It Happens in the Hamptons

by Holly Peterson

  Luke and Kona rushed up to Jake Chase, motivated not by wanting to help so much as fear this would make their camp look even more unruly than it already was. Kona said to both Kenny and Luke, “Watch, it’ll just give the town board more ammunition to shut the camp down. Let’s dig him out fast.”

  Members of the Seabrook Club were far from enamored with the idea of filthy camp surfboards and coolers adjacent to “their” beach. Some overreaching ladies had formed a committee the previous summer to lobby that Tide Runners be shut down on the legal grounds that money wasn’t allowed to change hands on town beaches. Kona and Luke always made it a point to accept checks and cash in the public parking lot, which was, according to the rules, legal.

  Jake Chase lumbered a few feet across the sand, defeated, confused but grateful these men had more 4x4 know-how than he did. His dark, curly hair now blew in his face, long on the sides to counteract the middle-aged, thinning spots on the top. “Thanks guys, I feel like a fool. I just wanted to say hi, hang out a little.”

  Kona said, “You know, Jake, when you drive on the beach, you’ve absolutely got to air down first.”

  “Air out what?” Jake chuckled and punched Kona’s arm too hard. “It’s a fuckin’ safari vehicle with the whole sky open to the passengers.” He wondered what the hell Kona was referring to, and hated not knowing.

  “Jake. Take a breather, man. I’m talking taking air out of the tires. It is actually called ‘airing down,’” answered Kona, returning the verbal volley. “If you want to drive on sand, you have to air down the tires.”

  “The guy who sold it to me never said I had to do that,” Jake responded, cranky over his disastrous Scout unveiling. He’d had a completely different entry in mind: he’d roll on the sand, the guys would hop on the side runners, they’d all plow down the beach to a good Kanye West song Jake had already queued up in his playlist. “If you knew what I paid the guy to . . .”

  “It actually doesn’t matter how much the truck cost. Regardless, you gotta ‘air down the tires’ when you’re driving any vehicle down the beach,” answered Kona calmly, like he was putting a mental patient into a straitjacket. “The softer tires with less air in them allow it to stay on top of the sand, making them wider, instead of getting stuck. When you plan on driving on the pavement, you gotta air back up to normal, hard tires.”

  During this explanation, Jake had his hands on his hips, shaking his head back and forth furiously like a five-year-old who didn’t want to eat his peas. He cut Kona off, saying, “No fuckin’ way am I doing that.”

  Just then, Julia Chase rolled up to the lot in her own clementine-orange 1974 Porsche Targa, which she thankfully had the good wits not to drive into the sand. Kona spotted her and took off his shirt as he gallantly shoveled her husband out of the mess he was in.

  “Hey, Julia!” Kona couldn’t help but yell. “We got this!”

  “I wouldn’t have bought this fucking car if I’d known I needed to go to mechanic trade school to . . .” Jake whined.

  “It’s pretty basic. It’s not like the guy who sold it needed to explain,” lectured Kona.

  “Dude,” Jake clarified, his need for acceptance driving his blood several degrees warmer. “Let’s get real here. I’m just a working guy like you. I ain’t actually like these rich city assholes who think they’re better than you locals who grew up here. I’m sure you know them.”

  “Yes, I do actually, my fair share,” Kona answered, curious where this line of reasoning was going.

  “I’m just like you guys. No different and no better,” Jake, a titan controlling half a billion dollars of Laundromats and mall properties, contended. “My dad never once made more than fifty K in a year, my mom was a substitute teacher.”

  “Well, now I wouldn’t . . .”

  “Put myself through school. Drove a laundry truck to get by. Swear, if luck didn’t fuckin’ follow me around. If it hadn’t, I would’a been happy teaching water-skiing for a living like you guys!” Jake thought hard about how much that would suck. “Point is, I work like a sweaty son of a bitch to run my properties. Never will I air a tire up, down, or even fuckin’ sideways.”

  “So why don’t you hire someone to lie down in the trunk anytime you want to go on a little off-road adventure?” Kona laughed and shook his head. “He could just pop out when you need him.”

