“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!”
Sammy crouched below the gunwale and fumbled his pistol from his holster.
“Careful with that,” said Perez. “You might shoot yourself in the foot or somethin’.”
“And no be shootin’ into no water,” said Manny. “Dem sea monsters, dey get mad.”
“Nobody told me there was fuckin’ sea monsters.”
“Live and learn,” said Perez.
“I hate fuckin’ sea monsters.” Sammy raised his head just as a great black back burst from the water and blew its spout into his face. He screamed and his gun went off.
On the Paintin’ Tom, Rake thought he had heard a shot. He cut the engine and listened.
“I can’t hear anything but the whales,” said Mary, who was all but hanging over the side to touch them. “My God, it’s beautiful.”
As far as she could see, from one side of Jack’s Island to the other, black-backed waves were rolling through the sea, misting spouts were rising in the night, and the water glowed with the phosphorescence of the squid that were drawing them on.
“Heard a shot,” said Rake. “Start tyin’.”
“You’re too jumpy. There was no shot.”
“On calm nights like this, sounds travel across water like pine needles blowin’ across a frozen pond. Tie.”
“You’re the boss.” She hauled out a length of line and began to lash cases together so that they’d all sink at once.
A whale spouted just a few feet away. Mary shrieked, then threw her head back and laughed like a little girl on a roller coaster, laughed for the sheer joy of the moment.
At Jack’s Island, Elwood was greeting the men in the trucks. The one in white got his attention first. “Nice suit. Looks, uh, familial.”
He started to back away. There was a pistol under the porch. If he sensed danger, he was supposed to fire it into the air. But they collared him before he reached it.
“Where’s Malloy?” he asked.
“Bog-hoppin’,” said the one in the suit, “like a good mick.”
“I… I must warn you, gentlemen—”
“Yeah, yeah. What’s that splashin’?”
“Whales. They’ve come into the creek after squid.”
“Whales in a tide creek?” asked the hulk twirling brass knuckles on his little finger. “No fuckin’ way.”
“Pilot whales. Puffin’ pigs.” Elwood put his monocle into his eye and looked at the hijackers as though they were illiterate, not a bad bet. “In the Latin, it’s grampas.”
“Grampas?” laughed the hulk. “They got any grammas?”
On the other side of the island, Aggie Dickerson Bigelow was now dragging her sleepy little boys along the path that led from the house over the dune to the beach. She should never have brought them out. With rumrunners all over the island and that strange boat in the creek, she should have been hiding in the root cellar, but her father-in-law had taken a shotgun and a box of shells and gone stumbling out the door before she could stop him.
For a moment she had weighed his life against that of her children. If he died, it would be a loss of only a few months, but she couldn’t think that way, and she couldn’t leave the little boys alone in the house.
“Grampa,” she cried, “if you shoot at that bo
at, they’ll shoot back.”
“Elwood said he saw whales. They’re comin’ in.” He had not moved this quickly in months.
“You’re not gonna kill ’em?”
“Hell, no! Gonna save ’em.”
“I want to go back to bed!” cried little Dickerson.
The cold sand found its way into Aggie’s slippers and ground at her feet. The little boys dragged at her arms. And in the meager light of a quarter-moon, she tripped over a piece of driftwood. Dickerson fell on top of her. Little Hiram landed in the knife-sharp dune grass and began to wail.
On the Pilgrim Portagee, Sammy the Snake heard the sound, like an animal cry, coming from the island. “What’s that?”
“Maybe a land monster!” said Perez.
“Holy shit, they got them, too?”
Then a shotgun blasted into the sky.
“Christ!” cried Manny. “Dem land monsters got guns!”
In the next muzzle flash, Perez saw the old man he had once stalked, like a ghost stalking the night itself. He had once wished the man dead; now the man was dying. There was bad luck in this. He blessed himself and revved his engine. “We gotta get away from these monsters, Sammy.”
