Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery

by Dallas Murphy

  Dwight opened the little French doors. The interior space was proportioned like a large house trailer, because only a long and thin building could have fit on this site. The walls were unpaneled, joists visible, and like the floors and ceiling, they were painted gloss white, giving the place an open, bright air, like a house in the Bahamas.

  “Still a little musty,” said Dwight. “I opened it up yesterday.”

  I didn’t smell any must. It smelled like a seaside pine forest. I caught myself grinning with delight.

  The bedroom was off the living room to the left, kitchen to the right. The kitchen was not separated from the living room except by throw rugs. I lugged over the foodstuffs. There was a genuine cast-iron stove with lion’s-paw legs. It had burned wood before somebody, maybe Dwight himself, had converted it to gas. There was an old-fashioned refrigerator, the kind with the rounded tombstone top and deco flourish of chrome. Windows looked out on Dog Cove and the wooded hills beside the house.

  The Selfs had made me a lasagna, a meatloaf, a stuffed chicken, twelve fish cakes, a lobster casserole, a corn chowder, and a deep-dish apple cobbler. I sort of wanted to go to the Self reunion. We would see each other as exotic, maybe share with each other the best of our foreign worlds.

  “Now you got no electricity out here on the island,” Dwight was saying, emerging from the bedroom, opening windows, finally inspecting underneath the refrigerator. “But the propane tanks is all full, and everything works. I checked myself yesterday.”

  “Please thank your wife and the rest of the Selfs. Anytime she wants to meet Jellyroll, please tell her she’s welcome—”

  “I will.”

  The furnishings were summerhouse simple. A wicker couch stood in the center of the living room on an ancient, threadbare Chinese carpet. There was an embracing, high-backed armchair, and an oak table with four distinctly mismatching chairs.

  “Dwight, is there a boat I could rent?”

  “Like for transportation? Or are you a high-speed recreationist?”

  “No, transportation. I want to pick my girlfriend up in Micmac. She’ll be coming in a day or two.”

  “You know how to operate a boat?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Well, don’t worry, you already got the binoculars for it.” His face didn’t move, but his eyes twinkled in a boyish way. “Just don’t take nothing for granted. That’s when people get in trouble around here, when they take things for granted.” And Dwight went off to see what he could do about my boat.

  I watched him go. I listened to the water sluice over the round, cue-ball-sized rocks beneath the porch. What did he mean? Take what for granted? Birds flitted in the trees and floated on the water. I spotted a great blue heron slow-marching in the shallows and put the glasses on him—

  I have a fantasy. There is this family of which I’m a member; it is big and close, tolerant, even nurturing of its members’ eccentricities, interests, phases. You can be yourself in this family without fear of losing its support. Its extended members gather annually for summer holidays when the evenings are endless, bathed in limpid light, fireflies blinking at dusk, a place just like this, bigger maybe to support the various branches that come from far and wide with smiles on their faces. I’ve never known such a place, such a family. Jellyroll and I could have bought a summerhouse that matched the fantasy as nearly as anything concrete could, but it wouldn’t be the same. After all, the fantasy is about the family that inhabits the place, and Jellyroll couldn’t buy that. I sat at the picnic table and grew pensive. The island promoted pensiveness. I stared out across Dog Cove, where life probably hadn’t changed since the Pleistocene…

  And then I began to feel that flood of eroticism again. I could almost hear the hormones roar, as if I were paddling toward a waterfall in the wilderness. My feet itched, my torso tingled. Just like back at the dock when the muscular woman lowered the refrigerator, the same mindless adolescent eroticism, and just like then, it was interrupted, not by someone screaming bloody murder but by strange howling.

  Jellyroll heard it first. His ears pricked. He snapped to his feet, cocked his head. Then I heard it, too, or I thought I did. Was it a howling? It was more like keening. We were both unacclimated to the absence of sirens, horns, alarms, explosions, salsa. Maybe in the silence, like in one of those sensory-deprivation tanks, we were hallucinating. My dog and I are very close, but not so close we share hallucinations. No, the sound was real, it existed. The hairs on the back of Jellyroll’s neck stood stiffly erect. The sound was moving fast, changing in pitch and quality…

  Dogs! Christ, that’s all—dogs. A pack of barking dogs, in Dog Cove, which was sheltered by the Dog Islands. Jellyroll began to bark his high-pitched, excited yap-yap bark.