  “I’m not, I just meant, I fuckin’ work all week already. It’s not fair on my weekend when I’m trying to relax to have to . . .”

  “C’mon guys! Let’s shovel him out before the Seabrook people come down,” Luke yelled. Kona fell to his knees to shovel the sand away from the buried tires. He hoped it would make him look like a stud in front of Jake’s wife, Julia.

  After only two minutes, Jake’s patience on the dig-out wore thin. He yelled at the guys, “How long is it going to take you to work me out of here anyway?”

  The fact that it wasn’t Kona’s job to work him out of there didn’t enter Jake’s mind. Neither did the fact that it might present a problem that his wife, Julia, was digging out the exact same tire Kona was working on. In fact, she was now kneeling in front of Kona at the perfect angle, so that her bulbous butt bumped into his inner thighs as she helped shovel her own husband out of humiliation.

  Chapter Eight

  Goliath v. Goliath

  Raging over how this week’s market hammered the meager trust his aunt Bunny and uncle Tripp had left him, Bucky Porter clambered down from the Seabrook Club. A summons he’d get signed today over the truck in the sand incident would be a step toward restraining the Tide Runners instructors’ ill-found sense of privilege. This summer, he’d decided to run for a trustee slot on the town board that would give him formal municipal levers to shut down the wretched camp for good.

  The Seabrook Clubhouse, well in sight from the camp drop-off, stood high up on a bluff overlooking the sea. It was an imposing fortress, with a slate roof, red shingles, and white-paned windows. The six cement cracked tennis courts, unrepaired since 1962, stood between the club and Beachwood Lane.

  The High Episcopalian members of Bucky’s club, already plying themselves with barrels of alcohol before lunch, nodded to him as he passed. The older ladies with hair so gray that it had a blue tint sat in circles playing bridge in the enclosed patio area. The younger women gathered at other tables, or chased after children, their A-frame Lilly Pulitzer uniforms signaling a strictly missionary, no orgasm zone.

  The bar counter, adjacent to a veranda-style restaurant, stood next to a pee-filled Olympic pool. Today, the male members washed down their drinks with Ritz crackers and cheddar cheese spread from a black earthenware tub. They chomped on Chex Mix, and guffawed about one of them missing putts all morning at the nearby Emerald Links Club, then miraculously draining a thirty-foot snake on the eighteenth hole to win the match.

  Bucky, forty-three, worked in New York, but, truth be told, didn’t really have a job. He had a broker spot at an investment firm that paid on commissions, but he wasn’t much good at it. He knew that, the firm knew that, but he was allowed to sit there because his great uncle Tripp had started the firm during its heyday in the 1950s. None of this mattered to Bucky; he had means other than his professional accomplishments to express his authority and aptitude.

  He marched down several splintered gray steps to the sand, shoddy from beach erosion. He waved a friendly hello to the Seabrook beach boys who busied themselves laying out dozens of rickety wooden chairs under matching yellow-and-white striped umbrellas. Ropes leading to large metal buoys on the shore delineated the sandy area that the club could control for their members only. Of course, in higher tides down by the shoreline, club members tended to put their chairs and umbrellas too close to the water, clearly encroaching on the public property . . . strikingly similar to those Israeli settlements they blamed for all the world trouble “we” were in.

  Bucky, having passed the figurative and literal line in the sand that separated Seabrook people from “other people,” now mar
ched to Tide Runners’ camp headquarters.

  Luke nudged Kona as the two of them, having gotten Jake off the beach successfully, stared out at the flat ocean before them. “Asshole coming at us at three o’clock on your right. Don’t make eye contact or he’ll think we give a shit. I told you Jake’s truck was going to cause huge trouble for the camp.”

  “Damn it!” Bucky yelled at himself. His worn loafers with the big gold horse-bit buckle loaded up with more and more of that flour-like New England sand as he marched toward the Tide Runners instructors. First he dumped sand out of his shoes and then, for some reason that made no sense to any of the guys, put them back on just to slide into each step and fill up again ten yards later.

  Kona whispered to Luke, “He looks like a walking billboard for an erectile dysfunction commercial.”

