Spartina (5 page)

Schuyler sang, “ ‘I am a pirate king! I am a pirate king! It is, it is a glorious thing to be a pirate king!’ ”

Marie had pulled a spare towel over her shoulders like a shawl.

Dick envied people who could just open up and sing. Parker would do that in bars every once in a while, just as if he was a guinea, knew some guinea songs too, he’d puff up his chest like a bird on a twig and let go. He’d do guinea opera songs, Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison.

Joxer and Barbara Goode smiled at Schuyler’s singing. Dick recognized himself in Marie now—when Parker started singing, Dick slouched down in his chair.

Dick finished his beer and stood up. Barbara Goode said, “Dick, before you go, we’ve got a couple of favors to ask. Joxer and Schuyler are doing a clambake here on the island and they need some help from someone. Could we get you to help? I mean, if we could buy the clams, and maybe some lobsters from you. And if you could show them how to dig the pit. And where to put the fire and the stones and the seaweed. Joxer
thinks
he knows, but I know you know. We’re going to have thirty people and I don’t dare let the two of them get it wrong.”

Dick said, “I’m going out in a couple of days, I’m going to be fixing up a boat for a friend of mine.”

Schuyler cocked his head. “You’re going out on the ocean in a fishing boat?”

“Yup.”

“I’m doing a little film—that’s what I do, is make films. You don’t suppose I could go along? Me and my camerawoman?”

Dick was taken aback. “I don’t know. It’s for four, five days. It’s not like it’s … I suppose I could ask Parker.”

Mrs. Goode said, “Well, let’s get the clambake settled first. Joxer, you and Dick have a little talk.”

Joxer walked Dick over to Dick’s skiff. Joxer said, “This would be a big help. You can see how it is. Barbara’s getting worried, this is her shindig, along with Schuyler and Marie. Barbara wants them to get off on the right foot now that they’re moving in. So let’s say five hundred dollars to cover the raw materials. You know the stuff—steamers, quahogs, potatoes, corn—I don’t suppose there’s any corn this early. Can you get thirty lobsters?”

Dick didn’t know what to make of this. Even for thirty people, lobster, quahogs, steamers, and potatoes would come to less than two hundred dollars. Dick thought with regret of the barrel of steamer clams he’d just sold to the dealer. He didn’t dare go back to the bird sanctuary with the tractor, but he might send the boys back. Drop them off in their boat with a couple of baskets. But Dick couldn’t figure the five hundred. He said, “That’s a lot of money.”

Joxer said, “Well, Barbara figures it’s a lot of work. And she’s right. What with digging the pit, gathering the driftwood, the seaweed. And I think she hopes you’d give me a hand ferrying people from the point to the island, so there’s the use of your boat.”

Dick began to see. He couldn’t see it all, but he began to get the picture. A lot of the independent lobstermen he knew had made deals with families who had summer houses. They drained the pipes in the fall, fixed the screens in spring. It started that way. Then they’d get a call that the family wanted to spend Christmas at the beach house if they could have the water turned back on, the heat, maybe a load of firewood. And if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, get that Eddie what’s-his-name to plow the driveway. And if there was a nice pine tree that would do for a Christmas tree, if it wasn’t any trouble, just cut it and leave it on the porch. Half the
lobstermen Dick knew got a nice Christmas check that way. And another nice check in the spring. He’d swore he’d never do it. But here it was. Five hundred bucks. Dick looked at the quahogs lying in his basket. He looked across the channel to the Wedding Cake. At least they weren’t asking him to drain the pipes.

Joxer said, “Schuyler’s an old school friend of mine. He’s sort of a funny guy, but he might end up doing a lot of business in the area. He’s talking about getting a boat built, I told him you were the one to see.”

Dick said, “The only boat I’m building these days is my own.” It occurred to Dick he’d better just say what he wanted. He said, “I’ll do the clambake—”

Joxer said, “Terrific.”

“If you’ll do something.”

“What’s that?”

“You come over to my place and take a look at the boat I’m building.”

Joxer said, “Sure. I’d love to see any boat you’re building.”

“This isn’t any boat.”

D
ick swore to himself not to take it out on the boys. He was bound to be in a foul mood what with fixing the clambake and working on Parker’s boat. He’d bit off too much, and he was working for two different people. Dick dropped the boys off on the sea side of the bird-sanctuary beach. Charlie was nervous about
going back there to dig steamers. When Dick tossed three peck baskets ashore, Charlie said, “The limit is a peck apiece.”

Dick said, “I’m the third. I’ll be back after I pull my pots. If the Natural Resources people come along asking you where you were the other night, you just say ‘home.’ You got a job to do and you can’t stop to talk.”

Halfway through the pots Dick remembered he wanted to take the boys’ skiff on Parker’s boat. That was the trouble with doing too much. But if he kept going at this rate he’d have enough for the engine by the 4th of July, enough to finish the boat by Labor Day. A good solid Cummins diesel. He’d decided to go first-class with the engine, first-class with the shaft and prop. He’d spent hours talking with the Cummins man in Providence, and at home measuring and remeasuring for the engine bed. The Cummins was the right size, the right weight. The Cummins rep had been as fair as Dick could ask. No financing, but he’d let Dick make a down payment of five hundred dollars to hold it at the old price. The Cummins price list had gone up 12 percent that spring. Dick had saved more than five hundred dollars right there. But he had to make another payment or the rep couldn’t hold it for him.

Paying 12 percent more would be a burden, and Dick had sunk more than just money. He couldn’t go with another engine without refiguring the size and weight, probably tearing out the bed. And what was as hard as the money or the work was the time he’d put in studying that engine. A diesel is a diesel, a pretty simple idea, but he knew this model inside out. He’d put one in when he worked at the yard, serviced it twice. And over the last year he’d read the manual so often he could close his eyes and see any page he wanted, words and diagrams both, down to every bolt, washer, and nut suspended magically in mid-air just the way they were in the manual.

