Disciples

by Austin Wright

  Bedtime in the Harbor Inn. A floodlight on a telephone pole lights my room as I pretend to sleep. Once I’m settled in the uncomfortable bed and it’s stopped squeaking and my brain passages have calmed down, a coastwise quiet moves in, magnifying the water sounds at the harbor, plop and gurgle. As the silence deepens I hear the ping of a bell buoy, marking something. The squeak might be a boat at the dock rubbing the pilings. Meanwhile the inside of my head is full of the day, flight attendants spieling, bags toted through corridors, new cars in strange countryside, plots schemes and betrayals, and especially rehearsals for tomorrow limited in scope considering that I have only the vaguest notion what the situation is.

  In the morning, Good morning, sunny curtains in the Inn’s breakfast room and again the young woman with long hair. Eggs or pancakes? I forgot to mention the Episcopal Church, she says.

  After breakfast, following plans made in the night, I go back to the general store to ask the postmistress if there’s a constable or sheriff in this town. But I failed to realize the post office won’t open until ten-thirty so she can sort the mail. People wait. Hello they say to me, containing their curiosity. My shyness is either innate or the product of environmental causes, in either case making me helplessly polite. But since I’m not expecting mail it’s silly to wait, especially when you think how simple my question is. Try the fat man after all. In the lawn chair where he always sits, probably all night. Excuse me sir, is there a constable or a sheriff in this town?

  Constable you want?

  If there is one.

  Law?

  If possible.

  Well now. You a stranger here?

  I think he knows that, but maybe it’s another form of politeness. I suppose Martin Bilodeau’s the man for you, he says. Martin Bilodeau for questions of law and the public peace.

  Where can I find him?

  Bilodeau Map Store, up the main road right. You’ll see him.

  Thank you sir. Now we’re getting somewhere, unless things are corrupt like the movies and Bilodeau the constable or sheriff is in collusion. I shouldn’t assume such things.

  Bilodeau Map Store turns out to be the souvenir gas and food shop where I had my hamburger from the woman of the yellow apron, I not having noticed the sign last night. This morning a different woman wears the yellow apron. I ask for Martin Bilodeau.

  He comes through the curtains, plump and rosy with silver glasses looking like a car salesman who drinks too much. Hi there, what can I do for you? Red plaid flannel.

  You the constable?

  Well, if that’s what you want to call me.

  I’m wondering what you can tell me about the Miller Church on Stump Island.

  Oh my, let’s go out onto the porch. Maybe you should tell me why you want to know.

  Sitting on the porch, what can I do but take the chances I have to take? I want to know, I say, because someone has kidnapped my friend’s baby. I’d like to get her back.

  Martin Bilodeau leans back in his chair, eyes noticeably widened at the word kidnapped, just as they widened when he first caught sight of me through the curtains into the room.

  So why are you asking about the Miller Church?

  Because that’s where we think the kidnapper is taking her.

  He thinks a while before speaking.

  Am I the one you want to see, he says, or should it be the state police?

  That’s what maybe you can tell me.

  Well for that maybe you’d better tell me what happened.

  To me his down east speech sounds exaggerated, deliberately juiced for outsiders, but what do I know? I tell him about Judy, Oliver Quinn, and Hazy. Why Judy thought he was taking the baby to Stump Island.

  You came all the way here in hopes of finding them?

  I thought it worth a try.

  Just you or is the mother with you?

  Just me.

  And if you find them, what do you propose to do?

  I don’t know. I thought maybe you could help. Or someone like you.

  Tell me my friend, what’s your interest? I mean, why are you knocking yourself out?

  Friendship, I say, to help out.

  A romantic interest maybe, hey?

  Is that a leer? Does it mean he has something against a romantic interest between people like me and people like Judy? On the other hand, he probably supposes Judy is a person like me and even possibly it’s my own baby we’re talking about, with reasons he hasn’t yet figured as to why I should conceal it.

  Not yet, I say foolishly.

