July 7
Something felt nice, somewhere below the snap of his pajamas. At first it had no focus, because he didn’t. His mind was still wandering through some dreamscape of fish wrappings and ship’s logs and fancy houses overlooking the bay. Then the feeling came to settle between his legs.
Every couple had their special time. For Geoff and Janice, it was morning. Especially at the Truro house.
When they bought it, the second floor had been a rabbit warren of badly lit rooms and sloping ceilings, where anyone over four feet tall banged his head getting up to pee. Their friends, of course, had been happy for
any
Cape Cod roof over their heads on weekends, but why did it have to be so damn low?
So Geoff had decided to put in a skylight, one of those double-insulated Velux numbers he was always calling for when he designed attic makeovers. If he could call for one, he ought to be able to install one. It took him two days, but he cut the rough opening, framed it, fit the window, secured the flashing, and with inordinate pride, found a place for every screw, bolt, and nut that had gone splattering across the floor when he first opened the box.
The next morning, sunshine streamed through the skylight to wake them, and they made love, first with Geoff on top, then with Janice, so each could enjoy the view. Both pronounced the skylight a success.
Children got in the way of mornings, and like most couples, Geoff and Janice had become creatures of the night. But sometimes, in high summer, the sun might wake one of them before the kids did, and that one might wake the other. And that might lead to something more.
“This is unexpected,” he whispered.
“I felt your sneaker last night. I wasn’t in the mood to feel anything else. Let’s say I’m reopening negotiations.”
He slipped an arm around her and drew her to his face.
She offered him her neck, where the aroma of Chanel still lingered. She liked sunrise passion, but passionate sunrise kisses were another matter, especially after an evening with George Flynn’s garlic-town bouillabaisse. She would rather kiss a furry old sock.
He slipped a hand under her nightgown. “You must have been dreaming.”
She hiked up her nightgown and threw one of those long, smooth thighs across his waist. “The kids’ll be waking up any minute.”
“Do you need something?”
“Day twenty-seven.”
He raised his hips. She lowered hers. And they met. At first they moved slowly, without the frantic speed of youth, the fear that it might end before it began. It was one body greeting another, old friends getting comfortable.
Then they stopped. They did this to prolong the pleasure. Sometimes they would try to see how long they could last before one of them moved. Sometimes they would try to take themselves to another plane by talking about flowers or baseball or maybe the weather, and all the while, the urge to move would be growing, the excitement tightening their voices… but the longer they lasted, the better they finished.
She pushed down. “You made me mad yesterday, Geoffrey. I didn’t deserve it.”
“You sent Arnie Burr and the Humpster to Rake’s house with a transit and a set of plot plans.” He slipped her nightgown off her shoulders and pressed his lips to a breast.
“That feels nice.” She sat back on his thighs, to enjoy the touch of his tongue, then pushed him away. “I want an apology.”
“All right. I’m sorry. Whatever I said, I’m sorry.”
“Accepted.” She plucked a gray hair out of his chest. “You aren’t getting any younger, Geoff. You shouldn’t pass up a big opportunity.”
“This is sounding more like a real talk.”
“It’s a good time to say what we think.”
“Say much more, and your visitor may think he’s not wanted. Either that or his owner will roll you over and finish what you started while you talk right through it.”
“All right. Besides, I’m getting sweaty.”
“So let’s do something worth the sweat.”
He pushed gently. She met his motion. The headboard began to creak. A sound rose from his chest. She sighed and closed her eyes. But even in the midst of love they always kept one of their senses sharpened to the outside world, and Geoff heard…
something
. He stopped and gripped her waist.
It was the scuffling shuffle of feet pajamas on a sandy floor. Janice dropped to her pillow like a tern hitting the water.
“I heard a noise,” said Keith sleepily.
“Noise?” muttered Janice.
“Something banging.” He rubbed his eyes.
“Ka-thumpeta, ka-thumpeta, ka-thumpeta.”
“That was Daddy.”
“What was he doin’?”
Janice yawned. “His exercises.”
“Oh… I’m hungry, Mom.”
“Go downstairs and get a Pop-Tart.”