Aggie left the boys at the top of the dune and ran to her father-in-law. “What are you doin’?”
“Scarin’ the whales. Savin’ ’em.”
“Come home. Save yourself.” The waves rolled in around her feet, and a dozen slimy squid came slithering at her ankles. She jumped back just as he fired again.
Suddenly a huge old bull pounded his flukes in shallow water ten feet away. Charles’s next shot sent up an enormous splash just in front of the whale. “Swim. Don’t come here or you’ll die.”
“Grampa!” It was Dickerson. “Stop shootin’. Stop it!”
“I’m warnin” ’em off, son.” The gun thundered again. “Swim! Swim for every bit of life you can!”
Aggie grabbed him by the arm, but he pulled away with more strength than he had shown in months.
“I’m dyin’, girl. My life’s over. And my sons want to chew up my island, and I’m not even gone yet. That’s my punishment for the bad I’ve done.” He fired again, and her ears began to ring. “This is a little good. I’ll save somethin’ before I’m gone, even if it’s a bloody whale.”
“Grampa,” said Dickerson. “Stop.”
The old man fired again and screamed at the whales, at the spiritlike spouts, at the blackness itself. “Go away!”
And little Dickerson began to cry.
Though Charles Bigelow could no more keep the whales away than he could stop the cancer, his firing accomplished several things.
Rake was warned off the island. He dumped his load, found a quiet spot, threw out the anchor, and made love to Mary in the V-berth.
Sammy the Snake was so frightened by the sea monsters that he didn’t even notice when Perez put his hand on the throttle and started for Provincetown.
With a crazy man firing on the beach, the hijackers knew there would be no work for them that night, so they watched the “grampas” churning up the water until the search beam of a Coast Guard cutter pierced the night.
At four in the morning Perez Nance sat in his kitchen and dialed Sbardi’s Boston number.
Sbardi picked up the phone on the first ring.
“Uh, Sammy the Snake, he’s afraid of sea monsters.”
“What fuckin’ sea monsters?”
“The same ones that brought out every old fool on Jack’s Island. Turned the beach into a shootin’ gallery, warned off the whiskey, too.” Perez slipped his axe out of his belt. “I done what you asked, Sbardi. We square, now?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “You still want to run rum?”
“No rough stuff.”
“I’m a religious man, Nancie. I make nine first Fridays every year. If God sends a sea monster when I pull a fuckin’ scam, I guess he tellin’ me to keep the rough stuff on my own turf.”
“I guess maybe he is.” Perez turned the axe over in his hands and wondered how often God had sent sea monsters to change men’s minds.
Rake and Mary came in a half an hour before sunrise. The tide was dropping fast, and the gulls were settling onto the hummocks of sand that rose in advance of the flats. The gulls made Mary laugh. They reminded her of New Yorkers collecting at a bus stop.
Then, through the rising mist, she saw the whales. From one side of Jack’s Island to the other, the black bodies covered the sand and splashed in the shallows.
They screamed like scared children. They snorted and gasped like dying old men.
And Mary Muldowney cried.
“This life has good things,” said Rake gently, “and things like this.”
“What will you do with them?”
“Cut out the melons, then haul ’em off ’fore they start to stink.”
“Melons?”
“Sacks of oil in the heads. Fetch fifty bucks a gallon. Purest oil there is.”
“That’s all? Can’t you save them somehow?”
Rake shook his head.
“They were so beautiful… just a few hours ago.”
“Nothing stays beautiful forever, honey.”
She jumped off and went splashing among the dying whales. A big bull studied her sadly and made a strange sound, as if it were trying to speak. But when she touched its slick black skin, it pounded its flukes and nearly knocked her over.
“The way of things,” Rake called. “Can’t change it.”
“Mornin’, kids!” Elwood came down to the dock and threw Rake a rope.
“What happened?”
“All kinds of conflications. Where’s the liquor?”
“Lowered it into Ellis’s weir.”
