Cape Cod

by William Martin

  Rake looked at the face and the shock of chestnut-colored hair, “Another one of those two-toilet Irish from Dorchester who come down for the month of August and think they’re Cape Codders?”

  The young guy smiled. “If I’m not mistaken, my house has seven toilets.”

  From that uncertain beginning, they became friends. They drank together, exchanged notes on women and PT boats, and shipped at the same time. Rake was given PT 104. His young friend went out in PT 109.

  When the war was over and his friend ran for Congress, Rake wrote him a note. “From an old Cape Cod Yankee to a seven-toilet Irishman. Watch your back, your front, and your midships. The politician can be as unpredictable as the Jap destroyer. If you win, I have an idea you might like to hear: a Cape Cod National Park.”

  CHAPTER 33

  July 16

  House on Billingsgate

  “It didn’t work out so badly for us after all,” said Mary. “Rake got to be friends with Jack Kennedy. I got to sleep with Darryl F. Zanuck.”

  “You shtumpfed Zanuck?” asked George. “How was he?”

  Jimmy hit George with his hat.

  Mary sipped her scotch. “Slam-bam-and-no-thank-you, ma’am.”

  They were gathered under the oak tree behind Rake’s house. The painting had been hung on a nail in the tree, and Geoff had not taken his eyes off it.

  “I’m damn sorry about Rake,” Mary said. “We got together whenever I came through in stock. We’d sit in the barn there, get out of the sun, have a beer… like old times.”

  “Did he say why he wanted to see the painting after all these years?” asked Jimmy Little.

  She pointed to the lacquered log holding open the back door. “Something to do with that silly doorstop I gave him.”

  “ ‘Mary Muldowney and the doorstop,’ ” said Geoff.

  She coughed out one of those famous scotch-soaked laughs of hers. “It was a joke. I was here the summer the Mayflower replica came from England. ’Fifty-seven, I think it was. Terrible weather, but Provincetown was mobbed—fluttering pennants, hot-dog vendors, kids dressed like Pilgrims.”

  Geoff remembered. He’d been one of them. So had a little girl named Janice Bigelow. It was where they first saw each other, Geoff holding the hand of his Irish Catholic mother and feeling ridiculous in a plug hat, Janice marching with her father as though born to the costume.

  “When that little ship sailed in, I said, ‘It’s like God ordered up a November day in June so we could know what it felt like.’

  “Rake said, ‘It was freezing that day. And overcast.’

  “I asked him how he knew.

  “ ‘I looked it up,’ he said, ‘in the log of the Mayflower.’ ”

  “When?” asked Geoff.

  “When what?”

  “When did he look it up? Before or after 1911?”

  She swirled the cubes around in her glass. “It was a joke. He never looked up anything. So I gave him the doorstop. One joke log deserved another.”

  “Joke logs,” said Janice from the kitchen window, “I like that.”

  “You would… as funny as joke bulldozers.” Geoff went back to the painting. “But why did he want to see this?”

  “And why did Tom Hilyard’s broken brain allow him to paint nothing but this house after his accident?” George Flynn studied the canvas. “From the outside, from the inside, and in this case, the inside inside the inside.”

  “It’s like M. C. Esher meets Edward Hopper,” said Samantha.

  Geoff stared at the painting, at the painting within the painting, at the square of light that fell, three times, on the same corner of fireplace bricks. “ ‘The book of history will set us free from the evil that bricks us up.’ ”

  “What?” Mary looked up from her scotch.

  “That’s what my grandfather, Zachary Hilyard, told Rake when he asked about the log. It was on his list.”

  Mary furrowed her brow, a neat trick in a face full of California sun-dried folds. “The night Rake gave me this painting, he said something like that. But it’s been…”

  George looked at Geoff. “Could it be that the book of history was bricked up, not burned in a hotel fire, and once it’s set free it sets us free?”

  “That’s a reach,” said Jimmy. After the fight with the Humpster’s bulldozer, he seemed to be regaining his lawyerly reserve.