  You don’t say? Well, here it is, the unfortunate thing I do believe Stump Island is currently uninhabited. It was inhabited but they moved. You might take comfort that my impression accords with yours thinking it was a commune of wackos. Old men with beards and wild-eyed youth and housewife types. Kept to themselves, though, didn’t bother nobody.

  They moved away?

  Let’s go down the wharf, talk to somebody. They get a closer view than I do.

  Down in my car, measuring as we go my disappointment against the relief of heroism postponed, though where does that leave us looking for the child?

  Where it leaves us is where we started. Trying to foil an intelligent person who has no intention of being foiled. Trying to undercut the advantage he took at the start. How can we do that except by luck, how else intervene before he lets us? By that line of thinking my heroism is just a show.

  The man on the wharf is Jack Carmody, his granite face with specks of mica. His eyes have looked at the sea for sixty years.

  Bilodeau says, This man is looking for a kidnapped child on Stump Island.

  Jack says, Ain’t nobody on Stump Island the last three months. Folks moved off before Christmas.

  Bilodeau says, Guy swiped this guy’s friend’s little baby under her nose. Taking her to the playground, ran off with her.

  Jesus, what do you know about that?

  Everybody stands around thinking. What I’m thinking is get the state police, find where the Miller people went. What Carmody is thinking pops up in a moment: I maybe saw them yesterday.

  Man and woman holdin a baby, he says, passed them in a motorboat headin out there.

  Maybe your man got a woman to help him, Bilodeau says. You game to take us out?

  Any time. Want to go now?

  Bilodeau asks me, You want to go out and see?

  Comfort from numbers, the shyness of my heart fast now with danger and excitement. Sure, I say.

  Sooner the better, right?

  A stinking lobster boat with ropes tangled in the bottom and lobster pots piled. Rusty hooks, buoy markers, nets. I climb off the dock, sit in the cockpit. Carmody starts the engine, backs out into the harbor. Takes the channel to the right.

  A little motorboat comes into view beyond the island, heading for the harbor. It rides low with top-heavy people sticking up out of the water. Carmody steers in that direction and the shapes clarify. Outboard motor, two wrapped figures, one bent, the other erect, the bow high, stern almost underwater. Carmody heads directly at them.

  Bilodeau asks it: That’s them?

  Them.

  You sure of that?

  Yep.

  That’s McCaskill.

  So ’tis.

  The boat passes close, the passage swift, man with a woman holding a wrapped up baby who wave as they go by.

  Didn’t get that good a look yesterday, Carmody says.

  Bilodeau explains to me. McCaskill on Fig Island. Don’t expect them out this time of year.

  Want to go back? Carmody says.

  Hell. Let’s take a look, we come this far.

  He turns up the engine fast heading out. The bay is full of islands, some near, some far out. A couple of islands are just rocks, others stretch for miles, I can’t tell where one begins or ends with a uniform treeline of black evergreens above the rocks. The bay gleams in the cold sun, the boat makes a trough on either side and a froth of green and white rises and falls behind.

  Going
to see the island they left. Why, I wonder. The only reason I can think of is curiosity, of which constables and lobster boat owners have as much as failed heroes. Meanwhile Oliver and his victim escape, the air fare and rental wasted, sorry, Harry.

  There ’tis, Carmody says.

  An island ahead, not big, covered with trees like the others, no habitation visible. A dock emerges among the rocks, we go in, tie up, go ashore.

  A broad path into the woods. I feel nervous, my shyness, or if the cult left a rear guard for ambush. In the woods a gate blocks the path. Barbed wire on either side. The gate is padlocked, Bilodeau climbs over, we follow, no problem there. The path continues.

  There’s a clearing with dead winter grass. Two structures opposite, one an old wooden house, the other a shed under a curved roof of corrugated sheet metal. We tromp across to the house. The grass disappears, trodden to dirt. Bilodeau tries the door, locked. Looks in the window. Cleared out good, he says. The door to the shed is open. Looks like a meeting room, dark without windows, a little light from gaps in the roof. Broken folding chairs against the wall. We walk around, outhouses, a trash bin, old bedding, old tanks for propane gas, dead tools and kerosene lamps. Yep, Carmody says, cleared out good.

