The Outer Cape

by Patrick Dacey

  “How can you think you’re saying something?”

  “What?”

  “Kevin Gaffney’s in the hospital. He’s got fractured bones in his face and his mouth is sewn shut. He’s going to need reconstructive surgery, plus some new teeth. Do you know how serious a matter this is? How much it’s going to cost me?”

  “Please, not the money, Robert,” Irene breaks in. “It’s not about money.”

  “Of course it is. I have to pay for it. Not only that, but the dent in the school bus.”

  He looks at his son, and the way Nathan is looking back, with complete disregard for consequence, it doesn’t enrage Robert the way he thinks it should. Instead, he’s sort of glad, that in this town of so many pussy kids raised by their pussy parents, a boy like his exists to keep everyone honest.

  “You don’t know how strong you are, Nathaniel. I mean, it’s good, good for the field. But these other boys, they’re not as tough as you, they don’t have the same insides as you do. Understand?”

  Nathan nods.

  “You’re going to be out of school until after the winter break. You’re going to help pay for what you did to that boy by going to work for me. Do whatever we ask you to do. No complaining. You think you’re tough? We’ll see just how tough you are.”

  “What about his schoolwork?” Irene says, having only now heard of this plan.

  “He’s going to keep up with the class. I’m having the dean fax over all his teachers’ lesson plans for the rest of the year. When he gets home, he’ll shower and eat, and go into his room and do his schoolwork. Maybe it’ll help him focus. I mean, who fails sixth grade science?”

  “Oh, don’t be such a prick,” Irene says.

  Andrew giggles again. Then Nathan giggles.

  Robert feels his face contract. He can’t hold still. He starts to laugh along with the boys, all three of them breathless.

  “This is serious,” Irene says, trying to stifle a laugh. “Isn’t it serious?”

  “Yes,” Robert says, howling now. “It’s very serious.”

  * * *

  As she washes out the mugs and coffeepot in the sink, Irene dreams of Florence. Why had she and Robert gone from Paris to Rome and back on their vacation last year? Robert had said he knew someone who had claimed that Florence wasn’t worth the money. And maybe she hadn’t missed anything. Maybe the smell in the Accademia where David stands is just the smell of sweaty tour groups surrounding what Michelangelo saw, not seeing, but snapping photographs, so that twice removed were they from actually seeing, and even farther away once the guide gave his opinions, mixed them with what their perception was, to see him under the dome of light, having fought or going to fight—now they had an answer. But it was better to see it alone, to let yourself be there, because you knew what the room looked like and you had studied the statue in a book of Michelangelo’s work, and you had pictured it there in front of you, surrounded by no one, not even you, looking at every fine detail, the vein down the right side of his arm, the tips of his fingers, the slight curve that reveals the muscle in his leg, and all of it is for you, that night, that month, until you had to return the book, and then you knew it better than you would having seen it once, in person, and you wouldn’t be swayed to think of it differently with the tourists (and you a tourist) knocking into your shoulder as they raise their cameras and click until this kind of music of whispers and clicks and footsteps removes the silence.

  Robert’s voice sweeps through that city of asters and stars. The browning grass and shedding trees outside the kitchen window.

  She flinches when his hand touches her side.

  “What were you thinking about?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “Nothing? No one thinks of nothing.”

  Irene feels an urge to plunge her thumbs into Robert’s eyeballs. Instead, she slaps his ears, and keeps slapping them, wild, furious, unhinged.

  “What is the matter with you?” Robert says, grabbing hold of Irene’s wrists and pinning her against the kitchen island.

  Her breath slows and Robert feels the tension in her wrists release.

  “I’m exhausted,” she says. “So fucking exhausted.”

