Then the turn onto Richards Drive, where I clenched my eyes tighter, for extra protection from a glimpse of the Hempstead House through the trees. Soon gravel popped against the undercarriage, the car gave one last rev of exhaustion before shutting off, and we had arrived. The bay could wait, the house could wait—they never changed so there was no need to appraise them, coo over them, honor them in any way—and me and my brother beat it to our bedroom for some proper sleep. Since my sister went off to college, Reggie and I had separate bedrooms after sharing a room our whole lives, either stacked on top of each other in bunk beds or head-to-head in a twin-bed L along the walls. Having our own space was wonderful. But out in Sag, we were back to sharing a room and we despised being so reduced in circumstance. The indignity of it all. There was an invisible fur covering everything, a musty coat, and it would linger for a couple of days until the house aired out.
It was six-thirty in the morning. That was that. We were out for the summer.
• • •
ONCE THE SEASON WAS IN FULL SWING, you came across one of the tribe and they asked, Do you know who else is out? The tantalizing inflection meant that they'd run into someone who hadn't been seen in a long time, some unlikely soul who'd gone missing in the big wild world. Bobby Hemphill, they said, Tammy Broderick, they said, and all the ancient stories and escapades bubbled up, nods and winks all around before you got to the business of trading rumors, the undermining of cover stories. Heard he got his pilot's license, he told me he went back to dental school. Rehab. She followed the trail of hang ups and odd receipts to her husband's mistress, dumped him, and decided to start coming out again. What were they up to? “A little this, a little that, you know, making some moves.” That golden oldie: “Getting some stuff off the ground.” Vague as hell, but persuasive if the speaker quickly changed the subject with a “How's your mom and pops?” They were back out to see if it had changed, if it was still the same, to recoup, recover, catch a breath. It was the bed you knew the best and all that entailed. We tried not to smirk at their predicaments, smirk at home maybe but not out there in public. It's such a nice day and we were raised better than that. By that strict generation.
There was something so sad about Those Who Didn't Come Out Anymore. Sometimes we knew why they didn't come out anymore, sometimes we didn't. Slander by their name if we suspected they thought themselves better than us. Good old Bobby, Good old Tammy. We called them by the old nicknames after all this time because it kept them in our clutches no matter how they struggled. They were branded by their pasts as much as we were. It was a close community and we all had dossiers on one another.
When I woke up, I heard my mother working the phone, trying to find out who was out, if the people who said they were coming out were indeed out, or if they had yet to arrive. No one was answering. Traffic or catastrophe, who knew. Reggie was already out of bed. In the kitchen, my father was bent over the grill scraping off last year's residue, strumming his harp with a pinkly foaming scouring pad. The pink reminded me of something and I went to check it out.
The doors to the storage space beneath the deck were secured by a cheap bolt from the Hardware Store in Town, as it was always referred to. No one ever tried to break in. I waded into the slatted light, swatting spiderwebs and half-digested creatures from my hair. I stepped over a spaghetti plate of hose and our three prizefighter rakes, one full smile between them, and approached the blue slopes of Mount Fuji. I pulled the tarp from the bike, spilling the dirty lakes that had accumulated over the winter. Reggie's bike lay a few feet away, wheels poking out from under plastic. It had fallen over at some point while we were away.
I tugged the red Fuji outside. The bike had been too small for me for a long time but now looked hopelessly lame. The grip tape on the handlebars, once a brilliant red, had faded to an inexcusably girlie pink. I'd raised the bike seat the last few summers, thin rusty scars marking the bar like the growth rings in a tree. When I raised the seat up this year, it'd be a clown bike. It needed air, and oil, and when I lifted it, it felt as light as a ball of aluminum foil.
“Reggie!” I yelled. He didn't answer. “Reggie!”
I found him up on the deck, hunched over the side of a chaise. At his feet, on some newspaper, I recognized an ancient bottle of ammonia from under the kitchen sink. It was older than I was. Reggie dipped a toothbrush into the bottle and then slowly rubbed it against the foxing of one of his new sneakers—puffy white Filas, B-boy specials he'd started wearing the week before. They weren't his usual style of footwear, a little further out into the Street than we ever ventured. He appraised the sneaker, rubbed the toothbrush against some tiny scuff, returned to the ammonia, and repeated the process. It was the most gentle I had ever seen him.
