by John Enright
“A Romeo y Julieta Churchill. I have never been in snow like this before. Did you know that scientists think that all the H2O in the world arrived here via meteors?”
“That’s hard to imagine.”
“I know. That’s why they call it a fact, so that you don’t have to think it up.”
“You don’t get to talk to many people, do you, Nickel?”
“No, I guess not. I usually try to avoid it. But you’re a chief, right? You must get to talk to a lot of people.”
“Well, I’m just a small chief, not the big chief, and there are only several hundred members of our tribe left, and a lot of them don’t live in the area anymore. No, my tribal work entails more running errands than talking.”
“Are there many other women chiefs?”
“Not so many. In my clan I am the only one.”
“What is Theo’s trip?”
“Theo likes to control stuff, including people. Take Bay Savers, for instance. No one elected him chief. He just sort of took over, and everyone let him because no one else wanted the job.”
“And you?”
“Because I slept with him a couple of times he thinks he’s got a claim on me or something. No problem. That was probably my last Bay Savers meeting anyway. Theo will have to find himself another squaw.”
“How so?”
“The tribal elders want out. It’s the terrorist thing. They want to apply for a casino license, and being tied to a radical group being accused of bombings won’t help. That place, Strawberry Point”—and here Emma gave its long native name—“was once our land, a burial ground because it was so well aligned with the stars. It’s been desecrated enough, but that plant would be the final insult.”
“Tribe looking for compensation?”
“Maybe. I can’t say that wasn’t part of it, but I was told by the elders to announce at that meeting that the tribe would no longer be part of Bay Savers. But Theo wouldn’t give me a chance to speak at the start.”
As the snow slowly lessened, visibility increased and with it the speed of the boat. Their passage now caused a stir, a snow wake, but the muffled world was still mute.
“Do you consider yourself a radical, Emma?”
Emma laughed. “What sort of radical? Here, hold this bomb for a sec, would you?”
“I don’t know. A Native American radical, a tree hugger radical, a feminist radical, a free love radical.”
“No, none of the above. But what a funny question. And if I was any of those, why would I tell you, someone I’ve just met and don’t know? I went to the Bay Savers meetings because I was told to, as a representative of the tribe. None of the elders wanted to do it. If that is what you were wondering about. And if by free love you were referring to this morning’s adventure, well, I don’t think of having sex as a radical thing to do. Do you?”
“In chemistry a radical is an entity with an unpaired electron looking to mate.”
“I never took chemistry, but I do like having sex. And if I was a Native American feminist radical I probably wouldn’t be pairing my electrons with white guys like you and Theo, now would I?”
“Never thought of that.”
“Ladies in my lineage have been screwing white boys a long time, Nickel. Why not? Sometimes they’ve got what we need. All the white blood in my veins—and there’s a mix, going way back—started out as white sperm. There’s not a single instance in my tribe of a white woman and an Indian mate. That would have been called rape in any case. Oh yeah, your hyper-pious forefathers here had red-skinned slaves as well as black-skinned ones, and they spread their seed around. My great-granddaddy’s slave family name was Mather. They say he could almost pass for white.”
Thanks to the onboard radar and GPS and the crew of two who knew what they were doing, the speedboat purred quietly back into the Quanticut Yacht Club marina under cover of snow. They were smugglers smuggling themselves back home. All was quiet. The boat dropped them off at a deserted outer dock and slipped away as silently as it had come. Dominick’s car, now covered with snow, was still parked between the yachts in the adjacent chandler’s lot. Emma’s car had not been towed, though there was a parking ticket beneath the snow and wiper on her windshield. They parted there, and Dominick walked back to his car. It had been a long time since he had driven in snow. He found it a very disagreeable experience, even though not much had accumulated on the roads.
