An Ocean Without a Shore

by Scott Spencer

  As Thaddeus says? Did she not know the line belonged to Hemingway? Had Thaddeus taken credit for it? My god! The ideal marriage. Let no man intrude upon this perfect union.

  Jennings emerged from the hardware store with a small red and blue box of dust masks.

  “They jumped the prices,” Jennings said, getting into the car and closing the door with a maximum amount of noise. It wasn’t meant to be angry, it was just how he closed a door. “But Oscar gave me the old price.”

  “Oscar’s a good guy,” said Grace.

  “Hometown boys stick together,” Jennings said. “Right, Kip?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said.

  Abruptly, Grace pulled out of her parking spot and wedged her way into the flow of traffic, which was moving slowly. By the time we were close to Leyden’s center, we were barely inching forward. Finally, we arrived at the source of the traffic jam. Three middle-aged men stood in the middle of the road soliciting donations for the Windsor County Volunteer Emergency Services. They were a matched set, burly, with long hair, flannel shirts, suspenders, blue jeans, and black rubber boots.

  Jennings powered down his window and called out, “Hey, Itchy, what’s the what?”

  Itchy pretended to adjust his glasses when in fact he was giving Jennings the finger.

  Grace scooped out quarters and dimes from the car’s ashtray.

  “That’s not going to do it, Grace,” Jennings said, reaching into his own pocket, pulling out a couple of bills, and handing them to her. “Shit gets noticed.”

  And recorded, too, it seemed. A woman in a print dress and ski jacket stood to one side, and as a car in front of us passed the three guys with their buckets without dropping in a dime, the woman bent at the knee and photographed the back of the Infiniti with her Polaroid. When the photo emerged, she shook it dry and dropped it into an open guitar case at her feet.

  “Who’s she?” I asked. “Madame Defarge, keeping track of people who don’t give so they can be dealt with later?”

  “It’s always the ones in fancy cars who don’t give,” said Jennings.

  We made our way to Riverview Road, with its wrought-iron gates and gingerbread gatehouses, the stone walls, the Corinthian columns, the security cameras perched like buzzards in the trees. Orkney had no gate, no gatehouse, and only a few flowers, the hardy ones that had made it through layers of leaf litter to show their shower-cap faces to the sun. The driveway had fallen onto hard times, and Grace’s car shuddered as if we were driving across an immense washboard. Suddenly, she braked and pointed to an area off to the right. “Your acres would be right there, Kip. If you want, you can walk around, check them out, then come to the house in a while and I’ll see what I can do about lunch.”

  Startled, dismissed, I got out of her car and stood there with the wind whipping at the cuffs of my trousers, and watched Grace and Jennings drive toward a sharp turn in the driveway and disappear from my sight. So here they were, my mute, innocent acres, the trees’ crowns moving with the wind, their roots sunk deep into the earth.

  I knew a few things about trees, learned in my youth during weekend trips with my grandfather to his musty little cabin near a trout-rich Michigan lake, near the town of Farwell. Grandfather’s name was Leslie Woods. He lived in the pricey Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe Farms, in a Tudor mansion overlooking Lake St. Clair with more than enough nature to satisfy what seemed to me his rather glancing appreciation of the great outdoors. If it was solitude he was seeking in that musty shack in the middle of nowhere, he surely could have gotten his fill of alone-time at home, with his wife long deceased and his only son, my father, permanently out of favor for marrying my mother, who he considered a gold-digging social climber. Grandfather showed no interest in either of my two older sisters, but at last my mother did something right in his eyes by giving birth to a boy. From the very beginning of my life, Grandfather paid attention to me. You would have thought my parents would have told the old tyrant to take his model trains and autographed footballs and shove them up his ass, but they submitted to his selective largesse, my mother grudgingly, my father abjectly. I adored my father but he was not strong. Raised affluently, he now lived with a wife and three children in a two-story house of about twelve hundred square feet, 88 Hydrangea Court, three little bedrooms, one bath, zero privacy. I would have traded an arm for my own private bathroom, and I would have rather been struck blind than to ever again see my sister tormentingly holding her nose upon entering the washroom after I had used it—which she would do even if I’d only taken a leak or combed my hair.

