“Seen him? Where?”
“Wherever.”
“He’s in L.A.”
Hawley seemed to ponder some question, but he didn’t pose it. “Well…bye.” Off he went after Dickie, his partner.
Jellyroll watched him for a long time after he’d gone. I remained seated until I felt reasonably confident I could walk without herniating any discs. Jellyroll idly licked my cheek.
TWELVE
I made it back to the boathouse intact. So did Jellyroll, but then he didn’t ingest dangerous doo-dah. He went to his place and waited for food. I fed him, made a cup of coffee, and settled back on the porch. Helen Humes sang the Earl Hines tune “Blue Because of You” as the tide came in, and in and didn’t stop until it had reached the foundation of the boathouse.
The phone rang. “Artie, how is it?” Shelly asked.
“It’s great, Shelly. Quiet, remote. You’d love it.”
“I hate remote. The Upper West Side’s too remote for me. Listen, the R-r-ruff idiots have been calling all morning. You ought to hear them. Nobody’ll take responsibility. They’re making a scapegoat out of that poor fucker who fired you. He’s gone. They’re implying he had a drug abuse problem. They’re so relieved Crystal’s a woman, they’ll do anything. Guy called to offer you a Mercedes-Benz, the big one, four-door. A bonus.”
“To do what?”
“To come back, of course. I’d like to let them swing a little just for fun, then you can decide what you want to do.”
“Okay, Shelly.”
“Artie, another bowling sheet arrived today. It was from the Atomic Bowl in Seabrook, New Hampshire. It had those TV cartoons. Like the others. The, uh, stalker was explaining to the interviewer how he loved the R-r-ruff Dog so much he just had to…do it, the fucker. Do you want me to send it out to you?”
“No. Shelly, you don’t think the R-r-ruff people are behind this somehow, do you?”
“How?”
“Well, like you say, there’s no such a thing as bad publicity.”
“I’ll get Myron to look into it. He’ll lay a cease and desist on the scumbags, see what they have to say. That idiot who fired you, he didn’t mention stalkers, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay, Sid—my brother-in-law—he’ll be in touch with you. I suggest you do whatever he says. He knows how to handle these things.”
“Okay, Shelly.”
I drove the boat out around the Dogs and headed generally south toward open water. I told myself to notice things that might be useful later as landmarks. The twin hills on this side of Kempshall Island would stand out, and so would the Dogs. Visibility was unlimited. I’d never seen such clarity.
Three wooded islands came into view, and I headed for the middle one, beyond which I think there was no dry land until Portugal. The sea was flat calm. The center island was called Hope. Hope Island. Artie Deemer of the Hope Island Deemers…I carefully ran my finger along the chart from Dog Cove to Hope Island. There was nothing to hit. The water was over a hundred feet deep in places.
Jellyroll stood in the bow, ears flapping. I munched some oatmeal cookies the Selfs had made. Suddenly I was in a sea of lobster pots. As far as I could see in all directions, there were markers floating languidly, all colors and combinations of stripes and bands, each trailing ropes that could tangle in my propeller to leave me floating fucked and banjaxed. I put the transmission in neutral and we coasted almost to a stop. Could I pick my way along? They weren’t quite as close together as they seemed at first.
Nearby, a lobsterman in a spattered yellow rubber apron aboard a salty green lobster boat worked a row of yellow and black banded floats. I watched through my binoculars. The man had a round face with a spotty, reddish beard. He wore a red plaid hunting hat. He was just a kid, I realized. Seventeen, maybe.
A wire lobster trap popped out of the water and leapt up onto the side rail of his boat. All those old-fashioned values of perseverance, ingenuity, endurance. No one from here lived off their dogs. The guy saluted at us as he dug in his trap with rubber gloves and threw things he didn’t like back overboard. I returned the salute, the brotherhood of the waves, here on the way to Hope Island. And suddenly I was out of the crowded lobster fishing grounds. There were no more traps, clear sailing. The traps had been placed in one area about the size of an Upper West Side block. I wondered why, what was there on the bottom that attracted so many lobsters. Baited traps?
