The Summer Guest Page 4

  “Jordan, I’m here to catch a trout before I croak. Can you do it?”

  I shot a glance at Joe, who was gathering their bags, then at Kate, keeping January busy with the Humpty Dumpty, and I saw that they were thinking the same thing I was: none of this was anyone’s idea but Harry’s. Pure harebrained whimsy, no matter how you sliced it: Harry was in a lot of pain, and he belonged in a hospital or at least in bed, not floating around the lake with me and scaring the wits out of absolutely everybody.

  But then I thought: a last trout. Not out of the question, and of course that was what he’d want. More to the point, what difference did it make what Harry wanted, so long as he wanted something? It could have been a trip to Disney World or a glorious hour with a three-hundred-dollar hooker (though Harry never struck me as the type for either one), as long as it was something still ahead of him.

  “Hell yeah, Mr. Wainwright. We can do that for you.” I gave him my best you-betcha nod. “Why just the one?”

  Harry managed a crafty smile. “On a dry fly, Jordan.”

  Now, this was a taller order. I saw no chance that Harry could actually wade the river, his best chance to take a fish on top. As for the lake, the summer had been hot and practically rainless, and what trout there were had long since headed for the lake’s colder waters, resting above the thermocline like so much unexploded ordnance (or, come to think of it, one very old and barnacle-encrusted F-4 Phantom lying in the drink off Newport News). It was productive if dull fishing if you were willing to take your time and drift a nymph or pull a wooly bugger below the surface; but to take one on top, as Harry wanted to do, would take plenty of raw luck and a first-class presentation besides, to land the fly as light as a baby’s kiss right on the nose of some off-chance cruising lunker. All of which, not incidentally, Harry certainly knew.

  “On top?” I thought a gentle approach might nudge him around to the idea of a low-stakes outing on the lake with no hopes in particular. “I have to say we’d do better underneath. It’s not really the best time for dry fly.”

  Harry shook his head. “Time I haven’t got, Jordan. Hal’s given me just twenty-four hours for this.”

  Joe, who’d mostly kept silent until now, jingling the change in his pockets and shuffling his feet on the loose gravel of the parking area, slid me a look that said we’d talk later, that there was more to this than I knew.

  “I think what Jordan meant,” Joe said, “is that it’s entirely possible.”

  “Twenty-four hours, Jordan,” Harry said. “Then it’s back to the hospital, where they’ll hook me up to every machine they’ve got and shoot me full of so much morphine I won’t care that I’m dying.” Harry stopped, looking as if he were about to cough—a prospect I dreaded almost physically—pulled the mask back up to his face, and took a pair of long, whistling breaths. Frances moved to his other side, cupping his elbow and watching his face as he pulled the air in. I could tell it had been a long, hard haul for her. It’s easy to imagine the worst when a rich man like Harry marries a younger woman late in life, to see it as one more of the world’s cold-blooded calculations—in this case, some eleventh-hour deathbed care for a piece of Harry’s not inconsiderable drugstore pie. But to watch her watching Harry struggle with every breath to pull the sweet taste of oxygen over his ruined lungs was to know that she truly cared about him, loot or no, and had trucked to hell and back.

  “Harry? All right?” Frances looked deep into his face, and Harry gave a faint nod. We waited while, bit by bit, some color flowed back into his cheeks. The sun had dipped below the line of mountains across the lake, and suddenly it was full-on night in the North Woods, the temperature falling like a stone. A shiver uncoiled around my spine, and I wanted to get Harry inside.

  At last he drew the mask away, pulling with it a spaghetti strand of spittle. Frances produced a handkerchief to blot it away.

  “They mean well, Jordan, and I’ve got no problems with it. But it’s not how I’d do things.”

  I wasn’t sure if he meant the doctors, or Frances and Hal, or maybe all three. In any case, it was clear to me that he was hoping he’d die before he ever got home, and the thing he feared most was that this probably wouldn’t happen.

  “All right, then,” I said. “We’ll get the job done.”

