by Chris Knopf
THREE
I’D MOVED OUT HERE after an act of self-immolation cleared out the preceding thirty years of my life. My parents were dead, leaving me the cottage where I’d been raised. It stood at the tip of Oak Point, a scrubby peninsula that juts fearlessly into the Little Peconic Bay on the northwest border of the Town of Southampton, Long Island. My father was an old-school mechanic, so it wasn’t surprising that his cottage expressed the character and refinement of a ’55 Chevy. Sturdy, sure-footed and unadorned. My mother had tried to introduce a little gentility after he died, but the effort withered on the vine. Since I moved in, I hadn’t done much to improve the situation. With few friends or family, no job or any other meaningful pursuit beyond drinking vodka and watching the sun sizzle down behind the green mounds of the North Fork, home improvement seemed pointless.
I don’t know why I started building anyway. Probably some newfound professional enthusiasm. Every kid who grew up on the East End of Long Island worked in construction at least part of the time. The booms and busts would parallel the fortunes of Wall Street, though I could always get some kind of work, even in the slow times. The weather never stopped chewing up all the big wooden houses over in the estate section. And there were always a lot of rich people who were richer than everybody else, no matter what the economy was doing, and most of them had a house out here. I worked for them—or rather, I worked for the carpenters and contractors who lived off the trade.
I liked to work for a guy named Frank Entwhistle, who’d hired me thirty-five years before. His son, Frank Junior, now ran the crews. He needed a finish carpenter and cabinetmaker. Not an easy hire, now that most of the tradesmen, and for that matter waitresses, store clerks and bartenders, came from up island.
The only affordable housing locally was held like family heirlooms, and passed along to anyone bound to the dream of lost possibilities. I’d grown up with these people, and I recognized them around Town, going in and out of the hardware store or in the checkout line at the food market, but I didn’t know most of them anymore.
I worked for Frank more or less when I felt like it, and occasionally helped maintain his fleet of pickups and light-duty earthmovers.
Luckily he hadn’t asked me to set any ridge plates.
The cottage my father built had a big screened-in porch that faced the water, a living room of sorts with an oversized woodstove, a kitchen, a bathroom and two ten-by-ten bedrooms. I lived out on the porch most of the year so I could keep an eye on the Little Peconic Bay. After five years, it was still there, so the vigilance must be paying off. I kept a round table, a few chairs and a cot out there so I could eat and sleep and entertain a select guest list. People like Jackie Swaitkowski and Joe Sullivan. Maybe an occasional Jehovah’s Witness or a neighborhood dog Eddied bring home to share water and biscuits. A little hospitality to prove to God I wasn’t completely disillusioned with His creations.
The cottage was never the center of Oak Point social life. At least not when my father was around. People shied away, and my mother tucked herself into a corner of the living room with her knitting when she wasn’t waging a losing war on the sand and salty damp air that clung to the walls and soaked through cereal boxes and bed linens. My father wasn’t much with people, especially the ones who lived in the house he built. He ran almost entirely on momentum and the acid gas of a nearly uncontrollable fury. I never knew why he was the way he was. I never thought about it until he was gone. I do know how he died. Beaten to death in the smelly men’s room at the back of a dusky, threadbare bar in the Bronx. It was down the street from his weekday apartment. They never learned who did it. They never really tried. There were no witnesses, even though a half-dozen barflies and the bartender were there at the time. The police figured it was a pair of junior-grade wise guys passing through the neighborhood under their customary cloak of invincibility. They assumed it was provoked. They knew my father.
While I was growing up he spent most of his time in the City working on cars and oil burners while my mother, sister and I were in Southampton at the cottage on Oak Point. In those days the peninsula was a working class neighborhood, on the whole, made up of guys from the Bronx like my father and local service people and unheated, do-it-yourself summer retreats. But it was wooded and filled with East End light, and under the beneficence of the Little Peconic Bay, and, most of the time, free of my father’s corrosive wrath.
