Right Livelihoods Read online

  The beaches where I live, they are not of the highest quality. Those of you who are used to beaches where the sand is actually sandy, where the beach is an expanse on which you can recline, my humble resort town is not for you. Here the beaches are composed mainly of these perfectly round stones, each the size of a conventional softball, and the sandy part, well, it’s just some scarce feet at the water’s edge. The sand is mainly the action of the ocean upon these softballs. When a great storm comes up, it can erode most of the actual sand, so that there is no comfort at all for the preeners and tanners of the shore, in their skimpy little outfits. No comfortable patch on which to fling yourself in pursuit of the volleyball, no secluded rock inlet in which to have the occasional beach assignation, not at all. Our beaches are rugged, and South Beach is the worst of them. Thus, when I fell sideways into the great Atlantic, mindful of the obvious danger that I might be sucked out to Portugal, or farther south depending on the vicissitudes of the Gulf Stream, it was no doubt because of the rocky shore. I simply lost my footing. The fact that I was not feeling terribly well only added to my distress. My stick was flung from my hands, and a retriever happening upon the scene took up my stick and capered off with it into a thicket, where it chewed the stick to toothpicks. Nevermore would I taste the salty, peaty tip of that blessed baton.

  And were it not for the water-safety ministrations of a person who effected my rescue, that might not have been the only thing I lost.

  3. A Once Proud Men

  When my wife and I were selecting this resort location for our vacation summers, we made our decision based on such factors as exclusivity, golf programs, cuisine, like-minded persons, and so forth. Never did we think to inquire about the livelihoods of the surrounding population. Of course, an important part of any resort community is its dependent populations. Though it is true, for reasons that escape me, that I am a well-known local character, I find that I am often in contact with the dependent communities, the various laborers in such areas as electrical wiring, plumbing, roofing, plastering, and lawn mowing. I find that I enjoy bantering with these persons, and they recognize that I am not a man of wrath but a man of love. I have only two settings on my dial. Thoughtfulness and joy.

  Chief among the once proud men of our community are the fisherfolk. As you can imagine, here in a marine ecosystem, we ought to have a reliable subculture of fisherfolk, out there each morning hauling in the lobster traps or setting out the nets. However, because of poaching from the Nutmeg State, whose marine professionals are a lower class of people, our fisherfolk have found that they just cannot compete, and now many of them have gone on to other sorts of labor. What I am really pleased to report is that some of them have made the move into espionage. This is certainly an area where they can do a lot of good for all of us who are concerned about the national security picture, and, no doubt, they will still have a little time left to set a few lobster traps in the secluded inlets, just so that we’ll have something to eat on the big three-day weekends.

  How do I know that the once proud men of our community are now embarked on this noble calling of espionage? Well, because of the gentleman who rescued me from the chilly north Atlantic on the morning in question. Let’s say his name is Ed Thorne, though this is not his name at all. I would be unlikely to give his genuine name in a report such as this, because it is a federal offense to give away the identity of an intelligence agent, and I would not want to appear frivolous in such matters. In any event, once the gentleman had successfully made sure that I was not in danger of drowning nor of choking on my own spittle, Ed Thorne, who was wearing the traditional hip waders of the surf-casting expert, sat with me for a moment and put aside his state-of-the-art fishing pole, which made my conducting baton look a little silly by comparison.

  “Dr. Van Deusen,” he observed, “a little early for you to be out dressed like that, isn’t it?”

  Indeed, I was trembling. Having been plucked from a watery grave by a fisher of men, I found that my hands were trembling as if I had some terrible neurological scourge, and I made an effort to conceal this from Ed by clutching my hands to myself. It’s possible that Ed thought nothing of my comportment. And yet in order to ensure that his attention was elsewhere, I noted that it was a marvelous morning, and I was pleased to be out frolicking in it, and late September was the most extraordinary time to be here on our island. See the gentle reds and yellows on the chokecherry and the ailanthus! See the birds on their migratory overflights! With my distended liver and some of the health hazards associated with that lamentable condition, I told Ed, I needed to take the pleasures remaining to me where I could find them. Ed was rather skeptical about my self-diagnoses, I suppose, but was not one to take issue with a man who has clearly made up his mind. We sat quietly, in the fraternity of early-morning risers. And our quiet was especially natural once Ed made clear that he had heard that my wife was involved in a prolonged house-to-house search for my whereabouts. He also let me know that he would be perfectly willing to help, by driving me to a secure location.

  I was seized with a sentimentality about my wife. I did not understand why certain things kept happening to me and why I could not have a more stable home, in which I woke mornings and went to an office somewhere in the house, an office kitted out with the latest ergonomically designed office chair and a fax machine and some other devices with light-up dials, an office where I could work on my memoir about my years as a civil servant or perhaps a treatise on hybridizing chrysanthemums. I was appalling. The once proud men of my town seemed to have a lot more sense than I did. However, it was also possible that Ed was beginning to communicate with me in code. It’s important to be on the alert for the possibility of code. Listen carefully. Ed was gathering himself up; Ed was about to return to the activity for which he was noted, namely the entrapment of fish, but before he did so, he took pause, and this is when he said those immortal words, “You know, I saw something on the strange side yesterday.”

