Osprey Island

by Thisbe Nissen

  Suzy smiled facetiously. “Well, I’m surprised you and Dad conceded to hire such a lowlife—I mean, it’s only been, what? Twenty years? Shouldn’t he be banished a little longer?”

  Nancy shot her a look. The conversation was over. “You know I don’t like talking about this, Suzy. Please.” Nancy took a gulp of coffee, washing away the topic like an unpleasant taste. There were certain things you didn’t talk about, pretended not to notice, learned tactically to ignore. It was what had kept Nancy Chizek from losing her mind completely when her son came home from Vietnam in a casket. She’d fallen apart at the news, then patched herself together into a rigid, near-catatonic state of mourning for the funeral. Once he was in the ground, Nancy spoke of Chas only with great honor. Her boy had died for his country. In pride she had found some sort of comfort.

  RODDY LED THE TROOP of housekeepers on a rudimentary if not particularly scenic tour of the Lodge—showed them a few different rooms in the main building, the kitchen, and dining room, and the lobby that opened out to the large deck overlooking Sand Beach Bay. He took them through the office and reception areas and pointed through a set of glass doors to Reesa Delamico’s Osprey Lodge Beauty Salon and Gift Shop. Out the back kitchen door and up the hill, Roddy showed them the guest cottages, the weedy clay tennis courts, and the swimming pool that looked more like a swamp. “We’re going to have to dump a hell of a lot of chlorine in that thing to get it swimmable by July Fourth,” Roddy said. The girls nodded skeptically, following behind Roddy in a tight huddle like cold and wary immigrants. At the laundry shack, which sat between the staff barracks and Lance and Lorna Squire’s cabin, Roddy held open the door and let the girls file past and peek their heads in one by one. They squinted into the darkness, just able to discern the outlines of looming washing machines and dryers. Drying racks and plywood shelving blocked the few small windows. There was a ratty couch and an old minifridge, and the place just seemed to be crammed crevice to crevice, floor to ceiling, with piles of mildewed newspapers, rusted aerosol cans, water-stained and disintegrating cardboard boxes spilling soda cans and carpentry tools and sewing kits and paper napkins and crusted shampoo bottles. The air was cigarette-stale and uncomfortably close. Brigid took a step inside the shack. On the splintery wooden floor, in the shaft of light from the open door lay an old sponge the color of spoiled meat. She made a gagging noise in her throat and ducked back outside. “I’ll for one be spending as little time in that place as I can manage, I’d say,” she announced.

  Her roommate, Peg, passed all of three seconds in the doorway and turned away, disgusted. “It’s like a fire trap, eh?” she said to Roddy. He let the door swing closed, shoved his hands back into his pockets, and shrugged at the girl, nodding slowly, his mouth an unreadable line.

  They stood outside the laundry shack, scuffing their shoes in the dirt amid patches of sad, dead grass. “Um,” Roddy began, and the girls looked at him eagerly. “If you all wanted I could take you around, show you the island some, if you want . . . ?”

  The girls conferred wordlessly, shrugging, nodding. Like their spokeswoman, Peg turned back to Roddy. “That’d be grand, Mister . . .”

  “Just Roddy’s good.”

  “Thank you, yes, that’s grand, if it’s not like a bother to you?”

  He drove them in a Lodge van down Sand Beach, that mile of crescent moon that never waxed or waned. Near the Lodge a few large homes sat on the bluffs overlooking the water, salt-stained old mansions whose grand lawns sprawled above the bay. They took the long route around the island, through town, and he showed them Ferry Street, Bayshore Drug, the Luncheonette, Tubby’s Fishhouse, all of which had been there when Roddy left Osprey twenty years before and were still there now, the prices higher, but otherwise pretty much the same.

  At the ferry dock Roddy parked the van and climbed out. He slid open the side door and watched as the bevy of redheads and brunettes tumbled out onto the asphalt, chirping and twittering among themselves like a clutch of nestlings.

  “This is just where we arrived yesterday, isn’t it?” said a tall, pigeon-toed girl with lank brown hair.

  “Only way on-island,” Roddy said.

  “Ever read that novel—Agatha Christie, was it? Where they’re stuck on the island, being murdered one by one?” the girl said, taunting a shorter, plumper girl beside her.

