The End of the Point (31 page)

For Charlie, there were the paths again, there was Teal Rock, boats to be sailed, tide pools to explore, collections—wishing stones, discharged bullet shells—to build, birds’ nests to find. One day the army showed up with trucks and men to stage a training battle, with guns, uniforms and drill commands; the boys installed themselves by the gate. At four o’clock, the troops left and padlocked the gate, as if that kept anyone out. The next day, the whole thing felt like a dream except for a new round of spent shells. There were crabs to be caught: they’d tie a fish head to a length of string, sit on the bridge over the salt creek and wait for the rock crab or blue claw to take the bait. There were trips to Salvador’s for ice cream, hours spent at Grampa’s side, visits from family friends. Charlie resolved to stay out of trouble, and amazingly, for the rest of the summer, he did—or else managed not to get caught.

IT MIGHT HAVE SHIFTED THINGS
permanently to have this new person, who changed the shape of the family, but if it softened his mother briefly, it returned her to herself more fiercely in the fall. Her work was start-and-stop now. Bound to the nest she was (by her own choice, he told himself, told various shrinks over the years), and though the baby could do no wrong, she snapped at the others and fought with Charlie’s father more and more. At prize day in fifth grade, Charlie won nothing. He began smoking cigarettes that year, filching them from his mother. The summer he was eleven, she hired a tutor and signed him up for camp on Windy Point, where he knew nobody and chafed at the nonstop schedule—sailing, knot-making, baseball, archery, crafts involving Popsicle sticks. On Windy Point the houses were clustered close. A field had been cropped and fertilized into a mini golf course, and the boys were clannish, and Charlie was, anyway, determined not to make friends.

By then, the line was drawn between him and his mother, the two of them against each other, vigilant—and through it all, unsettling moments of détente, when she would relax, make a joke or offhand remark that showed she understood him as no one else could. Or they’d go sailing in the Beetle Cat and she’d give herself in to it, and Charlie too, the wind at their backs, the sail full, and they knew, still, how to sail together well—tacking, trimming, coming about as if one well-tuned human machine. Or his parents would grow warm and playful, flirty, fight again, kiss, fight, kiss. And Dossy in and out of the hospital, which made Charlie’s mother, as she put it, lose her mind, and Grampa ever frailer, and throughout it all, Gaga entertaining, volunteering, steering her precarious, huge ship.

When Charlie was twelve he was sent to a sleepaway camp in Maine where you had to salute the flag each morning and make your bed well enough to bounce a penny on. For the next few summers, he convinced his mother to let him go with Rusty, whose mother was a Quaker, to Quaker Wilderness Camp, and that was better: canoeing, fire-building, rock-climbing, even the silent meetings, and finally he was too old for camp. After his second and third years at St. Mark’s, he worked as a counselor at Brantwood, a New Hampshire summer camp that the school ran for inner-city boys. Charlie liked this job—to show the boys stuff, to watch them start to trust the natural world, to goof around with them—and his one real disappointment was that he was not invited back as a senior counselor after he graduated (a privilege reserved for the boys with the most leadership potential). Every summer, no matter what he was doing, how far away he was, whether he had to come by bus or bike or hitch a ride, he saved the last two weeks of August and as many weekends as he could manage for Ashaunt.

We’ve become a world without values, his mother was starting to say by then, first a supporter of the “conflict” in Vietnam, then eventually against the war. Each summer, her time by the sea grew shorter; she loaded the car with books and brought them into the Red House, then complained that she couldn’t get anything done, too many people in and out (and she over at Jane’s or at the Big House, or in her garden, or going with her sisters for long swims). The cabin was unofficially Charlie’s by then, and he was allowed to stay there even when his mother was in New Jersey. He kept the path overgrown, used the outdoor shower at the Big House, not the Red House. He found, in his cabin’s location (smack in the middle of Gaga’s fifteen acres, built as if she’d known, when he was just a boy, that he might need it there), an island in a sea of leafy green.

XI

A
FEW DAYS
after the bulldozer razed his wall, Charlie picked up Jerry on the road again, and Jerry got in the car, agitated, head bobbing, and when Charlie asked How’s it going, Jerry said they’re clear-cutting now, and Charlie asked who and Jerry said the Golf-of-Coursers.

