finery with a bravado that belied the nakedness soon to come. The breeze off the Atlantic signaled an end to Indian summer, and Ray Norton smelled the first signs of winter in the air as he turned the town’s only police car onto Conger’s Point Road.
Ray had grown up in Port Arbello and now, in his mid-fifties, he was beginning to feel old. He had watched himself change and grow older as Port Arbello stayed the same. He tried to remember what changes had come to the town since he had been born, and realized that there just weren’t enough to make much of a difference.
There was the new motel, doing its best to act as if it had been there since the beginning of time. It hadn’t been, and as he passed it Ray wondered what would become of it when the losses finally became too great for even its management to tolerate. Maybe the town could buy it and turn it into a country club. Get rid of the neon sign. Put in a golf course.
Then he remembered that Port Arbello had already tried a country club, or at least a building near the old golf course. That had failed too, and the building now stood vacant and dying, serving only as a shelter for the few people who still used the golf course. There weren’t more than forty or fifty of them, and it was all they could do to keep raising the funds to pay the greenskeeper each year.
All in all, other than the new motel (which was already fifteen years old), there wasn’t much that was new in Port Arbello. A store occasionally changed hands, a house came on the market now and then, and once in a while a new family came to town. For the most part, though, the town kept to itself, passing its homes and its businesses from one generation to the next. Its small farms remained small farms, and its small fishing fleet continued to support a small group of fishermen.
But that was the way they liked it, Ray realized. They had grown up with it, and they were used to it They had no intention of changing it He remembered a few years back—how many he was no longer sure, but it must have been right after the War—when a real-estate developer had bought up a lot of acreage outside the town limits. He was going to turn Port Arbello into a summer town, filled with A-frames and summer natives.
The town had caught wind of the plan, and for the first time in its history, Port Arbello had moved quickly. In a single town meeting, with the support of everybody except the farmer who had sold his property, Port Arbello had passed zoning ordinances to prohibit such projects, then annexed the property that was to be developed. The developer fought it through the courts, but Port Arbello won. In the end, the developer had been unable to sell the property, and the farmer, a couple of hundred thousand dollars richer, had foreclosed on the mortgage, bought himself all the newest equipment he could find, and was still happily working his land at the age of eighty-six. Ray grinned to himself. That was the way of things in Port Arbello.
He tooted his horn as he passed the old farmer, but didn’t wave. He didn’t have to, for the farmer, intent on what he was doing, didn’t look up from his field.
But Ray knew that the next time he saw him in town, the old man would touch the brim of his hat and say, “Nice to see you the other day, Ray.” That, too, was the way things were done in Port Arbello.
A mile out of town the Conger’s Point Road made the left turn that would take it partway out to the Point before it cut back inland on its way south. Ray supposed that this, too, was something new, though the road had been extended far beyond Conger’s Point long before he was born. But in the old days, the really old days, it had probably ended at the Congers’ front door, a direct pipeline from the heart of the town to the residence of its leading citizens.
The Conger family, though not the founders of Port Arbello, had been at the top of the sodal heap there for so long that it was now a tenet of faith with the people that not much could go on in