Spartina

by John D. Casey

  Marie was Schuyler’s May. Maybe Dick was Parker’s May. What flavor you were depended on whether you had a wish or were being dragged after someone else’s wish.

  Dick wanted his boat, Parker wanted his fancy boat, Schuyler in his way wanted … might as well throw in Joxer Goode—they all wanted and wanted. Until this very minute Dick would have figured that all their wantings were different, that everything about all of them was so different they were each in their own shell. But now it was as if their wantings stretched out of themselves into each other, not just fighting it out with each other but conducting, backward and forward, some of Parker into Dick, some of Dick into Marie, Marie into May, Dick into Schuyler, Schuyler into Dick.…

  Dick would have figured everyone was different the way everything was different. A lobster wasn’t a crab, a blue crab wasn’t a red crab. The old Pierces in the Wedding Cake. The Buttricks in the Buttrick house. Miss Perry in Miss Perry’s house. Dick in the house he’d built on the last piece of the old Pierce place.

  Now everything seemed to be leaking, percolating, flowing into everything else. Dick could turn around right this minute and be for Marie as easily as he’d been for Schuyler. He could go back another step and remember the Wedding Cake and Uncle Arthur … and be like Miss Perry. He could feel the way his father felt. He could stiffen up and wish to feel like Captain Texeira. He could let himself feel like Parker, he could try to back away and not feel like Parker.

  He’d got onto an edge. Was it last night? No, the night before—he’d broke off the piece of black bank so it slid into the water, dissolved. Stopped being footprints and mud, slid into the salt creek.

  It shouldn’t take him by surprise, he’d always known both sides: that the salt marsh is the salt marsh, the sea is the sea, the sky is the sky … and that the land washes into the salt creek, the salt creek into the sea, the sea into every sea, and everything in the sea dissolves. Everything in the sea dissolves—the particulate matter into the deeps, then back into upwellings, into the chain whose first invisible links are animal—plants, plant-animals; and all the while the great fluid of the sea is drawn into the sky by the sun, takes passing shapes as cloud, and returns to the earth.

  The cycle had always been a remote comfort. So long as it was out there—earth, water, air. Somewhere else. Now it was in this kitchen, suggesting dissolution, dissolving. His notion of his—his house, his boat, his difference.

  He got up. He washed Schuyler’s dishes. Took Parker’s key and drove home in Parker’s car. He didn’t explain the car to May, he’d had enough of everything for the morning.

  But May seemed genuinely glad to see him, didn’t ask right off if he’d made enough to ante up the household money.

  She said, “You want some breakfast?”

  “We ate.”

  “Well, why don’t you go ahead and take your shower. The boys are out for the morning. I was going to clean some, but I can get to it later.”

  This more than usually enthusiastic offer didn’t please him as it usually would have. He still felt strange to his life, still as chilled and shriveled as he had felt hiding on the hummock in the salt marsh, still as constricted by nerves as on the foredeck of Mamzelle watching the cops search her, still as pierced as he’d been by his displaced boyhood when he’d stepped into the Wedding Cake.

  He showered, came out in his towel, and took a hold of May’s long waist. On the bed he slid her hairpins out the way she liked, even slower than usual, so it got to her more than usual, but all the while he couldn’t get his mind off how he couldn’t tell her what was going on on account of how right she’d been about Parker. He rubbed her slip on her skin the way she liked, feeling indecently competent as she breathed harder and got pink and hypnotized.

  Later on she said that she’d forgotten how much she used to miss him when he’d been going out regular on a boat. It was a nice thing to say, but it didn’t reach him. He looked up at a thin spattering of rain across the windowpane, the tired southwester dragging on.

  The next morning Dick dropped off Parker’s car at the railroad station, got in the pickup with Charlie, dropped Charlie, then headed back up toward Wickford to a salvage-warehouse auction of Navy surplus.

  He was still tired, still tense, still baffled by his unsettled sense of things.

