Spartina Read online

  Dick stopped by Joxer Goode’s crab-processing plant to check the price. The wells on Parker’s boat were pretty big. The price for crab was about half that of lobster, but if they got to the right spot they might get twice as many. Dick asked if Joxer was there. Joxer had few enough boats going out for crab that he might just give a tip about where to set the pots. One thing Dick knew was even the nearest crabs were way out, on the edge of the continental shelf, took a day or more just to get out to the grounds.

  The secretary told him Joxer was out on his motorboat showing some friends around the salt ponds and then picnicking on Sawtooth Island.

  Dick went home and headed down the creek in his skiff. He took his quahog tongs. He didn’t want to seem to be looking too hard for Joxer. When he got into the pond past Sawtooth he saw Joxer’s boat pulled up on the tiny beach on the southwest of the island. Sleek little water-jet with padded seats, like the inside of a new car. Two couples standing on the beach. Joxer and his wife, both of them great big folks, played lots of sports. Tennis, waterskiing. Joxer had a little single shell. He’d been a single-sculler in college, Dick had seen the engraved cups in Joxer’s office, and a picture of Joxer with a lot of Japs on board a fishing vessel. But Joxer knew his stuff. Dick had heard how Joxer had gone into the water with his scuba gear to cut loose a propeller fouled with a stray piece of polypropylene. The boat had tied up at Joxer’s dock to unload crabs and got fouled as she was pulling away. Joxer had another boat standing by to unload and didn’t want to wait around. So in he jumped.

  Dick understood that. What he held against Joxer was his paying his crab workers piecework instead of an hourly wage. And then breezing through the plant jollying up the pickers, patting the women on the back. “That’s the ticket, ladies!” As though it was a little-league game and a lot of fun. And his Jap foreman who never talked but just reached over the picker’s shoulder and showed her how to do it faster.

  Joxer was out to make his million. Didn’t have time to come look at the boat Dick was building.

  Joxer’s wife. You couldn’t tell she’d had two kids. Striding around in a tennis outfit or a bikini with a beach robe that just came to the tops of her yard-long thighs. Dick saw her waterskiing around the salt ponds and out on the ocean on calm days. She and Joxer were good at things like that.

  The other couple were smaller versions of the Goodes. Same healthy good looks, but scaled down, and more willowy too—the pair of them.

  Dick began to work his tongs.

  The couples were in a huddle, pointing to parts of Sawtooth Island and back up to Sawtooth Point. Dick had heard there was some buying and selling going on. Dick wouldn’t mind having Joxer Goode as a neighbor, that would give Dick a bit of a claim on Joxer. Dick had always been a handy neighbor during snow, flood, power outage. But the only landowners left on Sawtooth Point were one old couple—every other house was now a summer rental—even the Wedding Cake, completed in 1911 by Dick’s great-uncle. Dick’s part of the family had never lived in it. When his great-uncle died, his son, who’d moved away, sold it, along with a narrow right-of-way from the Post Road. Dick’s grandfather got the rest of the point, Dick’s father sold off two house lots—the Buttricks’ and the Bigelows’. Then Dick’s father had sold off his house and the rest of the point, except for the acre Dick now owned, when he went to the hospital. He thought he’d leave Dick some money after his bills were paid. There was so little left, Dick had to use up his own savings from his Coast Guard tour to build his little house. Dick had tried to shut his mind to all the ifs. If his father had held on a little longer, the land prices would have doubled, tripled. If the old man had had health insurance. If the old man had deeded over some of the land to Dick. If, if, if. The old man had paid his debts. He probably held the record at South County Hospital for biggest bill ever paid by an uninsured patient. Dick had been away at sea, helicoptered off his cutter when his father died, was buried. Dick’s hitch was up eight months later and he was back in time for the final accounting after probate. He’d figured there might not be a lot, but he hadn’t been prepared for next-to-nothing. He’d thought of using the money—he’d hoped there would be ten thousand at the very worst—to send himself to the Merchant Marine Academy. He’d had a plan: by age forty he would be master of a ship. Here he was at age forty-plus in an eighteen-foot skiff. Here he was tonging quahogs. Here he was watching four beautiful people in swimsuits so small that all four of them wouldn’t make a single shirt.

