“And the Romans were the ones who actually nailed a certain influential carpenter to a stick of lumber.”
“What do you mean?”
“Whom does history blame for Calvary, Finnian? Not the people who did the literal stabbing and flogging and hammering.”
I see where he’s headed with this, but I allow him to make his point.
“There have always been, and always will be, Romans,” he says. “People with power and money who seek to enforce their will at everyone else’s expense. Romans are a given. A force of nature. Like weather. We don’t take what they do personally. Miles Sutcliffe is a Roman. No one expected any better of him. You, on the other hand...”
“I may be many things, Enzo, but I’m no Judas. I didn’t betray anybody.”
“You might want to take an opinion poll on that, Buckaroo Banzai.”
“I didn’t know Miles’ plan was going to change! I didn’t know Fish Pier was going to be shit-canned! Once that started happening, I washed my hands of the whole thing!”
“Interesting choice of words.” He smiles slyly.
“I was as pissed as anyone when those plans started changing, Enz. More so. I was the one who came up with the whole letter-writing idea and got all those letters to the developers.”
Enzo leans back and appraises me with a hoised brow.
“What?” I ask. “Are you saying you don’t believe me?”
“What I believe is unimportant. I’m not a member of—” He cuts himself off, looks around the barroom, and softly growls, “of a certain ‘fraternity’ that need not be named.”
“What are you talking about, Enz?”
“I think you know exactly what I’m talking about.”
Maybe I do, but I want to hear him say it. “Can I buy a vowel here?”
Suddenly the silent drinkers at the other table rise in tandem, sliding their chairs back. Enzo flicks his eyes toward them and knocks on the table in a wrapping-up gesture. “The wine’s done too much yapping already. …Besides, you probably want to get on with your day.” He says the latter in the tone of a strong suggestion.
The raincoat posse heads toward the door en masse. Enzo stares at the floor, waiting for them to exit. After they do, he pauses for a few seconds, then stands and zips his raincoat up to his chin. He tosses a scratch ticket on the table as a tip and walks to the door himself. Before leaving, he peers out at the street, then shoots a glance back at me that I interpret as a warning.
I stand and amble toward the rear of the bar as if I’m going to use the men’s room.
I duck out the back door.
Chapter 22
I make my way out of Greyhook, sticking to the back alleys and right-of-ways. I haven’t found a roost yet, but right now the village seems like a more welcoming place than Greyhook. I’m passing the row of old fishmonger shacks that serves as the unofficial borderline between the two “districts” when I spot Jeannie, in a blue poncho, talking to someone in a side alley. I can’t see the other person; they’re blocked by a stack of beat-up lobster traps.
Jeannie notices me, and I think I see a “caught” look flash across her face before she covers it with a smile. She says something to the other person, who turns briskly in the opposite direction. I catch a glimpse of motion behind the stacked traps as the figure stalks away.
Jeannie marches toward me. Before I can ask her any questions, she says, “Walk with me. I’m on my way to work. Let’s take the long route.”
We’re only a pebble’s toss from Pete’s Lagoon, but we take a detour loop around the small residential neighborhood north of Island Ave. Jean pulls down the visor of her rain poncho as if she doesn’t want to be seen with me. “I hear you’ve been snooping around Greyhook, looking for trouble,” she says, aiming her voice at the ground.
“Can’t a person take a crap on this island without CNN doing a Special Report?”
“It was on TMZ, actually. …Hey listen, I’m sorry about the way I slammed the brakes on last night.”
“It was late. I’d been blathering. It was time for me to go.”
“No. There was something I wanted to tell you. Something that might be important to you, but I couldn’t. Not till I checked with someone first.”
“And?”
“Well, I did that.”
“And?”
“It’s not something I can just blurt out in thirty seconds. It needs… context.”
“Okay. So what time do you get off work tonight?”
She trudges ahead for several yards before saying, “Ten.”
Fine. I’ll take that as a “date.” We walk in silence for a bit. I want to know who she was just talking to—my gut is flashing warning signals—but she doesn’t volunteer the information, and I don’t feel it’s my place to pry.
Instead I say, “Hey Jeannie, can I ask you a big favor? Promise you’ll say no if it makes you uncomfortable.” I ask her if she still has dial-up Internet at her house, and how she’d feel about my using her place while she’s at work.
I expect some reluctance, but she quickly replies, “Sure.” I don’t know if she’s agreeing so fast because she wants to help me or because she wants to distract me from asking about her back-alley conversation.
“I promise to respect your privacy. I’ll just plug my computer in and work. I won’t poke around or look in anything.”
“You didn’t have to say that, Finn. I trust you. That’s why I said yes.”
She hands me her key chain with the tiny stuffed Cthulhu doll on it (another old gift from me) and tells me where to find the logon instructions for the Internet. “Use the landline too, if you want, and help yourself to anything you need.”
“Thanks. I will masturbate into your underwear drawer; I hope that’s understood.”
“Well, duh. It’d almost be creepy if you didn’t.”
We’re approaching Pete’s again but from the opposite direction. I say I’ll meet her at ten. She doesn’t argue. She’s about to step inside when she says, “I’m worried about you, Finn.”
