by Tim Weed
We drove off the site, past the open trenches and the gaping foundation pits for row upon row of new Highlands Ranch homes. I looked west, hoping to find some kind of relief in the soaring peaks, but the Front Range was obscured by clouds. I tried to put myself in Billy’s shoes, down in the trench under the dying prairie, with the smell of mud and the bare wire of the cable ends, with the rain pouring in and the thunder cracking. Would the smell of sage have reached him down there?
SCRIMSHAW
THE CESSNA BANKED and began its descent, which felt steeper than usual to Kevin. He hated this part. Most mornings, there was a gusty wind blowing in from the open Atlantic, causing the small plane to jitter and bump. The worst was when the plane shimmied sideways, as if at any moment it could lose its equilibrium and get blown out of its flight path. Easy enough to imagine how this could happen: an unexpectedly powerful gust coming in at a critical angle; the Cessna spinning out like a boomerang and then plummeting, as in an old war movie, a spiral of black smoke billowing from the tail as it plunged into the sound. He closed his eyes and gripped the hand rests. It had been six months since he’d had a drink.
When he opened his eyes, the island was visible below, early-morning fog just lifting, an Aladdin’s-lamp crescent of sand and yellow-green heath; a rich man’s playground of weathered cedar cottages and summer mansions. Kevin had used a shovel on this ground, and he knew it was just as hard as anywhere else—just as fatal, too. But for some reason he breathed easier once the plane crossed over dry land. Looking down he could pick out half a dozen building sites, the recumbent skeletons of newly framed mansions-in-progress, each clamped like a parasite to its own scar of bare yellow earth. He could even see his ultimate destination, the Beekman estate, a sprawling three-building compound in various stages of construction on a private peninsula jutting out into the harbor. The sandy rectangle where the tennis court was about to go in. The long staircase down the bluff to the beach. Kevin had built that staircase himself.
The plane tipped and bucked before it touched down, then at last planted itself firmly on solid ground, taxiing along the runway to the small island terminal. Kevin was the first of the seven passengers to deplane, accepting the gym bag that held his lunch and an extra change of clothes from the wingman and walking the asphalt strip between parallel yellow lines into the terminal building. He’d been spared to live another day, but it was only decompression he felt, not full-blown relief. After all, he had to fly home that evening, and return the following morning, and keep making round-trip flights every workday for the foreseeable future. At least, that was, until he found an affordable place to live on the island or—not likely—a job somewhere else that paid better. The building boom had created a shortage of finish-carpenters, and he was earning twice as much as he could on the mainland.
Phil was waiting out front in his vintage blue Ford pickup. When he saw Kevin he nodded, poker-faced but genial. It was a typical Phil expression, one Kevin read this way: “Picking you up every day is a waste of my time, but on the other hand I don’t really mind, because I’m on Beekman’s clock and I have time to waste.” He was a good foreman, Phil. He gave his employees the benefit of the doubt and never yelled, even when they screwed up. Kevin had worked for plenty of worse men, for sure.
He tossed the gym bag in the bed and got in. Phil put the truck in gear and drove slowly out of the airport lot. He was older than Kevin, in his late fifties probably, and had lived on the island since the 1960s. There was a rumor going around that he was a Wampanoag Indian descended from Squanto, and another that he’d once been the island’s principal supplier of cocaine. Like most long-term islanders, he was a maddeningly slow driver. With his messy white hair and olive-skinned, preppy-boy good looks, he could have been an artist or a college professor, although he was laid back to a point just short of laziness—which explained why he was still toiling for an hourly wage. He and his wife Ursula lived in an old houseboat they kept moored in the harbor.
“How was your flight?” he asked.
Kevin exhaled. “Fine. Hit some rough air on the way in, as usual.”
Phil gave him a sympathetic look. “Ursula and I always take the ferry. Although I guess that wouldn’t be possible in your case.”
“Not unless you’re okay with me showing up at eleven every morning.”
“Yeah. I don’t think that would sit too well with Mr. Beekman.”
