Nantucket Red Tickets

by Steven Axelrod

  “I don’t need a spy. People talk, people hear things. You say you called in the State Police? All the more reason to get out to Tuckernuck and dump those pills. Lonnie Fraker might be headed out there already! So the race is on.”

  “Not going to happen, Pat.”

  He grinned. “Good. That gives me an excuse to fuck you up.”

  I held up a professorial hand, index finger pointed to the sky. “Hold on. Before we start, I need to explain a few things. Bear with me. First of all, you may have wondered why it seemed so easy to rough me up when we were fighting two years ago at the Delta Fields. I mean apart from your obvious first ideas, that I’m a weakling and a fag.”

  Another piggy laugh. “Something like that.”

  “In fact there were two other reasons. First of all, I was pretty well beaten up already. I was a mass of burns and bruises. But that’s not even the important part. See, I was trained to fight. Actually trained. It wasn’t the kind of fighting you’re used to—playground push and shove. All I know how to do is disable and kill. Shatter the knee, close the thorax, drive the nasal bone up into the brain. It’s a last resort. Don’t drive me to it.”

  “You finished?”

  “Not quite. Beyond that, there’s the legal problem. You raise a hand to me and no matter what I do I’m justified and no matter what you do you’ve committed felony assault against a police officer. I get a medal. You go to jail.”

  “If there was a witness. But there is no witness.”

  “Yes, there is.”

  It was a woman’s voice. Karen Gifford stood up from behind a big four-door Jeep and stepped into the street.

  “So some girl’s gonna fight your battles for you?”

  “I don’t fight,” Karen pointed out. “I watch. And film things on my iPhone 8.” She held it out to frame the scene properly.

  “There’s another alternative, Pat,” I said. “Walk away. Forget about this idiotic little game. Go on about your business. Take care of your son. I won’t press charges but I am putting you on probation. The next time you step one baby step out of line I will come down on you like the trash avalanche at the CD building. And all you tradesmen remember the trash avalanche.”

  A toxic slide of construction and demolition debris had killed a worker at the dump a couple of years before—a horrible way to go.

  The three of us stood there on the quiet tree-lined street. Finally Sauter caved. “Fine. You win. But the game is rigged so the cops always win.”

  “Right. It’s called ‘civilization.’”

  Walking into town with Karen on Fair Street—Pat had retreated in the opposite direction toward Pine Street—I asked the obvious question. “What were you doing there?”

  “I’ve been following you in my spare time. Everyone knows about Pat’s phone call. I was worried.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  “I guess I didn’t need to be, with you knowing all that killer karate stuff.”

  I laughed. “That was bullshit, Karen. My game is poker, and I love to bluff.”

  Everything fell into place after that, like a jar full of coins dumped into a sorting machine, spinning into neat stacks of quarters, nickels, and dimes, ready to wrap. I talked to Pat Folger and the other would-be vigilante drug squad; Pressman was arrested and booked, his dog taken to the MSPCA for adoption, the drugs confiscated. I gave David Trezize the story—a small early Christmas present—and he ran it on the front page of the Nantucket Shoals that week, impressively scooping the Inquirer and Mirror.

  “I’m a petty and vindictive little man,” he told me. “But I love this kind of shit.”

  Dave Prescott confessed to Bissell without betraying Hector Cruz, who confessed in turn to my daughter and got what would no doubt be the first of many “Can’t we just be friends?” rejections (though she was happy to eat the chocolates).

  At my suggestion with some gentle pressure from the Selectmen, Bissell offered Dave the chance to work off his two-week suspension in community service, so no scandal tarred the town’s sacred Nantucket Whalers football program.

  The last coin dropped into the last tube when I ran into our new sheriff, Fred Lowry, on his way to deliver an eviction notice to Sam Trikilis.

  “Can it wait until after the holidays?” I asked him, as we walked out of Fast Forward with our coffees.

  “It won’t make any difference, Chief.”

  “But it’s a nice gesture. And I’ll remember it.”

