The Water-Method Man

Bogus wondered how he might best approach Biggie, realizing only now how much he missed her. She'd never stay in Iowa during the summer. At this moment she was probably in East Gunnery, helping her father and letting her mother help her with Colm. It was even conceivable that her abandonment had inspired an I-told-you-so sort of negative invitation from his own parents, but surely Biggie would have declined those helping hands.

In any case, she certainly would have written to Couth to ask if he knew where his friend Bogus was, and Couth would know where she was, and what her feelings were about her runaway husband. Perhaps Couth had even seen them and could tell him how Colm had changed.

'Hey, sir?' someone was asking him. It was the man in the front seat in the doorman's uniform. 'Hey, where in Maine?' he asked.

Trumper looked out the window; they were coming through the deserted rotary by Portsmouth Harbor, crossing the bridge to Maine. 'Georgetown,' he said to the driver. 'It's an island. You'd better stop and get a map.'

And Dante Calicchio thought, An island! Sweet Jesus, how am I supposed to drive to an island, you frigging crazy bastard ...

But Dante got a map and saw there was a bridge from the mainland at Bath, across a tidal inlet of the Kennebec River, to Georgetown Island. As he crossed the bridge some time after midnight, Bogus rolled down the back windows and asked him if he could smell the sea.

What Dante smelled was too fresh to be the sea. The sea Dante knew smelled like the docks off New York and Newark. The salt marshes here smelled tangy clean, so he rolled down his window too. But he didn't like the driving any more. The road across the island had loose, sandy shoulders, was narrow and winding and didn't have a median stripe. Also, there weren't any houses, just dark black pine trees and stretches of high salt grass.

Also, the night was alive with sounds. Not horns and mechanisms, or tires squealing or unidentified human voices or sirens, but things - frogs and crickets and sea birds and foghorns out at sea.

The lonely road and the terrible sounds scared the shit out of Dante Calicchio, who kept sizing up Bogus in the rear-view mirror, thinking, if this nut tries anything, I can break his back in two places before his friends jump me ...

Trumper was calculating how long he'd stay with Couth, and whether he'd phone Biggie or just go see her when the time seemed ripe.

When the road suddenly turned to dirt, Dante slammed on the brakes, locked the two front doors, and then the two back ones, never taking his eyes off Bogus for an instant.

'What the hell are you doing?' Trumper asked, but Dante Calicchio sat in the front seat with one eye on Trumper in the mirror and the other roaming the map.

'We must be lost, huh?' Dante said.

'No,' Trumper said. 'We've got five miles to go.'

'Where's the road?' said Dante.

'You're on it,' Trumper said. 'Drive on.'

Dante checked the map, saw that this indeed was a road and drove on with trepidation; that is, he inched the car forward as the island narrowed down around him. A few unlighted houses appeared, solemn as moored ships, and he saw the horizon open on both sides of him; the sea was out there, the air felt colder, he could taste the salt.

Then a sign told him he was on a private road.

'Drive on,' Trumper told him. Dante wished his tire chains were beside him on the seat, but he drove on.

A few hundred yards further on a sign said PILLSBURY, and the road dipped so close to the water that Dante thought the surf would break over them. Then he saw the magnificent old house with its barn-red wooden shingles, a high gabled house with a connecting garage, a boathouse and a tidy cove of the sea to itself.

Pillsbury - Dante thought he probably had one of them in the back seat. The only Pillsbury he knew was the competition for Betty Crocker. He peeked in the rear-view mirror, wondering if he was chauffeuring the crazy young heir to a cake-mix fortune.

'What month is it?' Trumper asked. He wanted to know if Couth was still alone in the place, or whether the Pillsburys would be here for the summer. They never came until the Fourth of July.

'It's the first of June, sir,' said Dante Calicchio. He stopped the car where the driveway ended, and sat listening to the shrieking night - to what he imagined were whistling fish and great birds of prey, bears roaming the deep pines and an insect world of jungle ferocity.

When Trumper hustled up the flagstone walk, his eye on the one lit room in the house, the master bedroom upstairs, Dante hustled after him uninvited. He had grown up in a tough neighborhood and felt perfectly comfortable going out for a late-night six-pack when no one else would venture abroad in less than gang numbers, but the stillness of the island really threw him and he had no intention of facing the teeming animal potential singing and scuffling in those bushes and trees all by himself.

'What's your name?' Trumper asked.

'Dante.'

'Dante?' Trumper said. A shot of light flickered down a hall of the house; a shaft stretched downstairs; a porch light went on.

'Couth!' Trumper yelled. 'Heigh-ho!'

If there's just two of them, Dante thought, I can handle the mothers. He felt the hundred-dollar bill in his crotch for reassurance.

*