Meet Me in the Bottom

By Eric Reenstierna

It is the summer after high school graduation. Four seniors – Tom, Monty, Monty’s girlfriend Jerri, and red-haired Sarah Gibbons – are sorting out their futures. Will their future be in the small Cape Cod town where they grew up? The one that empties out in September when all the summer people go home? Or will it be “off Cape” and into the big time? One of them has an all expenses paid scholarship to the West Coast college that is a ticket out of town. Small time. Big time. What will it be? Set against the backdrop and beauty of Cape Cod, Meet Me in the Bottom is a story of friendship, beaches, boats, loyalty, the ocean, drive in movies, jalopies, love on blankets in the dunes, ice cream shops, and young people finding their futures. Death enters, too. The stakes are high for these four.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Release date: Feb 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9781478771630

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Meet Me in the Bottom

All Rights Reserved.

Copyright © 2024 Eric Reenstierna

v1.0

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author and do not represent the opinions or thoughts of the publisher. The author has represented and warranted full ownership and/or legal right to publish all the materials in this book.

This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the express written consent of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

For Vaughan, Chip, Jo Howe, Norma Liggett, Helen Reenstierna, Arthur Davidson, Tod Reenstierna, Anne, Bridget, Tom, Peter Holden, Ron Benanto, Linda, Donnie, Wanda, Jane, Lindsay, Susan, Wilcox, Richie the halfback, Glenn with the motorcycle in parts all over the living room floor, and John with the Corvette. One way or another, you are all in here.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I

II

III

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I

From opposite sides of the sales counter, the man in the plaid shirt and the blonde dressed for tennis stared down at the row of fishing lures he’d removed and spread on top of the glass case between them. Said the woman, Oh, I don‘t know, they’re all so pretty I’d like to take every one. I like this one and this. But I suppose what really matters is which ones will catch the fish.

The man paused before he answered. Dat all depents, he said.

It does?

Yes.

On what?

It depents, he said, first on de fisherman. Also de fish.

Oh. I see. Uh-huh. It was her turn to pause. Dropping her dark glasses from on top of her forehead, she slowly nodded her understanding. Uh-huh.

She chose a Hawaiian Wiggler with a rubber skirt that masked the triple barbed hook underneath. She took a simple, silver spoon, a day-glow orange fluorescent lure full of swivels, and another big enough to scare off a sand shark. The man kept his opinions to himself. He bagged the 1ures.

Forty-two eighty-t’ree, he said.

She paid. He handed the bag across, and as she took it and headed for the door, he followed the twitch of her hips beneath the tennis skirt. In spite of himself, he couldn’t take his gaze away.

When she was gone, he let out his breath and looked around to see that no one else was in the store. No one else but the boss, Bill. The boss, he thought, who was half his age.

A little of that, Frank? chuckled Bill. Bill had seen the long legs and the short skirt, too.

Once upon a time.

Frank looked at his watch. He was a half hour overdue for his afternoon break.

I t‘ink I step out, he said. He came around the end of the counter, pushed open the rickety wood screen door, and stepped out into the fresh air onto the deck.

Frank moved to the end of the deck and lit his pipe. Another car pulled in off the road and came to a stop at the bait shop. Bill could take care of it, he thought. If he couldn’t, what did it matter? It was all the same. The money Bill made from selling worms and tackle was like nothing against what he would get if he got what he was asking for the real estate. And he would get it. If Bill never sold another lure, it didn’t mean a thing.

Frank stepped from the deck and shuffled to the place on the guard fence where his own shoes had worn a bare patch like a scrape in the scrubby grass. Puffing on his pipe, he leaned his arms on the fence rail and looked out over the salt water river, which, though all around it might change, for as long as he’d been watching it, seemed the same. The river flowed in and out with the tides. It roiled at the concrete pillars of the bridge, where it was choked down from its breadth to a narrow neck. On the blacktop road above, the traffic stood bumper to bumper on its way from somewhere to somewhere. On the far bank, a blocky-looking, white- painted motel with plastic shutters had replaced the two fishermen’s cottages of weathered shingles he still could recall. The new buildings marched down the main road through the intersection on the far side of the bridge in brick and block and gaudy colors. The Age of Concrete on the new Cape Cod, thought Frank. All that was left of the places along the old highway that were still as he remembered them was the ground where he was standing. He had been there longer even than the owner. And, yet, it was only a matter of time before the bulldozers would arrive, knock down the bait shop, and make the destruction complete.

The tide, on an inflow, pushed upstream past marshes that were only steps and, yet, a world apart from this crush of traffic. At the edge of the marsh waded birds in the glint of the sun reflecting on the ripples from the wind. Jutting into the marsh was the dock lined with boats, berthed for their repairs. Somewhere below among the boats would be the boy, the latest that Bill had hired to fiddle with the engines, doing the work that Frank himself had somehow never grasped. Some of the boys Bill had hired had been worthless. They would be in one day, out the next, and never working hard, as if it didn’t matter much to them whether they kept such a steady job. But this boy seemed different. He had been on for a year, through a winter. Whenever Frank came along, he seemed to be everywhere at once, like a monkey on those motors, banging and clanging and working three or four. Sometimes, Frank told the boy to go slow. He worried sometimes that the boy in his haste might get himself caught in a propellor. Those propellors had blades like knives and could lop off a limb before you knew. Looking down, Frank could see the boy’s tools on the dock. He could see in at the open door of the tool shed, where there was no one. The boy wasn’t anywhere in sight.