“Then maybe he could find a place for me to stay over here.” Kevin rolled down the window and spat.
“Not likely,” Phil said. “But it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, does it? They can’t afford to put you up on the island, but they can afford to fly you back and forth every day?”
“No shit.” Kevin stared glumly out the window as they drove past the old brick whaling mansions into town, the pickup lurching over the cobblestones on Main Street. It was April—still the off-season—but it wasn’t hard to imagine what summer would be like: tax attorneys and CEOs trying to look like locals with their long-billed fisherman’s caps, teenagers joyriding in Land Rovers, and—of course—the women: leggy college girls with peachy complexions and high firm tits; young mothers perfect as magazine models; well-preserved older housewives with their taut, freckled faces and the pampered little rat-dogs they carried around like baby dolls.
Phil parked outside the pharmacy, and they went in to get coffee for the crew. Kevin helped him carry the trays out to the Ford, where they used a length of two-by-six and Kevin’s gym bag to prop them up against the front of the bed so the styrofoam cups wouldn’t tip over if Phil took any fast corners. Not that there was much danger of that. Phil steered the pickup gingerly out of town at an unvarying fifteen miles per hour, past the single farm and the cranberry bogs and all the tasteful gray-shingled mansions nestled among the low hills of the moorland, eventually turning left onto the unpaved access road to Massassoit point and the Beekman compound. The property displayed the jumbled order of a typical construction site: stacks of particleboard and raw cedar shingle, rolls of tarpaper, loose piles of sandy earth, and a blue dumpster overflowing with packaging and unusable scrap.
Phil cut the engine. The laborers stirred and rose listlessly from their seats on cinderblocks and stacks of lumber, strapping on their tool belts and walking stiff-limbed over to the truck for their coffee. They were still sipping it when Beekman pulled up in his black Hummer. He sat for a moment finishing a conversation on his cell phone, then got out and strode over to the crew. He was a tall, burly fellow with tiny eyes and a ferociously ruddy face, a Fortune 500 CEO with the carriage and attitude of a man accustomed to getting his own way. Kevin gave him a friendly nod as he approached, which Beekman predictably ignored.
“Late start today, Phil?”
The foreman shrugged. “I had to swing by the airport to pick up Kevin here, then to the lumberyard to order some Tyvek.” He glanced at Kevin, who nodded solemnly to confirm this little white lie.
Beekman gave a low grunt and glanced suspiciously around the site. In another life he might have been a baker, Kevin thought, with a sudden vision of the aproned CEO bursting out of an antique Bavarian storefront to shake his rolling pin at some poor, hungry kid who’d made off with a loaf of bread. Beekman couldn’t seem to find anything wrong, so he allowed his face to relax into a smile of snakelike amiability.
“Well, I’ll let you fellas get to it, then. Give me a holler if there’s anything I can do to speed things along, okay, Phil?” He climbed back up into the Hummer and spun its tires as he drove away, leaving the crew wheezing in a cloud of dust.
To supplement his construction income, Phil worked as a caretaker for a few dozen summer homes. Often, he would spend the middle part of the day, after he’d gotten everything started at the Beekman place, driving around the island to complete various small repair and maintenance jobs. Usually he left Kevin in charge at the site, but the laborers were putting up sheathing today—extremely straightforward work—so he invited Kevin to come along. They
drove to a cottage built on the sand dunes at the northwest point of the island to repair a screen. From there they went back into town to adjust a chimney flue in a nineteenth-century whaling mansion, and finally to the Overlock place, a sprawling, cedar-shingled house on the bluff overlooking the harbor, where they had to measure the “flower-arranging room” for a new set of tiles.
“Unbelievable,” Kevin said, when Phil told him what the room was for.
Phil grinned. “These ladies take their flower-arranging seriously. I’ve seen whole outbuildings dedicated to it. No joke.”