A three-story white frame house with a green roof and a veranda overlooked the water from Hope Island, but it seemed to be boarded up. “Hey, Jellyroll, you want to buy that house?” He looked back at me from the bow and wagged. Sure, he’d be delighted.
I motored down the side of the island as close in as I dared. Hope was typical of this ocean full of islands, wooded, surrounded by rock in piles with a central, rounded peak. I went around behind Hope. There were no other houses visible. Feeling confident, I kept going for a while—
What was that ahead? White. I looked through the binocs. Waves. Big waves were breaking over black saw-toothed rocks in a line across my course. Reflexively, I slowed the boat as if I were about to hit one, and Jellyroll slipped off his feet. I consulted the chart.
The Disappointments.
That’s what they were called, this alligator’s back of sunkers. It wasn’t a wall. The Disappointments consisted of rock in piles, clumps, and pinnacles that were very close together; according to my inexperienced reading of the chart, there were only two places a boat like this could squeeze through in four miles of malevolence. Hope behind—the Disappointments ahead.
There were barely any waves around us, gentle swells, perhaps you’d call them, but big combers crashed over the Disappointments and exploded in glaring white spray—
I saw the white wake while the boat was still far away. Spray flew from its bow. I put the glasses on the boat. It was a sport-fisherman type, very modern and expensive with a flying bridge. The hull was black, the deck and all the rest of the stuff above was white. Boats like that were used in the charter fishing business in Florida and the Bahamas. People paid five hundred dollars a day to murder fish. Two men sat side by side at the topmost steering wheel—the flying bridge—under a white canvas top. The boat was still far away, but it was coming very fast right for us.
I looked back at the Disappointments. If the waves broke like this on a calm day, imagine what it would be like in some wind. I felt good. The vicious look of those rocks didn’t stiffen me up with indecision. It excited me. I was happy to be out here. I should have done this sooner. Maybe boating would be a new career for me. But I didn’t like that black sportfisherman. And it was getting closer by the minute.
I turned around and headed us back toward Hope Island. I had our Hampton boat going as fast as she could. I watched and waited. The sportfisherman’s sharp bow was still pointing at us. Maybe that was merely an illusion caused by unfamiliarity with relative speeds and converging courses in clean air. I kept going, and soon it became clear that the black boat was turning at us the whole time. This made me edgy. The sportfisherman began to take on a menacing aspect…
He caught up with us suddenly, it seemed to me. He slowed down and turned parallel to my course. The boat was bigger than I’d thought. I didn’t know boat lengths by sight, but it was over twice as long as my boat.
“Hello.” The man waved from the bridge. “I tried to call you on the radio—”
“What’s wrong?” I shouted back across the water without slowing down.
“Oh, nothing, sorry to alarm you. But my son wanted to meet the R-r-ruff Dog—”
I couldn’t see the son’s face, because it was completely hidden behind a big camcorder. He was hanging over the side aiming the damn thing at us, getting a shot of me scowling back at him. The father had an oddly elongated face, as if it had just begun to melt, and a long beak of a nose. His eyebrows met in the middle. Everything else being vertical, his smile seemed surrealistically horizontal. He wore a captain’s hat
with yellow braid on the bill. He sat there rocking atop his enormous gleaming boat, grinning down at Jellyroll and me. We rocked in his waves. Jellyroll scratched for footing on the wooden bottom.
“Where are you headed?” he asked. We were going along slowly side by side now, shouting across the gap.
“Nova Scotia,” I said. Jellyroll looked edgy.
“In that?” His eyebrows arched sardonically.
“No, I have a mother ship. Waiting for me. A gunboat.”
He chuckled and nodded.
I was icy. He was a nosy intrusion on my fantasy of remoteness, a shithead from the world of pop values busting in on my fantasy of connectedness to permanence and peace. Fuck him and his son with the camcorder in my face.
But then the guy said, still grinning, “I heard some bastard’s stalking him.”
“Wha—? Where? Where’d you hear that?”
“On TV. You know those kind of shows, those celebrity shows. Channel surfing.” He made a motion over the side as if flipping a remote. “I can’t remember.”
