The Fisher Boy

by Stephen Anable

  This is betrayal, I thought, of my mother whom he’d insulted, betrayal of all of my family, going back generations. But I took another swig of vodka, raw like paint thinner, down my throat. I remembered all he’d done, all he’d apologized for, then tried to stand but lost my balance.

  My heart was pounding the way it does when my blood pressure gets taken, when the sleeve begins tightening, crushing my arm.

  “Hey, man, relax.” A sexy leer transformed Ian’s face. I had another hit of vodka then another, my eighty-proof excuse for what was happening.

  “It’s not like we’re total strangers,” he said. Conservative in his politics and clothing, he was liberal in ways of the flesh. His chest was like stone. He was far from the beefy stripling of St. Harold’s. I’d done my time with free weights and jogged hundreds of weedy-smelling miles by the Charles, but I felt thin and naive at that moment compared to Ian.

  I was enjoying the sex, but felt a little detached as though I were hovering above us in the hot, salty air, like a soul afloat above its newly-dead body. I was confused about the work my mouth and hands were doing—to someone I half-despised.

  After it was over, he became brusque. He stared out to sea. The coast, the crook of Cape Cod stretching toward Plymouth, was grayish-blue in the distance. He lit a cigarette and smoked with a kind of hunger.

  “You never used to smoke,” I said, and he snapped, “Don’t get on my case, okay? I don’t need an extra physician. I’ve got enough people on my case already, so I sure as hell don’t need you!”

  He slipped the Swiss Army knife back into his wicker hamper, then brushed me and the sand from his towel.

  “You’re not staying to watch the sunset?”

  “You sound like a greeting card.” Ian sounded more weary than hostile. He pulled on his clothes roughly, as if they’d misbehaved. “If you want to watch something, I suggest you watch little Edward.”

  “Why? Are you after him too?”

  Hugging the hamper and his beach things, he headed toward the breakwater and his house. “Vaya con Díos,” he said, over his shoulder.

  I felt very alone, and a bit drunk from the vodka Ian had insisted I share. He’d left me the bottle, now my only companion on this empty beach.

  Why didn’t I leave right then? Why didn’t I pack up and return to the Herring Cove parking lot? I stayed, I suppose, because there was something magical about the beach at that hour, the cooling sand, the ocean like quicksilver, so dense and metallic, and the full moon white as a shaman’s bone amulet in the pale sky.

  I swam, and the water was frigid. Colder currents must have come roiling in from somewhere out toward George’s Bank. When I ran to my towel, I was shivering, so, to warm my gut, I finished the last of Ian’s vodka. I meant to watch the sunset but my insomnia had kicked in since that awful night at the club, since my disgrace. Sleep overwhelmed me.

  When I awoke, it was dark, nine-forty by my watch. I was alone in a black windy landscape. I didn’t want to chance taking the beach route back what with the threats from those Christian Soldiers. Provincetown was in such a mess. I wanted the lights of the shore road in my sight as a beacon, a kind of comfort. So I decided to cross the granite breakwater—the long string of stones across the inlet separating Herring Cove Beach from the mainland.

  The breakwater seemed to stretch forever in the moonlight. The tide was in: you could hear it gurgling and sloshing between the stones. There’s no mortar in the breakwater; it’s just heaped together, like the stone walls marking the pastures of long-dead farmers in rural New England. It’s tricky walking. The stones, quarry scrap, are the size of car hoods, tilted every which way and sometimes loose, so you have to watch every step, plan every move. Even in daylight, you could slip and twist an ankle or break your leg.

  The breakwater is long, a good half-hour walk. Soon, I began tiring, but with hundreds of yards behind me, I’d already gone too far to turn back. I was also realizing the foolishness of my choice; at least the beach route was relatively flat. But here you could see the lights of Provincetown, glittering along the harbor shore in an uneven tide, as if each building had been gently, haphazardly, deposited by a different tide.

  I was relieved, happy, to see a man in the distance. Not a basher, I hoped, not some hostile visitor from the west. He was on the right side of the breakwater, facing the harbor, leaning against an upright slab of rock. At night, at high tide, you see people fishing here, but I couldn’t make out his line or reel.