—
After making and breaking my share of good and bad habits over the years, I decided to stick with those already established, for better or worse. One of them was running along the sandy roads that thread their way along the bay coast and connect several North Sea neighborhoods. The day after Sullivan came to see me, Eddie and I were up early and moving west at a brisk pace. In the summer this was only possible in the morning. Later on the heat was too much. At least for a fifty-three-year-old guy with a full set of bad habits to counterbalance the benefits of regular exercise. Eddie might’ve stood it, but not happily.
An atomized mist had been sprayed around the scrub pines and oaks. A smooth cloud cover hung above the tree-tops. The sun had a few hours to burn it all off. Enough time for me to make it all the way to the Hawk Pond Marina where my friend Paul Hodges lived on his boat. My T-shirt was already getting soaked and I had to occasionally wipe off the sweat that slipped through my terry cloth headband. The chirping bugs from the wetlands were quiet now, having exhausted themselves during the night, but their diurnal relatives were up and about, buzzing around the forest and sticking themselves to my arms and legs. Eddie stopped a few times to pick a critter or two out of his fur. We shared some water from a bottle Velcroed to my waist and soldiered on.
“You burning some of that for me?” I asked Hodges as we approached down a slender swayback dock.
“I knew the smell of food would turn you up,” he said, standing in a cloud of smoke coming from the rusty Weber grill he’d set up on the dock next to a short mahogany gangplank. Some of the smoke was caught under the market umbrella that shaded a white plastic table and two canvas director chairs. Hodges was somewhere in his mid-sixties, big around the middle and heavy shouldered, with short, gnarly legs. His arms were formed out of thick bunches of twisted cable. He’d seen forty years of fishing boats and construction crews, which had turned his skin into the working side of a catcher’s mitt. Under the best of circumstances you wouldn’t have called Hodges a good-looking man. He looked more like a superannuated frog. The gray-white hair that burst out in lunatic clumps from his head and chin didn’t help.
Hodges had a pair of Shih Tzus he’d inherited from his wife. They treated Eddie like he was some sort of rock star, skittering up to him, all sharp-edged noise and wiggling fur. Eddie was magnanimous.
“Canadian bacon on the grill. Scrambled-up shit in the skillet. Season to taste. Want a beer with that?”
“Coffee’s fine.”
“Not if you’re drinking mine.”
He dumped our breakfast out on paper plates and went below for beverages and sesame seed bagels. The swan couple who freeloaded around the marina glided up to the side of the boat, hoping to get in on the action, which provoked Eddie and the Shih Tzus to go berserk. The swans floated away, deciding it wasn’t worth the trouble.
“And don’t come back,” Hodges called to them as he came through the companionway.
“I thought you were a bird lover.”
“In the sky or on the grill, exclusively.”
We ate and drank coffee under the big umbrella and watched the colorless sky turn blue overhead.
Hodges ran a bar and grill out of a dilapidated boathouse on the grounds of a commercial marina up in Sag Harbor. Most of the trade were professional fishermen or men and women who crewed on the charter boats during the season. The place was called the Pequot and it had a rickety deck out back where Hodges and his daughter Dotty, who helped him run the restaurant, ate most of their meals. At least until one afternoon when the deck collapsed while Hodges was finishin
g off a plate of the house special—baked, stuffed whitefish of unknown origin.
“How’s the rib cage?” I asked him.
“Almost healed. Give’s new meaning to breathing easier.”
“And the neck?”
“Good as it’s gonna get.”
“Can still make breakfast.”
“They want me to do more rehabilitation.”
“Some people are beyond that.”
“That’s what I tell em. How’s your butt?”
“My back. It was my back.”
“We’re a pair of sorry chewed-up fuckers, aren’t we. More eggs?”
I was still hot, but the breeze coming off the bay had started cooling me down. Hodges’s cuisine was sitting surprisingly well in my belly. All of which was eroding the desire to run back home. Hodges sat back in his chair with his coffee and looked at me intently. Something he rarely did.