All this time, the kid continued to shoot at me. I never did get a look at him.
“Yeah,” I said unconvincingly. “We hear that a lot. All kinds of rumors.” Everybody in the world knew! “Just rumors.”
“Where you headed?”
I waved in mock friendliness as I peeled off and turned back toward the Disappointments, hoping he wouldn’t follow. I looked over my shoulder. The guy was watching me, the kid was shooting, but they kept going. The boat was named Seastar; there was a home port on the black stern, but I couldn’t read it. I leaned back against the wheel and looked through my binoculars.
Boston.
I looked up from the stern to see the guy looking back at me through a pair of binoculars even bigger than mine. The kid kept shooting. I turned away—
The Disappointments were much closer than I thought. I wasn’t about to run up on them, but I was close enough to distinguish individual rocks, black, barnacled, weed-covered ship killers. I wanted to get even closer, but I didn’t dare. I feared the place, but it fascinated me. Why were waves breaking over them when it was almost dead calm here? I turned parallel to the Disappointments until I couldn’t see the black boat anymore, then I turned for home.
Dwight’s boat lay against the flat rock when I returned to Dog Cove. He was bending over something at the foot of the stairs. I looked through my binoculars. Five-gallon gas cans. He was leaving me fuel. He heard me coming, straightened creakily, and waved.
Jellyroll saw Dwight and began to bark happily. I managed to pick up the mooring without getting jerked overboard, and we dinghied ashore. Dwight and I shook hands, one seaman to another, while Jellyroll danced around trying to get noticed.
“I met Hawley Self,” I said.
“Yeah, it’d be inevitable.”
“He said he killed Compton Kempshall with an ax—no, a hatchet—when he was a boy, and then he burned down the Castle.”
“Well, he might have.”
“He might?”
“Yeah, but Hawley don’t go anywhere.”
“You mean what difference does it make?”
“Sort of.”
“Do you want a beer?”
“Sure.”
We sat at the picnic table. Jellyroll barked at the chipmunk. I asked what had happened to Hawley’s face.
“Gasoline boat engine blew up. Happened over at Micmac. If it’d happened out in the islands, he’d be dead. And that’s why you got to perform the sniff test. You thought maybe it happened while he was burnin’ down the Castle? Don’t worry about Hawley. Hawley’s harmless.”
“I saw some unusual boulders up the hill. It looked like a quarry.”
“That’s wildcat granite. Good granite cuts along the grain real predictable. Wildcat granite cuts straight for a while, then suddenly splinters all to hell. This’s all wildcat in through here. Quarryin’ goes back to before the Civil War.”
“Do people on this island shoot dogs for chasing deer?” I asked.
“There ain’t any deer on Teal Island. Why do you ask?”
“Dickie said so. Dickie the Red.”
Dwight just shook his head.
Shadows stretched all the way across Dog Cove, the still time of day, but that black boat had jangled my nerves. I asked Dwight if he’d ever seen it before. “Seastar, it’s called. From Boston.”
Dwight rubbed his cheeks thoughtfully.
“Very fancy, high-tech,” I prodded.
“Ain’t any summer person I know.”
Then I told Dwight about the stalkers. Why not? Everybody already knew anyway.
Dwight pondered the whole concept for a long time. His brow knit, his face moved. “So they’ll get famous, huh? Is that why they do it?”
“That’s about it, I guess.”
“So you think it’s them in the black boat?”
“No. I have no reason to think so, but they’d heard he was being stalked, perfect strangers. I’m worried that other nuts will get the idea.”
“Afraid of the stranger…That’d tend to keep a man near home.” He nodded to himself and looked out across the cove. He understood. “You planning a trip over to the mainland?”
“Yes. Tomorrow, I hope.”
“On the way over, you just aim for the smoke from the cement plant. Micmac’s just to the left of the smoke.”
