The End of the Point (36 page)

One early morning as he started on his bike ride, he heard a loud explosion coming from the base. Frightened, he got off his bike, changed direction and took a path toward the end of the Point, walking Indian style, his hands close to his sides. There was a silence there when he arrived, and a chemical, smoky smell. Then a voice:
Back up, fellows! We’ll give it one more try!

It was the casemate they were trying to explode with dynamite, so they wouldn’t have to build on top of it. Charlie stood watching from the brush, knowing with a certainty rare for him these days that, unlike the radar tower, this structure would not give in. He’d been in there too many times as a boy, pried open the cold metal door in the hill to enter the long, dark, dripping tunnels, the branching, endless rooms. He’d felt the massive circuit boards, wires cut and splayed, traced his hand over a long pillar of what felt like a column of marble but turned out to be (his fingers had read one letter, then the next)
A S B E S T O S
. He had lain on the racks that might have been for weapons storage or might have been for bunks, holding his breath as a flashlight scanned the corners of the room. The casemate had been there his whole life, and for once he felt a rock-hard faith that unlike the land it sat on and the ever-changing string of owners, the battlement would hold its ground.

The second blast of dynamite went off, so loud his hands flew to his ears. Then a stillness. Three men appeared in hard hats, moving toward the casemate.

“No go,” one man said. “I told him, but he didn’t believe it. It was built to withstand the Nazis’ bombs, for Christ’s sake. Ten-foot walls of reinforced concrete.”

THE WILD CLEMATIS BLOOMED. THE
monarchs gathered on the Japanese black pines to migrate, and the asters blossomed purple and white, and the sea turned grayer, and a chill came in, followed, some days, by waves of heat. When Charlie mentioned the asters to his mother on the phone, she said Oh it’s always been my favorite time, are you watching the tree swallows gather, and he almost said Yes, you should come see. But then she started in: When are you going back to college? You need a plan. I know, he said, but he did not know, would not ask the questions. Each day presented itself plainly, as it was, a day, and he began to find, that fall, what he had come for in the summer, which was the slow, unwieldy process that was healing, or beginning to heal, or learning to live with a brain that would never be—as his would never be—the same.

Still, small improvements. He could read for longer now. His daily exercise had made him lean and strong, and sometimes he actually felt his age. Sometimes, taking off his shirt, stretching his limbs or climbing naked on the rocks, he felt at home in his body. He would lie on the whale-shaped dark gray boulder after swimming and become part of the rock as the air raised goose bumps on his skin. He’d drop himself back in time: just after the Ice Age, or in the 1700s when the Cookes farmed the land, or earlier, when the Indians fished the shores. He still had moments—every day, at least a few—when his self seemed a mechanical object, metal or plastic, bland and smooth, with no openings or face. Once a week he talked to Dr. Miller on the phone, but the sessions felt stalled, Charlie as reluctant to say he felt better as to describe how he was not. Columbus Day weekend, some people came back, but not his parents—his mother was busy, teaching a course—and not Gaga, who had sprained her wrist. Holly came, alone this time, and Rusty, and some friends of Rusty’s, and they made a dinner at the Red House, a feast—turkey, roasted corn, pumpkin soup—and then the pot appeared, but Charlie did not freak out. He simply went down to the cabin to bed.

The cleaners came after Columbus Day and did the closings, stripping the beds, covering the couches with sheets, dropping mouse poison, bright blue pellets, all around. The water was turned off, antifreeze poured into the Red House toilets. Still, he stayed on, as three foundations were poured on top of the casemate and to the east and west, as new power lines went in, trucks coming and going, the noise a constant. He hated it, but there were only so many times you could let loose a flare of anger only to watch it sputter and fall. Now and then, at night and on weekends, he went to the house sites and scavenged shingles and scrap wood for kindling. He found a shiny silver hammer and took it for himself. He had a slight urge, but only slight, to drop sand into the gas tanks of the bulldozers, carve obscenities in wet concrete, but he knew it would be a repeat performance, and self-defeating, and by someone who had not earned the right.

Mostly he was trying—more or less unconsciously—to fold the changes into his sense of things: here this house, there another. The homes being built were big but not enormous. They would have heat, brand-new appliances, interior walls made of drywall, not of the textured particleboard in the Red House and Portable (built on the cheap to house the multiplying generations), or the plaster and horsehair of the Big House (built to last). New people would move in, nobody’s relatives. He was inclined to either dislike the newcomers or ignore them, but might there be a pretty, lonely girl?

