by Robert Pobi
More.
More.
Then the atmospheric pressure dropped several millibars.
And the hurricane began to move west.
On its journey its eye dilated to the largest in history, outsizing Carmen by over sixty miles. In the tradition of political correctness, the storm had been identified as male, and given the title of Dylan.
Hurricane Dylan was now surging toward the American coast and the water in its path was hammered into eighty-foot waves by winds that neared 200 miles an hour. And he hadn’t really started putting on his war paint.
He was saving that for landfall.
6
Day Two
Montauk, Long Island
Jake stood just above the ridge of foam and seaweed that the Atlantic had spent the night laying across the beach one wave at a time. It was still nice out, the Gulf Stream now bringing up a southern current that pulled the warm air along with it. The whole East Coast was having a good day, one of those fall mornings that let you know that summer was not yet gone. There was no taste of the hurricane that was pushing the warm front north.
He had been up early, and ate a piece of bologna on toast over the sink like he had back in his junkie days. It was funny, even back then, when his mind had been dialed to comatose most of the time, he had never become a slob. The apartment was always neat. Of course that was easy when you didn’t own a second pair of shoes and the big-ticket items in the place were the stainless-steel fork and knife that lay proudly on the cardboard place mat on the kitchen counter. Beside the heat-blued spoon and the surgical tubing.
He had walked across the living room in his bare feet, drinking a cup of coffee out of an ancient A&W paper cup that he had emptied of its paintbrushes. Something about the wax and the heat of the coffee on his fingers and the faint smell of turpentine brought out that the world had changed irrevocably. He hadn’t been here in almost thirty years and now, walking through the bright wedge of space, he realized it was as if he had never really left at all. Because our minds are not built to forget, but to ignore.
The craggy man with the flat black eyes and the tattoo he saw looking back from the big mirror beside the piano was nothing like the boy who had left here all that time ago. Twenty-eight years had been swallowed by the clock and the almost-broken piece of machinery he used for a body had changed its cells a full four times since leaving. Except for the electrical impulses stored as memories, Jake Cole was a different man.
Jake didn’t remember getting the tattoo, or even thinking about it. Back then his money had been spent on coke and heroin; he never would have wasted budgetary considerations on something as inane as a tattoo. But one morning he had woken up in the tiny apartment on Spring Street, four months behind on rent and somehow not evicted. He had come to life in the middle of the kitchen floor, his head pulsing like an infection, shivering in a pool of rusty brown water from an overflowed toilet in the next room. He stood, and when he put his arm out to steady himself on the fridge that was no longer there, he saw it, covering his arm like a black silk shirt. The ink blanketed his entire body. From wrists to ankles, ending in a jagged line just below his larynx. Flat and healed at his feet—puffy, red, and fresh at his neck. And he remembered none of it. Four months erased from his life.
He had stood in front of the mirror for hours, the longest period he had could remember going without the nervous twitches without being high. The script was Italian and after deciphering a few names and phrases, he realized what it was.
The twelfth canto of Inferno, the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Jake knew the story, of course. When he had been a child, it had been his favorite book in his father’s library. A massive leather-bound tome illustrated by Gustave Doré. He had never made any sort of conscious decision about the best parts, but staring at himself in the mirror, watching the ink that snaked over his frame, he knew that he had made the choice. And when he thought about it, the twelfth canto was the inevitable passage. The violent condemned to hell. The story of the Men of Blood. Like the ones he now hunted.
Like the one he now hunted.
After all this time. And just like finding himself back home, it all reeked of that fucking word destiny. Because some things were meant to happen. Some places were supposed to be revisited. And with that he realized that he hadn’t yet gone upstairs.
Of course the upper floor was as bad as the downstairs, worse because the rising heat had no place to go and it had baked the smell of dust and dirt and despair into the walls. The floor up here was bare, the hardwood stripping dented and the varnish beaten through to now dirty raw wood. Along with more utility knives, a few miserable blobs of canvases were stacked up here, too, leaning against the wall. He stopped and picked one up, trying to figure out what had happened to his father’s thinking. Were these exercises? How long had he been painting these things? How long had he been sick? Why had no one noticed?
