by Peter Colt
I drove along, enjoying the scenery and listening to Dvorak. The road hissed along under the car, and life was okay. My head hurt a little from the night before with Danny, but not too badly. I had taken an Anacin when I got up and hadn’t needed an Alka-Seltzer, which was reserved for New Year’s Day types of hangover. The hissing of the tires coupled with the engine and the radio made for a soothing noise.
I drove over the Bourne Bridge, marveling as always at the WPA-era construction and details, over the Cape Cod Canal, and entered into the rotary. Exiting the rotary, I followed the canal until it was time to turn onto Route 6 and, after a few twists and turns, into Hyannis. I turned onto Main Street and followed it up in one direction and then turned down it in the other. I was near The Steamship Authority, where Leslie and I had taken the ferry out to Nantucket on our last vacation. We had been early enough for the ferry that we had been able to get breakfast at a diner on Main Street. It had been nice sitting at the counter on yellow vinyl-topped stools. They were the type that as a kid I would spin myself around on until my head hurt with dizziness.
It had been a good vacation, almost the calm before the storm. If I had paid attention, I might have seen the signs. The desire to make happy memories, ones that would last, so that she had good times to remember. The sun had been nice and the beaches beautiful. We had made love in the afternoons just back from the beach, smelling of Coppertone. Her skin tasted like salt from the ocean. The nights were cool and I slept without nightmares. It was like I was normal for a week.
The diner was still there, and my stomach was rumbling in a way that let me know it expected food after a night of drinking. I found a spot up from the diner and parked. I slid a couple of quarters into the meter and headed toward breakfast and more coffee. The storefronts were decorated with orange and black streamers. Everywhere there were cardboard ghosts and goblins.
I could smell fried eggs, mixing with the fall air that was coming off of the water. The leaves on the trees planted along Main Street were shades of red, yellow, and orange. I was heading away from the post office, but I was hungry and stalling. I wanted eggs, bacon, and bad coffee, with toast that was only buttered in the center of each piece. I wanted time to think about what I was going to say to whatever faceless postal employee was at the counter.
I went into the diner. Most of the breakfast crowd had left, and lunch wasn’t for a long couple of hours. There was a middle-aged waitress straight out of central casting, smoking a cigarette and leaning against one side of the counter. In a booth, two old women were talking about someone named Justine who had run off with someone named Rico. I was jealous I didn’t know anyone named Rico. Behind the waitress, I could see the grill and the guy working it.
I sat down at the counter and waited for the waitress to peel herself off her end of it to take my order. She put a vinyl-covered menu down in front of me as though she were swatting a fly with it.
“Coffee?” She half barked the question at me.
“Please.” She went to the Bunn and poured me a cup from the half of a pot that had been sitting there since the end of the breakfast rush. She put it down and slid a little dish with sugar packets and some pink packets of sweetener toward me, along with a small tin pitcher of cream. I ignored the cream and the sugar.
“Know what you want?” I don’t think it was me she disliked, just the world in general.
“Two eggs over easy, corned beef hash, and rye toast.” She didn’t bother to write it down. She picked up the fly-swatting menu that I had ignored and pivoted on her heel away from me. The place had either lost its charm in the off-season, or it had just looked a whole lot better with Leslie in it. Leslie, whose smile was warm and bright, indicative of the person within. Leslie, who toward the end hadn’t smiled much at me but had a lot of tears. Leslie, who had accused me of shutting her off. Shutting her out. Leslie, who got sick of the silences, the waking up in the middle of the night, because I was wrestling with the demons in my sleep.
In the beginning we had been in love. Everything love should be, warm, affectionate. We would talk about books, movies, cooking, my new passion. I remember that we laughed a lot and it felt good. Rainy days, sitting on the couch, drinking strong coffee, and reading the Sunday Times or Globe, I felt like maybe, just maybe I had a shot at being normal. Just like everyone else. Like the stain left on me by my part of the war would wash off because of her love. Looking back, it must have been an awful lot of pressure for her to bear. It wasn’t enough that I was asking her to be my lover but also my salvation.
