Cape Cod (84 page)

He kissed the salt from her neck and her nipples. She touched the hard muscles lining his flanks and the hardness thriving in the cool water. They sank to their knees and the foam came up around their legs. They lay back on the sand slope. The sea surged over them, and in the swirl they lost their bearings.

He rolled over her and she over him, and they were the wave and the sand, and their rhythm was the rhythm of the waves, and the waves drew them back, fast and faster, back, past Adam and Eve, back, to the first moment, the first coupling at the edge of the sea.

There was an old blanket on the boat. They wrapped themselves together afterward and sat on the dry sand. Their bodies were naked and cool in the scratchy wool.

“Now, who’s done more for you? Hank Fonda or me?”

“Rake, you’re the best man I ever met.”

“Then stay.” He twined his fingers into her wet curls and pulled her face to him.

“I have to go to New York.”

“O’Neill goes to New York and comes back. You can, too.”

“Maybe I will.”

“I’ll go with you. We can have that world of yours, all flash and pretend, then come here and have this.”

The sea rushed up, foaming around their bodies. She felt him growing against her. She gave a lascivious little laugh and slipped herself onto him. “Nothin’ like a man.”

“Nothin’ like a man… to grow old with,” he whispered.

The softness of his voice above the rush and retreat of the waves was more seductive than anything she had ever known.

Then he shouted, “Oh, Jesus!” and pushed her off. The tide was lifting the boat, and Rake went running, bare-assed as birth, after the
Paintin’ Tom
.

vii.

“Boat comin’… comin’ fast,” said Manny.

“Let him come.” Perez kept hauling the trawl from the starboard bucket.

“You got anything?” asked Manny.

“Haddock. Gimme a hand.”

“Bait and haul. Bait and haul.” Manny took the tail. “Break your balls doin’ this.”

“This the way
men
used to fish, the way my father fished, before draggers… and rumrunners.”

“So why we no more runnin’?”

“I told you. We’re done with it. Too dangerous.”

“Eh, maybe so”—Manny watched the boat—“but it no done with us.”

It was the
Gray Lady
, pounding so fast across the waves that she seemed to be riding on top of them.

Nance loosened the axe in his belt. “Keep doin’ what you’re doin’.”

Sammy the Snake, strapped tight in his life jacket, was holding up a gaff.

“Maybe he want to tie up,” said Manny.

“Don’t throw him no rope,” answered Nance.

The
Gray Lady
made a circle around the
Pilgrim Portagee
, and the smaller boat began to rock drunkenly as the wake rolled in, whacked against itself, and rolled back out again. Perez and Manny bumped into each other, and Manny fell on the pitching deck.

A half a dozen faces were at the stern of the
Gray Lady
, laughing at Perez and Manny like kids at the Keystone Kops. Then Sammy fished the gaff into the water and caught the Portagee’s trawl. A switchblade sprang to life in his hand and slashed the line.

“Dat sonamabeetch!” cried Manny.

Perez felt the line go slack in his hand. “Twenty bucks’ worth of fish!” he shouted over the thrumming of the Fiat engines. “
Full
trawl.”

Sbardi appeared from the wheelhouse. “You been duckin’ your job, Nancie. I don’t like when somebody ducks a job.”

The
Gray Lady
drifted closer, and Sammy hooked his gaff into the transom of the
Portagee
. Then he and half a dozen others stepped aboard. One of them was dressed in a white suit and wore a pasted-on white Vandyke. He looked about the foolishest thing Perez had ever seen.

“Your new crew,” said Sbardi from the stern of the
Gray Lady
. “We gonna give you a chance to show you still our buddy.”

“I don’t want no crew, I don’t want to be your buddy, and I don’t want your boat.”

“You ain’t
gettin’
the fuckin’ boat, Nancie. That offer been withdrawn. You made me do my own spyin’. But you do what the boys say, you get back in my good graces.”

“I’m done runnin’ rum. Too dangerous.”

“Too dangerous if you don’t,” said Sammy the Snake.

Sbardi stuck a Parodi into his mouth, and one of the others lit it for him. “We busted a few Irish legs, found out what you could’ve told us three weeks ago. We know where Flip’s trucks are goin’ tonight.”

viii.