  There was a small part of Dick that recognized that his dream of working his way up to master wouldn’t have been a piece of cake. He hadn’t done so good in the Coast Guard, and that was before he could blame his bad temper on his bad luck. Even his friend Eddie Wormsley told him he wasn’t good at taking advice, let alone taking orders. When Dick crewed on fishing boats, the various captains and shipmates had been glad to see the last of him. When he worked in the boatyard, even though the yard owner let him do his work his own way at his own pace, Dick drove boat owners up the wall. There was a pretty strong tradition at most New England boatyards of rich boat owners’ putting up with blunt talk from grumpy workmen. The New England bankers and lawyers who owned boats didn’t expect well-mannered servants—they even liked being roughed up a little by an old salt when they handled their boats badly, or came in to get a dumb mistake fixed. “Of course you broke your mast. There was whitecaps on the pond, and you tried to take her to Block Island.” Dick’s mistake was adding a little barb. Like “You’re a real piss-to-windward sailor.”

  The yard owner let him go, but still called him in for a job now and again. And when someone asked at the yard to have a beetlecat built of wood, he referred him to Dick.

  The beetlecat was a beauty. Cost four thousand dollars. Dick’s profit was less than a thousand, and the pay rate finally came to less than three dollars an hour, including driving around for the right wood and fittings. You could buy an okay used beetlecat for a quarter of that. A new plastic knockabout for only a little more.

  He built a couple of skiffs to sell, and then the one for himself. A smaller one for the boys. Thought he would just see if a man with a good skiff could make do. The answer was yes. Barely. But the yes gave him less and less satisfaction as the seasons went by. Then, three years ago, he started his big boat. He saw the plans in the National Fisherman and fell for her. That was the main part of it—he just fell in love. Later on he felt other motives, felt the jump this would give him. No one expecting it, he’d pop her into Great Salt Pond at high water and chug past the rest of the fleet to the town wharf. The harbormaster would ask him if the owner was a resident. “You can’t tie up here unless the owner’s a resident. You know that, Dick.” Dick wouldn’t answer. Just stroll back and look at the lettering across the stern, as though he was checking where the boat was from. Dick wasn’t sure of the name—maybe May, maybe Spartina—but underneath it would say “Galilee, R.I.” The harbormaster would come back and look. Dick would show the papers. “Owner: Richard D. Pierce.”

  The harbormaster would say “Jesus! Jesus, Dick.” The town-wharf crowd would see something was up then. They’d all come over, even Captain Texeira. They’d all say, “Jesus, Dick.” Maybe Captain Texeira wouldn’t say “Jesus,” but he’d damn well think it.

  “Where’d you get her?”

  “She’s not the one the yard’s been building …?”

  They’d figure it out. One of them would pretend to just be strolling the length of her along the dockside, but he’d be counting the paces. He wouldn’t be able to keep it to himself. “Fifty-four feet!”

  Dick might say something then. He might say, “Near enough.” The harbormaster would have seen it written down. He’d say “Fifty-four feet, eight inches.” He was always setting people straight.

  Dick had a couple of other scenes he couldn’t help playing in his imagination no matter how he tried not to. Miss Perry, Captain Texeira, and the harbormaster were recurring characters. So was Joxer Goode. Joxer Goode wi
th a sweet contract. “Dick, I need you and your boat. Here’s the deal.…”

  Joxer briefing the skippers of the red-crab fleet, pointing out likely spots near the edge of the continental shelf.

  “And by the way, men, the Spartina was this month’s bonus winner. Some of you sixty-footers better stay out longer.”

  Dick took a bite of the bottom with his tongs. He could feel the good crunch of sand. He was working in about eight feet of water, not far in from the gut. Farther back in the pond it was mud and black silt—with eel grass and wrack to get fouled in the tongs. Too much current near the gut for that stuff. Dick closed the tongs and flipped up the business end, using the padded gunwale as a fulcrum. He shook a bit of ooze and muddy sand loose from the basket. Bingo! Look what the Easter Bunny left. He pulled the tongs in and picked up the quahog. He used to say that to Charlie and Tom when they were little. So little they had to use both hands to pick up a good quahog. Look what the Easter Bunny left. Dick held the quahog in his hand, ran a fingertip over the fine grooves of the shell.