I wanted to believe that she got sick of the weird hours, or the fact that I carried a gun, or that I occasionally came home bruised. I think she would have put up with all of it if I had told her about any of it. If I had just let her in a little more. In the end, I wore her down with silence about the things that I couldn’t or wouldn’t talk to her about. In the end, those became the things that mattered.
It hadn’t always been bad. The first year had been great. The best of my life maybe. We had met by chance in a used bookstore. I had left the cops and was a private detective, so I was looking for some detective fiction to show me how to do it. I spotted The Raymond Chandler Omnibus of Philip Marlowe novels. The Friends of Eddie Coyle was coming home, too. There were a couple of Ross Macdonald novels in the pile.
In that same aisle was a girl in jeans and a sweatshirt standing on tiptoes, trying to reach the top shelf. Her hair was short by the standards of the day and when I offered to help her, she fixed me with dazzling blue eyes. She assessed me and I must have been judged acceptable because she favored me with a pearly smile. I handed her the book and she agreed to go for coffee. I couldn’t believe that she had agreed to coffee and then a few days later a date.
She was a grad student at Northeastern, working on her PhD in English. She was focusing on Private Detective as the new, urban American cowboy. How as we moved into the cities after the Depression we stopped romanticizing cowboys, but we needed some violent paladin, not beholden to the rules. A man without family, without ties, without limitations, who could do what needed to be done. The private eye was the new cowboy. Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Doc Holliday had given way to Marlowe, Spenser, and Nick Charles.
In a lot of ways, it was as though she started dating her thesis. Except that I was no hero. I was a mess who went to sleep, ended up in Vietnam, and woke up sweating and fighting with the bedding. I didn’t talk about it. I couldn’t tell her about Vietnam. She was perfect, unmarred, and my sins were graphic, my hands would never be clean. In the end the gulf between us, the silence grew too wide. Then she left. There were no letters, no phone calls. She was gone and I ended up living in half of an apartment.
The food came and was what diner food should be: greasy, good, and life-sustaining. The coffee wasn’t bad. I was expecting something that had been sitting in the urn for hours, but it was actually fresh. After I had finished, I realized the headache was gone and that I was ready to face the day. The waitress brought the check, and I put money down to cover it and the tip.
“Anything else, hon?” She picked up the bills and the check.
“Where’s the post office from here?” I asked.
“Take a right and head up the street three blocks. You can’t miss it; it has U.S. Post Office written on it.” Her delivery was dry, and the sarcasm was not lost on me.
“Thanks, I need some stamps so I can mail you your tip.” I left her a couple of singles anyway.
Chapter 6
The sun was mostly out by now, but it was anemic and stingy with its warmth. The gulls were circling overhead, riding thermals and making a racket as they whirled around. I couldn’t look at them the same way anymore after having watched The Birds. There was enough of an off-shore breeze that I actually buttoned my trench coat. Normal people were out going about their normal business, making almost as much of a racket as the gulls. I wondered idly if any of them were armed or hung over or had been in a war? They all seemed so normal t
hat I doubted it.
I passed a Chinese restaurant with a sign that told me it made the best Scorpion Bowls on the Cape. I passed a used bookstore. Across the street was an army-navy surplus store. I didn’t need any more surplus from the army, so I kept moving. I passed about a hundred shops selling the crap that the tourists buy: T-shirts, plastic lobsters, pirate figurines.
The post office was a large, brick structure that screamed of WPA-era architecture and construction. It was large, imposing, and oddly out of place in a seaside town on the Cape. It looked more like one of the old public schools in Boston or a library, but here it dominated a block of Main Street.
