Orient (20 page)

“What? You mean you think they were taken out or something?” Tommy considered it for a minute. The tide raced in and
receded. “That hadn’t occurred to me. You know, Jeff Trader was pretty stuck on that rope. I didn’t cut him loose. Beth’s husband did that. I didn’t go under to see how he was caught. But the first thing my mom said when we got back to the house was, ‘Jeff Trader has a set of our keys.’”

“I know something about those keys.”

“What?” Tommy grabbed Mills’s wrist. “Tell me. Come on.”

Savoring the moment—Tommy at full attention with his hand on his wrist—Mills finally conceded a few secrets. He told Tommy about Beth taking him to Jeff’s property, about the book she’d been looking for and the jar of keys they hadn’t found in his truck. “Then we went back, and Magdalena was dead.”

“Fuck,” Tommy yelled. “You’re kidding me. I don’t know, though. To kill an old man for his keys and then an old woman for wanting them. That’s pretty desperate just to gain access to some of the most boring houses on Long Island.” Tommy was speaking so loudly that Mills hushed him. “No one can hear us out here,” Tommy said, quietly now. “It’s just us.”

Just them. And with Tommy’s fingers still pressed against his wrist. Mills wished for the confidence to wrap his hand around Tommy’s neck and make a move that wouldn’t result in a punch. Instead he sat there shivering. Their bodies were practically the same age, covered in the same smooth material, running with the same blue substance, fast and cold as Canadian rivers. They were separate ecosystems coming into near contact, hosts to separate microorganisms and shaped by separate storms.

Tommy let go of Mills’s wrist, jammed his hands into his sweatshirt pouch, and pulled his flask out for another sip.

“Not likely,” he said with stinging breath.

“Maybe he was killed for this book.” Mills took the journal from his pocket and waved it. “Jeff was writing down secrets, I think.”

Tommy grabbed the book before Mills could pull it away.

“Holy shit. Addresses,” he said, holding the flame of his lighter
against the pages. He slumped forward, trying to decipher the tiny black print. “What kind of secrets was he into?”

“You can’t have it,” Mills said, reaching to recover it.

Tommy blocked his arm. “Why not? You don’t know the people here. What difference does it make to you? You’re a stranger. These are my neighbors.”

“I need to give it back to Beth.”

“Screw Beth.” When Mills reached for it again, Tommy pushed him in the chest, harder than either anticipated, and Mills fell backward, slipping off the rock and slamming his shoulder against the beach. The fall hadn’t hurt, hadn’t destroyed much more than one-sided romance, but Tommy stared down worryingly, as if the reason for the shove had entirely escaped him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching out to pull him up. “Just let me borrow it. I’ll give it back to you tomorrow.”

Mills shook his head. He sat on the rock again, a few inches away.

“Look, I promise,” Tommy bargained. “There could be things about my family in here. Jeff Trader fixed our porch last month.”

“I thought you said there was nothing wrong in your family.”

The Sound spread against the pebbles. Tommy’s face whitened in the water’s reflection as he watched its flow and retreat.

“You’d need to have had a family to understand,” Tommy mumbled, his voice a broken chord. “Like my father. Nothing but a cheater. Cheats all the time. I don’t blame Lisa for going to college way upstate just to get the hell away from him. I’ll do the same thing when I’m done with school. As far as I can, with whatever money I can find. There are more fucked-up creatures in this town than the one that washed up from Plum.”

Mills wanted to put his arm around Tommy simply to comfort him.

“You’re not the only one with problems,” Mills said. “I wouldn’t be out here fixing up Paul’s house if New York hadn’t been filled with them.”

“What did you do?” Tommy looked over with interest.

Mills knew he could impress Tommy simply by listing his missteps. He could so easily describe New York as a paradise of lurid dreams: drugs and all-night music and half-nude bodies twisted across couches, a version of the truth decorated into a brag. But Tommy might find that version a dream worth believing in, might see that mirage in the west and head toward it, arms and mouth open. No young person was ever enticed by the reality of a place, its mornings and not its nights.

“Drugs, the worst stuff,” Mills said in the dullest voice he could muster. “It’s not something I’m proud of. It was the easiest thing to fall into, and the weakest are the last to stop. I guess I didn’t care anymore once I got to New York. Like I’d hit the end of the country and wanted to keep moving, however I could. At the end, it didn’t feel like moving. It felt like dying slowly on someone’s floor. To be honest, experience isn’t always such a good thing.” There went his chances of seducing Tommy on the endless upsides of new experiences.

Tommy pressed his knuckles on Mills’s leg. Maybe he was just part of a generation that always needed to do something with their hands.

“I caught that about you,” he said softly, so unlike the Tommy Muldoon that Mills had come to know. “I figured as much. You know, you really aren’t that hard to read. I think I know what you’re about.” Tommy turned to him with shivering teeth.