He wondered what his father had been thinking while he had been painting these lifeless chips of noncolor. Jake had stopped caring about his old man years ago, but he had never stopped respecting his mind. Of all the shitty things you could say about Jacob Coleridge—and there were enough to fill a football stadium one filthy vowel at a time—you could not say was that he was talentless. Not like the rest of the hacks who had cashed in on being in the right place at the right time, back when showing up had been half the battle. When you added this hardwired brilliance to the equation the whole process of slapping paint to canvas had become something special to behold.
While the rest of them were measuring their progress with a backward-sliding pencil mark on the door jamb of self-parody, Jacob Coleridge had been reinventing the way people looked at the world. Looked at canvas and crusted pigment. Looked at themselves. He went deep into the arteries of the beast, until he was at its paint-pumping heart, and his work had been the most original and passionate to come out of the East Coast for a long time. Jacob Coleridge had not been a slouch, not even when it had been in style.
So what the fuck had happened to him in the past what—two?—five?—ten? years?
Jake turned one of the asymmetrical canvases clockwise, then counter-clockwise. His father had never believed in modern art, not as a rubric. And he certainly had never believed in the narcissistic self-indulgent crap that his son was now staring at. So what had happened here? Jake leaned the canvas against the wall and walked on down the hall.
His old bedroom and his mother’s old office were both locked. The master bedroom had a pocket door that slid into the wall. It was cocked about four inches and Jake wrapped his fingers around the edge and tried to pull it open. It barely budged, as if it was mired in wet sand. He peeked through the crack, into the room, and saw that the door was barricaded—there was no other word for it. From the tight view he saw a chest of drawers, an old iron architect’s table, and a giant gilded blackamoor pushed up against the panel. How the hell had his father gotten out of the room after doing that? And what had been going through his head when he had piled the furniture up?
Peeking through the gap, he saw more utility knives laid out on all the surfaces, always one within reach. The room smelled worse than the hospital did, and in the dark it was infinitely more gloomy, if that was at all possible. He’d open it tomorrow—or the next day—it really didn’t matter.
After the tour of the upstairs, Jake headed down to the water. He walked barefoot, his tattooed arms almost the same worn blue as his FBI T-shirt with the cracked yellow letters. He held on to the empty cup; he was never able to litter, to leave any of himself behind. In his job, he had seen it get too many people in trouble. Kay always said that after Jake visited a place, it was as if he had never been there at all. He thought of it as simply another occupational hazard.
The cold sand was in direct contrast to the warm wind but he barely noticed. His mind’s eye flicked between the 3-D model of the Farmers’ bedroom and his father’s accident. Coming here to deal with his father and walking into
that house up the highway last night were not coincidences. This was bad no matter how he tried to look at it.
Jake walked up the beach, the cool sand squeezing up through his toes like gritty cake icing, the sensation stirring up vestigial memories. The beach had changed in the last quarter-century. A lot, in fact. Like the town itself, the point used to be a community of two distinct groups: the locals and the summer people. The smaller, more modest homes belonged to the locals and the bigger, newer places belonged to the summer people. Gentrification had swallowed all the available real estate in sweeping gulps, and the locals had been pushed farther and farther from the shoreline until the beach was a well-kept line of resort houses devoid of personality and Montauk risked becoming just another eyesore of the wealthy. Desecrated land with preened lawns and three-car garages that owners called car houses.
By the time Jacob Coleridge had moved to Montauk he had already made a name for himself. Pollock was dead, Warhol was a firm presence, and there was a huge gaping hole in the progression of American painting. Opposed to Pollock’s color overload or Warhol’s trite packaging, Jacob Coleridge laid down a grim vision in sweeping lines of crusted pigment that critics began to notice. Collectors quickly followed.
