John Casey - Spartina

Dick thought of Parker’s grin. He saw it clearly. For the first time in all the years he’d known Parker, Dick noticed there wasn’t quite enough flesh between Parker’s nose and Parker’s upper lip. No wonder Parker had paid to get his teeth fixed, even before he paid to fix his boat. Parker couldn’t help that grin. Was that how it worked? Parker was just born with that short upper lip and couldn’t help living up to it? Or had that lip shortened up a hair’s breadth with every quick trick Parker pulled? With every sly dollar he conned from tourists, insurance companies, his crews of green college kids? Captain Parker’s Pep Pills for Sleepy Sailors.

Dick stopped. What was he up to? Blame it all on Parker? Dick had always known how Parker lived. If he’d gone along with Parker, it was because there was a piece of him that wanted to be just as sly. Dick couldn’t claim he caught that disease from Parker. He’d gone poaching clams all on his own, no matter that was small potatoes. And the way he felt about banks, if he could have robbed one without inconvenience, he just might have.

And it had been Dick’s idea to get Schuyler on board and stick him with the bill for the spotter plane. That was pure Parker, and Dick had done it.

As for Parker’s drug run, Dick had balked at that, but he’d gone ahead. And to be honest about that, he had more worry that Parker was going to stiff him than he had remorse. Goddamn right. He couldn’t get any more mortgages on what he owned, so he’d taken one on his being a free citizen. No interest, but lots of penalty.

But mainly here he was fooling around with Elsie. Parker didn’t have a thing to do with this.

With every minute of waiting, Dick saw more and more clearly how Elsie was linked to every piece of his life. To his father’s land, and even to his father’s death by that odd condolence. To the bright rich people who now inhabited his father’s land by the salt pond — Joxer, Schuyler, the whole clambake. To Natural Resources, for God’s sakes. To Miss Perry. To his own sons. Dick remembered Charlie’s startled look of longing at Elsie’s legs when she’d whipped off her skirt to go swimming.

Charlie’s dreams might be full of Elsie — Miss Buttrick to him. Charlie’s puppy love merging with Charlie’s first spasms of billy-goat anguish. Banging his head on a tree for sweet Miss Buttrick, for her complete sweetness as she bent over him at her ecology class, her sleeve touching his hand as her finger touched the powder on a butterfly wing. Gritting his teeth at night, thinking of the terrible things he wanted to do to Miss Buttrick’s body, imagining with equal and simultaneous shame and pleasure Miss Buttrick saying “No, Charlie,” Miss Buttrick saying “Yes, Charlie.”

Dick cringed. He didn’t want to get that close to that part of Charlie.

But the thought of Charlie clung to Dick’s mind; Dick’s actual pleasure — accomplished not ten feet from where he now sat — seemed pale by comparison with Charlie’s dreams.

Dick was finally getting rid of Charlie’s daydreams when Elsie came in the door, down the two steps. He stood up. She put her pocketbook on the table. One hand on his shoulder, she kissed him shortly. She said, “I thought you told me you’d be back day before yesterday.”

Dick thought of what to say—“We got into some fish” was answer enough for anyone — but the sight of Elsie in a blue seersucker woman’s suit, dressed up as soberly as if she worked in a bank, and Elsie’s face cocked to one side in such a perfect imitation of a wife waiting for an answer, not May, not May now, not May ever — this was an affronted wife out of someone else’s life, someone wearing a suit and a tie to match her suit, someone who would say, “I’m terribly sorry, darling — I got tied up at the office”—all this was so far from Dick, so far outside what he’d just imagined, that Dick was popped right out of a straight answer.

He felt himself slide back into himself, reinhabit his body, from his vacant face down to his wide feet in his tight good shoes. He looked up to Elsie’s face, still cocked, her chin stuck out, her forehead furrowed up. When she folded her arms across her chest, he started to laugh.

He tried to stop. Elsie said, “What’s so funny?”

Dick shook his head. Elsie said, “It’s the whole thing, is it?”

Dick said, “That’s right,” and sat down.

Elsie said, “You son of a bitch.”

“It’s not the whole thing with you ,” Dick said. “It’s everything right now.”

“You liar,” Elsie said. “You think you can get away with anything because you still think I’m just a spoiled brat.”

“You’re wrong there,” Dick said. “That’s just one thing I think you are.”

“You asshole!” Elsie wasn’t out-and-out screeching but there was some screech to her voice. It struck Dick as odd that Elsie was losing it. In all his set-tos with yachtsmen, bankers, and such, Dick had been the one to lose it. The other guy may have been mad too, but it was Dick who lost it. Just now he’d been a little riled, but he didn’t want Elsie to lose it.

“Aw, come on, Elsie. I couldn’t use the radio, for God’s sakes. The operator at the Co-op is nosy as hell. And Charlie was on board, remember how close by everyone the radio is? I know I said I’d be back, but if you get into fish, you—”

“I don’t give a damn about your calling in. Though I’ll bet you could have thought of something if you’d tried just a little. You could have sent some innocent message, you could have asked if I still wanted a basket of lobsters even if you were going to be late.”

Dick said, “I’m not too good at thinking up things like that.”

“But what is rude, what is unspeakably rude, is your sitting here going har-har-har like a big oaf! I come in, you’ve been gone nearly a week, and you laugh in my face.”

Dick said, “I wasn’t—”

“And in fact the first person you go see is Miss Perry.”

Dick said, “It’s hard to explain. I was—”

“I’m sure it is,” Elsie said. “In that case you could at least have had the grace to lie and say you were looking for me.”

Dick didn’t try to say anything.

Elsie said, “Do you know what Captain Texeira does when he gets back to port? He phones Miss Perry. If he comes in late at night and can’t call, he leaves flowers. She finds a little flowerpot on her front step and she knows he’s back safe. And he named his second boat after her.”

Dick was afraid he was going to laugh again. Flowers. Him and Elsie Buttrick arguing about flowers. He got up and walked to the window, looked down at the pond.

“I don’t have one boat, let alone two. I’m not sure I’ll ever be the kindly soul Captain Texeira is, even if I do.” The pond was glaring, exposed as muddy by the midday light. Dick said, “I told you why I was going to see Miss Perry. I can tell you too that I don’t want to. I’m going ’cause it’s rock bottom. It came to me this morning when I got in. This trip I did as good as I could hope for, I had as good luck as I could ask for, and it ain’t enough. If it was just me, I’d give up, I’d salvage what I could from the goddamn boat and beg for a job. That’s what May would have wanted a year ago. Now she wants the boat in the water because she says I’ll be poison to her and the boys if I give up. And she’s right. I could bring myself to sell off the boat, but I couldn’t do it cheerfully. Even if I got fifty or sixty thousand for her, that money would evaporate. If I back off now, I won’t ever get a boat. So I’m willing — just barely willing — to go begging to Miss Perry. I knew this morning, if I didn’t do it that very minute, I wouldn’t ever do it.”