  “Maybe,” said Geoff, “but thanks to Georgie’s friend, Carolyn Hallissey and Nance know all the things we know.” He apologized for that as soon as he said it. But it was true.

  George made no apologies. “We all need someone to get us through the night.”

  Mary Muldowney sipped her drink. “Ain’t it the truth.”

  “Let’s face it, guys”—George fixed his eyes on the painting—“an Indian married to a blond white woman, or a Hilyard married to a Bigelow, or a Hilyard who may descend from Serenity Hilyard and Black Bellamy… any one of you knows there are some things you can’t fight.”

  They also knew that George was explaining, not apologizing. He had stopped apologizing a long time ago.

  “It’s okay,” said Geoff. “We’ve all made some mistakes.”

  “And we’ll make some more,” said Jimmy.

  “Ain’t it the truth,” Mary said again.

  George laughed a bit nervously and touched the picture frame. “At least I never got to tell the bad guys about this painting.”

  “Which you’d better take a Polaroid of,” said Mary, “because I have to get to makeup.”

  The crash sounded like a gunshot. Janice was standing in the doorway, the tea tray shattered at her feet. “That house… I’ve been in that house.”

  ii.

  “She said they’d painted it blue all over.” Geoff glanced at a Polaroid of one of Rake’s paintings, a full frame—House on Billingsgate, Number 12, propped up on the dash. Then he glanced out at the house. “Sky blue, but that’s it.”

  “What… a… dump.” George did his best Bette Davis from the backseat.

  “Go slow,” said Jimmy, who rode shotgun, “but not too slow. We don’t want these guys to notice.”

  The door of the cottage was opening. The owners were stepping, or slinking, out for the night. Silk shirts open to their navels showed off more cheap gold than the Home Shopping Network. Very tight black trousers displayed the other cheap stuff.

  “Dressed to kill,” said George.

  “No joke,” answered Jimmy. “Charlie Testaverde, known also as Charlie Balls, and Vinnie McGinnis, the Irish Eye.”

  The two men got into a BMW and drove away. Geoff drove down to a little lot rimmed with dune grass at the end of the road. They had to park on the shoulder because the lot was full. There was no better show than sunset over the tideflats. After dinner on warm nights everybody came out to chase Frisbees, comb for shells, and watch their children grow up as the sun went down.

  “So who are they?” Geoff turned off the ignition, but no one got out. Three strangers strolling through a neighborhood of summer cottages might look a little suspicious.

  “Wise guys,” said Jimmy. “If you’re on the New York Bar, you know about them. Bad dudes. I heard that Vinnie keeps a fifty-foot Chris-Craft at East Wind up in Chatham. Twin diesels, twenty-foot bridge, loran, radar, the works. The kind of thing you could take to Florida, which he does, about once a month. The other one, Testaverde, runs around in a slick speedboat, visits Panamanian freighters at sea.”

  “Drug runners?”

  “Not much call for rumrunners anymore.”

  “So what are they doing on the bay?” asked George.

  “Maybe their wives like Eastham… bay beaches are safer for kids or something.”

  Geoff craned his neck. From where they were parked, he could see through the corner lot to the ancient house. According to Janice, the two men had bought the corner lot and were planning to put up a modern house with a view across the bay.

  Geoff got out of the car. “I’m going to have a closer look.” />
  “We’ll stay here,” said Jimmy. “One fool snoopin’ around after supper’s enough. And remember the difference between a closer look and a b-and-e.”

  “I don’t need any more legal-voice-of-reason stuff, thanks. It’s time for a little action.” Then he looked at George. “And if you come along, we’ll probably read about it in the Brewster Oracle.”

  “Low blow,” said George.

  Geoff stuck his hands into his pockets and began to whistle. Up ahead, a group of kids were playing stickball in the street. A dog was barking.

  A modest summer neighborhood, the kind that sprang up in the early fifties, when ten-thousand-square-foot lots could be had for a few grand, and every GI could put up a one-story shell for a song. Now the houses were worth a quarter-million, minimum.

  Even at dusk the neighborhood rang with the sounds of improvement. Hammers hammering, saws sawing, paint compressors compressing…. One-stories becoming two-stories, Capes sprouting additions…. and a bulldozer sleeping behind the House on Billingsgate, like a lion beside the carcass of a gazelle.

