The End of the Point (25 page)

Now no game or cousins, just Charlie undone and undoing, removing markings in the night. He knew it would lead to nothing, but he did it anyway, stowing the tags behind the drawer under one of the cabin’s built-in beds. Over a quarter century later, cleaning out that drawer to make space for his girlfriend Rachel’s weekend clothes, he would come across the tags and be surprised that he had saved them, the sight of them slightly painful even after so much time. Rachel was on the other bed; it was Memorial Day weekend (round and round it came, and always here). He’d built a fire in the woodstove, made them milky Earl Grey tea. “What?” Rachel asked, but vaguely; she was bent over her laptop, working on a paper, her bangs covering her eyes. Charlie held up the tangle of plastic; it was, among other things, a chance to sneak a look at her (they were still so new). “What’s that?” Rachel asked. He might have told her then, the whole story, or the pieces that came back to him, but the memory was shameful—all gesture, no action—and from a period in his life he rarely talked about. “Surveyor tags,” he’d said simply, and when she didn’t press, he threw the tags away.

V

T
HE FIRST TIME
Charlie gave Jerry Silva a ride was not the first time he had passed him on Gooseneck Road, but it was raining that morning and there, on the side of the road, was a guy he’d seen before on his way to town, only today he was soaked and hauling a large canvas bag. Every few days that summer, Charlie was in the habit of driving or biking to town for food, where he bought only enough for a couple of days so he’d need to go back to the Village Market, take money from his pocket, hand it over, receive the change. Speak. He didn’t generally pick up hitchhikers (once, earlier in the summer, he’d pulled over at the foot of Windy Point for three teenage girls who’d taken one look at him, giggled and run off), and Jerry’s thumb was not even out. Still, uncharacteristically, Charlie pulled over and rolled down the window. “Need a ride?” he asked, and this wet and wordless guy, still nameless to Charlie at that point, got in.

Even once the car started up again, they did not speak—not about the rain, which was sheeting down over the harbor as they crossed the drawbridge, not about their respective destinations. No chitchat, no introductions or how-do-you-dos or it-sure-is-coming-down-hards. The guy was olive-skinned and brown-eyed and looked Portuguese or even Indian (the black ponytail helped), and this pleased Charlie, who liked how dark his own skin got in the summer, some glitch or untold story in his WASP and Swiss-French genes. When they reached the market, he stopped the car and his passenger got out and rounded the corner out of sight. They might have been two animals, foxes or coyotes, pairing up for a time as they traveled across mutual territory, then splitting off without a glance.

A few days later, driving back from town, Charlie saw him again. This time it was a steaming, sunny day and Jerry was barefoot, dressed in frayed cutoffs and a flannel shirt, and holding, again, the canvas bag. As Charlie slowed and pulled over, Jerry turned and lifted a hand in a half salute.

“That bag looks heavy,” Charlie said out the car window.

“He’s not heavy, he’s my brother.”

Charlie smiled. “Does your brother need a ride?”

“Lemme see.” Jerry put his ear to the bag.

As he leaned down, Charlie saw that what had looked at first like a strip of cloth tied around his head was a dried snakeskin, black and orange, the skin pulled taut.

Jerry nodded. “Lazy son-of-a-gun. He says yeah, he’ll take a ride.”

Charlie leaned to open the car door.

WHY, OF ALL THE PEOPLE
in the world, did you have to take up with a nutcase, his mother would ask later. Not only his mother. Jane. His father. Dr. Miller, though his mother’s phrasing was the most direct. Why, of all the people? Was Charlie lonelier than he wanted to admit? Did he hope to find in Jerry—this from Dr. Miller—a more attenuated, or more authentic, version of himself, or to find himself normal in comparison? In fact, Jerry had seemed normal at first—quirky, yes, but in a good way. And even later, Charlie liked him, admired what he stood for, was trying to stand for. Felt his pain. Mostly, though, this: Could no one see that no matter how it played out, there was something worthy, something
valuable
, about the reaching out toward another human being during a time when nearly everything he did was aimed at the relentless discipline, protection, preservation of his so-called Self?