  He reached in with the tongs again. It was a good patch in here. Hard to get to except by boat. Didn’t get weekend quahoggers wading in with their forks, pulling their inner tubes on a string with bushel baskets riding in the doughnut hole.

  The effort of tonging calmed him. The mild southwest wind blew toward him from the scrub at the back of the barrier beach. Beach plums, bayberry, beach peas, poison ivy. He caught a whiff of beach-rose blossoms.

  He was bringing up a quahog or two with every try. Better than he’d expected. If he topped off a bushel he’d run them over to Mary Scanlon’s Green Hill restaurant, just west of the salt-marsh bird sanctuary. The tide was running in—he could get up the salt creek right to the restaurant porch. He’d come away with a few bucks for May. Sweeten up the fact that he was going out with Parker. Mary usually threw in a pie or a cake that hadn’t turned out just right—that would sweeten up May and the boys.

  It came through to Dick that Joxer Goode was calling to him. Dick looked up. Joxer waved both arms and yelled again, “Ahoy! Dick Pierce!”

  Dick finished sifting the basket, dropped another quahog on the pile, and waved back. Joxer beckoned to him. Dick saw that Joxer’s boat was pulled up pretty high on the beach. Dick yanked his anchor up, but didn’t crank the motor. He caught a little curl of the incoming tide that took him the first fifty feet, then he fitted his sculling oar and stroked across the current. Joxer waded in and caught the prow.

  “Hello there, Dick. Sorry to bother you, but you haven’t by any chance got a bottle opener on board?”

  Dick shook his head, not meaning so much “no” as “goddamn.”

  The smaller man put down a big movie camera that rode on his shoulder on a padded stock. He said, “We have all this cold beer, but it’s in nontwist bottles.”

  Joxer’s wife said hello and introduced Dick to the other two, Marie and Schuyler van der something. Dick saw a look on Marie’s face that was familiar to him. It was a little bit puzzled, a little bit vacant. Dick knew it from May. It meant “I’m not saying anything, but I’m not having as much fun as everyone else.”

  Dick said to Joxer, “You got a screwdriver—or a marlin spike?” Dick pulled his own rigging knife from his pocket and opened the spike. He took the bottle of Heineken Schuyler was holding and gave a little pry to several of the crimped furrows of the bottle cap with the tip of the spike. There was a satisfying hiss and a little foam leaked down the neck. Dick popped the cap off and handed the bottle back. Schuyler toasted him with the bottle and took a swig. Schuyler’s wife said, “Would you like one, Mr. Pierce?”

  Dick said, “No thanks.”

  Dick was having a little trouble with the bareness of the four bodies, particularly the two van der somethings. They looked barer than the Goodes. All four of them had early-summer pink-brown tans. Dick looked away and thought it might be the fact that both the van der somethings had perfect sets of tight blond ringlets.

  Joxer had the knack of prying open the beer now. “Would you like a sandwich, Dick?” Dick hesitated. Joxer’s wife handed him one and he couldn’t resist. It was fancy egg salad with bacon strips in it. He wished he’d taken a beer.

  Joxer said, “Come on ashore. I’m glad I ran into you—I’ve got a favor to ask.”

  Dick didn’t want to scrape the bottom of his skiff on the sand. He tossed the stern anchor out, rolled up his boots, and waded ashore with the bow anchor. The skiff rode in a foot of clear water. Joxer looked at the boat. “She really is a beauty.” He turned to the others. “She’s not typical—Dick puts a higher prow on his boats. And a little more sheer—is that right, Dick?”

  Dick nodded. He was uncomfortable, but pleased. Joxer said, “And all you need is that little twenty-horse there … and she flies along.”

  Joxer pried open another beer. “Dick’s family used to own Sawtooth Island, Schuyler. You and the Pierce family are going to be neighbors in a way. Dick lives up that creek.” Joxer pointed out the creek and then turned back to Dick. “Schuyler and Marie bought the Wedding Cake house last year. That used to be your grandfather’s—or was it your great-uncle’s?”