Kevin shook his head, incredulous. He’d never seen the inside of a house like this, with its immense floor plan and carefully crafted woodwork, and its unthinkably valuable collection of art and antiques. And this was only a summer home. One thing he knew for sure: if he ever had this kind of money, he wouldn’t spend it on a flower-arranging room, nor on hiring someone like Phil to do things he could easily do himself. But then experience had taught him that rich people were, for the most part, pretty helpless. They would call someone in to fix a flat tire, or to rake a few leaves. Probably they rationalized their laziness as generosity, as an excuse to toss a few coins to peons like Phil and Kevin.
After they’d eaten their sandwiches, Phil left Kevin ripping up the old tile while he went to the lumberyard. Kevin was an efficient worker, and the job didn’t take long, so he had time for a self-guided tour of the Overlocks’ home. It was a sprawling, well-built place: tightly seamed trim, hardwood floors and cupboards, no cost cutting on materials or technique, even the invisible stuff that was obvious only to a carpenter. Most of the rooms were decorated with a nautical theme: antique lamps crafted from astrolabes and old ships’ compasses, a collection of weathered mermaid figureheads, oil paintings of whaling captains and storm-tossed ships, plenty of scrimshaw lying about.
Kevin was especially taken with the scrimshaw. His old man had been a night-shift lathe operator at a furniture factory, never around much, asleep all day most days and fond of his liquor when he wasn’t sleeping. But he and Kevin had gotten along all right, especially when the old man told stories about Kevin’s great-great-grandfather, who’d crewed whaling ships out of New Bedford. Like many whalemen, their ancestor had spent the empty hours at sea etching finely detailed pictures into whale teeth. Some of these pieces had stayed in the family until just before Kevin’s birth, when they’d been sold off to pay a debt. The old man had always regretted that move, and he’d remained fascinated with scrimshaw throughout his life. For him, Kevin had later come to understand, the art form was so important because it represented the legacy of illiterate men, strong men of great spirit and small means who’d had no way to express their humanity beyond the things they made with their hands.
One gray January morning when Kevin was eleven years old his mother had awakened him with the news that the old man would not be coming home. He’d been killed the previous night, along with a few dozen others, because there’d been a fire at the furniture factory, and some idiot manager had locked the emergency exits. She was already sick at the time, and seven months later, she too had died. Kevin had gone to live with an uncle. His most treasured memories of his father were tied up in the stories of his great-great granddad the whaleman, and the Saturday afternoons Kevin and the old man had spent together in New Bedford, combing garage sales and pawnshops for scrimshaw. They’d never unearthed much, and what they had found they mostly hadn’t had the wherewithal to buy.
The Overlocks obviously didn’t have that problem. They were collectors. Scrimshaw could be found throughout in the house, artfully scattered on mantels and side tables, propped up in niches and glass display cases, accenting the expensive built-in bookshelves of the mahogany-paneled library. Kevin could see that these were authentic works of art, too—real antiques, literally hundreds of them. The old man wouldn’t have believed his eyes.
The commutes that evening and the following morning were less turbulent, but not enough to put Kevin at ease. On both flights he ground his teeth and clutched the arm rests until the plane landed. When they arrived at the Beekman compound, Phil turned off the Ford’s ignition and tossed Kevin the keys. “Feel like going freelance for a while?”
“Sure.” Kevin eyed him. “What does it entail, exactly?”
Phil picked up the clipboard he kept on the sun-cracked seat and used a pencil to scan the list he’d written there.
“Well, summer’s coming, and my caretaking jobs are starting to pile up. I have to go up to Providence next week to help my brother build a deck, and I think I should spend more time here at the site before I leave. Yesterday these bozos measured the windows wrong, and I’m pretty sure we’re going to have to re-sheathe the entire guesthouse. If Beekman gets wind of it . . .” He trailed off, looking sheepish, as if being under the gun were something to be ashamed of.
“Consider it taken care of,” Kevin said reassuringly. “I won’t let you down.” Truth was, he liked the idea of driving around the island by himself. The camaraderie of a construction crew had never done much for him—all the sex talk and the crude banter left him feeling awkward and sour—and the fact that Phil thought well enough of him to let him work unsupervised was a boost to his ego. It was nice to be trusted—and rare, in his experience. Over the last few years, he’d come to understand that when it came down to it he was not someone people felt all that comfortable with. This had become undeniably clear on his last two jobs, from which he’d been dismissed with the almost identical non-explanation that he just wasn’t “a good fit.”
