“Not really,” Mac said, looking over at me for confirmation. I shrugged at him.
Doc sighed. “I ask because he sure as hell looked familiar to me. I’ve been nattering on the last while in your living room there while I try—for the life of me—to figure out if I’m crazy or not.”
Mac said, “You’re not crazy, Doc. You’re probably one of the smartest—”
“Don’t lie to an old man, m’ boy.” Doc said and then chuckled. “You’ll go to hell for it. I’m getting up there. I know it. I’ve treated enough of these old-timers who lose track of things...who wash the walls with pickle brine and drink their own bathwater cuz some of the bigger marbles have just clean rolled away...it happens to us all, Mac. Dave. Remember that, men.”
“Yes, sir,” Mac said, thirteen again and addressing the school principal.
Doc smiled at that but he didn’t say, Enough of the sir-stuff, kid. He probably liked the respect. He’d been retired a few years now and probably missed having the townsfolk look to him for all the answers. Now islanders thought of the generation a few years younger than Doc Sawbones and Judge O’Hurley as the ‘go-to’ men, the problem-solvers. The new mayor was in his forties and it was guys like him and Roddy and Parson who piped up at Town Hall meetings and the like. They got the floor without question now, so to speak.
“How many more days you two at home? Back on the island, I mean?”
“A week or so, I expect,” I said.
Mac nodded. We had clearance to be off work, for as long a haul as the estate required, but would need to coordinate a lift out to the trawler if our timing was off.
“Well, then, I need to tell you a little story. First off, I haven’t had a chance to say it yet. My condolences on the loss of your Ma. She had it hard the last number of years. And I know you boys had some tough times too. It don’t mean anything from spit, coming from an old man like me who didn’t know you, didn’t bring you up, but I am proud to see the young men Y’are nowadays. Ethan and all them boys on the boats have told me the same.”
“Well …” I said, searching for words, which usually came so much easier to me than to my brother, “I thank you, Doc. Nice of you to say.”
“It’s the truth, young David. Things coulda gone a number o’ different ways but you both are stand-up boys. I hope you’ll consider settling down here in DC when the time is right for you. No rush, though. Some wild oats can be sown at sea. Just as good a place as any, I s’pose.”
He looked at us both, satisfied to get this out of the way. He might have been buttering us up but it came across as genuine. I actually felt a lump in my throat at this and flashed on a picture of Da in my mind.
“Mighty strange, t’wasn’t it? Having that mad feller in here like that?”
“It was, it was,” Mac said, leaning forward on the table with his elbows. “Never seen the likes o’ that here in Dovetail, Doc. You?”
“Haven’t. Not a once. But I think I have an idea what’s going on here. If you’ll indulge this old man …“
“Sure,” Mac said. “Have at ‘er.”
6.
It’d be, oh, I guess about four or five years gone by now. The years blur together when you get to my age, I tell ya that much. You boys both know I’m the coroner for the island, not just the Doc. Oh, excuse me. Was the coroner. Was the town Doc.
Mandatory retirement kicked in for me. Just as well. I coulda gone a few more years just as happy as a clam. But Agnes got more, uh, distant. Just as well, yuh, just as well altogether.
I got a call out to the south end of town. Birkhead waited for me there. His new deputy too. The neighbour had a key and he’d already been in the house, a big ol’ Victorian number. Luxury to the hilt.
A man you might remember, well, he hadn’t been into work for a few days and his secretary called the police station to let them know. Man’s wife had up and left him and we thought we’d find he’d done something...regrettable. A place this small, everyone knows your business and most can’t stand the idea that we all might look at them like they just failed at life. Wife left ya? You must be a horrible person. May as well just end it all.
We found him. Sure as shootin’. But nothing told us he’d done it to hisself. He just lay there on bloody white sheets with blue florals on ‘em. Now forgive me, boys. I’ve lived a life of looking at some awful wounds, some bad infections. But this was a sight. I won’t mind if you tell me to stop.
The man’s head was bald. Not a hair left. Just a scalp of oozing lacerations. Yup, even after a few days you could still see...moisture.