  “Twenty-four hours,” Harry said, and began his long creep toward the dining hall, Hal and Frances each taking a side. Kate was still carrying January, who had fooled us all by falling asleep. “One fish, Jordan. My way. That’s the deal.”

  TWO

  Joe

  W hen Hal telephoned to tell me his father was dying, I couldn’t help myself. My first thought was: Thank God.

  It is possible to hate somebody you also love, as I both loved and hated Harry Wainwright, though it was a lesson I learned not from Harry but my father, the great war hero. He taught me this the day my mother died, when he asked me, a boy of nine, to be brave when I could not; and again three days after Halloween, 1968, when, a man at last or so I thought, I was made to give that manhood back to him and forever be a coward and a criminal.

  I asked Hal how long.

  “Months. It depends. He’s tough, you know?” Hal cleared his throat. “A tough nut. He’s got a deal to offer you, Joe. One I think you may like.”

  Which told me that I would also hate it. “Deals are what he’s best at.”

  “He wants you to fly up to New York. We’d like to send the plane for you. Excuse me one second?” The sudden, deep well of the hold button, long enough for me to wonder if he’d forgotten me. Then he returned. “Joe, I’m sorry, but there are some people here I have to see. Totally urgent stupid stuff, but there you are. Where did we leave this?”

  “I think you were . . . sending me a plane?”

  “Not showing off here, Joe. Just trying to move things along. You’ll like it, I think. Be sweet to the pilot and he may even let you sit up front and play with the wipers.” He cleared his throat. “And, because we’re friends, and in an effort to be less than totally vague, I will also tell you that you may want to have a lawyer handy.”

  “Isn’t Sally a lawyer?”

  Sally was Hal’s wife, a real legal sharpshooter from what I’d heard, though I mostly knew her as a pretty woman in a flannel shirt who usually sent her backcast looping into the trees behind her head. The last time I’d seen her, two summers before, the flannel shirt was a big one of Hal’s, hanging halfway to the backs of her knees but riding up in front over the big belly of her pregnancy.

  “Yes, but in this case Sally would be what you would call the other lawyer.”

  “So we all need lawyers, is what you’re saying. For whatever it is you have in mind.”

  Hal sighed. “This is Harry, Joe. He likes drama. I’d tell you more if I could. I’ve got a cousin just out of law school. Not too bright and his suits are bad, but he means well and he needs the work. I’ll put you in touch. Lucy fine?”

  “You know Lucy.”

  “Pleased to hear it. Our love, all right? And to Kate.”

  “You serve those little whatyacallums on that plane of yours? You know, in the foil packets?”

  I could practically hear him nod. “Honey peanuts.”

  “That’s it. Honey peanuts.”

  “There’s more than peanuts in this for you. I’ll say it again. Think about it, all right? But think fast. He’s dying, Joe. ‘Months’ is what they say when they mean dying as we sit here talking.”

  This was back in April, before Harry pulled his big surprise; Lucy and I were still in Big Pine Key, finishing out our third winter in the stolen sunshine. It was a good life shaping up down there for us—I had two boats working, a solid and growing list of clients, and a tan that would have made me nervous if I were one to worry about such things—all of it just profitable enough that it didn’t feel like a vacation. Our condo, which I had bought for a song at a sheriff’s auction, was, like everything else on Big Pine, made of materials as light and phony as a child’s art suppl
ies, but it did the job: two bedrooms, one of which I used as an office for bookings and paperwork, a little kitchenette, and a balcony off the living room with a view of the docks where I kept the boats, and beyond them, on the far side of the bay, the Key Highway, leapfrogging over the water to Marathon. We didn’t feel as if we belonged there, but we weren’t exactly homesick either, and evenings when we didn’t rent a movie or hover by the phone waiting to hear from Kate (who had survived twelve years of, let’s be honest, completely so-so public education courtesy of the Greater Sagonick Community School District to hit the dean’s list at Bowdoin six semesters running and had MCAT scores through the high heavens), Lucy and I would sit for hours on the balcony, drinking something and maybe talking a bit, but mostly watching the headlights soar like distant angels over the water and feeling amazed that such a place existed.

