John Casey - Spartina

He looked around for the bathroom, found it behind the fireplace, on the pond side.

The toilet was humming. It was a huge plastic cube with a temperature gauge and a lot of wiring. The only normal part was the lid and the seat. There was a high footrest jutting out on the front, which made it awkward for a man to take a leak. Dick had to put one hand on the back wall to lean over the bowl. This struck him as funny. He started to laugh, had to bite his lip to keep steady.

He zipped up his fly and looked for the handle to flush. He found a handle but all it did was slide shut the lower level of the bowl. Maybe it was like a head on a boat, had a holding tank. He settled for shutting the lid.

He closed the door behind him and started laughing again. Elsie came up the spiral staircase from the well to the greenhouse, holding her robe wrapped around her. “What’s so funny?”

Dick said, “That contraption in there.”

Elsie went in behind the curtains at the far end. She called out from inside, “Oh. The bio-let. ”

“The what?”

“It’s like a multrom. Turns sewage into compost. No leach field. Keeps the pond clean.”

She came out wearing shorts and a faded red sweatshirt. She pushed the sleeves above the elbow as she padded to the kitchen in bare feet. The stiff black shorts made her legs look particularly bare and harshly defined.

He was about to tell her about his odd morning at the Wedding Cake, Schuyler making breakfast for Parker and him. He caught himself. He thought of Marie coming up from the salt pond in her oversized robe, her chatter, her odd combination of boneless laziness and glass-edged attack. Maybe these rich girls all started conversations the same way, letting the fizz off the top of the bottle.

“I’m just going to have coffee and soup, that okay with you?”

While she was at the stove, Dick looked again at the shelves against the windowless wall. Quite a few books. One row of nothing but bird books. Boxes of loose photographs, a few more matted and propped up, a few in frames. Two cameras. There were three tennis trophies, two of them filled with pennies, straight pins, and odd buttons, the third a little statue of a girl serving. The arm with the racket had broken off.

Under the lowest shelf there were plastic-mesh baskets and a cardboard carton, all filled with stuff, as if Elsie were getting ready to have a yard sale. A pair of girl’s ice skates, a skin-diving mask and snorkel, cans of tennis balls, a jump rope, a lot of bicycle inner tubes, a swim fin with a torn heel. That was the first basket. Dick shoved it back against the wall with his foot. It wouldn’t go all the way. He picked up the handle of a butterfly net that blocked it, but the net was hung up on another carton. He gave up and wiped the dust off his hand.

Elsie was looking at him. “You’re as bad as my sister,” she said. “If you want to play with something, fine. But don’t go around straightening up.”

Dick reflexively stiffened against someone setting him straight. “Been here long?”

Elsie shrugged. “A year. Less. I’ve been fixing up the outside, putting in plants. I’ve got some furniture in storage but it doesn’t really go here, and I can’t afford new stuff. What’s the rush? I kind of like it with just the minimum.”

The one sofa by the fireplace and the one table by the window looked unrelated and forlorn. The sofa was a three-seater that had seen better days. The table was a rustic picnic table with benches, the cedar bark still on the legs.

The only other visible piece was a tall double-door wardrobe. It was carved and painted in some sort of old-time Italian or Portuguese way. It was faded, but still a beautifully made thing. Backed against the scarlet curtain, it made that corner of the room look like a side altar in a big Catholic church. It was a shame to have everything else so slack.

“It’s all passive solar,” Elsie said. “There’s a pile of rocks at the back of the greenhouse, and the heat flows …” She gestured sweepingly. She stopped. “Did you know you have the most terrible expression on your face?”

Dick was embarrassed. “It’s the benches and table. I like the wardrobe. I like the house and the pond.”

“Well, good. That’s the point. It’s just a shelter by a pond.” She put her hands deep in her shorts pockets. “I did a lot of the work, I mean hammering and sawing. Ask Eddie. And he and I worked on the plan.… I know it may look drab on a rainy day.…”

“No. It’s …”

“But on a nice day you can float on the pond — we dredged it and fixed the little dam — you can lie there and—”

“I like your house. Eddie likes your house. He spoke to me about it. The air flow and everything.”

“I just haven’t gotten around to … I’m perfectly happy to get some advice. You have any ideas?”

“Nope.” He had no idea what she wanted. But she could get him talking, he just couldn’t keep his mouth shut around her. He said, “Well, maybe you could take the bark off your picnic table. Looks like a hippie girl with hairy legs.”

Elsie laughed. “That’s going outside. Eventually. Back to nature, where she belongs. And eventually I’ll get some chests for all that equipment.”

“Maybe you should put it out in your garage. Makes the house look like it ought to have hinges on the lid. Like a big toy box.”

Elsie looked hurt, laughed, then looked hurt again.

“Aw, hell, Elsie, I’m just …”

“Did you know you used to terrify kids when you worked at the boatyard?”

“I was mean to kids? Naw. I may have explained things kind of briefly to one or two boat owners. I wasn’t mean to any kids.”

“I didn’t say you were mean.”

“First time I worked in the yard, I was just a kid myself. That was before the Coast Guard. Before I was on Captain Texeira’s boat. I used to fall back on the boatyard when things didn’t work out.”

“That’s funny. Even when I was a kid I admired the way you’re good at things, the way you seemed to have worked out a good relation to things, I mean the physical world. I thought you and Eddie — you around boats and Eddie back in the woods — I compared you with most of the men around.… You and Eddie seemed so real. And happy about … things.”

Dick laughed. “You’d have to leave out a long list of real screwups. That goes for Eddie too.”

“Oh, I know you and Eddie get into trouble. But that’s because you have your own rules … or at least your own sense of things. I’ve always liked the way you and Eddie treated this part of South County as though … well, certainly not as if it belonged to you, but as though it were open to you, part of your natural territory.”

“That’s a pretty picture all right. Natural territory.”

“Did you know the Indians — or, as Miss Perry says, the red Indians — didn’t own anything?”

“Well, that’s me and Eddie. But I’d like to have my natural territory so’s it includes, say, banks. The way it is now, I’m not in what you might call the natural business flow.”

Elsie didn’t go on with the subject. She brought the soup over to the picnic table. She said, “I know you don’t like this table with hairy legs, but it’s all we’ve got.”

Dick thought he’d spoken about money in some crude way. It irritated him. He said, “I see you got some tennis trophies. You going to join the tennis club when your brother-in-law gets it going on Sawtooth Point?”

Elsie smiled as though she saw through him. “Tennis used to be the way I punished boys. Now it’s how I try to meet men. So maybe I will. Increase my natural territory.” She got a picture from the shelf of herself and a man shaking hands over a tennis net. “That’s me at seventeen. I just beat him. The old headmaster at Perryville — he still had a pretty good game.” Elsie laughed. “Still! Old! He was only a few years older than I am now. He wasn’t even forty.”