  Standing before them now, Bucky pondered the camp headquarters. It resembled a low-rent yard sale. Before him: a few Lands’ End navy-and-red striped towels with children’s initials left behind from last summer’s kids, two coolers filled with juice boxes, a huge bag of Cheetos from the Riverhead Costco, several life vests, four paddleboards, four uneven paddles that didn’t match the paddleboards, three Star Wars boogie boards from last century, and thirteen long surfboards with soft tops for beginners, also scraped to hell and dinged, showing pockmarks of the Styrofoam layer underneath as if they had been riddled with machine-gun fire.

  Kona, standing five foot ten, puffed out his bare and tanned chest to prepare for battle. He walked straight up to Bucky who was dressed in a teal-blue polo shirt. It didn’t go unnoticed by onlookers that Bucky’s upper torso and biceps were larger and more sculpted than Kona’s, who’d spent hours at the gym to work on getting his body right for the ladies.

  Bucky was a man who did not work hard at anything. His muscles, like his handsome face, were God-given.

  “Bucky, so good to see you,” said Kona. “If you don’t mind, I’ll take two egg salad sandwiches and a glass of that cheap Chardonnay you serve.”

  “Before you start,” Luke interrupted immediately, rolling his eyes at his friend, “the Scout truck was not ours, and we got the man out of the sand quickly. We’re simply helping a citizen of this town.”

  Bucky surveyed the disarray before him. “You sure that dangerous safari vehicle didn’t belong to a camp parent?”

  “I have never seen that man in my life,” Kona lied.

  “Hey, Kona,” Bucky said. “C’mon, work with me a little. You know this is a town beach, no vehicles, no businesses that attract such vehicles, no . . .”

  “Exactly. Town: as in catering to the citizens. Meaning we, as lifelong residents of said town, can do what we want here,” Kona answered, sounding like more of a stuck-up ass than Bucky. “Including teaching kids and adults to respect the power of the ocean. And keeping them safe.”

  Bucky guffawed, “Safe? With boats that don’t work, Jet Skis that are a dozen years old? Just look at this equipment!”

  “Yeah, safe. Speaking of which, we noticed you foundering around in the flat shore break today. If you want a quick ocean swimming lesson, there’s a spot in the six-to-eight-year-old swim class, we could squeeze you in. But you’re going to have to wait about twenty minutes for that egg salad to digest. I don’t want you to cramp up in those scary, ankle-high waves.”

  “Your camp is a joke, barely legal,” Bucky scoffed.

  “We’ve been over this every summer. We do what we want on the ocean as long as we take payment in the public lot,” Luke claimed, noticing that Bucky once again turned his back to him, only talking to Kona.

  “Why do you have to gather here, at the top of the beach entrance, with this vista,” Bucky answered, ignoring Luke, then waving his hands over the Atlantic like Jesus at the Sea of Galilee.

  “Just curious,” asked Kona. “How exactly do twenty pieces of equipment laying in the sand destroy a ‘vista,’ and your two hundred yellow chairs and umbrellas and ropes do not obstruct our view?”

  “The Seabrook serves the community. We provide a wholesome family environment that generations of . . .” As Bucky listed his people’s superior attributes, he witnessed a rather attractive young mother running down to camp headquarters. She was clearly rushed.

  Kenny, a huge beast of a bearded man and a few years older than the rest of the crew, raced to go talk to the mother, away from this group. Mrs. Saltzman reached into her purse and grabbed her wallet while Kenny tried to yank her up the lot. Too late, she pressed several bills in his hand, screaming, “It’s all there plus tips!”

  Bucky smiled. Bingo. Exchanging cash for a business on a town beach: very, very illegal. Even better, this Kona from some loser Hawaiian island was so busy defending his filthy enterprise, he didn’t notice. These guys were nailed, done, and it wasn’t even June.

  “You may feel comforted to know we are, in fact, doing the same thing as your club. Catering to our clients. Now if you’d . . .” Kona made a quick head-butt motion at Bucky.

  Bucky jerked his head back and then leaned right into Kona’s face. “You do know I’m running for town trustee? And you do know trucks driving on sand in public areas could run over and kill people?”