“What are you doing?”
“What's it look like? Cleaning my kicks.”
Such an alien thought, keeping your sneakers clean. I'd switched over to black Chuck Taylors that spring, a gesture toward punk by my sights (no one cared), and the days had not been kind to them.
The black canvas had sickened to uneven gray, and the toe bumpers a jaundiced yellow. But the true shame was the shoelaces, which were too long to begin with, and which I ineptly tied in addition, and had over the months dragged across whole marathons of Manhattan pavement. Perhaps you have seen documentary footage of a dry lake bed in the Kalahari, where it rains once a year for one precious hour. The lake bed transforms into an all-star tribute to the dynamism of creation. Dried-out seeds explode into flowering vegetation in an instant, nearsighted pollywogs and gangs of winged bugs suddenly hatch out of microscopic eggs, and all the parched animals who have been dying for a drink scurry out on their skinny legs to fill their humps and canteens. A whole, ragged world erupting from that one thunderclap. Now imagine the germy legions and bacterial hordes slumbering in the sidewalks of New York, waiting for a little moisture. On rainy days, the shoelaces were their floppy refuge, soaking up these misbegotten life-forms and granting them salvation. They were a holy land.
I heard about his sneakers before I saw them. Reggie was an easy sleeper who occasionally talked in his sleep, and I was an apprentice insomniac and eager audience for his nocturnal soliloquies. I usually tried to engage his gibberish and get a conversation going but it never worked. His mouth was awake but his ears slumbered. The week before we went out to Sag, we were watching TV in the living room when Reggie fell asleep and began to mumble. I waited for an opening. Maybe this time I would unlock the secrets of his unconscious mind, and use what I learned against him later.
“My new Filas … the brambles.”
“Tell me about the brambles,” I said patiently.
Reggie turned into the cushions. He said, “My new Filas … are …” And that was it.
I saw now that the missing word was white. His new Filas, following his ministrations, were a sheer gleaming white. He had his hand deep in one sneaker and held it up to the sky, scrutinizing it, tilting slowly to and fro, as if it were a piece of cloud that had broken off and conked him on the head. “The brambles” I interpreted as the unjust world, the vast array of malevolent forces out to blemish or mar his blessed kicks. I'd talk in my sleep, too, if I had such heavy thoughts roiling in my brain. (Maybe I did talk in my sleep but there was no one to hear me.) I wanted to know the origin of Reggie's behavior. Why Filas? Who told him about using ammonia? I said, “Let's go riding around.”
“I gotta wait for them to dry.”
Half an hour later, I was waiting in the driveway. Three months, I thought. In idle moments, I retreated into that early-summer dream of reinvention, when you set your eyes on September and that refurbished self you were going to tool around in, honking the horn so people would take notice, driving slowly around all the right hot spots: Look at me. I had a Plan coming together, and three months to implement it. Surely I was not alone in my delusion, although that wouldn't have occurred to me then. All over the world the teenage millions searched for routes out of their dank, personal laby
rinths. Signing up for that perfect extracurricular, rehearsing fake smiles before toothpaste-flecked mirrors, rummaging through their personalities to come up with laid-back greetings and clever put-downs to be saved for that special occasion. Lying sprawled on their beds, ankles crossed, while they overanalyzed the lyric sheets of the band that currently owned their soul, until the words became a philosophy. Running up to bordering cliques and hurriedly exclaiming, “I want to defect!” All of them stooped and hungry, lurching after that shadowy creature, the New Me. An elusive beast, but like I said, I had three months to get my shit together.
“Come on!” I yelled.
My little bike. I leaned it away from me so I could get a good look. Flat tires, rusted joints, peeling paint, out of scale. Only a buffoon would climb on such a thing, but I'd been marked as such for a while now—some grave mistakes the first week of freshman year, and I'd derailed all my junior-high schemes of social improvement. I was one of those dullards who thought that “Just be yourself” was the wisdom of the ages, the most calming piece of advice I had ever heard, and acted accordingly. It enabled these words, for example, to escape my mouth: “I can't wait for Master of Horror George A. Romero to make another film. Fangoria magazine—still the best horror and sci-fi magazine around if you ask me—says he has trouble raising funding, but I think Hollywood is just scared of what he has to say.” And also: “It seems like we—all of us—made a mistake by switching over to Advanced D&D. The Basic game was … purer, you know?” Statements (of simple truth!) that had been harmless weeks ago were now symptoms of disease. And possibly catching. I was just being myself, and I was just being avoided. For whole, contaminated semesters now.
