The Fisher Boy

by Stephen Anable

  “He looked scared to death writing that note.”

  “Scared you’d expose him, sure.”

  It was more than that, a more virulent fear. As we wandered back to Miriam’s house, I told her I was sure that the painting’s title being identical to Edward’s warning was no coincidence. And the vagrant going berserk near that painting was no coincidence either.

  “But he didn’t strike The Golden One, he struck at Youth in the Dunes. You saw the scratches,” Miriam said.

  “He missed.”

  Besides, The Golden One was in the permanent collection of the museum, so Edward’s reference to it could pre-date the opening of the big Royall exhibit in July.

  Miriam muttered something about fearing no art. We adjourned to her house, where she began stringing a necklace of aventurine beads the light celery color of certain Chinese porcelains. She’d brought her work out onto her deck, along with a pitcher of sun-brewed iced tea. The afternoon was still and hot, the turquoise sky hard as a gem set in Navajo silver.

  “There’s a mystery around Thomas Royall, you know. Royall didn’t die—he disappeared.”

  “What?!” She stopped stringing the beads, while I related the story.

  On July 21, 1918, a German submarine was sighted offshore, near the naval air station at Chatham. The submarine fired on the Perth Amboy, a tugboat out of Gloucester, and throngs of people from the lower Cape crowded the shore to watch the action, the Great War right here in New England waters. The incident inspired a wave of local anti-German hysteria, which was common enough throughout the country: dachshunds were being stoned in the streets; families with German surnames were petitioning courts to change them, from Schultz to Smith.

  “Royall, of course, was an ardent admirer of Nordic culture: runes, Wagner’s operas, Viking sagas. So his community became a convenient target, a scapegoat for people on Cape Cod.”

  “Of course, the bluenoses had been sniffing at Royall all along. His nudes were going out of fashion. War makes the home front break out the fig leaves, the whole culture becomes puritanical…Anyway, Royall vanished. His clothes were discovered at Scusset Beach in Truro, but his body was never retrieved. The police assumed he drowned himself, figuring his career was finished.

  “But I’m going to grill Edward,” I told Miriam, “because he’s some sort of link between this Golden One and, well, anyway, he’s key.”

  Miriam exaggerated her sigh. “The key to your heart? You couldn’t take your eyes off him the day of Arthur’s party. Of course he’s pretty enough in a surfer-boy way.”

  “He was half-naked when I arrived.”

  “Chloe,” said Miriam, “go play with your mermaid. You left her in the kitchen.”

  The little girl went bounding away.

  “Forget Edward. He’s been trouble from the word go.”

  “Edward didn’t put the dog on Arthur’s doorstep,” I said.

  “And Edward didn’t make the late-night calls Arthur kept getting. And he didn’t kill Ian, that maniac did. But all of this trouble began once he showed up. And he’s with those fascists now, helping them disseminate hate.” She used the worst cliché possible: “Let sleeping dogs lie, Mark.”

  Then Chloe came running from the kitchen, holding her mermaid’s broken arm. Even the Krazy Glue hadn’t held.

  Chapter Twenty

  The next day, the Christian Soldiers’ office was closed. The dotted Swiss curtains and posters of the Holy Land were gone. The building was full of Soldiers in Army fatigues, hammering, sawing plywood, measuring bolts of fabric. Indeed they were expanding, just as Alicia, the receptionist, promised. “My boss is a Jewish carpenter,” the new sticker on the front door proclaimed.

  The guard from the Provincetown police was across the street, buying a slice of pizza at Spiritus. The police, apparently, thought the threat to the fundamentalists was diminishing, thought the violence this year, Ian’s murder, the museum stabbings, were the work of a man on the fringe of the movement, a loner scorned by mainstream Christian Soldiers. The Christian Soldiers would linger to save face, then close up shop and skulk away. But if that were true, then why were they expanding?

  Inside the shop, I said, to no one in particular, “I bought this chain but it broke right away…”

  “We’ll take the broken chain, then send you a new chain in the mail,” someone said. I turned to confront the Soldier I’d seen in the storage room with Edward. He was frowning, lugging a piece of Formica. “We have your name and address, don’t we?”

