That included the Ku Klux Klan, who burned a cross in front of the church a few months after his marriage. In a last flurry of nativism, Klansmen went about the Cape, frightening Catholics and foreigners both, but by 1928, most night riders rode rum. There was more money in bottles than in bed sheets.
Once past Race Point, the
Pilgrim Portagee
turned east. The gray and white town sank behind the dunes, which soon faded into the haze. After about twenty minutes, an old schooner appeared, snoozing at its anchor like a dog leashed to a stake. Off to the south a rotten five-master rolled on the swell. And to the north, an old bucket of bolts rusted away.
This was Rum Row, the beggars’ blockade that stretched along the American coast from Maine to Florida. The challenge for this navy, however, was not to keep things
out
, but get them
in
. Only ships of American registry could be seized outside the three-mile limit. So rum-ship captains registered in Britain, set their anchors ten miles offshore, and left the landing to men who could handle small boats in coastal waters—men like Perez Nance.
He guided the
Pilgrim Portagee
around the stern of a three-master named
The Dalmatian
, and tethered her to the seaward side, out of sight of patrolling cutters.
As soon as the
Portagee
was tied up, the loading began. She could carry three hundred cases, worth a hundred dollars apiece to the syndicate that owned the
Dalmatian
and the delivery trucks, five dollars apiece to the man who got the booze from one to the other. The liquor was packed in straw-filled burlap sacks—still called cases—and fitted into every corner. The work went quickly, because as soon as there was liquor on board the
Portagee
, she was hot.
Perez unsnapped the leather sheath that covered the axe-head and went aboard. He and the men of the
Dalmatian
worked for the same syndicate, but when he went aboard without a weapon, he felt as if he had gone without his pants. These were not sailors to trust in heavy seas—or with your back turned. In such company, an old battle-axe demanded respect.
“Hey, Iron Axe,” said one of them, “Sbardi come all the way out from Boston to see you. You in trouble?”
Perez swallowed the fear that rose with the linguiça he’d had for lunch. “Just load the booze.”
Sbardi and his three bodyguards sat in the captain’s cabin, playing poker. When Perez knocked, three hands went for shoulder holsters.
“Easy, boys.” Sbardi flicked his stubby fingers and Sammy the Snake made room for Perez.
Sammy had slicked-back hair and sleepy eyes, and always wore a life jacket because he was afraid of the water. Beneath the life jacket, he always wore a shoulder holster. Perez didn’t like Sammy or any of the others. The dark, disinterested faces said that any of them would chop him up with his own axe, stuff him into a burlap liquor case, and send him back to P-town without twitching a nose hair, and there were plenty of those in sight.
Of course, most of Sbardi’s hair was in his ears. His olive-colored skin was as smooth as an eggshell. And the way he hitched his pants up over his potbelly, he even
looked
like an egg. He waved his black Parodi cigar like a wand, and a glass of Haig & Haig appeared before Perez.
“Nice boat you got tied up at the stern.” Perez sipped the scotch and felt it burn through the linguiça.
“
The Gray Lady
. Ran it out from Boston in two hours. Forty foot, twin Fiats. Make most Coast Guard scows look like rowboats.”
“You… you on a pleasure cruise?”
“Uh-uh.” Sbardi blew a stream of smoke. “We got a problem with one of the other syndicates. Bunch of fuckin’ Irish bums. They got Southie, Quincy… halfway down to Plymouth, they got. But they greedy.”
“No good to be greedy. Plenty to go around.”
“Yeah, well, these fuckin’ Irish bums, we gotta teach ’em a lesson. I want you find out who’s runnin’ for a guy goes by the name Flip.”
Nance could think of several. But he scratched at his chin as though he’d never heard the name.
“You tell us who’s runnin’, where they land, when when… get some boys go visit ’em.”
Nance was as tough as anyone, but he steered clear of things beyond the beach. He knew only that along the dark roads between Cape Cod and Boston, men like Sbardi’s thugs were at their best. “This… this ain’t my line of work. I’d do you a lot more good outsmartin’ the Coast Guard.”
“And you’d make a lot more money with a bigger boat. More money to pass on to that little bambino.” Sbardi laughed like an old man buying his grandchildren gelato from a pushcart. “He a good boy?”