  This house didn’t have much time, so neither did Geoff. He went right up to the door and knocked. No answer. Not surprising. What wife would let her husband go off looking like some cheap Romeo while she stayed home in this dump?

  He peered into the front window for a closer look. Time for the b-and-e part. He gave the neighborhood another glance. The stickballers weren’t paying any attention. An old man was fumbling with a kinked hose and sprinkler next door. Across the street, behind a wall of wild blueberries, two carpenters worked late on an addition.

  He opened the screen. He tried the door….

  No wonder it wasn’t locked. There was nothing inside but a few chairs, a boom box, and a pile of pizza cartons and beer bottles in the middle of the floor. Even the refrigerator and stove were gone. Stripped for demolition.

  Geoff took out the Polaroid of Mary Muldowney’s painting and stood in the middle of the room, where Tom Hilyard might have sat with his easel. He held up the picture and looked at the fireplace.

  This was it.

  Windows flanked the fireplace, though they no longer looked to infinity, just into the scrub pine. No curtains fluttered in the breeze. But Geoff saw Serenity lettering broadsides at her son’s table, Sam wishing to die, Tom wondering at the beauty and harshness of his world. Then a shaft of sunlight fell through the window and brought the brick to life.

  Geoff touched where the sunlight touched. Was the log of the Mayflower really here? Beneath these bricks? Or burned to a wisp of ash in the Hilyard House fire?

  Only one way to find out. But where was he going to get a hammer in a house that didn’t even have a refrigerator?

  And another problem presented itself. How was he going to get out of the cottage, now that a car was pulling up outside? A red Toyota, stopping in the road.

  He dropped down beneath the window and scrambled for the back door—the next Frank Lloyd Wright scuttling around like one of the cockroaches in the pizza box on the floor.

  The driver had long black hair, sunglasses, a white raincoat. She aimed a camera and took three quick snapshots. Then she looked around to see if anyone was watching her.

  “As suspicious as we are.” From the car at the bottom of the road, Jimmy watched her go toward the house, then he got out and went striding up the road like he owned the place. “Can I help you?” he called, and while he kept her busy, Geoff made his escape.

  “She’s the one Janice told us about,” said Geoff on the way back to Brewster. “Strange lady… very twitchy… sunglasses at dusk, looks like a battered wife….”

  “Wearing a black wig,” said George.

  “Black wig?” Geoff glanced into the rearview.

  “How can you tell?”

  “In my line”—George straightened his Panama hat—“you’re smart to know what’s a wig and what isn’t.”

  Geoff wasn’t quite as much of an expert, but he could tell a black wig when it lay on a counter in Carolyn Hallissey’s house.

  iii.

  “They moved houses all over the Cape in the nineteenth century,” said Jimmy.

  They were back at Rake’s house again, sipping beers and cooking franks on the grill Jimmy and Geoff were pumped full of excitement, like little kids who had found a new cave to explore. Janice and Samantha were very tense. And George was in the kitchen talking on the telephone in a funny voice.

  “It was the land that mattered in the old deeds, not the houses,” Jimmy went on. “When some of these places were moved, especially little dumps like the house on Billingsgate, they just disappeared. There was no electricity to disconnect, no water, so no permits to leave a paper trail. There might be legends, but nothing concrete.”

  “So if you’re hunting for a needle in a haystack, and you have a haystack as big as the bay shore, what can you do?” Geoff put half a dozen rolls on the grill to toast.

  “You hire a real estate agent.” Janice took a sip of beer. She wanted to get very drunk. “Let her find the house.”

  “Congratulations.” Geoff smacked her on the ass, which she did not like at all. “The lady in the black wig used both of us.”

  “She didn’t wear the wig around you. Did she wear anything else?”

  “Her ambition.”

  Janice turned the hot dogs. They were burned on one side. She was burned on both. She had done everything to make Geoff face the real world, and she had led him straight to the source of his fantasy. Well, she was nothing if not stubborn. “Agnes says the log burned in a hotel fire in 1911. I still believe her.”