  That night, I sat with Lucy and told her about Hal’s call. She cried at the news, as I knew she would, though she also did not want me to watch her: she averted her face and wept without making a sound, and when she turned again to face me I knew the crying was over.

  “You should go,” she said to me.

  “To New York?”

  She sighed and wiped her eyes with the tips of her fingers. “He wants to see you, Joe. Or Hal does. Honestly, what harm could it do now?”

  “That’s what I’m wondering. Hal said I would need a lawyer, for starters.”

  “That sounds like Hal, not Harry. He won’t even let his father go to the head without running it through legal.”

  “Even so. It’s a reason to be cautious, don’t you think?”

  On the causeway, headlights floated dreamily past; looking the other way, out toward the channel and the open sea, I could make out the twinkling bulk of a cruise ship, its boiler stacks strung with lights, pushing south from Miami like a floating Christmas tree turned sideways. This close in, she was probably headed for Key West, where the fun, I was told, never stopped.

  “Luce—”

  She stopped me with a hand. “Joe,” she said. “Joe. It was all a long time ago. Go see what’s on his mind.”

  As we both knew I would, which is how things are when you’ve been married twenty years and spent most of this time as isolated as a couple of bears in the Yukon: a lot of what passes for discussion is really just taking in the scenery, and a recap of something you both already know. Hal’s cousin called the next morning, right on schedule, but I told him I was tied up and would call him back, having no intention whatsoever of actually doing so. I like lawyers fine—despite the jokes, most are just people with a job—but whatever Hal had to offer, he would have to offer me alone. I had one boat on the water for the day; Tyrell, my sole employee, had taken out the smaller of the two with a group sent over from the big resort on Hawk’s Cay. But the second, the Mako, which I used for deep sea, was in for engine maintenance, so I spent the afternoon doing various odds and ends to prep it for a weekend party and keeping an eye peeled for Tyrell’s return. My deal with Tyrell was a sweet one; unless somebody asked for me in particular, all the flats-guiding was his to do, with the two of us splitting the take, plus the tip, which he got to pocket free and clear. On any given day I’d have him out on the water for at least four hours, making money for both of us and generally scaring the whiskers off our white-bread clientele with his dreadlocks, Jamaican accent, and twelve-o’clock doobie (he thought I didn’t know about this; of course I did), though by Miller time everybody would be happy as a band of Smurfs, full of stories about the huge fish they had caught or not, and a permanent appreciation for Tyrell’s mystical ability to tell them where to drop a cast. No doubt most attributed this to some kind of island wisdom, or else the dope, but I knew better. Tyrell was actually from Corpus Christi and had a master’s degree in marine bio from Texas A&M. The accent was pure theater, something he had picked up in the Peace Corps.

  By two o’clock he hadn’t returned, a good omen, since his party had signed on for only half a day but now had obviously sprung for the full ride, so I decided to kill the rest of the afternoon by driving up to have a look at a boat I was hoping to buy. I say “hoping” because there was no way on God’s green earth anybody was going to loan me the scratch for it, and with Kate planning on medical school—she had her heart set on either UCLA or Dartmouth Hitchcock—I saw nothing but the worst kind of cash squeeze in my future. But this boat! A 1962 38-foot Chris-Craft Constellation with twin MerCruiser Blue Water 350s, totally restored with glossy teak from bowsprit to transom, more varnished wood in the wheelhouse than in all the pubs in Dublin, all of it completely top-shelf right down to the bait wells with custom circulating pumps and enough electronics on the helm to command the U.S. Seventh Fleet: in all my life, I had never seen a boat like this. It wasn’t the best rig for deep sea, or fishing of any kind, as I would spend half my time mopping up the blood and reminding people to use the goddamn coasters. But we want what we want, and I wanted this boat, never mind the price tag, an eye-popping $220,000, about the same as four years of medical school in sunny California or snowy New Hampshire, take your pick. She was docked in Marathon, and the only reason she hadn’t sold was that the owner, a former “labor official” from Providence, was now out of the country “indefinitely” and had left the sale to the yard where she was kept. This was a fox-henhouse proposition if ever there was one, as the slip fees and maintenance on a boat like that easily brought in three times the money they would see from a brokerage commission, so the thing had sat through two winters with nary an offer I knew of.