  TWELVE

  By October 1992, not even the most isolated builders in the country can ignore the doomsday projections. The papers are calling for a housing recession by as early as winter. Still, Robert keeps his contractors working through the rest of autumn, on borrowed loans, having convinced the banks he has enough equity to pay them back. The country is at war, small businesses are folding up, and commercial real estate is at an unaffordable premium only recession-proof companies can take on, sensing like wolves the need people will have for video rentals and microwaveable hamburgers and honey-cured ham from God knows where. But Robert isn’t going to be stifled by the banks’ suggestions that he stay put for a year or two, let the market work its way back to level. His ego impresses even himself. He’ll beat the market. He’s a salesman, after all, and what good is a salesman if he can’t even sell himself on the future.

  Then, in a moment of destiny or irony or hallelujah, Robert’s college roommate, Frank, rings him up at his house on a Sunday afternoon, while Robert is taking a drubbing on the NFL, asking if he might be interested in selling land in Tennessee.

  “What do I know about Tennessee?” Robert says.

  “Right. What does anybody know about Tennessee?”

  Frank explains.

  The proposed town is called Indian Trees Lake. Some lake, somewhere outside of Nashville. It’s a scam—a smart one. You sell land, pocket the money, build a house or two, sell more land, until there’s no land left to sell, and then you ask for more money, complain about costs, flooding, corrupt building inspectors, etcetera.

  But Robert has ethics. Doesn’t he?

  Don’t I? he thinks. He thinks about the summer when he was eleven years old and had the idea to open his own ice-cream stand. He needed someone to stake him first. His father said no, ice cream melts, dummy. His mother was asleep at the kitchen table. Robert took three bucks from his mother’s purse and went to the A&P and picked up three gallons of ice cream and a bag of ice. The trick now was to say the ice cream was homemade. Even if he was selling it cheap, some people might pass by his stand to the parlor on Main because they made their ice cream right there in the back, charging a dime for your regular flavors and fifteen cents for, say, your banana or cantaloupe. He made up a sign that read YOUR FAVORITE HOMEMADE ICE CREAMS. Maybe he remembered his father telling him how the only way to really sell anything in America is to make them believe they already have what you’re selling. He set up his stand near the stop sign up the road. He figured he could get a nickel a scoop, two-fifty a gallon, take in a total of four dollars, fifteen cents, after the bag of ice. Then, depending on demand, he could reinvest, buy six gallons, ten, twenty, hire the Sturgis kid next door, Brian’s friend, to run ice for him, have a line of cars all honking their horns for the guy in front to make up his mind on what flavor he wanted. He saw a shop, with that same old sign above the door, people around the corner, people sighing loudly when he called out they had no more chocolate left. Then he’d open up another shop in Hyannis, and another in Buzzard’s Bay, really playing to the tourist crowd—Famous Cape Cod Ice Creams—and soon he’d have shops up and down the East Coast, and a deal to box and freeze the gallons and sell them in every A&P across the country. It did cross his mind that what he was doing wasn’t exactly on the up-and-up, but, after seeing his twenty-year plan, he didn’t mind a kid trying to make it on his own. And when he sold his first cone, he taped the dollar to the front of his stand, and it stayed there for about fifteen minutes, until his father came by with a bat and demolished the desk and cooler and sign, then took the dollar and plugged it in his pocket.

  “You owe your mother three dollars, plus interest. Two points every day until it’s paid.” He was steaming. That was the first time Robert really understood why they called his father Red. “I’m n
ot going to have a thief for a son. My boys have ethics. We don’t steal. We don’t cheat. Understood.”

  Robert nodded his head.

  He nods his head now as Frank says his name into the receiver.

  “You there, Bob?”

  “I’m here.”

  “So, what do you think?”

  “Oh, fuck your ethics, Bob.”

  Later, watching his kids run around the backyard pegging each other with acorns, Robert says to himself, Why the hell not? With the housing market going from bad to worse, he calls Frank back the following morning.

  “I’ll send you out the prospectus today,” Frank says.

  Robert knows there are so many dupes out there and the prospectus Frank has developed looks promising: seventy-five lots with lake views, private docks, a community center with tennis courts and a fitness room, and a free membership to the local country club.

  Paradise Is Closer Than You Think is written on the cover in soft blue letters, above the heads of two believable-looking retirees, folks who have never been beautiful or rich but have at last found a way to be happy.

