by Kaylie Jones
She stepped on the gas. There was no traffic to weave through that early in the morning. She took Dune Road to the reservation, then turned onto Old Point Road.
Tommy Hawk’s Trading Post was just where Lawrence said it would be. A weathered cigar-store Indian leaned on its side in front.
When Mary shut off the car, her hands were shaking.
Inside, a Shinnecock man sat behind a long counter. Brown skin, slicked-back kinky hair, red-rimmed eyes. The Shinnecock had intermarried with local African Americans so much over the generations you could barely see any Native American in them anymore, unless you got very close. Behind the Shinnecock man were pallets and pallets of cigarettes.
“Hello there,” Mary said, trying to sound regular, trying not to sound like a professor. He mumbled a “Good morning.” There was no heat in the store, and she was shivering.
“Eddie sent me,” Mary said. “You know—Eddie.”
The Shinnecock gave her a once-over with those redrimmed eyes, said nothing.
Mary pointed. “Let me have twenty cartons of those, the menthol, please, um, fella.”
Lawrence chain-smoked those menthols. His mouth stank of it. Thinking of it gave Mary an erotic surge. She blushed, despite the cold.
Oblivious, the Shinnecock moved with glacial speed. He put the cartons in cardboard boxes.
Mary paid him quickly in cash. “I bet my guy and I’ll make a bundle reselling these in the city.” She wished Lawrence were there with her. She knew she would be believed more if she had a man with her.
Still, the Shinnecock said nothing.
“Thank you, then,” she said, giving up the ruse. “You have been singularly helpful.”
Mary took the boxes to the trunk of her car. When she set them down, she couldn’t help sweeping her hand over the wrapped-up plastic bag behind the pile of textbooks. Of course it was still there. She didn’t want to think about what it was, what it could do.
As she got in the car, her cell phone rang. A text from Lawrence. With a picture of himself, just smiling, no doubt naked under the frame. She stared at it for a while. She wanted to speed, but the rain had started and made it slow going.
She took County Road straight up to Riverhead. With the rain, it took most of an hour. She hated being late.
She parked behind the Peconic Bay Diner on West Main, hoping she had arrived on time. It was an average diner, detached from the buildings on either side. A Greek flag and an American flag hung side-by-side limply on its roof. Her former brother-in-law came here every morning without fail, like an elephant returning to its graveyard.
And there he sat, a plate of pork chops in front of him. Still in his Suffolk County Police Department uniform. Mary remembered when he graduated from the academy—“I want the world to see that the Shinnecock people can be more than just hoodlums from Riverhead,” he’d said. He was proud then. And much thinner.
“Eddie,” she said, going right up to his table.
“Mary?” His brown bulldog face had once been handsome. But now his features were thickened with age. He kept his coarse gray hair short. He had a big smear of sauce on his cheek. “You’re sure far from your hunting grounds.”
“Yes, how funny to bump into you here,” she said. “Pork chops for breakfast?”
“Nothing like gnawing on something to get your day started right. How are you, Mary? You look … good, good as always.”
“Fine. Fine. How are things with you?”
“Work is work. Best thing in my life now is Larry. Larry’s doing good. Very proud of my boy. In his second year at Stony Brook. You see him on the campus?”
She blushed. She decided to look intently at the sugar dispenser. “Never,” she said. “I mean, well, he was in one of my classes last year, but, well, his schedule is probably completely different than mine. He probably takes classes in a different building. What is he, a psych major?”
“An English major, I thought. Last time I heard. No money in it, but—oh, sorry, no offense, Mary.”
“None taken, believe me.”
“Have a chop,” he said, pushing the plate closer.
Mary was starving, but she was in a hurry. She picked up the remaining chop at the edge of his plate. She anticipated something salty and meaty, but instead it was cold and greasy.
“How is Brenda?” she said.
“She left me. She had it already. Two years now.”