  After bouncing around a few retail jobs, my dad was fortunate enough to reconnect with Joe Schultz, an old army buddy with textile factory contacts in Hong Kong. Together they opened Hilary Custom Shirts, called after my father’s given name. Dad and Joe worked out of the old Michigan Central Station, carefully measuring the necks, arms, chests, and torsos of their customers and sending the measurements off to Hong Kong to be made. They would pick up the shirts in their blue and white boxes at the Wayne County Airport and hand them to the men, not exactly saying that either my father or Schultz had handcrafted the shirts, but not averse to giving the impression that they had. Even after fifteen years of exile from his father’s affections, ever hopeful Hilary Woods still believed that one day he’d be welcome again in Grosse Pointe Farms, and he saw Grandfather’s interest in me as an early promising sign that the old man was slowly undergoing a change of heart. Alas, Dad was dead wrong. My grandfather favored me out of boredom and loneliness and, really, as a way of reminding my father of all he had thrown away by marrying my mother. Beyond that, the old man’s supposed fortune, made brokering cement and stone, was wholly dependent on the auto industry, and when the auto industry faltered, and the town took a nosedive, Grandfather’s coffers were soon empty. After he died, the government seized his property to offset five years of unpaid taxes.

  But we had no idea he was living so close to the edge of financial ruin. To my family on Hydrangea Court, he was like a king and I was encouraged to be close to the old man, which meant attending hockey games, boxing matches—he owned a tenth of a middleweight named Billy Diaz—and spending an occasional weekend at that cabin, where there was no phone, no TV, no radio, no music, and the lightbulbs were so dim that reading was impossible after dark. Much of the first day was spent making the place habitable—sweeping out the droppings, the spiderwebs, the leaves and acorns, the occasional weightless corpse of a bird that had found its way in but could not find its way out, and which lay like a mournful shadow on my hand. The cabin was filled with booze, locked away in his absence. Usually, he grabbed a bottle and wandered into his bedroom, and that would be the last I’d see of him for four or five hours. He had come there for the silence and the silence reigned. There was only wind, birdsong, the occasional plane passing overhead. While Grandfather rested (or drank himself to sleep) I took walks in the woods, careful not to get lost. There were few books in the cabin, but there were wildlife guides, bird books, and The Collins Guide to Trees, by Norma and George Collins. Their illustrations never quite matched the trees in those Michigan woods but nevertheless I learned how to recognize shape, bark, and leaf, and I still remembered my lessons.

  And so I wandered through my soon-to-be-acquired acres and spoke their names aloud, as you would incantate the names of saints—locust, oak, spruce, hemlock, Douglas fir, maple, ash, wild cherry.

  Chapter 6

  Cozy and Threatening

  I stood now before a white oak, quercus alba, its grayish bark like the skin of an elephant, with a bumpy carpet of acorns scattered beneath it.

  “See this tree over here?” a voice behind me asked. Startled, I turned to see Jennings. “That’s your honey locust. My father planted it.” He patted the tree’s reddish bark, like a trainer stroking a prized horse. “This one’s young, one of the last Dad put in the ground.”

  Jennings stood close to me now, cozy and threatening at once. “People treat them like they wa
s weeds, but Dad thought they were a good tree. Not a great tree. But a good one. Fast growing, good for fence posts, and they drop these pods the deer really like. It’s a delicacy for deer. Gracey won’t let hunters in so you’re going to see a lot of whitetails around here, whole herds of them hanging around like a bunch of bums.” He smiled his clean, confident smile.

  He was carrying something that looked dug out of the earth. It was about two feet wide, one foot high, made of wood. When I looked more closely I saw it was an old radio, a Philco, with two black plastic knobs, one for volume, the other for moving the square orange and black dial, which was beneath its plastic cover. Next to the dial was another square, the same size, this one covered in fabric, or what was left of the fabric, where the speaker was housed.

  “Does it work?” I asked.

  “Don’t know. We shall see.” He looked at it fondly. “Every time I go poking around these woods I think of Dad. He used to take me with him, I can still hear him say ‘Son, we are going prospecting just like the forty-niners of old.’ First time out we found a spoon worth three hundred dollars. Solid silver. Paul Revere, I think he made it himself. I was so excited. I was always asking When we going prospecting? But Dad was usually too tired. Man, they worked that guy, they just wore him out like a pair of shoes. But we’d go out some Sundays. We found coins. Once we found some old stock certificates, really beautiful, with all this scrollwork. I thought it was the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Dad got a good laugh on that.”