“The what?”

“The military-industrial golfplex.”

“A golf course? Is that what they’re building?” Charlie asked. “Where I dropped you off last time? I assumed it was houses.”

“Nope. A golf course for the rich and infamous. They won’t let me cut through to get home. They think”—Jerry laughed mirthlessly—“they own the place.”

“Who does own it?”

“My family owns forty acres and we’re not selling, but the developers keep crossing over the property line. I’m trying to monitor it, but every time they see me, they tell me to leave. They think I’ll scare off the golfers.” He bared his teeth.

“But there are no golfers yet.”

“Some guy stepped in one of my snare traps. You’d think I’d set a bomb. Do you play golf?”

“God, no.”

Jerry looked pleased. “Did you know Castro got rid of every golf course in Cuba? The playgrounds of the bourgeoisie. Did you ever notice how green a golf course is? The grass always greener on the other side. Day-Glo green. Rainbow green.”

Charlie nodded. “They use all kinds of chemical crap to get it to look like that.”

“You know where it’s at, man. Do you believe in private property?”

Charlie hesitated. “I believe . . . I believe we don’t own any of it, really. That we should be, you know, stewards. In an ideal world. There’s this book,
A Sand County Almanac
—”

“I read it.”

“What’d you think?”

“I thought, way to go, Aldo, and then I get shipped out, and they’re like, ‘Only you can prevent forests!’ I shit you not—‘Only you can prevent forests,’ courtesy of Operation Ranch Hand. They give us gloves, like dishwashing gloves, red, white or blue to hold the poison hoses. Somebody in some office is having a good laugh.”

“Jesus. Are you, you know, okay?”

“I made it out alive, I came back here, I got
out
, so I was flying high, I was, like, waiting for my girl and my trees and my . . . my
de-formation
, but it turns out she’s sayonara and my trees are waiting for the ax.” He looked up, his eyes pained. “You know how Agent Orange works?”

“It kills the foliage?”

“It makes the plants grow themselves to death, like cancer.
Grow, grow grow, my pretties
, then”—he clapped—“
Tam biêt
. It’s happening right here.”

“I doubt they’re using Agent Orange to build a golf course.”

“It’s the same chemicals, same family. Cording does his song and dance about open space and recreation, but he left out the part about Die-dioxin.”

“Cording? Bill Cording? From New Bedford?”

“According to Cording.”

“He’s developing Ashaunt too, building houses.”

Jerry nodded. “He’ll eat the coast and shit it out.”

WHEREAS FOR THE FIRST FEW
trips to town, Jerry had been silent or spoken in spurts, now he could not stop talking, with a mix of logic, knowledge, passion and hyperbole that both drew Charlie in and set him on edge. Jerry had been to the town hall and library, he said. He’d found deeds and records, maps. His mother didn’t know anything about the property boundaries; it had been his father who’d bought the land; the developers thought they could screw over foreigners, but Jerry was born here, a draft-card-carrying American, and he had a plan. He was going to put up a fence at the entrance of the construction site to block the trucks from getting in and slow the whole thing down, and then he’d make the developers stay on their own property and off his, and he’d spread the word about the chemicals—did they really want to spawn kids with no eyes, no eye sockets, did they really want babies with two heads, there was a reason it was called
die-
oxin, and it wouldn’t stop at golf courses, the chemicals would leach into the drinking water, into the fish, everywhere. He’d gone to Earth Day in Providence and heard Barry Commoner speak. The chemicals were in our fat and bones. We’ve got, he said, to bring the knowledge to the people.

By now they had crossed the bridge and were idling in front of the bait shop.

“Could you”—Jerry pointed at the ignition—“keep driving?”

“I was going to pick up some food.”

“After, okay? We can’t—listen, there’s something I want to ask you, but it’s got to be—”

Jerry put his finger to his lips as Charlie, half knowing he should not, turned the car on and headed down Bridge Street, then onto Dartmouth Street toward New Bedford, past filling stations, the Salvation Army, the A&P.

“Over there,” Jerry said as a large brick church came into view.

Charlie turned into the parking lot and turned off the car.

“Okay, so are you in?” Jerry rolled up his window. “Do you want to help?”

“With what?”

“Stopping the development. Keeping them off my land.”