  “Of course,” I lied. “I gave it to…Paul.”

  “Paul is a little scatterbrained,” the Soldier said. “He mixed up the order on those chains, he chose the wrong manufacturer.”

  Did he suspect Edward knew me? For the first time, I worried that my presence could endanger Edward.

  “You have to make allowances. Paul came to us from difficult circumstances. Very difficult circumstances.”

  Was that a dig at Arthur, at me, at Edward’s gay past? Or was he referencing something earlier? I wanted to ask so many questions. Since Edward was absent, I wanted to interrogate the Soldier about who—or what—was this Golden One.

  “We’ll be opening again next week.” A boyish enthusiasm crept into the Soldier’s manner as he began boasting about their new technology. “We’ve bought brand new computers and all the latest software. We’ll do all our ordering online and buy from American manufacturers.” He added, “Paul is being transferred,” while gauging my reaction. A wide smile animated his features and vanished as quickly as it had begun.

  ***

  The Soldier wasn’t the only one whose mood was changeable. Roberto abruptly entered a blue funk. He’d been manically planning our show, sharpening his mime skills. But now his mood was low as the tide. We were strolling through the muck flanking Provincetown Harbor. That’s when he mentioned the reason for his mood, a telephone call from Dr. Schreiber.

  We’d walked from the White Gull to beyond MacMillan Wharf. There, on the beach, an actual shipwreck was resting on the sand, a rusting fishing boat smelling of tar and fuel. It was not the least bit like the sunken pirate vessels of my fantasies, thick with sea fans and coral, doubloons and ingots and pirates’ bones spilling from their broken bulwarks. No, this was hazardous waste. Some lawsuit was stopping the town from removing it.

  Roberto kicked a coil of rope from the boat. “For an atheist, my father is very religious. He was dead set against me having a Bris, being circumcised, and my mother forced him, almost at gunpoint, to have me Bar Mitzvahed. Science is his theology, but he’s the most homophobic person I’ve ever encountered. He keeps talking about laws, not God’s laws, but the laws of science. How can he take my ‘lifesyle’ seriously when I belittle it onstage in my comedy? How rational is that?”

  He climbed barefoot onto the deck of the little boat, all sharp, rusting edges, a case of tetanus waiting to happen. A Keep Off sign was posted on the bow. Fuel from the ruptured tank was staining the sand opalescent, blackening some nearby scallop shells.

  “Be careful.”

  “He promised to come to our opening night, then reneged. He says he’d forgotten about some conference at MIT, but that’s bullshit. I checked my calendar—it doesn’t conflict with our show. And I double-checked with MIT, just to be sure.”

  He jumped from the boat, splattering my shins with sludge. “Quick whiz,” he said suddenly, and, stepping closer to the wreck, unzipped his shorts, stroked his penis as if to reassure it, then guided an insistent stream splattering against the hull. The sight of his peeing, this masculine yet vulnerable gesture, released a vast tenderness within me, so, when he was done, I encircled his waist with my arms and hugged him, and he smelled of the Drakka Noir he wore when he was testy.

  We were heading back, passing the carcass of a skate, its vertebrae pushing up through its flesh like the frame through the skin of a ruined kite, when he gave me more news. “Tim is coming back. I, umm, didn’t want to tell you until it was defini
te.”

  The other houseboy, whose futon I’d used, until Roberto invited me into his bed. Did he regret that invitation? Was he finding living and working together claustrophobic?

  He said, “Sorry,” and I wasn’t sure he meant it.

  The sand was winking with the burrows of submerged clams. Roberto picked up a pebble and sent it skimming along the ground in a happy, boyish gesture. Having told me this news, he seemed better already.

  Tim returned, but only to collect his things, before resigning to take a job in Rehoboth Beach. That same day, we learned that the museum assailant was buried in the anonymous earth of a potter’s field. And I felt something else being buried too: the affection and trust I’d been building with Roberto, the bond that would allow me to confide in him about Ian, about our sex in the dunes and my finding Ian’s body. And that Ian was my long lost brother—if he was.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  But I still had the stage, that little shelf of plywood at the club. There was magic there; it was thrilling, the risk of trying each new line, casting it off like a fisherman’s lure to see if an audience would bite; then the burst of laughter like a marlin breaking up out of a once-calm sea. You knew that that moment was yours, yours alone. Yours in its utter and temporary perfection.