In New Jerusalem Dominick parked in a restaurant’s lot and had lunch before walking to Ms. Arnold’s. The snow was the kind that turned into slush on the sidewalks where people stepped so that they left personal trails. Dominick was trying to decide on a story to tell Lydia and Ms. Arnold. Would the truth suffice, or would that be too much information? What they already knew would help determine what else he would tell them. He stopped at a corner convenience store and bought a copy of the morning’s New Jerusalem News. There was not a mention of the Bay Savers meeting or the raid. Okay, he could go with some innocent story of the meeting running late, Atticus staying to work, and Dominick too tired to drive back alone. All Lydia would want to know was where was Atticus, and Dominick would just say with Theo.
But at Ms. Arnold’s house no one was home. There was a small envelope with Atticus’s name on it pushpinned to the front door beside the brass knocker. The message inside read, “Lydia and I have gone to Boston Xmas shopping.” So Dominick could save his story; he would have no audience. As he waited in line in his car at the ferry dock he flicked through the local radio stations, searching for news. Nothing.
Back on the island the snow had turned to cold rain, a sort of falling slush. Dominick’s thoughts turned south again. He had forgotten how miserable winter could be. Really, there was nothing keeping him here, although he had nowhere else to go. Usually he had his moves planned weeks in advance, but he had been remiss the past few months and fallen out of contact with any of the people he might have wintered with or house-sat for. True, he could always just head for his mother’s in Virginia. She was never really pleased to see him, but she was polite enough to let him stay there if he was in transit. There were always motel rooms, but he hated them, and there was not a bed and breakfast in the land where you could smoke a cigar. But there was nothing keeping him here. It was not as if he would be missed. Lydia had probably forgotten him already after only one day. Atticus could find another driver to his clandestine meetings. It was time for a change of scene, to something with palm trees.
The black SUV with government plates arrived at Mt. Sinai soon after Dominick did. He was making a fire in the back parlor when they came in. There were three of them this time. They were looking for Atticus. Dominick told them that he was alone in the house, but two of them went to search the house anyway. When the agent who stayed with him asked where Atticus was, Dominick told him he believed the Jamesons were away on vacation, perhaps visiting their children for the holidays. He was just watching the house for them. They left without even asking his name, which Dominick figured meant they already knew who he was and he was deemed unimportant, a mere factotum, a servant maybe. He got the fire going, then went out to bring in more wood. If the weather improved he would leave the next day. When the phone in the hall started ringing he decided to ignore it. But it would not stop ringing, so he went and picked it up.
“Atticus, this is Martha. Are you deaf that you could not hear the telephone ringing?” It was Ms. Arnold. “Atticus, you must come to Boston immediately. Lydia has had a little misunderstanding with the authorities. You have to come and bail us out. Officer, officer, where are we? District D4 station? That doesn’t mean anything. Back Bay, yes, Hamilton Avenue? Anyway, Atticus, you’ll find it. It’s right by that big cathedral or whatever it is. Do you hear me, Atticus?”
“Ms. Arnold, this is Dominick. Atticus isn’t here. He is still away on business.”
“Well then, Lord Witherspoon, you will have to come and deal with this. Lydia will not allow me to call her daughter, who is right here in Boston. I’
ll expect you here immediately. Oh, and bring some identification for Lydia.” And she hung up.
The grandfather clock in the parlor was chiming a half past something. Dominick went to check. It was three thirty. The last ferry back to New Jerusalem would just be leaving. So much for immediately, Martha my dear.
Dominick missed the first ferry the next day and ended up on the midmorning boat. He took the main roads to Boston this time, which were cleared of snow but slick and crowded. By one o’clock he was searching for a parking place near the Back Bay police station. In a desk drawer in her room he had found Lydia’s wallet, which contained, among other expired cards, a long-expired driver’s license. He had stopped at an ATM and taken out the daily maximum of $400. The District D4 Police Station on Harrison Avenue was modern, redbrick, three stories, and could have passed for a high school classroom building. Dominick was pleased to find that Lydia and Ms. Arnold were still there and had not been moved to some other location overnight.