“Why?” Like there aren’t 457 good reasons to be.
“Just a vibe I’m picking up.”
“Do you know something I don’t? Have you heard something?”
She pauses pregnantly. “It’s more what I’m not hearing. Something not being said to me. I don’t know. But also—” She cuts herself off.
“Also what, Jeannie?”
She shakes her head dismissively.
“Come on, Jeannie. Spit it out.”
She sighs. “It’s probably nothing, but… Danny called me. Asked if I knew if you were okay. Said he had a bad feeling.”
Uh-oh. When Danny gets an intuition, it’s time to sit up and pay attention.
“How did he know I was on the island?”
“He didn’t. Not till I told him. He was just calling out of the blue.”
Yipes.
. . . . .
Danny Mawukura. One of my most beloved friends on Musqasset. I was already hoping to see him this morning—to say hello and maybe hit him up for a place to crash. Now I have an even more pressing reason to pay him a visit.
If I’ve ever met an enlightened human being, it is Danny Mawukura.
He has a bungalow that sits all by itself on the hilly northern side of the island. To get there, I follow a winding trail off Studio Row marked by a brightly colored sign, “Dreamsong Studio.” His place is tucked away on a grassy terrace partway down North Hill where it slopes toward the water. The homes of the rock-star artists perch elegantly atop the hill; Danny’s place
peeks out from the middle like a kittiwake’s nest.
His yard and house are an explosion of hand-painted color.
Everything Danny touches becomes a work of art—his guitar, his refrigerator, a hammer from Ace Hardware. He paints all his possessions in a trademark palette of bright earthy colors, creating forms out of clusters of dots. Danny has no formal art training, but his animal-themed paintings, influenced by his indigenous Australian heritage, tap into some primal dimension of the psyche completely inaccessible to crude brush monkeys like me.
I’m not a formally religious person, but you can’t hang around with Danny very long without coming face to face with the mysteries of the cosmos. The guy’s a freaking shaman. He visits other dimensions with the ease most people visit 7-Eleven.
Case in point, as I approach his house on its walkway of hand-painted stones, not only does the rain stop but the sun makes its first appearance since I arrived on the island. It shines down only on Danny’s color-crazed quarter-acre—I swear—as he emerges from his studio and says with a grin, “I asked for a sign to mark your arrival, mate, but this is a bit showy, no?”
We give each other a hard hug. As to how he knew I was coming, I learned long ago not to trifle with such questions. Danny just knows stuff. Not because he’s tapped into the island’s gossip network but because he’s tapped into a network of an entirely different frequency.
As we sit down for tea in his glowing-artwork kitchen, I am heartened to see his eyes light up with pure affection for me. At least there’s one person on the island who doesn’t think I’m lower than barnacle turd on a bilge pump.
Danny was never a hang-around-with-every-day type of friend, but he was my spiritual touchstone when I lived on the island. I’m about to ask him why he called Jeannie about me when he lays a hand on my arm, closes his eyes, and says to me in his hybrid Aussie accent, “Spirit has been knocking on my door about you, mate. Hard. Shall I find out why?”
He looks the question into my eyes and I nod. If Danny has any insight about what’s been happening to me, I need to know what it is.
Danny goes into a small room off the kitchen and draws the curtains closed, darkening the room. He lights a sage smudge-stick and wafts the smoke in the air as he faces in the four compass directions, bows, and mutters some words I can’t make out. He sits on a cushion, picks up a hand drum, and taps it rhythmically. The drumming goes on for about ten minutes. Then he stops, stands, bows in the four directions, and returns to the kitchen.
“Something came through,” he says. Uh-oh. Careful what you wish for.
He lays his hand on my arm again, looks down at the floor, and says, “Spirit tells you’ve been carrying a burden for a long, long time, Finn. This burden has been sapping your power and now it is threatening to literally kill you. It’s not your burden, but you don’t know how to lay it down. That’s because you’ve always carried other people’s burdens. Kept other people’s secrets. Preserved other people’s falsehoods. You thought that was your way to have value in the world. But in doing so, you’ve leaked your own power away. And now you must reclaim it. You must fight for your truth, fight for your worth, fight for your power. Or… else.”
Jeez. Well, what did I expect? When Danny gives you advice, you don’t get “cheer up and look on the bright side” stuff, you get a sucker punch to the soul. Twelve years of therapy condensed into forty-five seconds.
He lets me marinate in the message for a minute or two, then moves on to lighter fare. He asks me about my work, and we talk about painting for a while. When I get up the nerve to ask him if he knows a place where I can lie low for a day or two, he offers to make up his back room for me. Of course he does; that’s Danny. But I refuse to stay in his house, so he leads me outside. The sky is busy with barreling clouds again, but the rain is still on pause. I follow Danny to his storage shed, which is down the hill a bit, a safe distance from the house. He thrusts the door open with a ta-da gesture. “Be it ever so abominable,” he says.
The shed is actually decent sized and fairly clean and uncluttered, with a window and a wooden floor. It’ll do just fine. I’m happy to have a “home” at last.