  The sight of all the material in the warehouse cheered him up at first. Jeeps, three-quarter-ton trucks, marine hardware, coils of steel cable, a half-dozen steel lifeboats, donkey engines, auxiliary generators …

  When the bidding started he realized that the stuff was being sold in bulk in lots too expensive for him. He was about to leave when he ran into Eddie Wormsley, who also wanted some narrow-gauge steel cable. Together they managed to get a spool. Dick picked up some electrical wire and some defective porthole fittings no one wanted. The last of the lobster money went for steel davits.

  Eddie said to give him a call after lunch and he’d come help with the wiring. Eddie was slower at wiring than Dick, but did a better job. Having Eddie around got Dick in a better mood, a better rhythm. Eddie’s offer cheered Dick up, he’d been feeling uneasy and itchy about the wiring.

  On the way home it began to rain again, not a steady clean rain, just more spitting and drizzling.

  Several miles short of Wakefield Dick saw a bicyclist. It always annoyed him when bicyclists or joggers cluttered up a high-speed road, wavering along the shoulder. This one was actually on the edge of the right-hand lane, pedaling furiously. Dick recognized the uniform first, then saw it was Elsie. She recognized his truck, he saw her wave in his mirror. He pulled onto the shoulder a hundred yards ahead. He rolled down the passenger window, and when her face appeared, flushed and wet, he asked her if she wanted a ride. She said no, then yes. She hoisted her bike into the bed beside the spool of cable and climbed in beside him. She was in a raw mood too: the weather, having to leave her new Volvo at the dealer’s for mysterious noises, but most of all having her leave canceled to spend two nights ferrying around two cops in a Natural Resources whaler.

  “Alleged backup to the alleged alert for alleged smugglers. Three-state alert. From the Cape Cod Canal all the way to the Connecticut River. The state police and the Coast Guard must have used up a thousand man-hours, just racing around flashing their lights. The Coast Guard boat spent an hour zipping along the beaches, poking around with a searchlight. We chased a boat into the salt marsh, could have been kids poaching clams or even just fourteen-year-olds drinking beer.” Elsie rolled down her right pant leg and flung herself back in the seat. “And I mouthed off to my boss about what a waste of time it is to use us as backup. The state police don’t like having us along. Though the guys I was with would still be lost … We used up a tank of gas going up every salt creek. And my revolver got wet, so I’ll have to clean it again.”

  It occurred to Dick that it was good news that the alert was such a big deal—it seemed less likely that Parker was the object of any special attention. But still, here was official Elsie right beside him in his truck.

  Elsie told him where to turn. Up Miss Perry’s driveway and into the woods. Another turn onto a narrow dirt road.

  “This is the way to Quondam Pond,” Dick said. “I didn’t know your house was in here.”

  “Yes. Miss Perry sold me that little tip of her land.”

  The house was on the south side of a flat grassy clearing. From the clearing the house looked like nothing more than a big toolshed. A stretch of shingled roof and a dwarfed windowless wall. There was an open one-car garage at the side of the clearing, a covered passage from the side of the garage to the house. Elsie hung her bike on hooks inside it. She said, “Come on in. I’ll show you the house.”

  The passageway was dark, but when Elsie opened the door to the house there was a glare of daylight. Elsie said, “Watch the steps, they go down.”

  There was one long main room, bright even on this gray day. The house was embedded into the slope, almost all window along the south side. The windows o
verlooked the small pond, an oval stillness except for the dappling of the light rain. On the far bank rhododendrons hung out over the water, their blossoms gone by. A few white petals floated where they’d fallen.

  Elsie put water on in the kitchen, which was simply a back corner of the long main room. There was a freestanding stone fireplace and chimney two-thirds of the way to the kitchen.

  Elsie walked past him, all the way to the opposite end, where the other back corner was curtained off by folds of shiny material. It seemed scarlet at first, but he saw it was changeable in the light, darker in the troughs of the folds, lighter, almost pink, on the crests.

  Elsie came out wearing a terrycloth robe that was too big for her. It could have been the same one Marie was wearing the day before.

  “You want to swim?” Elsie said. “I’m going for a quick dip, wash off this all-night grunginess.”