Reggie didn't talk about his first year of high school. But he didn't look happy, and if I was faring poorly, logic said he had to be doing worse. I had always been the capable one, if you can imagine.
“Where's your bike?” I asked, when he finally showed up.
“Nah, I'm going to walk.”
This was a breach of protocol. Riding around meant riding.
“You can ride if you want,” Reggie said. “I'm going to walk.” He looked down at his sneakers with great meaning.
It was the last time we'd start the summer that way. It was how we always did it, that first day—get out the bikes and take the measure of things. Tour the developments to see who else was around, recruit, then hit town, the five-and-ten, the Ideal, get a slice at Conca Doro. This was our system, skidding down the streets like some fraternal tumbleweed gusted about. Technically, we were hitting the reset button on our twinhood, but it didn't seem like that much of a cheat. Maybe it didn't matter what went on during the rest of the year. Sag Harbor was outside the rules.
“I'm not going to wait for you,” I said. But I didn't leave him. I wobbled in foolish loops around him, out in front then doubling back. My long legs zagged goofily about. Each time I turned, the flat tires made long farting noises as the rubber collapsed into the asphalt. Reggie kept a solid pace as we headed up Walker Avenue. There were three housing developments in our summer world—Azurest, where we stayed, Sag Harbor Hills, and Ninevah. But Ninevah was a bit of a hike, and only Bobby lived there, and we'd trained him over the years to come to us, so it was off our itinerary. Azurest, check out the Hills, then town.
I didn't see a lot of parked cars. The summer people were trickling in. This was when there were still plenty of unimproved lots and people hadn't started building the really big places. The majority of the houses were two-or three-bedroom jobs built in the '60s. Snubbed-nosed, single-story ranch houses with cement patios and screened-in porches sat next to pastel-colored split-levels with oil-stained carports and unruly hydrangeas for that extra dab of color. Occasionally you came across a harsh-angled beach house, sheathed in rain-streaked gray pine and introduced by dark gravel that leaked out into the street after every big storm. No matter the size or make of the house, the early arrivals were tormented by the same questions. Did the roof keep through the winter, did the pipes hold, did a townie or local bad kid break in and steal the television, or was it just the raccoons and squirrels who had given the place the once-over? Is it still here or did I just dream it?
We passed the house that we always called “haunted,” and for the first time we skipped our ritual, in which one of us dared the other to knock on the door, we argued about it for a few minutes, and then somebody threw a pebble at one of the windows as we ran away screaming. It was a tiny box of a house, shrinking every year into further dilapidation as more roof shingles flew away and the paint scabbed off. A motorboat on its hitch was barely visible for the weeds and bushes, beached there in cracked fiberglass after the Great Flood, and an old barbecue grill lay on its side, half in the woods, legs poking up, like a potbellied animal that had crawled there to die. Like we said, haunted.
There were a bunch of these ramshackle abodes scattered throughout the developments. The hedges grew out into—let's face it—a nappy riot, grasses filled the tire ruts of the driveways, and the front yard became a minefield of old phone books, the swollen pages of info straining against their plastic sheaths. The houses of Those Who Didn't Come Out Anymore. Who knew the stories behind them. Ask my mother about this or that house and she'd say, “They Don't Come Out Anymore,” in such a way that you saw the weeds growing up around her words. There were obvious reasons—economic reversal, no longer living in the Northeast—but my thoughts always tended to the melancholic. Like, the red house on Milton was one generation's gift to the next, but the kids and grandkids neglected it, didn't appreciate the treasure they possessed, and left it to rot. Or, the people who lived on Cuffee Drive hadn't come out in decades, but if they sold the property, what did they have? It was the most important thing they had in their lives and they held out hope that one summer they would return. Maybe the missing neighbors absorbed all our bad luck so that we could have it easy.
