Cape Cod

by William Martin

  Geoff knew the Humpster was nasty enough that he wouldn’t pull any punches, so he jumped between them. “Let’s talk about this, boys.”

  But Rake sent a roundhouse over Geoff’s shoulder, straight at the Humpster’s nose. His aim wasn’t what it used to be, and he hit Geoff in the side of the head. Then the Humpster grabbed for Rake, and Geoff grabbed for the Humpster, and they were all scuffling and yelling at once.

  Let go… Back off… Quit it… He called me screwy… You ARE… Quit it… Back off… Fuck off… QUIT IT… YOU fuck off… Back OFF… Get off my land… We ain’t on it, you screwy old bastard… He said it again. Let me at him… C’mon, you old… BACK OFF…Oomph…

  Geoff sent the Humpster into the side of the van, and his big ass put a dent in the door. He bounced back with a wild right, which Geoff ducked. This exhausted most of Geoff’s street-fighting skills and reminded him that no matter how often he pumped the Nautilus, he was in over his head with the Humpster, who did this kind of thing for recreation.

  So Geoff grabbed the transit and pointed it like a pike. “Back off, you big tub.”

  This brought Arnie Burr into the fray because Arnie was, above all else, cheap. “That transit cost money! You want to break it? Put it down.”

  “Call off your whale,” said Geoff.

  “Back off, Hump.”

  Geoff put himself in front of Rake, who was twitching around, trying to get another shot in at the Humpster.

  “I don’t know what we’re fightin’ about,” said Arnie. “We got permission to be here.”

  “From who?” demanded Rake.

  The Humpster aimed his finger at Geoff. “Him.”

  Rake looked Geoff in the eye. “You?”

  And Arnie turned on Geoff, too. “Your wife gave permission. We’re checking your land against the 1904 lines.”

  Geoff saw betrayal in Rake’s gaze and a fury so pure that it drained all the color from the old man’s face.

  “Your wife,” Rake said. “Bigelows do stick together.”

  Arnie chuckled at this. He had married into the Hilyards, but he had sided with the Bigelows, too.

  Geoff couldn’t stand Arnie. He knew Rake couldn’t either, so he let Arnie have it. This always made him feel good and might get him back into Rake’s good graces. “I didn’t give permission for any survey, Arnie, so pack up and get out of here.”

  “The land’s community property, ain’t it?” Arnie set the transit back in the van. “What’s yours is your wife’s. And if you can’t control what she’s sayin’, it’s no reason for us to lose a fee. Somebody pays for our time.”

  The Humpster pointed at the dent in the door. “And you’ll pay for that, smartass.”

  “That’s your ass,” answered Geoff.

  The Humpster gave him the finger.

  Geoff turned to Rake, “Bright guy, the Humpster.”

  “At least you know what side he’s on,” said Rake, and that was all he said.

  ii.

  MLS. Multiple Listing Service. The bible of the real estate trade.

  MLS. More Lousy Summer houses. The book for Barnstable County contained photos and statistics on over two thousand houses, from multimillion-dollar waterfront beauties to the little shacks back in the hills.

  MLS. More Little Surprises. “Old Cape Cod charm and village convenience” could be a falling-down place on Route 6A that smelled of fish caught in 1892. “Some saltwater views, walk to beach” meant that if you climbed onto the roof, sometime in January, when there were no leaves on the trees, you might see some blue in the distance, and you might be able to walk there in an hour, if you had no beach umbrella, cooler, chair, bag, books, or two-year-old grabbing at your heels.

  MLS. More Lost Saturdays. Much Luckier Somewhere else. My Life is Slow. Cape Cod real estate was slow. That was why Janice would have been luckier to be somewhere else, doing something else, instead of wasting her Saturdays waiting for the phone to ring so she could take some vacationer to see “Old Cape Cod Charm, convenience, saltwater views, and a walk to the beach.”

  Janice had missed the mid-eighties boom, when a two-holed outhouse on an eroding bluff appreciated at thirty percent a year. Now the only property sure to sell was the expensive stuff on the waterfront. That was why the Jack’s Island development made sense.

