John Casey - Spartina

But May seemed genuinely glad to see him, didn’t ask right off if he’d made enough to ante up the household money.

She said, “You want some breakfast?”

“We ate.”

“Well, why don’t you go ahead and take your shower. The boys are out for the morning. I was going to clean some, but I can get to it later.”

This more than usually enthusiastic offer didn’t please him as it usually would have. He still felt strange to his life, still as chilled and shriveled as he had felt hiding on the hummock in the salt marsh, still as constricted by nerves as on the foredeck of Mamzelle watching the cops search her, still as pierced as he’d been by his displaced boyhood when he’d stepped into the Wedding Cake.

He showered, came out in his towel, and took a hold of May’s long waist. On the bed he slid her hairpins out the way she liked, even slower than usual, so it got to her more than usual, but all the while he couldn’t get his mind off how he couldn’t tell her what was going on on account of how right she’d been about Parker. He rubbed her slip on her skin the way she liked, feeling indecently competent as she breathed harder and got pink and hypnotized.

Later on she said that she’d forgotten how much she used to miss him when he’d been going out regular on a boat. It was a nice thing to say, but it didn’t reach him. He looked up at a thin spattering of rain across the windowpane, the tired southwester dragging on.

T he next morning Dick dropped off Parker’s car at the railroad station, got in the pickup with Charlie, dropped Charlie, then headed back up toward Wickford to a salvage-warehouse auction of Navy surplus.

He was still tired, still tense, still baffled by his unsettled sense of things.

The sight of all the material in the warehouse cheered him up at first. Jeeps, three-quarter-ton trucks, marine hardware, coils of steel cable, a half-dozen steel lifeboats, donkey engines, auxiliary generators …

When the bidding started he realized that the stuff was being sold in bulk in lots too expensive for him. He was about to leave when he ran into Eddie Wormsley, who also wanted some narrow-gauge steel cable. Together they managed to get a spool. Dick picked up some electrical wire and some defective porthole fittings no one wanted. The last of the lobster money went for steel davits.

Eddie said to give him a call after lunch and he’d come help with the wiring. Eddie was slower at wiring than Dick, but did a better job. Having Eddie around got Dick in a better mood, a better rhythm. Eddie’s offer cheered Dick up, he’d been feeling uneasy and itchy about the wiring.

On the way home it began to rain again, not a steady clean rain, just more spitting and drizzling.

Several miles short of Wakefield Dick saw a bicyclist. It always annoyed him when bicyclists or joggers cluttered up a high-speed road, wavering along the shoulder. This one was actually on the edge of the right-hand lane, pedaling furiously. Dick recognized the uniform first, then saw it was Elsie. She recognized his truck, he saw her wave in his mirror. He pulled onto the shoulder a hundred yards ahead. He rolled down the passenger window, and when her face appeared, flushed and wet, he asked her if she wanted a ride. She said no, then yes. She hoisted her bike into the bed beside the spool of cable and climbed in beside him. She was in a raw mood too: the weather, having to leave her new Volvo at the dealer’s for mysterious noises, but most of all having her leave canceled to spend two nights ferrying around two cops in a Natural Resources whaler.

“Alleged backup to the alleged alert for alleged smugglers. Three-state alert. From the Cape Cod Canal all the way to the Connecticut River. The state police and the Coast Guard must have used up a thousand man-hours, just racing around flashing their lights. The Coast Guard boat spent an hour zipping along the beaches, poking around with a searchlight. We chased a boat into the salt marsh, could have been kids poaching clams or even just fourteen-year-olds drinking beer.” Elsie rolled down her right pant leg and flung herself back in the seat. “And I mouthed off to my boss about what a waste of time it is to use us as backup. The state police don’t like having us along. Though the guys I was with would still be lost … We used up a tank of gas going up every salt creek. And my revolver got wet, so I’ll have to clean it again.”

It occurred to Dick that it was good news that the alert was such a big deal — it seemed less likely that Parker was the object of any special attention. But still, here was official Elsie right beside him in his truck.

Elsie told him where to turn. Up Miss Perry’s driveway and into the woods. Another turn onto a narrow dirt road.

“This is the way to Quondam Pond,” Dick said. “I didn’t know your house was in here.”

“Yes. Miss Perry sold me that little tip of her land.”

The house was on the south side of a flat grassy clearing. From the clearing the house looked like nothing more than a big toolshed. A stretch of shingled roof and a dwarfed windowless wall. There was an open one-car garage at the side of the clearing, a covered passage from the side of the garage to the house. Elsie hung her bike on hooks inside it. She said, “Come on in. I’ll show you the house.”

The passageway was dark, but when Elsie opened the door to the house there was a glare of daylight. Elsie said, “Watch the steps, they go down.”

There was one long main room, bright even on this gray day. The house was embedded into the slope, almost all window along the south side. The windows overlooked the small pond, an oval stillness except for the dappling of the light rain. On the far bank rhododendrons hung out over the water, their blossoms gone by. A few white petals floated where they’d fallen.

Elsie put water on in the kitchen, which was simply a back corner of the long main room. There was a freestanding stone fireplace and chimney two-thirds of the way to the kitchen.

Elsie walked past him, all the way to the opposite end, where the other back corner was curtained off by folds of shiny material. It seemed scarlet at first, but he saw it was changeable in the light, darker in the troughs of the folds, lighter, almost pink, on the crests.

Elsie came out wearing a terrycloth robe that was too big for her. It could have been the same one Marie was wearing the day before.

“You want to swim?” Elsie said. “I’m going for a quick dip, wash off this all-night grunginess.”

Dick shook his head, watched Elsie as she went down a metal spiral staircase into a small greenhouse that was built along the pond side of the house. The roof of the greenhouse slanted down from the bottom of the main-room windows. Below the greenhouse there was a grass slope and then the bank of the pond. Elsie jumped from the bank to a large rock two feet from shore. She let her robe fall and dove in all in one motion. She came up in the middle of the pond. It was all so quick Dick wasn’t sure whether she was wearing a swimsuit.

He turned to look at the woodwork. It was simple but good. He remembered Eddie talking about doing the work a while back. The one really fancy bit was the steps down from the front door. Two concentric arcs, almost half-circles, nicely rounded at the lip. They somehow gave the impression of leading to water. The brown-and-gray fireplace and chimney stones were chinked with quartzite, and that pattern too reminded him of water, light reflected from water.

He thought of yesterday morning in the Wedding Cake — his undertow of thought then, started by the force of the Wedding Cake.… This house sure as hell didn’t have anything to do with that old style, none of the ornament. And yet it was alike in a way. It looked as if Elsie was moving in or moving out. The squat back wall had built-in shelves, which were half bare, half a-clutter.