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“I don’t see why Reuben Tate had to come back to town at all,” Ellie White complained, digging into her lobster tortilla.
We were at La Sardina, Eastport’s Mexican restaurant. The menu was south-of-the-border with a downeast Maine twist—thus the lobster—but the atmosphere was all laid-back Key West:
Strings of tiny, twinkling colored lights framed the tall front windows. White gauze beach umbrellas slanted over the old wooden tables. And potted plants grown to enormous sizes lent a tropical flavor: palm, spathiphyllum, a flowering bougainvillea like a tree full of purple butterflies.
With her tortilla, Ellie was having a tomato and mesclun salad with blue cheese dressing, and a Dos Equis. “And I don’t see,” she added, “why he had to come now.”
Beside me, my son, Sam, went on attacking his combination plate. “You could strip varnish with this hot sauce,” he remarked appreciatively; at seventeen, Sam thought flaming coals weren’t quite hot enough unless you doused them in Tabasco.
“Reuben’s like a bad rash,” Ellie’s husband, George Valentine, said. “He comes back.”
He cut a slice off his well-done ribeye steak; to George, the French fry is about as foreign as food needs to get, with the possible exception of the English muffin.
“The trick,” he added, “is getting rid of him again. But this time I hear he means to stay.”
At which my friends all sighed sorrowfully. Reuben Tate was the sly, grinning worm in the apple of their happiness that autumn, and it seemed unfair just when everything else in town was looking up:
Summer had come and gone but we still had the taste of it in our mouths, tart and sweet as a drop of lemonade. Dahlias with bright shaggy heads big as dinner plates bloomed in the perennial beds; ripe tomatoes loaded the vines in our back gardens, and the rosebushes massed along the seawall bowed low under their heavy burden of rose hips, huge and juicy as Bing cherries.
Also, for once the town had cash. Sea urchins and sardines had been freakishly plentiful that season, the boats coming back half-capsized by the unaccustomed weight of their catches, and scallop harvest promised to be as bountiful. Until then, foreign freighters—their names, unpronounceable, stenciled in white, rust-mottled Cyrillic letters on their towering sterns—loomed at dockside, loading paper pulp and particle board from the mills up in Woodland, making overtime for the stevedores and truckers.
Finally, at September’s end came the annual East-port Salmon Festival, the last outdoor bash of the year on our little island in Maine, which meant that cash registers in the cafés and shops on Water Street would soon be jingling with tourist money.
So we were content. Only the thought of Reuben with his quick, twitchy ways, his pale, wandering eye and odd laugh—a harsh, painful-sounding bark like a strangled cough; when he uttered it, he meant to hurt someone—kept putting a damper on people.
“Could be this time Reuben’s luck will run out,” said my main squeeze, Wade Sorenson.
Just off the water after guiding a cargo vessel into port—it’s what he does, as Eastport’s official harbor pilot—Wade wore a navy turtleneck, jeans, and a cableknit sweater the color of vanilla ice cream. His gray eyes reflected the light of the candle stuck in the neck of a wine jug on the table.
“Not soon enough,” my ex-husband, Victor Tip-tree, said sourly, and I glanced at him in surprise.
“Reuben Tate’s luck,” he emphasized, “can’t end soon enough for me.”
“How do you know Reuben?” I asked, and the others around the table looked inquisitively at him, too.
Six months earlier, Victor had moved here to East-port from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and in remote, thinly populated downeast Maine his arrival had of course been newsworthy. But I hadn’t thought any of the local people were newsworthy to Victor, and especially not a ne’er-do-well like Reuben.
Tonight, Victor’s dinner had consisted of the olives from his martinis. “It’s not important,” he muttered, and gulped the melted ice from his glass.
Annoyed but determined not to argue—the rule, when dealing with Victor, is never wrestle with a pig; you both get dirty and the pig likes it—I turned away, as a voice from the next table rose in worried complaint.
“Did Reuben really say that?” Paddy Farrell, who ran a textile design studio out of an old canning-factory building he’d rehabilitated down on the waterfront, had clearly been listening in on our conversation. Sitting with Paddy was his longtime companion, Terence Oscard.
“Did he?” Paddy demanded, his close-clipped salt-and-pepper head coming up pugnaciously as he caught my eye. “He’s staying?”
