Woo Woo

by Joe Coccaro

  “So, the top two cops are relatives? Those are pretty good odds of staying out of jail,” Carter said. “Okay, take a beer then, but promise not to tell Aunt Hattie—or cousins Chip and Smitty. I don’t want to get on their bad side.”

  The boys each grabbed a beer and grinned at each other.

  “Sir, mind if I smoke?” Jed asked.

  “I’d advise against it, but that probably wouldn’t do any good.”

  “Well if that’s a ‘yes,’ can I bum a cigarette?” Jed asked.

  “Sorry, son. A bad liver is one thing; lung cancer is another. I don’t smoke—never did, never will.”

  “Not even—” Jed started.

  “Not gonna answer that,” Carter said. “Too many rumors around here.”

  The boys were careful moving the furniture. They only banged the stairwell walls a couple of times. A few wall scrapes and creases. Never fails. Nothing ruins furniture like moving it, Carter thought.

  Jed was on the skinny side but had that wiry strength that would surprise a foe in a fight. He had smoky blue eyes, one crossed and filmy. Carter wondered if he could see out of it. Jed’s dusty blond hair flowed in wavy knots, and his front teeth were mostly straight but gapped. Braces would have made him almost handsome. He had a long, thin jaw, and his ears were set back. He looked like Tom Petty, overbite included.

  Roy, on the other hand, looked like a very young Idris Elba. He had dark skin, arresting facial features, and the bulk of a linebacker—but not the height. His calves were nearly as thick as Hattie’s, and his hair was shaved close to the scalp. He had a pierced ear and blue tattoo on his forearm that seemed faded and smudged.

  “Looks like your tattoo tried to escape,” Carter joked.

  Roy spoke up. His words came out with a slight stutter. “My b-brother’s friend done it. Not sure what it’s supposed to be,” he said as he looked at his forearm and shrugged.

  “Me neither,” Carter said. “You need a do-over.”

  Carter could tell Roy was the smarter of the two, despite his oral impediment. It was Roy who had directed Jed as they tried to figure out the best geometry for getting furniture through narrow doors or up the stairs. His dark-brown eyes were kind, and he never got flustered. Roy had leveraged the weight of furniture and boxes efficiently. While Jed grunted and used his back to lift, Roy had hoisted silently with his thick legs and broad shoulders.

  “You’re strong,” Carter said to Roy during a break. “You play sports?

  “N-no sir. N-no sports to play ’round here ’cept fur f-football. Lift weights, though.”

  “Told ya ’bout his muscles,” Jed chimed.

  “G-go on and stop it, Jed, ’fore I smack you one,” Roy blurted. Jed smiled demurely and headed to the U-Haul for another box.

  All three were soaked as the sun-steamed humidity stubbornly lingered. Toads and frogs screamed in the drainage ponds at Oyster Park, no doubt gorging on a hatch of insects. Carter had already swatted a few mosquitoes needling his exposed calves and arms, and now he crushed gnats flying suicide missions into his eyes.

  “Buggy ’round here,” Jed said as he watched Carter scratch and swat. “You’ll get eaten ’live ’round this time of day. The town used to spray fur skeeters, but Aunt Hattie says they’s run outta money fur sprayin’.”

  “Hope I don’t get malaria or that Zika virus,” Carter said as he pointed to a welt on his leg.

  “Cats get it,” Jed said. “And thar damn sure ’nough of ’um ’round here. Aunt Hattie calls ’em crab bait. Says they’re worse than rats, possums, and squirrels. They’s kill the birds in the spring, baby ones.”

  “Yeah, I see. I found a dead robin by the bushes.”

  “That m-makes Aunt Hattie m-mad,” Roy said.

  “Guess I’ll have to get a dog to keep the damn cats away. Man, these mosquitoes are bad,” Carter said as he slapped his neck.

  “My maw says to eat g-garlic,” Roy piped.

  “Eat garlic?”

  “Yes sir. Keeps the sk-skeeters ’way.”

  “I guess garlic’s good for mosquitoes and vampires . . . and scorned women too,” Carter joked. He took a swig of Rolling Rock.

  “I don’t get it. What’s women got to do with skeeters?” Jed asked.

  “They’s all b-blood s-suckers, dummy,” Roy said.