“Of course I’d want that, I just—”

“So you’re in?”

“Listen, I can’t get involved with anything violent—I’m not into that.”

“I’m a pacifist, brother.” Jerry looked hurt. “Nothing violent—we just got to act now, like tonight. They’re at it with the chainsaw and dozers, the trees are coming down. They’re defoliating.
Today
was too late.”

“So what are you thinking?”

“First fencing. Then the legal part. They’re on my land, and I’ve got to live there—it’s the only place for me. They think I’m a goddamn nobody freak, but they’d maybe listen to you with your Harvard education.”

“I don’t go to Harvard.”

“Yale? Princeton?”

“I was in college in Cleveland, but I’m taking a break. Or dropping out.”

“I hear you.” Jerry handed him a catalogue across the stick shift. “Take a look.”

The catalogue showed chain link and chicken wire, split rail, cedar, aluminum, locust wood. Some fences had been circled. Some circles had been crossed out, drawn again. “Free Delivery!” announced the sticker on the cover below the address: Brobart Fence, 12 Cove St., New Bedford. Civil Disobedience. Uncivil Disobedience. Nearly a decade earlier, when the gunpowder exploded in Charlie’s face, he had experienced a moment of pure wonder before the pain hit—that he could do such a thing, that he contained such power. Dick Wilson hadn’t answered his more-in-sorrow letter, which must have arrived too late and was, anyway, less a call to action than a mannered whine. In a few days, the workers would widen the road, lay and bury pipes and wires. His grandmother had called to explain but not apologize: I won’t sell our portion, Charlie, but I couldn’t afford to buy the rest. On Ashaunt, surveyors continued to mark house lots and foundation sites. Earlier in the week, a worker had begun to cut down the scrubby cedar trees on the end of the Point.

“All right, we can put up some fencing,” he said to Jerry. “It’s not going to change a lot, but it might help draw attention to what’s going on. We might even get some newspaper coverage.”

“Do you have a little cash for supplies?” Jerry asked. “I’ve only got five bucks.”

“I’ve got a little more than that.” Adrenaline coursed through Charlie. Hadn’t Gaga urged him to get involved, to care about things? He could use his birthday money, spread the wealth. “We can make signs. There’s plywood at the dump on Ashaunt. I can put it on top of my car. And we’ll need paint.”

“
Shhh
.” Jerry looked around.

“No one’s listening,” said Charlie. “Anyway, we’re not doing anything particularly illegal. Just civil disobedience. You’re with me on that, right? Nothing shady. I can’t afford to get in trouble, and I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

“Nothing shady, except protecting the shade.”

WHAT HAPPENED HAPPENED QUICKLY, THE
two of them gathering supplies that afternoon, stowing them at dusk in the woods near the construction site, then meeting after dark to put up fencing to block the access road where the vehicles came in, as well as along what Jerry said was part of his family’s property line. It was only deer fencing, the stakes pounded six inches into the ground, but while Jerry had wanted barbed wire, and Charlie had hoped for chain link, this was the cheapest and fastest to install. Charlie had stowed two flashlights, kerosene lamps and black paint in his car, and when they were done with the fencing, they dragged the plywood out and turned to making signs: “Road Closed—Land Returning to Nature; Die Dioxin; Golfers Have Little White Balls.” They worked quietly and mostly in silence, and though Charlie knew—because he’d drunk one—that Jerry had brought beer to the site, it wasn’t until they were quite far along that he realized that Jerry had been drinking steadily, and it wasn’t until Jerry upset a can of black paint across a nearly finished sign that Charlie began to get a sense of things having already taken a distinctly wrong turn.

“You’re spilling,” he told Jerry.

Jerry plunged his hands into the paint can, then raised them to his face and smeared. He opened his eyes wide, rolled them. “Camouflage!”

“Stop—you’ll get it in your eyes,” Charlie said, but Jerry took his shirt off, picked the paint can up and tipped it down his body, turning his torso black.

“Holy shit, Jerry! What the fuck are you doing?”

Jerry turned on him and bared his teeth, which showed white in the moonlight. “Black Power! Power to the People!” He thrust the can at Charlie. “Cover up, man. Camouflage!”

“We don’t need to. No one’s here.” He took a few steps back. “We should go now—we’ve done what we came for. Come on.”