  How many was they, you reckon? Bilodeau says.

  Twenty, twenty-five? Could that many live in that house?

  Don’t know. They go much back and forth?

  Some for supplies, Carmody says. They only had an outboard.

  Who owns the property, Pickins?

  Likely. He owns most the islands round about here.

  Wonder what he knows.

  He’s in Florida, takin in the warm and tropical mangoes.

  Flamingos and alligators. Guess that’s what he’s doing.

  To me Bilodeau says, Guess you got a wild goose on your hands son.

  Wild goose?

  Chasin the wild goose. You know the expression.

  Maybe somebody knows where they went, I say. Post office should know, shouldn’t they?

  Post office, sure, if they want their mail to catch up with them, post office should know.

  Back to the boat then, back through the islands, back to the harbor. Nothing is more important than time and distance, because the cold on return is freezing me to death, I not having anticipated what the Maine coast would be like this time of year. I stamp my feet and swing my arms, jaw chattering, nose running, eyes blinded in ice. Welcome death. After a long time Carmody digs in the bottom for a yellow rubber slicker. It’s clammy and loose like a tent, a little help but not a lot, barely enabling me to endure torture while the distance closes between me and shore.

  It does close though, proving once again that everything in the future will come to pass. Thank you Bilodeau and Carmody for your help even if it didn’t get us anywhere and back to the post office, the plump postmistress writing in a notebook at her desk.

  I ask her for the new address of the people who used to live on Stump Island.

  What people? she says. They was several names out there.

  How about the Miller Church?

  Miller Church? Don’t remember that. She thumbs through her file, I could do it faster. No Miller Church, she says, where’d you get that name? I’ve got a Miller. No first name. I remember that, mail addressed Miller, no front name. You want his new address? How about Wicker Falls, New Hampshire?

  Wicker Falls. I’ll take that, thank you.

  According to my Rand McNally, back in the Inn, Wicker Falls is in the New Hampshire wilderness beyond Endicott, north of Gorham. It’s on the map, but couldn’t be much bigger than Black Harbor. I put my bag in the car and check out. There’s a pay phone outside the general store, a bad connection, the professor’s voice up and down in the static.

  I spell it for him, W-I-C-K-E-R. No I don’t know if it’s the right Miller, think I’ll go there anyway, I say. I’ll let you know.

  So here we are again, heading out on a long day’s drive, still trying to be a hero, west now across the interior of Maine while afternoon folds in and darkens down. Miles of flat country, though not as flat as Ohio, fields and woods, barns and houses and wilderness to US 2 and on, fast between the towns and slow through them, on through back country, my mood stretched thin across the state. The heavy pounding road, my rental car less smooth and elegant than it was. Quick supper at a café along the road. I postpone the question of heroism ahead by the question of where to sleep, which depends on what time I’ll get to Wicker Falls and whether I can find a place at that hour. That wilderness. Calculating and recalculating distance and time while clouds roll in over central Maine getting dark and the March afternoon gives way to the March evening and full night, estimating arrival at midnight or later.

  Look forward. We’re heading for the rugged mountain region of northern New Hampshire, above Mount Washington and the resorts, on the other side from where the tourists go. Out of season, not many tourist amenities on this road, and there’ll be fewer where we’re going. What would I gain by driving late and finding no place to sleep?

  So I’ll stop at the first decent motel I see along the way. I’ll have half a day’s driving or less tomorrow, which will give me enough time for reconnaissance. Then maybe, I tell myself, I won’t have to do anything heroic until the next day.

  6

  Harry Field

  Harry Field prided himself on being tough-minded and professional. He knew how easy it was to be fooled by wishful rationalizations. He took the tough-minded scientific view of death (death is death) so as not to be deceived.

