The Glass Factory (24 page)

I bike home and Reggie Einhorn’s there.

“Let’s go fishing,” he says.

“I don’t have time for that.”

“That’s just when you need it the most.”

“It’s clouding over.”

“Trust me.”

Rosita wants Antonia to stay with her but I say no, I’m taking her with me this time. I change her clothes and throw on a little of the baby cologne that Colomba got for her.

Reggie Einhorn walks in and says, “Jeez, it smells like a French warehouse in here!”

“I don’t think that’s quite what you mean,” I say.

“I know what I mean. Come on, let’s move out.”

We go over to his place so we can gather the fishing equipment. He’s got a couple of decent casting rods and a deep-sea rod that he doesn’t take with him. He’s got a two-foot-long, three-tray tackle box that’s pretty damn serious. And that’s before I notice a Colt All-American Model 2000 double-action semiautomatic pistol down on the bottom.

I look it over. “Fifteen rounds?” I ask.

“Ain’t it a beaut? Only eight pieces. Easy to break down. And you can take off the barrel bushing for easy concealment.”

“We going to catch these fish or assassinate them?”

“You don’t want some varmint stealing your fish, do you, young lady?”

“No, I guess not. Uh, Reggie?”

“Yeah?”

“What exactly is a varmint?”

“Oh, foxes, raccoons, possums, there’s more than fish in them woods, you know.”

“There’s still woods left out here?”

“You bet your sweet p-toot.”

I heft the gun. It’s got a good, solid feel, almost like a police .38, with black composition grips. Interesting detail about the removable barrel bushing, but I wouldn’t want to remove it. It’s got a luminous dot on the sight for rapid alignment in darkness. Not a feature I’d choose to do without. Especially since it’s getting dark and cloudy. Though why the hell you’d need it for hunting (on a fishing trip) I don’t know.

“Thing got a rave in
Shotgun News,”
he says, tossing me a copy of that venerable semimonthly publication.

I glance through it. I don’t mind the ads listing vintage Czechoslovakian resistance carbines from 1943 but do we really need kits for converting the Chinese assault rifles to full automatic, or for every family to own their own flame thrower?
Flame throwers?
I guess that’s for going after
really
big fish.

I put a light summer sweater on Antonia and have to drag some rain gear, just in case. Reggie swings the tacklebox behind the seat of his pickup and groans.

“Oh, to be sixty-five again,” he says, rubbing his sore arm.

“You want me to drive?”

“I can handle it,” he barks.

“Okay, okay.”

He starts the truck. “Where’d you learn so much about guns?” he asks.

“I thought everyone in the county knew I used to be a cop.”

“Did you now?” And that gets him laughing. “A lady cop! Oh, that’s good!” He laughs some more.

“You done?”

“Listen, young lady, my father and two of my uncles were city cops in the days of Jimmy Walker.”

“I’m impressed. It must have been pretty tough to survive. That was a pretty corrupt administration.”

“Sure, kid. And Patchogue’s been corrupt since Dutch Schultz ran rum out of here in the twenties, but it wasn’t like it is today. It was just old-fashioned patronage. My old man told me back then there was only
one
supplier of police uniforms for the whole city, and you had to buy from him if the bosses said so. At an inspection, they’d say, ‘Einhorn: You need a new uniform,’ and—” He snaps his fingers, then rolls them together in the sign for money.

“Yeah, well, some things never change.”

“Yeah, except today you got the guns, the drugs, this mob, that mob. Even the Vietnamese got a mob. So what’d you do? Huh? You have tea parties with all the other lady cops?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

It starts raining.

The temperature has dropped twenty degrees since noon and the fog is coming in. We turn onto a gravel road and fifteen slow, bumpy minutes later we pull to a stop under a wet canopy of trees. The sky is dark and foggy, but Reggie says the fish are jumping. We walk down a path, wet leaves slapping at my face and thighs, and come to the edge of a pristine pond with ducks, geese, and swans in it. Yes, swans. There’s a plaque from 1938 dedicating the pond and environs to Vaughan Carter, who donated the land to the county on the condition that it not be developed.

In contrast to Shore Oaks, the memorial park is trimmed, well-kept, with an old stone bridge persisting through the decades in sharp reflection of the English style. Antonia’s antsy from the car ride so I take a walk with her while Reggie sets up the fishing gear. There’s some kind of pine tree I’ve never seen before whose incoming pine cones are utterly obscene flaming pink protuberances, and we come to a huge beech tree, black and shiny with rain, with a Code of Hammurabi–length list of lovers’ names carved on its trunk, scarring it like a tattooed elephant.

We come to the bridge, where the pristine pond drains into a fetid, foul-smelling marsh and becomes a murky, narrow creek twisting and winding through high, windblown reeds to the Sound somewhere not visible from here. Not even enough of a flow to start the waterwheel by the dark empty old mill.

We rejoin Reggie, who has opened a cooler with soda and two Lite beers.

“What’ll it be?” asks Reggie.

“Soda’s garbage,” says Antonia.

I have to laugh. “She got that from me.”

“I want juice,” she says.

