Sag Harbor (18 page)

            
ALL THE ILL SHIT WENT DOWN ON THURSDAYS LIKE
clockwork. Mondays we slept in, lulled by the silence in the rest of the house. The only racket was the carpenter ants gnawing the soft wood under the deck, not much of a racket at all. It was safe. When we met up with the rest of the crew, we traded baroque schemes about what we'd get up to before the parents came out again. The rest of the week was a vast continent for us to explore and conquer. Then suddenly we ran out of land. Wednesdays we woke up agitated, realizing our idyll was half over. We got busy to cram it all in. Sometimes we messed up on Wednesdays, but it was never a Thursday-sized mess-up. No, Thursday we reserved for the thoroughly botched, mishaps that called for shame and first aid and
apologies. All the ill shit went down on Thursdays, the disasters we made with our own hands, because on Friday the parents returned and our disasters were out of our control.

The first gun was Randy's. Which should have been a sign that we were headed toward a classic Thursday. I never went to Randy's—he didn't have a hanging-out house. But everybody else was working. Nick at Jonni Waffle or in the city buying stuff for his B-boy disguise, Clive barbacking at the Long Wharf Restaurant, Reggie and Bobby at Burger King. I felt like I hadn't seen Reggie in weeks. We had contrary schedules, me working in town, him off flipping Whoppers in South Hampton. When we overlapped in the house we were too exhausted from work or gearing up for the next shift to even bicker properly. I had no other option but to call NP, not my number-one choice, and his mother told me he was at Randy's. Normally I would have said forget it, but there was a chance they might be driving somewhere, an expedition to Karts-a-Go-Go or Hither Hills, and I'd have to hear them exaggerate how much fun they had.

Randy lived in Sag Harbor Hills on Hillside Drive, a dead-end street off our usual circuit. I knew it as the street where the Yellow House was, the one Mark James used to stay in. Mark was a nerdy kid I got along with, who came out for a few summers to visit his grandmother, who was of that first generation. When I turned the corner to Hillside, I saw that the Yellow House's yard was still overgrown and the blinds were drawn, as they had been for years now. I hadn't seen Mark in a long time but a few weeks ago, by coincidence, I'd asked my mother if she knew why he didn't come out anymore and she said, “Oh, it turned out that Mr. James had another family.”

There was a lot of Other Family going around that summer. People disappeared. I asked, “What happened to the Peterses?” and my mother responded, “Oh, it turned out Mr. Peters had another family, so they don't come out anymore.” And what happened to the Barrowses, hadn't seen those guys in a while, Little Timmy with his crutches. “Oh, it turned out Mr. Barrows had another family so they're selling the house.”

For a while it verged on an epidemic. I found it fascinating, wondering at the mechanics. One family in New Jersey and one in Kansas—what kind of cover story hid those miles? These were lies to aspire to. And who was to say which was the Real Family and which was the Other Family? Was the Sag Harbor family of our acquaintance the shadowy, antimatter family or was it the other way around, that family living in that new Delaware subdivision, the one gobbling crumbs with a smile? I picture the kids scrambling to the front door at the sound of Daddy's car in the driveway after so long (the brief phone calls from the road only magnify absence) and Daddy taking a few moments after he turns off the ignition to orient himself, figure out who and where he is this time. Yes, I recognize those people standing in the doorway—that's my family.

How extensive was the transformation? The rules and decor and entire vibe changing from house to house. In that other zip code, Daddy was a pipe-puffing teddy bear in a sweater vest, a throwback to a sitcom idea of genial paternity, peeling off wisdom like “You know, son, sometimes a body's got to stand up for himself” and “We all get bruised sometimes, but then we dust ourselves off and say, Golly, tomorrow is another day.” Mommy was always taking the bird out of the oven, she dolled herself up on Our Anniversary and they walked out arm in arm, they never missed a year. Everyone tucked in tight. The family ate together and communicated. And then Daddy lit out for this zip code, changed his face, and everything was reversed. One man, two houses. Two faces. Which house you lived in, kids, was the luck of the draw.

