The Last Refuge

ONE

MY FATHER BUILT this cottage at the tip of Oak Point on the Little Peconic Bay in the Town of Southampton, Long Island, in the mid-1940s when there was nobody else around to build anything. They were all still at war, most of the young guys anyway, and the older guys were either too poor or too scared of the future—or too damaged by the Depression—to take a chance. But my dad had vision before people called it that, and he bought this nine-tenths of an acre parcel right at the edge of the bay. Waterfront, they call it now. Then it was called stupid and expensive, even though it only cost about $560 a lot.

The price of this kind of property has gone up a lot since then.

He built the house himself, a little at a time, without a mortgage. The first year he dug the foundation with a pick and shovel, laid up cinder block and put on the first floor deck. Then he built the rest of the house room by room as he got the money, and the building materials, most of which he scrounged out of local dumps and empty lots and the handful of construction projects that were going on at the time around the city and out on the Island.

He was too old for the war, but he fought plenty at home. My dad wasn’t a nice guy. He was a real bastard actually, but he treated me okay, most of the time.

I live in this place now, by myself. I was born about the time my father winterized the cottage, so for all intents and purposes, this is where I grew up. We also had an apartment in the Bronx where he stayed during the week, but my mother and my sister and I lived on the bay year round after he installed the oil furnace. I don’t remember ever being in the Bronx, though he used to tell me about the room I had, and how my sister and I played in the backyard around the crabgrass and sumac trees, until “the Negroes all moved in and scared away the regular people.” That was more or less how he put it, speaking the words with an acid fury. He was an active racist, like all the people of my father’s generation I knew growing up.

All I remember of my childhood is the restless water and neon sunset sky of the bay. The persistent breeze that could suddenly snap into hysteria and the smell of rotting sea life at low tide. I’m breathing it in now, and sometimes it seems like life’s only durable reference point.

The cottage is all on one floor, with a corner-to-corner screened-in front porch facing the Little Peconic. It’s the best room in the house, and it’s where I sleep all year round. Beginning about early April, till a little before Christmas, I leave off the storm windows. That was why I could always hear Regina Broadhurst moaning in the night. She slept with her windows open as well, and since her house was right next door, the only thing to stop the noise were the cicadas, the flip-flip of the little bay waves and about five hundred feet of windswept Long Island air.

When my mother died, I called a local used furniture guy to come over and take everything out of the house. Occasionally I see one of our things for sale in the window of an antiques store, or the thrift shop on Main Street, depending on its perceived value. I got two thousand dollars for the whole thing, which included hauling it away. They had to take a lot of stuff they didn’t want, but that was part of the deal.

I held on to my dad’s ’67 Pontiac Grand Prix. I keep it running and drive it around the eastern end of the Island. I try to stick to the back roads during the summer season. The big stupid car has a huge engine. Traffic makes it overheat.

Because it’s so big and improbably shaped, people don’t realize that the ’67 Grand Prix was one of the fastest production cars Detroit ever made. My dad and I retrofitted it with a 4-speed from a GTO, which made it even faster. I let the paint fade into the undercoat, but I patch the rust holes as they surface. It’s something to do.

My dad never appreciated the car like I did. He really only got a few good years out of it before those guys beat him to death down at the neighborhood bar in the city where he used to hang out.

After the furniture guy stripped the cottage, I stripped the paint my mother had put over the old varnished knotty pine that covers the walls. She’d done it to get back at my father for getting killed and leaving her alone on a permanent basis, not just during the week. I revarnished it and bought a new couch and a woodstove for the living room. Also a kitchen table and chairs, and a bed for the screened-in porch. I haven’t got around to doing anything else, but the little cottage feels bigger, and even echoes a little, and at least it’s wiped clean of the cluttered, congealed misery of my parents’ lives.

This all happened about four years ago after I came out here to stay. The place had been empty for a while—my mother spent her last years imploding into herself at a nursing home in Riverhead. My sister saw her more often than I did, even though she had to fly in from Wisconsin. I said I was too busy at the company to break away, but actually I couldn’t stand to see my mother in that place surrounded by all those demented, hollowed-out mummies. Or suffer the reproach I always imagined I saw in the contour of my mother’s set jaw.

It was also true that the company stole a great deal of my time, including the time I should have had for other things, and other people.

My mother didn’t like Regina Broadhurst, the woman who lived next door. But she liked everyone else in the neighborhood. They would seem to be all over the place during the week, then they’d evaporate on the weekends when my father came out East to stand in the front yard, fists on hips, glaring at potential trespassers.

Regina was tough to like, and even tougher when I moved in full time four years ago. By that time she was pushing eighty and hard as a hickory tree. Ropy, and not much of a smiler. Her white hair sprung chaotically from her head in woolly clumps. Her hands, like her knees, were all knobby and twisted up with arthritis, so she’d point at me with her knuckles when she wanted to emphasize a point. Which was often.

I had trouble escaping her because she was always calling me to come over and fix something. This was a habit she got from my father, who would look after all the mechanical systems in the neighborhood, being the only local certified mechanic and bound by some strange force of philanthropy. Regina’s husband had died so long ago he may as well have never existed at all. The house he built, which expressed the same ad hoc attitude as my father’s, was always on the verge of general collapse. She would stand at the edge of the scrubby bed of wildflowers that defined our property line and release a single noun the way you’d send forth a carrier pigeon. Something like “furnace,” and my father would swear at her and go fetch his tools. This was such a routine occurrence that when she did it to me the first time I complied without hesitation.

Like my father, I swore at her under my breath. Some precedents can only be honored in whole cloth.

The people who built this neighborhood were all like my father. They worked at jobs that got their clothes dirty, joined unions, bought cheap furniture and put statues of the Madonna inside big tractor tires out on their lawns. Many spoke with accents, or at least their elderly parents did. Their boys played baseball in the street just like in the city. Their daughters were mostly pale and overweight, though a few turned beautiful right before they flew the coop.

The neighborhood, arrayed randomly on a ragged peninsula made of sand and covered with scrub oak and mountain laurel, was little better than a squalid summertime tenement for the first thirty years it was here. It didn’t help that an old brick manufacturing outfit was on an adjacent shore. Their last serious enterprise was making rubberized life rafts for the Navy during World War II. They finally surrendered about thirty years after the Japanese. After that, property values got a little better, as the houses were winterized, and real estate in general out here went supernova. But even now, in the first year of the new century, a neighborhood like this, in a place like this, is a little like a guy in a cheap suit accidentally invited to a gallery opening.

I said I slept on the porch, but mostly I’d sit at the table and smoke Camels, drink overpriced vodka and look at the bay. I had a bargain going with Nature. She was supposed to let me do this long enough to get my fill, before shutting down all my internal organs, and I was supposed to worship her greater works, like the saltwater taffy hydrangea at the edge of the lawn, the fishy, smelly flavor of the breeze and the gaudy red-purple sky that shattered into a billion shards as it played across the Little Peconic Bay.

Late at night, usually after darkness had completely settled in, I’d hear Regina moaning in her sleep. The sound was from the damned, filled with despair. It either expressed the state of her soul, or the lady just made a lot of noise in her sleep. But it wasn’t all that great to listen to, cutting across the black peace of a quiet summer night.

Happily for me, she’d stop after a little while, and I could go back to my agitation without the external soundtrack.

If you spend a lot of time alone you can almost forget how to talk. The language may be forming continuously in your mind, but the mechanics can atrophy. That’s why I got a dog, so I could speak out loud without technically talking to myself. The thought of bumping around inside the little cottage talking to God, or inanimate objects, or my dead friends and family, was disturbing. Eddie was a pound dog on the way to getting gassed, so he seemed willing to listen to whatever I wanted to say without complaint, if not entirely devoted attention. Other sentients have cut worse deals.

The strategy worked most of the time. Though it didn’t entirely stop God or dead friends and family from crowding onto my screened-in porch to hector me with details from my massive ledger of failings and misapprehensions, usually first thing in the morning, with the vodka crackling around my nervous system, jolting me awake, my stomach in flames and my heart pumping up high around my throat.

Eddie’s principal domain was the half-acre of lawn that separated my house from Regina’s, and the thin stretch of pebbly beach beside the Little Peconic. These he monitored on a regular timetable, nose scanning the turf and tail spread aloft like a mainsail. Occasionally he’d shag tennis balls I hit for him with the three-quarter-sized baseball bat I kept by the side door. It had Harmon Killebrew’s signature branded into the rock-hard oak grain. My father had it stowed in the trunk of the Grand Prix, at the ready for incidents of road rage.

Most of the balls bounced out toward the beach. Some went over the flower bed into Regina’s yard. He was mostly indifferent to Regina, though he kept one eye on her whenever she was out there hacking away at her raggedy flowers. She spoke to both of us with about the same degree of warmth. Even so, whenever she caught him retrieving a ball she’d scratch his ears. He’d give her a tentative wag, which I admit I never did.

One afternoon in the fall of 2000 I was out in the drive working on the Grand Prix, which I did whenever the temperature was above freezing and below 850. I was under the car on a wood creeper when I caught a whiff of something. It was strong enough, and strange enough, to stop my work. Then it seemed to disappear, swept away by the clean, dry October air. About twenty minutes later it was there again. Holding the wrench still on the bolt, I stopped turning and took another whiff. There was something primal in the air. It reminded me of a pile of leaves I’d once set on fire that had a dead squirrel hidden inside. Something corrupt, decayed.