  “What was that?” A steady stream of mucus cascaded from my nose, a stream I was powerless to bring to a halt, except with the occasional swipe from the back of my exposed wrist.

  “Well, I was just a couple hundred yards from here, down the beach, and the fish were not exactly biting.”

  By this, of course, he meant that he was near to the airstrip. Because alongside the former military outpost on our island is a tiny airstrip, just a pair of crisscrossed runways, really. They form a kind of an X on the western end of the island, and when the barons and viscounts of our community are in the mood to charter flights, you might see a Piper, Cessna, or even a small jet land here. A faded wind sock, in orange, flops lazily on a flagpole at one end of the tarmac, and there are two or three prop planes parked, awaiting their inconstant custodians. There’s no air traffic controller here. In fact, the upper floor of the one remaining structure beside the airstrip has lately been given over to one of the local contractors. That is, even if there were air traffic controllers, they would not have a place in which to set up their equipment. Ours is just a modest airstrip, and people drive their cars across it every day on the way to the light-house at the end of the island, and let me tell you how they do it: they look up. If they see aircraft, they wait. If not, they drive on.

  “I’m minding my own business, the way I do,” Ed continued, “down there by the end of the runway”—the runway that, because of prevailing winds, is the less often used of the two—“and I watched a plane park at the end of the tarmac.”

  “Why, Ed,” I said, “that’s not very unusual. Don’t planes land there every day?”

  “Right, except that they don’t park so far away from the main parking lot. And then there’s what happened after these guys parked. That was the part that got me thinking a little bit. These persons, they got out of the plane, and they took their time getting out, and then they were standing around outside. Kind of looking around.”

  It is true, for those of you who are unaware of the status quo here, that there
is virtually no way to visit our island if you are not already here. Nor is there anywhere to stay were you to surmount the first hurdle. Were you kidnapped by evildoers and chloroformed and brought here to the island, to be released into the wild, you would find that there was neither inn nor motel to take you in, to give you succor, to offer you starchy towels. So, as Ed suggested, the very appearance here of strangers was worthy of note.

  “And these persons, I don’t know how else to talk about them, except to say that they were dark-complected persons. They were dark-complected, and they were standing around outside of the plane, and here’s the really unusual part, they had some kind of camera, and the camera had a big lens, and they were photographing the area around the landing strip. There was a lot of photographing going on, all the way around where they had landed. I was sort of minding my own business, but I couldn’t help thinking that there was something downright disturbing about it, Dr. Van Deusen. I watched them taking pictures, it must have been ten minutes or so, and then just as quickly as they touched down, they got into their plane and took off.”

  As if the tension were too much for him, Ed once again took up his fishing pole and waded out beyond the edge of the shore, one of the once proud fisherfolk of our area attempting to forge a living from a dwindling fish stock. I was given to understand, astoundingly, that the conversation was now at a close, taciturnity ever being a characteristic of the traditional angler. However, the devastating implications of Ed’s remarks stayed with me long after.

  For example: though it was true that there was nowhere for the visitor to our island to stay, there existed simultaneously a powerful allure to our enclave. Who would not care to see the affluent and well-connected families of the oligarchy at play, who would not care to observe us up close? Who would not wish to banter or shoot the breeze with oligarchs in the context of luxuriant cocktail party soirées? I know that for many people social events of this kind are not to their tastes. And yet when you have flair and style, you know that any party is not memorable until you throw your car keys to the valet and stroll onto the patio. Yes, when my wife and I arrive, when we administer our air kisses and firm handshakes, then it is widely known that an island party has begun to lift off.

  Now, because of the powerful allure of our island, as I have described it, you will find that curious persons occasionally take the ferryboat over just to see the place for a few hours. Often they bring bicycles, until they are told that the island is largely off-limits to bicyclists, the majority of the roads being under the control of the several exclusive country clubs. Just when the cyclists, with their unbecoming fanny packs, have given up hope, then the pleasure boaters begin to assault our shores with their shameful powerboats or, even worse, those things, what are they called? Those things that look like large-scale electric shavers of some kind, inevitably piloted by young men with revealing bathing trunks. These so-called pleasure crafts assault our beaches and shores, and their helmsmen bring tape players and play horrible music, and they roast salmonella-infected meats over open fires.

  It was possible, of course, that the plane Ed described carried the sort of dark-complexioned, or dark-complected, persons who were simply curious about the island, a rumored enclave that houses many storied individuals. And yet you know as well as I that there are certain moments in a life when you begin to see the way things really are. You have just been fished from the sea. You see information systems spread out before you. You understand that divergent and equally important systems of thinking and communicating are happening at one and the same time. You understand that there may be a manifest echelon to human events, and this manifest echelon may conceal much more important subliminal echelons, and this subliminal content is the region of government operations, where secret budgeting processes take place, where backroom negotiations transpire, where deals are cut, and where prisoners are occasionally forced to listen to popular music that is distasteful to them, or are made to touch the breasts of female interrogation experts. This is the way it must be.