  I saw the underbrush rustle and then, here and there, a flash of dog flesh. Ten dogs seemed to materialize from the undergrowth and gather in the clearing at the foot of the steps, where they swirled in excited circles. Jellyroll hesitated, watching the signals, then bolted down the steps to meet them.

  Dogs are not mere will-less servers of a master. Dogs are egotists. Everything they do around people and their fellows is rich with self-awareness and expression. The pack, a mix of mutts and purebreds, froze as Jellyroll neared the ground. He stopped on the bottom step. Tails down, they all waited for the ritual to resolve itself. A well-bred chocolate Lab, the biggest dog in the pack, dropped into the play posture, forelegs on the ground, rump in the air, and barked once, the cue for everybody to chill, we’re here for fun, aren’t we? Then they all moved at once.

  A springy Jack Russell bounced up on the steps to welcome Jellyroll, and he bounded into the play posture to accept. They swirled and sniffed and panted and leapt over each other’s backs. They had the look of a pack of hooligans feeding off each other’s energy. The Lab kissed Jellyroll, so did one of the two coyote types, then they all started running headlong back into the underbrush and up the hill the way they came. Jellyroll started with them—

  I gave that some quick consideration—a city dog running with the local pack—and I whistled for him to stop. He did. He always does, but this time he didn’t turn around to look at me. A couple members of the pack stopped, looked over their shoulder at him. Then they ran off and left him standing there. Their wild barks faded to that keening sound, then to silence.

  I felt like a cruel bastard. Jellyroll still wouldn’t look at me. He didn’t return to the porch. He flopped on his side. No relationship can run smooth all the time. Even in a fantasy family.

  Then from along the shore in the opposite direction, we heard something else. Of course, Jellyroll heard it first. Someone coming on foot, walking along a shoreside path I hadn’t noticed yet. Jellyroll forgot his despair. He began to bark. This particular bark sounds like a dangerous dog’s bark, and sometimes I like that.

  Hands in his pockets, a gangly guy in his forties shuffled out of the woods into an open area at the side of the house, the only spare flat ground. He wore blue jean cutoffs, hiking boots, and heavy woolen socks. He had pale bird legs. His head bobbed forward and back with each step, like a great blue heron’s.

  “Christ,” he exclaimed, “I thought you were Clayton Kempshall for a minute there. I thought I’d seen a ghost.”

  “A ghost? Clayton’s not dead.”

  “He’s not?”

  “No.”

  “…Are you sure?”

  “I just saw him a week ago. He didn’t die since then, did he?”

  “Oh no, years ago.”

  “You must be thinking of someone else.”

  “Clayton Kempshall?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not dead?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, man, I feel relieved…Look, I’m Dickie.”

  “Artie,” I said.

  Jellyroll watched him suspiciously.

  “Wow, that’s really great about Clayton.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “There hasn’t been anyone in the boathouse for years, o
f course.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, because of Clayton’s ghost, but now, of course, we know that’s bullshit, what with Clayton being alive. Yeah. I wonder whose ghost it was. You haven’t seen any…paranormal shit go down hereabout?”

  “No, but I haven’t been here long.”

  “Yeah…Maybe it was Compton Kempshall’s ghost.”

  “People have seen a ghost around here?” People other than him?

  “Locals, mostly. Don’t trust a local. Fuckers will hurt you. Have you seen a dog come by here?”

  “A pack of them went up the hill a little while ago.”

  “A pack? Christ! Fucking locals see some dogs playing in a group, and it gets them nuts. They get into some kind of crazed caveman head, competing predators, or some bullshit. They’ll shoot the dogs.”

  “They will?”

  “Fuck yes, they think the dogs are running deer. I say, ‘You inbred lout, there are no deer on Kempshall Island.’ And you know what they say to that? They say, ‘See, that proves it.’ Island wit. Have you met the cop?”