I rolled out from under the car and stood up. Eddie stood in the middle of lawn and twitched his nostrils at the air.

I went inside and washed my hands, then walked back out to the driveway and grabbed a heavy cotton cloth. I told Eddie to stay in the yard and walked over to Regina’s house. I rang the doorbell, but she didn’t answer. I went around the house and tried to look in the windows, but they were obscured by sheer, lacy blinds. I went to the back door and pounded hard on the casing. Nothing. I yelled for her. Still nothing.

I wrapped my hand in the wipe cloth and punched out a window in the kitchen door. As I reached in to release the lock I was knocked back by the strange smell, only now it was close by and strong enough to take on mass.

“Goddammit.”

I put the cloth up to my mouth and walked around inside her place. She was in the bathtub. Black and swollen, face down in the water.

Joe Sullivan was almost a generic cop. Big in the gut and across the shoulders, liked to wear sunglasses, carried a Smith on his hip and a chip on his shoulder. His hair was blond and cut short. His shirt was perfectly pressed and his shoes polished into porcelain. He was a Town cop. His beat was the North Sea area of Southampton. He’d been doing it too long, I guessed, from his bored, tight-assed look and his fastidious attention to personal detail.

I sat in one of my two Adirondack chairs on the front lawn and waited for him to walk over. There were a half-dozen cars over at Regina’s, most of them with bubble-gum machines blinking on top. A few people were gathered whispering at a respectful distance, but events like this are all sort of routine and dismal once you find out it’s only an old lady dead in her bathtub.

“Sam Acquillo, is it?” Sullivan asked as he dropped down in the other Adirondack.

“Yup.”

“I knew your folks. Sort of. Your mom, anyway. Played with a kid down the street. Saw you around once in a while.”

I nodded.

He flipped open a little notebook when he saw I wasn’t going to chat. Probably relieved.

I gave him the statistical details of time and place. We’ve learned it all from TV. He wrote it down with deliberate thoroughness.

“I guess you can’t live forever,” he said, looking at me.

“Nobody’s done it yet.”

Eddie trotted over looking alert and lightfooted. All the people milling around and the blinking lights from the cops and EMTs represented high entertainment value. When he wasn’t patrolling the yard, Eddie was usually more than content to just hang around under my feet. But he was never one to pass up on a party. Sullivan made some sort of squeaking sound with his lips and beckoned him to come closer, which he did, and got his ears scratched for the trouble. Sucking up to law enforcement.

“Know if she’s got any family?”

“A nephew in Hampton Bays. Haven’t seen him for a few years. Kind of a meatball. Mows lawns, or something. Saw him here in a crappy red pickup about the time I started fixing up this house. She didn’t like him.”

“How do you know that?”

“She told me.”

“Name?”

“Don’t remember.”

“Tha’s okay. I’ll find him if he’s still around. Have to notify somebody.”

I was a little distracted watching them roll Regina out in a bag. That was how my mother wanted to go, in her house, but we couldn’t figure out a way to look after her. It was a full-time deal at the end. Her heart and lungs were in perfect shape, but she would take off her clothes and wander around the neighborhood, complaining about the way Harry Truman was running the country.

My sister brought in a succession of live-in nurses to stay with her, but nobody can watch a demented old lady twenty-four hours a day. It made my sister feel guilty that she couldn’t be there herself, but she had a husband and a pair of dopey kids out in Wisconsin. There was never any suggestion about sending my mother out there, ostensibly because she was determined to stay in the house by the Peconic. Of course, by then, she might as well have been living on the third moon of Jupiter for all she knew about it.

“Mind if I get back to work?” I asked the cop.

He wanted to be annoyed by my lack of engagement, but I really wasn’t worth the effort. He stood up and adjusted his belt, sagging under the weight of belly and ordnance.

“Whatta ya do out here all the time?” he asked me, now more curious than friendly.

“Fix that piece of shit car, mostly,” I said, truthfully.

“Early retirement must be nice. I got a lot of time before that.”

“Didn’t retire,” I told him as I went over to the Grand Prix and rolled myself back under to see if I really needed to replace that front universal, or if it had another few years left in its sloppy mechanical soul.

It’s not that easy to find a place to drink in the summer out here, for obvious reasons, but by early October the good places are mostly back to normal. Mine was loosely associated with a working man’s marina on a little cove slightly outside the busier parts of Sag Harbor. The Pequot was such a crummy hard-bitten little joint that even regular townspeople mostly overlooked it. The inside walls were unfinished studs and wood slats that had aged into a charred, light-absorbing brown. There wasn’t even an operable jukebox or Bud sign. There were Slim Jims, and lots of fresh fish year round, since the steady clientele were mostly professional fishermen.

When it got dark the night after I found Regina I drove over there in the Grand Prix. Already autumn leaves were swirling around the streets in little vortices made by passing cars. The Grand Prix rumbled through the tangled whaling village streets of Sag Harbor like a PT boat, and I watched the leaves swoosh up behind me in its wake. The fall is a good time to be anywhere in the Northeast, but especially good to be out here with the soft-edged light and crystal salt air.

At the Pequot you were rarely menaced by the threat of unsolicited conversation. It was a place where you could sit by yourself at a little oak table and a young woman with very pale skin and thin black hair pasted down on her skull would serve you as long as you stayed sober enough to clearly enunciate the name of your drink. You could almost always get a table along the wall over which hung a little brass lamp with a shade made of red glass meant to simulate pleated fabric. Though the place itself was pretty dim, you could read under those lamps, which I always did. It gave me something else to do besides sitting there raising and lowering a glass of vodka and something to look at besides the other patrons or the wonderful ambiance. You could get a lot of reading done before the vodka had a chance to establish a hold.

I don’t even know why I went there all the time. I guess it was some ingrained impulse to put on a clean shirt around dinnertime, get in the car and drive someplace. To be someplace other than your house, at least for a little while.

“You eating?” the waitress asked, holding back the plastic-wrapped menu till I gave her an answer.

“What’s the special?”

“Fish.”

“Fish. What kind of fish?”

“I don’t know. It’s white.”

“In that case.”

“I could ask.”

“That’s okay. White goes with everything.”

“You get it with mashed potatoes.”

“And vodka. On the rocks. No fruit, just a swizzle stick.”

“We don’t have fruit.”

“Good, then I’m safe.”

“But I can give you a slice of lime.”

“That’s okay. Save it for the fish.”

“Fried or baked?”

“Fried.”

“Okay. Fried with a lime.”

“Exactly.”

I’d been trying to read Alexis de Tocqueville, and not getting very far. It was okay, though I always felt with translated prose that I was missing all the inside jokes. But since this guy gets quoted a lot, I figured it was worth slogging through.

“I think he would’ve shit his pants,” said the waitress, dropping the vodka with a lime in it on the table.

“Who?”

She pointed to my book.

“If he came back he’d really shit his pants about everything that’s going on now.”

“You read this?”

“At Columbia. American Studies. My dad wants to ask you about your fish.”

I looked past her and saw the owner of the Pequot coming toward my table. For a brief moment I thought I’d managed to turn a simple little dinner order into cause for a fistfight, but the way he was wiping his hands on his apron looked more solicitous than accusatory.

His name was Paul Hodges and he’d been a fisherman himself at one time, among other things, though he wasn’t the kind to talk about what those other things were. He had a face that blended well with the inside of his bar. The skin was dark and all pitted and lumpy, and his eyes bugged out of his head like somebody was squeezing him from the middle. Old salts don’t usually look like the guys from Old Spice commercials, they mostly look like Hodges, kind of beat up and sea crazy. He had very muscular arms for a man his age, old enough, it turned out, to have a daughter old enough to study Tocqueville at Columbia.

“You wanted to know the fish?”

“Yeah, but only curious. I’m sure whatever you got’s gonna be fine.”

“It’s blue.”

I smiled at the girl. She rolled her eyes.

“I told him it was white.”

“Yeah. Blue’s a white fish, sort of. Maybe a little gray. Caught right out there north end of Jessup’s Neck.”

“That’s great,” I told him, relieved he wasn’t mad at me about anything, since I really wanted to keep coming there and had less than no stomach to fight with anybody about anything at all. Ever again.

“Bring it on.”

He kept standing there wiping his hands on his apron.

“You’re Acquillo’s boy.”

I looked at him a little more closely, but no deeper recollection emerged.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Fished with him. You wouldn’t remember.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Yeah, but I seen you around with him before. Weren’t that many around here then. You knew who was who.”

“True enough.”

“Now I don’t know any of these fucking people.”

I kept trying to fix him in that time, but all I saw was the old man behind the bar at the Pequot. I also couldn’t imagine my father fishing. Even though he was always bringing home a bucket of seafood for my mother to clean and overcook for dinner whenever he was out from the City. Even when he wasn’t there we lived on fish because that’s what people without a lot of money did in those days. It was basically free, and plentiful. You wanted to put on a little style you went out for a steak, or something like pork loin. Something that came from a farm, not the old Peconic Bay that was just outside the door.

Hodges didn’t look like he was in much of a hurry to go back to the kitchen. Without asking, he pulled out the other chair at my table and sat down. I suddenly started feeling hungry.

“I heard what happened to him,” said Hodges.

I focused on my vodka, but had to answer.

“That was a while ago.”

“I know. He was a guy with some pretty firmly held convictions, your father.”

“That’s true, too.”

“And wasn’t all that shy about letting you know what they were.”