  Outside, a car door slammed and Geoff got out of a station wagon. He’d come by boat from Jack’s Island to Sesuit Harbor, then by thumb to the restored Victorian house on Route 6A, home of Bigelow Development.

  She put up her hands. “I’ve heard all about it, Geoff.”

  “You had no right to send them down there.”

  “Douglas asked me. I didn’t think they’d go this morning. But you shouldn’t have picked a fight with them.”

  “You’re pushing me, Jan.” Geoff slammed his hand against the side of a file cabinet. It echoed off the refinished floors and white walls and framed prints of Bigelow projects.

  “Ahoy, there.” Dickerson came downstairs from his office. “We’re in a place of business.” He poked his nose into Douglas’s office. “But no one else here, so slam away. Bottle it up, you might get a heart attack, like me.”

  “I thought Rake would drop dead when he saw the surveying equipment,” said Geoff.

  Dickerson’s eyes widened in their little bags of flesh. “Surveys. Good idea. Get those topos and old plot plans into the hands of the architect. Stimulate his brain.”

  “We haven’t gotten that far, Dad,” she said gently.

  She had been here less than a day, and already it was clear: Dickerson had lost it. He used to spend the morning on the telephone or in the field, chatting, cajoling, raising holy hell. Now he was up there at his desk, behind his row of pill bottles, reading Field and Stream.

  “Dad,” she explained, “Douglas says that if we win at the town meeting, we have to be ready for the Conservation Commission a week from Tuesday. We have to talk to them before we do anything else. We have to shoot boundaries around Rake’s property, in case he won’t give in, flag trees, get the botanist in to mark off wetlands. These things can’t wait.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Can’t forget the Conservation Commission.”

  Now she looked at Geoff. “That’s why I told them they could work on our property.”

  “Our property?” said Geoff. “You mean my property? Or do you think it belongs to Bigelow Development already?”

  She looked down at her notepad and drew a rough map of Jack’s Island. She wrote “Bigelow” on one half. Then she drew the road through it…

  Geoff put his hands on the desk and looked into her eyes. His sunglasses had left large white circles on his face, which made him look slightly depraved. “I was just starting to feel my way with Rake when those two ruined everything. Now he won’t even talk to me.”

  … And then she divided the Hilyard half into segments. One belonged to Geoff. A larger one to Rake. The sailing camp on Nauseiput Creek belonged to Rake’s sister, Clara.

  “Feeling your way with Rake,” said Dickerson, getting himself back into it. “Does this mean you’ve committed to us?”

  “I don’t know.” He aimed a finger at Janice. “Just don’t push.”

  She looked at the finger. She thought about biting it. “The property’s yours and mine, by marriage.”

  “That’s why Rake’s so mad.”

  Janice looked at her father. “If you had come to Cape Cod to be ‘the architect who cares,’ wouldn’t you want a commission like this, to show what you could do?”

  Geoff slipped on his sunglasses. “That would depend on how much I cared… about Cape Cod, that is.”

  “We been here as long as you, Geoff,” said Dickerson. “We care as much. Don’t forget that.”

  Geoff looked at his wife. “See you tonight.”

  Tonight. The gathering would continue. She couldn’t count on George. Maybe Jimmy Little would help her. He was the most cynical of all of them. And he was an Indian. Tonight. In the dunes.
/>   iii.

  The dunes that formed the hand of Cape Cod and the long curling fingers of Provincetown had themselves been formed from Cape Cod’s forearm. Some people saw something biblical in this. Like Eve being fashioned from Adam’s rib. Others, who took their metaphors from science, thought of skin grafts or tissue transplants.

  But to understand the forces that had shaped Cape Cod, you needed a biblical sense of God’s power… or a modern faith in the science of geology. A good imagination helped, too.

  First you had to imagine ice, a shimmering glacial sheet nearly a mile thick, grinding south across the continent. Then you imagined mild breezes blowing up from the south. Then you got in the car and drove Route 6 from Sandwich to Orleans, along the line of hills formed twelve thousand years ago, when the glacier met the mild air, dropped a load of rock, and dissolved into rivers that carried debris south, creating the flatlands from Falmouth to Chatham. The terminal moraine and the outwash plain.

