Six
Conrad found himself counting his steps as he walked—ten paces to every breaking wave, the spume washing around his bare feet. He resisted the urge to hurry ahead, the darkness not descended yet, measured strides over the tide-packed sand at the water’s edge. One-to-ten, one-to-ten. The mental metronome of a route march, memories of the ragged hills east of Cassino invading his thoughts, the sound of the collapsing waves not unlike the hollow report of distant artillery fire, unseen shells reshaping the Italian landscape.
Looking up, he saw a couple coming towards him, arms linked, bodies pressed close, stepping out at twilight. He thought of turning away, veering off towards the dunes to allow them a clear passage along the shore, not wanting to intrude on their moment. But they had seen him now, and a sense of propriety drove them apart.
They approached through the blue-black light, eyes downcast like guilty children.
‘Good evening,’ said the man stiffly as they passed.
A thought occurred to Conrad, and he stopped in his tracks. ‘Excuse me.’
The couple hesitated, turning.
‘Do you walk here every evening?’ asked Conrad.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I was just wondering if you walked here most evenings.’
‘Why?’ said the man.
‘We’re from Albany,’ said the woman. She uttered the words as if they were some kind of protective incantation.
Conrad took a couple of steps towards them. ‘Last night, were you here around this time?’
‘Look,’ said the man, ‘we’re very late.’
‘It’s important,’ said Conrad.
‘We weren’t even here last night, okay? We got here today. And now we have to go.’ They turned and left, stepping briskly away.
Puzzled by their reaction, Conrad glanced down, taking in his appearance, aware for the first time that he was still in his fishing gear—the shabby twill trousers, patched and stitched and crusted with fish scales, plaid shirt protruding from the tattered hem of his jersey, once white, now stained with fish blood and streaked with tar. No wonder they’d been so anxious, confronted by a ragged, barefoot scrap of humanity.
He tugged the jersey up over his head and set off along the shore. After a few hundred yards, he cut inland, up the steep frontal dune. Beyond lay a tumble of sandhills, a tangled maze of crests and troughs, like an angry cross-sea. Narrowing to a point a few hundred yards beyond the Maidstone Club, this mysterious tract of vacant land extended four miles eastwards into Amagansett, widening considerably as it went, demarcated to the north by the steep inland bluff on which the wealthy had built their summer homes.
It was a world Conrad was well acquainted with, one that hadn’t changed in all the years he’d known it. As kids, this had been their preserve, a private nether world where innumerable battles were fought, where Custer died a thousand deaths, yet, strangely, Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett always seemed to survive the storming of the Alamo.
Back then the old-timers still referred to the place as ‘the Glades’, dim memories handed down of the time when the pockets of freshwater marsh, fringed with phragmites, were deep enough for skiffs, and cranberry bogs abounded. The cranberries were still there, a welcome source of pocket money for Conrad and his friends when they were growing up, though Arthur Bowles, the manager of Roulston’s Store, always screwed them down hard on the price, his plastered smile masking a ruthless business head.
It was ‘down the Glades’ that Conrad first met Rollo, wheeling around, lunging wildly, delightedly groping the air—a game of blind-man’s buff—surrounded by a pack of shrieking kids, too young to know they were laughing at his expense, no sense yet that others saw him as different. That came later. Long summers spent roaming the sandhills in packs, squelching knee-high through the swales, forming tribes, alliances sealed in blood but soon reneged on, building camps thatched with dried reeds and cat-tails, whittling spears with gutting knives filched from unsuspecting fathers.
Sometimes they ventured beyond the southern frontier on to the beach, little Edmund Tyler—always Edmund, with his cherub face and see-no-evil eyes—coyly approaching a group of bathers, ‘Watch out for the sand snakes, it’s their feeding hour’, the others flat on their bellies in the beach grass at the top of the dune, howling with laughter as the city people snatched up their belongings and scampered to safety.
One time, venturing further still, into the west, to the Maidstone Club—the playground of the rich—the club itself too closely patrolled to risk an incursion despite the imagined lure of naked female flesh around the swimming pool, striking out across the golf course instead, sticking to cover, the eighth hole—par three, partially blind approach—Conrad racing from the scrub, staying low, scooping up a ball from the edge of the green and dropping it in the hole, not staying to witness the celebration of the hole-in-one, knowing their laughter would give them away and ruin the prank, the unwitting victim still dining out on that magnificent drive from the tee, no doubt.
Conrad smiled, remembering. Then it occurred to him that four of the six boys present that day were now dead.
He banished the memories, pinched the burning end from his cigarette and drove the stub into the sand with his finger.
It was night now, time to go.
Only fifty yards or so separated the wind-trimmed holly tree where he’d been sitting from the sandy bluff, and he could see the lights of the houses glinting through the oaks standing sentinel along the crest.
The moon lit his path as he picked his way across the sandhills and up the slope. He slipped the latch of the gate in the iron fence and stepped into the garden.
The air was cool and moist, rich with earthy scents where the borders had been watered. Somewhere out there in the night a dog barked and another returned its call. A low hum emanated from the small hut that housed the swimming pool’s filtration system.
There were patches of water on the pool’s flagstone surround, and a part-smoked cigarette in an ashtray beside a lounge chair. The cushions bore the moist impression of a person not-so-long gone.
He was right to have waited a while.
He strayed as close to the house as he dared, positioning himself beneath the boughs of a tree at the edge of the lawn. From here he waited and watched, the figures moving behind the windows like marionettes on a nursery stage, until the lights were extinguished. A lone bedroom light was still burning bright behind the curtains when Conrad finally slipped away through the shadows.
He stopped as he passed by the swimming pool.
Crouching down, he dipped his fingers into the water and raised them to his lips.