“Dad says Pop-Tarts are shit.”
“So eat an apple,” growled Geoff.
The boy started to leave, but first he said, “Mom?”
“Mmm-hm?”
“Why are you sleeping with your leg on Dad’s stomach?”
“Because she
likes
me,” growled Geoff.
“Oh… I like you, too.” Then Keith went off.
Janice listened for the perplexed whine of Kermit the Frog on the television set. Then she slid her body back across Geoff’s. “Where were we?”
“Wherever we were, we’re not there now.”
“I hope that stuff George read—about that
Mayflower
log, I mean—I hope you’re not still thinking about that.”
“C’mon, Janice—”
“I want an answer. Don’t forget what’s at stake.”
“Don’t forget
my
stake.” He rolled her over, and the talk ended.
They began to move together. She closed her eyes. Another sound vibrated from his chest into hers. This time they would get there. This time…
And from somewhere in the house came a cry of terror.
“Sarah!” Janice pushed Geoff off and ran for the door.
“Where is she?” Geoff pulled up his pajamas and ran after her.
They scrambled through the upstairs, from their bedroom in the front, through Keith’s room, which backed onto Sarah’s, then a step down, around the chimney, into the skylit dorm with five beds.
Snapping and buttoning themselves as they went, they stumbled down the back stairs toward their daughter, who stood at the bottom, looking into the bathroom, screaming, “Nooo!”
Janice pulled her away from the door. Geoff sprang from the third step, landed, and squared himself in the doorway, ready for whatever he would face… but not for what he stepped in.
“I’m sorry, Daddy, I just flushed and… and the water came right back up, and I tried to stop it but I couldn’t—”
The water was still coming up, overflowing the rim, running across the floor in a fine yellow film to bathe Geoff’s splintered feet. He pushed the cover off the tank and raised the float. After a moment, the overflow stopped.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” said Sarah. “I only did… you know, number one, and I didn’t use too much toilet paper, like you always yell about.”
“It’s all right. Go and have a Pop-Tart.”
As she scurried off, Janice appeared in the doorway with a mop and bucket. “I thought you said Pop-Tarts tasted like shit.”
“I said they
are
shit. They taste pretty good.” Geoff sat on the edge of the ball-and-claw tub and began to rinse his feet.
“It’s only kid pee, Geoff.” She slapped the mop on the floor and began to soak up the flood. Her breasts swayed gently beneath her nightgown, but the mood was lost.
“It’s the biggest problem we have.”
“C’mon, Geoff.” She squeezed the mop into the bucket. “You and I have bigger problems than an overflowing toilet.”
“Not us. The whole Cape. The whole damn world. But especially the Cape.” He grabbed a towel and dried between his toes. “A reason to question this development.”
ii.
“You say you had this pumped in April, and it’s backin’ up already?” Blue Bigelow smiled. His teeth were stained brown halfway down and yellow the rest of the way, and he seemed not at all bothered by the stink rising from the cesspool. “You got a problem.”
Geoff stood at the lip of the tank. If Blue could stand the smell, so could he. “Why are you so happy, Blue?”
“I’m workin’, which is more than I can say for most construction men on Cape Cod.” He turned to the Humpster, who was standing by the truck. “Almost down, turn ’er off.”
“Let ’er run a little more.” The Humpster leaned against the truck, one of those big red tankers with a shit-covered hose squirming like a tail out the back and a smell that seemed to be rusting the paint from the inside. On Cape Cod they called them honey wagons.
“Kill ’er
now
, you stupid son of a bitch,” shouted Blue, “before she starts suckin’ air!”
Maybe everyone should treat the Humpster like a stupid little boy, thought Geoff. “Glad I got the A-Team. I thought you guys didn’t get dirty anymore.”
“I never let my boys forget what’s important.” Blue jammed his hands into his back pockets, which caused his flabby pectorals to stretch against his T-shirt like two water balloons. “It’s great to be—what is it?—
vertically integrated
. Development, money, materials, construction—all in one little company. Your father-in-law handles the first two, gives me the orders, I do the second two, and we get on fine. But when you’re vertical, it means you go from the ground up.”
