Bulls Island Read online

  “Go ’head,” I said.

  “Don’t speak with a full mouth, J.D. It’s very impolite.”

  “’Kay.”

  “Now see here, J.D., I know that you have concerns about Valerie. I share them. Her inability to conceive is a cause for grave concern. And your father…”

  “Where is Big Jim tonight?”

  “Down in Savannah at a business meeting.”

  “Oh.”

  We both knew that meant he was visiting the strip joints he owned with an anonymous U.S. senator on the border and very likely on the receiving end of the intimate favors of a pole dancer.

  “Listen, son. I understand that you want children, but you must also understand that this land has been in our family’s blood since the days of King Charles II. Why, we even own Cavalier King Charles spaniels! It is our bloodline that has worked this land, fought to hold on to it, and our blood that cares so much about it. You cannot, simply cannot, bring in some foreign child born to some drug-addicted prostitute and call that child our blood!”

  “Oh.” I waited a few seconds and then said, “Why not?” I tried to maintain a placid expression to minimize the scuffle.

  “Have you and Valerie both gone completely insane?”

  “Mother?” I wiped my mouth, put my napkin on the table, and sat back in my chair. “Plenty of people adopt wonderful children who grow up to do great things! I must say, you surprise me. How can a woman like you continue to be so narrow-minded?”

  “Narrow-minded? Me? Not in a million years and you know it!”

  “Was not our Lord adopted by Joseph? And what about Moses?”

  “Beside the point…”

  “And Dave Thomas?”

  “Who in the world is Dave Thomas?”

  “Founder of Wendy’s?”

  “You mean that fast-food establishment?”

  “Yes. That fast-food establishment. And President Gerald Ford? Art Linkletter? Even Eleanor Roosevelt, Mother. I mean, come on!”

  “Well, I can see you did some homework, J.D. You did some homework. You’re just like your father! Always have to have the last word!”

  “Come on now…let’s be civilized about this.”

  “I just want you to be careful, that’s all.”

  “I am, Mother. And I always have been.”

  “Don’t you worry about Valerie’s headaches, too? Heavenly days, it just seems to me that she has a litany of maladies, J.D. Don’t you think she should see—I don’t know, a neurologist?”

  “Who knows why she gets headaches—probably pollen. Fine. I’ll take her to a neurologist.”

  “Please don’t adopt, J.D. Please.”

  “Let’s talk about something else.” A long pause in our conversation ensued and I knew it was my job to get things rolling on a better and more courteous track. “Hey, did I tell you that we got the permits for the docks out on the Edisto project?”

  “No. How?”

  “The same way as always—a sack of fifties.”

  “Everyone has their price, don’t they, son? Your daddy has taught you well.” Mother smiled.

  “Yes, Mother, they certainly do,” I said, needing to change the subject. “How are things on the symphony board?”

  “Hmm. The symphony? Well…”

  Mother rattled on for a while about the fall season and the holiday concerts that were being planned and soon I could see she was growing fatigued. The bourbon and the heat had done their job. It was time to send her home. Frankly, I was whipped, too.

  “Come on, I’ll walk you to your car.”

  “Thank you, son.”

  We stepped outside. The skies had cleared and stars twinkled everywhere. Only distant rumbles of residual thunder and the occasional flash of heat lightning disturbed the landscape. Lowcountry? Swamp? Marsh? We called our locale every manner of thing, but on nights like this when I was a kid, my dad would laugh and say it was a beautiful night in the jungle. The swell of music from the crickets and other critters was the signal that peace had been restored in the world. And yes, it was a beautiful night in the jungle.

  As propriety dictated, I opened the door of Mother’s station wagon and she slipped in behind the wheel.

  “You sure you want to drive? I can take you home and bring the car back in the morning.”

  “Go on and hush,” she said, kissed her fingertips, and touched my cheek with them. “I could drive home blindfolded.”

  “All right, then. Call me just to let me know you got there—”

  “Who’s the parent?” She smiled at me and then said, “I’ll call your cell, let it ring once, and hang up.”

  “Okay. Night.”

