Hale's Point (6 page)

“I don’t understand how music could have interfered with your
grades.”

“We were playing at a couple of the local clubs—”

“We?”

“I had this… this friend.” He turned the airplane over in
his hands and inspected it with a distant expression. “This guy Chet. We met
while we were both taking flying lessons. Turned out he played guitar, too.
Anyway, this was back when there were still a lot of coffeehouses around, and
it was great for untried talent. If you hung around long enough, you got to go
onstage. After a while they started actually booking us.
R.H.
thought it was unseemly. It was okay to take piano lessons, he said. Every
well-rounded man should be able to appreciate music. But to actually spend the
time and energy to get good at it, and then get up in front of an audience …
There was something terribly low-class about that. It was not the Hale’s Point
way.”

“Hence the military-school threat,” Harley prompted.

“Hence the bolting. Chet, too. We put our thumbs out on the
expressway one night and never looked back.”

“Where did you go?”

“New York. The Village. We played in clubs for a while.
Almost got a record deal, but it didn’t work out, and we ended up quitting that
scene and getting real jobs. Then we went to Miami, but that… didn’t really
work out, either. Things kind of fell apart there. Then I ended up in Alaska.”

“Chet stayed in Miami? Did you have a falling-out? What
happened?”

He put the airplane back, his expression grim. “Wouldn’t
interest you.” Somehow Harley suspected that it would. Summoning a more
lighthearted demeanor, he turned and bowed formally in Harley’s direction,
supporting himself with the cane. “My adolescence in a nutshell. Your turn now.”

Right.
“In a nutshell? I had a lot
less stuff and a lot less angst.”

“You got through your adolescence without angst?”

“Oh, there was angst, just not your fancy,
wanting-to-be-fulfilled kind. It was more your garden-variety,
struggling-to-survive kind.” She bowed her head, indicating she was done.

“That’s it? That’s not a very vivid description.”

“How about this—unrelenting squalor. Is that vivid enough?”

“Come on—I’m serious.”

“Unfortunately, so am I.” That was as much as she would tell
him. The rest was none of his business. Or was she just ashamed? It didn’t
matter, since she had no desire to relive it just to satisfy his curiosity. He
walked over to the bed and looked down at her, his expression thoughtful. “Come
down to the kitchen and have a Coke with me.”

“Can’t. I’ve got to get ready for my afternoon run. Besides,
we don’t have any sodas. Just juices and mineral water.”

He grunted and sat on the bed near her feet, bedsprings
squealing. She tried to curl her legs up to make room for him, but he rested a
strong hand on one of her calves to still her. “That’s all right, I’ve got
room.” The hand traced a warm path down to her ankle and then wrapped around
first one small foot and then the other. “Your feet are cold. They shouldn’t be
cold on such a hot day.”

The warmth from his hand felt wonderful. Nevertheless, she
sat up, and he took the hint, removing the hand. She said, “You know, I can’t
help but wonder…. It strikes me that the real world must have come as something
of a shock to a poor little rich boy from Hale’s Point.”

He grinned. “Rebel without a charge card. Once I realized
there wouldn’t be any big music career, and moved to Miami, I decided to start
saving up for an airplane so I could go into the air cargo business. Took a few
years to get the bread together. I drove a forklift, pumped gas, patched roofs,
cut sugarcane. I caught fish, I cleaned fish, I canned fish—I still can’t stand
the sight of it.”

“What did you do in your spare time?”

“I worked some more. Usually I was holding down two full-time
jobs, sometimes one full-time and two part-time. Till I’d gotten together four
thousand dollars for a used Piper Comanche. Man, I was proud of that plane.”

“And now you’ve got your own aviation business in Alaska,”
she said.

“I’m really just a bush pilot. Only now I’ve got a bunch of
other pilots working for me, ‘cause there got to be too much business to handle
alone.”

“I’m afraid I’m a little fuzzy on the definition of ‘bush pilot.’
Do you fly people or cargo?”

