Amagansett

Nineteen

The beach near Fresh Pond was deserted. Conrad hauled the sharpie to the water’s edge and lashed the sail-bag to the foredeck. Drawing the stumpy little craft out into deeper water, he clambered awkwardly aboard and began to paddle.
The tide was on the ebb, the wind stiffening from the southwest as it always did at this time on summer afternoons, catspawing across Gardiner’s Bay, its invisible hand slapping the surface at intervals.
Today, it carried with it the playful shouts of children leaping from the end of the long jetty at the Devon Yacht Club, hurling themselves off the wooden rail, skinny brown limbs scything the air before impact. He could just make out the dim tock-tock of a tennis ball being struck on an unseen court behind the low clubhouse.
The Junior Yacht Club was out on the water, a flotilla of boxy little Knockabouts running dead before the wind. A motor launch was in attendance, an instructor barking orders through a loudhailer. As the dinghies came about, Conrad ranged alongside the cat-boat.
The Demeter had been his first purchase on his return from Europe—a twenty-five-foot Gil Smith from the turn of the century, a masterpiece of design, and a dream come true. The elegance of its sheer lines aside, the shallow, wide hull, almost eleven feet in beam, provided the perfect working platform for a bayman. It was the first boat Conrad had ever crewed on, working the culling board with Antton, plucking out scallops from the eelgrass and the crabs and the culch dredged from the sea bed. Conrad had never concealed his interest in the craft, and when old Josaiah Fullard died in 1943 the Demeter had languished at her moorings in Accabonac Creek, awaiting Conrad’s return from Europe. Even when the news arrived that he’d been killed in action, Josaiah’s sons had held out a little longer, just in case.
Now the Demeter was his, more beautiful than ever—new running rig, new sail, new yellow pine hull. He always felt good when seated at the helm, teasing the great barn-door rudder, beating before the wind, the canvas snapping like a rifle-shot each time he tacked. Even now she seemed to understand him, responding with ease, compensating for his distraction.
With any luck, the last few pieces of the puzzle were waiting for him in Montauk; he’d have them by the end of the day.
Before he knew it, the buoy at the mouth of Napeague Harbor was bearing down on them. He thought about entering the channel and making for Lazy Point, but decided against it. He didn’t want to see Sam right now. It would only mean turning down his offer of assistance for a second time. Once had been hard enough. He was already regretting having shared the truth with him. The last thing he wanted was for Sam to get caught up in an affair that could only end badly.
He leaned on the tiller and came about on the port tack. That’s when he saw it, lying in the bilges—Lillian’s jadeite hair clip, a gift from her brother. She had mentioned to him that she’d misplaced it, and they had searched his bedroom and they had searched her bedroom, and then he had remembered that she’d been wearing it the last time they took the Demeter out, and they had laughed, remembering that night, then all the other nights they’d taken the Demeter out, right back to that very first night.
She had phoned as he was halfway to the truck, and although they hadn’t seen each other for a week, not since the evening of her birthday, he sensed it was her and he hurried back to the house.
‘Hello.’
‘It’s me,’ she said.
‘Hi.’
‘Hi.’
‘How was your surprise party?’
‘Oh, you know…’ said Lillian. ‘What are you up to?’
‘I was about to go firelighting for fluke.’
‘Firelighting for fluke?’
He explained.
‘Sounds to me like you could do with some help,’ she said.
He picked her up at her house and they drove to Promised Land. It was a warm night, with the lightest of breezes, perfect for the task in hand. Safely aboard, the gear loaded, he edged the Demeter away from the dock and out into Gardiner’s Bay, the five hundred square feet of canvas sucking up what little wind there was. Nearing Cartwright Shoals, he rigged the lantern from the stern of the boat and lit it.
‘Wow,’ said Lillian, peering over the side.
Beneath the glassy surface, the sea bed was laid bare.
‘Those are wild oysters,’ said Conrad, pointing. ‘They’re pretty much gone now.’
‘Why?’
‘Who knows? That’s a horseshoe crab.’
‘Where?’
‘There. And that’s a fluke, over there by the eelgrass, the flatfish.’
‘With the spots?’
‘With the spots.’
Taking up the spear, he slid the barbed head beneath the water and stuck the fluke. He tossed it to the far end of the cockpit, where it flapped wildly in the bilges.