  “Naiiight,” she said in an exaggerated drawl, and the Mercedes-Benz engine turned over with a predictable purr. “Love you, dahlin’!”

  “Love you, too, Mother.” I nearly choked on the words every time I said them.

  I watched her pull away and thought about how complicated and unsatisfying my life had become. Nothing had turned out the way I thought it would, except for the constant flow of money. It made me laugh. Money for the Langley clan was sort of like manna. It just seemed to fall from heaven. It was true that the richer we became, the richer we still seemed to become. But were we happy? Had any Langley ever thought about happiness? Except me, that is. We spent generations thinking about how the accumulation of wealth and power begets more wealth and power, but we surely never wasted the turn of a tide clock thinking about a trifling thing like happiness.

  “The pursuit of happiness is for the poor people,” my maternal grandfather, who we always thought was an atheist, used to say. “They will never be rich, J.D., so they coddle themselves with other matters, like the great mythology of Divine Justice and that they will get their rewards in another world, that their enemies will surely burn in the fires of hell. We do not have the privilege of fantasy. We have to concern ourselves with duty and leadership. Creating jobs. Keeping food on the tables of others.”

  There was a frowning portrait of him over the fireplace mantel in my living room that Mother had given us as a housewarming present. Nice gift. My mother’s white-haired father had been a formidable man, stout, bearded, and gruff. Family legend said that he enjoyed a generous shot of whiskey with his morning coffee and not another drop all day or night. I took every word he said seriously, and to this day I have never known a man who spoke with more emphatic self-assurance. Because he dictated our family’s mission and because his manner was enough to turn your own hair white, I largely agreed with his philosophy. Besides, to disagree was traitorous.

  As a little lad, I was terrified by the whole concept of Satan, devils, and the smoldering brimstone I heard about on Sundays when my father would take me to the small Fundamentalist church we occasionally attended down the road. Like her parents, Mother had little interest in organized religion, so my dad and I went to services together. Big Jim would wet-comb my cowlick and tie my necktie, and Mother would yawn, implying that the entire exercise was a complete waste of time. I liked the choir’s music well enough, but the sermons were the cause of some serious night frights. Looking back, I think old Big Jim spent more time reassuring me that the devil wasn’t waiting around the corner to grab me than he did trying to explain how wonderful heaven would be if I lived a righteous life. His enthusiasm to indoctrinate me into old-time religion began to wane when I called him from his sleep night after night to look under my bed for the dark thing that wanted to gobble me up.

  As a result of my childhood psychosis and my father’s boyish desire to fish, our participation in Sunday services dwindled down to Easter and Christmas and a healthy donation for whatever the minister needed—a new roof, organ repair, or rewiring. No Langley seemed to possess the aspects of character required to become zealots about anything except net worth, but we padded the church’s bank account just in case.

  “You never know,” Big Jim said every time he signed a check for them.

  My parents were opposites in man
y ways, but I had to admit this much: Mother had made a good marriage when she married my father. That’s how they referred to marriages—made well or marrying down. So Mother had married well, but unfortunately her union with Big Jim had only produced one child. Me. The burden of being that one child, that only promise for future generations, was greatly imperiled by my childless union with Valerie.

  There we lived on the opposite side of the family’s property from my parents, under the constant and unforgiving surveillance of my mother, Louisa, and the distanced but benign eye of my father, Big Jim. It was one helluva gilded cage.

  I went back inside to turn out the lights, feeling a little down. I glanced around our Anglophile’s treasure trove of a dining room that was proof of the complete absurdity of my life. All the priceless Georgian silver and bucolic eighteenth-century portraits of hunting dogs in the realm could not lessen the disappointment Mother felt toward Valerie, the hysterics that possessed my poor wife, or the aggravation I suffered with both of them. I had a domineering mother and a wife who was fast-tracking toward becoming an imbecile.

  I turned on the dishwasher in the kitchen and took the remaining small bag of garbage outside to the shed. One dependable fact about Lowcountry living—you took out the garbage at night or you had a staggering population of bugs to greet you in the morning. So, after stepping out into the night once more, I stopped to feel the air and to consider my life. I threw the bag in the can, replaced the lid, closed the shed, and flipped the latch. My cell phone rang once and then stopped. Mother had reached her home safely.

