Storm Tide (25 page)

“You can’t give it up, can you?” Crystal said. But neither could she. Having invested two hours in my satisfaction, she was afraid that she’d be sending me off to Judith in the morning hornier than ever. But all I felt was a weight pressing on my head from the inside, a pounding need for revenge. I had two choices: to back off or go at them, not only the idiots on the crew or Donkey Sparks above them, but Johnny at the top of the pyramid. Johnny Lynch had viewed my father as invisible, the way they all looked through me. I doubt I was the first to decide to run for political office while having sex, but something did happen just then. Something had fallen into place. Compare it to a gear, spinning for years without engaging. Compare it to catching your breath; or to orgasm itself, the explosive fusion of mind and body.

I came in what felt like a torrent of memory and emotion. Crystal swallowed, swinging her head to release the crick in her neck. “Finally,” she gasped, for both of us.

J
OHNNY

    Johnny thought of parking in the woods and walking to the house, like the old days when the whole town knew what he was doing before he had his pants off. Around here, your car told people everything they wanted to know, what you drove and where you parked it. He’d learned that the hard way. He’d lost his first election because of that little red Triumph. It was months later before he’d understood how people here perceived him. Playboy. High roller. You could get away with a lot in this town if you knew the limits. Marry a black girl. Drink yourself pickled. Be a lesbian. But drive around in some fancy Mercedes? People wouldn’t put up with it.

Ever since, he’d driven a Ford Crown Vic brown or maroon four-door sedan. The dullest car in town, everybody knew it on sight: his problem today. He didn’t want the boy to see it in his mother’s driveway and drive off angry. But Johnny no longer had the strength to park the car on a sand road and go on foot the way he used to: half a mile sometimes, through the woods like a tomcat.

Johnny didn’t like involving Linda Greene, but what could he do? David Greene avoided him. Never set foot in the office when he picked up Crystal. Never returned Johnny’s wave in the parking lot. Something had to be done.

“Hello, dear. How are you?” Johnny kissed her cheek but was careful to thrust his gift between them.

“Roses, Johnny! You didn’t have to do that.”

“You’re putting yourself out for me and I appreciate it.”

“Oh, you. Putting myself out. It’s just brownies and coffee with David.”

Linda Greene was a fine-looking woman still, with a high broad bosom and slender legs. Unlike the others her age, she never let herself go gray. She dressed young; a ribbed cotton sweater over black leggings. He’d watched her walking over the years, sometimes with women friends, sometimes just with her dog, but out there rain or shine on Ocean’s Edge Road, keeping up a pace, working on her figure.

Johnny usually avoided being alone with Linda Greene, but thought it best to be seated at the kitchen table when the boy walked in. “You’ll want to get those in some water.” Linda was a little too passionate. He had his excuse now: he could blame his bad heart and her feelings
wouldn’t be hurt. She was a needful woman. Emotional. Not emotional like his wife, not delicate but the opposite. Before her husband passed away, she’d made her interest in Johnny plain enough. At curtain factory parties. Good Christ, in the elementary school parking lot one snowy December night after the Christmas play. She practically shoved her tongue down his throat. It wasn’t for lack of desire on his part. He could have met her in Florida any number of times, where she visited her sister. But Johnny knew this town well enough to keep his hands off the widow of his ex-partner.

He anticipated her return from the sink, her cool fingertips grazing his skin above the shirt collar. “So young David said he was coming, dear? Just what did you tell him?”

“That I wanted him to see a friend.”

“You didn’t say who?”

“He doesn’t hate you, Johnny. He just doesn’t understand.”

“But you didn’t—”

“No, I just told him somebody he hadn’t spoken to in a long time wanted to talk to him about running for selectman.”