‘A third of that’s yours,’ said Conrad.
‘Only a third?’
‘The boat gets a share.’
‘If I’d known, I wouldn’t have come.’
‘Okay, I’ll go fifty-fifty, but you’ll have to earn it,’ he said, handing over the spear.
They talked while they fished, drifting across the shoals. Conrad explained that he’d learned the technique from Billy, who had learned it from Sam, who in turn had learned it from his father—a family tradition reaching back to well before the arrival of the first white faces on the South Fork.
‘Billy’s an Indian?’
‘He’s dead. But yes, a Montaukett.’
‘I didn’t know…I mean…’
‘There aren’t many of them left,’ said Conrad.
He told her how, within living memory, the Montauketts had been lured off their tribal lands with promises of payments which had never materialized; how they had been chased away at gunpoint, shot at, killed in some cases, by the same men who had assured them they could return to fish and hunt on Montauk whenever they wished; and how the Suffolk County Court had then dismissed their suit against these blatant injustices on the grounds that the tribe had ceased to exist, that it was now extinct.
He told her how Sam had been present in the courtroom when Judge Abel Blackmar handed down his ludicrous verdict, declaring that he saw ‘no Indians there’, apparently blind to the fifty or so Montauketts cramming the public gallery that day, clad in full tribal regalia.
He described how he had stood with Sam and Billy on Signal Hill in Montauk one blustery summer’s day in 1926. The community was in the firm grip of construction fever, with hundreds of workers bulldozing, blasting and building away, racing to bring to life Carl Fisher’s dream of turning Montauk into ‘the Miami Beach of the North’. The centerpiece of his vision was Montauk Manor, an enormous mock-Tudor hotel perched high on the hill above Fort Pond. The location offered unrivaled views to the west, and it was no coincidence that the site was already occupied by an ancient Indian burial ground. The Montauketts always buried their dead on high ground, in a seated position, facing west—the direction of their journey into the afterlife.
Fisher had given his word that the burial ground wouldn’t be disturbed by the construction work. But that brisk summer’s day, with the clouds whipping by overhead and the rush of the wind drowning out the sound of the earthmovers, it became clear that Sam’s advice, and that of the other Montauketts who knew the precise compass of the sacred site, had been ignored.
There were scraps of rough-woven cloth, dank and dirty, in the mounds of earth. And there were bones.
‘That’s terrible,’ said Lillian.
Conrad shrugged. ‘Maybe not.’ He explained how two months later, a hurricane had ripped through Miami Beach, devastating Carl Fisher’s greatest creation; how later that year the headquarters of Fisher’s Montauk Beach Development Company had burned to the ground, blueprints and all; and how the stock market crash in 1929 had then killed off Fisher’s Montauk dream for good.
‘He died poor and unhappy,’ said Conrad. ‘But Sam still said a prayer for his soul when he heard.’
They were heading back to the dock now, the Demeter gliding across the surface.
‘You think there’s a connection?’ asked Lillian.
‘I don’t know. I like to think so. If Fisher hadn’t desecrated the ground, if he’d pulled it off, everything out here would have changed for the worse.’
‘Yes,’ said Lillian, smiling, ‘it’s a pleasing irony.’
Back at the dock, they unloaded the fluke into crates then he ran her back to her house on Further Lane.
‘When do I get my cut?’ she asked as they pulled up.
‘Couple of days, week at the most. I’ll ship them down to Fulton tomorrow.’
‘You know,’ she said, ‘it’ll be the first money I’ve ever earned.’ She glanced across at him. ‘I’m not proud of it.’
‘No, I can see.’
‘But I do think it calls for a celebration.’
They took their drinks to the end of the garden and they sat on the bluff overlooking the ocean.
‘This is my favorite spot in the world,’ she said.
They never finished the drinks.
A little while later, she placed her hand on his, the charge of her touch shorting out all other thoughts, smiling at him with a mixture of tenderness and certainty that left no room for doubt or maneuver. Not that he was considering either. He leaned across to meet her lips, and she drew him down on to the ground.
Later, when it was over and they were lying entwined in the grass, she pressed her face to his neck and inhaled.
‘You have a very particular smell.’
‘It goes with the job.’
‘I like it,’ she said. ‘Eau de fish.’
Conrad laughed.
Lillian’s fingers sought out the long ridge of scar tissue in his side, tracing its smooth contours.