It was September. The summer people had left. Rake’s brother Billy had gone to Harvard. Rake’s sister had married an Orleans fisherman named Eri Hartwig and gone to live with him. Jack’s Island had grown quiet. The days grew short.

Mary often thought she should have left him that night at the beach, gathered up her clothes and simply walked off into the dunes, but she could not. Rake hoped, after that night at the beach, that she might stay, but he asked for something only once.

So they took what the summer gave them of blue seas and warm days, of decks piled high with liquor and pockets stuffed full of cash. And they hoped that the cool winds would not come.

“How much you figure you got now?” he asked.

“Close to five thousand. More’n I’ve ever had in my life.” She leaned back and looked up at the sky. “I do love it here, Rake. When you’re on the water, under the stars, you feel that you’re somethin’ special.”

“You
are
somethin’ special.” He pulled a package from under the wheel. It was flat, crudely wrapped in newspapers, with a red bow in one corner. “Was plannin’ to give you this when we got in. But—”

“It feels like a picture.”

He lifted the blanket that covered the V-berth hatch. “Go in and open it.”

“But the light?”

“Ports are blacked out. Keep the blanket down.”

A rumrunner loaded to the gunwales was not a swift beast. Without speed or claws, it relied on darkness, quiet, and stealth, like any creature of the night. The
Paintin’ Tom
always went blacked out, the engine muffled by a U-shaped length of pipe that funneled the exhaust into the wake. But they could never be too careful.

While the
Paintin’ Tom
slid through the bay, Mike Malloy drove his truck across the causeway. Tonight they were landing on Jack’s Island, and never once had there been trouble there. But Mike was always cautious, even with an empty truck. When he saw the body lying face down in the road, he almost drove around it.

“Hey,” said his partner, Eddie. “That’s Elwood.”

“Never stop on the causeway.”

“C’mon. Who else you know wears a white suit and has a white Vandyke beard?”

So Malloy stopped the truck a few feet from the body and pulled a thirty-eight revolver from under the seat. Then he waved a white handkerchief out the window to tell the boys in the second truck to keep their eyes sharp.

Eddie took the shotgun and got out. He nudged the white jacket with the muzzle; then he knelt. That was a mistake. Elwood turned out to be someone with very black hair, a pasted-on Vandyke, and a .45 automatic.

Ten minutes later Malloy looked at Eddie. “Bebber mop ob de cobway.”

“Ahhh?”

Malloy looked at the driver of the second truck and made the sounds again. What he was saying, through a knotted gag, was “Never stop on the causeway.”

“Bebber min bat. Bis maht ink,” said the other driver. Never mind that. This marsh stinks.

“ ’N a bide bill isin.” And the tide’s still risin’.

“Baby it ust ese ancupps.” Maybe it’ll rust these handcuffs.

Maybe… but it would take more time than Malloy and his friends had, or Sbardi’s men needed….

Aggie Dickerson Bigelow never slept well on the island, especially when Ethan was off in Boston on business. She heard everything, even the clunk of an oar against the side of a boat.

A little while ago, that clunk had brought her straight out of bed, and she had seen a fishing boat going up the creek, with men on either side using oars as poles. At the boathouse, six men had gotten off, including, of all people, Elwood Hilyard.

Now she rocked in the chair by the window, hummed a nervous little tune, fidgeted with the braid that hung over her shoulder, and watched the boat glide back to the mouth of the creek.

She didn’t care how good the beer tasted on a hot afternoon. The Hilyards were now using the Bigelow side of the island, where
her
children slept. She had to do something. So she went into her father-in-law’s room.

“Wake up, Grampa. Wake up.”

It was nearly time for his painkiller, and he was easily roused. He smelled old, not simply sick, but used up, like a pile of autumn leaves turned over in March.

“Elwood and five other men snuck up the creek a while ago. They’re running rum on
our
property now.”

Out on the
Pilgrim Portagee
, Sammy the Snake was listening for the sound of an engine.

Perez had already heard two trucks, but Sammy hadn’t budged, and Perez wasn’t helping him with any of this. He considered gangsters bad luck on a boat. He considered this island worse luck. Here his old nemesis lay dying. Here he had seen things that had broken his youthful heart.

“Hey, Sammy,” Manny was saying, “where you get dat name, ‘Sammy the Snake’?”