  “Wasn’t us and . . .”

  “Are you sure your ledgers are clear and copacetic?”

  “Copa-what?” asked Kona slowly, trying to sound like a doofus surfer dude. He made another head-butt motion right at Bucky.

  “You know what? I’m not making any progress here; you don’t get it,” Bucky answered, pulling his head back in defense, with no particular riposte in mind except, “Jesus H. Christ!!!”

  It was important to know one’s limits when dealing with people who had less of a brain in their heads, like that Lenny character in Of Mice and Men. Bucky matched up physically with this gorilla before him, but he realized Kona could still do something to harm him. After all, he was hardly accustomed to fistfights, as this local shithead surely was.

  And so, Bucky retreated, spinning around to mingle with the more genteel types behind the ropes, and silently vowing, once elected, to get these local, uneducated, unrefined pieces of crap back where it counted.

  Chapter Nine

  That Memorial Day Monday Thing

  Huck studied the wrinkled Lego manual with defeat. “Mom, can you help me find the piece with six holes? It’s flat and red and I think it didn’t make it with the rest.”

  Katie closed her eyes to summon patience and knelt on the floor with her child, an old peach-flowered pillow barely providing cushion under her knees. After eight minutes of separating Lego pieces into piles, she walked back into the kitchen to get cereal bowls. “Honey, we’ll put them in bowls by colors. That way you can keep better track.”

  “Okay, Mom.” Huck smiled. There was nothing Katie hated more than Legos, but her son would never know. She spent half an hour helping him construct a wing of a Lego heli-jet they’d brought from Hood River in a huge Ziploc bag. Once Huck hit a stride, she left him to finish the next stage on his own. She had more organizing of her own to do before George arrived in less than a week.

  Next, she lined up her cosmetics in neat, obsessive lines on the bathroom windowsill. She then folded her son’s shirts as if they were new and for sale, all physical steps to giving an upended life a sense of order.

  Katie felt fidgety this early Monday evening. She had so much to do, but, she remembered, none of it needed doing just then. While Huck constructed his flying masterpiece, she plunked herself down on her bed, the springs creaking loudly beneath her. She’d wiped the bedroom dresser several times since they’d moved into the Porter family’s second cottage, and it was even dustier now.

  She stood up suddenly to open the windows. The cooler breeze and the sounds of cicadas buzzing like tractors flowed into her teeny bedroom. She knew she felt out of sorts; a half-happy and half-sad cocktail that, when mixed together, turned melancholy.

  Today was only ten weeks since her mother died. The carved ebony box she’d brought
from home beckoned her from the crooked shelf of the bedroom closet. She’d carried it on the plane in her purse, the velvet pouch inside holding half her mother’s ashes. Katie had purposely placed the box behind sweaters when they arrived. She didn’t want to see it every day. Some days, she hoped, she’d forget it was there.

  Now she grabbed the box and held it in her hands as she again sat on the edge of the bed. The thin mattress listed, and she had to push her feet against the floor so as not to slide off. She traced the pattern of inlaid enamel flowers of the box. Once the cancer vanquished her mother, she implored her daughter to face life with a strong, authentic smile. Though Katie felt her eyes get hot, she used the box to summon resolve over sorrow.

  The early evening sun now streamed sideways through the lace curtains of the musty cottage. Speckles of dust floated in the air and reflected like bits of mica. Katie reminded herself this was simply the beginning of her eastern adventure. Everything that could be in place was in place, just like those products on her bathroom windowsill.

  Her landlord in Hood River had thankfully allowed her to end the lease four months early, and she knew it would be easier to move out here with nothing holding her back. Six hours a week were already guaranteed by the tutoring company, and that newly posted Bridgehampton Middle School job for a special ed substitute had her name on it. She’d have her couches, boxes, and car sent in September if all went as planned.

  Katie stood to touch the scrimshaw etchings of ships on the bedroom wall, wondering which members of the Porter family had a history of whaling. Nautical charts hung everywhere. Heavy doorstops made of shipping rope held doors ajar, and an antique brass telescope dominated much of the living room. She figured the family must be attached to the quaint flea-market aura of it all.