Easing the old truck down the rutted sand driveway of the estate, he was filled with a pleasant sense of purpose. He would get the work done quickly and expertly. He would make both Phil and himself look good.
He started with the small jobs: checking the air conditioning at a secluded mansion near the lighthouse, tightening the hinges on the back door of a guesthouse near Silversides Point, replacing a few rotten boards on a deck south of town. He drove to the lumberyard to pick up the Overlocks’ tile and some shiplap pine he needed to panel the hall in the attic leading up to the widow’s walk. That and the flower-arranging room were part of an overall effort to make the house more “presentable,” Phil had wryly informed him. Kevin shook his head in disbelief every time he thought about the Overlocks.
By four, he was done laying tiles, and he decided to take another look around the house. He ended up in the library, gazing at a piece of scrimshaw he’d noticed the day before, which sat on a shelf in front of a three-volume biography of Winston Churchill. It was a small piece—insignificant really—a polished, slightly yellowed, blunt fang of ivory etched with a pair of crossed harpoons. When he picked it up it felt smooth and substantial in his hands. As a joke, he slipped it into the pocket of his work pants, where it settled as a cool weight against his thigh.
He could keep it easily, he mused. Surely the Overlocks would never notice. The scrimshaw felt natural where it was, hammocked comfortably in the bottom of his pocket with the curve of the tooth nestled against his thigh as if it belonged there. And in a way it did belong there. After all, even if it wasn’t his ancestor’s work—and who was to say it was not?—he surely could claim a closer tie to the lonely whaleman who’d etched those realistic-looking harpoons than the Overlocks could, this faceless, pampered, absentee family who paid a caretaker to do their simplest chores.
He would just hold onto it for now. He could always bring it back tomorrow, or the day after.
The next Friday, Phil invited him out to the houseboat for lunch. It was a crystalline spring day—a few wispy clouds, sky and ocean the same pale, hopeful shade of blue. The air smelled pleasantly of brine and rotting seaweed, and a light breeze ruffled the water as the skiff motored past the empty moorings of the inner harbor. Phil cut the engine as they approached the houseboat, a squared-off barge about forty feet long with blackened particleboard siding and a rusty stovepipe sticking out of the roof.
Ursula came out on the
narrow deck and Phil threw her the bowline, which she tied expertly to a cleat on the aft gunwale. She was younger than Phil, somewhere around the same age as Kevin, with a head of curly-blond hair and a slightly bruised look about the eyes, like a silent-movie actress. Kevin had met her a few times before, and he’d never thought of her as a particularly attractive woman. Today he found himself revising that impression. Maybe it was his mood, or perhaps it was that the houseboat was her home environment, but Kevin could barely keep himself from staring. She was big-boned and slightly overweight, but she had full, sensual lips, and as she moved around the deck setting out sandwiches and bottles of Heineken, he couldn’t help but notice the way her breasts filled out her white-cotton Oxford. The shirt had flecks of blue paint on it and she wore it untucked, with the sleeves rolled up to reveal strong, well-tanned forearms.
When Phil got up to use the head, she looked into Kevin’s eyes and smiled. “Is something wrong? You keep staring at me.”
“Nope,” he replied, taking a swig of beer to cover his embarrassment.
She gazed at him insolently, still smiling. The water lapped against the flat hull of the houseboat. After a moment there was a hydraulic flushing sound and Phil emerged. “Ready to go, Kev?”
“Sure,” Kevin replied. Ursula continued to hold his gaze as they both got up from their deck chairs. Phil leapt into the skiff and bent down to start the motor. Kevin was about to follow him when she gripped his arm.
“Nice to see you again, Kevin,” she said. Her gaze was intense and full of unspoken meaning. He felt his ears reddening.