“So you knew him.”

“Not well. Just came out on the boat a few times. Crewed for me and my boss. Done his job well. Had to keep him away from the customers.”

Hodges sat back to give his belly a little leeway and rested his elbows on the armrests of the chair.

“Never bothered me, though,” Hodges added.

“No. Me neither.”

Hodges nodded, chewing on something in his head.

“Not that I’d let him. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“How’d you want that fish again?”

“Fried.”

He nodded again.

“Better that way. You bake it you got to deal with the parsley, the custom herb mix, the special lemony butter sauce. Fried, it’s just there kind of contained in its lightly seasoned breaded batter, ready to eat. No muss.”

“Next time I’m going baked, no doubt about it.”

He registered that and finally left me alone with my Absolut and Tocqueville. I’d almost started to get a little traction with the thing when his daughter showed up with a fresh drink.

“On the house.”

Apparently, once you actually had a conversation with the Hodges family there was no going back.

The fish was pretty good, especially inside the lightly seasoned breaded batter. I stayed another hour and read, distracted from the packs of malodorous crew coming in off the late-arriving charter boats, and a cluster of kids, probably underage, who piled into the only booth in the place, elbowing each other and goofing on the world in urgent sotto voce.

I walked the bill over to the girl and asked her if I could bother her father one more time before I left.

“How long you been around here?” I asked him when he came out of the kitchen.

“In Southampton?”

“Yeah.”

He pushed out his bottom lip and thought about it a minute.

“’Bout forty-five years, give or take a few. Came out of Brooklyn. Don’t actually remember why, or why I stayed. Fish edible?”

“Definitely sustain life.”

“Then we done our work here.”

“I was wondering about an old lady.”

“Old lady like ‘old,’ or like, ‘lady’?”

“No, just an old lady. Next door neighbor, wondered if you knew her.”

Hodges picked a piece of something out of his back teeth, popped it back in his mouth and then swished it down with a mouthful of beer from a glass stowed out of sight under the bar.

“At my age, old’s a relative term. Which old lady we talking about?”

“Regina Broadhurst. Lived to the east of me at the tip of Oak Point. Been there as long as my folks were. Maybe longer.”

Hodges smiled at something inside his head before he answered.

“Sure. Seen her around. One of the old bitches down at the Center. Never said anything to me that I can recall. I don’t think she’s all that fond of men.”

“The Center?”

“The old folks hangout, the Senior Center down behind the Polish church.”

I was genuinely surprised.

“Senior Center?”

Hodges looked at me like I’d disappointed him. He ticked off a few points on his fingers.

“First there’s the two-dollar breakfasts Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Then there’s the three-dollar cold cut and potato salad lunch every day. Then there’s the five-dollar Sunday supper. You eat better than anywhere else in the Village and it’s practically free. The worst you have to do is say a few prayers and put up with a bunch of fuckin’ old bitches like Regina Broadhurst who act like you’re the only charity case in the joint. Of course, they’re wolfing down the same free shit you are. Subsidized, anyway.”

“I get it.”

“Not exactly. I pay my own way. Work in the kitchen. Once a week, gives me full meal privileges. Can even bring Dotty with me.”

“Dorothy,” said the girl without looking up from the small stack of checks she was tallying up.

“You’re wondering why I’d eat anywhere’s but my own place.”

Hodges looked defensive.

“No. I can see it,” I said.

“You can get tired of fish.”

“He hits on the old ladies,” Dotty slid in.

Hodges gave her a little fake backhand and lumbered back through the swinging door into the kitchen. I thanked him as he retreated and asked his daughter to settle up my bill.

“He actually does it for the church,” she said to me quietly. “For years and years. He’s says he hates religion, but he does things for people. He hardly ever eats there.”

“Nothing wrong with a good deed.”

She seemed to be taking her time with my check. Stalling.

“Why did you want to know about Mrs. Broadhurst?” she asked abruptly as she handed over the slip.

“She’s dead. They fished her out of her bathtub today. I found her.”

“Oh my God.”

“Just wondering if your dad knew her. He’s been around here a long time. She didn’t seem to have any family or friends.”

“He’s going to be sorry he called her a bitch. You should have told him right away.”

“Probably should have. But don’t be too sorry. She was a bitch.”

She almost smiled at me despite herself.

“That’s very harsh.”

“I know. Speaking ill of the dead. God doesn’t like it.”

“God doesn’t care. People do.”

“Apologize for me,” I told her as I started to leave.

She stopped me. “I know Jimmy. Or at least, I used to, sort of.”

“Jimmy?”

“Jimmy Maddox. Her nephew.”

“Really.”

“Wow, like a real asshole. I knew him at school. At Southampton High School. I’m sorry to talk about somebody like that, but some people you just can’t like.”

“It’s okay. He’s not the dead one.”

“I guess he’s still alive. I don’t know. I haven’t seen him for a long time. He got into bulldozers or something.”

“Construction.”

“Big earth machines. Pushing lots of shit around. It would suit him.”

“Lives in Hampton Bays.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“That’s what his aunt told me. She didn’t like him, either.”

“Charming.”

“No other family?”

“That’s all I know about. Jimmy’s parents died when he was still in high school. I don’t know what happened to them, but he was the first kid I knew who lived in his own apartment. But unfortunately he wasn’t cool. He was just fucked up and pissed off all the time.”

“Helluva way to live.”

“Dumb way to live, if you ask me.”

“Yeah,” I said to her, finally leaving, “only an asshole would live like that.”

I’d pretty well forgotten about the whole thing with Regina after a few days. A talent for forgetting was something I’d cultivated since moving into the cottage. I also worked on my body, which was less than it was, but good enough for my age, considering. I’d wanted to be a boxer in my twenties—actually fought a little to help pay for night school. The only Franco-Italian boxer in New York was how I billed myself—in my own mind. I was too small and too light to be much of a hitter, so I figured myself a finesse guy, which people expected from me, being white. In those days, white people were supposed to be genetically smarter than dark-skinned people, so everyone figured if I could dance around the ring it was proof of my brilliance. This I knew from the dawn of cognition to be complete horseshit, despite my old man’s attitudes. But I was smart enough to know getting beat into pudding by another boxer was a shortsighted operating strategy. Better to get in and out of there quick and do maximum damage to the other guy’s self-confidence in the early rounds. Fool him into thinking you were actually somewhat of a contest. You win more fights that way and get to keep most of the face you were born with.

More than anything, boxing had made hanging around gyms a habit with me. Decent conditioning was also prolonging suicide by alcohol, but that couldn’t be helped.

Deep in the pine barrens above Westhampton a rummy old ex-cop ran a youth club boxing school and gym for retired military, other cops and people like me who’d rather cut their balls off than walk through the doors of a typical health club. I know that’s a kind of reverse elitism, but screw it.

The guy’s name was Ronny and his gym was called Sonny’s, which made it authentic, at least, in that respect. It was off-white cinder block on the outside with pale green cinder block on the inside. The lighting was a little less dingy than the gyms in the city. The bags, ring and other equipment were tired but solid, and the stink was just within tolerable limits. Most of the kids were Shinnecock Indians and blacks, or a mix thereof, and the “coaches” were all local municipal thugs. I went there about three times a week to jump rope, do some calisthenics and spar with whoever. Usually one of the kids. I had to avoid the more serious guys so they wouldn’t pester me all the time into what they figured would be an easy way to nurture their egos.

They always say you’re supposed to pick the toughest guy in Dodge City, hurt him badly and conspicuously, and the other tough guys would leave you alone. Rarely worked, since there was usually a reason why the toughest guys were the toughest. But a bigger problem for me now was being fifty-two years old. So instead I just broadcast a don’t-fuck-with-the-crazy-old-man vibe, hoping to plant a seed of doubt with anyone wanting to exercise his dominance instinct. This, in fact, had worked pretty well so far.

I was at Sonny’s working on the sand bag. The cop, Joe Sullivan, was there lifting some free weights. He ignored me for a while, then came over and stood next to the bag. I ignored him and kept hitting the bag in the loose pattern I’d been hitting it with for about thirty-five years.

“Found any more dead old ladies?” he asked me when he saw I wasn’t going to acknowledge him just standing there.

I kept working on the bag.

“Hey, just a bad joke,” he said after another minute.

I held the bag still with both gloves.

“Not really,” I said. “I’ve heard worse.”

Sullivan shifted his top-heavy body weight from right foot to left.

“I haven’t dug up any nephew. You sure you don’t know the kid’s name? I mean, she’s not even planted yet, and we gotta do something with the house. Haven’t found a will.”

“No will?”

“Not that anybody can find. Not that anybody’s really looked, I should say. Usually there’s family that just does everything. I’m not really supposed to be involved in this shit, but I hate to hand the whole thing over to the court in Riverhead, where they’ll just pay McNally to settle it out, and I hate that dumb fuck of a lawyer. I guess it doesn’t matter. I just know what happens when the court has to handle everything itself. I don’t know why I give a shit.”

Municipal guys on the eastern end of Long Island would rather sell their souls than concede to other New York agencies. There was often talk of seceding from Suffolk County itself. The spirit of disenfranchisement runs deep out here.

I hit the bag a few more times, trying to re-establish the pattern.

“Jimmy Maddox,” I said to him as he was about to walk away.

“Huh?”

“Jimmy Maddox. That’s the name of her nephew. Works construction on heavy equipment. Don’t know where, though I’m guessing he’s still in the area.”