“I’ll bring a sleeping bag and a lantern down for you in a bit,” Danny tells me, “and a bite to eat.” He points to an inflatable boat with an outboard motor. It is currently deflated and packed onto a hand-pulled, two-wheel trailer. “If things really come a gutser for you,” he says, “take the raft down to my little dock and get the hell off the island.”
“Thanks, Danny, but I’d never make it across in this weather. Not in that.”
“I ain’t sayin’ it’s your ‘A’ option, mate, but if you find yourself facing a choice between the worst possibility and the second worst, take the ruddy thing and go.”
I nod and thank him. He clasps my shoulders and looks me up and down. “And if you’re thinkin’ of goin’ walkabout again, switch into this.”
He grabs a bright yellow rain suit from a hook and hands it to me, then hangs a pair of binoculars around my neck. Lastly, he reaches into his pocket, pulls out a small black stone and places it in my hand. “Obsidian,” he says, “the stone of truth. It’ll awaken the warrior within and help you speak your truth.”
Those words might sound ridiculous coming from another mouth—such as mine—but not from Danny’s. I accept the stone with gratitude.
Danny gives me a hug of pure love and starts back toward his studio.
After a few steps, he turns and our eyes meet again. We both burst out laughing for no apparent reason. Then he taps his heart, points to the sky, and slips away in the wind.
. . . . .
It’s only a five-minute walk from Danny’s to Jeannie’s, but I’m making it stretch. Trying to digest Danny’s words to me. Actually, Danny would be the first to tell you they’re not “his” words at all—but wherever they came from, they’re right on target.
It’s true that I’ve always derived my sense of worth and power in a secondhand way. From other people. For some reason, I decided early in life that my value as a human being lay in enabling others to have the happiness and peace of mind I inexplicably denied myself. And now life has painted me into a corner, and I must find my own power. Or… else.
As if to challenge me on this very point, a figure appears in my vision, about seventy yards ahead on the road. Wearing a hooded rain slicker—yes, Davy’s grey in color—and sporting a high black-and-gray beard, the man is pacing around in an overgrown driveway two lots down from Jeannie’s. He’s talking to a shorter guy, lightly bearded. They seem to be watching the road for someone—someone whose name rhymes with Bin Barrel, I’ll gamble. I’m glad I’m disguised in Danny’s yellow rain gear.
Faking an old man’s penguin walk, I turn into the driveway of a vacant home and stroll behind the house, shielding myself from the men’s view. I creep into a patch of scrub pine behind the house from where I can watch the men, unseen. I remember that, miraculously, I have just acquired a pair of binoculars from Danny. I put them to my eyes and adjust the focus.
Davy Grey has his back turned, but the shorter man’s face gels into clear view.
Oh.
It’s the first time I’ve laid eyes on him since the inn trucks left the dock.
E-cigarette guy, from the ferry.
Chapter 23
This could be the break I’ve been hoping for. A chance to pivot from mouse to snake. These guys don’t know I’ve spotted them. That means I can now watch them, maybe find out where they’re operating from and what they’re up to. Make a move on them before they make their next move on me. I feel electrified.
My new bright yellow rain outfit suddenly seems a liability. It glows like a road-hazard sign. I take it off and stash it in the bus
hes.
I watch the men as they confab on the side of the road. Once or twice, the shorter one points to the road itself, as if examining the very path I trod last night. They must have been part of the posse that followed me. Which means they are almost certainly Trooper Dan and Chokehold. Clearly they’re waiting for me to show up at Jeannie’s. How would they know I’m heading there? Only Jeannie and I know of my plans. Same as last night.
An image in my mind tries to flag my attention: the person who was talking to Jeannie in the alley. No. I foul it off like a bad pitch. Watch the men instead.
The two guys finally turn and walk off in the direction of the village. Guess they’re sick of waiting for me. Good. Now I can follow them. Here’s where my knowledge of the island will pay dividends. I know how all the properties interconnect and where all the shortcuts are. I feel confident I can tail these guys anywhere on the island without their knowing it.
I watch them from a distance as they proceed toward the village. At one point, the smaller one crouches and studies a rain-eroded section of the road. It’s the exact spot where I picked up my throwing stones, I believe. What are they looking for? They continue to walk, and take a right on Island Avenue. I cut through a series of back yards and overgrown lots, then jog lightly down Thistle Path to pick up their trail as they reach the west end of Island Avenue.
There they are, still walking west. I track their progress down Island Ave as I move light-footedly behind a row of shops. I temporarily lose sight of them.
Suddenly I hear the men take a brisk right turn into a narrow alley that runs alongside the very shop I’m crouched behind! I barely have time to duck around the opposite corner. Miraculously, they don’t spot me. I watch as they head down an overgrown path to Town Road 1, the dirt lane that leads to the town barn.
The town barn, where Musqasset keeps its maintenance equipment, sits all by itself in the wooded center of the island. So that’s where these guys have been hiding out the last couple of days? Makes sense, actually. They probably figured no town employees would be working over the long holiday weekend, so the barn would be a safe, out-of-the-way place to stay dry and use as a temporary headquarters. Avoid checking into any B&Bs or hotels.
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