Branches broke. Frozen grass snapped under foot in the black shrubbery behind them. Mills spun around. Tommy searched for his shoes.

“Someone’s out there,” Mills whispered. “Behind us.”

They concentrated on the silence, trying to pick up loose sounds in it.

“Tommy,” a woman’s voice called. “Are you out there? You need to come in this instant. You’ve got school tomorrow.” A dark shape shifted near the trail leading to the beach.

“It’s my mother. I’ve gotta go.” Tommy shoved his feet into his
shoes and raced up the trail. He had left his silver flask on the rock, but not the book. Mills wanted to call him back for it, but he was afraid Pam Muldoon would recognize his voice and ban him from ever seeing her son again. He waited for five minutes, angry for losing the book, worried that Beth would stop by tomorrow and demand its return.

He climbed the rocks, shoving the flask in his back pocket as he crossed the lawn. The light in Tommy’s window blinked on and off like a boat signal in the ocean. He reached the porch and opened the front door.

Beeping invaded the foyer. A box above the light switch in the parlor flashed red. Paul sprinted down the steps in a T-shirt and sweatpants, his shoulders bunched and his hands in clumsy fists until he caught sight of the intruder. He went directly to the box and punched in the code. His eyes were fluttering like canaries in a shaken cage.

“Why did you turn the alarm on?” Mills asked.

“For security. I thought you’d gone to bed.”

“I thought you weren’t scared. I thought you said there wasn’t anyone dangerous out here.”

Paul turned around and feigned a calm smile.

“It was you who put that in my mind,” he wheezed. “And anyway I was just testing that the damn thing still worked.” Paul balanced his hand on the wall and filled his lungs with air. “Okay, I admit you frightened me.”

Mills apologized, tugging on Paul’s shoulders as they climbed the steps. Mills put the flask in the bowl of the birthing room for safekeeping. Out the window, the light in Tommy’s room was on, a kid catching up on his reading. Maybe Pam Muldoon had been right to worry about Mills’s influence on her children. Mills couldn’t shake the ominous feeling that he’d just introduced Tommy to the kind of book that would destroy him.

CHAPTER
11

N
aked and wet from the shower, she walked assertively through the darkened bungalow. Too assertively, Adam Pruitt thought, as if she’d only recently come to understand the dynamics of her body. He was naked as well, lying on his bed, arms splayed across the sheets and his legs forming the number 4. Tattoos decorated his ribs: on his left an orange tiger, on his right a black treble clef. They trembled as he breathed. He watched as she slid her hand under the chair cushion, located her cell phone, scrolled through missed calls and texts, and returned the phone to its soundproof hiding place. She climbed onto the bed, weightlessly mounted him with corrugated knees on either side of his shoulders, and spidered her fingers against the wall.

“You want some?” she asked. “Go on.”

He liked hearing her talk like that because he knew it was foreign to her. The fact that he wasn’t actually in the mood might have put a damper on the situation, but Adam did not consider himself a selfish sex partner. He stuck out his tongue.

“You want me to lick it?” He looked up, beyond the smooth white vase of her stomach, between the two rounded cones of her tits, up to a throat that gulped and a bottom lip that trailed white from scraping teeth.

“Yes,” she said.

He rooted his tongue between the entry doors, drawn together like the dorsal wings of a beetle. His tongue chafed against trimmed
hair and hit a pocket of emptiness, which gave him a hard-on because now he was inside of her, so inside there was no barrier. His nose snailed against her pubic hair. He expected her to moan in pleasure but she remained silent, and Adam quickly broke from his time-tested approach and burrowed his face in, sloppily licking. Neither of them made pleasure moans, and Adam wondered if he was doing this only for her benefit and she was letting him only for his, the usual sex paradox. His hands climbed her body and found her arms. He yanked her down until she lay next to him, and he flipped on top of her.

“Condom,” she said. He grabbed a gold square off his nightstand, tore it open, and milked the rubber down his shaft. These were awkward seconds for a man, no matter how attractive the woman under him appeared—legs open, breasts resting on the rib cage—because a man has to stay hard while the woman watches in some negative quiet where irrevocable judgments are formed. She did the right thing, pinching his left nipple, not painfully but enough to give him an electric prod. He had a difficult time putting it in her, but finally her body accepted him. That’s all it took: he jiggled it, not in and out but clockwise, and the tension of her muscles made him come almost instantly. When he realized he was coming, really coming, running home instead of to first base, he started thrusting in and out, determined not to leave her unsatisfied.

“Oh,” she said.

“Fuck,” he said through clenched teeth.

“That’s right. Okay.”

“Fu-u-
uck
.”

He spent, and their lips met when he fell against her. He rolled over. His skin was wet from perspiration and from the shower water she hadn’t toweled off. Her hair was almost black when it was wet, though in a matter of minutes it would dry light brown. Adam waited until it was light brown to tell her she shouldn’t be here.