They had, in fact, been given their own private holding cell and a deck of cards, which Lydia returned to the desk clerk in exchange for her purse when Dominick checked them out. They had also been issued blankets and pillows, which were not commonly supplied at the precinct level. When Dominick had told the female officer behind the bulletproof window at reception that he was there to bail them out, he had been greeted happily and buzzed right in. The beefy desk sergeant filled Dominick in as he dealt with the paper work and paid their bail—only $50 each.
The ladies—as Desk Sergeant O’Shea referred to them—had presented a small problem. Normally, suspects brought in on minor charges such as theirs—shoplifting and interfering with an officer’s duties—would be charged and booked, post a bond, and be released, all at the precinct. But the ladies had no cash to post their bonds, and one—Miss Lydia—had no identification, so she couldn’t even be properly charged. They obviously were not dangerous criminals, and they reminded everyone there of aunties they would not be seeing over the holidays. They should have been sent downtown for overnight lockup, but the loud one, Martha, insisted that someone would be there soon to “spring them,” as she put it. So the lieutenant let them stay, and the night shift took care of them. “Hell, it’s Christmas,” Sergeant O’Shea said. “They were no trouble. They got a lot of tea and Christmas cookies. So, are you this Lord Witherspoon Martha said would be here? She expected you last night.”
Dominick did not like friendly authority figures, even overweight Irish cops. They made him suspicious and gave him the creeps. Some basic instinct instructed him to never converse with people in uniform. Always answer their questions with a question. “Is that it for the paperwork then?” Sergeant O’Shea either had not noticed or did not care that Lydia’s driver’s license was long expired. The sergeant went off to Xerox things. He took Dominick’s driver’s license as well, his Florida one with the address of an old friend who had since died.
When the sergeant returned he brought Lydia and Ms. Arnold with him. Ms. Arnold looked the worse for wear after a night in the lockup. Her blue-tint hair had lost its coif and her clothes were wrinkled. Lydia, on the other hand, looked fine, refreshed. She was listening to her iPod and smiling, off in her own private Narnia. Formalities completed, Dominick had them wait by the front door of the station while he went to get the car. In the car, Ms. Arnold started to give him a hard time about her having to spend overnight in custody because Dominick had not come immediately. Dominick reminded her that she had called him on the island after the last ferry of the day had departed. No matter, it was still his fault.
“What was the arrest all about?” Dominick asked. Surely she couldn’t blame him for that.
“A mere misunderstanding blown up out of all proportion.” Ms. Arnold was in the back seat, while Lydia hummed along to her earphone tunes in the front seat beside Dominick. “Lydia just forgot what she was wearing, that’s all. But that security man at Anne Klein’s had to make a big deal of it so he could feel self-important. Men. I swear, you give them any kind of control and they become monsters.”
The disjointed and defensive account of the crime that Dominick slowly extracted from Ms. Arnold, when reconstructed, went something like this: They were just window shopping at the Copley Place Mall. Neither of them had money to spend on presents. Lydia didn’t even have a credit card. In Anne Klein’s Lydia had taken some items off to a dressing room to try on while Ms. Arnold sampled different perfumes. When they went to leave, an alarm went off and this perfectly terrible man stopped them. It turned out that Lydia had forgotten which clothes she was wearing and was still dressed in unpaid-for Anne Klein creations. She had just liked the way her new clothes felt.
“But I just paid bail for both of you,” Dominick said. They were on fairly open road now. The traffic out of the city was not as heavy as the inbound had been. The late-afternoon sun was trying to break through the clouds. Lydia played with her iPod.
“Well, I couldn’t just let them take her off all by herself, could I? The train trip to Boston was my idea after you men didn’t return the other night.”
“And?”
“I made that man take his hands off her. You know how she hates being touched by strangers. And he just wouldn’t, so I hit him with my purse a couple of times. Got him once down there, you know. At Anne Klein’s of all places. What the world is coming to.”