“What?”
“I saw a friend of yours in Town yesterday. Jackie What’s-her-name.”
“Swaitkowski,” I told him.
“Looked like crap.”
“I know.”
“She said you’d been around.”
“I saw her before she went in for another round of surgery.”
“She’s not telling you,” said Hodges.
“Telling me what?”
“She’s not doing too good, but she won’t tell you.”
Jackie’s moods had always flown around the room like a drunken sparrow. But since all this she had trouble getting anything off the ground.
“I can’t do anything about that,” I told him.
Hodges grunted and looked up at the sky. The sun had done its work on the low clouds. The bay water reflected the color of the sky and the languid disposition of a midsummer’s day.
“Ross Semple’s got the Southampton cops working on the case,” I told him.
“Joe Sullivan to the rescue.”
“I guess. It’s sort of out of his league.”
“At least he’ll work the crap out of it,” said Hodges.
“He wants me to talk to the guy’s wife. The guy who got blown up.”
Hodges seemed to like that.
“Excellent. Get the old team back in action.”
“Sullivan and I are not a team. Not remotely.”
Hodges scraped a few spoonfuls of some indeterminate fried stuff up against the side of the pan and hovered over my plate.
“More?” he asked.
“Nah. No sense pushing my luck.”
He shrugged and served it to himself.
“You are full of shit, you know,” said Hodges.
“Just full, thanks.”
“You’re dying to stick your nose into this thing.”
“No, I’m not. I’m really not. I want to work on my addition, put up a little crown molding and make a few cabinets for Frank Entwhistle, and stay out of trouble. Stay about a million miles away from anything that even remotely looks, sounds or smells like trouble. For the rest of my damn life.”
“I guess that’s what Jackie’d want you to do. Stay out of trouble.”
“She’s alive.”
“That’s right.”
“Aw, Christ.”
“All you have to do is go talk to the guy’s wife,” he said, and folded his arms.
Eddie and the Shih Tzus clattered down the dock and jumped into the cockpit of Hodges’s boat, looking at us like we were supposed to provide the next segment of entertainment.
“One thing I can do,” I told Hodges.
“What’s that?”
“Have a little more of that coffee.”
Hodges went below deck to retrieve whatever was left in the antique pot. He poured us both a cup. I took a sip and looked up at the sea gulls cruising in random patterns, cool white marks of brilliance against the deep blue background.
“Fucking hell,” I told Hodges while I tried to drink the sludge from off the bottom of his crappy old percolator.
FOUR
IT WAS GRAY AGAIN the next morning. Warm, wet air was stuffed in all the enclosed spaces, and my skin stuck to everything it touched.
My car was a ’67 Pontiac Grand Prix with a modified 400-cubic-inch V8 and a four-speed manual transmission that my father and I had installed at great cost to the harmony of our already disharmonious household. A car this old and poorly conceived took a lot of effort to keep running, but replacing it seemed pointless. The body was free of rust or Bondo, though I needed to add a coat of paint over the gray-brown primer. The interior still smelled of leather, or at least I imagined it did. Maybe moldy leather.
That morning I built myself an extra-large mug of Belgian chocolate nut coffee from beans I’d bought at the corner coffee place in the Village. I liked it a little better than French vanilla or caramel classic, my other favorites. I poured it into an enormous insulated travel mug with a New York Yankees logo printed on the side.
I was wearing an off-white linen suit, last cleaned and pressed in the middle of the prior decade. It was still wrinkle-free, but a little musty. I was counting on natural forces to air it out. I put it together with a striped tie and an Egyptian pima cotton shirt that cost my ex-wife Abby a hundred dollars twenty years ago. It felt like liquid silk.
It was too hot to leave Eddie in the car, so I had to lock him up in the house. I felt like a rat, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to concentrate if I was worrying about him asphyxiating in the backseat of the car.
I left the radio on for him. Morning jazz on WLIU. Plus a full bowl of fresh water and a few Big Dog biscuits, even though he was officially more of a medium-sized dog. I still felt like a rat.