  “For fuck’s sake—as if I needed reminding of it!” the girl cried.

  “And Then There Were None . . .” warbled the instigator.

  “Shut your hole,” scolded the other.

  Roddy turned away, out toward the water. It was hardly more than a mile across the bay to Menhadenport on the mainland. Still, it was an important mile. It spanned more than distance.

  At the edge of the beach stood an improbably tall pole with a platform affixed to its top on which an osprey had built its ramshackle nest, streamers of dried seaweed hanging down like decayed party decorations. It was a quirky twist of things that had an entire island of people standing in awe and reverence to a bird who built a nest like something out of Dr. Seuss. To judge from its nest, you’d imagine the osprey would be a motley-looking bird, tattered and discombobulated, with maybe a few absurdly placed, unnaturally colored bouffant feathers froofing it up like a show poodle. In reality, the bird’s elegance more than made up for its slovenly home. The osprey was a gorgeous creature—the majestic stretch of its wings, partly skeletal, like something prehistoric, but then plumed in contrasting black and white, alternating patterns like the ruffling skirts of a flamenco dancer. The white head with its black bandit’s mask seemed to make perfect sense when you looked at the osprey’s talons: four hooked claws on each foot, deadly as a dragon’s. With such weapons permanently affixed to its body, the osprey seemed smart to wear a mask. It was unquestionably a fearsome and magnificent creature, but perhaps even more so to the people of Osprey Island, who could not help but feel a sense of eminence as the chosen ones, the ones the osprey watched over, the ones who had named their home in the bird’s honor.

  Three

  THE RAPTOR IS A BIRD OF PREY

  The literal translation of the osprey’s genus name, “Pandion haliaetus” is “Pandion’s sea eagle,” but it seems that the scientist who named it thus—one Marie Jules-Cesar Lelorgne de Savigny—was somewhat confused. You see, Pandion was the king of Athens in Greek mythology. Pandion had two daughters, Philomela and Procne. Procne married Tereus. Theirs is a lengthy and bloody story, but suffice it to say that in the end Philomela, Procne and Tereus are changed—as was the convention of Greek mythology—into, respectively, a nightingale, a swallow, and a hawk. If anything, the osprey should have been named after Tereus, as he was the only raptor among them.

  —DR. EDGAR HAMILTON, PH.D., “How Our Island Was (Mis)Named”

  IT WAS PAST NOON WHEN Roddy returned the girls to the Lodge, traded the van for his own truck, and drove up the hill toward the Squires’ cabin. It was like the guest cottages, but with a real kitchen, and someone had thought to plant flowers. A neat row edged the shore side of the house, but on the inland side, though the bed had been cleared, it was left as a plot of churned-up soil, a few flats of dying pink impatiens stacked precariously by the hose spigot. In the large tree that shaded the cabin someone had begun to build a tree fort and had raised a solid, well-made platform before abandoning the project and leaving the rest of the lumber to rot in the grass.

  Though afternoon, it appeared to be morning at the Squires’. Lorna sat on the edge of the unfinished porch, her long hair down and middle-parted, which made her look younger than her thirty-six years. Roddy gave the horn a toot and waved. Lorna lifted an arm, cigarette in hand, and waved distractedly, a slow smile crossing her sleep-swollen face. The rings under Lorna’s eyes were dark and sunken. From around the corner of the house, Squee shot out on his two-wheeler and careened past his mother in a display clearly for her benefit. Lorna gave a hoot of encouragement that sounded as if it took more energy than she had.

  Ro
ddy climbed from his truck, forcing a smile. “Hey, pretty lady,” he called.

  Lorna arched an eyebrow and took a sip of coffee as though it were something far stronger. Then, with effort, she smiled. “We’re so glad to have you home, Roddy Jacobs.” Lorna was sixteen when Roddy left Osprey, and though they’d never been close friends, Roddy’s homecoming seemed somehow important to Lorna. He got the feeling she felt he’d done something right, for once, in coming back.

  The screen door edged open and Lance appeared, thin and leathery-tan, his head grazing the top of the door frame. At thirty-eight, Lance was nearly as good-looking as he’d been in high school, save the taut potbelly he’d developed and the broken red capillaries that zigzagged his nose. He took a long drag on the stub of cigarette he held between two fingers like a joint, then crushed it out against the screen and tossed the butt into the yard.