  Jennings put the old radio down for a moment and flexed his fingers, over and over, as if he were milking a cow. He had long fingers, perfectly proportioned. You could look at those hands and think, Yes, I get it, I can see how this man was once beautiful. He may have sensed what I was thinking because he smiled at me, not in a friendly way.

  “This is a beautiful spot,” he said.

  “Yes, it really is.”

  “I don’t understand how you city people find out about this place. I don’t know jack about the city, but you guys swoop up here and land in the most beautiful place.”

  “Well, back in the day, Thaddeus used to work at a place called B. Altman, and he met Gene Woodard, who worked there, too, and Woodard invited Thaddeus and Grace up for the weekend.”

  “Them,” said Jennings with an unpleasant laugh. “They’re long gone. Some guy from television’s got that place now and all he’s got is Mexicans working the place for two bucks an hour.”

  “The Woodards are gone? What happened? Did their money run out?”

  “Money,” he said. “I find it really weird. I mean money is crazy, isn’t it? A bunch of paper, or maybe just numbers on a screen somewhere—and you get a piece of God’s own earth. Blows my mind. I know, this ain’t the stuff you’re supposed to think about except for kids, right? But if being a grown-up means you believe that some numbers on a screen gives you permission to say to the whole world that you own this”—he waved his arm at the treetops, the sky—“then I don’t know what to tell you. I’ll take being weird over believing something like that.”

  Jennings walked slowly and I followed him. We traipsed through weeds and vines, past towering hemlock. The wind was up and the clouds moved swiftly; the daylight came and went, as if a hand were moving across the sun.

  “This will be your north border,” Jennings said. “I mean once it’s all paid for.” He said paid as if there were something unclean about it. We came to the remains of a stone wall like a set of aged teeth that followed the undulations of the land. I was abreast of him now and my feet got tangled in a swirl of vines. I made the mistake of trying to power through, impatiently yanking my foot forward, but the vines were as stubborn as steel and I fell forward. Jennings grabbed me beneath both arms and held me suspended for a moment before setting me straight on my feet.

  “You right?” he asked.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  My armpits ached from where he had grabbed me. I felt foolish and weak—not only for having lost my footing but from the pain of being caught. Hard hands. His touch was still on me, as if I were clay. The cawing of crows. The zizzing sound of car wheels on the distant blacktop. The tattered sound of music disappearing with the car. The desiccated crunch of winter’s carpet of casualties beneath our feet as we walked.

  “So pretty soon this land belongs to you,” he said. “But you should know—it won’t really be yours. No one owns land.”

  “Except legally,” I said.

  “Money money money money money money money,” he said, his voice getting quieter and softer, his head shaking back and forth.

  “I didn’t make the world, Jennings. I just live here, okay?”

  “So, is this like an investment for you?”

  “No.”

  He smiled, as if he were used to hearing a bunch of lies from people just like me. I resisted the impulse to amplify my no, and to tell him I was buying the land to help a friend out of a jam.

  “We can keep an eye on things for you, if you want,” Jennings said.

  “We?”

  “Me. My kids. Last thing you want is to come here and see someone’s put a deer stand up in one of your trees and left a bunch of beer cans and candy wrappers as a thank you note. Thing is, if folks know we’re looking after you, that way they’ll know. All the folks in the big houses don’t realize it, but the hometown boys know everything that happens around here and if a place is empty or there’s some land no one’s taking care of, we know, we all know. We see it all. You know.” He lifted a finger, thick and battered. “Like red-tailed hawks, right? Riding the thermals. It’s our world, it’s how we prosper.” He laughed. “Not that anyone’s doing much prospering, but you understand.”