During the second car ride they exchanged names, and somehow Jerry already knew that Charlie was from Ashaunt, and when he said, So you’ve got one of the summer houses, Charlie said he lived in a one-room cabin, then added that he foraged and fished for a lot of his food (which was true) and would spend the fall out there (which hadn’t been true until he said it, when it became a plan). He had something to prove, or something to deny. Did it matter? For the first time in months, he felt eager to engage. Jerry said he fished too, and snared small game to eat. Charlie asked about the snakeskin, and Jerry said he’d found a water snake and stretched and dried the skin.

“Did you eat the meat?” Charlie asked.

“No. It was too skinny, and DOA. I had some on a snake farm once, though—blood, heart, eyeballs. They kill it right in front of you. Nothing goes to waste.”

“Where was that?”

“No place you’d know.”

“I cooked a snake once,” Charlie said. “It tasted okay, but there wasn’t much of it. A few years ago I had this idea of hunting and gathering everything I ate. It was harder than I expected. I only lasted a few days.”

Jerry nodded. “My cat’ll only eat Nine Lives, won’t even eat a mouse if I kill it for her—that’s the main problem for me with living wild. That and booze. But at least she stays out of my traps.”

“You have traps? What do you catch?”

“Chipmunks, rabbits, whatever takes the bait. I set up a squirrel snare a few days ago, but it hasn’t gotten anything yet.”

“Where’d you learn how to trap?”

“My father, the Mighty Wampanoag.”

“You’re kidding.”

Jerry laughed sharply. “Yup. I read some books.”

Could you show me how to build a snare, Charlie nearly asked, but something held him back. Jerry might have been a little older than he was, or even in his late twenties, good-looking but in an already slightly worn-out way. His hair was a glossy, blue-tinged black, his braid secured by twine. Burrs clung to his shirt. He might have been a vet, back from the war, but he could just as well have been a CO or student, or flat-footed, walleyed or a homo, or a hippie getting back to the land. Or he could even have been a guy more or less like Charlie, sponging, squatting at his family’s summer place. His coloring was off for that, but things were getting more mixed up these days; on Ashaunt there were a few half-Korean kids among the blonds, and Rusty’s older sister was engaged to a (Princeton-educated, lawyer) Jew.

Mostly in Jerry, at first, Charlie saw, what?—a Green Man, a dweller of the forest.
Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.
Later, he would learn that Jerry’s bag was filled with library books, and, on return trips, a new batch of books, along with liquor, cat food, peanut butter, beans. And what did Jerry see? Eventually Charlie would have to wonder this as well. Somebody curious? Somebody with two ears? A rich boy playing poor? A ride? Or this: a lonely person looking for a friend.

“Here,” said Jerry suddenly as they drove along. “Stop.”

Charlie veered onto the shoulder. A few minutes earlier, Jerry had told him to take a right onto Rock O’Dundee Road. Now there was no sign of a driveway or house, though they’d recently passed a rotting barn and silo, and after that, a construction site with bulldozers and mounds of dirt. Now, on each side of the road, just woods: the trees grew so well here, with such height and confidence, that you’d never suspect the ocean was a few miles away. Charlie looked for a path or other traces of human habitation and saw nothing, aside from a few No Trespassing signs nailed to trees. Over the years he had explored these woods, crossing over stone walls where farm fields used to be, bushwhacking down to a brook where the water ran copper from tannic acid, coming, once, upon a meadow full of spent daffodils that seemed to have multiplied profusely on their own.

“Here?” he asked.

Jerry nodded and got out with his bag. He looked down the road in both directions but did not move. In the distance, a motor started up, a towhee made its call—
Drink your tea
(Gaga’s translation), or (Bea’s)
Brush your teeth
.

“I can drop you at home,” Charlie said, as much out of curiosity as generosity. “Where do you live?”

“Close to the bone,” Jerry said.

He squatted by the door and met Charlie’s gaze across the front seat, and what passed between them was strong enough to feel almost erotic—a current stretching, a plea, but some kind of promise too, traveling in both directions: Follow, do not follow, follow me.
I live close to the bone.
It was from Thoreau. Charlie had been reading him just that week; they both had, though neither of them knew it of the other yet.

Charlie was the first to look away. “I live pretty close to the bone myself.”