  The stall would only buy Sam a few weeks, but he had a pile of past due invoices to collect, and a small inheritance that might rescue him if it cleared probate by January. So it was worth a shot. And I knew that Fred didn’t relish the job of kicking a family out of their house this time of year. He was a strident believer in the Fox News “War on Christmas”—this was his chance to take up arms for the beleaguered holiday.

  So all the coins were wrapped up and ready to deposit. Carrie’s play was going well, she had made her peace with Jane’s little elf—apparently he had finally learned his one line—and we were mostly moved into the new house.

  Crime on the island had hit at an all-time low. It looked like an easy slide into the New Year.

  And then Alana Trikilis came down with food poisoning.

  Part Two

  Christmas Eve

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Ghost of Christmas Future

  Max Blum hadn’t always hated his father. He could remember walking on the beach with the old man, talking about whatever came into their minds. They discussed Max’s fear of the ocean—in some book he had seen a looming storm swell referred to as a “motherless” wave, and his dad wanted to know why the phrase stuck with him. “Maybe because…a huge wave is so, I don’t know. Not human? Uncaring? Everything Mom isn’t.”

  “Good boy,” his father had said that afternoon. “Very shrewd. And your mother will be pleased to get the vote of confidence.”

  Shrewd: that was his father’s favorite compliment. Max understood the significance of that now. But on those long walks he had just been drunk on the smoky elixir of his dad’s undivided attention. Dad spoke to him as if he was an adult already (well, of course; children bored him), with no subject out of bounds. Politics? His dad was a Libertarian and thought the only remaining example of American democracy was Nantucket’s annual Town Meeting. Sex? “Remember this for later, Max: never let a girl leave a single personal item at your house. Not a shirt, not a hairclip. That’s the beginning of the end.” Religion? “Fairy tales for fools afraid to die.” They both loved puzzles—crosswords and Sudoku, puns and plays on words (“Be it ever so crumpled, there’s no plate like chrome”) anagrams, oxymorons (“soft rock!”), palindromes (Horses say “Yahoo! Hay!”).

  His dad had laughed at his jokes, frowned at his concerns, clasped his shoulder with an easy camaraderie that attached him to the world. His dad had been his anchor then, holding him tight against the tides and currents, the chain dropping straight into the dark water, the barnacled metal resting in the silt.

  How had it all changed? Maybe it was just puberty. But Max started to see things differently. Discrete observations that hadn’t even seemed to register, collected and organized, random strangers forming a mob, a lynch mob jazzed at the hate they had in common.

  Max remembered getting his first pair of glasses—putting them on and looking around, the world leaping into a bright caustic unwelcome clarity. The dust on the furniture, the pores on his father’s face, the flaws in his father’s character.

  His father was cruel and mean-spirited. He treated his employees and his friends and his family badly. He was abusive. Max recalled the night Dad had made Martin rewrite some stupid English paper over and over, starting from scratch by hand each time he found a misspelled word, a missing comma, or an improperly indented paragraph. Max felt absurdly protective of his older brother. Mart
in was flimsy, porous, sad. He needed TLC, and he got that cold rage, that shiver of disgust, that bottomless dismissal. It was midnight before Martin completed the paper to Jackson Blum’s satisfaction.

  “So, you finally managed to do something right!” Dad had sneered. “Amazing.”

  Maybe Dad had sensed something even then, something off about Martin, some physical failure to conform, like a limp or a tic. Martin had something much more incriminating, from around the age of ten: a sense of style.

  When he was fourteen he spent the summer at Nantucket Sailing. The organization offered the kids free Crocs, as part of some corporate promotion. By the time it was Martin’s turn to choose, the only ones left in his size were pink. He politely declined.

  “Don’t want to look like a fag?” his father had asked, when Martin told the story at dinner that night.

  “Oh, because they’re pink?” Martin had shot back. “It’s exactly the opposite, Dad. No ‘fag’ would ever be caught dead in those grotesque rubber clogs. Fags have style.”