Like most artists, Coleridge began as a classicist and was, by the age of eleven, a skilled draftsman. He quickly outgrew the need for people to see meaning in his work and began each painting with a technically breathtaking illustration that he would deftly, and some would say criminally, cover with successive layers of pigment until only a small detail of the original photorealist work was left. Unlike the mass of American painters who wanted their work worshipped, Jacob Coleridge covered up the parts he figured people would want to see. The critics lauded him as the only non-narcissist in American painting. Many collectors had their works X-rayed so they could see what they were missing. Eventually he started painting with lead pigment, grinding it with linseed oil so that an X-ray machine would have a hard time getting through. And the more he told them to go fuck themselves, the more they paid for his work.
Jake edged along the surf line, absentmindedly kicking at the thick line of weeds and flotsam that snarled the shore, his inner detective looking for…what? Sea shells? Pirate treasure? Answers? A spotted sandpiper trailed behind him, picking up early-morning insects that his curiosity dislodged.
He hadn’t come home to work—he had come home because his father had set himself on fire and burned off most of the meat of his hands—little more than charred black hooks now. The short of it was he had come home to set things straight so the old man could be placed somewhere. Then he was going to get back into his car, head for New York, and never come back here. It was a simple scenario when it was put in those terms. Only those terms had been blown to pieces when Hauser had called last night.
The sandpiper off his flank raced in and picked up a sand crab he had kicked up, skedaddling away with the coin-sized animal. The bird dropped it onto the beach and stabbed at its belly with controlled jabs of its beak. For a few seconds the crustacean made a valiant effort but it eventually succumbed to the superior firepower and the bird pulled its guts out in a jet of color.
The lighthouse shone weirdly in the early-morning haze and Jake could see two fishing boats heading around the point, to the lee side of Long Island. He figured that every boat in the area would be somewhere else by nine a.m.
As far as he could see both up and down the coast he was the only one out. He turned his head back toward the house, a geometric wedge of black against a blue-orange sky, as if Richard Neutra had designed the Rorschach test. The light off the water bounced red and orange against the glass and the dark line of the horizon crept down the wall of windows that faced the beach. The house looked like it was rising out of the dune and Jake remembered watching the sun come up on the beach with his mother after a night spent eating Mallomars and watching old movie marathons on PBS.
Why was he unable to focus here? What was scattering his concentration? Was it the mess inside the house coming awake in front of him? Was it the memory of his mother? Was it that fucker who had taken the woman and child apart? Was it those creepy little paintings inside the house? Or was it just the plain old fucking fact that he didn’t want to be here? That he wanted to be back in the city with his wife and son, away from a place he had tried to forget for most of his life. After all, how did he have any responsibility here?
As the sun rose, its light crawled down the dunes and Jake felt the damp start to burn off his body. He stood on the sand, watching the edge of the world somewhere off to the east, and he knew that he wouldn’t be able to leave. Not now. Not for a while. I came back to take care of my father’s life, he told himself. And now there’s work to do. There’s a monster here. A monster no one else can handle. A monster no one knows but me. A monster no one else can find.
Skinned.
I came here to help my old man. Not because he deserves it or because I give a shit. But because it is the thing a son should do. And what am I going to do about the past? Nothing. Because it’s not something I can fix.
Skinned.
It’s not a coincidence.
Skinned.
I don’t want it to be him.
Skinned.
Not now.
Skinned.
Not after all this time.
7
Jake stood in the kitchen sipping his eighth cup of fine convenience-store no-name blend topped off with a shoplifted packet of sugar from the coffee stand in the Kwik Mart. His hair was still wet from a hot shower and he felt better. At least comfortable in the doubts department, for whatever the fuck that was worth. From forty feet the endless line of black script tattooed into his flesh looked like a well-tailored shirt. He considered it part of the new him, one that began when he had stopped speedballing his way through life on heroin and cocaine and baby laxative. The end of the before. The end of the drugs and the booze and the heart attack trifecta that he had somehow managed to cheat. The end of the bad times before he had found Kay and Jeremy. Before they buried a cardiac resynchronization appliance under his chest muscle, almost in his armpit, to keep his heart from simply forgetting to beat. Before he had decided that life wasn’t shitty all the time. Before the new and improved Jake Cole.