Over the years I discovered that there was a variety of haunted. There were houses that were immaculately maintained, but where you never saw any people. The gutters sparkled in the sunlight, the hedges were grazed into clean, perfect geometry, the curtains in the windows just so. The lawn mowers appeared the first day of spring, shredding up and down the rows twice a week, and the sprinklers maintained sure, sibilant order, calibrated to wet one molecule's distance from the property line and no farther. But you never saw a human presence. No lights, no cars, no life-affirming barbecue smoke rising from the deck in the backyard. The houses waited all summer for their owners to appear, and then one day the lawn guy made his last visit and that was that. Well, taking into account people's schedules, it was possible that you might miss seeing your neighbor, never pass them on the street. You could coexist in this Sag Harbor galaxy in perfectly alienated orbits, always zipping into each other's blind spots, or hidden on the dark side of the moon. Of course that could happen to people who lived on the same street. Sometimes it happened to people who lived in the same house.
Someone was writing the maintenance checks, doling out cash to LILCO and the water company, but somewhere they got stalled out. There was a malfunction. I couldn't wrap my head around it. That kind of house was different from the ones that were kept up all summer but were only inhabited one weekend a year, usually Labor Day. The one-weekenders were a familiar group, not known for their planning skills. And for completion's sake, we should also respect that renaissance house, haunted for long years but rediscovered by a new generation out to reclaim some shred of childhood joy, or by new arrivals who finally owned their little piece of the Sag Harbor mystique after so long. They fixed the roof, redid the patio, finally put in a decent water heater that didn't go into a coma after one shower. Performed an exorcism. Kudos.
WE ROUNDED THE BEND on Walker. Marcus was first up in our circuit. The Collins House was a lime-green split-level where we were never allowed upstairs. Marcus's bedroom was on the first floor, next to the rec room, and there we had often loitered around the old Trinitron, but going upstai
rs was off-limits to kids. Periodically, his mother shouted down directives we couldn't decipher, and Marcus would curse, stomp upstairs, and disappear for a while. When that happened we knew we were getting kicked out into the street. We were already standing when Marcus eventually reappeared, tossing excuses, and we beat it out the sticky screen door to the next afternoon oasis.
The telephone book was still waiting on Marcus's front step, and this year's Oldsmobile, the next in a proud line of Collins Oldsmobiles, was not to be seen. “Let's take the shortcut,” Reggie said. Walker was the last street in Azurest before Sag Harbor Hills, so it was convenient for taking a shortcut to the other side.
We loved shortcuts. For a long time, it was hard to top the thrill of slipping into a slim corridor into the woods, undetectable except for the small mound of kicked-up soil by the side of the road. Sometimes a shortcut was half woods and half a sprint through someone's property, but the best ones cut through two unimproved properties, one in Azurest, the other in the Hills. Even though you were only making your way across two quarter-acre lots, it was like hacking through primeval forests, the gigantic fronds of an alien planet. The only people who had preceded us were fellow explorers. Each time the branches shivered closed behind us, we exited our juvenile existences and joined the fraternity of the brave. I never discovered any shortcuts on my own. I only found out about them when the rest of the gang initiated me. Didn't have the eye, apparently.
The real woods outside of the developments were the true frontier, enigmatic and intimidating. Behind the gas station, or leading out from the paths behind the park, we tramped farther and farther from the roads we knew, each fork thoroughly debated—left is madness, right is the buried treasure, the gold doubloons to be divvied up according to age and status. We stumbled across shotgun shells, remains of fires, crushed beer cans, fresh tracks gouged by motorbikes—dangerous characters were up to inscrutable things between towns. Who had left these things, who was lurking in the shadows? “The KKK” was the usual answer, the reliable if unlikely boogeyman, tossed out there to amp up the feeling of danger. Statistically speaking, there may have been some members of the KKK in the near vicinity—it was the Hamptons, a “resort community” after all, and even the worst America has to offer occasionally need to unwind, catch some rays—but it was unlikely that they were patrolling on horseback, in full getup, complete cracker regalia, behind the dirt trails of Mashashimuet Park. Nonetheless, everybody immediately traded versions of how they were going to outrun the KKK—“I'd be out in front of you dummies with a quickness,” “Knock your ass down to buy me some time”—while I kept silent, thinking of how I was going to save Reggie. Grandiose scenes of self-sacrifice came easily to me, wherein I distracted the Hooded Menace long enough to allow him to escape. He was my little brother.