The linen suit, insulated Yankees mug and I climbed into the car and spun out of the driveway. The Grand Prix was an extreme example of an absurd era of automotive engineering. Heavy as a bulldozer, powered like a jetfighter and roomy as the penthouse suite at the Waldorf Astoria. Strictly mid-twentieth-century technology gone psychotic. A good car for my father. People in the Hamptons just averted their eyes.
I don’t know why my father bought the car in the first place. He didn’t have much money and was hardly much of a sport. I don’t remember ever seeing him laugh out loud, or express a materialistic desire for anything, mechanical or otherwise. He just showed up one day driving the thing. It looked almost new, unsullied and legally registered. My mother was suspicious.
When I was the head of R&D at one of the big hydrocarbon conglomerates, I drove a string of serenely perfect European sedans. They were better cars than the Grand Prix, but none of them had a center console big enough to stow a huge mug of Belgian chocolate nut coffee.
I dug a piece of paper with the directions Sullivan gave me out of my breast pocket and spread it out on the passenger seat. I wouldn’t have to look at it until I was in Riverhead, the tired old mill town at the crotch of the North and South Forks of Eastern Long Island. I knew how to get there, but I didn’t know much about the place. It used to be where local people could shop affordably for things like groceries and Barcaloungers, but strip development up island and general prosperity had eroded that role. Now it was just a little urban barge afloat on an ocean of wealth and aspiration. Not a likely place to lodge a high-tech financial consultant.
To get there, you had to go west from Southampton, cross the Shinnecock Canal and head up Route 24, past an enormous stucco duck and through Flanders, another raggedy old town that looked like it had wandered away from somewhere in rural Alabama. When I hit town the directions sent me up an incongruous four-lane divided highway toward Long Island Sound. As I crossed the river that named the town, I looked east toward Southampton but saw only gray translucence enveloping the Great Peconic Bay.
To either side of me were flat open fields. Huge irrigation machines were spraying geysers over the crops. Banged-up pickup trunks were out there, too, throwing up dusty contrails. Before I turned off the highway I noticed it was a sod farm. But not like the ones in Oklahoma. They were growing instant lawns. Just
cut it up, haul it off to Biffy and Foo-Foo’s, roll it out and the automatic sprinklers do the rest. I wondered if they also harvested cappuccino or BMW convertibles somewhere in the area.
In a few more turns I was on her street. It was an arid subdivision, sparsely developed. The curbs and asphalt were fresh, but the common areas were weedy and poorly graded. The lots had all been clear-cut, realtor signs providing the only visual relief. I felt like I’d just toured the United States and ended up on the outskirts of Des Moines. I hoped the Grand Prix didn’t frighten the neighborhood kids.
Her house was a huge white two-story colonial with black shutters, a two-car garage and a professionally manicured lawn, cut to the length of a putting green. I waited a long time for someone to answer the doorbell. I rang it twice to make sure it was working.
The door opened a crack.
“Yes.”
“Mrs. Eldridge?”
“No.”
“Is she home?”
“Who’s this?”
“My name’s Sam Acquillo. I’m here about her husband’s death.”
“She know you?”
“No.”
“You have to call the attorney.”
“I’m with the police.”
It was quiet for a moment.
“You have to call the attorney.”
The door shut softly and latched with a barely audible click. I rang the doorbell again. A few minutes later, the door opened.
“Yes.”
“What’s the attorney’s name?”
“Gabriel Szwit. S-z-w-i-t.”
“Here in Riverhead?”
“In the phone book. That’s why I spelled it.”
The door closed again. I spun on my heel and walked back to the Grand Prix with an air of cool self-possession. I didn’t want the neighbors to see me sweat. That’s okay, Mrs. Big Shot Widow. Just wait. I’ll be back.
I drove to a phone booth on a far corner of a gas station in Flanders and called information. Mr. Szwit was in Southampton Village. I called Sullivan.
