that?” one of the girls downstairs asked. Marjorie raced down the stairs, leaving me holding the scribbler.
Three people piled out of the back seat of the car: two boys and a girl. One of the boys was fat. They were tanned. They wore pastel Bermuda shorts, button-down shirts, and loafers without socks. They were drunk and laughing, waving their beers around.
“Get back in that car and move it.” Marjorie stood by the open passenger side door, hands on her hips. “Who do you think you are? You can’t just drive up and park on the grass. And turn that radio down!”
“I thought this was a party,” said the fat boy. He leaned against the car, grinning stupidly.
But someone did turn the car radio down. From the window of Marjorie’s bedroom, I saw that two people were still in the car, the driver and a woman beside him. I couldn’t see her features, but she had her arms folded across her chest and she didn’t look relaxed. The driver opened his door and put one foot out, but he remained seated, smoking a cigarette.
“Turn out those headlights!” someone yelled from the porch.
“So, it’s a party. Who invited you?” Marjorie said. “And on top of everything else, your friend is being sick.”
Sure enough, behind the station wagon, the other boy (Radley Smith, I would learn was his name) was bent over, throwing up in the petunias. The girl who had got out of the car went to tend him, although she kept her distance. The faces of the two who remained in the car were shrouded in darkness.
Phil and Charmaine came out of the shadows and into the light cast by the lamp on the telephone pole.
“It’s Jethro and Ellie May!” said the fat boy, laughing again. He drained the rest of what looked like a Budweiser — the long-necked bottle was exotic — and threw it into the darkness behind him.
“Watch your fuckin’ mouth, fat boy,” said Phil.
From the porch, Chicklet yelled, “Turn out those headlights! We can’t see a damn thing up here.”
“All right, you go out there, right now, and pick up that bottle,” said Marjorie, pointing to the dark field.
“Oh, yeah, right,” said the fat one. “Like I can see in the dark?”
Henri and Donny materialized out of the darkness by the barn. Donny was carrying a crowbar.
“What…?” said the fat one, standing up straight. Even the boy who had been vomiting stood, watching Donny.
Henri stopped at the edge of the circle of light. Donny loped past the front of the car. He raised the crowbar and swung it down hard. The sound of breaking glass shattered the night.
The driver bolted from the car. “Jesus Christ!” He moved toward the front of the car. He was tall and he looked strong, but Donny had the crowbar. “Look,” he said, waving his hand at the darkness. “How are we going to see to get out of here?”
“Your fucking problem,” said Donny. He raised the crowbar to smash out the other light, but the woman in the car reached across to the driver’s side and switched it off. That was when I saw her.
Donny lowered the crowbar and faded into the darkness. The girl in the car shifted over to the driver’s seat, started the engine, and backed carefully off the lawn. She leaned toward the open passenger door. “Come on, Jack. Let’s get out of here.”
While the fat boy and Radley Smith scrambled back into the car, the tall boy came forward into the pool of yellow light where Marjorie still stood. He looked down at the scars the tires had gouged into the lawn, the broken glass from the headlight.
“Sorry about the grass,” he said. “I guess the broken light means we’re even.” He held out his hand and smiled at Marjorie, a toothy grin. “I’m Jack Miller. You must be Marjorie. We really were invited to your party, you know. My sister and I.” He gestured toward the car. “We’re out at Providence Island. Your mother —”
He stopped mid-sentence. I suppose he didn’t want to sound condescending. After the death of her husband, Mrs. Applewood had started doing a little work for some of the summer people, including the Millers. She had asked Mrs. Miller if Jack and Quentin would like to come to her daughter’s party. Mrs. Miller would have wondered how she could say no.
I had met Jack’s brother Stephen once when he chased Phil and me when I was about thirteen. We used to throw milkweeds in clumps of earth at passing cars from the bluffs above the highway. Sometimes a car would stop, and we would run into the woods. One time a man in a convertible — he would have been about eighteen years old then — screeched on the brakes, jumped from the car without opening the doors, and ran up the bank. Phil headed for the underbrush, while I ran across an open field. I heard the man panting behind me — then he leaped through the air and caught me by the foot; he grabbed me by the shoulder, turned me over. He was about to hit me, but when he saw the split in my lip from the fall, he held back.
“What’s your name?” He was red in the face and panting. “The police will be by your house later.”
“No appetite?” asked my father at dinner that night.
“What have you been up to?” Aunt Beth asked. “How did you get that cut lip?”
The police never came. The next day in Phil’s cellar we smoked a couple of his father’s Export “A”s and split one of his beers.
“You know who that guy in the fuckin’ convertible was?” asked Phil. “One of those Miller assholes.”
“Who are they?”
“Who are they? They only own pretty near the biggest fuckin’ place in the islands. That’s who.”
That had been my first meeting with the Millers. The man in the convertible was Stephen Miller, Jack’s older brother. Seven years later he was killed in Vietnam, near the Cambodian border.
There was a squeaking in the ceiling above us. Phil’s father was home, back from one of the summer cottages he looked after. We heard him stop dead in the middle of the room. Sniffing the air, Phil motioned me not to speak. We carefully buried our cigarettes in the dirt of the basement floor and rolled the empty beer bottle along the pipes under the water heater.
The kitchen door opened, throwing a beam of light down the wooden stairs.
“Boy, you down there? Jesus Christ, answer me!”
Mr. Havelock started clumping down the stairs. He was a gnarly little man with red hair. Years of work on the farm and then at the gravel pit had given him a stoop, but he could move quickly. He held his broom above his head like a sabre. As soon as I saw his feet on the stairs, I ran for the ladder that led to the cellar door and the yard. I heard him as I left: “Goddamn it, boy, I told you to stay out of my beer,” and the sound of the broom as he swiped at Phil.
“I’m sorry,” Jack said to Marjorie. “Sorry we’re late. I shouldn’t have brought my friends along. I thought it would be a bigger party.” He looked toward the house, to the little group standing around the porch steps and on the lawn, the boys clutching their stubby brown beer bottles.
“Come on, Jack,” said the girl. “Let’s go.”
Because
