When we arrived at the police station, O’Rourke led me into the squad room. There were five officers there and they all looked as if they had just returned from a saturated fat convention. “If this is what the police force looks like,” I remarked, making sure it was loud enough for them all to hear, “no wonder crime in America is exploding.” It was like talking to a painting, but not a real painting by an actual artist—more like the kind where dogs play poker. I sat down and one of the fat bastards requested I blow into a straw attached to something that looked like an old radio. It was a breathalyzer, someone explained. I was bored with the conversation—honestly, it was like throwing a tennis ball at a marshmallow wall—so I did what they asked. This would be a good time to tell you that I received a nearly perfect score on my college boards. I was accustomed to doing well on tests, so when I registered a 0.27 on the breathalyzer, I wasn’t surprised. 0.08 is considered drunk. At the time I found this very amusing, but my laughter failed to move them.
I was allowed a phone call. I couldn’t contact my father who was presumably asleep in our house in Connecticut. He was an attorney at a Wall Street firm and this arrest would not comport with his worldview, in which his son progressed seamlessly from high school to college to law school, partnership, marriage, and high-achieving children, without any detours into jail cells along the way. So I called Bob, the guy from my construction crew. We had been friends when the summer began and I thought if I explained the situation, he would let bygones be bygones and bail me out. Bob was surprised to hear from me and I could tell he was about to hang up until I let him know where I was. He said he’d meet me in court the next day. I’m not sure why I called him other than I was smashed and not thinking rationally. I should have been suspicious when he agreed to come.
The cell was about half the size of my dorm room. Unlike my dorm room, it had a steel toilet and a steel bed. It was down a hallway with several other cells, all of them empty. (Apparently, I was a one-man crime wave.) There was a large metal door at the end of the hallway and when the cop who had escorted me to my cell departed it closed with unsettling finality. For about five minutes I sat there and stared into space, angry, humiliated—no, insulted—that I was being treated this way. Then I began to yell. I cursed, screamed imprecations, made demands. This went on for a while. My throat became raw. I was beginning to feel dehydrated. The brutes in the next room continued to ignore my cries. Eventually, after it became clear that they couldn’t care less whether I lived or died, I lay down on the metal rack and tried to sleep. My mouth tasted like the inside of a sneaker, my eyes were brittle, and my ribs ached from when that ape at the nightclub kicked me. I thought about what it would be like to spend the rest of my life in a cell. I decided I’d rather be dead. Was this where they’d taken Margaret’s brother after he beat up her ex-boyfriend? Was that story even true? And if it was, it occurred to me he might know some of these cops. Would they let him into the cells to work me over with a truncheon? But I hadn’t really done anything to Margaret other than embarrass her, so maybe I was safe.
Somehow, a facsimile of sleep arrived, and when I awakened it felt as if a flock of tiny raptors were battling in my skull, their spiny wings throbbing against my delicate membranes. Pain like I had never known radiated down the left side of my head and to my neck. It sang in unbridled cacophony to my quivering tendons and hollow bones. As soon as I realized where I was, the feeling intensified. I was too dehydrated to urinate so I sat frozen in a vortex of self-pity until I heard the metal door open. Was this someone coming to exact revenge, to beat me in all the places that would never show when I stood in court? No, just a cop unlocking the cell door. He said he was taking me to be arraigned.
In the courtroom, I looked for Bob, but he was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he’d had no real intention of showing up, his little revenge. The judge was a bald man with black horn-rims who asked me how I pled. “Not guilty,” I responded. My plan: take the money I had made that summer, hire a lawyer, and have this stain removed. Out, damned spot, right? My father would never have to know and my future legal career would go as planned.