THIRTEEN
I set off early on the Great Crossing of Cabot Strait after performing the sniff test. This was no half-assed embarkation by my dog and me. I’d lain awake last night thinking about how ludicrous it would be to die in a boating accident on the way to pick up my lover. She’d wait on the dock at Micmac, hours, days passing, until they brought my body ashore in a rubber bag. Jellyroll, too, only the bag would be shaped differently. No, wait, I’d forgotten: these waters never gave up their dead, due to the absence of bloating gasses. But the day was perfect, bright and crisp, and I was prepared. I had charts, extra gas, water, dogfood. I’d just follow the smoke from the cement factory. I couldn’t go wrong. Hawley’s boat was not on his mooring as I passed. Maybe I’d see him out urchining. The tide was ebbing. I let us drift in it for a few boat lengths toward the mouth of the cove.
I also had thought about Crystal herself as I lay awake thinking about the voyage, about the turn of her ankle when she wears these particular open-toed shoes. I thought about fondling her ankles. Not all my thoughts of her were lewd. I thought about the way her face lights up when she’s enjoying herself. I mused, for example, on her nine-ball break, that full-bodied snap, all her weight behind it, arm extended…Well, I guess that one was a little lewd, too. Actually, I believe I was grinning with delight as we left the cove to pick up Crystal. I seldom grin with delight on a day-to-day basis, especially when I’m alone.
There was barely any wind. We rounded the point, and Jellyroll took his place in the bow where the wind would flap his ears. There, he could throw up without it sloshing underfoot. Everything seemed shipshape. I turned around the point, and we stepped off into the unknown—
The white smoke, my landmark, hung against the cloudless blue sky. The horizon was empty. I was offshore. The compass said we were heading due west. Okay. That seemed fine. The engine ran with a determined, steady sound. I relaxed, had a swig of water and—Wait a minute, the water was moving.
It took me a long time to recognize the meaning of those lobster trap floats lying flat on their sides with water running around them so fast it made a wake. The current ran from right to left. That had to affect my plans. I looked back at the smoke. We were still heading straight for it. I decided to observe for a while.
I thought about the old man I’d seen dead on the subway. Shortly after I’d moved to New York, learning the urban ropes, I was waiting for the downtown local at 103rd Street. I was late, I needed a train—and here it came. Perfect. Not such a hard town after all. Only the train didn’t stop. It slowed down, but it didn’t stop. The cars were all empty. It slowed still mor
e, and at walking pace passed through the station, car by car. Until the very last car. That’s where the dead guy sat, absolutely alone on the Number 1 local. He was old, frail, and bony in a threadbare herringbone sport coat. His bald head bobbed against his chest with the movement of the train. His hands lay in his lap palms up. A violin case leaned against his legs.
I needed to do something about this moving water. I still headed for the smoke, but I was moving sideways as well. I had to compensate. By turning right. Turn right how much? I tried to make the boat go faster, but it wouldn’t. I pondered the problem. Jellyroll looked over his shoulder at me a little skeptically, I thought. After all the sea miles we’d covered together…
So I decided the thing to do was to keep pointing at the smoke until I arrived at the coast—then I would know I had to turn right to get to Micmac. But what about going back, without smoke? I’d worry about that later. Besides, Crystal knew about boats; she grew up on Sheepshead Bay. With her aboard, I could share the loneliness of command.
Land. I first saw a wooded hill with a cone of bare rock at the top. Soon I saw the shoreline itself. It was wild and stern, rocky shelves that offered no safety, but it was beautiful and serene. As I turned right, I began to see white frame houses overlooking the water, and soon I came to Round Island. My first trip was over. I’d crossed. I was grinning, but I still needed to dock without making a spectacle of myself.
There was plenty of room at the dock forward of the Belgian’s boat. I turned around and came up dead slow beside it, caught hold of its rail, and carefully walked us hand over hand along its side. That was a conservative way of getting to the dock, but there I was without incident. I stepped ashore and tied us on.
There were twice as many people on the hillside as when I left. They sat or stood in clots, idly. Some were cooking breakfast over outdoor stoves, others were eating out of bags with their fingers. Many, apparently, had slept up there. Some were still doing it on foldout cots, cameras dangling on lanyards from their limp wrists. A few kids were trying to play, but now the hill was too crowded for frivolity. The kids tripped over supine adults. Had they lost hope?
Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery Page 10