  “Pig,” Lorna said.

  “Goat,” Lance said back.

  Lorna took a drag of her cigarette, the ashy tip growing longer and more precarious. She did not tamp it off. Squee came circling around the house again. When he saw Lance in the doorway he swerved and skidded to a stop, but then, at a loss for what to say, he simply stood there on the grass, the front wheel of his bike raised off the ground like a horse rearing its head. He rolled the rear wheel back and forth beneath him, digging a rut and matting the summer grass.

  “Hey, bucko,” Lance scolded, “watch whose yard you’re wrecking.”

  Squee looked down at the bike as if it had sprung from the earth beneath him, and let the front wheel drop to the ground.

  “Gonna help Roddy today, Squirto?” Lance asked, his voice suddenly distant as his gaze. “Keep out of trouble?”

  “He’s no trouble,” Lorna said to Roddy. It came out like a question.

  “He’s my partner,” Roddy said. His enthusiasm sounded false and hollow.

  “Yeah. Your partner.” Squee’s voice was sure, though he did not look at Roddy, his stare fixed on his father. Lance was looking off to the water.

  “We got lots to do,” Roddy added.

  Suddenly from the porch Lance let out a whoop. “Got ’im!” he cried, raising an arm toward the bay. Just offshore an osprey rose slowly from the surface of the water, a wriggling fish snared in his curled talons. The bird paused, adjusting its grip, then shook its feathers, sending off a hearty spray of sea-salt water. It flew toward a nest perched atop an old telephone pole by the beach. The bird hovered a moment over the nest before he released the twitching fish to the bird family below and took wing toward the water for another hunt.

  “Poor fucking fish,” Lance said, and then he turned and went back inside without another word to anyone. From the nest by the water they could hear the osprey’s high whistle, kyew, kyew, kyew.

  Lorna was putting everything she had into mustering her expression for Squee. “C’mere, kid-of-mine, and give your mom a kiss!” She held open her arms to him, then remembered her cigarette and ground it out on the step.

  Squee dropped the bike and galloped across the yard. Lorna mussed his hair, then grabbed a fistful of it on either side of his head and held him that way so she could look in his face. “When’d you get so goddamn handsome?” she said. “God, you turned out so good, Squee. You’re turning out so good, every day, you know.” She let Squee go and he tripped away. “Don’t get sunburnt,” she said to Squee. “Be good, mind Roddy, don’t get in folks’ way, all right?” She racked her thoughts for more essential motherly advice. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do . . . ,” she said, then laughed, picked her coffee back up, and looked into it hopefully. “You just be good,” she said to the mug.

  They stepped away from the porch, and Squee waved to his mother as Roddy clapped a hand on the boy’s shoulder, guiding him to the passenger door of the truck.

  Roddy parked down in the lot by the beach, near one of the tall osprey nesting platforms that dotted the Sand Bay shoreline. There’d been a time in the early seventies when the osprey population was in such danger of extinction that if a bird made its nest where there were electric or telephone wires the Island Utility and Power guys got out there as quick as they could to remove the lines, put up a new post, and divert the route to make the nest safe for the birds. All this at the instigation of Eden Jacobs, Roddy’s mother. She’d spearheaded the movement to save the osprey from imminent extinction—the only time Osprey’s residents had ever followed Eden Jacobs’s lead. The osprey platforms strung the length of Sand Beach—amid the scrub grass by the dunes, and set back from the shore in the marshy reeds just past Morey’s bar—were known as “Eden’s nests.”

  The afternoon sun was strong, and Roddy dug an old Tree Farm hat from behind the truck seat and adjusted the band as tight as it would go for Squee’s head. They spent the afternoon repairing winter damage to the boat dock that stuck out into Sand Bay from the shore-front of the Lodge. Squee and Roddy worked companionably, testing and replacing rotten planks. Eden Jacobs was pleased to have Roddy back home on Osprey after all those years, but she was extraordinarily pleased at the way Roddy and Squee had taken to each other. Eden felt Squee was in desperate need of a father figure, on account of the actual father he’d gotten saddled with.

  Eden said, “You don’t know what that boy lives with.”