I was given a court date and released on my own recognizance. I didn’t need Bob to post bail after all. When I left the building, sunlight eviscerated my eyes. The tiny raptors continued to beat against the inside of my skull. Bile sluiced through my gut as I wobbled down the courthouse steps. I heard someone calling my name. It was Bob. He was backlit by the sun so it was hard to see the expression on his face, but I could tell the person standing next to him was his sister. Was she going to shoot me or do something equally trite? Bob said she wanted to have a word and I had better do her the courtesy of listening, but I was in no condition for a sidewalk colloquy with a one-night stand and I said as much. I didn’t see Bob’s fist, but the blood pouring out of my face an instant later suggested he had broken my nose. The pain, of course, penetrated the penumbra of my hangover and I felt like a grenade had discharged in my sinuses. The blood-soaked white polo shirt looked like a crime scene as I staggered away, the pathetic maledictions of Bob’s sister raining down on me. Why are people so unbelievably annoying?
The Peugeot had been taken to the police garage so I walked the short way there from the courthouse. The guy in charge of the motor pool, prematurely gray with hawkish features and a scar on his left cheek, stared at me and didn’t say anything. I looked down at my bloody shirt and shrugged. “A bad night in Hyannisport,” I said. He nodded warily and told me there was a problem with the transmission. If I wanted, he would fix it, but it wouldn’t be ready until the afternoon. The oil stink of the garage was making me nauseous and I had to get out of there. I thanked the man and told him I’d be back later. Then I thanked him again. I remembered enough of the previous night to recall that after my arrest my behavior had left something to be desired, and today I was going to make up for it. I’m not a bad guy. I thanked him a third time before I left.
The walk home from Hyannisport to West Dennis was about ten miles. My hangover seemed to have gained in intensity and I thought a cocktail of fresh air and sunshine might make it dissipate. The list of places more beautiful than Cape Cod in August is a short one. As the salt breeze filled my nostrils, I noticed that a few dabs of ochre and yellow had begun to peek through the leaves. I headed east along the blacktop, still trying to will my hangover into submission and humming the opening of “Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin. Their drummer, the great John Bonham, would be dead from drink six years later. The temperature was in the nineties by now and I was beginning to perspire. By the time I hummed my way through the song once, I knew I didn’t want to walk.
I stuck my thumb out and two cars passed me, a Volvo station wagon and a Ford Pinto. Wouldn’t it be just my luck, I reflected, if Margaret and her brother drove past? Was she kidding when she told me he had been in jail for beating up her old boyfriend? I still couldn’t figure that one out. Sometimes people said things just to play with your head. And what if Bob and his sister happened by? It wasn’t like I could run. A red Malibu with mag wheels pulled to a stop. I approached and looked in through the rolled-down passenger window at Officer O’Rourke. This was a stroke of luck. It’s not often the possibility of redemption presents itself in so convenient a way.
“I’m really sorry about last night,” I said. “I acted like an idiot.”
“Where you headed?” His face was neutral, but cops are like that. I said I was going to West Dennis and he told me he could take me most of the way. I got in the front seat. O’Rourke was dressed in civilian clothes: painter’s pants and a gray T-shirt that said, Eddie’s Seafood Shack, Since 1972. That was a joke, since it was 1974. Eddie obviously had a good sense of humor, which was more than I could say for O’Rourke. There was a snub-nosed revolver on his hip. We rode in silence for a minute. This made me uncomfortable. I like small talk.
“How long you been a cop?” I asked, leaving out the word have in an attempt to be familiar.
“Five years.”
I nodded. It was clear O’Rourke wasn’t interested in talking. I settled into the seat. At my feet there were a pile of eight track tapes: Blue Oyster Cult, Deep Purple, Bachman Turner Overdrive. Utter crap. I hated all of it but wanted to be friendly.
“Okay if we listen to some music?”
“Sure,” he said, as he picked up the BTO tape and slid it into the player. “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” filled the car. I closed my eyes and sighed. Wouldn’t it be ridiculous, I thought, if this shit was the last thing I ever heard?
SPECTACLE POND
BY LIZZIE SKURNICK
Wellfleet
Albert was going to clean out the house. This had been decided weeks ago by his aging aunt June, although if you asked Albert, which it was unlikely anyone would, the circumstances that sent him—not his older brother Mark, or even Mark’s nineteen-year-old only daughter Ludi, whereabouts undetermined—from Queens to Cape Cod had been set in motion decades before, perhaps by his and Mark’s dead parents, or even, Albert suspected, when Aunt June’s husband Travis first bought the house as an investment property, then decamped immediately for parts unknown.