“I think I remember that guy. Didn’t know he was her nephew.”

“I saw him a few times, like I said, hanging around her place. He could be her only living relative.”

“Now that I got a name, I can find him. That house on the bay’s gonna be worth something.”

“House is pretty beat up.”

“Nah, they’ll just bulldoze it and put up some big honkin’ postmodern. Jimmy could handle the dozin’ himself. It’s the land on the bay that counts. Nobody cares about the little shit boxes that’re sitting on it. No offense.”

I stopped working the bag and held it still between my gloves.

“I can help take care of this if you still want,” I said to him.

“What do you mean?”

“Can you get them to make me the executor?”

“You can’t be an executor if there ain’t a will. You gotta be an administrator.”

“Okay then, can you get them to make me the administrator?”

“Yeah. I think so. Like I said, nobody really wants to fuck around with any intestate shit. Especially with an indigent.”

“Regina wasn’t indigent.”

“Sorry. You know what I mean. No family.”

“Just the kid. Make this administrator thing happen and I’ll go talk to him. If he wants in, then I’ll cut out. But more’n likely he won’t know what the hell to do.”

“You’re not kidding.”

“I’m used to looking after the old broad’s stuff. It’s part of my family heritage. Just get me the papers I need. I don’t want to have to work at it too hard.”

Sullivan stood there silently until it sunk in that he’d achieved the goal he’d set himself to. Made him a little perky.

“Okay. That’s really cool. I’ll talk to the town attorney—they know how to deal with Surrogate’s Court, get you some kind of administrator papers or something. If you got the time to get on it now. I really can’t. That’s great. That’s a help.”

He lingered a few more minutes like he’d have more to say if I’d made it easier for him. Eventually he drifted away as I built up my pace on the bag, hitting it a little extra hard, hurting my wrists and getting a little winded in the process. What is it about human interaction that makes me feel so sick and ill at ease? I am going to grow old and die without ever learning how to achieve common discourse, free of implications that extend far beyond the importance of the moment.

A few days later I was in the Village to do my monthly banking. It isn’t really necessary to do this in person anymore, with ATMs and PCs. But I didn’t have a PC, hardly ever used my ATM card, and never got over the old-fashioned habit of checking everything out with some semblance of a human being. Maybe I did it because banks would rather you didn’t, even though they had the tellers there for anybody to use. Most of whom were, by training, surly and aloof. Which suited me fine.

The inside of the bank was standard rehab coral and chrome. The tellers were lined up along one wall manning a mahogany palisade you assaulted after passing through a gauntlet of brass poles and velvet rope. Along the other wall were desks that were supposed to seem friendlier, but in fact felt less approachable. That’s where Amanda Battiston sat and conducted business with a continuous but graceful rhythm. She was what they called a personal banker, somebody you got to talk to if you had a big account and lots of juicy business with the bank. Which I didn’t, but I preferred to deal with a personal banker anyway.

Her husband was the branch manager. He sat in the only enclosed office you could see from the floor. That’s where he met with local businesspeople and out-of-town customers from New York City and other faraway places. He was younger than me, but he was a local and I remembered him and his family from when I was growing up. When I first opened my checking account he tried to engage me, but I preferred his wife. I didn’t like the way his midriff filled out the lower half of his shirt or his smooth meaty handshake. Plus, she didn’t seem to care that I didn’t have a whole lot of money, even though her husband thought I did. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have even looked at me.

Amanda was a little shy of forty and well organized. Her hair always looked freshly combed, though obviously unpermed and secretly on the brink of rebellion. Her olivy skin tone saved her from a genuine need for makeup, though she used some anyway. She had a set of green eyes with the hypnotic quality that came from an excess of color and contrast. I rarely saw her up from her desk, but when she moved it was quick and young. It made me think of tennis shorts. Though I rarely saw them speak to each other, her marriage to Roy seemed to enclose her like a crystalline display case.

“Mr. Acquillo, your free-checking status is in dire jeopardy,” she said to me without looking up from her computer screen.

“I didn’t know I had any status to jeopardize.”

“Yes sir.” She tapped at her keyboard, having pulled up my accounts when she saw me walking across the parking lot. “Maintaining a minimum balance in the CheckPlus account affords you unlimited free checking.”

“So the bank covers all my checks.”

“Just the checks themselves, at a dime a pop. Not bad if you think about it.” She looked at me out of the tops of her eyes, waiting for me to make her decision official, which I always did.

“I can get it back up to the minimum. I got a check here.”

“I’m sure you’re getting great service on your investment account, but don’t forget we can handle that for you here as well.”

She began to type in the deposit information while I wrote out a check against the tattered remains of a money market account left over from my marriage.

My ex-wife used to try to manage my money. She was insulted when I wouldn’t let her. She saw it as an affront to her intelligence. It wasn’t, I just had a poor kid’s fear of losing everything if it drifted too far from my immediate grasp. I stopped feeling that way long after this particular incision had been opened up in our relationship. Nowadays, I’d be more than happy to let her manage anything she wanted—she was naturally better at most of those things than me, even though she never got a chance to exercise her talents—but that’s just another of the lamentable ironies that entangle my life.

Roy came out of his office and pretended not to see me so he didn’t have to re-live my rejection. Amanda looked up at him neutrally as he passed by. She muttered something about picking up extra food for dinner, as if seeing him jarred a guilty conscience. I took Roy to be a guy who would care about the incidentals.

“Everything is as you’ve requested,” said Amanda as she swiveled the computer screen around so I could see. “The deposit will take a day to clear, then you’ll be okay as long as you don’t let things slip past the minimum.”

“I’ll be alert.”

She swiveled the monitor back around to wrap up the transaction. I vaguely remembered that, like her husband, she was a local, born and bred.

“Did you know Regina Broadhurst?” I asked out of the blue, enough to surprise myself as much as her.

She looked at me blankly, but nodded. “Yes I did, as a matter of fact. She just died.”

“Yeah, I know. I found her myself.”

Her shoulders dropped in sympathy. “I’m so sorry.”

“That’s okay. It’s just that I got myself into a situation where I have to talk to her nephew, who’s supposed to be her only next of kin. You know if there’s anybody else?”

“I know very little about her. I heard of her death from the people at the Senior Center. She was a friend of my mother’s. That is, they knew each other. I don’t know if I’d say they were really friends. I think they worked together years ago.”

“Regina was sort of a hard drink.”

“She wasn’t very pleasant. Are you handling her affairs?”

“I didn’t mean to. I’m just the next-door neighbor. I don’t know, I got myself stuck with this, like I said. Just thought you might know about the nephew, Jimmy Maddox, since you’ve been out here all along.”

“Not really all along. I was away for quite a while. Like you,” she said, and then suddenly looked embarrassed, as if caught with stolen knowledge of my personal life.

“My mother, on the other hand,” she said quickly to cover the moment, “would have known, I’m sure. Only she’s gone, too. They spent time together at the Senior Center.”

“Sorry. What was her name?”

“It was only about a year ago. Julia. Julia Anselma.”

“Italiana. Va bene.”

“Battiston isn’t really as pretty, is it?” she said, this time embarrassed that she’d shared a private little bit of her own.

“No,” I admitted, “it isn’t.”

She scanned the room as if awakened to the intimate drift of the conversation. She sat up straight and tapped a few times on the computer keyboard, covering her tracks.

I got up to leave.

“If you want to know more about Regina,” she said without looking up, “you probably should stop over at the Senior Center. It’s quite a tradition with local people. They’ll probably know a lot more.”

“I’ll do that. Thanks for the information. Regards to Roy.”

She smiled a twisted little smile and nodded, looking a little unbalanced. I didn’t want to disturb her, but I seemed to be doing it anyway. So I smiled back, gently I hoped, not wanting her to be afraid of me or regretful that we’d talked. It only made her look more intently at her monitor.

The sharper angle of the autumn sun was rinsing away the remainder of summer’s color. Still, it was clear and the air did little to interfere with the light that shot down Main Street, careening off the worn Mercedes and Rolls Royces of the year-round rich, and the service vans and dented pickups that reclaimed the village off-season. I bought some flavored coffee and a croissant at the coffee place on the corner before driving back up to North Sea—avoiding eye contact with the tradesmen more embarrassed than me to be seen in a Summer People hangout.

In the mailbox was a bundle of death certificates and a letter naming me administrator of Regina Broadhurst’s estate, pursuant to a hearing by the Surrogate’s Court, which the Town attorney, Mel Goodfellow, circled in pen and noted was pro forma, so I didn’t have to show up. I was surprised and mildly impressed with Sullivan’s prompt action. He must have really wanted this thing off his back.

When I opened the door to let Eddie out the phone was ringing. I pushed the receiver into my ear with my shoulder so I could use both hands to dump a tray of ice into the ice bucket. It was Amanda Battiston.

“I’m sorry if I was short with you.”

“You weren’t short.”

“Roy gets really annoyed with me when I talk about my mother.”

“We were talking about Regina Broadhurst.”

“I said they were friends, but mother really didn’t like her. She called her That Woman.”

“Regina had that affect on people.”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry if I got you in trouble with Roy.”

“He doesn’t know you’re not an Aff-1.”

“Aff-1?”

“Top affluent account. Minimum seven-figure net worth.”

“Definitely not Afff-1.”

“He doesn’t like it when locals do well. But he likes their business.”

“I could ease his mind.”

“No. That’s all right. I just didn’t want you to think I was rude.”