“Good boy. Big and strong.”
Sbardi puffed thoughtfully on his cigar. “Save what you make from this work. Save it, put it away, set him up in business. None of this… dirt.”
Nance swallowed a bit more scotch. “For the boy, I do some dangerous things, but no gunplay, no head-knockin’.”
“Eh”—Sbardi shrugged—“you play with fire, maybe you get burned. But maybe I give you the
Gray Lady
. Carry six hundred cases, so fast she outrun Coast Guard
bullets
, never mind the boats. Make you three thousand bucks every fuckin’ trip. You help, she’s yours.”
iv.
Rake went to the Cape Playhouse a week later. The play was called
Mr. Pim Passes By
. Henry Fonda had passed
it
by and was now in some other summer theater someplace in Connecticut.
Good riddance, thought Rake. With luck, that would be the last he’d see of Fonda. The backstage talk this week was of a young actress with big eyes and a bad temper named Bette Davis. Rake thought Mary was a lot better, but he hadn’t come with compliments.
“Hiya, fisherman,” said one of the girls in the dressing room. “Got any haliddock?”
“How ’bout some chow-dah?” called another.
Rake ignored them. He went to the corner where Mary was slicking off her stage makeup with cold cream. “You and
Hank
want to go fishing?”
“Get lost,” she said, without looking up.
He put the bouquet under her nose.
“Is that supposed to be funny?” She glanced at the dandelions and lousewort and other weeds, festooned with cattails and marsh grass.
“Thought this might be more to your taste than the first one.” He set it on the table. “Don’t need a vase.”
“You got that right, fisherman.” She picked the bouquet up to throw it into the trash, but the heft of it made her curious. It had its own vase, wrapped in woven marshgrass.
She peeled back the dandelions and sliced a long red fingernail into the weaving. Beneath was the corner of an orange label with juniper berries—Gordon’s gin. “Where would a fisherman get—”
But the fisherman was gone.
She gently unscrewed the top, passed her nose over the lip, and smelled merry old England, uncut and unadulterated. She had learned to tell the good stuff from the rotgut. She had also learned to ignore the insult when a gentleman brought gin instead of candy. Candy she could buy at the general store.
A few days later, Mary hitchhiked to Jack’s Island. It seemed that she had gotten herself fired. She had bobbled a line, causing Bette Davis to miss a cue. Afterward, Davis had accused her of being drunk on stage, which was a lie. Mary drank no more than the other girls, and never before the show. But the producers sided with the rising star, who was not Mary.
At the causeway, she put down her suitcase and sat on it. She rubbed her knuckles, where she’d smacked Davis, but her pride felt worse than her knuckles. And her feet felt worse than her pride. She slipped off her shoes and rubbed the soles of her feet. She should have known that on Cape Cod you needed something more than heels. And a wide-brimmed hat would have helped, too, instead of a cloche that you’d wear to some West Eighties speakeasy.
But it was all for the best. She was on her way to Provincetown. Dennis was nothing but a backwater of summer families and tooth-sucking old Yankees looking to make a buck from the Off-Capers. She’d heard that Provincetown was like Greenwich Village gone to summer school. There were artists at easels in the dunes, writers in the cafés, speakeasies right in the town, and the Provincetown Players, the first company to produce the plays of Eugene O’Neill.
But Mary was broke. To get to P-town, she needed another ride, and she
was
a little thirsty… and come to think of it, that fisherman did look a bit like Hank Fonda.
It was a sparkling afternoon, the kind she wrote about in letters to her New York girlfriends when she wanted to make them envious: “There’s a hot sun but a cool breeze. A clean stillness hangs over the marshes and meadows, letting you hear sounds you never hear in New York—the chatter of a mockingbird when you pass her nest, the slamming of a screen door down the road, the faraway cries of kids at the beach….” Her friends wouldn’t envy her now.
The west side of the island was covered with stunted pitch pines, the only kind of forest on Cape Cod. In the middle of the island, the trees thinned to meadows dotted with cedars, as though somebody had painted them in, thinking they’d look nice against the blue of the bay. And over on the east side, seedy lawns and hedges grew up around a big house.
