Mark Mills - Amagansett

‘Don’t sound so surprised,’ said Lucy, coming to Hollis’ defense.

‘Yeah,’ said Hollis.

‘Come on, Tom, you’ve got looks, brains, a sense of humor, but not a whole lot of any of them.’

‘Abel Cole!’ snapped Lucy, kicking him under the table.

‘Jesus, Lou.’

‘He’s just jealous,’ said Lucy, turning to Hollis. ‘She’s one of the few women in town who never succumbed to his dubious charms. And, believe me, he tried.’

‘Is that what she told you?’

‘I remember you trying.’

‘I meant the bit about not succumbing.’

Hollis laughed. Abel was indomitable in these situations.

‘Don’t,’ said Lucy, ‘you’ll only encourage him.’

At that moment the waiter appeared at their table with the bottle of wine. He cast a surly eye over their unopened menus and left.

‘It’s okay, we’ll pour,’ said Abel, just loud enough for the departing youth to hear.

Hollis filled their glasses and insisted that they order whatever they wanted from the menu—it was his treat. There was nothing magnanimous in this gesture. He was painfully aware that he’d been living off their hospitality since Lydia had left him. A meal out was the least he could offer them.

His stated intention of getting them round to his house had somehow amounted to nothing, maybe because he had lost the desire to prove to himself that life went on. It didn’t. He knew that now. It stalled, shuddering towards inertia.

He was shocked by the speed with which the house had descended into a state of dereliction. Dust heaped up in corners he could swear he’d just swept. Clutter multiplied, begetting yet more clutter with no apparent involvement on his part. Without Lydia to spur him into action, hinges creaked, window sills leaked, taps dripped and bulbs went unchanged.

At first Hollis had battled bravely against this creeping decay, but at a certain point he had conceded defeat, contenting himself with an uneasy coexistence, singling out a room and concentrating all his efforts there, allowing the dust and detritus free run of the other areas of the house. The kitchen had been his first place of refuge, then the living room, but he’d recently retreated to the bedroom. He had plans to break out soon and reclaim the kitchen. But right now, number 4 Indian Hill Road was not a fit place to entertain one’s friends—in fact, it was hardly a fit place for anything—hence the dinner at the 1770 House.

Hollis and Abel opted for the steak; Lucy ordered the bluefish before announcing that she was going to ‘powder her nose’. Abel suggested she take a leak while she was at it.

‘You want to tell me what’s up?’ asked Hollis as soon as she had left.

Abel lit another cigarette and eyed him suspiciously, almost aggressively. ‘Who said anything was up?’

‘You seem a little edgy is all.’

‘Yeah?’

Hollis didn’t mind being shut out. He knew Abel well enough to accept that he’d tell him in his own time. This turned out to be about twenty seconds (and three large gulps of red wine) later.

‘She mentioned the M-word.’

‘Ah,’ said Hollis.

‘A couple of nights back. Just dropped it in there. Caught me on the hop. Guess I’m still hopping.’

‘Marriage, huh?’

Abel winced at the word. ‘Don’t do that.’

‘You brought it up.’

‘ She brought it up. I’m just…relaying it to you. Forget I ever mentioned it, okay?’

‘Okay,’ said Hollis. He waited, relishing his friend’s discomfort, trying not to smile. Abel snuck a look at the rest-room door.

‘So what do you think?’ he mumbled.

‘About what?’ asked Hollis innocently.

‘You know…the M-thing?’

‘What do I think? I think she’s crazy.’

‘Come on, Tom, seriously.’

‘Abel,’ he said despairingly, ‘she’s smart, talented, funny and very, very beautiful.’

‘I know, I know.’

‘She’s too good to be true. And she’s chosen you.’

‘That’s the point.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t you see?’

‘No.’

‘I wanted…’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t know…to amount to something first. Then think about it. Maybe. Or not. I don’t know.’

‘Abel, you’re a great photographer.’

‘Bullshit. And I’m not fishing for compliments.’

‘Let me lay some on you anyway.’

Abel wagged a hand, cutting him dead. Hollis didn’t persist. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t had the conversation before. Abel judged himself far too harshly. How many other photographers would have been mortified at getting their work on the front cover of Life magazine? How many would actually have given thanks for the fact that the photo wasn’t credited directly to them but to the US Army Signal Corps? Most would have had that front cover framed and hanging on the wall of their shop for all to see, not moldering amongst a pile of other magazines on a shelf back at their house.

It was Lucy who first drew Hollis’ attention to the magazine cover. Lydia was also present at the time. Abel wasn’t. He was in the kitchen, preparing dinner—their first dinner together, two couples tentatively getting to know each other. Taken in a small town in Germany, the photo showed a GI leaning against a halftrack, muffled up against the cold, and smiling. Abel’s reaction when he wandered through and found the three of them bent over the copy of Life almost soured the evening. He dismissed their compliments, cutting Lydia quite dead, something for which she never really forgave him.