VI

D
ON’T KNOW, BEA
said, for perhaps the fourth time. Maybe, Mrs. P. said, it should be something of his grandfather’s. A pocketknife, she thought aloud. Or a book they both cared about, but which one? Bea exchanged a look with Agnes as they sat on the faded couch in the Big House living room. What did you give a boy who had everything and thought he had nothing? Who dressed like a tramp and left his own and other people’s bicycles and tools in the rain, and had been living here on his own, no job, no course of study, no plan, as far as she knew, of any kind. They had arrived the night before, for Fourth of July weekend. Mrs. P. had told Charlie in a letter that she’d be bringing his late birthday present. She took her gift-giving seriously, but Mr. P. had often done the choosing for the boys.

“I’m flummoxed,” she went on. “I should have gotten something when I was in New York last week. The girls are easier.”

“How about a bit of money?” Agnes tried. “He’ll pick out something he wants.”

As in drugs, thought Bea.

“I will—I always do, but I need a present too.” Mrs. P. sighed, then perked up. “I know. What about a compass? One of his grandfather’s. Charlie may already have one, but I think he might like the idea. We’ve got a gold one in Grace Park, but I’m pretty sure there’s a camping one here—I can picture it.”

“Good idea,” Agnes said.

“But where might it be? Do either of you know?”

“No,” Agnes said. “But I can take a look around.”

Bea knew precisely where the compass sat—in the middle drawer of the child-sized maple secretary in the front hall, tucked in a ring box behind the fishing lure, twine and flashlights (the top drawer held Band-Aids, tweezers, batteries; the bottom drawer was swollen shut). In his last years, Mr. P. used to ask her to get it for him sometimes, to hold it in her palm or set it in his. He’d taught her how to turn the outside dial until it matched up with true north and then move the base plate until it pointed toward Gaga’s dock (which she’d not had put back in the water this season), or Scotland, or New York. Where, he would ask, would you like to go today? He had loved geography and maps, to watch the needle wobble in his hand. That she’d half fallen in love with him over the long course of years was a plain fact to her, as her name was a fact, as her body (which she cleaned and fed and otherwise generally ignored) was.

Mrs. P. had not let her husband’s death stop her from living, not in the slightest. She made—it was her mantra, and Bea admired her for it—the best of things, but she also seemed almost giddy sometimes since Mr. P. had died, free, and younger and, well, not properly mournful. Not three months after his death in February of last year, she’d offered all his clothing, save his army uniform and the suit he’d married her in, to Stewart and the grandsons, and given the discards to the Salvation Army. When Bea was boxing up the clothes, she took a necktie dotted with red sailboats from the pile, and a monogrammed handkerchief. That summer, Mrs. P. traveled with friends to Italy and France, and all the following fall and winter she went off each week to the opera and art shows in New York, where she’d taken an apartment at the Lowell Hotel. She oversaw her father’s small foundation, which supported the Newark schools and museums, and set up several scholarships in her late husband’s name. She lunched with her friends, her grandchildren and her grandchildren’s college roommates. She visited friends in the hospital, got her hair done in New York. In the Big House, she moved her bedroom upstairs for a better view and because the old room was too sad. She read the
New York Times
and
Herald Tribune
every day and stayed abreast.

Two days before Mr. P. died, he had thanked Bea, said I’ll see you someplace, Bea, I’m not a religious man but I do think it more likely than not, don’t you, and she’d nodded, utterly unable to speak. He had asked her to put his hand over hers, so she’d lifted it—feather-light, still broad—and placed it on her own. Mrs. P. had been in the room but had politely ignored them. When he fell asleep, Bea returned his hand and tucked him in. She had not been present at the moment of his passing, the door closed—just Mrs. P. and the doctor in there for much too long, and finally the doctor came downstairs with the news and it was just Mrs. P. left with him, and the sound of muffled sobs, and eventually she came down holding a spoon, which she looked at as if she couldn’t recall its use.

By the next week, the wheelchairs, braces, bed lifts were disassembled and donated, and not longer after, they began getting organized for Ashaunt. In September, at Mrs. P.’s urging, Bea started volunteering at the hospital in Orange, holding the babies, putting on a pink-striped smock and going up and down the halls with a cart stocked with playing cards, Saltines and orange juice—but she didn’t much like it, the smell of the place, babies passing through like cupcakes on a line, and after a few weeks of it, she gave it up. Then, last month, Scotland, a trip designed in part, she knew, to cheer her up.