  In a sentimental moment, I strolled across the yard toward our dock on the Wappoo River. The lights were still on in Rosie’s cottage. She was probably online, working toward her degree with whatever online university was taking her money. I had to admire her. Although she worked for Mother, Daddy, Valerie, and me, and was a single parent, she was always trying to better herself. I knew she had a little bit of a shine for me and it was flattering in some marginal way.

  It was a good thing she didn’t know the real me, the one who had given up on life the day my childhood sweetheart, Elizabeth McGee, walked out. Very few people did. So Mother picked Valerie for me to marry instead. I married Valerie. Big Jim wanted me to run the business, so I ran the business the way he wanted, doing whatever it took to get what we wanted. My life was prescribed like an antibiotic a doctor gives a patient, swearing it will cure what ails him. So far, it had not worked for me, and that was probably never going to change. I barely cared.

  The moon shone over the Wappoo, throwing everything into a kind of half-light, and in those dream shadows sometimes I wondered whatever had become of Betts. She had never married, so far as I knew. I knew she worked for some kind of huge company in New York because I had Googled her, and that she had done very well. She lived on Park Avenue, I’d heard. She was still beautiful according to the picture on the company’s website. It was best not to think about her too much and I had disciplined myself to do that, but still I couldn’t help thinking I might drop by her friend Sela’s restaurant and try to weasel some news about her. Sela was pretty tight-lipped about anything that had to do with Betts—which told me she knew everything. I needed a Betts fix.

  Six o’clock the next evening and I was walking through the door of Sela’s restaurant, named O’Farrell’s for her husband’s family from Dublin. I was to meet Valerie there after her appointment with the head of neurology at the Medical University. Valerie hadn’t been happy when I told her we were going to O’Farrell’s for dinner.

  “It’s so casual!” she complained.

  “It’s delicious,” I said.

  “It’s so noisy!”

  “Because it’s popular,” I said.

  I loved O’Farrell’s, with its decrepit brick walls, sawdust floors, and endless Irish memorabilia hung from every inch of wall space. Big wooden bowls of pretzels were scattered the length of the bar and the menu was written on a blackboard and rarely changed. Shepherd’s Pie. Bangers and Mash. Fish and Chips. The Dublin Burger. When they were in season the menu offered fried shrimp and oysters, and when the weather was cold there were endless stews with dumplings and chicken potpie. It didn’t matter to me; all the dishes were pretty mouthwatering. No frigging sprouts, no freaking tofu, no girlie smoothies. Sela was a great regulation cook, and when she’d grown tired of cooking, she trained four people to do her job, which should tell you something else about her.

  Anyway, I arrived early and there was Ed O’Farrell, Sela’s husband, who also happened to be the chief of police for the city of Charleston. Ed was out of uniform and working behind the bar. The regular guy must’ve been out or late. He saw me in the enormous mirror behind the rows of bottles of liquor and turned around to greet me.

  “Well, well! J. D. Langley in the flesh! As I live and breathe! How are you, my man?”

  “Good, Ed. Good. You?”

  “Right as rain! What can I get you?”

  “Harps? On tap?”

  “God love ya, man. Harps is mother’s milk!”

  He filled the mug and put it before me.

  “Thanks! So what’s all the news in Charleston?”

  “Not much new—same old drug business, crack houses, meth labs, the occasional murder…you know how it is.”

  I chuckled, thinking about this fair-haired, blue-eyed fellow, how unthreatening he seemed as a barkeep and how he had this whole other life as a Jedi keeping Charleston out of the hands of Darth Vader.

  “Right. Sela around?”

  He winked at me, knowing exactly what I wanted, and said, “I’ll tell her you’re here. She went to the beauty parlor when she saw your reservation.”

  “Women,” I said.

  “You’re telling me? Watch the till for me, will ya?”

  “You know it.”