“I know I shouldn’t,” she agreed. “Wasn’t that the whole point?”

“What I mean is, you should be back at the motel. Why did we
go to the trouble of getting you that room if you’re going to camp out at my place?” He resolved to leave the bed, sat up, and picked up his underwear from the floor with his toes. “I’ve got work to do.”

In a belated demonstration of modesty, she wrapped the sheet around her breasts. “I don’t see why you need to crash that stupid meeting,” she said. “I know you don’t really believe that stuff.”

“I believe it.” He stood up and located his jeans. He was usually a neat person, but since she’d arrived at his bungalow, his clothes were constantly in balls on the floor. What point was there in folding laundry and stowing it in his dresser if he was just going to act like a pig whenever he had company? He was thirty-four, damn it. Adam was the kind of man who kept reminding himself how old he was.

“Bullshit,” she said. She snaked across the mattress, reached over to the stack of lime green paper in the corner—losing for a moment her makeshift top—and took a pamphlet. She unfolded it and began to read the text, which Adam had meticulously crafted with the help of Wikipedia: “A mutant animal washes up in Orient, discovered by local hunters, and is immediately confiscated by government agents who have yet to produce any explanation or reassurance for a concerned public. A public who shares the water with a level-three biological-warfare and animal-disease laboratory that has been conducting clanstine—I think you meant
clandestine
—genetic experiments since 1954 without—”

“—once opening the site to private inspectors to determine its health risks on area wildlife and population.” He stopped quoting. “I know what it says, I wrote it.”

“This poor woman,” she said, tapping the section about the terrorist doctor who had her terrorist sights on Plum. “What kind of woman keeps mass-annihilation plans in her purse on the way to the airport?”

Adam dressed in a hurried manner, hoping to indicate that he had somewhere important to be. He found his wristwatch next to a box of tampons, which should be in her motel room and not at his house.

“Anyway, didn’t they already announce that Plum Island is closing down in a couple of years?”

“So?” he said. “Don’t you think it’s better to find out the truth before the government packs up and decides it’s no longer their problem? Out of sight, out of responsibility. Too bad, folks. Lyme disease? It’s all in your head. And Lyme might be the least of it. There could be far worse viruses out there.”

“Adam,” she said meaningfully. He threw her bra on the bed. “You really need to focus on building your own business, not trying to drum up paranoia.”

He took a second to appreciate how seamlessly women’s breasts were stowed in cells of elastic and lace.

“Security
is
my business,” he stammered. “At least it will be. And when I come to be seen as the man who was brave enough to ask the hard questions and get answers, people on the North Fork will start coming to me for their security needs.”

She smiled, unconvinced, and returned the pamphlet to the stack.

“I don’t understand why that’s so hard for you to understand,” he whined. “I’m not some outdated alarm company, like Muldoon Security, singular. I’m offering a whole new variety of services, plural—water testing, soil graphs, toxic air readings, the security of
this
century. The security that you aren’t being poisoned in your own home.”

Until recently, Adam had been having trouble raising the seed money to start Pruitt Securities, even after selling off his father’s six Sound-front acres to a neighbor. He thought about his father for a moment, the bulk and sweaty weight of him, a man who had died of mesothelioma after forty years of working as a construction worker laying asbestos-lined pipe for the township, until those toxic materials finally delivered the cancer to his lungs. In his last days, his father took in air like a man drowning, straining every muscle for one precious lungful. Sometimes it seemed like the whole point of life was not to die the same death as your father.

“I’m so tired of hearing about security,” she moaned.

“Security,” he said tauntingly as he placed a Marlboro between his lips and lit the tip.

“I don’t see how you’re paying for this.” She stood up and kicked the box of posters he’d made at the Kinko’s in Riverhead. “If you can afford all this, why can’t you take me out to dinner?”

“You can’t go out to dinner.” He let smoke drift from his tongue, a beating wick. “You aren’t supposed to
be
in Orient, remember?”

She dressed lazily, pulling on her jeans and stretching a sweatshirt over her head, the belated question W
HY DON’T WE SAIL FIRST
? emblazoned across it. He was relieved that she wouldn’t be there when he and his friends barged into Poquatuck Hall. They’d wave the posters printed with his photos of the mutant creature; it looked to him like a toxic monster villain in a comic book, like Geryon in his dead mother’s illustrated copy of Dante. Except it was Orient’s very own genetic nightmare come to life.

She watched him smoke as if she were smoking, lips puckered, pupils widening at intake. She clucked her tongue.

“It wasn’t even real, was it? That creature on the shore.”

She was starting to annoy him. She’d been annoying him for the past two weeks. There was an expiration date on all relationships, and he suspected they were nearing theirs. Adam had never been good at ending things. He ended them by thinking of them as ended and moving on.