He wasn’t in love with it the way he was with his boat, but until
he got the engine in her he couldn’t feel good about her. There was some pleasure in looking at the line drawing in his mind’s eye, and converting it to metallic, oily density, hoisting it, lowering it—a convergence of two daydreams here—into the boat, onto the preset bolts in the bed, jostling its huge weight on the hoist chain so that the eight holes in the thick-flanged base lined up, settled over the tips of the bolts, slid down, giving off a little ringing rasp, a steel whisper from the touched threads.

He’d do the clambake. He’d fix their boats, their docks, hell, he’d fix their toilets. He wasn’t going to work for them because he wasn’t good enough to make his living from the sea. He’d work for them to get himself out to sea.

D
ick got all the clambake goodies onto Sawtooth Island. He made Charlie and Tom spend the night on the beach on Sawtooth to keep an eye on the lobster car and the steel baskets of clams he’d submerged alongside it.

He ran by the Neptune and left a message for Parker that the stuffing box was fixed, the bow pulpit was rigged, and they only had to wait their turn for the boatyard to put her back in the water.

He dug the pit on the beach. He had to get Charlie and Tom to collect a new set of rocks to line the pit. The boys had gathered their rocks from below the high-tide line, and Dick had heard that every once in a while these had pockets of moisture in them. Dick hadn’t seen a low-tide rock explode, but he’d heard tell of some
summer folks’ blowing up their whole damn clambake, sandstone and granite shrapnel blowing holes through the tarp. It’d almost be worth it to do it on purpose—make them catch their hot lobsters on the fly. Of course things never went wrong when you wanted them to.

The boys had got a load of clean seaweed from the ocean side of the beach. When the fire burned out on the rocks, they dumped in the first layer of seaweed. There was a nice sizzle, and the air sacs on the seaweed began to pop. They got the whole wheelbarrow full of new potatoes in, and another layer of seaweed. A bit later the bigger quahogs, then the smaller ones and the steamers. Last of all the lobster. Resealed the tarp with wet sand and rocks.

Joxer had brought the first load of guests from the point to the island in his boat. Dick recognized some of them and nodded. A slice off the top of local South County and their summer guests.

Joxer brought him a beer and asked Charlie and Tom if they wanted Cokes. The boys had moved in behind Dick in a sheepish way that annoyed him, though he couldn’t blame them—these first ten guests had come ashore and arranged themselves in a semicircle on the higher ground, as though the Pierce boys and their authentic South County clambake were on stage. Dick turned away toward the water.

Joxer and Schuyler were lucky with the weather. A perfect June evening, one of the first still summer evenings after an unsettled spring. Just enough movement in the air to bring the smell of beach roses in across the pond. The sky, the puffs of clouds, the flat water of the pond, the swell breaking on the bar at the mouth of the breachway, even the terns circling and fluttering over their nests in the marsh grass seemed suddenly less frantic as the afternoon glare began to soften, the air and water to carry more color.

Joxer said, “You boys want to go for a swim?”

“Go ahead,” Dick said. “You got your swimsuits on. Then you won’t have to wash up when you get home for supper.”

“They’re welcome to eat here,” Joxer said. “I thought May and the boys would join us.”

“They’re used to early supper. Thank you just the same. Go on, boys, get wet and then go on home.”

The boys looked around awkwardly, as though taking off their sneakers and T-shirts was like changing in front of a crowd.

Elsie Buttrick came down to join them. “Hi, Dick. Hi, Charlie, Tommy.”

Dick said, “Hello, Officer Buttrick.”

The boys smiled. Elsie was an old neighbor but also an officer in the Rhode Island Natural Resources Department, a sort of super-powered game-and-fish warden. This authority would have made any of Dick’s friends more remote, but since Elsie started off as one of the Buttricks, a pretty rich family living on the Point, her official position brought her closer.

Dick was uneasy with her—closer wasn’t easier—but he liked her for her way with Charlie and Tom. She sometimes gave lectures in the school system and called on Charlie and Tom by name. “Charlie Pierce, I know
you
know if snapping turtles live around here.” Charlie said, “Yes, ma’am.” She’d turned to the class. “He knows ’cause one took a snap at him right in Pierce Creek. Right, Charlie? And is Pierce Creek salt, brackish, or fresh water? That’s too easy for you, Charlie. We’ll ask one of the potato farmers.”

Charlie reported all this, and more—the class trip to the Great Swamp, to Tuckertown to see potato planting. Elsie got Miss Perry to give a slide show on local birds, and—something that had puzzled Dick a lot—Eddie Wormsley to talk about trees. The only time Eddie ever got really pissed off at Dick was at the Neptune when Dick started to kid Eddie about his tree lecture.

Elsie said, “You boys going for a swim?” She kicked off her sandals
and pulled off her jersey. She had on a faded red swimsuit. She flicked off her wrap-around skirt, and Dick saw Charlie look at her legs.

Elsie said, “Come on, you guys.”

Dick was about to say something, tease Charlie about his girlfriend. He held back, puzzled by a sudden melancholy.

Charlie was sixteen. He wasn’t as tough as Dick had been at sixteen. He was smaller, smarter, and nicer. Not a shitty kid. A scrawny, shy kid who took a look at Elsie Buttrick’s legs. Dick knew he was too rough on him. From behind, Elsie still looked the way she had when
she
was sixteen. He remembered her walking up to him in her swimsuit that summer (at the town dock? at the boatyard?). He noticed her figure then. Little Elsie Buttrick all grown up. He watched her with pleasure as she came right up to him. She said she was sorry to hear about his father’s death. Put an end to
his
looking at her legs.