Inside the lobby, the building had the opposite effect. It was cramped, lit by fluorescent lights; a bank of mailboxes crowded most of the lobby. The counter had four windows, but just like every bank, there were only two people working. The first was a pinched-face woman in her late forties. The other was a burly man in his late thirties, with starburst veins in his nose and the hint of a tattoo peeking down from his short-sleeve uniform shirt. I went to his window and ordered a book of stamps. When he reached into the register, I could make out a red bayonet held by a wing.
“173rd?” I tried to ask the question casually. He looked up, a little startled.
“Yeah, a lifetime ago. You?”
“No, I wasn’t a Sky Soldier . . . were you there?” He looked at me for what seemed like a hard minute.
“Yeah. You?”
“Yeah, I was.” I named a few of the bigger towns near where we had operated but refrained from telling him what I had done. I was finding that after the war there were a lot of guys saying they were Special Forces. Most of them were just saying it. I didn’t want to be mistaken for one of them.
“Is there a good place to get lunch around here?”
“Yeah, Chinese place down the street.”
“Maybe I’ll see you there?” I put a fifty-dollar bill down on the counter, took my stamps, and walked out.
The restaurant was dimly lit with a faux Chinese motif and red vinyl booths. The place was littered with silk brocade, wooden dragons, screens, and a Buddha or two. The bar was left over from whatever it had been before but now was painted black. I was halfway through my second Löwenbräu when he walked in. He saw me and came over.
“You forgot your change.” He slid some bills and coins across the bar to me.
“Let me buy you a beer?” He looked at me, trying to figure out what I was all about. “Let me buy you a beer and some lunch and tell you why I am here. If you don’t like what you hear, you can walk out, and that will be the end of it. If you don’t walk out, you will get a free lunch and might get to help a little girl find her long-lost father.”
“I won’t do nothing illegal.” There was something angry and weary behind his eyes.
“I’m not asking you to. I’m just trying to track down a missing vet for his daughter. Nothing more than that.”
“What are you, a private eye?” I nodded and slid one of my cards, the one with an oversized magnifying glass on it, to him. “How can I help?” He motioned to the bartender, who brought him a beer.
“My client’s father came home from Korea and walked out on his family. I have hit nothing but dead ends. The only thing left is the fact that he got his VA checks sent to a P.O. box in your post office for a few months in 1968.” He was sipping his beer and nodding as I went on. “I want to know who was renting that P.O. box at that time in 1968. I also need to know where they are now.”
“I can find out who was renting it but can only tell you so much. They might have moved or died or whatever.” He was looking intently at his beer.
“Anything would be helpful. Right now, this guy is pretty much a ghost. It is really important to his little girl that she finds him again.” I couldn’t tell if I was laying it on thick.
“Okay, give me the box number.” I told him.
“I’ll meet you up the street at a bar called the Salty Dog. It is a dive, but the beer is cold.” He told me where to find the bar, and we agreed to meet there after his shift at 4:30.
Hyannis is a nice enough town, but it isn’t so interesting that you can easily kill three and a half hours in it. I went into every bookstore they had, all two of them. Then the public library and even the gun store by the bus station. The only thing I ended up buying was a pack of cigarettes. I avoided all the places selling plastic lobsters and ship-ina-bottle kits.
I walked down by the waterfront and looked at the mix of sailboats and cabin cruisers that weren’t quite nice enough to be dry-docked or to head to the Caribbean for the winter. They were the hand-me-downs of the boating world. The teak was worn and the nice stain had faded. The brass was dull and had greenish spots. They were the type of boats that I would have had if I had the money for a boat.
The fishing boats were heading into port, followed by clouds of wheeling, turning gulls. Somehow, they were better, easier to look at. They were just as old and run-down, maybe more so, but they were being used. The men on those boats worked them; the boats still served a purpose. I took one last look and turned away from the waterfront. I walked back toward Main Street, the smell of diesel growing fainter as I moved away.