She took the west fork. The sandy shoulders of the road were kind to her feet, and the scrawny trees threw more shade than she’d expected. Not bad walking at all. And there was a sweetness in the air, of pine and berries. Soon she came to a boathouse at the edge of the creek.
It was low tide. Nothing more than a trickle of water ran through the creek and onto the tideflats, like a river fading into an alkali sink in some cowboy serial. Two little boys were scrambling around a motorboat in the mud.
“Hey, you kids got names?”
“I’m Dickerson,” said the big one, who looked to be about eight. He had a layer of fat around his belly and an aggressive little scowl. The other one studied her with a sweetly quizzical expression that made him look a bit like an inbred, of which she had seen more than one in these parts.
“This here’s Hiram,” offered Dickerson. “He’s seven. Who’re you?”
“Name’s Mary. Are you Hilyards?” And was this fisherman stepping out on his wife and two kids?
“Nah. We’re Bigelows. The Hilyards live down the road.”
“Next house?”
“The one after. Next one’s my grampa’s. He was a senator.”
“A Washington senator?”
“Nah, just a state senator. Now he got a cancer.”
“Oh, uh, sorry.” She wasn’t much for small talk with little boys, especially about cancer. She left them to hotwire the boat and hurried on. Soon she passed a decrepit old windmill, all overgrown with brambles and vines, and she had the feeling she was walking back in time. Then she came to a big house, built in a style she’d read about somewhere. French Provincial? Greek something-or-other? She couldn’t quite remember. The name on the shingle read Charles Bigelow, Lawyer. She turned east and followed the road.
She found Rake in the barn behind his old Cape house. He was caulking a catboat.
“Hiya, Stage Door.” She dropped her suitcase.
He gave her no more than a glance, as though he had been expecting her all along. “What happened to your shoes?”
She wiggled her toes. They were coated all over with dust, which made her red nails look as cheap as rhinestones. She daintily lowered her ass to the edge of the suitcase, brushed off her feet, put on her shoes. And if she just happened to show more leg than this fisherman might have seen in his whole life, where was the harm?
However, if he was impressed by the whiteness of her thighs, he had a peculiar way of showing it. He fit his caulking iron into a joint and pounded some oakum. “Looks like somebody come to see Stage Door ’cause she got kicked out the front door.”
“
Back
door’s more like it. That Davis dame said I was drunk on stage. So I smacked her.”
“By gar, you’re a feisty one.” He put down his caulking tools and opened a trapdoor in the floor. “That deserves a beer.”
“But, gee-golly-gosh, it’s Prohibition.” She widened her eyes and gave her voice a little Betty Boop squeak. “Ain’t beer illegal?”
He laughed and pulled a burlap bag from below.
She heard the tinkling music of beer bottles tapping against one another, and soon she was licking the foam from her lips. The beer had a fresh, nutty taste, as cool as the earth it came from. “Guess you must’ve wanted to smack me, the way I treated you.”
“Yes, yes, I guess. And maybe you wanted to smack me for giving you a bouquet of weeds.”
“I liked the vase.” She sipped and let the coolness of the beer fizz on her gums. In this light, he really did look like Hank Fonda. “So… you a rumrunner?”
“ ’Fore Prohibition, nobody much cared ’bout booze. These days, win more friends with a bottle of gin than a halibut steak, and don’t know
who
to trust. If someone ain’t watchin’ to find your hidin’ place, they’re out to weasel on you.” He crouched in front of her and looked her in the eye. “Helluva way to live, but don’t trust anyone, girlie-girl. Now, what’re you after?”
Indignation
. She summoned it from her bag of expressions. “What makes you think I’m after anything?”
“Can tell when the mackerel are gettin’ ready to rise. Ought to be able to tell when someone’s after somethin’.”
She took another swallow of the beer. She could stomp out and keep hitchhiking. Or swallow her pride. Or settle for something in between. She poured the last of her beer onto the floor. Refuse to swallow the beer,
then
swallow the pride. “All I want’s a ride to P-town. I’m broke and I don’t know anybody else. If you can’t be civil, I’ll get up there—”
“
Down
there.”
“
Up
there! It’s
north
. Don’t you people know geography?”
“Rake?” A dark-haired young woman appeared in the doorway.
The wife, thought Mary. He
was
stepping out, the bastard. She got ready to spit in his eye and skidoo.