  I parked the truck in the yard lot, ducked into the office to fetch the key, and walked down to the slip where she was waiting, in all her forgotten glory. I had met the owner, Frank DeMizio, once before, when I’d first gone to the yard to take a peek—a tough-looking, squarish little man with a face like a piecrust and enough hair on his back to throw a shadow. He was wearing nothing but a Red Sox cap and a pair of aquamarine bikini briefs, and when I introduced myself and told him I was there to see the boat, he didn’t offer me his hand to shake but simply grunted and went back to wiping down the bait boxes with a shammy cloth.

  “Felicity,” I said, reading the name off the transom.

  “Means ‘pussy’ in Latin,” he said.

  “I think it means ‘happiness,’ ” I said.

  He shrugged his big shoulders and wrung his cloth into a bucket. “Same thing, innit?” He rose then and had a hard look at me where I stood on the dock. “You cocksuckers never give up, do you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Fucking IRS. Nothing satisfies you, you parasites.”

  “I’m not from the IRS. Ask Carl.” Carl was the yard owner; he knew my business, who I was.

  “That lying rat fuck?” He crossed his beefy arms over his chest. “He’s twice as dirty as I ever was. You tell Agent Tortorella to check his books, he wants a good laugh.”

  I fished through my wallet for a business card, which I held out to him over the gunwale. “Listen, I’m really not from the IRS. I run a charter service out of Big Pine.”

  He rolled his eyes, but then took the card and looked at it. “Joe Crosby.” He frowned and lifted his eyes to me. “That you?”

  “That’s right. I just told you.”

  His face softened. “Well, fuck it. So you did.” He sat down heavily on the bait box and shook his head regretfully. “Sorry about that. You gotta believe me, these guys have been all over my ass. I can’t take a dump without some fed reaching out of the bowl to grab the paper from my hand.”

  “Forget it,” I said. “If you don’t want me to look at the boat today, I can just come back another time.”

  “No, the hell with it.” He waved me up like we were the best of friends. “Who knows if there’ll be a next time, the way this is playing out. Might as well come on board and have a look around.”

  He gave me the full tour, even started up the engines and took us for a quick spin out to Key Vaca, and by the time we returned, he seemed to have f
orgotten all about his troubles. We sat on the aft deck and shot the breeze over a couple of cans of Coors; he told me how he had found the boat nine years ago in western Connecticut, falling apart in somebody’s barn, and had put it back together piece by piece, hoping someday to retire someplace warm and spend the rest of his life puttering around on it. His marriage was long over, his kids were grown and gone. Except for a crappy little townhouse in Providence and a ten-year-old Cadillac, the boat was what he had. He’d gotten as far as bringing her all the way down from Newport, piloting it himself right down the East River and under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. But then he had come into his office one day to find the place crawling with police, not just local cops but IRS and FBI, his file cabinets and desk and computer all sealed with yellow tape and making their way on handcarts to a step van parked in the alley.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Frank said, lighting up another of the long brown cigarettes he had smoked all afternoon. “You think those cocksucking Kennedys were ever put under investigation? They never did anything I ain’t done.”

  “Can’t say I know much about it, Frank. I’ve heard that, though.”

  “Well, they sure as hell weren’t.” He shook his head and smoked. “Irish trash from Southie. They’re no better than me, and look at the fix I’m in.” He fell silent for a minute, then flicked his cigarette over the transom. “So, you innerested?”

  So much time had passed I had almost forgotten the boat was for sale. I felt a little stab of shame that I didn’t have the money, or anything close to it. All I was doing was window-shopping.

  “Two-twenty’s a pretty big nut, Frank. For a guy like me, anyway. She’s a beautiful boat, though.”

  “Beautiful doesn’t begin it,” he corrected. “Beautiful is something you say to a broad. You’re beautiful, sweetie, yes you are.” With a bearlike hand he patted the gunwale. “This, my fucking friend, is a work of fucking art.”