Envious Moon Read Free

shoulder and hit the ground. I’d smell like the floor of the fish cannery but she wouldn’t care less. She’d leap into my arms and I’d spin her, her legs off the ground, while her kisses rained onto my neck.
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    E veryone knew that house. Where it sat, on the easternmost tip of Cross Island, you couldn’t miss it. Our path to the Grand Banks took us right underneath its turret and all the men used it as a landmark. It meant we were only an hour from home.
    I don’t believe it ever occurred to me that someone actually lived there. It didn’t look like the kind of place where people lived. I had no frame of reference for people living in houses that size. It looked like part of the landscape itself, sitting as it did above the granite cliffs, near where the corner of the island hit the broad Atlantic, leaning out over the water like it was one good storm away from tumbling in.
    Then one night on the jetty, Victor brought the house into my life.
    This was the summer I turned seventeen and Victor and I spent practically every ounce of free time we had out on the jetty. It was our place. We’d drink beer out of cans and sit under the stars listening to the water and watching the boats slide past us in the dark. We’d smoke cigarettes and talk about girls. Neither of us had any prospects, to tell you the truth. All of the girls weknew were still in high school, which we weren’t. Our work took us strictly into the world of men. And we could not go into bars yet. Bars seemed like some kind of nirvana. Even walking past the few dives in town, the door would sometimes be propped open against the summer heat and inside we’d see men we knew leaning against the bar with beers in their hands, arms draped around women who would never have given us the time of day. It appeared to us that you just needed to be old enough, and once you were, you could drink the night away and then know what it was to be between the legs of a beautiful woman.
    The night Victor told me about the house was a perfect summer night, clear as can be, and without moon. Above us was the great diffused spray of the Milky Way. Below us the waves lapped against the barnacled rocks of the jetty. The only sound was from the thrum of the diesel engines from passing lobster boats. We had a six-pack of beer. Victor started by saying he had done a wake at the house two nights before. An old woman had lived there alone, he said, had died in the kitchen, and then there was a wake in the house a week later. There was no funeral home on the island so they hired O’Brien’s. I thought this was shaping up to be another one of Victor’s funny stories about working at the funeral home. Like the one he told about a removal they did from a colonial on the waterfront near Connecticut. Some old fellow had died on the third floor and in this old house the staircases were so narrow there was no way they were going to get the gurney up to get him. So O’Brien had Victor keep the family busy in the kitchen and their eyes away from the window. From upstairs O’Brien just tossed the old man out the window and in the kitchen Victor saw the old man go by and he said he expected to hear a thud when he hit but that he was as quiet as falling leaves. The family never knew.O’Brien and Victor scooped the body off the lawn and into the hearse.
    But this story was different. At the wake, Victor’s only job was to stand in this library room in the mansion and look official in his suit. O’Brien always gave him exact orders. How to stand with your arms at your side, look straight ahead and don’t smile. If someone asks you a question, then bend forward to listen. It was all about appearances and Victor was pretty good at it, I guess. At any rate, at the wake all the people were in another room on the second floor of the house. This was where the food was and in the library where Victor was stationed nothing was going