  His uncle died when he was a kid. Harry imagined his ghost floating into his room and looking him over. Likewise his grandfather. His grandfather’s spirit watched everything he did and peeked into his thoughts. Well, his grandfather said, now I know more about you than I did when I was alive. Harry couldn’t believe it though. He used to worry, what will happen to me when I die? Nobody knows, his father said. That’s because no living person has had the experience of being dead. No witnesses, no evidence. His father was agnostic. It’s beyond human comprehension, he said.

  The dignified and certainly grown-up minister in his mother’s church talked of heaven as a real place. His grandmother was there looking down on him. At some point in his still early youth it occurred to Harry to be shocked. Can this man, an adult with children of his own, who makes a profession of counseling people, really believe that? Even in his teens young Harry was amazed by the human credulity all around.

  He went into science to be tough-minded. Not for the science as such but for the principle, whereby he became a historian of science and began his lifelong attack on wishful thinking. Determined to expose it wherever he could. He became a specialist in the misuses of science, in frauds and charlatans.

  He tried to find a scientifically tough-minded idea of death that would escape the terror such tough-mindedness implied. This caused an inner struggle behind his serene outer face. All life dies. So natural a thing should not be terrible, why therefore did it seem so? For years he soothed himself by arguments. For example, time is an illusion. Therefore change is an illusion, and likewise mortality and death. The trouble with this argument was that he had no reason to suppose time was not what it seems to be. Such arguments were as wishful as the heavens and ghosts he attacked. But suppose we are God’s eyes and science is God’s knowledge of himself? That was soothing. Yet it too was wishful, for though you may be one of God’s eyes, when you die that eye will go out, and that’s the end of you. Back to the void. He could never get away from the void for long.

  That’s why, when he heard on the day of the kidnapping that his inner mind had reconciled with death, he knew it was major news. He longed to recover the reasoning that led to this reconciliation but he was still too distracted by the noise and danger of present events.

  He was alone in the house at his computer looking out the window. The day was gray. The spring was suspended. The afternoon hung in a state of indigestion, waiting for worse. He had not m
oved for an hour, transfixed by a spell. Organize your thoughts, Harry. Using his rather old brain, trained in simplification, Harry reduced the things on his mind to four. Each thing paralyzed the others. The lost reconciliation with death that he would like to remember. The speech to the ladies of the Afternoon Club which he should be writing. The letter from Lena which ought to be answered. The kidnapping of his granddaughter, which should be fought with all the forces of the world. Do something, he said. Use the time, it won’t wait forever.

  He was also thinking about the undiagnosed cancer in his gut. An intermittent but recurring pain, not severe but not ordinary either, sickly and rotten. His annual colonoscopy next month ought to catch it. Dr. Andalusion was not worried, so Harry was afraid to say what he thought, his deep knowledge that it was too late.

  The speech for the ladies. Fakes, charlatans and pseudosciences. The speech was stuck, he couldn’t add anything today. He found Wicker Falls on the map, but his imagination stopped. Neither Wicker Falls nor Stump Island had anything to do with Judy’s baby and Davey’s trip was a mere distraction. Everything was a distraction from everything else. The interview with the FBI man was no help. His name was Jack Ford. He shook Harry’s hand and told him to wait. All you can do is wait. Harry knew this. Things happen after a while, the future always comes. Until then, it could be anything. The news he waits for waits. While David studied Wicker Falls, Harry waited to hear that Oliver Quinn had given the baby to a baby farm in California.

  He thought if I answer Lena’s letter, maybe that will get me moving again. Dear Lena, how wonderful to hear from you, can’t write now because of a family crisis. Don’t say that. Be calm as if only the most radical events could knock his well-ordered life out of balance.

  He took another look at her letter. He got it out of the file, touching it as delicately as a dried leaf folded into a book. The neat small handwriting made him feel like an adulterer. The letter was breezy and ignorant, full of disregard.