  Days, people nodded as they crossed paths here, those coming to the beach and those leaving it. Mostly men took this route, a lengthy but direct hike to the gay nude section of Herring Cove. Here the sense of “community” actually rang true: the handsomest men gave you a cheery hello, forced to confront you face to face on this narrow, slightly hazardous structure.

  This man was just the other side of a part in the breakwater where the sea had knocked some stones askew, so that, at high tide, you were compelled to wade through about five or six inches of water where the breakwater is intact but not as high as intended.

  Removing my shoes, I sloshed across this gap, not longer than a yard or so. I was just about to joke about this gesture, but wasn’t sure this was the right thing to do. I’d have ignored a couple who were here at night, figuring they wanted privacy in the moonlight and salt air. And if this man was fishing, I didn’t want to startle him, to make him inadvertently jerk his line, then lose his catch.

  So, I paused, momentarily, to study him. No, there was no fishing line, so it was safe to speak. “Beautiful night,” I started to say, but got only as far as the first syllable. I stopped when I saw his forearm—it was soaked in something thick, not the cold guts of bait…

  He had a startled look, his eyes were open. So was his mouth. His throat was leaking streams of blood from a deep, ragged gash.

  For an instant, I actually wondered whether he was still alive. That was before I realized who he was. His shirt was matted with blood, all but obliterating the Izod insignia. Instinctively, I reached out to touch his shoulder, but there was no place to touch, no part of his clothing or flesh not wet with thick arterial blood.

  So, instead of touching him, I said his name out loud…

  Chapter Eight

  “…Ian.” I said his name in a whisper, as if frightened to confirm it.

  Because, without a doubt, it was. I’d recognized the Rolex watch and the bodybuilder’s shoulders swelling the Izod shirt. I’d recognized those things before I’d admitted I recognized his face. I’d been postponing the decision it was him.

  I couldn’t see his beach things, his hamper and towel and book on wartime Greece, but his killer could have taken these. The man who had saved my life had now lost his, and not to something impersonal like the sea or a car crash or a retrovirus. Someone had killed him. Someone had done this. Someone had stopped his existence.

  I’d never seen so much blood. It was everywhere, gleaming in the light of the full moon. Blood had run down his bare legs, then dripped onto the granite slabs to collect in the grooves the stonecutters had drilled in the quarry. It looked as though someone had taken a saw to Ian’s throat and cut it through to the bone. There were wounds to his chest too; the fabric of his polo shirt was torn.

  Nausea seized me like a tackle in football. I knew I was going to vomit, the way Miriam had at Arthur’s. But then I knew I couldn’t, that I’d be contaminating a crime scene. I’d also be leaving a clue that I’d been here. Because I knew, without a doubt, that I would not report this horror to the police. Everyone knew about my fight with Ian, my public brawl in the audience at Quahog. I would be Suspect Number One, or at least high on the list of people to question.

  I pressed my arm against my mouth as bile rose then caught in my gut. To distract myself, I looked at the moon. Somehow, the spasms in my stomach eased. Then I covered my face with my fingers and began to cry, deep, ragged sobs until I bit my knuckle to make myself stop.

  Someone had killed Ia
n, someone had cut his throat. I had to get out of here as soon as possible, but first I had to be sure that I didn’t touch anything, that I hadn’t touched anything.

  Had I touched the stones? Had I braced myself against them in my shock, leaving fingerprints behind? I couldn’t remember. I stared at my hands. Thank God they were clean, thank God there wasn’t any blood on my hands.

  Then I noticed my beach bag. I’d dropped it and scattered some of its contents: one towel, my sunglasses, the swim trunks I’d brought in case the National Seashore rangers came patrolling…A wind had risen, and the towel was whipping along the breakwater, as if to evade me. I stamped it down, then snapped it up. Then I grabbed my sunglasses and swim trunks.

  Had I picked up everything? Yes, this was it. Had I touched anything else? Not as far as I could recall; I’d been careful. I bent to check a crevasse between the stones. Was that my comb in there? I reached…Then as I did, I felt something dislodge from inside the beach bag I’d wedged under my arm, something bright that caught the moonlight as it fell, hitting the stone then exploding into hundreds of incriminating fragments.