Dominick couldn’t see Ms. Arnold in the rear seat in the rearview mirror, but he could see Lydia beside him. He realized now that one of the reasons she looked so fresh was the new, stylish, and very un-Lydia-like outfit she was wearing beneath her same old coat. “That outfit from Anne Klein would be the one she is wearing now?”
“That’s right.”
“So, you bought it after all. So what was the problem?”
“We never! I will never buy anything from that place.”
“But how . . . ?”
“What were they going to do? Strip her right there? That man was in a hurry. Nobody knew where her other clothes were. I guess the store just wrote it off as they took us away. Which reminds me. I never did ask. Lydia, Lydia dear.” Ms. Arnold leaned forward over the seat back to pat Lydia’s shoulder, make her take her earphones out. “Lydia, whatever happened to the clothes you were wearing before?”
“Those old things? Why I hung them on hangers and put them back in the closet.”
“In the closet?”
“Back where I’d gotten my new clothes, of course.”
“You look nice,” Dominick said.
“Why, thank you, sir. My name is Lydia,” she said, extending her hand.
Dominick shook it. “Nick,” he said. “Still Nick.”
“I beat you at hearts, didn’t I, Martha?” Lydia said without looking back.
“We weren’t keeping score.”
“But I remember winning,” Lydia said, and she pulled out from somewhere in her clothes a playing card, which she held up, the queen of hearts. “You don’t suppose they will miss this one little card, will they?”
By the time they got to New Jerusalem it was snowing again, a more serious snow slanting sideways in a steady wind. At Ms. Arnold’s house Lydia got out of the car with Ms. Arnold. “Aren’t you coming on home?” Dominick asked, but Lydia had her earphones in again and didn’t hear him.
“She’ll stay with me until Atticus comes to fetch her,” Ms. Arnold said before slamming the car door and following Lydia up the front steps. Dominick didn’t remember her saying thank you.
He just made the last ferry. The metal grate between the dock and the deck was slick with snow. The van in front of him skidded sideways going up it. Dominick dreaded having to follow him, but he made it, creeping in low gear. His car was the last vehicle they allowed aboard. The ferry crew was in a hurry. Visibility on the bay was shrinking. Dominick was not looking forward to the drive off the ferry and the trip home to Mt. Sinai. He hated that sensation of sliding and slipping and having no traction, that sense of having lost control. He b
ought a cup of coffee at the concession stand in the top-deck cabin and stood with a handful of other anxious, silent passengers peering out the front windows at the snow blowing at them in the dying light as the boat headed out at quarter speed. It was dark when they disembarked—Dominick last on last off—and he skidded off the ramp onto solid ground.
The streetlamps made cones of white swirling air as Dominick left the village and headed for home. Well, home for at least another day or two until the weather let up and he could leave. He wouldn’t be driving in this, given any choice. About halfway home, well out of the village, Dominick’s headlights picked up a figure at the side of the road trudging head down into the blowing snow. He or she was going the same way Dominick was headed, so he pulled to a stop along side to offer a ride. Only when he buzzed down the passenger side window did Dominick recognize Atticus. “Give you a lift, sailor?” he asked.
Dominick got the fire going while Atticus fixed a pot of tea. Theo’s boat had dropped Atticus off at the village dock. When Dominick hadn’t answered the phone at the house, Atticus had had no choice but to hike it. There were no taxis available in the village at that time of year. Atticus was full of Bay Savers news. The fed’s case implicating them somehow in the bombings was falling apart. They had had to let Mohammed go—well, they did deport him back to Canada—but that proved they could find no evidence strong enough to hold him or connect Bay Savers with terrorists.
“I don’t suppose it’s possible for federal agents to do anything illegal, but the raid on our meeting was totally spurious. No judge would give them a warrant to raid a public meeting, and their only probable cause was looking for other members with questionable immigration status. That’s why the news blackout. We’ve got a bunch of lawyers in the group who were there, and they didn’t let those agents get to second base with questioning anybody, much less taking anyone in. The Federales really overstepped. We may even sue them for trying. We are well on our way to vindication.”