“Sorry, I really didn’t—”
He stopped her by putting up a hand, like a traffic cop, sauce-tipped fingers. “What are you doing here, Mary? You didn’t come out all this way to see your old brother-in-law for nothing.”
“No, Eddie.”
Eddie was the best man when she married Ralph, his brother; was there to help after Ralph got killed, was a much better man than his brother had been. She hated what she had to do now.
But there was nowhere else to go.
“Listen. On the Shinnecock reservation, there’s a—I guess you’d call it a trading post, on Old Point Road.”
“Yeah.” He was using his tongue to work at something in his teeth.
“They sell cigarettes, tons of cigarettes, that they get taxfree. Selling them to anybody, who might resell them in the city for a big profit. They’ve been doing this for years.”
“The laws changed, Mary, what with that crazy New York mayor. The rez is getting taxed for that kind of stuff now.” He was digging at his teeth with his fingers.
“Yeah, but your little trading post is still selling cartons and cartons at special prices to special friends. I know, I was just there this morning.”
“What do you want, Mary?”
“Let me finish. I know that’s your beat and has been for years. I know you’re part of it all, and that’s how you get yourself a brand-new four-wheeler every year.”
He leaned closer. He was looking hard at her.
She went on, trying to stay focused. “You wouldn’t want the Shinnecock to get a reputation for filling the pockets of bootleggers and crooked cigarette dealers. Not when they’re on the verge of sealing a deal to build one, two, maybe three giant casinos on Long Island. There are billions of dollars at stake.”
He wiped his face finally. “The professor did her homework.”
“I’ll put it plain. I need ten thousand dollars.”
“You and your new husband both got jobs.”
“My husband can’t know about this.”
“Ahh, I see—”
“Don’t try to see anything. This is a private situation. I need the money. I had some of my own, but now it’s gone. I need more.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I am. I need that money, Eddie. I am not fucking around.”
He stared at her. She had never cursed ever in his presence, and he’d known her almost tweny-five years, since she’d started dating his brother.
“Let’s go out for a smoke,” he said.
“But—”
Again the traffic-cop hand. “I know you still smoke. I can smell it on you. Remember how we used to sneak out and smoke behind Ralph’s back?”
“He hated the smell of it.”
“Let’s go outside.”
They went out behind the diner. Parked in the back was a brand-new SUV that she knew was Eddie’s. She took out a pack of cigarettes.
“Menthols now?” he said. “I thought you liked tougher cigarettes.”
“I—I just like them. It’s cold out there. Smokers seem to be sentenced to outcast status.”
“Well, that’s Long Island. All the inconvenience of the city and none of its perks. Let me tell you a story, Mary.”
“Okay,” she said.
“About us Shinnecock. See, back in the day, they used to hunt whales in these dinky little dugout canoes. Like twenty of these canoes, about a hundred guys. They’d go after a single whale. And you know how they would get it? They had harpoons, yeah, but still. How were they gonna get that giant animal back on shore, you see what I me
an? But the Shinnecock were smart, very smart. They would stab the whale again and again. So the whale would bleed to death in the ocean. Just bleed. You know whales are warm-blooded? Imagine all that dark red blood staining the water.”
Mary could see it, could see where he was going.
“After it got good and dead enough,” he continued, “they would just tow it back to shore. Imagine how that made the whale feel. These people come along and just peck at you and peck at you, till you have no choice but to give up and die.”
“I see your point, Eddie.”
“Listen, Mary, Ralph was a son of a bitch for the way he laid his hands on you. Life made him pay, it always does.”
Eddie had known about Ralph’s hands-on approach to relationships from the start, but had done nothing. She exhaled. “The Long Island Expressway made him pay.”
He laughed a cold laugh. “We’re still family. But just remember, whatever this is, I’m helping you out just this time. Just this once. Come by tomorrow.”
* * *
“Hello, Professor Cipriano!”
