41 RELICS
I started back toward Dunetown but when I got to the boulevard I went east instead of going back
toward town. I really didn‟t have anything to do after I left Skeeler‟s, but I had to put some distance
between me and Dunetown. I needed a little time to myself, away from Stick, Dutch, and the
hooligans. Away from Doe. Away from them all. I was tired of trying to make some sense out of a lot
of disparate jigsaw pieces, pieces like Harry Raines, Chief, and Stoney Titan. Like Donleavy and his
sweaty banking friend, Seaborn. Like Chevos and Nance, a badluck horse named Disaway, and a
black gangster I didn‟t even know whom everybody called Nose, but not to his face. I suddenly had
the feeling that using people had become a way of life for me and I didn‟t like the feeling and I
needed some room to deal with that. I needed to get back to my safe places again, at least for a little
while.
When I got to the Strip I headed south, putting the tall hotels that plundered the beach behind me. I
drove south with the ocean to my left, not sure where I was going. I just smelled the sea air and kept
driving. Finally I passed a decrepit old sign peering out from behind the weeds that told me I had
reached someplace called East Beach. It was desolate. Progress had yet to discover it.
I parked my car in a deserted public lot. Weeds grew up through the cracks in the macadam, and small
dunes of sand had been collected by the wind along its curbs. I sat looking out at the Atlantic for a
while. The sea here was calm, a mere ripple in the bright sunlight, and the beach was broad and clean.
It revived memories long buried, the good times of youth that age often taints with melancholy.
My mind was far from Dunetown. It was at a place called Beach Haven, a village on the Jersey coast
where I had spent several summers living on a houseboat with the family of my best friend in
grammar school. I couldn‟t remember his name but I did remember that his father was Norwegian and
spoke with a marvellous accent and wore very thick glasses and that the family was not in the least
modest and that he had a sister of high school age who thought nothing at all of taking a shower in
front of us. Sitting there in the hot sedan with sweat dripping off my chin, I also recalled that I had
spent a good part of that summer trying to hide a persistent erection.
After a while I got out and took off shoes, socks, jacket, and tie and put them in the trunk. I slammed
it shut, then opened it again, dropped my beeper in with them, and went down to the beach.
I rolled my pants legs to the knee and walked barefoot with the sand squeaking underfoot. I must have
walked at least a mile when I came upon a small settlement of summer cottages, protected by walls of
granite rock that were meant to hold back the ocean. It had been a futile gesture. The houses were
deserted. Several had already broken apart and lay lopsided and forlorn, awash with the debris of
tides.
One of them, a small two-bedroom house of cypress and oak, was still perched tentatively over the
rocks, its porch supported by six-by-sixes poised on the granite boulders. A faded sign, hanging
crookedly from the porch rail, told me the place was for sale, and under that someone had added, with
paint, the words “or rent.” There was a phone number.
I went up over the big gray rocks, climbed the deck railing, and looked through the place, a forlorn
and lonely house. The floor creaked and sagged uncertainly under each step and the wind, sighing
through its broken windows, sounded like the ghost of a child‟s summer laughter.
I stripped down to my undershorts, went down to the deserted beach, and ran into the water,
swimming hard and fast against the tide until arms and legs told me to turn back. I had to breaststroke
the last few yards and when I got out I was breathing heavily and my lungs hurt, but I felt clean and
my skin tingled from the saltwater. I went back up to the house and stretched out on the deck in the
sun.
I was dozing when the woman came around the corner of the house. She startled us both and as I so
rambled for my pants she laughed and said, “Don‟t bother. Most of the gigolos hanging around the
hotel pools wear far less than that.”
She was an islander, I could tell; a lovely woman, delicate in structure, with sculptured features
textured by wind and sun, tiny white squint-lines around her eyes, and amber hair coiffured by the
wind. I couldn‟t guess how old she was; it didn‟t matter. She was carrying a seine net—two five-foot
wooden poles with the net attached to each and topped by cork floats. The net was folded neatly
around the poles.
“I was halfway expecting my friend. He sometimes waits up here for me,” she said, peering inside
without making a show of it. Then she added, “Are you flopping here?”
I laughed.
“No, but it‟s a thought.”
She looked around the place.
“This was a very dear house once,” she said. She said it openly and without disguising her sadness.
“Do you know the owners?” I asked
“It once belonged to the Jackowitz family, but the bank has it now.”
Her sad commentary told rue all I needed to know of its history.
“What a shame. There‟s still some life left to it.”
“Yes, but no heart,” she said.
“Banks are like that. They have a blind appetite and no soul. They‟re the robots of our society.”
“Well, I see my friend down on the beach. I‟m glad you like the house.”
A skinny young man in cutoffs with long blond hair that flirted with his shoulders was coming up the
beach carrying a bucket. She went down over the boulders to the sand.
“Hey?” I said.
She turned and raised her eyebrows.
“Is your name Jackowitz?”
“It used to be,” she said, and went on to join her friend.
I got dressed and walked back through the surf to the parking lot. I found a phone booth that still
worked and called the number that was on the sign at the house, It turned out to be the Island Trust
and Savings Bank. I managed, by being annoyingly persistent, to get hold of a disagreeable little
moron named Ratcher who, I was told, was “in beach property”
“I‟m interested in a piece of land on East Beach,” I said. “It might have belonged to a family called
Jackowitz.”
I could hear papers rustling in the background.
“Oh, yes,” he said, probably after turning up the foreclosure liens. “I know the place.” I could tell he
knew as much about that cottage as I know about Saudi Arabian oil leases.
“Are you in real estate?” he asked curtly.
“No, I thought I might just rent it for the rest of the summer,” I told him.
“The place is condemned,” he said nastily. “And this establishment prosecutes trespassers.” He hung
up. I stood there for a minute or two, then invested another quarter and got Ratchet back on the phone.
“Ratcher?”
“Yes!”
“You‟re a despicable little asshole,” I said, and hung up.
I drove back down toward the beach and, by trial and error, found a neglected road that led to the
house and sat there, watching the woman whose name was once Jackowitz and her young man with
the long hair, dragging their seine nets slowly along the water‟s edge, picking the shrimp arid mullet
out after each drag and putting them in the bucket. After a while it started to rain and they quit. I
waved to them as they walked off down the beach. I‟m not sure they saw me but it would be nice to
think they did and that they knew the house still meant something to someone. Finally I drove back