  Dick shook his head, watched Elsie as she went down a metal spiral staircase into a small greenhouse that was built along the pond side of the house. The roof of the greenhouse slanted down from the bottom of the main-room windows. Below the greenhouse there was a grass slope and then the bank of the pond. Elsie jumped from the bank to a large rock two feet from shore. She let her robe fall and dove in all in one motion. She came up in the middle of the pond. It was all so quick Dick wasn’t sure whether she was wearing a swimsuit.

  He turned to look at the woodwork. It was simple but good. He remembered Eddie talking about doing the work a while back. The one really fancy bit was the steps down from the front door. Two concentric arcs, almost half-circles, nicely rounded at the lip. They somehow gave the impression of leading to water. The brown-and-gray fireplace and chimney stones were chinked with quartzite, and that pattern too reminded him of water, light reflected from water.

  He thought of yesterday morning in the Wedding Cake—his undertow of thought then, started by the force of the Wedding Cake.… This house sure as hell didn’t have anything to do with that old style, none of the ornament. And yet it was alike in a way. It looked as if Elsie was moving in or moving out. The squat back wall had built-in shelves, which were half bare, half a-clutter.

  He looked around for the bathroom, found it behind the fireplace, on the pond side.

  The toilet was humming. It was a huge plastic cube with a temperature gauge and a lot of wiring. The only normal part was the lid and the seat. There was a high footrest jutting out on the front, which made it awkward for a man to take a leak. Dick had to put one hand on the back wall to lean over the bowl. This struck him as funny. He started to laugh, had to bite his lip to keep steady.

  He zipped up his fly and looked for the handle to flush. He found a handle but all it did was slide shut the lower level of the bowl. Maybe it was like a head on a boat, had a holding tank. He settled for shutting the lid.

  He closed the door behind him and started laughing again. Elsie came up the spiral staircase from the well to the greenhouse, holding her robe wrapped around her. “What’s so funny?”

  Dick said, “That contraption in there.”

  Elsie went in behind the curtains at the far end. She called out from inside, “Oh. The bio-let.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s like a multrom. Turns sewage into compost. No leach field. Keeps the pond clean.”

  She came out wearing shorts and a faded red sweatshirt. She pushed the sleeves above the elbow as she padded to the kitchen in bare feet. The stiff black shorts made her legs look particularly bare and harshly defined.

  He was about to tell her about his odd morning at the Wedding Cake, Schuyler making breakfast for Parker and him. He caught himself. He thought of Marie coming up from the salt pond in her oversized robe, her chatter, her odd combination of boneless laziness and glass-edged attack. Maybe these rich girls all started conversations the same way, letting the fizz off the top of the bottle.

  “I’m just going to have coffee and soup, that okay with you?”

  While she was at the stove, Dick looked again at the shelves against the windowless wall. Quite a few books. One row of nothing but bird books. Boxes of loose photographs, a few more matted and propped up, a few in frames. Two cameras. There were three tennis trophies, two of them filled with pennies, straight pins, and odd buttons, the third a little statue of a girl serving. The arm with the racket had broken off.

  Under the lowest shelf there were plastic-mesh baskets and a cardboard carton, all filled with stuff, as if Elsie were getting ready to have a yard sale. A pair of girl’s ice skates, a skin-diving mask and snorkel, cans of tennis balls, a jump rope, a lot of bicycle inner tubes, a swim fin with a torn heel. That was the first basket. Dick shoved it back against the wall with his foot. It wouldn’t go all the way. He picked up the handle of a butterfly net that blocked it, but the net was hung up on another carton. He gave up and wiped the dust off his hand.

  Elsie was looking at him. “You’re as bad as my sister,” she said. “If you want to play with something, fine. But don’t go around straightening up.”

  Dick reflexively stiffened against someone setting him straight. “Been here long?”

  Elsie shrugged. “A year. Less. I’ve been fixing up the outside, putting in plants. I’ve got some furniture in storage but it doesn’t really go here, and I can’t afford new stuff. What’s the rush? I kind of like it with just the minimum.”