Maybe she felt him tense under her touch, or maybe she just knew him well enough already, but she didn’t give voice to her curiosity.
The Montauk fishing fleet was back in, and Fort Pond Bay was a hive of activity. Sloops and draggers were making for the docks where others were already packing out, unloading their catches, separating, boxing and icing the fish, hammering the tags of their favored dealers to the sides of the cedar crates.
Conrad ranged alongside Duryea’s Dock and made fast. He checked that the Demeter was good there till the morning, pushed his way through the crowd and set off along the great scythe of beach.
Waves lapped at the pebbly sand. Out on the water two boys were floundering away in a little craft cobbled together from fish boxes and corrugated iron. The caulking at the seams had failed and they were shipping water fast, bailing furiously with their hands. As the gunwales dipped below the waves, they saluted, going down with their stricken vessel. Their shrieks of laughter carried clear across the water as they kicked for the shore.
Just back from the beach some young kids were playing baseball on the same sandy lot where Conrad had once swung a bat with their fathers. The crude baseball diamond hadn’t changed, but Trail’s End restaurant and the Post Office which had once sandwiched the lot were gone, moved away on skids at the outbreak of the war.
The Navy had decided that the broad, clean sweep of Fort Pond Bay offered the perfect location for a torpedo-testing range, and had duly slapped a compulsory relocation order on every family in the fishing village. Some had rolled their houses down to vacant lots on Edgemere Road and Flamingo Avenue. Others had simply abandoned them, taking the $300 compensation on offer and buying or building anew.
The Navy succeeded where the hurricane of ‘38 had failed, delivering a blow from which the fishing village looked unlikely ever to recover. What buildings remained trailed around the shore like a broken line of walking wounded returning from battle, and only a handful of people had returned to the homes they’d been forced to leave.
Hendrik Morgan was one of them.
He was sitting out front of the two-room shack his father had first built, knitting a funnel for a lobster pot. More pots were stacked around him. Straggly shrubs demarcated the small patch of shingle that was the front garden, and a weather-beaten vine clung precariously to the side of the building. These few plaintive stabs at adornment were undermined by the rancid stench of bait fish setting in a barrel nearby.
‘Goddag.’
Hendrik looked up and smiled. ‘Hej.’
‘How’s it going, Hendrik?’
‘Good,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘Good.’
He took Conrad’s hand warmly, clamping his other hand on top. He stood at least as tall, his lank blond hair flopping in front of his blue eyes.
‘You got time for a cold one?’ asked Hendrik.
‘Sure.’
Hendrik headed inside, returning a few moments later with another chair and a couple of bottles of beer. He popped the tops and they settled down in the sunshine, looking out over the
bay.
‘How’s the lobstering?’ asked Conrad.
‘Easier now I got me a new boat.’
‘Yeah?’
‘The Alice T, a thirty-foot western-rig out of Stonington. Got a fair few miles on her keel, and trims a little heavy by the stern when loaded, but she’s a real beauty.’
‘How many pots you fishing?’
‘Hundred and fifty, more on the way.’ He nodded at the oak laths and other lobster-pot stock piled up nearby. ‘Two hundred and fifty should do it.’
‘And some.’
‘Yeah, first year back’s been good to me.’
‘You deserve it.’
Hendrik smiled. ‘Wish it worked like that, but we both know it don’t.’
Hendrik’s family had been plagued by a run of mud-luck for well over a decade. The Depression had been tough on everyone, but it had coincided with a sharp drop-off in the lobsters, obliging Hendrik and his father to abandon their operation for other work, chopping wood for the WPA and filling ruts for the Highway Department—anything to scrape together a few precious dollars a day. This was how Conrad and Hendrik had first got to meet, odd-jobbing in East Hampton one winter, thrown together in the gardens of city people, spreading manure on the flower borders, the heat rising up through their boots. Left to his own devices, Hendrik would take every opportunity to snoop around the summer homes. He claimed he never touched anything, though how he came across the selection of riding crops tucked beneath the bed of a well-known movie actress remained to be answered; and there was always a faint but distinct whiff of mothballs about him whenever he returned from his prowls.