  And he did. He spent his allowance on tight-pegged jeans and fancy sunglasses; on a family trip to Manhattan he had slipped off to Trenton, just to buy some “cute” shirts at DD’s Discounts. He was amused when hip-hop artists started adopting his style. Eventually the kids who’d been beating him up at school copied the rappers and wound up dressing just like him.

  But Martin had already moved on—to crewneck cashmere sweaters, slim-fit chinos, bright-patterned dress socks, and Baldese sneakers. Few fifteen-year-olds referred to themselves as “fashion forward.” Even at ten years old, Max knew that much.

  And it was clear that their father had been in denial about Martin for a long time. No single trait was conclusive, after all. Jackson Blum enjoyed show-tunes just as much as his oldest son did, and had in fact introduced the boy to the pleasures of the American songbook. Appreciating Jerome Kern and Harold Arlen didn’t signify anything but good taste. Max remembered the two of them performing a Frank Sinatra singalong to The Lady is a Tramp—and the sophisticated gusto with which Martin belted out the lyrics.

  “I’ll take Lorenz Hart over Oscar anytime,” Martin had remarked that night, cutting another facet into the rare gem of his father’s approval. Of course it turned out to be cubic zirconium, but for that one evening Martin glittered with the pride of being seen and appreciated, unable to sing a wrong note or say a wrong word.

  Of course it didn’t last. Things added up. All the refusals: Martin wouldn’t try out for Whalers football, or support the conservative candidates his father financed. He preferred Al Jazeera and Democracy Now to Fox News. Worst of all, he wouldn’t take a girl to the prom. In fact, Martin never had a girlfriend at all, though he had many friends who happened to be girls. No one could twine a French braid like Martin, or pay such sincere undivided attention to the melodramatic reconfigurations of cool-girl friendships and rivalries.

  And his makeup tips were impeccable.

  The girls Martin surrounded himself with confused his father. The old man just didn’t get it. One day he said, “You should stop shaving, Martin. You’ve got a good heavy stubble, just like me. Let it grow in! You’ll look like a real man with a beard.”

  Martin had laughed. “But I already have Marissa.”

  Dad’s baffled look was priceless.

  The evidence kept accumulating. Martin got into Oberlin, turning down Boston College, his father’s preferred institution of higher learning. He left home for the wilds of Ohio, and came back every vacation more flamboyant and less interested in putting on the show his father required.

  “If I’m going to stay in the closet,” he said to Max two Christmases ago, “I’m going to need a bigger one. Too much clobber—all those batts and kaffies.” That meant clothes and shoes and trousers in British Polari slang. Martin had started using Polari after listening to old Marty Feldman BBC comedy tapes and classic Morrissey albums. It annoyed and alienated their father; it cut and chewed at the thread binding them together, like all the other details had before, but nothing had quite managed to sever that coarse familial twine.

  Until now.

  Martin always came home for the four-day “reading period” between the end of classes and final exams. He didn’t need what he called the “Oberlin courtesy cram.” He generally knew the class material inside-out, and often moved beyond assigned texts to primary source material. This semester, for instance, supplanting the Zeiler and DuBois Companion to World War Two with Winston Churchill’s six-volume history, from The Gathering Storm to Triumph and Tragedy, along with Nazi diaries and collections of American GI letters home.

  So when classes ended, his time was pretty much his own.

  He had always returned to Nantucket by himself. This year he brought a friend, a tall shy slim redheaded boy with freckles and heavy black glasses named Connor McKenzie. Martin despised public displays of affection, so there was nothing obviously outrageous about the two boys together. Max could read the occasional shared smile or raised eyebrow, the quick secret brief touch, hand to shoulder, fingertip to cheek. But Dad was oblivious, and Mom didn’t care. She was just happy that her spiky difficult son had found a friend he liked well enough to bring home.