And the sheets weren’t bloody from wounds. No animal had come into that house and done that to him. He bled from the inside. Except for his head where the skin had flaked open, the rest had just seeped out, his mouth, his ears, his eyes, his ass, his pores, every hole imaginable. I looked him over good. His last remaining teeth softened into caramels, little grey nubs in his mouth. Others he must have spat out in his last minutes. They lay all around him like tiny grave markers. His eyes had sunk back into his skull. Parts of him looked and stank like he’d been rotten for weeks. Other parts looked fresh.
I called in to authorities bigger than our office and they sent a team out to do a proper autopsy.
The wife had left, that much looked sure, but she didn’t do this to her husband. We hadn’t a clue what had. Had the guy downed something? Lighter fluid? Paint thinner?
I hadn’t seen anything like this. Ever. Not in thirty-two-years-kind-of-ever.
Guy’s name was Frank Moort. Manager of the Union Rail office here in town.
He was your dad’s boss.
7.
Mac stared at Doc. Neither one of us said anything. For me, memories rolled through the back of my head, strung on a film strip I couldn’t erase.
Mac leaned to the side in his chair and reached into his pocket for his crushed pack of Viceroys, nearly empty. He offered me one. I shook a no. He offered one to Doc but Doc gave a small wave of his hand. Mac put one in his mouth, then leaned to the other side to retrieve Da’s silver Zippo from his other dress pant pocket.
He flicked the lighter and it caught the first try. He lit his Viceroy and a thin cloud formed in front of him, making him squint. The smell wafted strong, instantly filling my nostrils, and I realized I did want one. But I didn’t light up. Not just now. He put the pack and the lighter down on the table in front of him.
“So?” he said. And then he leaned back in his chair to take another drag, making his fingers a v on the cigarette to grip it. I expected him to look around for an ashtray but he didn’t. Ma never allowed smoking in the house, not since Da. But I guess that rule didn’t matter much anymore.
“So,” said Doc Sawbones, an echo of Mac but not open-ended. “I’m just laying it out for you. There’s more.”
“Go on then,” Mac said, fingering a bit of tobacco off his tongue and flicking it away. An icy wall had been built between the men. Where Mac had been calling his elder sir a few minutes ago, now the Doc trod in unsafe territory.
Doc’s age, his history with us, the fact that he almost died on our kitchen floor this afternoon—I knew my brother afforded Doc more time to unload this...story...of his because of these things, nothing more. If it had been anyone else who talked about Da, Mac might have knocked his block off. I’d seen Mac steal swigs from Ma’s liquor bottles all afternoon. His insides might not have been entirely painted by the booze yet, but he probably had his judgment compromised. I wondered if Doc saw this the same way. Likely. And likely Doc had known conversations with a good many hard men like my brother Mac.
8.
Chief had a hard-on for this guy, Frank Moort, for months. Boys, I mean a real swinging dick for this guy, like it would be his ticket to fame and fortune, just waiting to be printed on gold paper. A big commendation for Police Work of the Century or some damned thing. Birksie told me he didn’t have proof, but he knew—without a doubt, he said—that Moortie and a few Union Rail goons had made a habi
t of off-booking mined goods from Caterwaul on the south end of the island.
Now, Y’ask me, I never understood what good the rail lines were on an island this size. But Union owned them outright, and Frank told me once how a simple rail was cheaper to build and maintain than a road. Control the transport of goods, he’d said with a drunken snort, and you control the island’s economy. Roads. Ha. Outside of town, we sure-shootin’ don’t have many of those, do we?
Thing was, here’s this guy, he’s shy of sixty, pretty healthy except, like most of us, his lungs are grey. But I’d had him in for a physical a few months earlier. Union Rail made all their guys come in every year, like clockwork. I even had my notes in a file and I had Cindy pull ‘em for me before the guys got over from the mainland to do their autopsy on the body. Moort had been healthy. I mean, healthy enough. I’ve never seen vats of farm chemical do to a body what had been done to his.
