Chapter Eight
Goliath v. Goliath
Raging over how this week’s market hammered the meager trust his aunt Bunny and uncle Tripp had left him, Bucky Porter clambered down from the Seabrook Club. A summons he’d get signed today over the truck in the sand incident would be a step toward restraining the Tide Runners instructors’ ill-found sense of privilege. This summer, he’d decided to run for a trustee slot on the town board that would give him formal municipal levers to shut down the wretched camp for good.
The Seabrook Clubhouse, well in sight from the camp drop-off, stood high up on a bluff overlooking the sea. It was an imposing fortress, with a slate roof, red shingles, and white-paned windows. The six cement cracked tennis courts, unrepaired since 1962, stood between the club and Beachwood Lane.
The High Episcopalian members of Bucky’s club, already plying themselves with barrels of alcohol before lunch, nodded to him as he passed. The older ladies with hair so gray that it had a blue tint sat in circles playing bridge in the enclosed patio area. The younger women gathered at other tables, or chased after children, their A-frame Lilly Pulitzer uniforms signaling a strictly missionary, no orgasm zone.
The bar counter, adjacent to a veranda-style restaurant, stood next to a pee-filled Olympic pool. Today, the male members washed down their drinks with Ritz crackers and cheddar cheese spread from a black earthenware tub. They chomped on Chex Mix, and guffawed about one of them missing putts all morning at the nearby Emerald Links Club, then miraculously draining a thirty-foot snake on the eighteenth hole to win the match.
Bucky, forty-three, worked in New York, but, truth be told, didn’t really have a job. He had a broker spot at an investment firm that paid on commissions, but he wasn’t much good at it. He knew that, the firm knew that, but he was allowed to sit there because his great uncle Tripp had started the firm during its heyday in the 1950s. None of this mattered to Bucky; he had means other than his professional accomplishments to express his authority and aptitude.
He marched down several splintered gray steps to the sand, shoddy from beach erosion. He waved a friendly hello to the Seabrook beach boys who busied themselves laying out dozens of rickety wooden chairs under matching yellow-and-white striped umbrellas. Ropes leading to large metal buoys on the shore delineated the sandy area that the club could control for their members only. Of course, in higher tides down by the shoreline, club members tended to put their chairs and umbrellas too close to the water, clearly encroaching on the public property . . . strikingly similar to those Israeli settlements they blamed for all the world trouble “we” were in.
Bucky, having passed the figurative and literal line in the sand that separated Seabrook people from “other people,” now marched to Tide Runners’ camp headquarters.
Luke nudged Kona as the two of them, having gotten Jake off the beach successfully, stared out at the flat ocean before them. “Asshole coming at us at three o’clock on your right. Don’t make eye contact or he’ll think we give a shit. I told you Jake’s truck was going to cause huge trouble for the camp.”
“Damn it!” Bucky yelled at himself. His worn loafers with the big gold horse-bit buckle loaded up with more and more of that flour-like New England sand as he marched toward the Tide Runners instructors. First he dumped sand out of his shoes and then, for some reason that made no sense to any of the guys, put them back on just to slide into each step and fill up again ten yards later.
Kona whispered to Luke, “He looks like a walking billboard for an erectile dysfunction commercial.”
Standing before them now, Bucky pondered the camp headquarters. It resembled a low-rent yard sale. Before him: a few Lands’ End navy-and-red striped towels with children’s initials left behind from last summer’s kids, two coolers filled with juice boxes, a huge bag of Cheetos from the Riverhead Costco, several life vests, four paddleboards, four uneven paddles that didn’t match the paddleboards, three Star Wars boogie boards from last century, and thirteen long surfboards with soft tops for beginners, also scraped to hell and dinged, showing pockmarks of the Styrofoam layer underneath as if they had been riddled with machine-gun fire.
Kona, standing five foot ten, puffed out his bare and tanned chest to prepare for battle. He walked straight up to Bucky who was dressed in a teal-blue polo shirt. It didn’t go unnoticed by onlookers that Bucky’s upper torso and biceps were larger and more sculpted than Kona’s, who’d spent hours at the gym to work on getting his body right for the ladies.
Bucky was a man who did not work hard at anything. His muscles, like his handsome face, were God-given.