“Don’t be stupid,” he told her. His lips were still covered in her juice. It sopped the filter of his cigarette.

“Fine. I just don’t want to go back to Seaview. It’s fucking boring.”

“It was your decision.”

“How was I to know?” she said. “I’m not from around here anymore.”

“Sure you’re not.”

She gave him the finger, then used the finger to draw a heart in the fog on the bathroom mirror.

Bryan Muldoon brought
his posters to Poquatuck alone. Theo had complained at dinner that his cheeks felt warm, “like microwave cheeks,” and Pam decided to skip the crucial town meeting to keep their youngest in bed with an armada of cold water bottles.

Ted was uncharacteristically prompt, waiting for Bryan at precisely 6:30 by the glass announcement board outside Poquatuck Hall, and together they entered the gray-shingled building on the corner of Village Lane. Poquatuck was built in 1874 by the same architect who had constructed the bridge between Orient and East Marion. Both structures were designed to foster connection—one by geography, the other through community—and all roads in Orient eventually led to one or the other. Bryan and Ted assembled a row of folding chairs across the stage, set Bryan’s four posters on stands, and propped an out-of-focus photograph of their departed fellow board member Magdalena Kiefer against the stage, her frail, expressionless face blown up and glued sloppily onto a sheet of cardboard. Ted set two pots of poinsettias at the corners to hold it in place.

“It could look a little more professional,” Bryan said, comparing Ted’s work to his own: four sleek posters—pie charts and graphs—printed on expensive backing.

Ted offered an apologetic smile. “It’s the sentiment. And we can’t scrap it. Her name’s on the initiative.” He stepped back. “From a distance, you don’t even notice the glue.”

Bryan turned to lock eyes with Ted. “I’m worried about those Plum Island agitators. Those signs out by the tip: ‘Demand answers.’ Don’t they understand we’re fighting for the same thing? To preserve the land, to keep it safe.” Ted nodded, familiar with Bryan’s stump speech.

“This is something I can never tell my students, but do you know what geography really is?” Ted asked. “It’s not the shapes of countries or a list of trade routes. Geography is a snapshot of war, plain and simple. It’s a record of the state of hostile powers at a moment of
suspended animation.” Ted spread his hands, suddenly transported in a way that rarely came over him in his high school classroom with its nicotine-colored pull-down maps. “There’s always going to be a fight for land. And it’s never going to stay put without some muscle to defend it.” Ted gestured toward the room of empty tables and chairs. “You sell the initiative tonight and we’ll save it. Remember how well we did with the water-main debacle.”

Bryan did take solace in that. Two years ago, seemingly out of nowhere, the county had submitted a proposal to extend a three-mile water main from East Marion to Orient, bringing the first public water service to a village whose residents had been relying on their own private wells since its settlement. But the proposal met with so much hostility that locals took to calling it “the water-main debacle” or “the main debacle” or, eventually, just “the debacle.” It was the closest Orient ever got to declaring civil war on the rest of Long Island.

It wasn’t just that the project would have created a construction nightmare on the two-lane causeway. The key chairs of the Orient Historical Board foresaw far more dangerous stakes in the Suffolk County Water Authority’s overzealous proposal. What was at stake was the power to keep Orient out of the easy reaches of developers. As long as underground wells were the town’s only source of water, no high-rise condominium complexes could blight the coastline. No cavernous Walmarts or shoe box Radissons or grease-windowed restaurant chains could clear precious farmland and set up shop. Without public water, even ten toilets flushing successively would paralyze the plumbing. When SCWA, buoyed by federal stimulus money, announced its intentions, they touted the benefits of cleaner water and the freedom from having to maintain antiquated tanks. But what the historical board saw was the ghost of Orient’s future: the concrete, suburban sprawl that had already enveloped the rest of Long Island, one industrial pressure-flush toilet at a time. The entire fate of Orient rested on a matter of pipes.

Bryan Muldoon and his eight fellow board members were not elected or county-approved. Their membership was self-selected,
based on family status and a commitment to community affairs. The Orient Historical Board, or OHB, had been formed casually four decades ago to aid in the preservation of several Federal-style settlement buildings—the old nineteenth-century boardinghouse, the older eighteenth-century schoolhouse—that stood opposite Poquatuck Hall on Village Lane. But as time went on the board expanded its mission, beyond preserving the past, to preserving the present. The Orient Historical Board held no official power in Suffolk County, but unofficially it held the power of influence and outrage. In the last decade alone, the board had pressured the county into passing zoning laws on Orient real estate (ten-acre, five-acre, and two-acre plots could not be easily subdivided; commercial development was strictly forbidden). In return, OHB lent its support to the county superintendent during election years. The cycle of reciprocal altruism had harmoniously persisted until two years ago, when SCWA went AWOL on OHB.