Bob’s low laugh is way off in another mood. “Why you just go ahead and be Lady Pound but you and I know.” The laugh rises and John B. looks around for a second. Bob would not touch her now. Petty is still looking at the intruder but is surrounded by Bob. He says to me, but not so Petty can’t hear, “Oh you hang around her you know you been somewhere, and you won’t find it in National Geographic.” It’s a big joke, but again also under the aspect of mystery.
“Please stop it,” Petty says without shifting her gaze from the man on the nubble, but her primness is flickeringly tickled and she tries to keep back all she thinks she shows. The unknown man on the nubble seems to give her something to protect her against the exciting doubts that Bob’s presence assaults her with.
He turns away and looks at what he’s been doing. He says, “I’ll never get to the bottom of you, woman, not in a hundred Maine winters, by Jesus,” and the low laughter is again under the aspect of mystery.
As he jumps on down to the sand to get the last two joists, Petty calls, “You can get the lobsters any time,” and preoccupied he doesn’t answer. She follows down and heads for the water.
Robby says to Bob as Bob goes to take up the two beams, “Daddy, look at our castle,” and Bob turns and squats to look at the low but monumental oblongs, their walls here and there in the Egyptian style steeply “battered” like the great outer barrier. John B. has his hand on the Number 7 joist: “It’s nawt a castle; it’s a city.”
“Whatever it is,” says Bob, “it’s beautiful.” He means it and his sincerity embraces both boys, they come together in the sound of their father’s word.
“Whatever it is,” says Robby, “it’s a castle.”
Still squatting in the space between the sand construction and the beams, Bob looks up again at the man on the nubble. “It’s a city too.”
“I said it’s a castle,” says Robby. And then as John B. says, “It’s a city,” in four stamps Robby levels the buildings, kicking down the outer wall for good measure.
“Gawd damn you!” shouts John B.’s high voice and with his palm he claps the end of the Number 7 beam, which pivots on the flat slant of Number 8 so the other end turns smartly into Bob’s temple and he tips right over onto the wreckage of the city-castle. His hand doesn’t move to his head, he doesn’t move.
Robby is lifting Bob’s head and John B. is running in a sort of sideways dance away from his father and nearer Petty, who, up to her hips, turns and rushes powerfully out of the water and runs to Bob.
The man is leaving the nubble for his Land Rover, and as the radial line between us because of his motion sweeps across the family scene at the edge of the tough beachgrass, I am able to move swiftly. Bob is out cold.
When Hugh Blood and Bob got into an argument between stickball innings, I stepped between them and shoved Hugh. It was over an issue of fact which, despite what our English book at Poly said, is always more gripping than a matter of opinion because you know the true truth is there waiting. Hugh said his argument was with Bob not me, but we all knew he’d never try anything with Bob and I just stood facing him. It was the year before we graduated, so it must have been Saturday or Sunday — probably Sunday because we’d have been at Poly for practice almost any other afternoon. It was either DiMaggio’s record streak or the walls of Babylon, games or miles, I forget. And after Hugh did not shove back, Bob said let’s let Joey settle it. So Bohack Joey must have been there, so it couldn’t have been Sunday, and as I shall explain later it must have been before May. And it must have been DiMaggio not Babylon. And for a moment, here moving surely to Bob’s unconscious side lying on the ruins of Robby’s castle, I have moved all too swiftly to his white-knuckled fist which ultimately Joey Neurohr’s mouth and spine sought and found. Today Joey is in a real estate agent’s on Cobble Hill and if we met we wouldn’t dare speak. Joey had the right answer — I wondered how Hugh could even imagine it was fifty-four—and then Bob, as if Joey were about to give the answer he’d already given, said to all of us, “Joey knows.” And Joey knew he’d been rooked again somehow and he sneered a grin and went off on his bike-cart.
As the nubble man backs around I think of asking him to help us and take Bob down that next crescent of beach to the island’s one short road that bends past the general store and ends smack at the ferry landing.
Bob is coming around. I don’t know how long it’s been, I don’t wear a watch. Dom, what is happening here is beside time. Bob has gone yellow. Petty holds his shoulders back but he pulls up and stands. And then without having time to bend forward he vomits yellow all over himself.
So we’re all five of us going back to the mainland tonight but not before Bob swims it off; and then I pole him out to the Brandeis professor’s lobster pot but to get enough we start the motor and go out to Bob’s own buoys, while Petty watches from the beach, arms akimbo. Bob is remote. Petty watches us haul up the wood cages. The small lobster is too small to take and of the four others one is missing a claw; we take them all. There’s little talking at supper, Petty isn’t happy. The beach is ours.
Back on Route One she’s at the wheel.
We’ll cut to Bob’s living room, the boys in bed, John B. with a sore behind to go with his sore hand.
“No, I’m all right,” Bob calls going out through the kitchen to the bathroom.
“Listen,” I ask Petty quietly, “did you ever tell Bob what I told you about Al and Gail in Heatsburg? The quarry?”
“Oh yes, maybe; yes, years ago. Maybe the same day you told me. I went out with Bob all those summers. I used to tell him everything. But before I wrote you that silly letter last week he’d just been talking about that very thing, which must be why I mentioned it to you.”
So I learn even more than I wanted. He told Petty I mixed emotion with biology, and why get mixed up in a ploy to a girl that compromised my friendship with a guy? but it’s water under the dam, and Petty said she thought all that about emotion and biology was typical Bob.
But ask for reproof and you’ll get it.
Bob has a fresh bourbon when he comes back. His forehead has been rubbed and there are still some drops in his hair in front.
Petty is worried about him and wanted to cancel the two couples Bob phoned as soon as we got home, bump on his head and all.
Bob is almost eager for me to meet Leo and Irish. I find I can’t imagine them. Why can’t I?
I ask Bob, Have they children? Yes, a girl three, a boy two, and something on the way. Do they come to the island? Yes, of course they come; say have you read Beckett? Only his novels, I reply. Well, I’ve only read his plays, but — now the seismic pause, and Petty frowns, she’s had a hard day; she murmurs Which plays did he write besides — Ben Sedgwick and I talked this out all night last May after they did Krapp’s Last Tape at the church: by Jesus he’s a religious writer, Beckett. Bob’s guest is tired. Final things maybe, I say, but things, just things. Bob shakes the same head that commended Joey and got badly hit this afternoon: No s’r, I think you’ve got a problem… no two ways about it, Beckett’s religious, why he’s God-obsessed. He seeks him because he’s found Him, that’s how Father Sedgwick puts it. It’s a problem of commitment, Cy, commitment.
Do I hear tires on gravel? “Was it a castle or a city this afternoon?” I ask Petty.
Bob says, “Which said which?”