  “No.”

  “Nazi.” This guy was ardent, waving his hands before his face as if troubled by swarming insects. “That cop subscribes to Skinhead Nation. I’ve seen it folded in his back pocket. Kind of fucker who’ll beat you senseless, then ask for ID. I’ve seen it happen, but only to people from away. He’ll never beat a local. You know why? Because he married a Self. The Selfs are dangerous people, I’m telling you.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Central Islip, Long Island. Not that that’s any paradise. You?”

  “New York City.”

  “Yeah. I like New York, weird kind of postapocalypse head to New York I dig.”

  “What do you do here?”

  “Here? I’m on the run. I’m underground. I’m hiding out from the FBI. They want me for sedition. Back in seventy. I’m Dickie the Red. Maybe you heard of me? No? Well, I got to get my dog before some inbred Natty Bumppo smokes her. Speaking of dogs, that one looks a lot like the R-r-ruff Dog. Maybe I’ll see you at the launching. Are you going to the launching?”

  “What launching?”

  “This guy built a submarine. I mean, a real submarine. Up scope, like that.”

  “When is the launching?”

  “I don’t know. You’ll hear. There ain’t all that many conflicting activities out here. When did you come?”

  “Just now.”

  “Then you were in town when it happened? The murders.”

  “Murders?”

  “Weren’t you there? A whole family got hacked to bits. These Christians are a dangerous element. They’ll hurt you.”

  Dwight rounded the point going fast with a big white wave at his bow.

  “Dwight Reed. Don’t trust him. He ain’t a Self, but he’s pussy-whipped by one. One of the head Selfs. The tribal leaders are always women, savage Brunhilda twats.”

  Dwight docked against the flat rock.

  “Hey, Dwight,” called Dickie, big smile. “What say? Long time.”

  Dwight completely ignored Dickie. “I think I found you a pretty good boat. I used to own it when I first got married. It’s over in the Crack right now.”

  Jellyroll and I climbed aboard. So did Dickie. Dwight asked him where he was going.

  “Over the Crack.”

  “What about your dog?” I asked, but Dickie didn’t answer.

  TEN

  Everybody around here calls it the Crack for obvious reasons,” said Dwight at the helm as we neared the entrance. “Nobody ever calls it Kempshall Harbor.” He wrinkled his lip as if the words tasted metallic in his mouth.

  The Crack. I’d already seen it from the air, but airplane dimensions had softened its effect at water level. Sheer pink-granite faces rose three stories straight up out of the water. The walls rose so steeply and the rock was so smooth that a swimmer could not have climbed out and would have drowned like a turtle pawing against the glass in a flooded terrarium. At the mouth, the walls spanned fifty feet of water, but inside they narrowed steadily to an acute angle, then to nothing. Brown, leathery kelp clung to the rock and undulated in the swell as if beckoning us to watery death. This was a primal place.

  Some unimaginable force had cracked this island nearly in two. Did it crack gradually, eon by eon, or did it explode apart volcanically? Even Dickie shut up as we entered. The place seemed to demand solemnity from the people who entered, even those who did so often. I stepped from under the wheelhouse in order to look up. The cliffs loomed. Only lichens could live on them.

  The Crack could be explained, it had a knowable geologic origin. Uplift, volcanism, crustal plate tectonics, glaciation, one of those world shakers, but the feeling of the place didn’t encourage that kind of curiosity. Entering the Crack called up primitive anxieties, the kind that probably brought shivers up the spines of our ancient progenitors huddled around the paltry light of a campfire in an utterly dark world. I imagined otherwise extinct predators, saber-toothed tigers, dire wolves, giant marsupials peering down at us from the rim, licking their lips. Fresh meat. It felt like we were entering the blunt mandibles of a monster sprawled on its side. Inside, daylight dimmed. The cliff walls fell away to a shallower angle, still too steep to climb up, but shallow enough to build stairs down to the water—

  The apex of the Crack, the hinge of the creature’s jaw, formed a natural amphitheater, and there the submarine perched on a stand of interlocking railroad ties, a log cabin without a roof, twenty feet up on a ledge. The submarine was painted industrial orange, like the primer coat on highway bridges. The thing was as long as a pickup truck, but cylindrical, like a thick conduit. It was festooned with tanks, pipes, valves, hoses, connectors, adapters, nuts and bolts. It couldn’t be real. I looked through my new binoculars. It sure looked real. In front was a big Plexiglas bubble, like on those M*A*S*H helicopters. The captain would squat in there to con his ship. Its bulbous eye glinted in the sun.