“Well, even if we lose a few bottles, we’ll make it up in whale oil.” He was holding two knives. “Best get to initiallin’ right away.”
“Initialling?” cried Mary. “Initialling what?”
“Cut your initials into the whales, or somebody might come along and take the melons,” explained Rake. “Could use some help.”
“No thanks. I need some sleep.”
“Take eight hours. See you this afternoon.”
“All right. See ya.” She hesitated to say more. They both knew, but she could not say good-bye. “See ya this afternoon. We’ll go out and bring up that load.”
She went to her room in Elwood’s house, washed, packed, and put on her New York clothes.
By nine o’clock, the smell of dead whale was lifting into the breeze, and she could see Rake, far down the beach, working with his knife in the head of a beast. His arm was covered to the elbow in blood. He did not see her, and she did not call to him.
She wore no makeup now and, when she arrived in New York, people would call her a natural beauty. Her feet no longer hurt, and she’d built such strength that her suitcase felt like a purse. That was good because she would carry it for many years. And she clutched the painting under her arm, because she knew she would look at it every day of her life. But she was crying as she left the island.
Mike Malloy saw her on the causeway and called to her. “Bary! Bary! Own ere. In e harsh.” Mary! Mary! Down here. In the marsh.
She didn’t hear. She just went as quickly as she could, across the causeway and into the canopy of scrub pine.
“Bary! Bary! Ome bat. Ate ove oo!” Mary! Mary! Come back. Rake loves you.
ix.
Rake read books that winter. He had never been much of a reader, but he found that reading took him out of himself on lonely, dark nights.
He read the Cape Cod novels of Joseph C. Lincoln and the poetry of Conrad Aiken, who lived back in the Brewster punkhorn. He read a novel by Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises. But the book he liked most did not take him into other worlds. It opened his eyes to the place where he lived, and in the process drove him deeper into himself.
It was called The Outermost House, A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, by Henry Beston.
The author had moved into a tiny cottage on a dune in Eastham and from there had watched the drama of earth, ocean, and sky unfold.
Beston spoke to Rake more eloquently than any minister, playwright, or woman ever had. All the things that Rake had taken for granted became, in Beston’s eyes, the wonders of life, the mighty works of the natural world.
Like Beston, Rake had seen how the turning of the earth remade the beach in each season. But he had drunk the vintage of Cape Cod as a peasant drank in the wine cave, swallowing without tasting the subtlety. Beston had made him a connoisseur.
Here, in the endless change and renewal, there was a completeness that man could never achieve. The sea pounded Cape Cod, drove it back, broke its beaches, and yet Cape Cod greened each spring and came to vintage each fall. Cape Cod endured. It was a good lesson in that first year after Mary left.
But whenever Rake looked from Nauset toward the sea, he imagined U-156, something new and ugly and far more dangerous than anything man had brought before. And he knew there would come a time when this fragile place, to endure, would need the help of friends.
x.
Thirteen years later he met the man who would come to agree with him.
Repeal had long since killed the booze boom and sent Rake Hilyard back to fishing. Depression had killed the real estate boom and sent Charles Bigelow’s sons back to remodeling old houses. German U-boats were once more cruising off the Cape, and Americans were once more off to war.
Rake was forty-two, a reserve officer, a bachelor, experienced in handling small boats—prime fodder for the most dangerous service in the navy. He turned up, in the terrible summer of 1942, at the PT boat school in Melville, Rhode Island.
“You seem pretty old for this business, Pops,” said the guy who sat beside him on the first day of gunnery class. “What brings you into it?”
Rake hated to be called Pops. “I’m a fisherman. Used to be a rumrunner.”
“My father dabbled in booze a bit, too.” The young guy was as skinny as a fishing pole. If not for his Adam’s apple and flashing teeth, he would have had no shape at all. “Where you from?”
“Cape Cod.”
The young guy offered his hand. “One Cape Codder to another. My family has a place in Hyannis Port.”
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