“Shhh. Tryin’ to hear the boat.”

“Sammy the Snake. You don’t look like no snake.”

“Shut up, you stupid Portagee.”

Manny looked at Perez. “Eh, a sure thing, with dat life jacket on, dey no call him Sammy the
Water
Snake.”

Perez whispered for Manny to be quiet.

When Manny was frightened, he talked. And right now his mouth was going faster than when the
Portagee
lost an engine on Handkerchief Shoals and drifted halfway to Georges Banks before they got it started.

Perez was frightened, too. For himself and for the Hilyards. But he had made a deal with Sbardi. He had done what he could to warn Rake off. There was no escaping.

Suddenly something splashed in the black water a few feet from the bow… something big.

“What was that?” said Sammy the Snake.

Meanwhile, in the V-berth of the
Paintin’ Tom
, Mary Muldowney was holding the painting to a kerosene lamp. “It’s beautiful,” she said through the blanket. “A real study.”

It was called
House on Billingsgate
, Number 17—the inside of a cottage, south-facing windows on either side of a fireplace, windows angled into the east and west walls, silky curtains waving in the breeze. A shaft of light slanted through the east window and struck the fireplace. Beyond the south windows were three bright strips of color—gold for the sand, blue for the sky, and bluer for the sea.

“It’s like you can see forever out those windows.”

“Look at the paintin’ he painted in over the fireplace,” Rake yelled from above.

“It’s a copy of the painting itself, with an even smaller copy inside the copy.”

“In the first copy, the light’s comin’ through the west window, but it hits the same spot as the light comin’ through the
east
window. In the copy of the copy, the light’s comin’ from the east again.” Rake’s voice, muffled by the blanket and the rumble of the engine, sounded distant and disembodied, as though their drifting apart had begun.

She blew out the lantern and went on deck. “I love it.”

“Used to think there was hidden meanin’ in it, all tied up with bricks and the book of history.”

“What kind of meaning?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care. Did when I was a kid and thought there might be some money in it, or some trouble for the Bigelows. But the Bigelows let us land the booze, and the booze brings more money than I know what to do with.”

“The painting still says something.”

“It says on Cape Cod, you can see forever. Even in your own house, you can feel the turnin’ of the earth.”

“Oh, Rake”—she threw her arms around his neck—“giving me this doesn’t make this any easier.”

“Do what your gut tells you.” He took his hands off the wheel and held her. “But if you look long enough at that paintin’, you’ll come back.”

The wheel of the
Paintin’ Tom
turned by itself and pointed the boat back toward Provincetown. Then they heard something splash… something big.

In the big house on Jack’s Island, the phone rang. Elwood was on the veranda, listening to the splashes in the creek. Charles Bigelow was calling to find out where he was.

“I’m right here, waitin’ for a… for a deliverance.”

“Aggie says she saw you sneakin’ around our creek.”

“She didn’t see me, but maybe she heard something, ’cause I heard a sound down at our creek.”

“What did you hear?”

“A whale.”

On the
Pilgrim Portagee
, Sammy the Snake was shivering with fright. “Another splash! Over there!”

“Eh, just some sea monster,” said Perez calmly.

“Sea monster?” Even in the dark, Perez could see Sammy turn a funny green.

“What’s the matter?” asked Perez. “No sea monsters in Boston?”

“Never mind dat,” said Manny. “Whatsa matter he no tell us where he get his nickname? I teenk maybe it mean he got a big dick or somethin’.”

“Shut up, you fuckin’ Portagee, or I’ll pull out somethin’ more than my dick.” Sammy slapped at the holster under the life jacket.

“How ’bout we call him One-Eye, for short?” said Manny.

Now Perez let him talk, because the talk was making Sammy more nervous, and if he was nervous enough, he might not hear the sound of Rake’s boat, and this whole ambush would go to hell. “One-Eye for short? Short for what?”

“Sammy the One-Eyed Trouser Snake.” Manny laughed.

Suddenly something burst from the water just ahead of the
Pilgrim Portagee
, something slick and black.

“Holy Jesus!” cried Sammy, and he came scrambling back from the bow. “Another fuckin’ sea monster!”

Then something broke the surface near the stern.

“Mother of God!” Perez blessed himself. “They’re everywhere!”