Bound for the Outer Banks (21 page)

“Fascinating,” said Ella, secretly wishing Chief was seaweed and she was a clam about now. Clearly it had been too long since she had been close to a hot guy. “When it’s not being used to heat up clams, what exactly is its purpose? Does it have any redeeming qualities which is also what I wonder sometimes about wasps and cockroaches?” Ella thought, Great way to be a negative Nancy. The guy’s an Indian. He probably was raised on the philosophy that everything on Earth has a greater purpose, including cockroaches.

“As a matter of fact it does have a few redeeming qualities,” Chief answered. He held up another larger wad of the Sargassum weed and fingered through the slimy leaves and branches. “It’s a hideout for sea life like this little pipefish.” Chief pulled out a long thin creature with a snout like a tiny, long tube.

Ella was wide eyed. She had no idea that such alien type creatures lived in the stinky brown seaweed she’d avoided during earlier walks down the beach. She squatted down, flat footed, with her hips resting on her heels like a curious kid, next to a large pile of the Gulfweed. She began picking through the large clumps of miniature tree like masses. Chief knelt down across the stringy pile and smiled at Ella’s childlike wonder.

Ella gasped and said, “Look!” She carefully untangled one of the ocean’s most curious creatures from the branches.

“Hippocampus,” stated Chief. “
Hippos
from the ancient Greek for horse and
Kampos
for sea monster.”

Ella held up the tiny seahorse and proudly showed it to Chief.

“Now you know some of the many uses for seaweed,” lectured Chief. “But I have to cut the lesson short because we have to cook or the hungry masses may turn on us.”

“I can be your sous chef!” said Ella happily, discarding her deceased, partially dried out seahorse and scooping up batches of Sargassum weed for the clambake.

Chief smiled and shook his head as he began to gather his own batch. He knew Ella’s entire story. Dead parents. No relatives to speak of. Scraping out an existence in Biloxi. A relationship of almost two years with Dante Vitali and over a year of witness protection being dragged around the U.S. He was surprised that she still had any joy. Lacey had spoken highly of her new friend and was hoping that she’d take a liking to Manteo and stick around for a while. Chief hated to see Lacey be disappointed. He loved his sister-in-law like his own sibling. At first his and Samoset’s parents weren’t thrilled that Samoset was marrying a non-tribal member, but in Lacey’s charismatic fashion, she won their hearts as well as Sam’s.

Chief and Ella returned to the pit with their arms full of Sargassum weed. It smelled fishy and Ella shuddered to think what her chest and arms would smell like when she emptied the cargo from her grasp.

Chief tossed the seaweed in a pile next to the pit and Ella followed suit. He then took two cinder blocks lying next to the pit and sat them on either end of the rock bed. Ella saw his muscles flex when he lifted the heavy blocks, heaving them over the lip of the pit, created by the evacuated sand. He then took a barbecue grate and carried it to the surf to rinse it off. Ella sat by the pit and dug her toes in the sand, feeling the heat rise from the stones. Chief still had his shirt off and as he approached, swinging the dripping grate, Ella tried to concentrate on the little mounds of sand she was creating with her toes, but she couldn’t help sneaking peeks of Chief’s chiseled body.

Ella watched closely as he positioned the grate on top of the cinder blocks to form a table. He leaned over, smiled at Ella, and began to lift bundles of seaweed and scatter them across the grate. “Behold the clambake process.”

“My parents used to go to clambakes, but I was always with a babysitter. I always wondered what they did at one. I thought they just sat around literally watching clams bake. I had no idea they were having so much fun.”

“Now you know,” said Chief. “O.K. sous chef, you’re on. The first layer is potatoes.”

Ella stood and looked over into the two bushel baskets next to her. She began doling out the potatoes to Chief and he systematically placed them in a line on top of the bed of seaweed. When all the potatoes had been placed, Chief scattered bundles of seaweed on top of the potatoes and told Ella that corn was the next layer. She handed two ears at a time to Chief and he placed them in two parallel lines down the length of the grate. Ella was thinking that she would have just scattered the potatoes and corn across the seaweed willy-nilly, but she was sure that more vegetables were able to fit on the grate because of the way Chief positioned them. This was why she was merely a sous chef she thought.

While Chief was scattering on the next layer of Sargassum weed, he informed Ella that there was a large Tupperware container of kielbasa in a cooler on the sand next to the rear of Sam’s truck. Ella hopped up obediently and fetched the container from the cooler. Chief couldn’t help following her toned body, clad only in a bikini, to her destination. After she retrieved the kielbasa from the cooler, Chief went back to the job at hand. He took the container from Ella and dumped all the sausages out on the bed of seaweed. The last thing he wanted was Ella grasping and handing him a sausage one at a time. He found himself attracted to the poor, little rich girl, but he told himself it was probably White Knight’s Syndrome which they had been warned about when entering The Bureau.

“I had no idea there were so many more ingredients in a clambake than clams,” Ella said, smiling sweetly at Chief.

“Unfortunately if clams were the only ingredient, the crowd would still be really hungry, and after an afternoon of volleyball and swimming, they might turn zombie and try to eat us. When I was in Army Ranger School we burned so many calories and had so little food that you were convinced you’d cannibalize someone if they died, kind of like the Uruguayan Rugby Team.”

Ella wasn’t familiar with the tragic story of the plane crash involving a national rugby team which ate the crash victims in order to survive, but her eyes lit up and she said, “Now the bumper stickers that say ‘Rugby players eat their dead’ have a whole new meaning.”

Chief looked up and said, “I had one of those. I played rugby at West Point when I wasn’t playing football.” He then playfully chomped his teeth together at Ella.

