“Yale,” someone yelled.
“What?” asked Doris.
“Yale. He went to Yale.”
“Oh, for chrissakes, Harvard, Yale, it doesn’t make a goddam bit of difference as far as I’m concerned,” said Doris, shaking her head. “They’re both asshole factories. Give me a Maine Maritime Academy man and a glass of gin and I’ll be perfectly happy. Anyway, the point of the story is, Jed concocted this cockamamie race so Jed Junior could beat everyone in town.”
A low wave of hoots and hollers echoed from the back of the crowd.
Doris paused, smiling as she worked the crowd into a lather.
“Of course, Jed hadn’t considered the fact that a certain fourteen-year-old Castine kid might decide to enter the race!” Doris yelled.
A chorus of cheers erupted from the crowd. A few people even shouted out his name: “Dewey! Dewey!”
“A kid who, I’m happy to say, is back here twenty-five years later, and, from what I’ve heard, is prepared to defend his title.”
Doris raised her hand and pointed at the man leaning against the pickup truck. He didn’t move, in fact, he didn’t seem to be listening.
* * *
Dewey Andreas was Castine’s son, as much a part of the town’s fabric as the hard, wind-swept place was part of him.
He was born in the three-room Castine hospital, delivered by Doris Russell’s late husband, Bob. He was raised on a pretty rambling farm called Margaret Hill, up a winding dirt road behind the golf course. He was a boy like any other boy in town until that one day everyone saw Dewey wasn’t like every other boy in town. He was eight years old at the time. The occasion was the annual Independence Day picnic at the Castine Golf Club, attended by everyone in town along with all of the summer folks.
Dewey was playing tennis, barefoot, with his older brother, Hobey. At some point, one of the summer kids, a prep schooler named Hampton, told the Andreas brothers to get off the court. They weren’t supposed to be playing in bare feet. When Hobey told the older boy to wait his turn, he’d called Hobey a “townie.”
What happened next on the green-grassed #2 tennis court lives on in Castine infamy. Dewey charged over and slammed the fifteen-year-old in the chest, knocking the taller boy over. When Hampton stood up, he lurched at Dewey, taking a big swing at his head. But Dewey ducked. Then he punched Hampton in the nose. Hampton dropped to the court, screaming in agony, as blood gushed from his nostrils. But Dewey wasn’t done with him. As horrified onlookers watched from the terrace, Dewey jumped on him, straddling him, then punched him over and over, beating the living crap out of him, stopping only when a combination of Hobey and their father, John Andreas, was able to pull him away from the bloody, bawling St. Paul’s freshman.
From then on, it wasn’t considered a wise move to fuck with the younger Andreas brother, the one with the mop of uncut, unmanageable brown hair, the kid who liked to ride his horse to school, the handsome, quiet one with the blue eyes as cold as stone. It wasn’t that people were embarrassed that day Dewey beat up Hampton. It was the opposite. Dewey had stood up for his brother and, by extension, his town.
They watched him grow up. By the time he was in sixth grade, he was six feet tall and had the gaunt, sinewy physique of an athlete. He had few friends, choosing mainly to hang out with his brother. Those friends he did have had been selected largely based on their interest in shooting things and by a shared dislike of talking, girls, and summer people.
By high school, he was six-four, two hundred pounds, and had the posture and gait of a prizefighter. After breaking every high school football scoring record in the state, Dewey ventured south to Boston College to carry the ball for the BC Eagles.
To say the town of Castine was proud of Dewey would’ve been an understatement. Every fall, twice a season, a bus was rented to ferry a crowd down to Chestnut Hill to watch BC’s hard-nosed 225-pound tailback tear through every defensive line in the Big East.
After college, Dewey returned to Castine long enough to steal away the prettiest girl in town, Holly Bourne, daughter of a professor at Maine Maritime Academy. Everyone in town went to the wedding. By then, Dewey was getting ready to try out for the U.S. Army Rangers. His hair was short. That was when some people started to recognize that Dewey’s aloofness, his standoffish demeanor, his confidence, the meanness in his eyes, the hint of savageness in his stride, that all of it had been given to him for a reason. No one was surprised when Dewey graduated first in his Ranger class out of 188 recruits.
There were tough people in Castine. There were tough people in Maine. And then there was Dewey.
When he left Rangers for Delta, people stopped gossiping altogether. It was no longer about pride. Dewey, they all knew, was being groomed to be one of America’s most elite soldiers. Not only was he serving his country, he was being trained to be part of America’s jagged front edge, the place where secrets were killed for, in cities no one had ever heard of, where nations clashed in the fog-shrouded dark of night. Dewey was in the middle of it all. He was in the maelstrom. A palpable sense of intrigue was always there, even when he wasn’t anywhere near the town.
The few times he came home with Holly and their toddler, Robbie, what had been a quiet, laconic nature became distant. Dewey’s silence told of a world the people in Castine would never know, a world Dewey didn’t want them to know, not because he didn’t like the people in town—because he loved them.
Where I’m going, you cannot come. I’m going there so you don’t have to.
Castine’s pride turned into something deeper then. Something quieter. When Dewey would return, on those rare occasions, back from an operation, his arrival was noted but not discussed. He was, they all knew, engaged in activities on behalf of the U.S. government that could never be talked of. Dewey, their Dewey, was at the bloodstained front edge of America’s covert war on terror. He was the razor’s edge, the tip of the spear, the hunter. It all made sense then, the toughness, the fierceness, the inability to be stopped, to feel pain.
And then, like a lightning bolt thrown from a cruel sky, it was all destroyed. Leukemia stole Robbie at age six. The town gathered at the cemetery, speechless and numb, to help Dewey and Holly bury their boy. A month later, Holly was found dead in an apartment near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and Dewey was accused of murdering her. The town’s grief turned bitter. Its character was shaken to its core. Yet instead of destroying the town, the tragedy brought everyone together. There was never a moment of doubt. Dewey could never do such a thing. Every family in town donated money so that Dewey could hire a good lawyer, a gesture he appreciated but refused to accept. In fact, he didn’t hire a lawyer, despite the fact that he faced the death penalty. He represented himself, standing alone against a well-heeled prosecution, and told the truth. He stood tall, just as he’d done so many years before, back on the tennis court.
When he was acquitted after only thirty-one minutes of deliberations, it was the coda to a terrible chain of events that had physically and emotionally exhausted the entire town. No one talked about Dewey after that. They all knew he fled the United States, but no one asked where he was going or what he was doing. They let him be. His parents, John and Margaret, aged. They left Margaret Hill only on rare occasions. Hobey moved to Blue Hill. A decade passed, with vague rumors about Dewey working on offshore oil platforms in faraway countries, and that was all.
And then he returned. It was a week after the greatest terror attack on American soil since 9/11, crafted by the Lebanese terrorist Alexander Fortuna. Maine’s largest employer, Bath Iron Works, had been destroyed in the attack. But someone had stopped the terrorist, though no one knew who. Several news reports mentioned a roughneck—an oil worker—with a military background, though the government refused to comment. Yes, that was when Dewey came back, and no one dared ask him if he was the one. They didn’t have to.