Hey, boy, he called. Hey, Monty.

It wasn’t like him not to answer. What could have gone wrong? It could have been anything. And what if it had? The boy worked alone. If something had happened, if he had been injured and couldn’t call for help, who would know? There would be no one to notice. It could be done before anyone knew. And then the boy would be gone.

The boy was Montgomery Santmartin, and he wasn’t gone at all. He hadn’t drowned or lopped anything off. He was only out of sight in the water on the far side of an outboard, where he stood waist-deep in the river and felt with his feet in the bottom muck among fiddler crabs. He had heard Frank call from the top of the stairs and knew he’d be found out. Damn, he spat as he tightened a last screw to the outboard’s naked machinery. The engine’s jacket with the padding lay in the stern. It would have to stay there, he thought. With Frank on his way, there was no time to snug it in place.

Dropping the screwdriver into the stern, the boy unhitched the lines to free the boat, then hoisted himself into the cockpit, where a turn of the key brought the engine alive. He backed the boat into the shallows and put it in forward to idle as Frank came panting to the empty slip.

Monty, de boat- she’s driftin’, called Frank, and, looking over the side, the boy saw that, sure enough, it was.

She’s driftin’, he called again.

I’m going to take it out for a spin, shouted the boy above the rumble, and at that Frank had more than the boy’s safety to bother with. He took off his hat, whacked his leg with it, and yanked it on again.

You know you don’t take out de boats, he screamed.

Just one little spin.

No just one little spin. You know de rules. De rules de same for you and me. De rule is no one take out de boats except Bill. Dat been de rule for as long as I been in dis place.

I know.

Monty, you bring dat boat in here.

The boy looked at him, as though he might or might not.

You bring it in here.

The man pointed to the empty berth at his feet.

You bring it in here, Monty, I tell you, said Frank, and you better listen to me, because, if you don’t, I swear, I can tell you I’m lookin’ at one young man who is pretty quick going to find himself losin’ his job.

The throttle came down, the bow came up, and the boat shot out of the shallows. It was at thirty and climbing when it hit the channel, lined with marker buoys on either side. At the first red buoy, the boy cut a turn and headed outbound, toward the bay. Behind him, the engine made a sound like an angry animal. The speed limit signs in the shallows shot past so fast he couldn’t read them. The wind was all over him, on his face, in his hair. Before he could think, he was out of the narrows and into the river’s breadth. On the far side of the bay, the river met the land in the green banks and marshes of a golf course. It might have been a mile off. The boy set his course for a place on the far shore, and, as the engine churned, he felt the hull beneath his feet cut across the water and watched the needle edge up, fifty-three, fifty-four, fifty-five.

From the tee, the golfer’s drive had seemed aimed dead at the pin, but, at the last minute, it had hooked away. Everyone told him they’d seen it roll into the marsh, ·and, if it hadn’t been a new Titleist, he wouldn’t have gone after it. He would have dropped another and taken his strokes. From the edge of the salt grass, where the ground became soggy, he thought he could see it in the water. Taking a long iron, he stepped gingerly onto one clump of marsh grass and found that, by stepping from clump to clump, he could manage to keep his feet dry and still make progress toward the ball.

He was well away from the shore and digging with the iron when he first noticed the sound. It was like a buzz. He hadn’t paid it any attention, but, now that it had grown louder, he looked up to see where it was coming from. What he saw was that it was coming from a motor boat knifing straight for him.

The boat closed the distance between them in no time. The golf ball was forgotten. The boat was almost upon the man when he started for the shore. But he was too slow. It was like a slow motion dream. At the last minute, the boat cut a turn. But the wake it had made carried in. The wake caught the man in the marsh grass.

The boy turned away. Full throttle again, he steered a course for the opposite shore.

When I asked The Kid what the hell he was up to, he tried to tell me he was putting in fuel injection. Like half of what he said, that was hard to believe. What he had was an ancient, worthless, rusted Ford Falcon that had been handed down to him by his old aunt. It was her – excuse me, she – who had raised him. And I was the older brother he had never had. Older by one grade. But older, still. I was the one who told him what was okay and what was not okay. Like, maybe it was not such a good idea to be riding on the roof of a Buick doing eighty down the Mid-Cape Highway. Okay to smoke this. Maybe not so okay to swallow that pill when you didn’t know what was in it. Okay to be doing stuff with girls. He didn’t need me to tell him that. He looked like someone out of a movie. He knew about girls.

If he ever coaxed that Falcon to roll out