  Connor was charming. The youngest of six siblings, with five older sisters who tormented him amiably from toddlerhood, dressing him in their clothes, teaching him to cook so he could serve them breakfast in bed, showering him with nicknames (“Grommet” was the one that stuck), demanding that he communicate entirely through gestures and facial expressions. He was a genius at charades, after a lifetime of practice.

  He was a vegetarian, and quite an accomplished chef, and after a day featuring a lunch of quinoa burgers and a dinner of orcchiette with rapini and goat cheese, Marjorie declared that she could attempt a vegetarian diet with Connor in the kitchen.

  Blum laughed. “Marjorie has been trying to get me on one cockamamie diet or another since the first George Bush administration. She seems to think everything I like to eat is fattening.”

  Connor shrugged. “Nothing’s fattening if you exercise.”

  “But I don’t exercise. And the only people who do are obsessives and body-fetishists.”

  “What do you obsess about?” Connor asked. “Or fetishize?”

  “Money,” Martin answered for him.

  Blum turned on his son. “And it’s lucky for you that I do. Unless you’d rather have nothing.”

  Martin was about to answer, but Max saw a look pass between him and Connor, as if Connor knew Martin was about to blurt something bad and possibly unforgivable. A fractional shake of his head blocked Martin’s rebuttal instantly, Martin’s face shifting in less than a second from a sneer of rage to a baffled frown of insurrection to a half-smile of defeat. And all he wound up saying was, “You’re right, Dad. Sorry.”

  Max wasn’t the only one who caught that silent exchange. Marjorie Blum saw it too, and her quick smile was the seal of approval Martin had been longing for.

  It went on, from the ilex berry and pine bough centerpiece Connor picked in the moors for the dining room table to the easy way he helped with the housework. He made his own bed and did everyone’s laundry. He slipped coasters under errant glasses and fluffed flattened couch pillows. He even found a set of reusable Keurig pods at Stop&Shop to use with the pound of George Howell Terroir single source Caturra coffee he had brought with him from Boston. Marjorie summed it up on the second day of his visit, and even her husband had to agree.

  Connor McKenzie: best house guest ever.

  That was how things stood on the morning it happened.

  The night before they had attended a performance of A Christmas Carol at the The White Heron Theater and argued about it amiably afterward over a Gambella and a Rustica at Pi Pizzeria. Blum had always thought Dickens’ tale was sentimental claptrap, and the clumsy dramatization had done nothing to change his mind. Martin agree
d. Max and his mother took the other side, touched despite themselves by the spectacle of Scrooge’s redemption.

  Everyone retired early, congenially drunk after sharing two bottles of wine with dinner.

  Blum woke up just after six the next morning to the sounds of a scuffle. At first he thought there had been a break-in—that Max or Martin, or possibly both of them, were subduing a prowler.

  He sat up in bed, thinking about weapons. The Ruger was locked away in the gun cabinet downstairs. The andirons were standing uselessly beside the great room fireplace. His cell phone was charging in the kitchen. He held his breath and listened.

  A new sound, an unmistakable one: his son’s laugh. And another voice, mingled laughter and some sort of grunting then silence and the groan and squeak of the bedsprings, all coming from down the hall—Martin’s room.

  Had Martin sneaked a girl in there? The waitress at Pi had been flirting with him outrageously.

  Then that other voice again, no words this time, just a keening sigh dropping down the registers, landing in the baritone pit with a groan, then jerked up again into a little bleat of pleasure—not a female voice. Not a girl.

  Something in Blum’s chest clenched. He couldn’t breathe for a second or two. He pulled air in through the constricted passages, his childhood asthma coming back to haunt him. For years he had felt stress and fear and worry in his guts. But this moment was crushing his lungs.

  It couldn’t be possible. He had to be wrong. There had to be another explanation. There were always other explanations, things were never exactly the way they seemed, were they? People made mistakes, they jumped to conclusions! That’s what he was doing right now, jumping to conclusions. When you make an assumption you make of fool of—no an ass, you made an ass of—how did that go? Yourself, the other person, something, everyone. He couldn’t remember. But it was bad.