From shoveling shit in East Hampton they had moved to the woods north of Amagansett where they felled oaks for a couple of months, reducing the trees to cords of wood. Then it was on to Promised Land where they tarred the roof joins on the fish-factory buildings at Smith Meal, daubing obscene doodles—only visible from the air, they calculated—to relieve the monotony. When the shimmering pods of menhaden reappeared in late spring, they descended from their lofty perch and lugged hundredweight sacks of fish meal, still blisteringly hot from the driers, out to the box cars on the railroad siding. The only white men in the human chain of seasonal southern workers, they soon picked up the songs and learned to take the ribbing in good humor.
They grew tight, sharing stories as they toiled. Hendrik’s father was a tough little Welshman who had ended up in Montauk by way of Nova Scotia. It was here that he met his bride, Hulda, a towering Swedish blonde who waitressed at Parson’s Inn. It was a typical tale of Montauk folk: two people from different corners of the world, thrown together at this windblown outpost. There were Norwegians and Finns, Spaniards, Danes, Dutch and Portuguese. Many of the Italians had worked on the Long Island Rail Road, laying the final miles of track out to Montauk, only to marry and settle down. There were workmen left over from Carl Fisher’s doomed enterprise to develop Montauk, and there were Navy men left over from both wars. Then there were the Irish of course, not for any particular reason, just because they seemed to turn up pretty much everywhere.
Many in East Hampton and Amagansett looked down on the tatty little community of transients, apparently forgetting that their own villages had started life in exactly the same way. It was natural that Conrad and his family take Montauk to their hearts. After all, their story was no different—first-generation immigrants lured to the eastern end of Long Island by a twist of fate. In their case, they owed it all to the intervention of a loose paving stone. If one of the men who made the weekly booze run out to Montauk hadn’t turned his ankle, then Conrad’s father wouldn’t have had to stand in for him, and he would never have set eyes on Amagansett.
Two years into Prohibition, his father and Eusebio had secured a lucrative little slice of the trade in illegal liquor, running the stuff into the city from the tip of Long Island, where the foreign schooners moored just beyond the twelve-mile limit, the booze hustled ashore by a fleet of local boats. On the night in question, Conrad’s father had found himself on the ocean beach at Amagansett, hefting cases of Golden Wedding whiskey into the back of a truck.
The way he told it, he experienced an epiphany of near-religious intensity. As he took in the unbroken strip of moonlit sand backed by dunes, he found himself transported back to his Euzkadi, to the beaches north of Biarritz which he’d fished since childhood. The same ocean, the same waves breaking against an identical stretch of coastline. And he made a vow to himself: if he couldn’t go back to the old country, he would at least return to the old ways. As soon as he had saved up enough money, he would move with his boys to Amagansett and take up fishing once more.
That moment arrived, quite unexpectedly, a few weeks later. While pushing their way along a crowded downtown sidewalk one night, Eusebio yelped then spun around, searching the faces in the throng. He grabbed their father’s arm and urged him to hurry along. Within a block, Eusebio was leaning on him for support, steering him into an alleyway. That’s when their father saw the bib of blood soaking the back of Eusebio’s pants.
It was a warning, a single thrust of a stiletto blade into the back of the thigh; but the assailant had messed up, striking an artery. Eusebio felt the life slowly draining out of him and he began to talk. He admitted that he hadn’t been entirely honest in his dealings with their father, excluding him from certain profits, certain transactions, one of which had just backfired on him. He told their father to disappear, and quickly; it was just a matter of time before the people in question came knocking on his door. He barely managed to reveal the whereabouts of his ill-gotten gains before drifting into unconsciousness. Death followed moments later. Their father left Eusebio where he had fallen, curled on the cobbles. He would have taken his friend’s black Borsalino hat with him, but Eusebio had always joked that he never took it off for fear his Maker wouldn’t recognize him when his time came.
Conrad had a dim recollection of being hauled from his bed in the dead of night, of their father thrusting a thick roll of bills into the hands of a tearful Irena, of being bundled into a car. They woke the next morning to find themselves in a field on the outskirts of Hempstead. By late afternoon they had moved into their rooms on the third floor of Sea View House, the only hotel in Amagansett at that time.
The money from Eusebio was enough to buy a house, a boat and some gear; and their father’s first act on taking possession of the two-story lean-to on Miankoma Lane was to carve his name into the lintel above the front door, according to the Basque tradition.
