklace and could stick a harpoon in a half-guinea coin at a hundred paces, which skill far outweighed the tales told about him and his notorious mother.
In her youth, said the good people of Billingsgate, in her wild youth, they said, eyes ablaze with indignation and jaws slack with excitement, before her hair went gray and her teeth began to fall out, Serenity Hilyard had been a Smith’s Tavern whore, and one of the best, a quim that could service a dozen dirty whalers in a night and a smile that could steal a dozen souls.
Few who damned her whoredom knew that she used her body to provide for her child, then to buy law books in which she sought what she had once dug after in a Truro sand hill: comeuppance for the Bigelows of Barnstable. She had read in the law as voraciously as any Harvard prince. She had taught herself complaints and torts, land transfers and deeds, and had found nothing untoward in the sale of Jack’s Island or the Eastham farm.
So she gave up her dream of regaining her land, but word spread through the meaner taverns and meeting places of Cape Cod that Serenity was one who would help. Men in need sought her out when they wished to word themselves well before the court or comprehend a complaint brought against them, and she turned none away, neither thieves nor smugglers, Indians nor niggers, nor the forlorn French Acadian girl who appeared that spring. Her name was Marie Reynard, and she asked Serenity to bring suit for the return of the ship that was confiscated when she and her band of exiles were washed up on Cape Cod.
Serenity laughed and reminded her that there was a war between the French and English. The Acadians were unfortunate victims. Then she invited this exile to sup with her and her son Ned in their Billingsgate house.
Goody Daggett’s ghost must have put some strange potion in the cod muddle that night, because Ned and Marie fell in love at the table. It was called the Age of Reason, but Serenity could find no answer beyond witchcraft for the attraction of such opposites.
Ned was forty-three, Marie twenty-three. His hair was black, his eyebrows a scowling line across his forehead, his skin tanned brown as seaweed. She was blond and fair, with a complexion the color of clean sand. He had learned from his mother to expect nothing good of the world and went with his fists clenched. She had been an innocent, grown like a flower in the Acadian soil, now staring bewildered at all that had afflicted her people during the latest war between England and France. But a month later they were married.
The people of Billingsgate town were scandalized that
anyone
would fall in love with a French papist. And they were shocked that one of the wildest men on Cape Cod would fall in love with anyone.
After all, Ned Hilyard had darted irons not only into hundreds of whales but also into a few men. And he took his profits in whale oil, they said, so that he could defy the Crown.
British law did not permit importation of molasses—basic ingredient of rum, basic manufacture of New England—from any but British ports. Molasses from the French and Dutch Indies, however, was of higher quality and not subject to the Crown’s ninepence tariff. So each winter, Ned loaded whale oil onto his sloop and sailed to the warm Indies. He sampled the whores, traded oil for molasses, and smuggled home a handsome profit. Come spring, he went a-whaling again.
But in the year after his marriage, Ned kept close to Billingsgate. He had a family and a house to build, and in all his life, he had never known the purity of bliss he found in the arms of Marie Reynard, or the satisfaction in labor.
He chose a spot protected by low dunes, dug holes for brick pilings, and built a four-room house that hunkered out of the wind like a battened hatch. He used cedar shingles for the roof and sides, but for sheathing and floorboards he stripped the wood from the abandoned whale house at the tip of the island. After all, without whales, there was no use for a house, and on the lower Cape, wood had grown as scarce as Indians.