“Some time maybe we could get a cup of coffee and talk about your mother and Regina. When you’re not worried about Roy looking over your shoulder.”

“I couldn’t do that.”

“I understand. Anything else you can tell me, just give me a call. You obviously got my number.”

“It’s on your account information. I hope you don’t mind.”

One of the few things I appreciated about Abby, my ex-wife, was she never felt the need to apologize for anything. She was often wrong, but rarely in doubt. It seemed like a habit with most women to get you to say that something that was clearly all right was, in fact, all right.

“Figure out a time when you can have that cup of coffee and you can make it up to me.”

“I suppose that would only be fair.”

“Okay,” I said, “call me when you can.”

“Okay.”

Eddie barked at me from the side door to let him in. I scratched his ears and gave him a large dog biscuit, the consummate joy of his life. He waited while I gathered up the ice bucket, a glass, a bottle of vodka and a pack of cigarettes, so the two of us could enjoy our favorite consumables out on the porch together. The Little Peconic was calm, a gray mineral mass flecked with scintillations. The far shore, a gray-green hump trimmed with huge sandy cliffs, hid partially in the coming mist. The pink grandiflora hydrangea at the edge of the lawn had finally succumbed to brown, and would stay that way until the spring buds pushed them off like organic litter. I built my first drink of the day and listened to the noisy complaint of seabirds and insect life, hard against an approaching winter and reluctant to pack it in. It felt like more than the season was priming for change. But unlike the life around me, I’d wait for it in silence, void of anticipation, reluctant only to rush the inevitable.

I first made love to Abby on a moldy pool table in the attic of a half-abandoned fraternity house on the Charles River. It was a time when fraternities were out of political favor, so the declining membership had consolidated down on the lower floors, leaving a large garret to the dust and rats and me. I was on a government scholarship to MIT. Abby was at Boston University. She lived in an apartment next door. At the time, sex was about all we had in common, though we rarely had time to notice. That would come later. We kept at it straight through my college career, which ended the year it started. It took ten years of night school to get my degree. I loved to learn, I just had trouble with authority. And money.

But that first night I wanted to live for a million years. Naked and wet, mostly drunk and seething with sexual insanity, we stood wrapped in the pool table cover and watched the lights of Cambridge fracture and reform on the surface of the river.

The walls of the attic room were lined with books. It was furnished with cracked and scuffed red leather chesterfields and a ratty, oversized oriental rug. I felt like a barbarian squatting between the marble pillars of fallen Rome. And incidentally, screwing one of its princesses.

Her full name was Abigail Adams Albright, which accurately reflected her family’s tirelessly vigilant social pretense. I think she might have been a brilliant woman if she’d given herself the chance. If she hadn’t been born just a few years too early into a family that was already a hundred years out of date. I admit with shame that I was awed by her family’s self-prepossession, by the way they slouched comfortably within a social order presumably anointed by God. I married her partly because I thought old family poise and bone structure was something you could suck up through exposure, like sunshine.

Abby was a pretty girl when I met her, in a big-skulled, big-blond kind of way. As she aged, her skin and overall shape held up remarkably well, but her expression grew tight across her face until it formed a kind of mask that I used to think I could reach over and peel off her face.

I lived in that attic for two years after dropping out of school. Abby went on to graduate. I’ve actually forgotten what her degree was in. Maybe I never knew. I worked at whatever I could parlay into something I could parlay into a job in industrial design. That’s what I wanted to be—an industrial designer. I didn’t know what that was, but it seemed to fit. That I succeeded eventually means something, but I can’t tell what. I often wonder about it when I’m sitting on the porch looking out on the Peconic, when the bay water begins to look like the murky Charles and the buoys grow into the implacable towers of MIT.

Before I went to bed I woke up Sullivan. It was later than I’d realized. He was unhappy, but tried to hide it. I heard some feminine snarling in the background. Muffled but edgy. Sullivan spoke louder to cover it up.

“No, we didn’t do an autopsy on Regina Broadhurst. Old ladies croak. It’s standard procedure. They get old, they croak. Boom. I think an autopsy report would say, ‘one old lady, deader ’n shit.’ End of story.”

I nodded with understanding, even though he couldn’t see me.

“Did you see anything on her head when you pulled her out of the tub? You know, like a bruise or blood where it hit?”

“I don’t do the pulling. That’s the county coroner. You’ll have to ask her. Or the paramedics. I don’t even think the coroner got involved.”

“No other bruises or marks that you remember?”

“Jesus, you think I study week-old cadavers? I don’t even like to think about it. Yech. I’m sorry. I appreciate your help, but I gotta get some sleep. You oughta go to bed yourself.”

“Sorry. I didn’t realize how late it was.”

“That’s okay.”

“Just one thing.”

He sighed.

“Where’s her body?”

“Coolin’ at the coroner’s. Which is also standard procedure until some family member tells us what to do with it, or it gets past some statutory time limit. I don’t know what happens then.”

“The family could order an autopsy.”

“If the family turns up they get the body. It’s up to them from there. This is usually what happens. You want to know more about it, I’ll have to ask around.”

“No, I’m sorry. Go to bed. Just call me when you get a fix on Jimmy Maddox.”

It was quiet on the other end of the line for a moment.

“I got a fix. I got a place where he’s workin’. From a builder. I forgot about it.”

“Great.”

“It’s on my desk. I’ll call you with it tomorrow. I gotta go now, my fuckin’ wife’s gonna kill me.”

After he hung up I put the portable phone on the table and lit a cigarette. The night was thoroughly established. The bugs were buzzing and little bay waves were slapping at the beach. It was totally dark over at Regina’s house. And quiet. No moaning.

Eddie jumped up on the bed and spun around a half-dozen times while scratching up the bedspread before finally dropping down. He looked at me like, “Okay, man, time to sleep.” I told him to stay, but he followed me anyway when I left the porch.

I went out to the car and got the heavy Mag light and my tool chest out of the trunk. I dug out a ten-pound persuader and a cat’s paw, and stuck them inside my belt. I put a big old Craftsman screwdriver and a pair of Vice Grips in my back pocket. The neighborhood was silent as a cathedral. All you could hear was the tiny surf breaking on the off-white, sea-polished pebbles that lined the bay. No wind.

Somebody had put a padlock on Regina’s front door. It didn’t look like much. I tucked the cat’s paw between the padlock bracket and the door jam and gave it one good thwap with the little sledge. Almost. Another thwap and it was off. I sat down on the front stoop and looked around at the other houses nearby. No lights came on. Sleeping the sleep of the righteous, or just indifferent. Or wary. Skills learned in New York City.

I had a key for the door. Eddie padded silently up the walk and slid past me through the door. As I figured, the power was off. Everything was still basically undisturbed, though someone had neatened up the living room and cleaned out the dishes that had been left in the sink. The broom closet looked like it hadn’t been used in a while. There was just a faded cotton robe hanging by a hook on the inside of the door and some beach towels on a shelf. Eddie scanned the baseboards, snorting into the cracks and corners. I warned him not to bark.

I looked in the drawers of the tall hutch in the pantry where I remembered Regina kept her checkbook for those rare moments she paid me back for something I bought her. The papers stuffed in the drawers were carefully organized. This surprised me. I remembered Regina as an indifferent organizer.

The house still smelled like death.

I found the basement door and went down to look at the fuse box. I made Eddie wait for me at the top of the stairs. The mildewy smell was sticky sweet and mildly nauseating. The flashlight defined a tight little island of light and threw big black shadows against the walls. Something skittered across the concrete floor. Eddie whined, but held his post. The main switch was off, so I threw it back on. The light above the panel snapped on. That was too much for Eddie. He broke ranks and ran down the stairs.

“Come on, back up. Too many critters down here.”

He was reluctant, but followed me upstairs. In the light I could see the place had been professionally cleaned and organized. I went back to give the tall hutch a better look. Newspaper clippings, old travel brochures, some handwritten notes with indecipherable signatures. A stack of tear-offs from utility bills bundled up in a rubber band. Two boxes, one with canceled and one with unused checks. Harbor Trust. No checkbook. I slipped the used checks and bill records into my pocket.

The bathroom still held a faint residue of ammonia that almost disguised the angrier smells. I checked out the tub. It was almost polished clean. I pulled Eddie’s nose away from the toilet. The bath towels were laundered and folded over the towel bars in a way that suggested a nicer hotel. The medicine cabinet was empty. I looked around for another place Regina might have stored drugs. Nothing but bath linens and boxes of Kleenex.

I was about to move on to another room. I flashed the light around the unlit corners one last time. There was something on a narrow shelf above the spotless bathtub that I hadn’t seen initially.

It was a heavy, black neoprene plug. It was tapered like an ordinary plug, but also threaded. It had the usual chrome pull ring, but no chain. Not surprising since there was nowhere in the tub to attach the chain’s other end.

Something about the plug reminded me of factories, heavy machinery and guys in orange hardhats. My world.

Most design engineers pull a few years’ apprenticeship out on a plant floor as part of an assembly team, or serving as some kind of low-level QC grunt with a clipboard and an over-compensating air of importance. Getting a feel for what the applications boys go through to make your designs work in the real world. I liked being there, though I was just as keen on getting out. So I joined the first R&D lab that would have me and stuck my nose directly into a bunch of test stands and lab equipment. We messed around with a lot of nasty chemicals. Even before OSHA there were strict procedures regulating the use of caustics and corrosive acids. Most labs had special sinks that would drain into lined containers for toxic waste disposal. These sinks were usually stainless steel or some kind of exotic ceramic you could clean of residue from the evil shit we’d dump down the drain—which was really just a big round hole, unless for some reason you meant to contain the waste fluids, in which case we’d use a specifically engineered neoprene stopper.