Paddy wore a navy blazer and a tailored button-down shirt, a maroon silk scarf at his throat. “George?” he persisted as George stolidly went on chewing. “Did you actually hear him say that?”
“What I said,” George confirmed after a sip of Miller Lite. “Stayin’ in his mom’s old place out in Quoddy Village, got the little trust fund she left him to live on. It ain’t much, but I guess that’s nothing new to Reuben. He’s never had any job at all, that I’ve known of.”
Terence Oscard, a big-boned, pale-haired man with a beaky nose and a big, pointy Adam’s apple, wore a light blue chambray shirt, khaki slacks, and Topsiders. Good-looking in the way some very ugly men can be, his jutting features regularized by intelligence and kindness, he sat listening with his usual thoughtful attention.
But Paddy seemed agitated. “Reuben can’t do that. Why, the town won’t be worth living in. It’ll be the bad old days all over again.”
Terence leaned over to me. “I’ve got a new Red Cross first-aid book,” he confided. “I’ll be glad to lend it to you when I’ve finished it.”
He was a martyr to numerous imaginary ailments and, perhaps on account of these, a self-taught first-aid expert. I liked him a great deal; everyone did.
“Thanks, Terence, I’ll look forward to it,” I said, and he sat back, pleased.
“Doesn’t anybody,” Paddy demanded, “remember?” He glared at us, fists clenched as if he might punch someone just to refresh people’s recollections.
“Don’t see as there’s much we can do about Reuben sticking around if he wants to,” George said, his tone unperturbed as he went on eating his steak and potatoes. “Still a free country.”
I noticed, though, that George didn’t raise his eyes, a sign that he wasn’t enjoying Paddy’s conversation. Paddy was intense, quick to anger, and inclined to pound the table, while George was the opposite: the quieter he became, the more tactfully and carefully you’d better go, or eventually he would lower the boom on you.
“Unless,” George added to Paddy, “you’ve got some brilliant new idea.”
At this, the air around us seemed to grow darkly electric, charged with some knowledge I didn’t share. Silence lengthened as the three Eastport natives at our table—Ellie, Wade, and George—went on eating their dinners, concentrating on their plates. Sam and I looked puzzledly at them, while Victor continued drumming his fingers on the table, wanting the drinks waitress.
“No,” Paddy said at last. “No new ideas. Finished, Terence?” Shoving back his chair, he flung down his napkin furiously.
Nodding agreeably, the big man got to his feet. Then he staggered, briefly but unmistakably, placing his hand on the table to steady himself. But he recovered smoothly, dropping some money by his plate and smiling his farewell to the rest of us.
He hadn’t been drinking. Terence never did; the faint muzzy feeling induced by even a single glass of wine always made him think he had some rare neurological condition. And as they left together, he seemed fine again: bending as always to hear whatever Paddy was saying, Paddy accompanying his words with his usual energetic gestures.
Watching them go, I sensed an ongoing liveliness of interest undimmed by the comfort of habit; they were by all accounts a devoted couple. I thought they were lucky, and that Terence had somehow simply missed his footing.
But Paddy’s comments had dropped a pall over our table, with George, Ellie, and Wade looking suddenly even more dismal.
“Come on,” I said. “How bad can it be? I’m sure a few of the boys from the dock can take care of Reuben Tate, if he gets to be too much trouble.”
Ellie’s lips pursed. “You only know him by reputation,” she began, and was about to say more.
But just then a harsh bark of laughter was followed by the warning rasp of barstools being shoved back. Next came the voice of Ted Armstrong, La Sardina’s formidable bartender and bouncer.
“Okay, now, that’s enough. We don’t want to be breaking any expensive glassware, make the price of a beer go up another half-buck just to pay for it all.”
The scuffling quieted as the sound system began playing a cut of Bela Fleck’s new jazz-bluegrass fusion CD, “Throwdown at the Hoedown.” La Sardina’s owners had eclectic tastes in music, and so as a result did the guys who tended to occupy their barstools.
Or most of them did. “Throwdown” cut off in the middle of a banjo lick so breakneck, it had to be heard to be believed, and the music switched to something about how lonesome somebody was going to be tonight.