  Carter thanked the boys and pulled six twenty-dollar bills from his wallet and handed them three each. They shoved the bills into their pockets and grinned.

  “You fellas need a ride home?”

  “Nah. It’s just a few b-blocks. Just ’bout everything in town justa few b-blocks away,” Roy said.

  “Mr. Rossi, can I ask you somethin?”

  “Sure, Jed. Fire away. You want a beer for the walk home?”

  “No sir, well, yeah, but that ain’t my question. I’m wondering, you gonna be livin’ hure alone? I mean, you gotta girl?”

  Carter grinned. “Nothing subtle about you, is there. Why do you ask? You trying to fix me up with your Aunt Hattie?”

  The boys laughed. “Nah, she’s too old for you. ’Sides, she’s married to Uncle Wally, and you don’t want to get on his bad side. He’s a mean drunk. He fought in Vietnam and got some medals. Gets crazy sometimes. I’m only askin’, sir, ’cause the pickin’s is pretty slim ’round here.”

  “The pickin’s?” Carter said. He looked at Jed’s filmy crossed eye and matted hair.

  “Yes sir. I mean, they ain’t many good-lookin’ girls, at least ones ’round your age that ain’t married. There’s some divorced ones, but they gots kids and is kinda worn out. I’m just sayin’ that if you’re new here and want a girl, you’d better bring your own.”

  “Thanks for the advice, Jed.” Carter grinned. “I’m guessing from the looks of you two scrubs that the women folk around here probably say the same thing about the local men: slim pickin’s.”

  CHAPTER 2

  CARTER COULDN’T RECALL ever being in such a quiet place, except maybe when camping out West. He remembered a trip on the outskirts of Moses Lake, in eastern Washington’s Columbia River Basin. He and a college buddy had camped for a week in a ravine. They’d eaten peyote buttons and hallucinated, each swearing they saw Indian spirits. Coyotes had howled all night at the star-stuffed blackness. That trip was the first time Carter had ever really seen the Milky Way. Now, standing on his back deck in Cape Charles, there it was again.

  By eleven that night, the streets were dry and not even a car passed. No dogs barked, no people talked, no car doors slammed. Just frogs screamed in the park drainage ponds. Even the stray predators that had scurried around earlier were bedded down and out of sight. Carter heard a burst of laughter from two blocks away. Tourists having fun, he thought.

  Cape Charles wasn’t like the crowded resorts of Virginia Beach, Nags Head on the Carolina coast, or even the trendy resort villages farther north along the Delaware/Maryland/Virginia Peninsula. No, this place felt more like a sleepy town from the 1950s than a resort. Locals called it Mayberry. Others said it was like living inside “the bubble.” Everyone knew everyone, and everyone smiled, at least on the surface. Beneath the surface was centuries of history as old as the country itself. Carter loved history and had read a couple of books about Virginia’s Lower Eastern Shore.

  ***

  Everyone thinks about Jamestown and Williamsburg up along the James River as the first American colonies. In fact, the first British settlers claimed land in the Lower Peninsula. Englishmen had traded with Indians and farmed and timbered the seafood-rich Chesapeake Bay, which the indigenous Americans had to themselves until the 1600s. English kings granted the most productive and loyal British colonialists tens of thousands of acres. Direct descendants of those landed gentry still lived on the Shore. They included Hattie Savage’s family.

  Locals called these fortunate families the “haves.” They had owned plantations settled by English traders. Everybody else were “come-heres.” There were also generations of “have-nots,” mostly the descendant
s of slaves. Many of the descendants of those poor souls still resided on the Shore, not far from the grave markers of their ancestors. When author Alex Haley was working on Roots, he sent a researcher to peruse court records in Northampton County, Cape Charles’ home. Northampton didn’t send property or other records to the Virginia capital of Richmond. Good thing too. When Richmond was burned after the Civil War, most county records were destroyed. Northampton’s survived, including ownership records of slaves and land grants from the king.

  “Lots of history here,” Hattie had told Carter at his real estate closing. “People ’round here go way back; lots of stuff secret beneath the surface. Lots of people have cousins who don’t look nothin’ like them, if ya know what I mean. Lots of coffee in the cream. My family has some Indian and probably some African too. My best advice: Be careful about what you say and to who, ’cause they may be kin. Unless you know someone—and their family—you can’t be sure who you’re talking to. Word gets ’round fast. Easy to make friends here; easier to make enemies.”