On campus, one of Mary’s sweeter but more mediocre students recognized her walking out of the parking lot in her hat and bright black slicker. She said, “Kerri, hello.”
Traffic had crawled on the way from Riverhead. Not paying attention to her driving, Mary had taken 495 instead of 25A and had been adrift in a sea of traffic slowed down by the rain.
“I can’t believe you’re totally late for class!”
“Errands,” Mary said. “Happens to the best of us. How is your paper coming along?”
They walked together under umbrellas to the Humanities building and to Mary’s Modern American Poetry class.
The lesson was on parsing Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” and Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” but Mary could barely focus. The rain drummed hypnotically on the windows.
With ten minutes left, Mary had run out of things to say and questions to ask. She stared at her students for a hazy moment, not really seeing them at all. There was a long silence as the rain stabbed again and again at the windows.
Then the back door kicked in, and Lawrence slinked in, late as always, looking bored, looking as if nothing were amiss in his world. He took his regular seat way in the back, in the middle, so he had a direct line of sight to her.
She felt hot. She felt annoyed. She felt invigorated.
“Well,” she said, “I want to remind you about the research paper due next week. Strict MLA standards are to be followed—without fail.”
When class was over, the students scattered. But Lawrence, ever Lawrence, slinked his taut body through the sea of chairs, straight to her podium. His slicked-back, wavy hair and light brown skin were wet from the rain.
“Hi, professor,” he said. His pretty, angular mouth broke into a smile. He had huge brown doe eyes, a chin framed by beard hair slightly reminiscent, Mary thought, of his pubic hair.
“You look hot today,” he said, brushing her hand. He was touching her openly. Was there another class due in? Mary worried. Would anyone walk through the door?
“Lawrence, please. Not here.”
“I like when you say, Please. Can we do it tomorrow night?”
“Remember—I have to run that errand we talked about.”
“Oh yeah, cool. Do that first. I really gotta have that money.” He came even closer, if that were possible. You could barely see any Native American anymore, unless you got very close. “We don’t want anybody knowing about us, right?”
“No, no, we don’t. I—I don’t know if I’ll be able to get the money right away.”
He made a hard fist with his hand, but rubbed his knuckles gently against her cheek. People will see!
“C’mon, Professor Mary, he’ll give it to you.”
His infantile pet name for her. It made her defenseless.
“Yes, darling, I know,” she said softly. Damn this boy.
“Will you have time to meet me afterward? In your office?” He was radiant, glittering with barely postadolescent energy.
“We’ll see.”
“I think you should.”
The words themselves were a lover’s importuning, Mary thought, but they could just as easily be heard as a threat.
“Yes, of course, I will.”
Mary had known Lawrence for years, since he was a child. But she’d thought nothing of him then, just a handsome little boy. She was not one of those women, she was not. After her first husband’s death, she only heard from Eddie once a year, at the holidays. She hadn’t heard from Lawrence at all until he wrote to tell her he’d gotten accepted to Stony Brook.
When he took her American Lit class his freshman year, she found it fun to tease him and be teased by him. She liked his confidence, she liked his strength. She liked the exotic look of him. Then he would linger after class, walk her to her office, to her car. One day, her car wasn’t starting. He offered her a ride. She knew by the look on his face that it would be wrong to accept.
But she did.
And so she became the stuff of tabloid headlines.
He listened to her long, boring stories, he brought her bag after bag of unhealthy snacks, and, at the same time, when they were alone, he dominated her in the most masculine way any man had ever done.
“Victory, union, faith, identity, time / The indissoluble compacts, riches, mystery,” she said aloud to no one.
A knock. She had been sitting at her desk, staring out the window.
Professor Lee stood in her doorway, in his same old friendly corduroys. “Mary, how go the wars?”
“It’s a rout,” she said. “Raise the white flag.”
“You look a little peaked—really.”
Everett was a lovely man, really, Mary thought, given to toking a bit during the day, but still kind, caring.
“Not sleeping enough, I guess, Everett. Finals, you know how it is.”
