Their axes flashed like the sides of panicked fish, and like the fish, they were fleeing. But the woman stopped and looked at the old bull. She made angry sounds. She picked up a boulder and raised it over his head….

CHAPTER 1

June 30, 1990

Old Men

One of them had seen every year of the century, the other a full three score and ten. One had trouble sleeping. The other wondered where the years had gone. Neither ever awoke without a new pain somewhere or an old pain somewhere else. And neither could drink much anymore, or he’d spend the night at the toilet, pissing out ineffectual little dribbles that wouldn’t even make a satisfying sound.

But in these things, they were like old men everywhere. Other things bound them like brothers.

Both were descended from the Mayflower Pilgrims. One was grandfather, the other great-uncle, to the same two children. They walked on the beach between the creeks because each owned half of it. And they had detested each other since the administration of John F. Kennedy.

Rake Hilyard walked at dawn. The world was changing quickly, but he found perspective on the beach. Seasons passed, birds migrated, and tides flowed according to laws laid down long before the foolishness began. In the dunes, Indian shell heaps gave evidence of the first men. In the marsh mud, the bones of ancient pilot whales told of the first standings. Even the sea-smoothed boulders on the tideflats recalled the glacier that left them. And all of it made a ninety-year-old man feel a little younger.

Dickerson Bigelow did not come out as regularly. But after the heart attack, his doctor had told him to walk more, and on the beach, he could work even as he walked. If the tide was low, Dickerson walked on the flats, studied the island from a distance, and imagined what the last development of his life would look like. When the tide was high, he simply walked, his eyes fixed on the sand between his toes, his soul coveting the land on the Hilyard side, his brain scheming to get it.

At high tide on this summer morning, the beach was no more than a twenty-foot strand from wrack line to dune grass, which meant the old men could not avoid each other. But neither would turn back. They had been trespassing on each other’s beaches for decades, like warships showing their flags in foreign straits. So they ran out their guns and steamed on.

Dickerson fired first. “Mornin’, you old bastard.”

“What’s good about it, you son of a bitch?”

“We’re alive and can walk the beach. How’s that?”

“If it was up to you, only one of us’d be alive. Then you’d fill the creeks and hot-top the beach.”

Dickerson Bigelow laughed and ran a hand through the beard that fringed his face. He shaved his upper lip, in the style of an old shipmaster, so that whenever he bought property or petitioned for a permit, he would seem to have sprung from the Cape Cod sand itself, a modern man with the shrewd yet upright soul of a Yankee seafarer.

Next to him, Rake looked like the original go-to-hell dory fisherman—leathery face, dirty cap, dirtier deck shoes, and flannel shirt stuffed into trousers so dirty you could chop them up and use them for chum.

Rake glanced at Dickerson’s bony bare feet, the same color as the sand, at the gray trousers rolled up to the calves, the windbreaker draped over the barrel chest, and the knot of the striped tie. “Men don’t wear ties to the beach ’less they come on business.”

“Our families have quite a resource here, Rake.”

“Answer’s no.”

“Magnificent spot.” Dickerson stepped to the top of the dune and looked around.

“Mind the dune grass.