  “Sounds intimidating,” Carter had said, “and kind of nasty.”

  “It’s worse than it sounds. Just tradeoffs. Everything’s about tradeoffs.”

  “I suppose. Seems ironic though.”

  “Forget all that. Sorry I even brought it up. Just enjoy the place. Go with the flow. If you’re friendly to Cape Charles, it’ll be friendly back. Besides, buying here is a good investment.”

  “Right. It’s always a good time to buy when you’re in the real estate business, right, Hattie?”

  Hattie had winked. “You betcha! But sometimes is better than others, and now’s one of ’em. Where else can you buy a house for a couple hundred thousand dollars two blocks from the beach? We’re four hours from ten million people. If this house was near the Bay in Maryland, it’d be 800 grand.”

  Carter didn’t need to be sold. He had done his homework—and he didn’t have 800 grand, or even half that. He had recently divorced. This had whacked his savings in half, and his ex-wife had received most of the equity in their house. Cape Charles was affordable. But what he liked most was its eclectic nature. Seemed like there were lots of people rebooting their lives here, creating a melting pot of Northerners, Southerners, haves and have-nots, painters, webpage designers, soybean growers, teachers, divorced folks, trust fund babies on a budget, and a smattering of drunken handymen. Some of the richest people in the county never graduated high school. Some of the poorest had PhDs.

  Carter had heard the stories of how watermen with their white rubber boots, or farmers in Carhartts, would often mock Cape Charles’ fancy city boys with the pastel-painted houses, plaid shorts, and European convertibles. Some farmers even stopped coming into town, nauseated by the sight of men strolling down Mason Way holding hands or leaning into each other, shoulder to shoulder. But over time, men and women of the land and sea had learned to coexist, each keeping their distance, but remaining respectful.

  A massive golf course community and new marina had become the new economic engine of the town. Southern Living magazine and The Washington Post had hailed tiny Cape Charles as a hidden treasure, an “eco-tourism mecca,” a baby St. Michaels, Maryland, of the Lower Eastern Shore. Two syndicated real-estate-reality TV shows had filmed episodes on Cape Charles. The town’s two harbors also made it popular with weekend boaters, and it was often cited in boating magazines. Sometimes an entire yacht club would cross the Bay to party en masse here. They’d dock their sailboats and cabin cruisers, rent a golf cart, and ride the streets whooping and laughing and handing out cans of Budweiser. These well-heeled tourists spread lots of money around town, so the town cops practiced restraint.

  “You mark my words: In two or three years, you’ll make big money on this place,” Hattie had told Carter when all the papers were signed at the end of his closing. “I’ve seen this plenty of times before. The town goes up and then down. But each time it goes up, it rises a little higher, and when it goes down, it’s a little lower. We got a lot of new people comin’ here, older people with money. This town’s on the rise. Trust me.”

  ***

  In addition to Cape Charles’ energy, Carter liked the town because of its name. It sounded exotic—even hoity, like the other famous capes of the East Coast: Cape Ann, Cape Cod, Cape May, Cape Hatteras, Cape Lookout, Cape Fear. A cape is a spit of land jutting into the water and usually at the end of a peninsula. Cape Charles was named after the finger of land where the Delmarva Peninsula ends and fades into the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.

  Cape Charles had provided the Lower Shore with a core. The area had mostly been scattered hamlets and farms until the early 1900s, when railroad barons from Pennsylvania bought 2,650 acres around Cape Charles and carved it into 644 lots with a park at the town’s center. The railroad delivered passengers and freight to the town, which was essentially a dead-end street. The only way to get farther south was to cross the Bay by ferryboat or barge.

  Railroad workers, boat crews, bankers, builders, and convenience stores had fueled the local economy. Cape Charles’ permanent population had peaked at about 5,000. Travelers awaiting passage to the other side had packed hotels, boarding houses, terminals, and taverns. Some days famous actors or musicians had hung out on the piers or in hotel lobbies or walked the streets to admire the architecture of the town’s buildings. Benny Goodman and his band had passed through a couple of times, performing free concerts on the pier while waiting for the ferry to Norfolk. Louis Armstrong too. Wealthy New Yorkers and politicians had strolled the town’s main street and stayed in its best hotel suites while awaiting passage south.