“I’m sorry, I forgot to bring some. I didn’t think of it.”

She gets upset. Reggie offers her a sucking candy. They’re bad for her teeth, of course, but it calms her down so I accept it.

Two cans of Lite beer. “I’m glad to see you’re not one of those people who think hunting is an occasion for heavy drinking.”

“People like that make me sick,” he says, casting the rod. “Give the rest of us responsible gun owners a bad name. Darn drunken deer hunters’re always shootin’ up some housewife who’s hanging up the laundry in her backyard. Don’t deserve the right to bear arms. Nosiree.” He reels in. Nothing. He casts.

“Speaking of beer, who was that old buddy you had to go buy a beer?” Nothing. “On Memorial Day?”

He looks at me. “How’d you know about that?”

“You told me.”

“Oh, I did, huh? Well, I guess I did.”

“Yes, you did. What’s his name?”

“Sol Weinstein.”

“Where does he live?”

“Veterans Memorial Cemetery.”

It’s my turn to look and wait. He casts again, watches the lure bob and ripple away to stillness.

“You want to tell me about it?” I ask. “I’m a former soldier in blue myself.”

Reggie tugs the line, reels it in slow, making it skirt and shimmy. Not a bite. He casts it again, lowers the rod and reaches for a beer. He cracks the top, takes a sip, takes another sip, takes a long gulp. It digests for a couple of minutes. Then:

“We were trying to lay down some ground cover in the middle of nowhere when we took a couple of forty-millimeter shells right in the belly. Smitty pointed the thing out to sea but we went down too fast. Our boys had maybe one-third of the island, the Japs had the other two-thirds. We just crash-landed right smack in the middle of it, cradled in the treetops for a couple of minutes. By miracle we all got out before she blew. We were strictly flyboys, didn’t know diddly-squat about jungle fighting. We were dazed from the crash, didn’t even have on our cartridge belts. Then we heard a bolt being thrown.

“Sol saw the gun and never hesitated. He lunged and grabbed the Jap and took three bullets in the gut while the rest of us unholstered our pieces and got the guy. He saved me and two other guys. We turned the opposite way the Jap had come and met up with advancing Americans. They were just a bunch of moving bodies at first. I tell you, when I finally saw the two-inch Stars and Stripes on that corporal’s shoulder patch—”

He’s choking back something in his throat, and is bothered that I can see it. He reels in the rod for another cast. “Why don’t you cast your rod? I brought it along for nothing.”

I oblige him and cast my rod. “And where are they now?”

“They’re both dead. Bill in fifty-six in a steel mill accident and Sal in seventy-eight of silicosis.”

“Silicosis?”

“That’s the word, isn’t it? You know, Black Lung.”

“Oh, you mean miner’s asthma. Sal?”

“Yeah. Salvatore. Lombardi. We kept in touch for a good long while. Twenty years running, we’d meet on Memorial Day to buy the guy who saved our lives a drink. I missed a few years, but I’ve been doing it every year since sixty-eight. It’s the least I can do. We’re getting old, and there ain’t a goldarned thing we can do about it.”

“Yeah, that’s the truth. And the word you’re looking for is ‘goddamned.’“

“Don’t curse at me, young lady.”

I chuckle. “Sorry.” I shake my head. “You’re one of those old-fashioned guys, aren’t you, Reginald?”

“That’s funny: The only guys who ever called me Reginald were my old Air Force buddies.”

“How about that?”

“You know, in fun.”

“Yeah. In fun …”

Reggie finally catches a fish. He whoops, hollers (it’s a big one), then he unhooks it and tosses it back.

“What’d you do that for?” I ask.

“Are you kidding? You can’t eat these things!”

“Why not?”

“They’ve got too much mercury in them. It’s strictly catch-and-release fishing here.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“Now what is it?”

“You spend the whole afternoon trying to catch a fish that you’ve got to throw right back because the company you work for has poisoned the water?”

“Mommy, he’s silly,” says Antonia, who knows that you catch fish in order to eat them.

“Listen,” says Einhorn. “Don’t go blaming Morse again for our problems. There’s much worse than him out here.”

“Like who?”

“Like who?” He chuckles. “You couldn’t’ve been much of a cop.”

“Oh?”

“Let me tell you something about Minoa. One guy in the neighborhood tried to go into trash carting and the mob threatened him out of it. Now who do you think runs the toxic waste carting business?”

I guess my head goes “click” or something real audible like that because he goes, “Uh-huh? You see? Cop, huh? Remind me not to need
you
in an emergency—”

“Okay Reggie, just let it alone, will you?”

He chuckles. “You women’s libbers just hate it when you’re wrong and we’re right.”

“Yes. We do.”

Antonia asks me, “What do you call someone who’s deaf in their nose?”

“You mean someone who can’t smell?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know if there is a word for that.”

“Why not?”

“Because there are things that don’t have names yet. And I bet there are names that don’t have things yet, too. Maybe Dr. Wrennch knows.”

“I want to go see Dr. Wrennch.”

“Not now, Toni. We’re fishing.”

“I want to go see Dr. Wrennch.”

And you know? I do too.