Largely, now, it was not anger he felt, but rather a kind of bone-scraping, quiet, ever-present sorrow. To come to the place that was supposed to stay the same, to come and find it changed. Dr. Miller had warned him against what he called the “geographic cure.” You can’t fix yourself by going somewhere else, he’d said. You’ll always take yourself along. But Ashaunt’s not somewhere else, Charlie had said.

At the library, Linda, the reference librarian, told him how she’d helped Jerry get books on homesteading and trapping through interlibrary loan, how she’d encouraged him to apply to college and he’d started the paperwork for a few state schools but must never have sent it in. He talked to the unhappy, acned high school girl who shelved books after school. Jimi Hendrix overdosed; Janis Joplin overdosed. Both times, the girl had crying jags all afternoon. The second time, Charlie bought her M&M’s, and she flung herself, damp, into his arms.

He stopped taking Valium, though he still carried it in his pocket. He left Ashaunt more often, riding his bike to Little River or taking the rowboat to fish for bass or bluefish. One afternoon he went to Windy Point. It was deserted, the porch furniture put inside, the houses seeming lower, battened down against the fall wind. Another day, he walked to work with a backpack full of books, thinking of Jerry, who, according to Rich (Charlie had finally gathered the courage to ask), had been held overnight in jail for trespassing on the Point. The judge gave him a break, Rich said, and put him on probation with restitution to pay for the damage he had done at the construction site. Now he was living with his mother.

In the folk song, the cat came back the very next day,
thought it was a goner but the cat came back for it couldn’t stay away.
Jerry’s cat did not come back. Jerry didn’t come back, though Charlie watched for him in the library, on the streets. All that fall, he walked around with the figure of Jerry (hair grown back, skin brown, as he’d been when Charlie met him) on the outskirts of his consciousness, unsure what he’d do if he, in fact, ran into him. Run? Apologize? Accuse? Offer more money—here, take twenty dollars, thirty dollars—to get your feet back on the ground, pay the restitution, the chaser after the shot.

When, in November, there were no more fish to catch and the true cold came, Charlie thought he was ready for it. He’d gathered wood, chopped logs, made a woodpile underneath the raised pilings of the cabin. He’d brought wool blankets from the Red House and was keeping supplied with water by filling his jugs in the men’s room at the library. The fires he built in the woodstove kept the place toasty. He made tea. Sat by the fire. Talked to Grampa sometimes in his head. He’d doze there, in the bentwood rocking chair. An old man, he was; for now, he didn’t mind. A few nights later, he forgot to bring the water jugs inside the cabin and they grew a skin of ice. He woke one morning to the fire gone out. The library, cutting back its hours, let him go. He began to eat his food down and not replenish. He drank the water down. The day he left, he shut the cabin door and put up a sign, thinking mostly of Jerry: “Come in if you like, but close door
tightly
when you leave to keep raccoons out,” and signed it “a spirit storming in blank walls,” from the Wallace Stevens poem.

He piled some books in the car, grabbed a handful of clothes, his medicine, his address book, a fox skull, a Joan Baez record he’d bought, a few branches of bittersweet. He put his sleeping bag in the car, his tent. Where would he go? Not to Cleveland, not yet, if ever. Not to his parents. To Holly, maybe, at Wellesley, though he couldn’t stay there in her dorm. She might know someone in Cambridge looking for a roommate, maybe in the sublet she’d had over the summer. He might see Melanie, try not to dodge. He might—for a moment he allowed himself to think of it—become her boyfriend, get a job in a bookstore, or he could follow Gaga’s advice and work for a newspaper or volunteer for a political or environmental campaign, though he knew so little (and every day, a little less) and had so much to learn.

He passed Salvador’s, closed for the winter, drove through the village, then onto Route 6, where he stopped for gas. In the convenience store, he bought an orange juice and, impulsively, a pack of cigarettes, which, just as impulsively, he dropped in the trash bin outside. On Route 24, he switched on the radio. American troop levels had dropped to 336,400. The soldiers would be having canned cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, and in some cases even turkey, thanks to the tremendous efforts of the Red Cross. Thanksgiving; he’d nearly forgotten, lost track of days, though in their last phone call, a week or so ago, his mother had asked him to come home. Holly would be not in Wellesley but in New Jersey; everyone would be, for the annual meal at Gaga’s. He had never, in his nineteen years, not gone, except for the year they lived in Japan. If he went, it would be a triumph for his mother, but Gaga would like it. Holly would like it. His father too. If he didn’t go, it would be . . . what? He imagined bringing Thanksgiving dinner to Jerry in the woods, how they’d eat silently and say nothing of the Pilgrims, nothing of Indians or corn or God, just eat because it was time to eat and they were, both of them (of this one thing, he was sure) grateful to the land that gave them food, and Charlie would have dug oysters and clams and foraged wintercress and ground nuts, and Jerry would have snared a rabbit in his trap.