“Starting with the hole for the shit?” said Geoff.
Blue nodded. His first chin moved against his second, which moved the third. Most native Cape Codders were like their trees—closer to the ground, a little scrawnier than the mainland variety, and stubborn. The Bigelows got the stubborn part right, but someplace along the line, a
big
gene had been bred into them, and it always seemed to pop up in Bigelows that Geoff didn’t like.
And Blue looked even bigger, because the crew cut made his head look so small. “Like I tell my boys,” he went on, “never get out of septic tanks, no matter what.”
The Humpster might have heard this joke a hundred times, but he gave a laugh that was as false as his father’s friendliness. Geoff knew that when Blue joked, even the dumbest of his employees was smart enough to laugh.
“There’s always money in septic tanks,” said Geoff.
“Damn right. Sooner or later, people always stop doin’ what they like to do. When they’re kids, they like to watch cartoons, but that changes. When they get older, they like to screw a lot, but that goes, too. Some people even lose interest in eatin’.”
“Not you.”
“Not yet.” Blue slapped his belly. “But one thing’s for sure. We all want a good shit every day till we die.” Then he called into the house and asked Janice to flush a toilet.
The water rushed down the pipe from the house. They looked into the hole and watched it splatter into the tank. “I’d say you got problems.”
“Yeah, and a plugged line ain’t one of them.” The Humpster dragged a hose to the edge of the tank.
“Failed system, more likely,” said Blue. “That and an uncle who don’t know what’s good for him.”
“Now I know why the A-Team came.”
The Humpster sprayed the sewage off the grass around the lip of the tank, and some of it splattered onto his father’s trousers. For this he got another “Stupid son of a bitch!”
“You work in shit, expect to get some on your pants,” said Geoff.
“You could have it all over this place before you’re finished.” Blue looked around the yard.
The old house with the Greek Revival trim stood on an acre of land halfway up Tom’s Hill. There were ancient apple trees growing in the front yard, taller locusts all around the boundary. A hedge shielded them from the paved road below and from the dirt road that led up the hill.
Across the marsh on Cornhill, modern houses turned glass faces toward the sea, but the backside of Tom’s Hill had remained rural, a quiet little swatch of a Cape Cod long past. Its exquisite privacy had been a mistake of time rather than design. The nineteenth-century fisherman who built this simple house had had room for fruit trees because the land had cost less than the nails to build the house. And while you could see the ocean, there were no sweeping vistas of blue, because, for a fisherman, the sea was nothing more than a place of work and death.
In keeping with the house, the cesspool was about the oldest design you could find, nothing more than a stone cistern porous enough for liquids to leach into the surrounding sand, while bacteria consumed the solids. It was efficient enough, as long as there weren’t too many cesspools putting pressure on the sandy soil, and as long as the sand remained permeable.
Cape Cod’s water came from a single giant aquifer, a reservoir of fresh water floating precariously between the sand above and the salt water below, like curaçao floating between the cream and the crème de menthe in one of those fancy drinks. And if they kept building, someday all the cesspools might overwhelm the sand’s filtering ability, and some wells might start to pump gray water. Clam flats had already been polluted by tainted runoff. And if the aquifer was depleted, salt water might mix with fresh and destroy the whole system.
But all of this caused Blue Bigelow to smile, because whenever a septic system failed, the state required upgrading to what it called Title V standards, and Blue made big money. He pumped out the shit, he designed the system, and he put it in.
“If you need another pump real quick, you can start thinkin’ about Title Five. But you’re an environmentally sensitive kind of guy, so you won’t mind much.”
“How much?”
“Could be five or six grand, could be twenty-five or thirty. It all depends on how the glacier went through.” Blue lit a cigarette.
Geoff closed his eyes and waited for the explosion of sewer gas.
“That’s where your second problem comes in.”
“Rake?”
“You and him are sittin’ on a lot of money at Jack’s Island, and you may need it to solve your first problem.”
“What do I owe you for the pump?”
Blue waved a hand. Even his friendliest gesture carried some threat. “Just lean on that uncle of yours to let go of the land. I got a lot of people who want work.”