  Dwight had slowed his boat to a crawl. The span narrowed. Several motorboats were tied nose and tail in a line down the middle, making the quarters very close near the apex, in the shadow of the sub.

  “Why did he bring it all the way over here to launch?” I asked.

  “This is where he built it,” said Dwight.

  “What? I thought there wasn’t any electricity on the island.”

  “There ain’t.”

  “He’s a genius,” said Dickie.

  Dwight docked his boat against a narrow wooden float near the apex of the Crack. Strings of wooden stairs ran up the rock in switchback flights. Some stairs came only halfway down, as if the rest had dropped into the water. Some step units were old, the wood black and grainy, others were fresh, and the rest fell somewhere in between, all heading in the same direction like a visible demonstration of decay.

  “There’s your boat,” said Dwight, tying his own to a corroded cleat on the float. “If you like it. I mean, you don’t have to take it. Don’t feel no pressure.” It was tied to the adjacent float.

  I stepped up onto the floating dock, which needed a little more flotation. Water leapt up through the cracks in the boards. I leaned against cool pink granite and looked at my new boat. It was open, wooden, about twenty-five feet long with a faded red hull and white insides. There was a steering wheel with spokes mounted on a short pedestal in the center of the boat on the left side. Her ribs were visible, thick and closely spaced. Here and there rust streaked her red paint. This was a salty boat. This boat had been used, it had been out there. Things were worn in the way old craftsmen’s tools are worn, the way Dwight’s gear was worn. I was glad. I didn’t want a tourist boat painted metal-flake magenta like a motorcycle helmet. I didn’t want a boat that had molded indentations to hold your rum swizzle. I wanted a salty craft, and this was it.

  “It’s a Hampton boat,” said Dwight. “Well, I guess you’d have to say it’s a modified Hampton boat. I pulled up her sheer a little ’cause I liked a jaunty look in
those days, and raised the stern some just for balance.”

  “What? You mean you built this boat?”

  “Yeah, but it was a long time ago. She’s gettin’ old now, on her way out, but she don’t leak too bad yet.”

  Dickie said something about Hampton boats, but it was clear even to me he didn’t know shit. Dwight ignored him.

  “She’s gettin’ a little hogged, as you can see.”

  I couldn’t. I didn’t even know what hogged meant. She looked perfect to me. I wanted her. I had a feckless impulse to buy her right then and there, but I repressed it.

  “Everything ends,” said Dwight.

  Even so, building a complex thing probably develops one’s inner resources. Or did one have to have inner resources to begin building?

  “Immediate problem,” said Dwight dryly, “is gettin’ to it.” The modified Hampton boat was tied to a float identical to the one we stood on, long and narrow, but fifteen feet of water separated us from it. There wasn’t enough room for Dwight to raft his boat outside the Hampton boat because another boat, a decaying red clunker, was moored lengthwise near the apex of the Crack.

  Two-by-six planks braced somehow into the cliff formed a catwalk that technically spanned the rock between here and there, but it looked suspicious. Dwight was testing it with his foot.

  “Say, Alistair,” he said to a guy on the red clunker.

  I hadn’t noticed Alistair, my attention occupied with my own new boat. Nor had I noticed the carelessly hand-painted sign tacked to the roof of his boat, RED LOBSTERS. There was a crazy cant to the roofline. Green weed grew like long hair along the waterline. “Say, Dwight?” said Alistair, an old man with a face as granitic as the Crack itself.

  “Would you trust that catwalk, Alistair, you was me?”

  Alistair wiped his enormous hands on a mechanic’s cloth and scrutinized the catwalk in question. “Can’t say, Dwight. However, the last cat on that walk ended up in the drink.”