Ella giggled. She liked Chief. Not only was he all kinds of handsome with a rocking body, he had a wonderful sense of humor.

“Now for the clams.” Chief lifted the burlap bag and slowly poured the clams on top of the blanket of seaweed covering the kielbasa. He gently spread them in an even layer and covered them with a top layer of Sargassum weed. Then Chief took the empty burlap sack to the surf and dipped it in the water. This time when he returned to the pit Ella never took her eyes off him. He covered the entire stack with the wet burlap. Ella could see the steam start to rise.

“Would you like to go with me to wash the seaweed and clam smell off?” asked Chief.

“Absolutely,” said Ella. “If you get really hungry later, the last thing I want to smell like is food.”

Chief smiled, but again warned himself that Miss Eleanor Augusta Barrantine was his charge and not to confuse the need to protect her with desire.

Ella and Chief frolicked in the water for a few minutes laughing and talking. Ella then waded back to the ladies lounging in the chairs on the edge of the water. She patted her face with her nondescript white towel from the cottage.

“Well, well missy. I see you’ve made a new friend,” teased Lacey.

“We were just talking,” said Ella.

“Ah huh,” said Lacey. “That’s what everybody says right before they say the next infamous phrase, ‘I’m pregnant.’”

All the girls squealed except for Ella, who rat tailed Lacey’s thigh with the edge of her towel.

“Ow!” Lacey howled through laughter.

“Believe it or not we were just talking,” Ella insisted. Although she knew in her heart she was flirting with Chief. Anyway, she needed the practice. Ella had not been with a man since she’d been placed in protective custody. Soon Dante’s trial would be over and she would be thrust back into the dating world. She was rusty and as far as she was concerned a little innocuous flirting with Chief was fun and certainly safe because soon he would return to The Bureau when they felt he had recovered from the trauma of Brad’s shooting. In addition, soon Ella would receive a notice at the post office of her next transfer date or she would be whisked off because the trial would finally begin.

Desiree looked out over the water and asked, “Who’s that?”

Lacey pulled herself upright to get a better look at the young woman who’d swum out to where Chief was still treading water looking out at the horizon. “That’s Elise Winslet. She was a hostess at Pinkie’s this summer. That little slut came back from graduate school for Labor Day weekend. She had to have known Chief was in town. That’s the only reason she’d come back. She’s always talking about how The Banks are so PRAH-VINCH-AL with a stupid valley girl accent.”

Desiree asked if Chief and Elise were dating.

“She wishes!” scoffed Lacey. “Last year after The Peacock Ball she kept coming on to him and giving him glimpses of her fancy lace bra and her boobs in the corner.”

Tanqueray piped up. “She does have good boobs.”

“Hush Tanqueray!” scolded her sister.

“Anyway they hooked up, but I told Sam his brother better not get tangled up with her because I was not going to have a bitch for a sister-in-law.”

Ella figured she’d ask an innocent sounding question because she wanted to know all about Elise Winslet, not understanding how she could have such pangs of jealousy already regarding a man she barely knew. “How old is she?” Ella asked anyone who would answer.

“Given her lack of ass-fold she can’t be more than early twenties,” said Tanqueray.

“Ass-fold?” Ella had never heard the term.

Tanqueray explained, “Yeah, you know. When you suddenly feel one day something on the back of your thigh near your butt when you walk or worse yet if it’s hot and you suddenly feel the sweat between your thigh and the lower part of your butt. You realize that your old perky, up-in-the-air-off-the-back-of-your-thigh butt is now history and that your butt has now fallen and is resting on the back of your thigh. That, my friend, is ass-fold.”

The hatred for Elise Winslet swelled inside of Ella. She hated Elise for not having ass-fold. She hated the fact that she clearly remembered walking on a hot, humid day from the Hard Rock back to her bungalow carrying two uniforms to alter, and for the first time feeling contact between the top of her thigh and the curve of her buttock. That bitch, she thought. She also knew she hated Elise Winslet because she’d had Chief in a way Ella probably never would. Yes it was now official. She hated Elise and the fact that Lacey didn’t like her either made her hate Elise even more. She wasn’t sure why but that’s just how it was with girls. Ella was desperate to stop thinking about both ass-fold and Elise Winslet. She quickly turned to the ladies and asked, “Desiree and Tanqueray, I know you’re sick of answering this question but exactly how did you get your names? Please humor me.”

Tanqueray and Desiree had been asked the question countless times in their lives, but Tanqueray quickly started telling the tale since she could tell Belle Butler was clearly upset about the whole Chief and Elise cavorting thing. Tanqueray secretly wished she could take away the comment about Elise’s boobs because if Lacey didn’t like Elise then she didn’t either. That’s just how it was with girls.

“My mom isn’t pure white trash like our names might indicate. It’s just that since she was able to talk she always named her dolls Desiree. She doesn’t remember when she first heard it either. She just knew if she ever had a little girl she wanted to name her Desiree and if she had a boy she liked the name Desmond.” Tanqueray lifted her palm toward Ella in a “stop in the name of love” kind of gesture. She continued, “I know. I know it’s weird. Anyway, after the ultrasound, of course, she found out we were twin girls.”

Desiree interrupted, “We’re fraternal. That’s why I’m prettier than her.”

Tanqueray cut her eyes at her sister and said flatly, “Very funny. ANYWAY, when Mom and Dad got home from the ultrasound, Mom sat down in her chair and started trying to think up other girl names. Dad had gone into the kitchen and poured himself a stiff drink. Then he decided to bring the whole bottle of gin into the living room and sat it down on a little table between his chair my Mom’s. The second she saw Tanqueray on that bottle of gin she thought it was Providence.”