  The one sofa by the fireplace and the one table by the window looked unrelated and forlorn. The sofa was a three-seater that had seen better days. The table was a rustic picnic table with benches, the cedar bark still on the legs.

  The only other visible piece was a tall double-door wardrobe. It was carved and painted in some sort of old-time Italian or Portuguese way. It was faded, but still a beautifully made thing. Backed against the scarlet curtain, it made that corner of the room look like a side altar in a big Catholic church. It was a shame to have everything else so slack.

  “It’s all passive solar,” Elsie said. “There’s a pile of rocks at the back of the greenhouse, and the heat flows …” She gestured sweepingly. She stopped. “Did you know you have the most terrible expression on your face?”

  Dick was embarrassed. “It’s the benches and table. I like the wardrobe. I like the house and the pond.”

  “Well, good. That’s the point. It’s just a shelter by a pond.” She put her hands deep in her shorts pockets. “I did a lot of the work, I mean hammering and sawing. Ask Eddie. And he and I worked on the plan.… I know it may look drab on a rainy day.…”

  “No. It’s …”

  “But on a nice day you can float on the pond—we dredged it and fixed the little dam—you can lie there and—”

  “I like your house. Eddie likes your house. He spoke to me about it. The air flow and everything.”

  “I just haven’t gotten around to … I’m perfectly happy to get some advice. You have any ideas?”

  “Nope.” He had no idea what she wanted. But she could get him talking, he just couldn’t keep his mouth shut around her. He said, “Well, maybe you could take the bark off your picnic table. Looks like a hippie girl with hairy legs.”

  Elsie laughed. “That’s going outside. Eventually. Back to nature, where she belongs. And eventually I’ll get some chests for all that equipment.”

  “Maybe you should put it out in your garage. Makes the house look like it ought to have hinges on the lid. Like a big toy box.”

  Elsie looked hurt, laughed, then looked hurt again.

  “Aw, hell, Elsie, I’m just …”

  “Did you know you used to terrify kids when you worked at the boatyard?”

  “I was mean to kids? Naw. I may have explained things kind of briefly to one or two boat owners. I wasn’t mean to any kids.”

  “I didn’t say you were mean.”

  “First time I worked in the yard, I was just a kid myself. That was before the Coast Guard. Before I was on Captain Texeira’s boat. I used to fall back on the boatyard when things didn’t work out.” />
  “That’s funny. Even when I was a kid I admired the way you’re good at things, the way you seemed to have worked out a good relation to things, I mean the physical world. I thought you and Eddie—you around boats and Eddie back in the woods—I compared you with most of the men around.… You and Eddie seemed so real. And happy about … things.”

  Dick laughed. “You’d have to leave out a long list of real screwups. That goes for Eddie too.”

  “Oh, I know you and Eddie get into trouble. But that’s because you have your own rules … or at least your own sense of things. I’ve always liked the way you and Eddie treated this part of South County as though … well, certainly not as if it belonged to you, but as though it were open to you, part of your natural territory.”

  “That’s a pretty picture all right. Natural territory.”

  “Did you know the Indians—or, as Miss Perry says, the red Indians—didn’t own anything?”

  “Well, that’s me and Eddie. But I’d like to have my natural territory so’s it includes, say, banks. The way it is now, I’m not in what you might call the natural business flow.”

  Elsie didn’t go on with the subject. She brought the soup over to the picnic table. She said, “I know you don’t like this table with hairy legs, but it’s all we’ve got.”

  Dick thought he’d spoken about money in some crude way. It irritated him. He said, “I see you got some tennis trophies. You going to join the tennis club when your brother-in-law gets it going on Sawtooth Point?”

  Elsie smiled as though she saw through him. “Tennis used to be the way I punished boys. Now it’s how I try to meet men. So maybe I will. Increase my natural territory.” She got a picture from the shelf of herself and a man shaking hands over a tennis net. “That’s me at seventeen. I just beat him. The old headmaster at Perryville—he still had a pretty good game.” Elsie laughed. “Still! Old! He was only a few years older than I am now. He wasn’t even forty.”