He still missed the cocaine and the heroin. The booze, too.
But the coffee was good, and he raised his cup in a silent toast to the before, to the memory of his mother. To the good old days. Back before the whole thing had somehow just gone up in flames.
He was pouring another cup when the bell rang. He wondered if it was Hauser’s men or the news—both would be dropping by sooner rather than later. Out of habit, he dragged the cold stainless revolver off the counter, put it into the waistband at the small of his back, and walked to the door with the mug of coffee in his hands and another bologna on Wonder Bread clamped firmly in his teeth. He chomped down on the soft bread and it molded to the roof of his mouth. He tore the welfare sandwich away from his teeth and opened the door in one movement.
The bright panel of sun flooded the dark front hall and the space went from dead grays to dusty wood and chrome. Jake squinted into the figure at the door, haloed in light, features obscured in shadow, only one known quantity: male. The image slowly materialized, like an old-timey dial-up Internet connection, pixels slowly morphing into focus. Jake didn’t recognize the face behind the big Ray-Ban aviators, but he recognized the smile again, still amazed that it wasn’t broken like he had left it the first time they had met.
“Jakey!” Spencer yelled and barreled through the door, enveloping Jake in a bear hug that lifted him off the ground. Jake wasn’t small, but he was eclipsed by the mass of the man squeezing him.
“Jakey!” he hollered again, this time in Jake’s ear.
“Yeah, yeah. Jesus, you trying to make me deaf?” Jake wriggled out of the clinch, spilling coffee and losing the tail end of the sandwich.
His old friend backed away and held up the gun
that Jake had put into his waistband. “Not very trusting I see.”
“Not particularly, no,” Jake said flatly and took it back. When it was in his hand, he looked the man up and down, taking in what twenty-eight years had done. “You look good, Spencer.” And he did. Better than the flashing blue-and-red Christmas monster at the entrance to the death house last night.
Spencer nodded, smiled. “Thanks. Yeah. You—” He stopped and looked Jake over, taking in the sinewy build, the tattoos. His eyes slid back to the pistol in Jake’s hand. “—too.” He paused. “Really.” Paused again. “Different. But good, man. Wow.” He grabbed Jake by the shoulders and held him at arm’s length like a client sizing up a painting. “You look just the same. Charles Bronson.”
Jake rolled his eyes. “Thanks. Really. Come on in.” He ushered his friend into the house. “Coffee?”
Spencer lumbered by and the floor shook. “Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. Holy shit, this place hasn’t changed at all. I mean at all.” He walked through the hall and stopped at the geometric model on the console by the door. It was the size of a library globe. “I forgot about that thing. Now it’s like I was here yesterday.”
Jake followed his eyes to the stainless-steel sphere. “I know what you mean.” Jake walked into the house, took his FBI T-shirt from the back of a chair, and slid it on. “What do you take in your coffee? I got sugar.”
“Black’s perfect. Unless it’s some chocolate vanilla crap, then just get me a glass of water. Tap water. The bottled shit gives you Alzheimer’s and cancer—” He stopped cold, reconsidered his words. “Aw, shit, Jakey. I didn’t mean—”
Jake dismissed it with a shrug. “Fuck it.”
The question of whether or not his father had drunk too much plastic bottled booze was asked by that creepy little voice he had already heard too much of in the past half day. He topped off his coffee, poured one for Spencer—into an old superhero mug that had held brushes for three decades—then slid it across the counter. “Thanks for coming by.” And he meant it, which surprised him almost as much as hearing himself say it out loud.