Exactly like the one Regina Broadhurst apparently used to contain the water in her bathtub. It looked brand new.

The next morning I was up early, and after giving Eddie a chance to take care of things, opened the door for him to jump into the front passenger seat of the Grand Prix where he liked to sit with his head out the window. The air was agitated but clear. The smell was young and fresh, though a moldy whiff of burned-out vegetation recalled the dry hot summer. When its windows were down the Grand Prix sounded like an injured B-52. They didn’t care much about aerodynamics and exhaust flow back in 1967. You needed the normally aspirated, 10:1 compression, 385 horse, 426 ft. lb. torque V8s just to drown out all the wind noise.

Every kid I grew up with knew how to maintain and repair heavy V8s, and in-line 6s that powered all the cars in those days. All sloppy American cars, except for the VWs or the occasional MG. Open the hood of any car built today and you’ll see what only automotive engineers understand. Modern cars are run, maintained and monitored by microprocessors, so you can’t do anything without the diagnostic technology that jacks into interface connectors distributed around the engine compartment. Regular car mechanics have been reduced to computer jocks with a little grease under their nails. It’s all for the good, I guess, since it means better cars and less dependence on a class of trade that hadn’t exactly earned the Nobel Prize for commercial integrity.

But, say you know your way around that mess of multicolored wires and plastic connectors. If you get close to the actual engine you’ll notice a number of thin metal tubes arrayed along the top of the block under the air cleaners that used to sit on carburetors. Only now they filter air going to the little conduits of the fuel injection system. Pop off the air filters of ninety-five percent of the cars made in the world today and you’ll see a strange little nickel-plated or extruded plastic housing with a vacuum line sticking out of it. Also a three-pin connector with red, white and blue wires trailing off into an untraceable tangle of control wiring. Its purpose is to introduce a minuscule dose of a specialized organic compound. The compound vaporizes at slightly below normal atmospheric pressure and disperses evenly into the airstream flowing through the filter on its way to the cataclysm of internal combustion. Retrofitted through a custom configuration to the throat of the hungry 4-barrel in my Grand Prix, this tiny bit of late-twentieth-century technology was responsible for about 15 extra horses. Since I already had almost 400 in the stable, this wasn’t such a big deal. It was more important to all the new cars built around the world that shared a need for greater power, better fuel efficiency and cleaner emissions.

When added to the revenue stream of the company that owned and licensed the technology, it was also responsible for about eighty-five million dollars a year.

It was called a SAM-85, which every mechanic assumes is some dumb engineering acronym with a model number, but it’s actually a name. My name. And the year the company got the patent. The damn thing was my idea. It’s my legacy to mankind. And I’m sure mankind would just about give a rat’s ass if it knew.

I lit a Camel and took a sip from yesterday’s coffee, stowed in the aftermarket cup holder mounted to the shift console. Still tasted like French Vanilla.

I’d gone to bed thinking about Regina Broadhurst and woke up doing the same thing. It was annoying, but predictable. She’d occupied an unimportant yet irritating little spot on my consciousness for my entire life. I never really knew that much about her. I just knew she moaned in her sleep and pissed off my old man. Had a crummy little cob-job house and a load of arthritis that probably tormented her every waking hour. Probably couldn’t bend too well, or pick things up, had trouble digging in her garden or getting in and out of the bathtub.

The twin exhausts from the Grand Prix burbled in my wake like a pair of inboard Mercs. Eddie’s head was out the window, ears pinned back and teeth showing in a grim smile. The sun was bright again and everything looked like it was studded with cheap stage jewelry. The air smelled like a clear conscience. The bay was flat but roughed up by the sturdy breeze. The gulls were trying to look regal, heads to the wind, mustered at attention along the narrow piers and breakwaters. I got Imus on the radio and stopped for a huge hot cup of Viennese Supreme to replace the cold French Vanilla. I clutched it between my legs, warming up my nuts.

This time of year the back roads were a little less traveled, especially during the week. I passed a few pickups and mid-sized American cars that typecast the regular locals. They’d mostly peeled off from Montauk Highway, the area’s main two-lane artery now choked every morning with incoming traffic.

It was becoming almost impossible to live as a middle-class wage earner within the weird economics of the Hamptons. The only real industry was serving the wealthy who bought and sold things with a logic that was both outlandish and incomprehensible. Yet siphoning off even a little of that ocean of money was a lot more difficult than you’d think. And even when you did, it cost so much to live out here that holding on to it was even more difficult. You could buy Venezuelan coffee futures and first-tier art on Main Street in Southampton Village. But the closest affordable grocery store was twenty miles up island. The locals used to pass houses from father to son before they could reach the open market. But now the prices were so high few could justify not cashing in at a rate ten times the family price. So the native housing inventory was shrinking fast. More and more sons and daughters were traveling in from the west, or giving up and moving permanently to other places.

But some hung in there. They just couldn’t give up the air and the light, the canopies of maple leaves that billowed overhead like huge green clouds. The sea-sculpted beaches that stretched to the horizon and the oily fish stink of low tide.

I stopped at the hardware store. Five or six guys were there to look after three or four customers. Personal service was their forte. I showed the first guy I saw the big neoprene plug. He was prematurely gray, but relaxed. The hardware business had been good to him.

“Have something like it. Not exactly.”

He brought me over into the plumbing aisle. We both dug around in the parts bins and eyeballed the shrink-wrapped stuff hanging off display pegs.

“They might have ’em at a plumbing supply. Looks kind of industrial.”

“It is. I just thought I might have bought it here.”

He nodded, but said, “Nope. All I got’s these here. Do the same thing.”

“Not according to OSHA.”

He laughed, not understanding the joke. His pale blue eyes were kind, and eager to engage.

“Guess not, but there’s no pleasin’ those people.”

I stuffed the plug back in my pocket and went to the place on the corner for some more coffee. I stopped on the way to check up on Eddie. He was sleeping in the cavernous back seat, off duty.

The flavor of the day was Chocolate Raspberry. The Summer People sitting around the crowded little tables wore their weary City indifference as an accessory to their jogging suits and Oxford cloth shirts with little embroidered polo players. There was a lot of confused milling around the area where you got your coffee and pastries. Summer People rarely obey line protocols, so I just shouldered my way up to the coffee stand and cleared a spot for myself. Only the women looked like they might object. The men had lived long enough to own houses out here by knowing how to pick their fights. I was very polite to the tiny Spanish ladies behind the pastry counter. They kept their distance even though they’d been selling me bagels and flavored coffee on a steady basis for about four years. I had that affect on people.

Amanda was sitting at a table in the corner, almost hidden behind the deli case. I must have felt her looking at me, because our eyes met the moment I saw her.

“Hey. How’re you doing?”

“Okay,” she said, looking at my coffee. “Taking out or staying?”

I sat down at the table. She looked like somebody had tightened her all up. Her face was drawn back and her hands were clasped together in a white grip. Only her posture seemed at ease as she leaned in closer to speak.

“I feel so bad about the way I’m behaving. I really wanted to tell you I was sorry.”

“For what? How’re you supposed to behave?”

“I don’t know. That’s not really what I mean.”

“We’re just having a cup of coffee. That was the deal, I think.”

She dropped one shoulder as she leaned in a little closer. I could smell her hair.

“I don’t usually do anything on my own without telling Roy what I’m doing. I mean, I don’t have to ask permission. I just usually tell him if I’m doing something with somebody. But I thought I might catch you here. I see you come in and out of here all the time. It’d be like … coincidence.”

She looked up at me and smiled a tight little smile.

I wanted to get her off whatever subject we were on, even if I didn’t know exactly what that subject was.

“I guess Joe Sullivan tracked down Regina’s nephew, Jimmy Maddox. You know Joe Sullivan? He’s a Town cop.”

“I don’t know him. Roy probably does.”

“He’s a local.”

“Then Roy must.”

“You guys must have met here, as kids, huh?”

“Oh, yes. Roy’s always been here.”

It was her turn to whisk me off the subject. She pointed out at the street.

“I ran over here when I saw you pull in. That big car must be quite the collectible.”

I snorted, the closest thing I had to a laugh.

“Collects problems. It’s a big dumb thing.”

“But you drive it. It must be more fun than your regular car.”

“No, that’s my regular car.”

“My.”

“It belonged to my father. Who was also poorly designed and out of place on Main Street.”

The look on her face told me she regretted picking this tack, as innocent as it looked at first. I tried to recoup for her.

“Is your father still around?” I asked her.

“No. He died when I was little. I never knew him.”

Man, I’ve got a real skill with casual conversation. An instinct for scratching at nerves, picking off scabs.

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay. People die. Our parents die. Even my mother, who never had a sick day in her life.”

I pursed my lips and tried to look understanding, afraid I was going to stick my foot in it again. She helped me out.

“Roy and I went over there when we hadn’t heard from her and couldn’t reach her. She’d been ironing her little doll outfits. She made her own dolls. She was very talented. It was horrible.”

She looked me in the eye when she said that and took a sip of her coffee. It wasn’t as if she was trying to test my reaction. She just looked at me. Her hands rotated the coffee cup, occasionally stopping it to draw imaginary lines down the sides with her fingernails. They were strong, thin fingers, with perfect long nails.