  And hadn’t I always been acting, hadn’t I literally rehearsed for this career long before I’d joined that troupe? I was realizing now I’d never believed my mother’s tall tale about the Navy man and his phantom destroyer. Her imagination worked best with paint and song; the spoken word just wasn’t her medium. She was a charming but ludicrous liar, no better at being truthful than staying sober. Those years of trying to verify her fictions were just my part of her script. But that was over.

  People packed Quahog the night of our new show. The lead act, a lesbian comic built like a bowling pin and rumored to be a major diva, was graciousness itself to us. She was a shy Smith graduate whose passions were raw cookie dough and her paperback of poems by Emily Dickinson. “Did you know that Emily Dickinson was what we’d call a ‘big, beautiful woman’?” she asked us. “In her later years, I mean. There’s a dress they keep under wraps at her house in Amherst, and, let me tell you, Emily did some serious eating.”

  We were opening for her, and although the audience was ninety percent female, their response to us was fantastic. Standing on a stage, you can feel a room change as you win the crowd over, subtly at first, like barometric pressure, then the energy swells to a thunderclap.

  We saw a few familiar faces in the murk, some Boston actors and Roberto’s college stage combat instructor, but not his father, not Dr. Schreiber. Roberto waited until the end of our act to complain backstage. “It’s his loss. He’s missing a fabulous night. He’d travel ten thousand fucking miles if I were a lunar eclipse.”

  Roger Morton seemed elated. “You’re on your way, you’re on your way,” he kept repeating during our brief intermission.

  As our headliner was packing the next morning, she asked, “Do you guys have an agent?”

  “We wish,” I said.

  “Well, mine isn’t taking new clients.” She licked cookie dough from her fingers. “But there was one there last night, asking a lot of questions, a tall guy with a ponytail. He said he’d give Roger his card.” She pointed a sticky finger toward me. “He wanted to know all about you. He kept his eye on you all night, so he said.”

  We’d neglected to network after the show; we’d been too busy greeting friends from the audience. Roger Morton had slipped out of Quahog after the last curtain call, and was sleeping late this morning. When he came yawning onto the porch in a Hawaiian shirt, all catamarans and volcanoes, he was beaming. “How are the stars?”

  But the headliner’s story baffled him, he claimed. No “agent” had been circulating, asking about us. Sometimes our famous colleague overindulged in diet pills, although she’d seemed reasonably coherent last night. Anyway, no one “professional” had approached him about our act, except one writer from a bar rag in Boston, and she didn’t have a ponytail, just a padlock in one ear, and no one had given him a business card, certainly no agent wanting clients.

  By the time we’d spoken with Roger, our headliner was flying to a show in Montreal, so we were unable to question her further. She could have fabricated her agent story to boost our morale, or Roger could have been fending off agents to keep booking us at his stingy rate.

  “He kept his eye on you.” She hadn’t said this “agent” thought I was funny, and there was a suggestion of surveillance in the compliment. And, to be truthful, even when I was at my best, it was odd for anyone to single me out for praise when Roberto was so obviously The Star.

  My uneasiness increased when I stopped by my apartment to pick up my mail. Eleven calls were blinking from my answering machine, all hang-ups. Were these calls from the “agent” who’d kept his eye on me, or from Edward, to elaborate about his warning? Could they be from Ian’s killer, who’d seen me find his body? Could he—or she or they—have hidden from view? No, that was unlikely; there was no place to hide on the breakwater, and the moon had been generous with its light.

  Trying to stay calm was like willing my pulse to go down. I kept on down this road. The killer could have been waiting on the shore road: there were trees and cars and buildings to hide behind, shadows to absorb a silhouette. Whoever was responsible for Ian’s death could’ve seen me walk from the breakwater to the parking lot, then followed my car to this apartment.