He looked around, then stepped into the room, lowered his voice. “Well—well, did you hear about the chair position?”
She looked up. “No.”
“Looks like Gunderson’s a lock. Sorry, Mary. You know the department—they need to look diverse.”
She was quiet for a while. She stared at his white beard to keep focused. “Well, I don’t think if I were also black and handicapped it would’ve helped. Perhaps if I were a midget lesbian!”
They laughed at that.
“Gunderson is excellent,” she said. “I’m a lowly Whitman scholar, and she’s all post-post-postmodern. And she publishes like a machine. More power to her.”
“Sorry, Mary.”
“It’s okay, Everett, really.”
After he left, she got up and closed the door.
She drove home, to her colonial on Lilac Drive. Eric, the man Eddie called her “new husband,” would be home soon. She went out to the back, onto the patio. The rain had stopped, but it was still damned cold. She sat in her favorite Adirondack chair, the one on the left, in total darkness. The house was close enough to the shore that, when things were quiet, you could hear the song of Long Island Sound.
She lit another cigarette—damn Lawrence for getting her back into this habit. Eric didn’t like when she smoked. But he wouldn’t notice. Men stopped noticing things after the first few months of wooing.
She inhaled and imagined the lit tip was a beacon in the dark, a lighthouse for lost ships, lost sailors.
She had to admit Lawrence’s plan seemed to be working. Blackmailed by the son, she was forced to blackmail the father. A perfect circle of extortion. Of fearful symmetry. “He gets mad money from the cigarettes,” Lawrence had said. “We just got to bleed it from him.”
She went upstairs to change. She took off all her clothes and looked at her body. Not bad for mid-forties. No wattles. Both of the girls still perky. Not too much gray. A MILF, as Lawrence crudely said. How true. She’d start showing soon. That’s why things had to happen now. Poor Eric. He had always wanted children and couldn’t. And now this. This would
kill him.
It would destroy what was left of her career too.
Before she became Mary Cipriano, professor of English literature, she was simply Mary Cipriano, good Catholic girl from Massapequa. She ate almost every night at the All American Hamburger, spent countless hours getting groped and groping back at Croon’s Lake, lost her virginity willingly in the Jones Beach parking lot during a Stray Cats concert. Mostly willingly. Bad boys, bad men. Men like Ralph. Men like Lawrence.
When she came downstairs, Eric was on the couch, neatly shelling and eating pistachio nuts.
“Chinese tonight?” he said, offering her a shelled nut. He made tea for her every morning. He had never been a bad boy or a bad man.
“Yes, that would be divine.”
“Movies tomorrow?”
“Yes—oh—actually, I have a reception.”
“Need a second wheel?”
“No, Eric, thanks. You’d be bored to distraction.”
In the morning, she drove to the diner again. This time Eddie was eating a cheeseburger. He brought her out to his brandnew SUV and handed her a paper bag.
Ten thousand dollars in a paper bag, she thought. How cinematic.
“Eddie, I can pay you back,” she said. “Not soon. But—I have a promotion coming up. I’ll be chair.”
“Sure, sure,” he said.
Her plan was moving forward, and she felt damned awful about it. On the drive to campus, her phone chimed. A text from Lawrence. She stopped.
No picture this time.
U get it, he’d written.
Yes, she typed back.
KEWL!!! C U 2 nite.
She tossed the phone on the seat. As she drove, she began to cry.
That night, she drove back to the campus. She opened the trunk and tore open a box of cigarettes. She tossed a few cartons out, then unwrapped the gun. It was heavier than it looked and felt evil. She put it on top of the cartons. Then she sealed the box again.
Walking from the lot, she found she was scared. The campus, so green and alive that morning, was different at night. The many trees caught your eye during the day, but at night the institutional gray buildings ruled. The students had scurried to their dorms, the library, the student union. Very few of them hung around the Humanities building on a Friday night.