  When you turned north at the Orleans Rotary, you could now imagine the glacier on the Atlantic side, flowing west to create the tablelands of the Lower Cape.

  By the time you reached the place where Truro sloped toward Provincetown, the glacier was gone, but like the phoenix, was reborn in the seas that rose as it melted. Ten thousand years ago, Cape Cod ended at Truro. The glacier had left the arm without a hand, so the sea chewed into the tablelands and swept sand northwest. Soon a barrier beach curved into the bay. Marshlands formed within its protective arc. The forearm grew thinner. The hand took shape.

  And the wind always blew.

  It started in Labrador and came on as relentless as the ice had been before it. Grain by grain, it raised the sand into waves and wave by wave the sand rose into great cresting combers that would have flooded the land, but for the long-bladed grasses that held it until vines could bind it and trees could take root.

  After the glaciers, the wind, and the leaves of grass had done their work, the settlers came. They cut the trees for firewood, they foraged cattle on the ground cover, and in not much more than a generation, the sand was set free to roll once more.

  Now there were thirty cottages among the mountains of sand in the Provincelands. They were small and old. None had electricity or protection from the winter. Their only luxury was solitude. But on a summer night, they looked like small garnets of light in a great black matrix of sand.

  George Flynn stayed in a cottage at the base of a dune that each year crept closer to his back door. He had a single large room with a table, desk, sofa bed, kerosene lamps, wood stove, and water pump. It wasn’t the Hollywood Hills, and if he hadn’t been able to walk to Provincetown, he wouldn’t have been there at all. But he said that if he summered in the dunes that inspired Eugene O’Neill, he might eventually figure out how to write like him.

  The talk at George’s table began with old friends playing catch-up, gossip, and tell-the-latest-joke. After dinner and wine, it began to follow wild arcs that swooped from the crests of the dunes, where the summer wind still moved the sand, to the floor of the cottage, where a woman’s bare foot slid toward a man’s.

  “The Indians called Jack’s Island Nauseiput, which meant the place between two streams… unh…”

  “No footsie!” cried George. “Jimmy never says ‘unh’ unless someone’s playing footsie with him.”

  Jimmy’s wife, Samantha, elbowed George in the ribs. “C’mon, we’re among friends here.”

  “Play footsie all you want,” said Janice, “but only with your husband.”

  Samantha got an evil little glint in her eye and made a show of massaging her foot against Geoff’s.

  Geoff laughed and sipped his wine.

  “Don’t you envy Jimmy?” Samantha asked.

  “I never envy my friends.”

  “Oh, Geoffrey, you’re no fun anymore.”

  What Geoff envied was the intimacy of one bare foot touching another beneath a table, a hidden promise of passion while everyone else talked about Indian legends. Feel the sandy smoothness of my toes and just wait till later.

  The first time Geoff sat at the Bigelow dinner table, Janice slid the sole of her bare foot halfway to his thigh while her father talked about the impact of Nixon’s trip to China on Cape real estate. Now, Geoff would have been thrilled beyond envy of—or even passing interest in—Samantha, if his wife would play a little footsie with him. But they were not on the best of terms, and neither of them was barefoot.

  What the hell. He’d make the gesture, maybe break the ice. He moved his foot across the floor and touched hers. She was wearing sandals, and he had on Converse basketball shoes with soles like steel-belted radials. It just wasn’t the same.

  Her eyes flitted toward him, as though he had brushed her arm. Then she looked back at Jimmy.

  “These Indians didn’t know about glaciers and erosion and so forth, so they invented the legend of Maushop the Giant to explain things. Maushop pricked his finger once, and his blood fell on the Great Salt Marsh, and that’s where the cranberry came from. And he knew a magic song to lure the whales into the bay and… unh…”

  “Oh, Christ,” cried George. “They’re at it again.”

  Samantha giggled. She was slightly drunk and very giddy. “If we can’t do this here, where can we do it?”

  “Certainly not at Pride’s Crossing,” said Jimmy.

  Samantha pulled a long face and sat up primly. “But of course not, Mr. Little.” She was fair and blond and very delicate, and there had been hell to pay when she announced to her social-register family that she was marrying a Mashpee Indian.