As June rattlingly related to Albert from Horizon Wind, her active seniors community in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the last three years his older brother had joined an actor’s collective in the Appalachians—although on more precise details she was spotty. In the wake of his wife Susan’s tragic death, Albert had made a habit of calling June every two weeks. When she moved to Horizon Wind, he drove down to Charlotte to help carry the few treasured possessions—June was not one to treasure—from her ten-room Larchmont Georgian. Then June rebuffed his offer of one last nice dinner out. Surrounded by new social possibilities, like a gawky teenager in a college dorm, his seventy-three-year-old aunt was vaguely mortified, he realized, by his presence.
Ludi’s coordinates were less certain. After the accident that killed Albert’s wife, she returned to her mother; how often Mark had visited the girl during this period Albert did not know. He himself descended into a stinking waste of bourbon for a few years, abetted by a job that required little more effort than showing up. No one was riding a telemarketing firm’s accountant. Yet it was partly his money that, years later, allowed Ludi to debark from her small liberal arts school in New Hampshire to communicate, Albert understood from June, primarily with her father only by the occasional phone call or e-mail from abroad. June too claimed she was the recipient of a stray postcard from Barcelona or Kharkov, although Albert was dubious. But despite the improbability of the situation, despite the fact that the girl throughout her life had been removed from their family’s orbit for jarring and indeterminate periods of time, June had always claimed Ludi as her own.
The house ex-Uncle Travis purchased on Chequessett Neck Road in Wellfleet was not beachfront property. Set back in scrubby pines, it was enclosed in near twenty-four-hour darkness that Albert, clutching a small overnight bag and a paper tray of clam strips he’d purchased on Route 6, was relieved he could find.
The patch of bare needles they called the driveway was a ringing, chill silence. During the summer, that road had enclosed them in sleepy, chattering darkness, like voices from a party in another room. In late October, the air was a wall built to expel intruders. He approached the screen door, hoping, though the catch had been broken for at least twenty years, he might find it locked.
Travis bought the house before Mark and Albert’s parents died in a train accident. June handled this well. The boys were fourteen and fifteen, she reasoned, not five. Albert remembered standing by the grave after the funeral, feeling that he should ape June’s matter-of-fact behavior, click-clacking in mourning black out the door to the funeral home. She’d arranged a double ceremony with black coffins Mark said looked like cannons. Albert heartily shook everyone’s hand until June took him aside and placed him on a chair near the door.
Inside the house, Albert put his bag down and flipped on the lights. The sepia floral sconces seemed defeated by the redwood walls. Even from across the room, Albert could see the skinlike layer of dust covering the green couch. June had seemed confident that he could simply remove her personal items, give the house a scrubbing, and hand the keys over to a realtor, who would sell the place for enough money to keep her at Horizon Wind for another twenty years.
Albert didn’t doubt the house would sell, but he understood now that a simple cleaning would not suffice. During his bourbon months, he had seen “staging” makeovers on home improvement shows. This place was in such disorder it would be faster to empty it, have it professionally cleaned, and let the buyers, who would certainly knock it down and build one of the new sandboxes lining the road anyway, have it for cheap. June wouldn’t like it, but she would have no choice. “You have to forgive, Albert,” she had said when Susan died. “We’re family, and you have to forgive.” Now, June would have to forgive too.
Albert remembered the loop of summers. First, the beach at Newcomb Hollow, then Long Pond or Great Pond, followed by sandwiches from the Box Lunch, and lobsters—when June allowed—grilled by the porch. He and Mark would run on the bay side, by the house, where they once, at low tide, tried to swim across to Indian Neck Beach. June shouted until they gave up halfway, returning in slimy bay silt.
Rainy days, they went to Provincetown. This, in the 1970s, was truly the land of the “boys.” Mark stared openly. Albert was ashamed—not for himself, but for the men, whom he obscurely felt needed his reassurance. Later, in college, he realized his reassurance was not needed in this or any other areas. June had started to rent the house during the high season and go to Boca. Mark began a series of wanderings from California to India to South America, which even Albert knew enough to dismiss as the check-off destinations of their generation.