  I swore, then wept. It was the vodka, the bottle Ian had given me. It had broken and fallen into the space between two chunks of granite. I picked up the neck of the bottle, still with its cap…For God’s sake, don’t cut yourself, I thought, don’t leave your DNA in addition to your fingerprints.

  There was no comb, it was a twig of driftwood. I kept picking up glass. The more I picked up, the more seemed to appear, sparkling amid the straw, dried seaweed, and crumbly remnants of a styrofoam fishing float. My fingerprints were all over the bottle, I kept thinking; if I left even one shard of glass it could connect me to this murder. It could say, he was here, the man who fought Ian. I was stuffing the glass fragments into my beach bag. The label of the bottle, with its embossed design of St. Basil’s Cathedral, remained intact, clinging to the largest pieces of glass I could find.

  There was no one in sight, but how soon would that change? I had to leave, I had to run. Clutching the beach bag, twisting it shut to prevent anything else spilling out, I leapt from slab to slab of rock and was soon out of breath. It was both dangerous and useless to hurry. It also looked suspicious, but then, anyone crossing the breakwater this night would look, in retrospect, suspicious. And if I did meet people—anyone—on the breakwater, what would I do? Ignore them? Speak, but turn away? They might continue along the breakwater far enough to find Ian, then remember my photograph, from our comedy troupe flyers, the ones I’d posted with Roberto all over town. In my mind, each flyer became a “Wanted for Murder” poster.

  I met no one on the remainder of the breakwater, thank God, and my walk to my car in the Herring Cove lot was uneventful. I took the right side of the shore road, with the traffic to my back. When traffic approached me from the opposite direction, I hung my head, hiding my face, stared at my deck shoes.

  Every step I took brought me farther away from murder, away from everything except the horror of the memory.

  Chapter Nine

  I had some chloral hydrate at my apartment. I took two, washed down with some bad Chablis. Showering, I cried into the spray, then fell into bed.

  When the sun rose and stung my eyes awake, I realized immediately that it had set on Ian forever

  Until last night on the breakwater, I hadn’t realized the potency of my feelings for Ian—almost fraternal, we’d shared so much. Vignettes from our past kept playing in my head, of swimming, games of baseball, building forts in the sumac and cat briar of Eastern Point, and, of course, of his saving me in the storm in Gloucester Harbor. And our sex in the dunes kept screening in my consciousness, like a snuff film on endless loop.

  My milk had soured, so I dribbled some tap water over my muesli before deciding this was unsatisfactory. So I drove partway up Bradford Street, but it was seven-thirty, so the supermarket of course was closed. Instinctively, I headed toward Arthur’s. I had to speak with Arthur, whether he was “up to it” or not.

  His BMW, the gray of an old fedora, was parked in his driveway. The buttercup-yellow house looked serene, the peonies bending under the weight of their open, globe-like flowers. I heard someone singing—singing!—on this horrible morning. It was Arthur’s voice, damaging something from The Pirates of Penzance.

  “Hello?” I called, stepping toward the garden.

  Instantly, the air filled with noise, like the sirens from every fire engine on Cape Cod.

  Arthur came running in a terrycloth robe. “Don’t move!” he yelled to me, then vanished inside the house. After an interval that seemed endless, the racket ceased.

  “Your new alarm,” I said, when he returned.

  “It’s a bit hypersensitive, like its owner.”

  A neighbor’s shar pei was barking from the yard across the street.

  “They’re adjusting the alarm later today,” Arthur said, “before my neighbors evict me.” He began pouring birdseed into a Plexiglas cylinder wired to his silver maple. “You’re up early.” He was his buoyant old self, the Arthur of summers past.

  I was casual. “The early bird gets the worm.”

  “And then some.” Arthur closed the top of the feeder and then the bag of birdseed. “Well, you might as well be the first to know. My bird has left his gilded cage—along with two very valuable ormolu candlesticks. Can you beat that?” He plopped the bag of birdseed onto the flagstones on the terrace, then brought a plate of raisin bagels and two cups of coffee from the kitchen. “You look like you could use a hit of caffeine.”

  He went on about the candlesticks. His great-aunt Harriet had given them to him when he was twenty-three, when he had published his first poem in the Yale Review. “They were French, Empire. Harriet claimed they came from the salon of Madame Récamier.” He was lathering cream cheese onto his bagel. “The little hustler,” he muttered, obviously not referring to Madame Récamier.