Boys did a thorough cut. Wife wasn’t around so no one objected to the full slice-and-dice. Opened him up to have a look. Something looked wrong but it wasn’t the obvious kind of wrong, if’n you know what I mean.
It’s pretty rare to do an autopsy out this way, but because they’re so scarce in DC, I remember this one. They took detailed notes of every incision, every organ, every inch. And colour photographs of everything. My God, boys, enough technicolor of those weeping orifices to make you lose your lunch and breakfast both.
Course, our office kept copies of the whole file, pictures n’ all.
Now I bring this up for two reasons, boys. Two reasons and forgive me if this is blunt, or insensitive. I know that yer Da was a good man and he likely had nothing to do with any of the Union Rail investigation of Birkhead’s. Hell, I don’t even know if Birksie was in his right mind about it all.
But here it is. Your Daddy had been planted in the ground a lotta years by this point but I know for a fact, Birkhead had asked his old Union Rail co-workers about his actions—actions before he died.
And the second reason I’m telling you all this is that …
Don’t know how or if I’m crazy as a cuckoo clock, but I recognized that man in the pantry two hours ago. Not from the sagging body weeping red on the mattress, his teeth soft and grey all across them sheets. Nope, not him. But the guy in the pantry did look exactly like the man I knew from town, the guy who came in for his regular physicals. I remember because of the extra paperwork that got mailed out each time.
But this guy—this guy right here—shouting and frothing and trying to escape from the house here, he had the same tattoo. And his face looked a mess, but it was the same face. Do you hear what I’m telling you? The same.
It doesn’t make a bit of sense. Five years or so on, it makes my head spin. It’s impossible. Downright impossible, if you ask me. But I know what I saw.
Boys. The man in your Ma’s kitchen this af’noon was Frank Moort.
9.
Me and Mac, we didn’t ask Ol’ Doc Sawbones how sure he was. And he didn’t clarify. Didn’t say it with ninety-nine-point-nine-nine per cent surety, didn’t say anything more. He just looked at us like we should assume his words as the amen and almighty gospel.
And with our history and Ma’s plus the churches in town, I’m not sure why the gospel would be something that should ring true for either one of us.
Mac clicked Da’s lighter and the spurt of blue flame lit another cigarette at his mouth. He searched for a way to be cordial.
“Doc,” he finally said, “David and I, we, uh, we just buried our Ma today. N' somebody broke into the kitchen hopped up on who knows what. I’m real tired. And if you say this man was Da’s boss from, what, fifteen years ago? Well, that’s fine. I’m not going to argue with you. I’m not going to try and convince you otherwise or tell you it was probably just somebody who looked like him.”
He took a long drag and his Viceroy’s ash-end burned brightly.
“But what I’d like is… I’d like to just stop this conversation now.”
He took another long drag. “Thank you for your condolences. Thank you for everything. Now, if you don’t mind—” Mac got up from his chair and reached his hand out for a shake, his eyes squinting against his own cloud of smoke. With that, my brother shrugged off the report of our Dad’s dead Union Rail manager being in Ma’s house the day of her funeral. Mac and me had both been off-island by the time Frankie-Moort had kicked the bucket. Ma had sent me a letter—one of her last to us—that mentioned it in passing and how there had been an investigation. Nothing further came of it. And I hadn’t given it another thought.
Mac said nothing more to Doc. And Doc just looked at him through the haze of the smoke. Mac went on into the living room, expecting Doc to follow. And he did. Mac picked up the phone and dialled Arnie Dyer from a number in Ma’s writing on the bureau’s old yellow notepad.
When we heard the honk a few minutes later, Doc, who had moved back to the living room couch by then, got up in silence. He put on his coat with my help and I thanked him for coming. I didn’t know what else to say.
He turned back to face me on Ma’s porch. “Think on it, son,” he said to me while pulling on a checked cap over his thin white hair and looking at his watch. “Doctor’s office'll be open nine a.m. in the morning. I’m going to look up the file from Moort’s autopsy. Gonna see fer m’self.”