When he was in his early twenties, the family began spending Augusts at the house again. Albert married Susan. But Mark had a child. Aunt June liked Susan, yet seemed faintly astonished that Albert had a managed to get a wife at all, as if he’d suddenly revealed a secret mastery of the grand piano, or invented the Post-it. Mark was friendly to Susan, but when was he not? He was so friendly that he had brought home girlfriend after girlfriend from the time Albert was seventeen, culminating, around the time of Albert’s marriage, with a black woman named April.
April was a tall and somewhat forbidding professor of English. Always a little distant, always a bit apart. Albert could never tell whether this had to do with character, intellect, or was simply a defensive reaction to his strange family. There was June, a distracted, wizened chain smoker; the birdlike, chattering Susan, incapable of not flirting with Mark, whose appeal to all women Albert had long since accepted. Albert had difficulty gauging his own presence. He would have liked to think of himself as a comforting figure, calm and self-contained, but in her two Thanksgivings and one Easter with the family, April had barely said two words to him. She had a son from an earlier marriage whom they never met, and shortly after giving birth to Ludi, she kicked Mark out, only releasing the girl at Mark’s insistence after a year.
Given free rein, June revealed a maternal nature that had heretofore found no avenue for expression. Ludi, at age two, had a face like a beautiful smudge, almost a thumbprint of itself, and June delighted in pulling her black silken hair, which April had delivered braided, into soft pigtails that helped frame her gap-toothed grin. Those summer years, in Albert’s memory, seemed almost a constant series in partial visibility: Ludi in profile, bent over with a book in June’s lap, or departing, held aloft in June’s arms, head on the middle-aged woman’s shoulder.
Once, when April was living in New York and Mark was held up somewhere on unspecified “business,” Albert and Susan picked up the girl to drive her to the Cape. Albert was shocked at her surroundings. He’d pictured April in a bohemian but charming area, someplace in the city that would be new for him and Susan, different from their three-bedroom in Forest Hills. Instead, deep in Brooklyn, it was the kind of neighborhood where playgrounds
were made of steel piping and concrete, as if to emphasize their durability. There was charmless green paint over all the streetlights.
“I have her bathing suit in her bag,” April said pointedly. Last year, it had been nowhere to be found, a brief matter of contention when Ludi was returned with a pink flowered bikini Mark had picked up in a roadside shop.
“She’ll have a wonderful time,” Albert said, grasping the girl’s hand. Ludi seemed to know him, looking up with a smile. He was shocked to find himself rocked with a wave of protective affection. He squeezed her hand and Ludi forgot immediately who he was. She ran to the car, where Susan opened the door to welcome her with outstretched arms, then waved to April.
“She’ll have a wonderful time,” he said to April again, who was looking at him skeptically. She had aged very little but looked far less happy—unsurprising, Albert thought, if she had been brought low enough to live in this place. Mark’s bootless wandering certainly couldn’t have been contributing to the household. Albert thought again how stupid a name Ludi had been to give to the girl, a play on Liudmila, a favorite character of April’s from some Russian novel. It was one of the many crimes his absentee brother had helped visit upon his daughter.
“I’m sure she will,” April said, making to close the door, then paused. “Tell Mark I say hello,” she added carefully. It was always hard to grasp the essence of any couple, but for Albert, April and Mark were harder than most.
In the morning, Albert awoke and immediately felt glad of the silence and the lack of tourist traffic, which would make it easier for him to get the furniture hauled away and clean the house. He fished out one of June’s phone books from under the filigreed, fake wood counter. It was ten years out-of-date.
He decided to walk into Wellfleet. The Bookstore Restaurant, where he and Mark had once fingered stacks of overpriced vintage comics, was closed for the weekend, as was the small ice cream and candy stand at the end of the dock. Galleries had begun to spring up on Water Street toward the center of town, but Albert was not moved to examine them. It was the kind of thing Susan had liked.
Cape Cod Noir (Akashic Noir) Page 10