  “You really think these trees need guarding?” I said. I felt queasy. We were stopped now, but it was as if he were closing in on me. Whatever egalitarian impulses I’d had as a young man had atrophied within the confines of my cossetted New York life and, shamefully, at this point I had very little contact with workers who weren’t obliged to be polite to me. Cabdrivers, doormen, sales clerks, prostitutes, painters, plasterers, plumbers, electricians, bartenders, tennis teachers, personal trainers, waiters, concierges, bellmen, housekeepers, receptionists, tour guides—with them I was open and easy, friendly and kind, curious about their lives and no need to call me Mr. Woods, Kip’s my name. Good old Kip, friendly Kip, secure in the knowledge that my position was impregnable for no other reason than sooner or later I would be writing the check or handing over the credit card or peeling off one or two bills from the knot of twenties and fifties I always had in my front pocket. All that bonhomie was shaped by the fact that I was the boss, the client, or the customer. When was the last time I’d spoken to someone who lived paycheck to paycheck and our material inequality was irrelevant? In high school, and maybe never since. But here with Jennings I was nothing more than some stranger from the city walking around these soggy, brambly acres in the wrong shoes.

  But wait, I thought. He does want to be paid. I relaxed, the way you do when you realize that you get off the train at the next stop.

  “So yeah,” I said. “You and your kids? If you want to look after the place when I buy it? That would be great.”

  “Okay then,” he said.

  “How much do I pay you for this?”

  “Not much. We can work it out.”

  “No, let’s settle on a price. It’s cleaner that way.”

  He smiled. “Okay. Cleanliness. It’s next to godliness. How about five hundred dollars?”

  “Five hundred?”

  “A year,” he said.

  I was taken aback by the modesty of his proposal, but I could not resist the impulse to close. “All right,” I said, offering my hand to seal the deal. His hand was like stone.

  Chapter 7

  Stoned

  We finally had a date for the closing on the property, at the end of June, on a Wednesday afternoon. It was not a good time for me to be away from Adler, but I’d al
ready had to cancel the closing twice. I took Amtrak up, so the 110 minutes riding north could be used productively, writing a long memo to Ken summarizing what I’d so far learned about Sears.

  One of the traders at Adler was buying a lot of Sears stock and wanted to load up on more. Sears’s earnings were at that point well north of the disaster they became, but Ken nevertheless did not believe the board’s estimates of where profits and stock prices were heading—it was his guess that things were a lot worse than the board was letting on. I was sent out to visit Sears stores in malls and on Main Streets across the country, starting in Honolulu and ending in Bangor, Maine. I took notes, recorded testimony from employees, and photographed the countless clues I found to suggest mounting infirmity—plastic buckets beneath leaks in the ceiling, stained carpets such as you would find in a fleabag hotel, a cracked window repaired with masking tape, Kenmore washing machines three years out of date but still on display, a Kenmore refrigerator ostensibly for sale but plugged in via a tangled network of extension cords and being used to cool sandwiches and sodas by the store’s cost-conscious (i.e., underpaid) employees.

  I went over my notes as the train moved north. Most of the passengers chose to sit on the side that offered a continuous view of the Hudson, but I preferred the other side, where you could see human life unfolding. Little river towns, many not yet touched by real estate speculators. Junked cars, Irish saloons, cluttered yards, chained dogs. Normal life. I felt like a ghost longing to be corporeal. A little town slid by, replaced by a marshy pond choked with cattails. It was a lovely day out there, sunlight diamonds sparkled on the water, the sky so still that it looked like pottery. I drifted away from my work.

  In the New York Times. I read a piece about the guy who was the architect of Clinton’s proposal regarding gays in the military. Everyone from Morris to ACT UP to the guy skating backward down Hudson Street in a wedding dress thought Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was demeaning, while the homophobes thought Bill Clinton was giving people a license to commit sodomy. I was one of the few who thought Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was a decent idea—I liked the respect for privacy in Clinton’s executive order. Yes, it was sort of mealymouthed, but not all of us are temperamentally suited to uncloseting ourselves. From Stonewall on, I looked upon gay activists with admiration of the most distant sort—the way people thought of the Vietnamese monks who set themselves on fire to protest the war. And once AIDS became a reality, not being seen as a homosexual was even more important to me. I didn’t want anyone—not in my family, or in business, or at breakfast at the Regency—wondering what microbes might be swimming around in my bloodstream, or if I was practicing safe sex. Oh! Even the two-word phrase safe sex was a kind of verbal saltpeter—not to mention a total and excruciating invasion of privacy. My privacy was paramount, though it made me unheroic. Not everyone can be a hero; if everyone was heroic, then heroism would be nothing but doing what was expected and we would have no actual heroes. You understand?