  Ed disappeared behind the door to the office and he and Sela came out at the same time as Valerie came in the front door. Valerie despised Sela and any other detail of life remotely connected to Betts. Ridiculous.

  “Hi, J.D.,” Valerie said, and gave me an air kiss.

  While I’m no fashion expert, I thought Valerie was very overaccessorized for the occasion, especially in the diamond department. She had obviously overdressed for Sela’s sake, in the hope of sending a message to Betts about what Valerie assumed Betts likely didn’t have. Sela scrutinized Valerie with such narrow eyes that I was surprised she didn’t pull out a jeweler’s loupe.

  “Hi, Valerie,” Sela said. “It’s been a long time.”

  “Yes, it has,” Valerie said, in a singsong voice. “Nothing’s changed here! Can I get a double Grey Goose on the rocks with a twist?”

  “Sure.” Sela turned away to fix her drink.

  Now, in Valerie’s defense, I don’t think she really meant to speak to Sela like she was the help or to imply that the joint was a dump. It just came out that way.

  “Here you go,” Sela said, and placed the drink on the bar. “Hey, J.D.? Did you hear?”

  “What?”

  “Hurricane’s coming down the coast.”

  Ed and Sela looked at me to gauge my reaction.

  “Really?” I said. “Well, that piddling Anastasia was a sorry excuse for a storm. Is this a big one? We’re probably due for one.”

  “I watched the Weather Channel all day long and didn’t see a thing about a hurricane,” Valerie said, and pounded back her cocktail like it was a mere glass of water. “God in heaven, I am so parched! Can somebody please freshen up my drink?”

  Sela cocked her eyebrow in disapproval and took Valerie’s glass. “Yep, it’s a big one,” she said over her shoulder.

  Coming down the coast. The next one would be a B. Could it be? “Hurricane Betts” was what Sela meant. Good. I was ready.

  No. I was not ready.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Back to Betts

  Sela might have been right about how things were with my family back in Charleston, but she certainly had a short memory. How horrible
it felt to relive a single minute of the past! Jacob Marley’s chains were a lovely charm bracelet in comparison to what I remembered. And as to her insistence about my undying love for J.D.? It was not even remotely acceptable.

  I was at home, back in my comfortable apartment. It was late at night. Adrian, my high school senior, was in his room fast asleep. The emotional part of me wanted to yank him from his bed and tell him the whole truth about everything. Just get it over with, I would tell myself in weak moments. The other part, the careful, pragmatic, and intelligent part of me, would never just blurt out the truth. But some nagging little voice inside of me knew that the time would come when I would have to tell him. When I did, his world would unravel and our relationship would be sorely tested. How would he ever trust me again? I was sure he would hate me. And life as I knew it, loved it, and for the most part controlled it, would be over. I did everything I could to avoid thinking about this.

  I had a stack of magazines and newspapers at my side and my intention had been to flip through them, tear out the articles and essays I thought I should read, and discard the rest. But it was impossible to concentrate on reading material when my mind was fixated on Charleston. I was reliving the night that had ruined so many lives and changed all of us forever.

  It was 1989 and J.D. and I were at his parents’ home for dinner, waiting for my mother and father to arrive. This was to be the dinner to attempt to mend the divide between our families. I thought we were going to discuss the future…you know, that someday J.D. and I would get married. Someday we would all be in-laws, so now would be a good time to make that first step toward friendship. J.D. and I had planned the get-together. With some hesitation, both sides had agreed.

  It would be a gross understatement to say there was no love lost between our families. The ill will our families held toward each other dated back to so many generations of turbulence that I didn’t think either family knew who started the quarrels.

  Pecking order. There was no denying that the Langleys had landed in a very young America and therefore considered themselves to be aristocrats of a sort. Their property was a direct land grant from King Charles II during the seventeenth century. Slothful things that we were, we got here late, making landfall right before the American Revolution. First, our French forebears and later our Irish. God save us from our money-handling selves; we were merchants. Maybe you would have to be a Charlestonian to understand the subtle difference, but landowners were gentry. They considered merchants—even successful ones—common ruffians.