  “There’s only one way to find out,” said Geoff. “And we have to do it tonight, before the house is bulldozed away.”

  “You have children, Geoff. These men are dangerous.”

  “We stood up to the Humpster.”

  “And he would have killed you if I hadn’t called in the cavalry. And if you think Nance killed Rake, you really are crazy.” She took four franks off the grill and called the kids. The screen door banged open, and Samantha came out with a tray of beers and soft drinks. The smell of franks on Rake’s old grill mingled with citronella smoke that was supposed to keep the mosquitoes away but didn’t. The voices of the kids carried over the wash of the waves. A mustard bottle sneezed. God, this felt familiar.

  In some irrational corner of her mind, Janice had hoped that if they all got together around the grill, they could solve this problem, just as they’d solved all the world’s problems every summer of their lives.

  Geoff put a frank into a bun, loaded it with mustard, and spread it with onions. “That log’s worth millions. And it may contain information that would stop the development. Financial freedom for my family, freedom for this island. How can I do anything but follow it to the end?”

  Janice turned to Jimmy, who used to be the cool one. “Are you in on this?”

  “I counsel against breaking and entering.”

  Still cool, she thought gratefully.

  “The book’s a cultural treasure,” said Geoff.

  “It belongs to the owners of that house.”

  Geoff jumped up. “They’re drug dealers.”

  “Their house is a treasure, too,” said Jimmy “We can tell the judge it’s a historic landmark. Get a restraining order. Go from there.”

  “That could take days,” said Geoff. “And a restraining order won’t stop Nance.”

  “Nance.” Jimmy sat up straighter and looked at his wife. “We can’t forget he’s in the middle of this.”

  Now, George came out of the house. A walking bad influence. “I called East Wind marina, pretended I was an old friend, asked for Charlie Balls and the Irish Eye. They took off an hour ago.”

  Geoff looked at his friends. “Nance could have people watching the causeway. We’d better take Rake’s whaler.”

  “I won’t be here when you get back,” said Janice. “You’re all three endangering yourselves like fools.”

  The guys looke
d at one another. It was near eight o’clock. The sun was setting. The night would soon belong to the mosquitoes.

  “Are we fools?” said Geoff.

  “The expression,” said Jimmy, “is faggots, Mo-nigs, and fools.”

  “Not very nice,” said Geoff.

  iv.

  “You want a trowel and mortar?” Emily’s voice echoed down the stairs of the big house.

  Geoff stood in the foyer. “Arnie does the masonry here, doesn’t he?”

  “Yeah. Come on up.”

  The house was quiet. No more noise than a few campers flipping through the magazine rack in the library.

  Geoff followed the metallic stink of cigarette smoke to Emily. “I have a little work to do on Rake’s fireplace.”

  She took a puff and pushed the smoke out the corner of her mouth. “Arnie’s in the parlor watching TV.”

  She led him down the hallway. The place felt strange without Clara’s presence. The floors were new-waxed and squeaked against his heels. The usual cloud of urine didn’t waft out when he passed Clara’s room. In fact, something made him stop.

  A new mattress and box spring, all shining blue and white rayon, sat like an altar on the bedstead.

  “Arnie got rid of the old one last week. Makes the place smell a lot better… the way she wet the bed at the end.” Emily began to cough.

  “Didn’t you buy out a whole mattress factory once?”

  “We sure did.” Hack-hack. Emily could keep a conversation going through the worst coughing fit. “Back in the days when we bought everything by the truckload for the camp.” Hack.

  “I slept on one when I was a kid.”

  She held the back of her hand to her mouth and coughed and laughed at the same time, while the smoke from the cigarette made her squinty-eyed.

  Arnie Burr and his friends were watching the Red Sox. His friends were a marlin over the fireplace, a glass-eyed deer head, and a raccoon stuffed like a Halloween cat—back arched, fangs bared, tail standing straight up—on an end table.

  “Trowel and mortar. Hammer and cold chisel?” Arnie didn’t take his eyes off the game. “What the hell for?”