“Sorry. We shouldn’t talk about all these sad things. It’s just, you know, she was in pretty good health, and to just have that happen. And when you told me about Regina, something made me think about my mother. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“So what was it, a heart attack?” I asked, sensitive to the last.

She shook her head, her face down again.

“That’s what they thought. I don’t know. Roy looked after all that. I couldn’t really deal with it.”

“Roy must be a good looker-after.”

“Too good,” she said, then regretted it. She smiled brightly and switched gears.

“What are you doing in town today? I know it’s not bank day.”

“Just chores.”

“I can see everything from my window. I saw you go into the hardware store. I thought you’d come in here next. You usually do after you stop at the bank. I think it’s funny. I ambushed you.”

“I’m glad.”

She looked pleased. “I wanted to honor our bargain.”

“You did.”

She snuck a look out the picture window as she sipped her coffee.

“Something’s buggy,” I said.

She looked back at me.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I used to work on big complex systems for a living. Too complex for anyone to ever really understand. Even us engineers. So a lot of the time you just ran on instinct. I don’t know. Sometimes things just felt buggy.”

I drank a little more coffee and tried to keep my mouth shut, but it was hard with this woman. I wanted to talk to her.

“Maybe you just think too much,” she said.

“No, I do everything I possibly can to avoid thinking about anything at all.”

“You said it’s a feeling. So maybe you feel too much.”

“I’ve already had a lifetime of feeling. My allotment’s used up.”

Amanda sat back in her chair, looking into the paper coffee cup she was now crumpling with two hands.

“I understand. I shouldn’t be bothering you.”

“You’re not bothering me. I’m bothering myself. You’re just being nice. I’m not worth it. Not at all.”

She dug a thumbnail into the side of the cup.

“I understand. Really. I do. More than you think.”

Then she got up and left. I watched her delicately navigate the crowded little coffee shop. Nice going, Sam, I told myself. Fucking brilliant.

She got hung up in the chaotic line in front of the pastry counter. I saw an opening form along the window and took it, so by the time she reached the door I was already there, without having to climb over tables or trample baby carriages.

I caught her by the elbow. She swiveled her head around and stared at me.

“You don’t know this because I’ve been coming into the bank every month to do my stuff in person, because that’s a habit of mine. And somehow you got stuck with me. So it gave you the idea that I’m a normal sociable person, which I’m not. You’re actually about the only person I’ve said anything to for almost four years. You and Regina.”

“And here I am boring you about my mother.”

“I’m sure she’d have been pleased to know she had a daughter who thought about her,” I said, scrambling for something to say. “I bet the two of you had a lot in common.”

Some people were trying to squeeze past us to get out the door. Amanda held her ground.

“My mother was a very brave woman,” she said, “not like me.”

As the morning aged, the light out on Main Street had hardened up. But Amanda’s skin still looked like it’d been airbrushed on and her auburn hair sparkled with tiny little fireworks. It caught me by surprise and distracted me from coming up with something else to say, so she slipped away and walked back to the bank without looking back. A familiar sight. A beautiful woman in full retreat.

I was overconfident when I set the alarm for 5:30 a.m. Sleep clogged my veins and packed gauze in my eyes. The cigarettes had left their usual rat’s ass taste in my mouth. My stomach was skittery, unsure how to play the day.

When I left my wife, she predicted I’d last five years on my own. One to go.

That was around the same time the psychiatrist threw me out of his office. He said there was nothing he could do for me. Actually, he said he didn’t want to do anything for me, which I guess in retrospect was a breach of ethics. Not that I cared. I hated the self-important little prig. All he wanted was to get me off vodka and on to antidepressants. This was supposed to prepare me for psychoanalysis, so I could dig out deep-rooted causes.

The therapy was part of a deal I had to make with the Stamford district attorney. She hoped it would cover her decision not to prosecute me for a series of things, including gutting my wife’s house. Me and a pair of hard cases from the gym had packed all our furniture and household goods in a big semi, tore out the woodwork, ripped up the floors and stripped the walls. We filled up a few dumpsters, then trucked the semi down to one of those mountainous landfills in the Jersey Meadowlands where we buried all my wife’s treasured belongings under a hundred tons of Manhattan garbage.

We left the studs and rough plumbing and all the equipment in the basement. Plus a note on the plywood substrate floor, in what used to be the kitchen, telling her I’d cover full replacement costs.

I’d already given up my share of the house and three-quarters of my money. I still had a little left to live on, after I paid off whatever my wife’s insurance wouldn’t cover. I’m not proud of it, I just did it. I still don’t know exactly why, but it can’t be for any good reason.

I did, however, like that DA. My wife and her lawyers had a hard time getting her to muster the appropriate prosecutorial outrage. It helped that she’d been putting in twelve-hour days and weekends during the two weeks my wife had been out on the slopes. We talked about overwork and lost time and sacrifice. Her husband had spent most of their married life finding himself. She’d supported him while he earned a pair of master’s degrees and a Ph.D. He’d complain she was too stressed out. That she’d forgotten how to have fun. I just smirked at her and she looked down at her tired hands and said, “Right.”

So I copped the shrink deal and spent three months sparring with this little jerk who couldn’t look at a urinal without analyzing the psychosexual impulses underlying the urge to take a piss.

I never understood any of it. It bothered me that people considered lightheartedness and optimism the norm. I wondered how anyone could be more than half awake and not be at least a little bummed by the desperate hopelessness of human existence.

Mornings like this were especially hard. I was so tired and sick to my stomach. It didn’t help that I’d risen to this a million times before. The pain was cinched up tight around my heart.

After making up a pot of coffee, I put on a T-shirt and shorts and went out for a run. I usually saved this kind of thing for the gym, but I was afraid the big black dog was going to chomp down hard if I didn’t get my cardiovascular fired up.

A study someone did in the eighties concluded the better grip you had on reality, the more likely you were to be depressed, and vice versa. Science has confirmed that ignorance is, indeed, bliss.

My jogging route took me along sandy unpaved roads threaded through the tall oaks and scrub pines tucked up to the bay shore. Every fifty to a hundred feet was a driveway to a house built on the coast. Other houses were stuck in the woods or perched on pressure-treated pilings above swampy bogs that were grandfathered out of the Wetlands Act.

Twenty minutes into the run I started to feel better. Too distracted by the effort of running to bother with anxiety. By that time I was passing the gate to WB Manufacturing, the abandoned plant built on the peninsula immediately to the east of Oak Point. There was a new cyclone fence and gate securing the entrance, but otherwise it looked like it had forever— all concrete, red brick and rust.

When my father was building his house most of our neighbors worked at the plant. Even then, jobs at WB were considered tenuous at best. Manufacturing never really took hold out here, which helped save the East End for all the potato farmers and tennis courts. My father put in a little time there himself, but I think they fired him. If it was like any of his other jobs he’d gotten into a scrape with somebody, or spouted off about something too loudly, or too often. That was why he could only really work for himself. Today you’d say he was a little light on the interpersonal skills.

That’s probably what killed him. They never caught the guys who did it, assuming they even tried. Probably a pair of punks stopping off for a quick drink. He’d probably provoked them. The wrong look, the wrong word, a gesture, a snort—that’s all you needed to do. Took about five minutes. They left him in the can, already dead as you can get before the door slammed shut on their way out.

I felt better when I got back from the run. Good enough to take a shower, shave, get dressed and take off in the Grand Prix. Good enough to give it another day.

It took me most of the morning driving around Hampton Bays to find Jimmy Maddox. I started with the construction site Sullivan told me about. They didn’t know him, but they sent me over to an earth-moving outfit. They’d heard of him, but didn’t want to be helpful. I was polite and moved on.

At the third place there was a sandy scar cut into a tall grove of gnarly red pine. A big florid-faced guy in a gray T-shirt two sizes too small for his gut was rolling out of the cab of a huge Cat steam shovel. The machine looked like a giant yellow critter that hadn’t had breakfast yet. Diesel and pneumatic fluids blended with the smell of wet sand that stood in defeated heaps around the freshly cut excavation.

He squinted to hear over the engine noise.

“No, I don’t know where Maddox is, but I could probably find out,” he yelled to me as we walked away from the Cat toward a battered little office trailer. He seemed glad to be away from his big machine. There was no one else on the site. Maybe he was lonely. “What’s it for?”

“Just some family business I gotta take care of,” I told him, not knowing what else to say.

“You related?”

“No, it’s more a thing I have to do for the Town. His aunt died. I’m helping settle her estate.” I dropped my voice when he closed the trailer door behind us. “He just needs to sign some papers and stuff.”

The Formica table was covered in blueprints and brown burn marks from forgotten cigarettes. The walls were papered with Labor Department propaganda and calendars with topless women wearing tool belts and wielding impact drills. There were two coffee pots in an automatic maker and coffee stains everywhere. He filled a pair of Styrofoam cups.

“No shit. She leave him anything?”

“Probably a little. Not too much. Didn’t have that much.”

“Hey, you never know. Sometimes old ladies got bunches of money squirreled away.”

“That’s true. You never know,” I said. “You think you could find him for me?”

“Yeah, that’s right. Just a second.”

He pulled out a muddy Verizon yellow pages and thumbed through it with his muddy hands. He called from a black wall-mounted phone.