  The town died a swift death after a twenty-one-mile bridge with two tunnels opened in 1964. It had taken more than three years to build the span, which had used concrete casting made in Cape Charles. When the bridge opened, the plant and the jobs it created closed. Cape Charles had, unwittingly, engineered its own demise.

  Economic cancer spread quickly. Trucks and cars no longer needed passage through the tiny town. New Yorkers stopped coming. Boarding houses and hotels emptied, the banks left, department stores closed. And with them went the town’s people. Cape Charles shrank to fewer than 1,000 residents.

  The flight was so swift that the place became a perfectly preserved ghost town of old Victorians, Gothic Revivals, foursquares, bungalows, and colonials. Since no one was moving in, no one wanted the houses or the forty-foot-wide lots they stood on. So, for three decades, many sat and rotted, slowly sinking into the soft, still settling land. Only the poorest people looking for the cheapest rents moved in. Many of the old buildings became Section 8 federal housing. Cape Charles and surrounding Northampton County became the poorest geographic pocket in Virginia.

  Next came gentrification. Upwardly mobile baby boomers from Washington, Richmond, Maryland, Delaware, Philadelphia, New Jersey, and even New York City smelled a bargain by the Bay. They came in droves to snap up cheap summer vacation homes and restore them. This triggered a slow but steady resurgence that ebbed and crested with each real estate bubble in the ’80s and ’90s. Houses were so cheap, some charged them on credit cards.

  “My daddy sold three in one day to these gay boys from up around New York somewhere,” Hattie had told Carter. “They got ’em for around $30,000. I think they used a VISA card.”

  Most bought the houses to use as vacation homes. But some retired in the town. Florida was too damn hot, and the retirees had kids or grandkids they wanted to stay close to. Next came developers who poured tens of millions into the high-end golf community and marina on the edge of town. That lured even retirees and summer vacationers with even bigger money.

  Preservations protected old Cape Charles. Most of it was designated a historic district by the town and the state, which meant all but the most decrepit houses would not be bulldozed. That also meant no neon signs or billboards and no buildings taller than four stories. No franchise burger or pizza places were allowed in Cape Charles—not one—and no 7-Eleven, no Walgreens, not ev
en a commercial bank branch or a True Value. Not even a gas station. All of those tacky amenities were up on the highway two miles east of town.

  No, all the shops of Cape Charles were decidedly homegrown—for better and for worse. What stores the town did have were strung along five blocks of Mason Way, the town’s main street. It featured a coffee shop, a few art galleries, T-shirt shops, a pizza place, Blue Heron Hotel, an ice cream store, a wine shop, Bay Hardware, the old movie theater, a couple of art framing stores, and, of course, the pub and several real estate offices. Savage Realty held the prime spot at the corner of Mason and Harbor.

  Of the Mason establishments, no two were as vital as Bay Hardware and Gil Netters. The locals joked that the town had three branches of government: Cape Charles Town Hall, Bay Hardware, and Gil’s—the Congress, the executive branch, and the Supreme Court, in that order. The town gavel was the bottom of Gil’s beer mug. Carter had experienced the pub owner’s rants and proclamations many times over their many years of friendship. In fact, Gil had provoked Carter’s move to Cape Charles.

  “If this turns out to be a mistake, I’ll harass you forever,” Carter had told his friend when deciding to make the move.

  “Look, moron, your life is already screwed up. You got nothing to lose. Besides, I need more steady customers after the tourist season, so bring your wallet.”

  ***

  Carter stepped around some unpacked boxes on the kitchen floor and onto the rear deck. The wind had shifted from the south to the west, and he could smell the acridness of the Bay, a brew of seagrasses with hints of marine life. He even caught a whiff of the oyster and clam processing warehouse a mile or so away as the crow flies. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what flavors he could sense, as if he were blindfolded at a wine tasting. He filled his lungs and held in his breath. The air was heavy but sweet, not the diesel, stale mix of the city or the sulfur pungency of seaside marches during low tide. No, Cape Charles was a more complex brew, more subtle.