“That’s good. That’s very good.” He let her fingers drift up to his cheek before he removed himself to the window. He supposed he was no better than any man; he enjoyed being wanted. But the truth was, he’d always liked Linda Greene. Far more than the husband who’d never learned to play the game, she was a practical woman. Sure her feelings were hurt when he ignored her interest in him, but she got more out of him as a friend than she ever would in bed. The son was like the father, looking at the dark side of everything. Sure enough when he rolled into the driveway and saw the Crown Vic, he stormed from his truck like a company of marines, throwing open the kitchen door.

“What’s he doing here?” David Greene said, without so much as the courtesy to address Johnny by name. He was small like his father but an outdoor man, well-muscled, a scrapper. For a moment Johnny feared for his safety. He studied the boy’s eyes, light gray like storm clouds.

The boy had always been a cold one. He’d never sat at Johnny’s knee with the other children for stories but hovered back. Even when Johnny had picked the boy to ride with him in the big parade—two hours in the backseat of a convertible, creeping along Main Street in the scorching July sun—David Greene never spoke a word. “Hello, son. Your mother and I were having coffee and cake. Will you join us?”

“Why didn’t you tell me this is the friend you wanted me to see?”

“David—”

“Because I asked her not to,” Johnny said. “You wouldn’t have come.”

“You’ve got that right.”

Linda Greene placed herself between them.

“And why is that?” Johnny asked.

David folded his arms. “Where do you want me to start?”

“By sitting down. Stop embarrassing me,” Linda said. “The past is the past. You don’t know everything.”

“I know he bled my father’s business dry.”

Linda looked away, as if from a photograph she didn’t want to see.

“When I first showed him the factory, I told him there was a good life to be had in this town. The idea was to give people jobs, draw a modest salary, enjoy his life. Your uncle George understood that. I told your father again and again to wait, the factory would pay off eventually.”

“David, you were so young.” Linda Greene was close to tears. “Your father was a very impatient man. There was only one way, his way.”

“Enough of this,” Johnny said. “I didn’t come to rehash the past. I came to wish you luck in your run for public office and to ask you, man-to-man, if you’re planning to turn this election into a referendum against me.”

“Is there another issue?”

Johnny caught Linda’s wrist. “We need a little time alone, dear, the boy and I. Is that all right with you? If David and I take a ride together?”

“I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“Then we’ll sit right here and have it out in front of your mother, won’t we? Is that what you’d rather?”

“Any closer to that car door, son, you’ll be on the sidewalk.”

David didn’t answer. He sat as far from Johnny as was possible in the front seat. His face was a mask of stone. Only the police scanner broke the silence, spitting out the urgent business of the Saltash P.D.
“Roger. Who has the jug of windshield wiper fluid? Over. I think Duffy had it last. Over.”

Johnny caught the boy smiling. “You’ve got to love this town,” he said.

David, obviously uncomfortable, shifted in his seat, staring frontways, sideways, anywhere but at Johnny. He looked at the backseat covered with election posters for Blossom Endicott.

“First thing Monday, she’ll have these up at every traffic light on the highway, every window in the center of town.”

“Why would you tell me that? Why rat out Blossom?”

“Because you might win.”

“Where are we going?” David sighed, sounding almost resigned.

Johnny continued through Saltash center and out Dock Street along the harbor, up the state highway ten miles, then into the neighboring
town of Sandy Bars. Only when he signaled a left turn toward the bay did he answer, “To what they call their town pier.”

“What the hell for? There’s nothing there.”

Johnny pulled into a cracked asphalt parking lot, a peninsula surrounded on three sides by muddy tidal marsh. A row of dories and small motorboats lay one against the other along the back fence. A couple of old-timers in hip boots hung out on the steps of the Sandy Bars harbormaster’s shack. This was a high-tide harbor; boats sat in the mud until the tide came up. Until then, there was no channel, no access to the sea. Johnny nosed the car up to a guardrail and shut the engine. “What do you see here?”

“What am I supposed to see? Nothing.”

“How does it compare to Saltash harbor?”

“It doesn’t,” David said.