Abel explained that the officer in the photo had bugged him to fire off a couple of shots, and he’d only done so to shut the guy up. The reel of film was then tossed into the photographic pool, and that was the last he’d expected to hear of it. Next thing he knew, there was the smiling GI on the front of Life, some idiot at the War Department having decided that his grin struck just the right note of cheeky triumphalism for the folks back home. Abel rated the photo as one of the blandest he had taken during the long push eastwards from the beaches of Normandy—devoid of any technical or artistic merit—but what annoyed him most was its dishonesty.

The man whom he’d immortalized for the home-front readership had played no part in the fighting they’d just come through, the hell that was the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. He was from a relief unit sent in at the end, 33,000 men having already died or been incapacitated in a few brief months, swallowed up in five hundred acres of densely wooded real estate of little or no tactical value.

Some weeks after that first dinner, Abel dug out and showed Hollis a folder of shots he had taken in Hürtgen Forest, photos he’d held back for himself rather than consign them to the nearcertain oblivion of the photographic pool.

The forest itself was the stuff of fairy tales, those of the more nightmarish kind—a dark, dense underworld, the dwelling place of witches and wolves. Towering pine trees, tight-packed so that their branches interlaced, formed a gloomy canopy through which stray shafts of sunlight barely penetrated to the forest floor. What the photos didn’t show were the German anti-personnel mines lurking beneath the spongy carpet of pine needles, or the trip wires rigged to the assault course of fallen wood that anyone passing through the forest was obliged to negotiate. The greatest danger, Abel explained, came from above, from the deadly hail of wood unleashed by artillery tree-bursts. In one of the shots a soldier was literally hugging a tree, while all around him death whirled like a blizzard. It was an image that brought to mind a terrified child clutching at his mother’s thigh.

Most of the photos, though, were of GIs at rest, stuffed into slit-trenches and foxholes, tending to their feet or their weapons, seeking comfort in the little routines of life. One GI was even plucking at his nose hairs, using the inside of a tobacco tin as a mirror.

By the time Hollis had worked his way through to the end of the batch, the forest was all but gone, the noble pines reduced to matchwood, their shattered trunks poking through the surrounding debris. Light flooded the photos, the roll of the land was revealed. The final shot was of three tall pines outlined on a bald crest, beheaded and stripped of all but their lower branches. There was no mistaking the parallel with the three crosses of Calvary.

Abel had been right. The photo selected for the front cover of Life magazine was inert and empty when set alongside those other images. But he was wrong if he thought he had yet to prove himself as a photographer.

‘It’s a poor excuse,’ said Hollis.

‘What’s that?’

‘Your work. For not getting married.’

‘Right now it’s the best I can come up with.’

‘What if she leaves you?’

‘That’s her choice.’

‘I hope she does.’

‘You fancy a shot at her yourself?’

‘Then you’ll know what a damn fool you’ve been.’

‘You’re not her type, Tom.’

‘Will you just listen to me for a moment.’

Abel spread his hands: fire away.

‘Too late,’ said Hollis. ‘She’s coming.’

Abel stubbed out his cigarette.

‘Thank Christ for that,’ he said.

Hollis groped for the alarm and shut it off. Three aspirin and a cup of reheated coffee later, the little man jackhammering at the base of his skull downed tools.

Abel was to blame. If he hadn’t taken Hollis to task over the amount he was drinking, then he wouldn’t have got angry, and he wouldn’t have reached for the bottle of brandy when he got home. He guessed there was a hollow logic to this thinking, so he tried not to dwell on it too much.

He tracked down the binoculars eventually, though how they’d found their way to the back of the airing cupboard he couldn’t rightly say.

He had been up at this hour many times before, the duty rota demanded it, but he’d never found himself down on the ocean beach just after sun-up.

The fishermen, he knew, rose early. One time he had attended the scene of a bar brawl on Montauk. By the time the matter had been resolved, the participants in the fracas agreeing to split the costs of the damage, there were already dim little figures creeping from their shacks around Fort Pond Bay, rowing out to where their boats were moored, lanterns like fireflies in the fading night.

From the top of the frontal dune at the Atlantic Avenue beach landing, Hollis could make out two crews of fishermen working the shoreline to the east. The Basque’s Model A was not among the vehicles gathered on the beach.

It lay to the west, a mile or so away.

Hollis lowered the binoculars. Better to drive round to Indian Wells landing and walk from there.

They were emptying their net, dragging fish up the beach by the gills, big fish, their tails trailing in the sand. If the Basque was surprised to see him, he didn’t show it.

‘Morning,’ he said, tossing two fish into the back of the truck. Hollis waited and watched while they went about their business. When the net was empty, the Basque turned to the Kemp boy.

‘Rollo, you want to go get that other seine from the barn?’

‘Sure.’

Hollis took this as a sign that the Basque wished to be alone with him, but as the truck pulled away along the beach he wandered down to the water’s edge. Hollis followed. He hadn’t noticed before, but there was a shark wrapped in the sodden net.

The Basque picked up a baseball bat lying nearby and rinsed the bloodied end in the wash. ‘Thresher,’ he said. ‘Chewed up the seine some bad. Mostly they go right through. This one got snagged.’