  Even Robert, who is no dupe, believes a town like Indian Trees Lake still seems possible. He sees it as a place of comfort and freedom, the small-scale America that people work so hard for, the end of dreams.

  The first rule of any good salesman is being able to sell to yourself before anyone else.

  An initial investment of five thousand dollars is all that’s required to lock up one of the last remaining lots. The money is pooled in with other retired citizens’ money, and all of Indian Trees Lake will become a shared community with shops and corner stores, fine restaurants, and planned weekend activities. Even if you don’t intend on living there full-time or at all, or you’re nearly on your way to that paradise in the sky, what a once-in-a-lifetime investment for your children, for your grandchildren.

  Robert spends his weekends calling strangers from a sheet culled by David Bess, a hopeless alcoholic he and Frank knew from the old days, who now works in the real estate market down in Boynton Beach, Florida. He has a knack for extortion, it turns out. On a three-way call with Robert and Frank, he had explained how.

  “You get middle-income folks who’ve been told all their lives they should invest in real estate, but were skeptical, and with everyone raking it in around them, the stock market in a tailspin, and their days running out, they’ll think your call is a God sign.”

  On the phone, Robert promises recently retired Midwesterners naturalistic beauty, good weather, and fine, southern hospitality. For every five nos, there’s a maybe, and for every three maybes, there’s a sure-why-not.

  Promptly, at 5:45 in the evening, he rings Jim and Sharon Estes, who shout over each other while sharing the phone, asking, “Who is this? What do you want? Indian Trees? What the hell is an Indian Tree? Go milk a goat!”

  Next, he dials the number for Lee and Ruth Hodges, and when a woman answers, he asks if she’s interested in living out the rest of her days in a place so peaceful, she’ll think she’s already died and gone to heaven.

  “I’m out of lemons,” Ruth Hodges says.

  “Lemons?”

  “Can you pick some up for me at the store?”

  “Sure, I can do that.”

  “I drink my water with a little lemon, that’s the secret.”

  “The secret to what?”

  “What?”

  “The secret to what?”

  There’s silence on the other end.

  “You know,” Ruth Hodges says, “I can’t remember.”

  By seven o’clock at night he’s been told to fuck off, suck corn, and sit on an Indian Tree; two couples agree to see a prospectus, and two more agree to send a check for five thousand dollars, after Robert amps up his pitch, claiming there are only two lots left, and one he’s already promised to a famous actor with the initials P.N.

  * * *

  Frank, David, and Robert split 75 percent of the cash from each initial investment. The next investment is ten thousand dollars to start building. If investors don’t want to move there in the next year or so, they can rent the house and Charity Investments, the company name Bess has come up with, will handle the paperwork and collections for a small fee. Bess, Frank, and Robert send investors stock photos of a lake with boats nestled up to wooden docks and kids running along a sliver of beach, with a note:

  The only thing missing here is YOU!

  By his estimate, in just under two months, Robert has raked in nearly five hundred grand. But once every lot has been sold, Bess urges him to keep selling.

  “It’s nearly Christmas,” he says. “People are looking to spend money on a grand scale.”

  Robert has an inclination to get out, the same as when he saw the subdivision start to fail, but his pride trumps his panic, and even if he loses all, he thinks, at least he fought for more.

  Then one of the investors, a former police chief from some town in Kentucky, drives to the Lakes, sees there are no lakes, and starts making calls.

  On a snowy morning in mid-December, the FBI knocks on the trailer door, where Robert has been making his calls to Bess and Frank, who aren’t picking up the phone. The subdivision is clouded in windswept flakes. Robert wonders if Candice has come back, and as he’s about to open the door, it swings forward and knocks him in the head.

  “You knocked him in the head,” one of the agents says.

  “He’ll be fine,” another says.

  “He’s bleeding. Jesus, Matt, he’s not a gangster.”

  Robert touches his head, sees the blood on his fingers, looks at the two figures before him, blurring in and out of focus.