“Both. Mostly cargo. Alaska’s full of remote, inaccessible
areas, and they rely on us to fly in all their food, medical supplies, lumber,
everything. And then we handle all kinds of passengers—surveyors, explorers,
guys who want to parachute onto the North Pole in their skis… all kinds.”

“Do you like it?”

He squinted into the sunlight from the window, his eyes
igniting from within. “No. Not anymore. I mean, I like that it’s my own
business, and it’s a simple one. Doesn’t take some great high master of
business administration to figure out how to make money from it. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“Everyone tells me I should be reveling in my success, but I
don’t know—it’s worn thin on me. It’s taken the pleasure out of flying, for one
thing. I used to think it’d be great, being able to fly for a living. Buying
that first beat-up old plane was the biggest rush in the world. Now I buy a new
one just about every year and don’t think twice about it. I’ve got six of them.
Seven, including my Cessna
Skywagon
.” He grinned self-consciously,
as if he’d forgotten something. “Scratch the
Skywagon
.
It’s just six.”

“What happened to the
Skywagon
?”

He reached over her for the guitar, took it and his cane, and
started toward the door. “Some of it’s in my leg.”

Harley stared openly, first at his leg, and then, to see if
he might be kidding, at his face. She could tell he wasn’t kidding.

“There might be some left in my chest, I’ve lost track. The
rest is scattered over the side of a mountain halfway between Anchorage and
Fairbanks.” Standing at the door, he said, “Sure you won’t join me downstairs?”
She shook her head. He turned to leave. “Don’t forget your stopwatch.”

Chapter 3

Tucker sat on the low stone wall
overlooking the beach,
having a cigarette and watching Harley returning from her run. The late-afternoon
sun, low in the sky, cast the boulders on the rocky beach into sharp relief.
The sea air mingled with the lavender and thyme growing along the stone wall to
create a familiar perfume, the scent of his mother, who had planted this
border. It was Harley’s scent, too, he realized, breathing it in. At least, the
lavender part. Her shampoo, or maybe her soap.

As she approached, he noted that she ran barefoot and kept to
the wet, pebbly sand at the water’s edge. He watched the muscles in her legs
flex and contract; grace came from strength, and she was obviously
well-conditioned. Fanatically so, it seemed.

She was driven and she was humorless, but there was something
about her. As she crossed the property next door—the Tilton place, or used to
be—she waved to someone hidden from his view by a stand of gnarled pines. She
passed by Tucker without looking up and seeing him, and then, instead of
stopping, she disappointed him by continuing east. Her pony tail bobbed with
each step; from time to time she squirted water into her mouth from the plastic
bottle in her hand. As she ran out onto the jetty, her stride never altering,
he lit a new cigarette off the old, stubbed the butt out on the stone wall, and
slipped it into the pocket of his T-shirt.

From behind the stand of pines, a man emerged, obviously the
person Harley had waved to. Tucker stood to see him better, squinting through
his sunglasses. He was young, about twenty, tanned, with sun-streaked hair. His
feet were bare and he wore a white polo shirt and khaki shorts, in the deep
pockets of which tennis balls bulged. The
Tiltons
used to have two clay courts in the backyard; looked like they still did. The
young man stood next to a boulder at the water’s edge, also watching Harley.

She ran to the tip of the jetty, turned, and took the return
trip in an impressive, all-out sprint. When she got to its base, where it
joined the beach proper, she slowed her pace to a brisk walk, checked her
stopwatch, and pressed the side of her throat to take her carotid pulse. The
young man pulled three tennis balls from his pockets and began to juggle them.
Harley smiled, then noticed Tucker for the first time, standing at the top of
the makeshift boulder stairway. She waved to him and he nodded. The young man
looked up at him and frowned, dropping a ball. Tucker knew he didn’t look
reputable enough—with his black aviators, cigarette, and three-day growth of
beard—to be mowing Raleigh Hale’s lawn.

