Mark Mills - Amagansett

The tactic seemed to have worked. If Hobbs was going to spill the beans to Milligan, he would have done so by now.

He paused to catch his breath at the top of the bluff. The sound of a vehicle broke the silence. From his vantage point he could see headlights sweep the lot of the beach landing, passing over the patrol car, then accelerating away up Two Mile Hollow to Further Lane.

The sooner he was gone, the better.

Entering the garden through the gate in the rusted iron fence, he crept through the shadows and found himself poolside.

The pump suddenly kicked in, causing his own to skip a couple of beats. Dropping to one knee, he scooped up some water and raised the cupped hand to his mouth.

There was no mistaking the taste, the briny tang.

As he hurried away, there was no feeling of exhilaration, but a curious sense of inevitability. He hadn’t landed here by chance. Like a blind man guided across a road, he had been led by the elbow.

Nineteen

The beach near Fresh Pond was deserted. Conrad hauled the sharpie to the water’s edge and lashed the sail-bag to the foredeck. Drawing the stumpy little craft out into deeper water, he clambered awkwardly aboard and began to paddle.

The tide was on the ebb, the wind stiffening from the southwest as it always did at this time on summer afternoons, catspawing across Gardiner’s Bay, its invisible hand slapping the surface at intervals.

Today, it carried with it the playful shouts of children leaping from the end of the long jetty at the Devon Yacht Club, hurling themselves off the wooden rail, skinny brown limbs scything the air before impact. He could just make out the dim tock-tock of a tennis ball being struck on an unseen court behind the low clubhouse.

The Junior Yacht Club was out on the water, a flotilla of boxy little Knockabouts running dead before the wind. A motor launch was in attendance, an instructor barking orders through a loudhailer. As the dinghies came about, Conrad ranged alongside the cat-boat.

The Demeter had been his first purchase on his return from Europe—a twenty-five-foot Gil Smith from the turn of the century, a masterpiece of design, and a dream come true. The elegance of its sheer lines aside, the shallow, wide hull, almost eleven feet in beam, provided the perfect working platform for a bayman. It was the first boat Conrad had ever crewed on, working the culling board with Antton, plucking out scallops from the eelgrass and the crabs and the culch dredged from the sea bed. Conrad had never concealed his interest in the craft, and when old Josaiah Fullard died in 1943 the Demeter had languished at her moorings in Accabonac Creek, awaiting Conrad’s return from Europe. Even when the news arrived that he’d been killed in action, Josaiah’s sons had held out a little longer, just in case.

Now the Demeter was his, more beautiful than ever—new running rig, new sail, new yellow pine hull. He always felt good when seated at the helm, teasing the great barn-door rudder, beating before the wind, the canvas snapping like a rifle-shot each time he tacked. Even now she seemed to understand him, responding with ease, compensating for his distraction.

With any luck, the last few pieces of the puzzle were waiting for him in Montauk; he’d have them by the end of the day.

Before he knew it, the buoy at the mouth of Napeague Harbor was bearing down on them. He thought about entering the channel and making for Lazy Point, but decided against it. He didn’t want to see Sam right now. It would only mean turning down his offer of assistance for a second time. Once had been hard enough. He was already regretting having shared the truth with him. The last thing he wanted was for Sam to get caught up in an affair that could only end badly.

He leaned on the tiller and came about on the port tack. That’s when he saw it, lying in the bilges—Lillian’s jadeite hair clip, a gift from her brother. She had mentioned to him that she’d misplaced it, and they had searched his bedroom and they had searched her bedroom, and then he had remembered that she’d been wearing it the last time they took the Demeter out, and they had laughed, remembering that night, then all the other nights they’d taken the Demeter out, right back to that very first night.

She had phoned as he was halfway to the truck, and although they hadn’t seen each other for a week, not since the evening of her birthday, he sensed it was her and he hurried back to the house.

‘Hello.’

‘It’s me,’ she said.

‘Hi.’

‘Hi.’

‘How was your surprise party?’

‘Oh, you know…’ said Lillian. ‘What are you up to?’

‘I was about to go firelighting for fluke.’

‘Firelighting for fluke?’

He explained.

‘Sounds to me like you could do with some help,’ she said.

He picked her up at her house and they drove to Promised Land. It was a warm night, with the lightest of breezes, perfect for the task in hand. Safely aboard, the gear loaded, he edged the Demeter away from the dock and out into Gardiner’s Bay, the five hundred square feet of canvas sucking up what little wind there was. Nearing Cartwright Shoals, he rigged the lantern from the stern of the boat and lit it.

‘Wow,’ said Lillian, peering over the side.

Beneath the glassy surface, the sea bed was laid bare.

‘Those are wild oysters,’ said Conrad, pointing. ‘They’re pretty much gone now.’

‘Why?’

‘Who knows? That’s a horseshoe crab.’

‘Where?’

‘There. And that’s a fluke, over there by the eelgrass, the flatfish.’

‘With the spots?’

‘With the spots.’

Taking up the spear, he slid the barbed head beneath the water and stuck the fluke. He tossed it to the far end of the cockpit, where it flapped wildly in the bilges.

‘A third of that’s yours,’ said Conrad.

‘Only a third?’

‘The boat gets a share.’

‘If I’d known, I wouldn’t have come.’

‘Okay, I’ll go fifty-fifty, but you’ll have to earn it,’ he said, handing over the spear.

They talked while they fished, drifting across the shoals. Conrad explained that he’d learned the technique from Billy, who had learned it from Sam, who in turn had learned it from his father—a family tradition reaching back to well before the arrival of the first white faces on the South Fork.

‘Billy’s an Indian?’

‘He’s dead. But yes, a Montaukett.’

‘I didn’t know…I mean…’

‘There aren’t many of them left,’ said Conrad.

He told her how, within living memory, the Montauketts had been lured off their tribal lands with promises of payments which had never materialized; how they had been chased away at gunpoint, shot at, killed in some cases, by the same men who had assured them they could return to fish and hunt on Montauk whenever they wished; and how the Suffolk County Court had then dismissed their suit against these blatant injustices on the grounds that the tribe had ceased to exist, that it was now extinct.

He told her how Sam had been present in the courtroom when Judge Abel Blackmar handed down his ludicrous verdict, declaring that he saw ‘no Indians there’, apparently blind to the fifty or so Montauketts cramming the public gallery that day, clad in full tribal regalia.

He described how he had stood with Sam and Billy on Signal Hill in Montauk one blustery summer’s day in 1926. The community was in the firm grip of construction fever, with hundreds of workers bulldozing, blasting and building away, racing to bring to life Carl Fisher’s dream of turning Montauk into ‘the Miami Beach of the North’. The centerpiece of his vision was Montauk Manor, an enormous mock-Tudor hotel perched high on the hill above Fort Pond. The location offered unrivaled views to the west, and it was no coincidence that the site was already occupied by an ancient Indian burial ground. The Montauketts always buried their dead on high ground, in a seated position, facing west—the direction of their journey into the afterlife.