  Only now it registered. “Edward is missing?!”

  “Gone with the wind.”

  He was savoring the theatricality of the moment. Certainly he was upset about both losses, but his new security system, his electronic safety net, apparently gave him confidence, restored some humor, and from his pocket he drew a plastic bottle of pills. “My new prescription,” he laughed, shaking the dull turquoise capsules. “My bluebirds of happiness. Mother’s little helpers. Did I ever tell you I had a mad crush on the Rolling Stones during the Sixties? Don’t tell a soul!”

  Everywhere—in my coffee cup, in the waves winking from Provincetown Harbor—I saw the murder. As the sole witness to that scene, I carried all of its brutality alone. Arthur, obviously, had yet to hear the news. Ian’s body might still be on the breakwater, with no company but the gulls and terns. But I had to keep silent and use my acting skills, to pretend to be absorbed by some missing antiques, stolen by a kept boy who’d suddenly hit the road. Because everyone knew how I’d fought with Ian. Lots of people knew we’d both been at the beach. So I’d be a logical suspect.

  “You know,” Arthur was saying, “that Edward was something of a prude. He didn’t even like to be touched.”

  He was “that Edward” now. I thought of Edward’s story, of the man assaulting him in the woods. Who wouldn’t have qualms about intimacy after that? Supposing, of course, his story was true.

  “We slept in separate rooms last night,” Arthur said. “The pollen was bothering him, or a summer cold. Or me.”

  So Edward hadn’t mentioned his asthma. He’d kept his inhaler secret, like so much else.

  “He knew the value of those candlesticks. He knew the David painting of Madame Récamier. ‘Oh, we had that in art history,’ he told me.”

  “He slipped away without triggering your new alarm?”

  “I’d switched it off before we went to bed. As you saw, it’s got opening-night jitters.”

  Then the phone in the kitchen began ringing. To my tired ears, it sounded almost as loud as the alarm.

  “Everyone is so early t
oday!” laughed Arthur.

  I stared into my cup of coffee; I felt as quavery as my reflection. Cupping the cellular phone to his ear, Arthur came striding back onto the terrace. Surely this was the call; surely this was the news about Ian. Bad news is an early riser, and it was all of eight-fifteen.

  Arthur’s face assumed the frozen look of a mime’s. “Good God, I can’t believe it!” he was saying.

  I starting cutting a bagel, then I put the knife down, reluctant about using it while Arthur was hearing about Ian.

  “…Well, thank you,” Arthur said, in a strangled whisper. “I’ll break the news to Mark.”

  He walked toward me. “That was Roger Morton. The manager of the motel near the breakwater just phoned him. A photographer found a body on the breakwater this morning, some photographer doing a calendar of sunrise shots. The body has been identified. It’s Ian. Oh God, it’s so horrible!”

  ***

  Ian’s funeral was held in Gloucester, in a Gothic sandstone church the brown of cough drops, with some of the same Anglican touches as our chapel at St. Harold’s: the brass memorial plaques and Tiffany stained-glass windows glowing like sectioned mineral samples. These windows didn’t open, of course, so inside it was stifling, smelling of carpeting, old hymnals, and the lemon oil that emanated from the pews.

  The church was mobbed, owing, frankly, as much to the Drummonds’ prominence as to their youngest son’s popularity. For years, Ian’s father Duncan and all his children—Fulton, George, Ian, and Sallie—had ridden to the hounds at the Essex Hunt Club. Ian’s mother Janet, a tennis star during her youth, had aborted her first child, rumor had it, to play in the semi-finals at Wimbledon.

  Of course, Mrs. Drummond had been off the courts for years. She and her husband were elderly now, both Ian and Sallie having been “change of life” children. Today Mrs. Drummond was gaunt as one of the Fates, a black veil covering her features like an old-fashioned oxygen tent. Mr. Drummond seemed unsure exactly where he was, folding and refolding the funeral program as if making a piece of origami. Ian’s brothers—each years his senior—their eyes bright with grief, carried the mahogany casket while staring straight ahead, as if fixing their attention on anything but the gilt cross on the altar would endanger their brother’s soul.