The Salty Dog wasn’t actually on Main Street but halfway down a small lane that had one working streetlight at the other end of it. The Salty Dog had a wooden sign above the door that had a picture of a Border Collie on it. The sign was on iron rings and was creaking softly with the breeze. I pulled open a door made of oak planks and walked down into a bar that would have to do a lot of work to move up to being a dive bar. In the dim light, I was able to feel my way to a stool at the bar. The bartender was a fat man with a patch of thinning dark hair, a mean little mouth, and a chambray work shirt. A white apron was tied low around his ample gut, and he looked at me and then away, as if he hadn’t seen much of anything. I sat, eating pretzels out of a cheap plastic bowl. He eventually realized that I hadn’t made a mistake and that I wasn’t going to go anywhere, so he waddled down to where I was sitting.
“Whaddayahwant.” It came out so fast that I almost said, “Bless you.”
“Whadda yah have on tap?” I couldn’t say it as fast. He grunted and pointed a finger that looked like a sausage at the taps, which I had long since memorized.
“Pabst and a shot of Wild Turkey.” It seemed like a good idea.
“Ain’t got no Turkey, just Jack, Jim, and Old Crow.”
“Yeah, you do, on the third shelf middle.” He just grunted and turned away. It was like watching a battleship turn. Nothing happened quickly, but you didn’t want to be in the way, either. He pulled the tap and poured me a mug of Pabst and then poured the bourbon into the shot glass. He then lumbered up to where I was sitting and slammed both down on the cigarette-burned bar without spilling a drop.
“Four fifty,” he barked out from somewhere just above his jowls. I slid a five across the bar to him, and he lumbered away to get change. By the time he came back with it, the bourbon had burned its way down to my stomach, the beer was half gone, and my friend from lunch was sitting next to me. The bartender slapped my change on the bar with his meaty hand and turned to my companion.
“Whaddayah havin’, Lenny?”
“Same as my friend here.” Lenny nodded toward me.
“You want another?” He had warmed slightly toward me.
“Same again, and his is on me.” He nodded, which was like watching the ocean, and turned away.
“I’m Andy.” I stuck my hand out. Lenny crushed it in his.
“Lenny Wilcox, used to be Specialist Five L. Wilcox.”
“I used to be Staff Sergeant Andy Roark . . . that was a lifetime or two ago.” He smiled knowingly.
“Yeah, me too.” The bartender slid two beers and two shots at us and took my empty mug with a sleight of hand that I didn’t think he had in him. I slid a ten onto the bar, and the bartender nodded. Lenny raised his shot glass and turned to me.
“To absent friends.”
“Absent friends.”
We clinked glasses, and for the second time in an hour, the bourbon didn’t burn any less on the way down than it did with the last one. The beer following it was cold, and I was sure that I wouldn’t be feeling any pain.
“I got what you asked for.” Lenny was looking at me with serious, hard eyes.
“Okay.” He had something to say.
“The person who owns it now is the same as who owned it in 1968, but . . .” he trailed off.
“But what, Lenny?” He didn’t seem comfortable anymore.
“You are looking for a guy who split on his little girl, right? Nothing else . . . nothing bad, no scams or nothing like that?”
“Lenny, my client is an adult now, but she wants, for whatever reason, to find the father who left her when she was a little girl. Nothing more or less than that.” Lenny looked me in the eye for a few seconds.
“The box belongs to Ruth Silvia. She lives out on an old farm out of town heading toward P-town.” He slid a piece of paper over to me. It had her address on it.
“Thanks, Lenny, I appreciate it.” I did. “Who is she?”
“She’s a painter. Lived out in her farmhouse as long as I can remember. I think she bought the place after World War II. Turned the barn into a studio. She’s an odd one.”
“Odd how?” I was curious.
“Oh, every town has one. You know, the crazy old lady or the reclusive old man. No phone, no electricity. Comes to town only to buy food and supplies, otherwise lives out on their own. She owns a huge chunk of the Cape. People been trying to get her to sell it for vacation homes, but she won’t let go. She is just sitting on money.” I hadn’t heard Lenny speak so much at one time.