  “We’ll stitch you up, pal,” the first agent says.

  “And you’re under arrest,” the other says.

  THIRTEEN

  Early Christmas morning, two weeks before he’s set to go to trial for his role in the Indian Trees Lake scam, Robert sits at the kitchen table and cries. He is finally broke. The federal government has seized his assets, the boys’ college funds have been drained, and the cars and jewelry and furs pawned. Robert still has the Wagoneer, which, he knows now, is worth more in parts than in whole. He has his family, too. When the boys bound down the stairs, he wipes his eyes and hugs them and pats their butts on the way into the living room.

  Standing next to the glittering tree—which he and the boys had driven up to Plymouth to chop down—is the NordicTrack Classic Pro Skier assembled by Robert in the carriage house two nights before and tied with a thick ribbon and bow.

  “It’s a brand-new invention,” Robert says, having seen endless commercials of unnaturally fit and big-breasted women with tight abs and tighter asses, cross-country skiing, and, having noticed one morning as Irene was half-dressed, folding laundry in the bedroom, just underneath her panties the dimpled mass of flesh that meant the end of strong, feminine legs, and the beginning of aging, cheesy thighs. The gift, then, is a halfhearted attempt to get Irene to start exercising. All new things were like nothing you’d ever seen, until you saw it and then it was just another thing taking up space. But these new inventions gave him hope that if he was persistent and kept his ears and eyes open, he would be there on the ground floor for one of them someday. He was young still. He had nerve enough to fight.

  He has already made the coffee and started a fire in the fireplace. Now he sits on the couch looking at the NordicTrack Classic Pro Skier, the bow tied around the straps of the skis, spread open and ready for use. The boys’ presents have already been stacked in the order that Irene felt they should be opened. The boys swing their stockings in front of them, sit beside each other in front of the fire, and tip over the stockings, emptying out the candy and baseball cards and lotto tickets onto the floor.

  “Merry Christmas,” Irene calls from the kitchen, and Robert hears himself say, “Merry Christmas,” but the sound of his voice feels very far away.

  He watches the boys scratch the lotto tickets with pennies they have found under
the couch cushions. Neither wins a prize, but the winning doesn’t seem to matter as much as the possibility of winning, and they quickly discard the losing tickets in the fire.

  Irene stands by the fire, holding a tray of butter cookies filled with jam she has prepared every Christmas morning since the children were born. She puts the tray down and sits, and the boys hug her and she kisses them gently and sweetly before they run to their presents and shake the boxes, deducing by weight and size the general contents of what’s inside.

  Then the boys turn their attention to the NordicTrack Classic Pro Skier with an exalted curiosity, pulling the straps over their knees, skiing backward, pretending the cord is a horsetail.

  “Go ahead and open your presents now,” Irene says to the boys, avoiding Robert’s eyes.

  “It doesn’t even have to be a gift for you but for all of us,” Robert explains. “You should see the results on these people after just a month.”

  “I understand,” Irene says coolly, then covers her legs with a blanket.

  Robert lights a cigarette and walks over to the machine, plugs it in, and hits a few buttons to make sure the boys haven’t broken anything. He puts his feet in the straps and starts skiing. A breath of cigarette ash plumes out onto the face of the electronic pad.

  “There’s even a cable you can hook to the TV, so you can watch your soaps,” Robert says between puffs on the cigarette. But the rest of the family ignores him.

  Once the boys have finished opening their presents, Irene shoves a wrapped envelope into his hand. With his fingernail, he slits open the wrapping paper and pulls from the envelope two tickets for the Rolling Stones at the Boston Garden in February.

  He looks at the tickets and then at the NordicTrack Classic Pro Skier. He knows he was wrong to buy her this for Christmas. Maybe as an out-of-the-blue present, but not Christmas, and he’ll have to apologize, but to force him to apologize with a gift like this, tickets to the Stones, a gift he has essentially paid for, and now can’t afford, is criminal.

  According to the tickets, the seats are just right of the stage, a few rows back so that they can sit during the slower numbers.