  When Ed Thorne said what he said to me about the aircraft, I immediately recognized that dark-complected, in this context, had a particular meaning, and the meaning of it was that Ed himself was now in the employ of important national intelligence agencies, though I couldn’t be certain which shadowy acronym applied. If those of you in the intelligence community are reading these pages, as I certainly hope you will, you’ll no doubt remember from your own surveillance operations that the far end of South Beach is noteworthy for two local sites much celebrated hereabouts. One of the sites is the naval radar facility that is still, to this day, engaged in the business of searching the waters compassed around us for enemy submarines and other unidentified craft. The conjunction of that radar parabola (sweeping around in the distance like a heliotropic lily sped up on some nature program) with the facts described by Ed Thorne was totally overpowering. That’s what I’m trying to say. Suddenly, I recognized what I had dim-wittedly forgotten. That we were in a time of national emergency! In a time of war! And the first casualty of this war was superficial meanings. Things no longer meant what they seemed to mean. Words had begun to mean more than they appeared to mean. So it was that the employment of the awkward and hyphenated term dark-complected here on our vulnerable and pivotal island suggested to me grave international events, events that had mostly been distant from me personally. And as soon as I understood, I began to run in the direction of the other important local site at the distant end of South Beach, the golf course.

  4. A Quick Nine Before Lunch

  My pace could best be described as a trot. I was taking care not to trip on any of those rocks of South Beach, and though I cannot claim that my aerobic activity met the federal standards for an hour of physical activity per day, I was still capable of vigor, as I have said. Some days I still move around a little bit with my son, Skip, who even though he is in his early forties likes to throw the plastic disk known as the Frisbee. Skip has noted many interesting rhymes for the word Frisbee too: chickpea, scot-free, ennui, DDT, germ-free, squeegee, TV, whoopee, amputee, off-key, deep-sea—and my personal favorite, patisserie. My surmise is that Skip long ago decided, in his unhurried way, that the Frisbee was an important example of athletic prowess among those dazzling and beautiful preparatory school teens who encircled him occasionally, pointing and jeering, here on the island. That particular crop of teens has all grown up now, of course, and they have their own children, children who are themselves nearly teens, but time does not move nearly so quickly for Skip. He is therefore still attempting to perfect his Frisbee skills, in the hopes that those acquaintances of his past will shower him with esteem. It is in these touching moments that I am likely to clap an arm around my son and wipe a food smudge from his cheek. Then I will explain to him that there has never been a thrower of the Frisbee who has exceeded him in dexterity and prowess, and this will satisfy his need for fatherly approval, until he hears the hoarse cry of the northeastern blue jay, a bird he much admires.

  My objective was the golf course, where I would begin the process of disseminating the information that Ed Thorne had just passed along to me. No doubt Ed was now awaiting some kind of amphibious vehicle so that he could debrief the authorities on the dark-complected persons, the current ramping-up of antiterrorist activities along the eastern seaboard, and so forth.

  I’m not going to lie and claim that I’m a successful golfer. Just the opposite is the case. I am left-handed, like many creative thinkers, and when I was a young man growing up in northern Westchester County, I attempted to learn to golf right-handed. It was very difficult in those dark ages, you see, to get golf clubs for lefties. My golfing was execrable; my backswing was not to be trusted, and my friends and relations were occasionally injured. In fact, I had bad hand-eye coordination. I did not then (and do not now) let these limitations hinder me, because in my view golf is a fine social activity. As long as you can keep yourself from cursing and throwing your clubs, which I am able to do thr
ee out of four times, then you might as well get out there and walk around, even if this only involves disembarking from the cart, fishing out the relevant driver, and limping out to the ball.

  To reiterate: my plan was to take my message of imminent peril into the community. It is true that I was, at the moment, a man wearing only red poplin shorts, beige socks, and the shoe popularly known as the Docksider. Moreover, I was legally blind, or at least extremely nearsighted, without my spectacles. I had lost my wallet and all my house keys, and I was soaked through. I had, however, managed to hang on to my ocean-spattered copy of Omega Force: Code White by Stuart Hawkes-Mitchell. My style of dress should not have made it impossible for me to carry my message to my townsfolk. I would begin at the golf clubhouse. Accordingly, I crossed the beach parking lot, a mere bald patch, and from there I hiked along the road.

  There was an immediate hindrance to my progress, and that was that I espied my wife’s car, her little sports coupe, parked in the lot by the clubhouse. It is not that I viewed my wife as an adversary, of course. My wife is my ally and my best friend, except when she misplaces items that properly belong to me, or purposefully removes items from the house under the misapprehension that this will in some way keep me from practicing bad habits or pursuing lifestyle choices that she considers unhealthful. Were she fully informed, she would not take these drastic steps.