Part 35 (2/2)

”Tough, too. I heard you was tough.”

”I talk a good game,” I said finally.

”These days, you know, you never can be too sure.”

”Uh-huh.”

”County ambulance just went by actin' real serious,” he said. ”You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?”

”Man named O'Brian just got himself killed out on the bay,” I said.

His eyes got startled for a moment and then he looked down into his beer gla.s.s. ”That so” was all he said. He pulled on his ear, then took a folded-up paper napkin out of his pocket and handed it to me.

”Dab your lips,” he said. ”I gotta get back to work.”

He went outside and I unfolded the napkin. The message was written hurriedly in ballpoint that had torn through the napkin in a couple of places and left several inkblots at the end of words. It said: ”Uncle Jolly's Fillup, route 14 south about 18 miles. Tonight, 9 p.m. Come alone.”

No signature. Skeeler came back with another crate of soft drinks.

”You know a place called Jolly's Fillup, route 14 south of town?”

”Sounds like a filling station, don't it?” he said.

”Now that you mention it.”

”You'll know it when you get there,” he said, and went back outside. I finished my beer and followed him.

”Thanks for the beer. Maybe I'll come back and try the shrimp,” I said as I got into the car.

”You do that, hear?” he said. ”Be sure to introduce yourself again. I'm bad on names.” And he vanished back inside.

41.

RELICS.

I started back toward Dunetown but when I got to the boulevard I went east instead of going back toward town. I really didn't have anything to do after I left Skeeler's, but I had to put some distance between me and Dunetown. I needed a little time to myself, away from Stick, Dutch, and the hooligans. Away from Doe. Away from them all. I was tired of trying to make some sense out of a lot of disparate jigsaw pieces, pieces like Harry Raines, Chief, and Stoney t.i.tan. Like Donleavy and his sweaty banking friend, Seaborn. Like Chevos and Nance, a bad-luck horse named Disaway, and a black gangster I didn't even know whom everybody called Nose, but not to his face. I suddenly had the feeling that using people had become a way of life for me and I didn't like the feeling and I needed some room to deal with that. I needed to get back to my safe places again, at least for a little while.

When I got to the Strip I headed south, putting the tall hotels that plundered the beach behind me. I drove south with the ocean to my left, not sure where I was going. I just smelled the sea air and kept driving. Finally I pa.s.sed a decrepit old sign peering out from behind the weeds that told me I had reached someplace called East Beach. It was desolate. Progress had yet to discover it.

I parked my car in a deserted public lot. Weeds grew up through the cracks in the macadam, and small dunes of sand had been collected by the wind along its curbs. I sat looking out at the Atlantic for a while. The sea here was calm, a mere ripple in the bright sunlight, and the beach was broad and clean. It revived memories long buried, the good times of youth that age often taints with melancholy.

My mind was far from Dunetown. It was at a place called Beach Haven, a village on the Jersey coast where I had spent several summers living on a houseboat with the family of my best friend in grammar school. I couldn't remember his name but I did remember that his father was Norwegian and spoke with a marvelous accent and wore very thick gla.s.ses and that the family was not in the least modest and that he had a sister of high school age who thought nothing at all of taking a shower in front of us. Sitting there in the hot sedan with sweat dripping off my chin, I also recalled that I had spent a good part of that summer trying to hide a persistent erection.

After a while I got out and took off shoes, socks, jacket, and tie and put them in the trunk. I slammed it shut, then opened it again, dropped my beeper in with them, and went down to the beach.

I rolled my pants legs to the knee and walked barefoot with the sand squeaking underfoot. I must have walked at least a mile when I came upon a small settlement of summer cottages, protected by walls of granite rock that were meant to hold back the ocean. It had been a futile gesture. The houses were deserted. Several had already broken apart and lay lopsided and forlorn, awash with the debris of tides.

One of them, a small two-bedroom house of cypress and oak, was still perched tentatively over the rocks, its porch supported by six-by-sixes poised on the granite boulders. A faded sign, hanging crookedly from the porch rail, told me the place was for sale, and under that someone had added, with paint, the words ”or rent.” There was a phone number.

I went up over the big gray rocks, climbed the deck railing, and looked through the place, a forlorn and lonely house. The floor creaked and sagged uncertainly under each step and the wind, sighing through its broken windows, sounded like the ghost of a child's summer laughter.

I stripped down to my undershorts, went down to the deserted beach, and ran into the water, swimming hard and fast against the tide until arms and legs told me to turn back. I had to brea-ststroke the last few yards and when I got out I was breathing heavily and my lungs hurt, but I felt clean and my skin tingled from the salt.w.a.ter. I went back up to the house and stretched out on the deck in the sun.

I was dozing when the woman came around the corner of the house. She startled us both and as I scrambled for my pants she laughed and said, ”Don't bother. Most of the gigolos hanging around the hotel pools wear far less than that.”

She was an islander, I could tell; a lovely woman, delicate in structure, with sculptured features textured by wind and sun, tiny white squint-lines around her eyes, and amber hair coiffured by the wind. I couldn't guess how old she was; it didn't matter. She was carrying a seine net-two five-foot wooden poles with the net attached to each and topped by cork floats. The net was folded neatly around the poles.

”I was halfway expecting my friend. He sometimes waits up here for me,” she said, peering inside without making a show of it. Then she added, ”Are you flopping here?”

I laughed.

”No, but it's a thought.”

She looked around the place.

”This was a very dear house once,” she said. She said it openly and without disguising her sadness.

”Do you know the owners?” I asked.

”It once belonged to the jackowitz family, but the bank has it now. ”

Her sad commentary told me all I needed to know of its history.

”What a shame. There's still some life left to it.”

”Yes, but no heart,” she said.

”Banks are like that. They have a blind appet.i.te and no soul. They're the robots of our society.”

”Well, I see my friend down on the beach. I'm glad you like the house.”

A skinny young man in cutoffs with long blond hair that flirted with his shoulders was coming up the beach carrying a bucket. She went down over the boulders to the sand.

”Hey?” I said.

She turned and raised her eyebrows.

”Is your name Jackowitz?”

”It used to be,” she said, and went on to join her friend.

I got dressed and walked back through the surf to the parking lot. I found a phone booth that still worked and called the number that was on the sign at the house. It turned out to be the Island Trust and Savings Bank. I managed, by being annoyingly persistent, to get hold of a disagreeable little moron named Ratcher who, I was told, was ”in beach property.”

”I'm interested in a piece of land on East Beach,” I said. ”It might have belonged to a family called Jackowitz.”

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