  It was time to dispose of that awful towel, the physical evidence that linked me to the crime. I would burn it in the woods, then scatter the ashes. Of course burning was illegal during this record-setting drought, but destroying evidence was against the law too.

  I found some wooden kitchen matches that came with the apartment, then went to get the towel. I’d moved it a couple of times. I’d last stashed it under the bureau in the bedroom, among some dust, paperclips, and a roach motel. I’d left this litter from a previous tenant because it made the towel’s presence look innocent, haphazard. All of this was hidden by the bureau’s decorative panel, a cheap maple filigree hanging almost flush with the floor.

  I reached under the bureau, but felt nothing. I stretched out my arm, but felt no dust, no paperclips, no towel…Desperate, I crawled closer to the bureau, patting the floorboards beneath it and praying, then swearing.

  Standing up, I shoved the bureau aside so roughly it almost toppled. The space beneath it, once so filthy, was bare. My towel and the previous tenant’s refuse were gone. “Damnit!” I screamed.

  I tried to convince myself that the landlord had cleaned…But he never did that, he had no right, no business throwing anything of mine away. Then I thought of the police, of Almeida and his ghoulish detective on my apartment porch, questioning me, watching me sweat. But the police would need a warrant, they’d have called and left a message—wouldn’t they?

  Glancing around the apartment, I was sure, now, that things had been moved, just slightly, an inch here, an inch there: the brass floor lamp, the iron bed, the sofa with ratty upholstery. Everything had been handled and examined.

  I ran downstairs to the leather shop owned by my landlord. The fragrance of fresh hide overcame the chemical cold of the air-conditioning. I asked the clerk, verifying a credit card, whether Michael, my landlord, had been in my apartment. “No way, man. Michael’s in Palm Springs, visiting his mom. Like it isn’t hot enough around here.”

  “Someone’s been in my room!” I all but yelled. I was losing it. Amid the rawhide and tourists, I was losing it.

  “Did they rip you off? Is anything missing?”

  A woman was modeling a fringe jacket for her husband. “You look just like Annie Oakley,” he told her.

  I elbowed them aside.

  “Hey, call the police, man!” the clerk yelled in my wake. “You ought to call the police!”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Someone was investigating my life. “Your silence will not protect you,�
� the AIDS activists’ bumper stickers say. Waiting for the authorities to act wouldn’t either. I knew Thomas Royall was somehow associated with this summer’s horror through the title of his painting, The Golden One. So I went to the Provincetown Public Library to do some research.

  The Provincetown Public Library reminded me of an old-fashioned house. Despite the fluorescent lighting and linoleum floors, it still seems domestic with its narrow wooden stairs and gingerbread flourishes. There’s something homey and small-town about the staff there too: eager to help, grateful for your interest, glad you haven’t stopped by just to use the rest rooms.

  The one Royall biography had been published during the Fifties, when there’d been a brief flurry of interest surrounding the fortieth anniversary of his disappearance. The book’s plastic cover crackled as I opened it. Some pieces of angel food cake, pressed flat like flowers in a Victorian’s Bible, fell from one chapter, the contribution of the book’s last, messy reader.

  Some of the book’s photographs duplicated what I’d seen in the museum: six year-old Royall in velvet breeches and curls; as a youth, arm-in-arm with Edward Carpenter; in robes, with gilded horns in his hair…There were some photographs of Gilbert Dyer, the model, the text claimed, for The Fisher Boy and The Golden One. In one photograph, Dyer was posed in the branches of a tree, all but naked amid the apple blossoms. The caption read, “Gilbert Dyer: Unwholesome Adonis.”

  “Is this the only book on Royall you have?” I asked the librarian.

  “Where did you find that? You know, I’ve been looking for that all morning.”

  “It was on the shelf, in the art section. I was browsing.”

  “Misfiled.” She was wearing a small ceramic pin, a cartoon stereotype of the spinster librarian: hair in bun, Ben Franklin glasses. “There are some people in Truro who’ve asked us to hold this book for them. There’s been so much interest in Royall since that horrible stabbing at the museum.”

  “Oh, I always appreciated his work.” I must have spoken too loud because a man who was all belly, like a clam, put down his USA Today and hissed, “Sssssh!”