Saltash had thirty draggers, ten lobster boats, fifteen sport fishing charters. Johnny knew the numbers by heart. In season there were slips for 215 sailboats, 180 powerboats and a waiting list triple that. There were tackle stores and restaurants; two thriving boatyards, a summer theater, picnic tables, parking for four hundred, a bandstand, public showers and a fish market. Johnny stretched his arm across David’s seat, sending him sideways to the door. “Now why the fuck do you think that is?”

The boy hedged. “We have a better natural harbor.”

“Study your geography, son. Saltash harbor is a shallow embayment with a tidal amplitude of ten feet, about the same as what you’re staring at. Sandy Bars could have had a fine harbor too, but nobody had the brains or the balls to make it happen. Thirty-five years ago I looked at Saltash and saw a town crying for an industry. That’s why you’re looking at this mud puddle in front of you while ten miles down the coast we have a beautiful working harbor.”

“On which you bought up and sold—how many waterfront acres was it? Land you made valuable with public money.”

So it was a pissing contest he wanted? “All right, David. Let’s say I made a little money in my time. Let’s say also that I managed to do something for my people along the way. What have
you
done? What did Gordon and his wealthy retired friends do? They don’t give a fuck about who works or who doesn’t because they don’t have to work. As far as they’re concerned, the local women can clean their toilets and the men mow their lawns. Take your best shot, son, go ahead. What else do your fancy backers accuse me of? Keeping the state from turning half of Saltash into a fucking bird sanctuary? Am I supposed to apologize? The land we kept out of the state’s hands is what we call the tax base, son.
That’s what pays for the police and the rescue squad and the best school system within a hundred miles.”

“Isn’t the principal of the school your sister, Johnny? Maybe we ought to rename the place Coincidence, Massachusetts. Because we sure have our share.” The little prick kept pushing. “And didn’t the selectmen happen to buy
your
land to build the school on? And didn’t you handpick the contractor so the roof always leaks and the foundation is cracking?”

“The people of Saltash always made out,” Johnny said, a little louder than he meant to.

“Is that all you wanted to tell me?”

Johnny sighed. He was tired, as if he could sleep for the rest of the afternoon. “What do you say we have a drink together?”

“Thanks. I don’t have the time.”

Johnny laughed to himself. “Neither did your father, do you know that? In all the years we did business together, he never once had the time for a drink.”

As he drove back, Johnny tried to figure it out, how this cocky little high school pitcher had come back to haunt him. Johnny had heard he was screwing Judith Silver, Gordon’s child bride. For all the cheap gossip Johnny himself had generated, this town had never seen anything like Gordon Stone and his drugs and naked orgies and string of women. But the kid had been hanging around his new secretary too. He’d have to find out what was going on.

David Greene was a lightweight; youth and resentment, that’s all he had going. So what was so upsetting? Why did Johnny feel like he could pull the covers over his head and sleep the day through until morning? In front of Linda Greene’s house, Johnny offered his hand. “Well, son, goodbye and good luck. Tell your mother thanks for putting herself out.”

The kid nodded and slammed the car door, never acknowledging Johnny as a man or an adversary with whom he’d have to contend in the future.

And that was it, Johnny understood. That’s what was bringing him down. Under this boy’s contempt, Johnny was disappearing, shedding his importance. All his talent to move people, gone; his influence and the fear he instilled in men, gone; his eyesight and his stamina; his dear wife and what once seemed a small fortune. He was losing his life in pieces.

History and experience, all his accomplishments meant nothing. They kept coming at him: ambitious young pit bulls, smelling weakness, hungry for a fight. If it was a dogfight David Greene wanted, then
a dogfight he’d get. The old schoolteacher wouldn’t have been Johnny’s first choice, but he’d backed worse and he’d won. Her family had been in the town two hundred years, and if people weren’t crazy about her, they remembered her dad or her brother fondly. The Endicott clan alone were worth forty votes. It would be a dirty campaign, but Blossom could lick David Greene, and that was all he needed to get this depression off his back. To win, again. To win.