  Now Roddy did know, and it made him happy that Squee seemed perfectly content just to trail Roddy around doing whatever he did and didn’t seem to mind that Roddy spoke little, gave little away. It was hard to come back to a place where everyone he saw seemed to have a head full of questions for him, and Roddy spent much of his time trying not to go anyplace where he’d have to talk to anyone. Squee didn’t have questions for Roddy—or if he did they were about how to pin a line into the tennis court clay or how to refuel the Weed Whacker. Questions like that, Roddy was more than glad to answer.

  WHEN LANCE FINALLY DELIVERED his housekeeping lecture to the Irish girls, it was late that night and they were on the side porch, downing beers with the equally underage waiters. How could you ask an Irish girl not to drink? For the most part no one bothered them about it, except Lance, a raging alcoholic incapable of letting so much as a vial of vanilla extract pass under his nose without delivering a speech on the evils of alcohol. “Wouldn’t touch that shit with a ten-foot pole,” Lance declared. “Not a twenty-foot pole! That juice is poison. Poison.” The girls sipped at their cans, wiped their lips afterward. They listened politely to Lance, although Roddy had pretty much already told them everything they needed to know about the Lodge, and far more coherently.

  “He’s married, isn’t he?” Peg asked Brigid once Lance was safely out of earshot. Brigid shrugged. One of the waiters standing nearby overheard and shushed them with a wag of his head toward Squee, who sat cross-legged on the edge of the porch. It was the dark-haired waiter, Gavin, the one with the sleepy, hooded eyes. He leaned his long frame against the porch rail and smoked a cigarette, squinting, and casting—Brigid was almost sure—a few furtive glances in her direction. Brigid had been watching him; she watched people in a way that they could see they were being watched. About this Gavin fellow the rumors were already circulating: he’d followed a girl here, an Islander he’d met at college in California, had followed her home for the summer only to get dumped on arrival when the girl had gotten back with her Island High beau. It was said that Gavin was not a happy boy these days.

  Another waiter, Jeremy, a skinny boy with pimples in his neck stubble, slid into the chair beside Brigid and set his beer down with an emphatic thud. His voice was conspiratorially low. “Lance is Squee’s dad. His mom’s Lorna. She’s pretty much a drunk.” Jeremy took a sip of his beer.

  “Is she here?” Peg asked, waving a hand toward the cabins.

  “Yeah, you’ll see her around every so often. She’s in bad shape. It’s really sad.” Jeremy’s display of sensitivity was embarrassingly over-earnest.

  “So she’s just about the place, and drunk, and no one cares a thing about it?” Peg asked.<
br />
  “What’re you going to do?” Jeremy had worked summers at the Lodge before, as a busboy. He knew what things went unquestioned.

  “And Lance?” Brigid pressed him. “What about him?”

  Peg said, “He’s a bit of dosser, eh?”

  “A what?” said Jeremy.

  Brigid cut in: “A doss—a fellow who just lays about, like a bit of a waste, you know?”

  “Yeah,” Jeremy concurred. “He’s a dick. The whole teetotaler thing’s a total sham. Mostly he’s totally rocked too.”

  “Doesn’t anyone care at all?” Peg asked.

  “Yeah, but you know . . .” Jeremy stammered. “I mean, what can you do, you know?” They were all quiet then for a moment, sipping their Pabsts, thinking, God, yeah, what could you do, really? The air smelled of sea salt and smoke, the breeze from the shore delicious.

  Peg leaned in closer to Jeremy. “And the boy?” she whispered. Little Squee was swinging his legs back and forth off the side of the deck.

  “It’s messed up,” Jeremy said, “but, you know, he seems OK. He’s a pretty well adjusted kid, you know, in spite of everything.”

  “It’s wrong, isn’t it . . . ?” Peg said.

  Brigid looked again to Squee, his skinny legs still waggling off the edge of the deck. She turned back to her beer and drained it.

  Half an hour later, Brigid excused herself—jet lag—from the porch party. Gavin, the dark, smoking waiter, had disappeared, and with him had gone Brigid’s motivation to stay awake any longer. She cut through the Lodge, the fastest route to the staff quarters, but as she crossed the lobby she heard something—an animal, she thought at first—hiss from the far side of the room. She stopped where she was and spun around. The lights were all off for the night, and the moon glared in at Brigid like a spotlight. It shone through the sliding glass doors and obscured the far half of the large room in darkness.