  Joxer handed Dick the beer he’d just opened and sat down on a flat rock. The others sat on their towels in the sand. Dick leaned back against a round boulder. Barbara Goode said, “I love your boots. Don’t you, Marie? I love the way all those folds gather under the knee. They go all the way up the thigh, don’t they, when they’re unrolled? How do they stay up?”

  Dick finished chewing a bite of sandwich.

  “They hook on to the belt.”

  “For when you have to go wading, is it?”

  “That, and when you’re working in a cockpit just got a wave dumped in her.”

  Dick wondered that Mrs. Goode didn’t know all this. Or maybe she was just trying to draw the other woman out. If the other woman was like May, Mrs. Goode was wasting her breath. And making a fool out of him in his boots. When it was the two ladies that were barely covered.

  Schuyler sang, “ ‘I am a pirate king! I am a pirate king! It is, it is a glorious thing to be a pirate king!’ ”

  Marie had pulled a spare towel over her shoulders like a shawl.

  Dick envied people who could just open up and sing. Parker would do that in bars every once in a while, just as if he was a guinea, knew some guinea songs too, he’d puff up his chest like a bird on a twig and let go. He’d do guinea opera songs, Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison.

  Joxer and Barbara Goode smiled at Schuyler’s singing. Dick recognized himself in Marie now—when Parker started singing, Dick slouched down in his chair.

  Dick finished his beer and stood up. Barbara Goode said, “Dick, before you go, we’ve got a couple of favors to ask. Joxer and Schuyler are doing a clambake here on the island and they need some help from someone. Could we get you to help? I mean, if we could buy the clams, and maybe some lobsters from you. And if you could show them how to dig the pit. And where to put the fire and the stones and the seaweed. Joxer thinks he knows, but I know you know. We’re going to have thirty people and I don’t dare let the two of them get it wrong.”

  Dick said, “I’m going out in a couple of days, I’m going to be fixing up a boat for a friend of mine.”

  Schuyler cocked his head. “You’re going out on the ocean in a fishing boat?”

  “Yup.”

  “I’m doing a little film—that’s what I do, is make films. You don’t suppose I could go along? Me and my camerawoman?”

  Dick was taken aback. “I don’t know. It’s for four, five days. It’s not like it’s … I suppose I could ask Parker.”

  Mrs. Goode said, “Well, let’s get the clambake settled first. Joxer, you and Dick have a little talk.”

  Joxer walked Dick over to Dick’s skiff. Joxer said, “This would be a big help. You can see how it is. Barbara’s getting worried, this is her shindig, along with Schuyler and Marie. Barbara wants them to get off on the right foot now that they’
re moving in. So let’s say five hundred dollars to cover the raw materials. You know the stuff—steamers, quahogs, potatoes, corn—I don’t suppose there’s any corn this early. Can you get thirty lobsters?”

  Dick didn’t know what to make of this. Even for thirty people, lobster, quahogs, steamers, and potatoes would come to less than two hundred dollars. Dick thought with regret of the barrel of steamer clams he’d just sold to the dealer. He didn’t dare go back to the bird sanctuary with the tractor, but he might send the boys back. Drop them off in their boat with a couple of baskets. But Dick couldn’t figure the five hundred. He said, “That’s a lot of money.”

  Joxer said, “Well, Barbara figures it’s a lot of work. And she’s right. What with digging the pit, gathering the driftwood, the seaweed. And I think she hopes you’d give me a hand ferrying people from the point to the island, so there’s the use of your boat.”

  Dick began to see. He couldn’t see it all, but he began to get the picture. A lot of the independent lobstermen he knew had made deals with families who had summer houses. They drained the pipes in the fall, fixed the screens in spring. It started that way. Then they’d get a call that the family wanted to spend Christmas at the beach house if they could have the water turned back on, the heat, maybe a load of firewood. And if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, get that Eddie what’s-his-name to plow the driveway. And if there was a nice pine tree that would do for a Christmas tree, if it wasn’t any trouble, just cut it and leave it on the porch. Half the lobstermen Dick knew got a nice Christmas check that way. And another nice check in the spring. He’d swore he’d never do it. But here it was. Five hundred bucks. Dick looked at the quahogs lying in his basket. He looked across the channel to the Wedding Cake. At least they weren’t asking him to drain the pipes.