I bade him goodnight and watched as he ambled down the steps and across to the waiting cab. I had let him take one of Ma’s canes. I saw no earthly reason why I shouldn’t let him.
Ma wouldn’t be needing them—or her twenty-year-old wheelchair—anymore.
Part II
The Ground
May you live as long as you want
And never want as long as you live;
May misfortune follow you forever
And never catch up;
May you be in heaven a full hour
Before the devil knows you’re dead.
Sláinte!
—Traditional Irish Drinking Toast
1.
Neither of us went into the den where Ma had been found. I slept in my sister’s room upstairs and Mac took our old room down the short hall, the one we’d shared right up until we both quit school and headed for the water. Ours proved a different kind of life and I didn’t think on those DC years. Only saw the town fleetingly in my mind’s eye when a letter from Ma or from our sis, Teeny, would arrive. I’d read them like I read a novel, picturing things for a second or two. But the pictures looked as unfamiliar to me as the ones I made up when I read “The Old Man and the Sea” or “Treasure Island.”
So being back here, seeing my Ma in that open casket, even aged and bloated by whatever chemicals Cobb’s Funeral Home pumped under her skin, it all seemed surreal to me. DC is where I grew up. But it was different now. That lingering feeling I mentioned? Everyone and everything pulled its trigger on me.
In Teeny’s bed, I fell away to sleep just fine. But I woke in the black with an image in my head, stark but threatening to trickle between my mind’s mental fingers like sand. Tied to what Doc had said, it swam dreamily alongside something else, something I had thought in the split seconds before the Moort look-alike had thrown Ma’s kitchen table at my brother and me.
Mac let out a wail from our old bedroom. I fell out of bed in a tangle of pink sheets and slammed to the floor, my face smacking the hardwood of Tina’s bedroom floor. I got up and moved as best I could through the darkness to the door and out into the hall. I opened Mac’s door and reached in for the light. I gave it a flick and a blanket of white washed my eyes.
I adjusted and saw Mac upright in the bed that Ma had moved in to replace our old bunk beds. He squinted at me, his body shaking with the convulsing wrack of his sobbing. He squeezed his eyes shut against something only he could remember seeing. Me? I’d want to keep my eyes open no matter what. Least that way, I could just keep looking at whatever was real. Seeing anything other than memories is easier.
“Jeezus, Mac,” I said. “You hav
in’ those dreams, ain’t ya.” I went in and sat at the edge of the bed by his feet, not making eye contact. It’s hard to look your big brother in the eyes when there are tears in them.
We sat for a long while, not looking at each other, not looking at anything. Mac’s sobbing trailed off to just sniffles. He reached for his pack of Viceroys on the nightstand and clicked his lighter to one. He took a shallow drag and I felt him relax. His weight on the old mattress shifted and he laid his head back on the wall behind him while he smoked. Outside, a wind howled and the storm window rattled. The sash offered a crack of air, and when the wind settled, I could hear the crickets out in the yard. I wished I hadn’t turned on the light. It felt too bright and I finally closed my eyes and laid my head back on the cool wall behind me. As I did, Mac finally spoke.
“It’s different. The dream. There’s this…heavy weight. I see Da like I did in the ones I had before…but he’s not at the house. He’s in a field of tall grass. Just standing there. Dark sky’s overhead and there’s this huge wave coming up behind him. He doesn’t see it. And I want to shout at him to look. ‘Da! Da! Behind you.’ But he can’t hear me. Or he doesn’t want to look. I don’t know. And then—”
“What?”
“And then the wave hits. But it crashes into the lighthouse.”
I’d seen a hundred lighthouses in my last ten years up and down the coast. But I knew which one Mac meant. I blurted it out, even before thinking it through.
“Pelée House? Seriously? Up at Howl Cape?”
“Yeah, you remember when Da used to take us there. Teeny was still a baby and we’d go for picnics on nice days.”
“I barely remember. You’re like an elephant.” I reached out and rapped on his head, but only in a pretend way. I made a hollow clicking sound with my mouth to simulate a knock on wood. “Everything’s still up there.”
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