Harley propped first one foot and then the other on the
boulder, leaning over to stretch her hamstrings. While she warmed down, she and
the boy talked, both of them glancing from time to time in Tucker’s direction.
Her stretching took longer than Tucker thought strictly necessary, and when she
climbed up to the yard and rejoined him, he merely nodded again in response to
her smile.

“Who’s the guy?” he asked.

“Déjà vu,” Harley said. “Those were Jamie’s first words just
now.” When she repeated the phrase, it was with a stiff-jawed Hale’s Point
accent: ‘“Who’s the guy?’”

Tucker couldn’t help smiling. “So you do have a sense of
humor.”

“Of course I do!” She sat in the grass, extended her legs
straight out in front of her, grabbed her sandy feet with both hands, and
pulled. “I just can’t take a joke. There’s difference.”

He chuckled and shook out another cigarette. She closed her
eyes, and he took the opportunity to appraise her shamelessly. Her skin had a
ruddy glow and was glazed with a sheen of perspiration. The wisps of hair that
had sprung loose from her ponytail clung in damp curls around her face.

When she opened her eyes, he said, “This Jamie, does he live
next door?”

She nodded, shifting position so that the soles of her feet
were together, and leaned over to touch her forehead to her ankles. It looked
effortless; she was limber. “His name is Jamie Tilton.”

Tucker thought back. “Oh, man, I know who that kid is! Mrs.
Tilton was pregnant with him when I left here.” He glanced down at the beach,
where Jamie stood knee-high in the surf, juggling. “Wow.”

“He just graduated in the top of his class at Princeton.”

“What law school is he going to?”

“Harvard.” She looked up. “How did you know he was going to
go to law school?”

“They all do.”

“‘They’?”

“Rich boys who don’t have to work, but feel the need to make
themselves—” now he adopted his own exaggerated imitation of the Hale’s Point
accent “—useful to society.”

“Are you saying there’s something wrong with that?”

He sighed. “No. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Because there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“That’s what I just said.”

She crossed her legs, put both hands on her waist, and
twisted back and forth. “He’s a very nice person, he’s been very friendly to
me—”

“I’ll bet he has.” Harley rolled her eyes. “You think he
wouldn’t jump at the chance to get into your spandex?”

Still twisting, she said, “Not every man on the face of the
earth thinks about sex constantly.” Tucker just laughed. “Anyway, he’s not
interested in me.” With every twist, her breasts strained against the white
cotton of her tank top.

“Don’t be so sure.”

“I am sure. He’s in love with the au pair. His stepmother
told me. He just talks to me to make her jealous.”

“Stepmother? What happened to Mrs. Tilton? The first Mrs.
Tilton. Well, technically, the second Mrs. Tilton. There’d already been a first
Mrs. Tilton.”

“Well, now there’s a third Mrs. Tilton. No, she must be the
fourth Mrs. Tilton, ‘cause there was an in-between Mrs. Tilton.” She stood,
shaking out her arms and legs. “In answer to your question, Jamie’s father
divorced the first, second, and third Mrs.
Tiltons
,
each time in favor of a younger Mrs. Tilton. Jamie says it was his hobby,
collecting wives.”

“‘Was’? Has he finally found one he’s happy with?”

“He died a year ago of a heart attack.”

“Younger and younger wives will do that to you.” Tucker had
liked the second Mrs. Tilton, but had thought her husband petty and
self-important, and was not sorry he was dead. Back down on the
Tiltons
’ piece of beach, two young women and a fat toddler
had joined Jamie. “Which one’s the Widow Tilton?”

Harley squinted. “The dark-haired one. Mimi. She’s really
nice, I like her.” She was very slender, with dose-cropped hair and delicate
features. She stood ankle-deep in the water, holding up the skirt of her
flowered sundress. The other woman—a copper-penny redhead in a yellow
bikini—squatted next to the child and quickly undressed her down to her pink
disposable diaper. When she stood, Tucker saw that she was no more than
eighteen or nineteen, but very tall, with a nonstop centerfold body. She had
pale, freckled skin, and her hair was a blazing mop of corkscrew curls. Jamie
couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her.