Their sudden appearance on the scene, to say nothing of their father’s deep pockets, piqued the interest of the community. But suspicion soon gave way to wary acceptance, largely thanks to the intervention of Cap’n Josh. When word trickled through to the old man that the newcomer was a Basque, Conrad’s father was summoned to the Kemps’ large house on Bluff Road. Cap’n Josh’s mother was still alive at the time, though you wouldn’t have known it to look at her, and four generations of the family were living under one roof, the oldest and youngest both in diapers.
The two men retired to the study where they traded stories for most of the evening over a bottle of King George rum. When they finally emerged, Cap’n Josh announced to his sons that the Labarde family was to be welcomed into the fold. He had worked alongside Basques on the whaleships and knew them to be one of the oldest seafaring peoples, God-fearing and hard-working, proud and reserved, their ancient homeland divided by a border not of their choosing.
All this was more than enough to recommend them to Cap’n Josh. However, he did suggest that their father spend that first winter cod fishing with the Kemps. It would give him a chance to learn the ways of the local surfmen.
Antton and Conrad were placed under strict orders to tell no one about the source of their wealth, even when it became clear that many in Amagansett were lining their pockets with booze money. It was an oath Conrad had broken on only two occasions—once with Lillian, the other time with Hendrik.
‘Was that the Demeter I saw out there?’ asked Hendrik, nodding towards the bay.
‘Yeah.’
‘You’ll be wanting a bed for the night, then.’
‘The floor will do.’
‘I got a mess o’ clams and a bluefish needs eating. I’d boil up a lobster, only I’m sick to the hind teeth of the damned things.’
Hendrik cooked up the clam chowder on the kerosene stove, and they ate it off their knees, watching the sun slip behind the bluffs on the western shore of the bay.
‘Heard you had a run-in with Charlie Walsh,’ said Hendrik.
‘Yeah?’
‘Don’t want to talk about it?’
Conrad shrugged. ‘Just bad history going back a ways.’
‘That’s good of you to say. But I heard what he done with them earrings off of that girl you found. He’s rotten like a pumpkin hit by a frost then melted in a harvest sun.’
Conrad smiled.
‘I knew the girl, you know,’ continued Hendrik, reaching for his beer. ‘From the yacht club, when I was working bar last summer.’
On returning from the war, Hendrik had taken a job at the Devon Yacht Club that first season to raise some cash to replace his neglected lobster pots. It was very likely he had met Lillian during his stint at Devon.
In fact, Conrad had been banking on it.
‘Fine-looking and funny with it, always quipping,’ said Hendrik. ‘Had a smile could tear the insides out of a bear.’
It was Conrad’s cue, the reason he had come here, but he felt her hair clip in his pocket, pressing against his thigh, and he found he was unable to speak. He looked to change the subject, anything to regain his composure.
‘Hendrik, I need a charter boat for this Saturday. There’s a party wants to go tuna fishing.’
‘Tuna fishing, huh?’
‘Best if it’s someone who works out of Montauk Yacht Club.’
‘Rich folk, eh?’
‘Money no object.’
Hendrik thought about it for a moment then came up with a name.
They talked about the old times until the moon was high overhead. They skirted around the subject of the war, dipping their toes in from time to time, but never taking the plunge. That was the way of it, though. Only the ones who hadn’t been through the real meat-grinder liked to go over their adventures.
Moving inside, Hendrik insisted that Conrad take the cot while he bunked down on the floor. Lying there in the darkness on his back, Conrad toyed with how best to tackle the subject. There was only one way—front-on.
‘There’s something I got to talk to you about, Hendrik.’
‘I didn’t want to ask.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I ain’t seen you in months, and you don’t need me to find you a charter boat.’
‘Last year,’ said Conrad, ‘at the Devon Yacht Club, were you working the night of the first dinner dance?’
‘Sure I was. It was a big do, all hands on deck.’
‘Was Lillian Wallace there?’
It was a moment before Hendrik replied. ‘Yeah.’
‘You remember who she was with?’
This time, the silence lasted longer.
‘There was a whole gang of them,’ said Hendrik.
‘Her brother?’
‘Sure. And her sister. They was always there together.’
‘What about her fiancé, Justin Penrose?’
Conrad heard a match strike. Light from the kerosene lamp flooded the shack. Hendrik was looking at him intently, his eyes demanding an explanation.
‘I can’t,’ said Conrad. ‘Not yet.’
Hendrik nodded. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Who she left with. And when.’