  Jimmy had the copper skin, the high cheekbones, the almost Oriental eyes, the straight black hair of the Wampanoag. He had grown up never trusting the treaties, as he said, and his cynicism had been an invaluable tool on his journey from the ponds of Mashpee to a corner office in a New York law firm.

  “Would Maushop object if we built a development on Nauseiput Island?” asked Geoff.

  Jimmy grabbed his beer can. “Don’t ask me a serious question when I’m playing footsie with my wife.”

  “So ask him a stupid question,” said Janice. “Did you know that the only wood remaining from the Mayflower is a piece of timber that Rake Hilyard is using for a doorstop?”

  “What?” cried George.

  “Baloney,” said Geoff.

  “Really.” Janice laughed. “The old man thinks it’s going to save the island. I’m afraid he’s getting senile. Geoff hates to hear me say it, and I hate to say it myself, but… senile.”

  Geoff waved his fingers, as if to tell her to shut up. But he had brought the whole thing up in the first place.

  “We can’t leave important decisions in the hands of someone who may not be competent,” she said. “Can we, Jimmy?”

  Jimmy squared himself to the table, a good lawyer listening to a client. But Samantha sabotaged him with her foot. Jimmy’s face cracked; then he began to laugh.

  “There she goes again,” said George.

  “We can’t carry on a serious discussion when everyone’s horny,” said Janice.

  “So, we either talk about sex, in which case you four go off to the dunes and leave me to choke the chicken, or we discuss something stupid, like a doorstop.”

  “Stupid is right,” said Geoff. “A piece of varnished firewood is all it is. The plaque calls it a Mayflower log.”

  “A log,” said George, “or the log?”

  “It’s just an old joke. What does it matter?” Geoff held out his glass.

  “Does this mean I’m driving?” asked Janice.

  “If you’re not careful, you’ll be walking.”

  “Before you two whisper any more sweet nothings,” said George, “are we talking log as in piece of timber from a ship the fate of which no one knows? Or log as in captain’s diary?”

  “If no one knows where the ship ended up,” said Geoff, “how in the hell would they know where the log went?”

  “Bradford’s diary disappeared before
the Revolution. Seventy-five years later someone found it in England and bang!” He clapped his hands. “Big sensation.”

  “Where is it now?” asked Janice.

  “In the state archives.”

  “What’s it worth?” asked Geoff.

  “Millions.”

  George gestured to the bookshelf where he kept his research material for a play on the Quakers and a signed studio photo of Bette Davis. “I have the Morison edition. Good footnotes, good job of modernizing the spelling without spoiling the antiquity of the syntax.”

  Geoff locked his fingers behind his head and rocked back in his chair. “Did you ever read the part where they find the kid screwing the turkey?”

  “In a famous document of history,” said Janice, “you remember that.”

  “Spare us the details,” added Samantha.

  “The details are amazing.” George went to the bookcase. “I’ve heard the details of what they did to the Indians a hundred times,” she answered.

  “That’s so I can make you feel guilty whenever we have a fight.” Jimmy slid his foot across the floor to her.

  “The Indians got off easy compared to the adulterers and the turkey-fuckers and—God forbid—the committers of other unnatural practices,” said George.

  “I don’t suppose you mean the gays,” said Janice.

  “ ‘Sodomists’ is the word they used.” George reached for the Bradford diary, but another book caught his attention. He pulled it down and began to riffle through it. “Samuel Eliot Morison is the only one who mentions the log, as far as I know. Ah.” George found the place and held up the book. “The Story of the ‘Old Colony’ of New Plymouth, published 1956 by Knopf.” And he read, “ ‘It is too bad that we have no log or sea journal of the Mayflower; it would be priceless now. Master Jones doubtless kept one, but as he died shortly after returning to England, his widow probably used it for wrapping paper.’ ”

  “Typical male remark,” groused Samantha.

  “Priceless?” said Geoff.

  “Lost and gone forever.” Janice held out her glass. “Pour me some more wine.”

  Outside, the breeze blew and sand grains rolled down the dune.