“Yeah, Davy, this is Frank. You got Jimmy Maddox working on your job? Nah, I don’t need him. This guy,” he looked over at me and I shook my head to caution him. He turned his head back down before going on, “This guy wanted to talk to him about some other job. Doesn’t need him right away. Nah, I don’t know why he wants to talk to Jimmy, he just does. Must of got a recommendation. I don’t know, just checking for him. Nah, don’t tell Jimmy anything, let this guy talk to him. Yeah, let him work it out. How’s it going over there? Yeah, what the fuck. Don’t I know it. Yeah, Davy. Okay.” They volleyed banalities for a few more minutes before hanging up.

He turned to me from the phone.

“So what’s the big secret.”

“No big deal. Like you told him, I just want to work it out with Jimmy. You handled that well.”

“He owe you money?”

I drank some of his ubiquitous coffee. It was pretty good, even from a Styrofoam cup. I watched him write something down on the back of a receipt swiped from the in-box on somebody’s desk.

“Nothing like that. You can check it out with the Town. Ask a cop named Joe Sullivan. Tell him you talked to Sam Acquillo.”

He gave me the address of the job.

“That name’ll be on the sign at the job. Maddox’s working the backhoe on the utility trench. Good backhoe guy. Good enough to pick your teeth with it. Too bad.”

I tucked the folded receipt into my shirt pocket.

“What do you mean ‘too bad’?”

He shrugged.

“He’s a nasty asshole. Nobody can stand working with him. He’s just one of those guys. Asshole kid. You know what I mean?”

“I guess, sure.”

“You’ll see. Real sweetheart.”

I walked him back to his steam shovel.

“Someday,” the big guy told me as he climbed up over the polished steel treads, “somebody’s going to beat the snot out of that little fucker, you know what I mean?”

The day was coming in cloudy, but still clear, with a breeze that swept the Cat’s exhaust up into the pines and out toward the ocean. The diesel roared behind me as I lugged the Grand Prix back to Montauk Highway.

“Shit, fuck, Christ, you son of a bitch piece of shit. Fucking piece of shit. Fucking goddammit cock sucking piece of crap SHIT.”

Jimmy Maddox was about twenty-eight years old, but his face looked a lot younger. Soft and round, barely showing a few smudges of orange fuzz on his upper lip and jowls. Freckles and curly red hair bursting out from under a bright green hat with an orange rim. He looked like the demented trade-school son of Ronald McDonald. A little of his Aunt Regina haunted his face and poked through his bitter eyes.

I stood just outside the swing of the big shovel and spray of invective. The kid had an interesting style. The trench he was digging was almost sculpted. The action of the shovel was smooth and controlled. It didn’t fit with all that yelling and swearing. Dotty Hodges and the big excavator had it right. A young dickhead. But with a little texture.

“Fucking shit bag piece of fucking shit.”

He knew I was standing there watching him. I thought he’d finish the last section of trench in about half an hour. I decided I’d leave before that. Stand in one place too long and your dignity drains out of your feet.

Maybe curiosity got the best of him. Idling the backhoe, he curled the shovel between the little front wheels and climbed down from the seat. He walked past without looking at me, but close enough to hear me call out his name.

“Yeah?” he yelled back. “And you are?”

He had a good start on a blue-collar beer belly. It strained the fabric of his muddy white T-shirt. His jeans were bunched down around a pair of expensive Dunhill boots. His lip was actually curled a little.

“Sam Acquillo. I’ve got some bad news.”

He spit at the ground.

“Fuck. What is it?”

“Your Aunt Regina died.”

He looked at me as if I hadn’t said anything yet. I waited. He spit again.

“Died?”

“Yeah. Been about a week. She’s still in the morgue. It’s time somebody decided how to settle her out.”

“That’d be you?”

“With your help, if you’re interested.”

“You the ex-ec-u-tor?”

I’m not good with that kind of approach. But I was trying.

“I might be. That depends on you.”

He crouched down on his haunches and picked up a piece of dirt. It crumbled in his hand, and he tossed the pieces away like a sod farmer on the last legs of foreclosure.

“Just up and died?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

He stood up again, wiping his hands on his hips. I’d moved in a little closer so I could get a better look at his face when he talked. He noticed the intrusion and stiffened a little.

“What’s your deal in this?”

“Next-door neighbor.”

He looked over my shoulder.

“You got that old Pontiac. I seen it in the driveway.”

I nodded. “The cops couldn’t find any next of kin. I told them I’d help out. Talk to you.”

He crossed his arms over his belly and leaned back a little.

“Cops? Somebody kill her?”

“What do you think?”

“You a cop?”

“Should I be?”

“Is this twenty fucking questions?”

I smiled. The backhoe was still idling next to the trench. A hundred feet away a gang of foundation guys were leaning on their shovels and rakes, watching the mixer back up. The smell of fresh concrete competed with the mud smell and a touch of raw lumber coming from a large stack of two-by-eights. Maddox was slowly rocking back and forth on his heals, acting out his manifold indecisions.

“I’m just trying to help out,” I told him. “Something bothering you?”

He uncrossed his arms and shoved his hands in his pockets. I saw him as I first saw him. As a kid.

“Aunt Reggie’s the only relative I got left. How’d she die?”

“Just did. I found her floating in the bathtub. Frankly, I think they should nail down the exact cause of death. I think you ought to authorize an autopsy. They got her on ice, but time’s going by.”

“I gotta do that?”

“You don’t have to do the autopsy. Just authorize it. And take a little responsibility for all this. Funeral, estate, all that.”

He wasn’t listening.

“My mom always said she had a bunch of money hid away somewheres.”

“You think so, too?”

His face shifted around under the pale, fleshy surface. I wondered how much of his family he’d already buried in his young life. That kind of thing can put uneven wear on a kid. Ruin his balance.

“Nah, she didn’t have shit.”

“You checked?”

His soft face filled up with blood.

“You think I’m stupid?”

“Not yet.”

“You think I don’t know what you’re gettin’ at?”

“I’m not getting at anything. But you’re gettin’ edgy.”

“You’re gonna shut the fuck up.”

“Not likely.”

The old punch drunks who used to hang around my neighborhood gym called it a Western Union. That was when a guy did everything but send you a telegram that he was about to take a shot at your nose.

I just waited for him.

“You’re a fucking asshole,” he told me.

I let him talk and take my measurements. I kept my hands loose at my sides and my feet in a partial stance.

Then I took a piece of a second to think about the delicacy Jimmy Maddox showed digging a utility trench with a two-ton backhoe. It made me rethink my estimate of his speed, and adjust accordingly. In an even tinier fraction of a second his cowboy swing was launched toward my jaw.

I caught his fist like a baseball with my left hand and held it. He froze in surprise, straining against my grip. It was hard to hold him—he was stronger than he looked. I popped him once in the mouth and sat him down on his butt. I squatted down as he dropped, keeping my grip on his right fist and feeling the resistance drain out of his arm.

“I used to be a boxer, son. No more of that stuff, okay?”

He nodded with his free hand over his mouth. He wasn’t ready to say anything, so I did.

“I’m not accusing you of anything. It’s just your personality. So what say we start over. More friendly.”

He nodded and I let go of his right hand. He looked at it like an annoying pet that’d been missing for a few days. Blood ran out of the corner of his mouth and spotted his T-shirt. I handed him the paper towel I’d stuffed in my pocket that morning in a moment of prescience. He held it to his face as we walked over to the Grand Prix. The sun was behind some clouds, and the light was diffuse and less forgiving. The blood on his shirt was bright red. His face was back to pale.

“Do any work around chemical plants, Jimmy?”

He looked at me with a frown.

“There aren’t any chemical plants around here.”

“Up island? New Jersey?”

“Never been there. What difference does it make?”

“No difference.”

He was too jangled to argue anymore. I let him sit in the passenger seat of the Grand Prix with his legs out the door while I leafed through the papers for a clean sheet to write on.

“I think it’s a good idea to do this. There’s no harm in it, unless it bothers you, and that’s your privilege. The court’s already given me what I need to handle things, but she’s your aunt.”

He looked at the letter I’d written out while I was talking.

“Says I want an autopsy.”

“Just sign it, Jimmy. I’ll take care of everything. I’ll let you know when the funeral is.”

His signature was a graceful Palmer-method script. Wrote like he dug holes. Only quieter.

“And if you want, you can say it’s okay for me to act as administrator of her estate.” I handed him another piece of paper. “You don’t have to agree. You can get your own lawyer. I’m just sayin’ I got the time and I’m willing to do it. I just need your address and telephone number. You get whatever she’s got, unless some other family pops out of the blue.”

He read the letter I’d written up. Then shrugged and signed it.

“Money’s okay. I don’t want any of her shit. Too fucking depressing.”

“Except maybe the house. It’s worth a lot of money,” I said.

He snorted into the paper towel.

“She don’t own that house.”

It was my turn to look like a dope.

“She don’t own that house, Einstein,” he said, somewhat buoyed by my confusion. “She just gets to stay there. Till she dies. Now everything gets passed back to some other fucker.”

“What other fucker?”

“She never said much about it. I only know about it ‘cause she didn’t want me gettin’ ideas about her stupid house.”

A black mass of clouds was clumping up over the rangy oak trees. The breeze was working itself into a northwesterly wind. There was something mildly electric about the air—warning of an incoming storm. The concrete guys had stopped working to look up at the sky. Maddox looked wearily over at his unfinished trench.

“Fucking piece of goddam piece of shit weather.”