But Jerry was with his mother, and if he hadn’t been, he would think the food was poisoned, tell Charlie he was trespassing, Lord of 10,000 Acres, where’s my cat? You drew me in, led me on, Jerry might say, or speak extravagantly in five different voices. A bird might fly through the scrub oaks, a flash of blue, of green, extinct in the wild, and the Portuguese settlers farming the land, fishing the seas. A place could turn out so many ways—could it? A place could turn out only one way: divide and conquer. Divide. At the end of Route 24, Charlie got on Route 128 heading toward Boston, though there were still times when he could exit and enter, split to go north or south. He flicked the radio off, his thoughts roaming. Several times he almost turned around, back toward Ashaunt, but the car was warm and the cabin would be cold, the land carved up, though as he drove away from it, he could already feel it returning in his mind to what it once had been.

He was five or six, on the base, deep under a black pine, sitting on dry needles. In the distance he could hear his mother calling: “Charlie? Charlie, where are you? Answer me!” And for the first time in his life, it had occurred to him that he did not have to respond—that he could sit there breathing, hearing his own breath, not answering when she called. For a long time he sat listening to his mother repeat his name, hearing the panic in her voice, the worry, the irritation: “For god’s sake, Charlie, is this your idea of a joke?” Eventually, she stopped calling, just stopped. Had she left? Gone for help? Given up?

After a few minutes, he crawled out and stood, his legs cramped. His mother was sitting on the steps of the old foundation, reading a book. He coughed and she glanced up at him and, her face registering nothing, returned to her book. Squinting in the sunlight, Charlie began to cry. Slowly, his mother put down the book and stood. She hugged him tightly to her, his head not much above her waist. She was wearing blue, he remembered, a light summer skirt. Together, without speaking, they’d walked home.

MIGRATE

1999

I

E
ACH DAY THEY
change the garden around, the trucks rolling in on a convoy, flatbeds loaded with perennials in full bloom. Steadily—they’ve been at it for four days now—the gardeners play with colors as if on a movie set: blue hydrangeas in the back, followed by black-eyed Susans, coneflowers, finally lavender, and the next day, the pattern altered, blue at the bottom, Susans in the middle, new blooms—today it’s pink tulips, and salvia, and tufts of stiff, tropical-looking grass, everything still in pots. The garden is sloped, the casemate hiding underneath, but the gardeners have doctored the hump to make it look intentional. Along the outermost rim behind the house—Land’s End—they’ve planted a row of saplings supported by wire, the doomed trunks bandaged white. Below, they’ve shored up the cliffs with riprap and wire netting. None of it, trees, blooms (even house, in the grand scheme), will last for long out here, felled by erosion, salt spray, wind, but for now, the colors dazzle. Helen, who comes each day to watch, supported by André and her cane, cannot get enough.

Not native
, her grandmother would have said of the flowers.
Too uniform
, of the bleached white shells on the path. Such a waste, said Jane the other morning as two trucks from the swimming pool company rumbled past the Big House, tanks filled with water for the plants. The Uh-Ohs are having a party in a few weeks, hence the beehive feel, the furniture delivered; hence the bands of merry Merry Maids, the Sylvan Landscape trucks, the push to get the garden done.
The windows alone cost a million dollars . . . It’s just the three of them
(the owner, Owen O’Reilly—they called him O.O. until it morphed into Uh-Oh, plus wife number two or three and a baby younger than his grandchildren).
It makes me feel soiled just to see it
(this, over drinks the other night, from Holly). And Percy:
There’s a bathroom with his initials on the wallpaper and a urinal shaped like a conch.
And Will, whose apartment in Dubai has recently been featured in the
Times
Style section:
Give the guy a break, people
—
at least he made his own money. He grew up in Southie.
And Charlie:
He’s not exactly Horatio Alger; he went to Harvard. So did his father. Anyway, he’s a nice guy
—
the house just depresses me. Can’t we talk about something else?