You might call this speculation dumb. Each house made the other a lie. None of it was real. I'm not so sure.

Randy and NP were in the street. They were bent over, looking at something on the ground. I yelled, “Yo!” They didn't respond. I walked up.

“Look at that,” NP said.

“What happened to it?” I asked. The robin was lying on the asphalt, but it didn't have the familiar tread-mark tattoo of most road-kill. It was tiny and still.

“Randy shot it,” NP said.

Randy grinned and held up the BB rifle to show it off. It looked real, but that was the point. If it looked real, you could pretend it was real, and if you had a real gun you could pretend to be someone else. The metal was sleek, inky black, the fake wood grain of the stock and forearm glossy in the sun. “I got it at Caldor,” he said.

We looked down at the robin again.

“It flew over and landed on the power pole and I just took the shot,” Randy said. “I've been practicing all day.”

“Is it dead?” I asked.

“I don't see any blood,” NP answered.

“Maybe it's just a concussion,” I said.

“You should stuff it and mount it,” NP said.

I thought, “That's uncool,” a judgment I'd picked up from the stoner crowd at my school, who had decided I was “okay” toward the end of the spring semester and let me hang out in their vicinity or at least linger unmolested as a prelude to a provisional adoption by their clan next fall. (They had a Weed for Nerds charity and a strong commitment to diversity.) I liked uncool because it meant there was a code that everyone agreed on. The rules didn't change—everything in the universe was either cool or uncool, no confusion. “That's uncool,” someone said, and “That is
so
uncool,” another affirmed, the voice of justice itself, nasal and uncomplicated.

Randy let NP take the rifle and NP held it in his hands, testing its weight. It looked solid and formidable. He aimed at invisible knuckleheads loitering at the dead end of the street: “Stick 'em up!” He pumped the stock three times, clack clack clack, and pulled the trigger. And again.

“It's empty, dummy,” Randy said.

We headed into his house to get some more “ammo.” Randy lived at the end of the street in a long green ranch house with fading orange trim. I'd never been inside. He opened the screen door and yelled, “Mom, I'm inside with my friends!,” and the sound of a TV disappeared as a door closed with a thud. I didn't know much about Randy's home life, but I knew his father wasn't in the picture.

There were fathers who worked in the city during the week and there were fathers who were a variety of gone. I knew Randy's father came out one weekend every other summer because I'd hear my parents talk about it. “Stanley's out this weekend with his young girlfriend/expensive car/speedboat,” whatever prop he was riding that year. I assumed he didn't stay on Hillside.

The blinds were tilted open, sending planes of light to charge slow-dancing motes of hair and dead skin. NP and I sat on the plastic-covered furniture while Randy went into his room. I smelled dog, and remembered a recent conversation with Randy about his dog, Tiger, a cocker spaniel who had choked on a piece of rope and died two years ago. I noticed some white fur trapped underneath the plastic on the upholstery and experienced a doctor's-office wave of nervousness.

“Can we sit down here?” I asked.

“What do you think the plastic's for?” NP said.

Randy returned and led us out through the kitchen into the backyard. Brown leaves drifted in tiny dirty pools in the butts of chairs. Behind the house was woods, allowing him to convert the patio into a firing range. He'd dragged the barbecue grill to the edge of the trees—I saw a line of ashes in a trail—and around its three feet lay cans and cups riddled with tiny holes. Randy set up a Six Million Dollar Man action figure on the grill's lid. It took a few tries to get him to stand up straight. We'd outgrown tying army men to bottle rockets, failure itself despite our delusions of NASA-like competence, so this was a logical extension of action-figure abuse.

“Lemme get a shot,” NP begged.

“I go first,” Randy told him, with the imperious tone he'd mastered during his stint as the Kid with the Car.

Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man, who had been rebuilt at great expense with taxpayers' money, stood on the red dome, his bionic hands in eternal search of necks to throttle. Randy took aim. Steve Austin stared impassively, his extensive time on the operating table having granted him a stoic's quiet grace. It took five shots, Randy pumping and clacking the stock with increasing fury as we
observed his shitty marksmanship. Steve Austin tumbled off the lid and lay on his side, his pose undisturbed in the dirt. Didn't even blink. They really knew how to make an action figure back then.

“I want to get the optional scope for greater accuracy” Randy explained, “but that costs more money.”

“Lemme try that shit now,” NP said.

I left soon after. I threw out a “You guys want to head to East Hampton to buy records?” but no one bit. I thought we were past playing with guns. I walked around the side of the house and when I got back into the street the bird was gone.

That was the first gun. The next gun was Bobby's. This one was a pistol, a replica of a 9mm. We were in his room. Bobby had invited me to play Lode Runner on his Apple II+, but when we got up there, he dug under his mattress and pulled out the BB pistol.

I jerked my head toward the open door. “What about your grandpa?”

He pointed to his alarm clock. It was 7:35
PM
. Which meant his grandfather had been asleep for five minutes. Bobby's parents returned on weekends, like ours, but in his case he was not completely unsupervised. His grandparents came out for the entire summer to make sure he got fed. But after 7:30, Bobby crawled over the wall.

His grandparents were friends of the first generation, but they'd never bought a house during the gold rush. They stayed with pals on weekends, and then Bobby's parents started renting a house in the '70s, up the street from our old house on Hempstead, which is how he became such an integral part of our crew. His family had built the house up in Ninevah two years ago, an imposing gray beach house overlooking the bay from on high. I remember playing Alien Prison Cell in the cement foundation when the construction workers were off slacking. Splintery and vertigo-inducing stairs led down the dune to the water. It was a big place—most of the first-wave houses were single-story—with a guest room downstairs and three bedrooms upstairs.

Bobby's grandparents stayed on the first floor, so we had a state-of-the-art slipper-on-stairs warning system in case his grandfather,
against all odds, was still puttering around past 7:30. In the great local tradition, his grandmother stayed in her room at all hours, occasionally summoning Bobby in for conferences from which he'd emerge with a five-or ten-dollar bill for “treats.” I don't think I saw her that whole summer. His grandfather was a real gentle guy, always kind to our mangy bunch when we came over. Gentle in that way that said he'd seen a lot of racist shit in his life and was glad that things had turned out better for his children and grandchildren. That cool old breed. His daughter had married another Brooklynite—not a Sag guy, although he grew up with Sag kids in the off-season and knew the myth—and now they had finally arrived. He had a right to be proud. And a right to get some damn sleep at the first hints of twilight.

“Me and NP went with Randy to Caldor and got one,” Bobby said. “He got the silver one, but I wanted the black one. It's the joint, right?” Of course Randy was the facilitator. Seeing Randy fondle his rifle, given its potential, had the paradoxical effect of making him look like a monstrously overgrown baby. He might as well have been sucking his thumb. Bobby's real-lookin' gun allowed him to indulge his hard-rock fantasies and bury his deep prep-school weakness. Hide his grandfather's soft features in the scowl of a thug, the thug of his inverted Westchester fantasies. A kind of blackface.

“Greg Davis's cousin has a gun like this,” Bobby said, squinting down the pistol's sight. “I saw it once at his house. You know what he's into, right?”

“No, what?”

“You know, some hard-core shit. He was in jail.” He held it out. “Do you want to hold it?”

“No, that's all right.”

“What are you, a pussy?”

I shrugged.

“Me and Reggie were shooting stuff over at the Creek today,” Bobby said. “He has good aim. He should be a sniper in the Army Corps.”

I'd seen Reggie before he went off to Burger King, asked him what he'd been up to. “Nothing.”

“Let me see that,” I said. It was heavier than it looked. Its insides dense with cause and effect. I curled my finger around the trigger. Okay. Got the gist. I pretended to study it for a few more moments and gave it back to Bobby.