Maniac Drifter

by Laura Marello

  My worst fear was an incident like one of these, a careless mistake that caused someone harm or loss, a mistake you couldn’t live with, you couldn’t face anyone after. How could Antaeus’ mother come back to town when she knew she had killed Mrs. Souza? How could Cosmo stay in town when everyone knew he had had an affair with Nello’s wife? How could Falzano watch Paula and Christianne sing at the club every night, when Christianne had taken Paula away from her?

  This was the way things worked in a small town, in a family, in public life, but I couldn’t imagine being in any of those positions. Cedric had always told me I was not tough enough. “Tough as nails!” he said was what I had to be. “Hard as a ball bearing!” But I wasn’t. I was a coward. And with my amnesia, I was especially afraid I might cause someone harm.

  I finished passing out the envelopes to the investors, and sat down. I looked over at Harper. Now he was taking on his investors’ legacy. What disasters would visit him, once he started this Maniac Drifter corporation? What part of the legacy would he inherit? The movie stars were opening their envelopes. “It’s like the Oscars,” Antaeus said, and in his best Cary Grant voice added: “The envelope please. And the winner is — .” Then he started talking to Raphael about the killer whale he had seen in the harbor. Raphael explained that killer whales were really dolphins, and harmless. They did not eat people. Some of the lobstermen had been swimming with it. I thought: Antaeus’ mother had killed Raphael’s and they were sitting next to each other talking about an Orca in the harbor. These people were too sophisticated to live.

  Ruth asked them if the figures were correct. They nodded. “Okay,” she said, “the end of Article VIII reads: It is further understood by the investors that however private, all business transactions will comply with the spirit and letter of the law, within the realm of business activities sanctioned by the United States Federal Government and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”

  “Is that necessary?” Cosmo said. “Doesn’t it go without saying?”

  Ruth looked at Harper. “We decided to add it because of the secrecy clause,” she said. “Harper wanted it clear that, not only are the investors uninformed of the activities of the company, they expressly don’t sanction, condone or support any illegal activities.” Cosmo nodded his head.

  “That doesn’t absolve us from legal liability,” Falzano said.

  “That’s correct,” Ruth said. “Well, the rest is standard. All I need now are your checks.”

  The investors opened their black vinyl three ring binders. Inside were pages and pages of checks, three per page, with the information stubs off to the left by the metal rings. It was quiet for a moment while everyone wrote. Then the investors began to tear their checks out, fold them in two, and hand them to Ruth. She looked carefully at each one, and compared the figures to hers.

  Everyone stood up; each investor shook hands with Harper. It was a rite of passage, the older movie stars acknowledging the talented young movie star on the rise, and welcoming him into their group, like when Bogart made his big break by playing the outlaw in The Petrified Forest with Bette Davis and Leslie Howard. Cosmo, Antaeus, Raphael and that group — they were the older generation now. Harper was the new generation.

  “The checks will be deposited in your Maniac Drifter account by bank closing this afternoon,” Ruth told Harper. He bowed. They shook hands. He tipped his hat.

  When I was walking out the door, Ruth yelled: “Wait, wait, come back here.” I re-entered the room and waited until everyone left. Ruth shut the door. She pointed out the window, across the street to the Figurehead House. “I told you that Getz was bad news. I told you he’s a dealer.”

  I opened my mouth to speak. Finally I said, “I’m a sucker for a pretty face.”

  “Have you ever noticed the mural at Animus Pizza?” Ruth said. “Joe Houston painted that. Let me introduce you to him. He’s a nice guy. He runs the projectors at the Bad Attitude Cinema. Nice build.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I just stood there.

  “I’m going to introduce you to Joe Houston,” Ruth said. “Now will you get out of here?”

  ***

  After work at Cosmo’s restaurant that night, I walked home on Commercial Street. A lot of cars were parked at the Beachcombers and the Art Association seemed to be opening a show, because a crowd of well-dressed people was milling around carrying plastic cups of white wine in their hands. I didn’t recognize anyone I knew so I kept walking. The sky was clear and the air seemed thin and sharp; it had a bite to it like mountain air at high altitude. It wasn’t foggy and languid the way beach air usually was. I walked down the hill past Ruth’s house and the Figurehead House, looking at the lights in the different windows.

  At the bottom of the hill, at the gutted Ice House, a mangy cat padded out from under the abandoned truck there. While the cat walked in circles around me. I bent down to pet it. I looked up at the truck and the Ice House. On the enormous brick and concrete building with its gaping open spaces, a sign was posted, saying that the Ice House would be converted into condominiums. The sign showed a renovated Ice House with window boxes full of flowers, striped umbrellas on a plank-board patio, and a rebuilt wharf with figures sunbathing on lounge chairs. But the sign had been posted there for a year now and no work had been started. Edward the real estate agent owned the building, but he had not sold enough condos on speculation to fund the renovation.

  Locals kept their eye on the truck over the year, figuring it would be the first thing to go if the project ever got underway. But the big green hauler still sat there. All four tires were flat, someone had thrown a brick through the front windshield, a load of torn-up siding with rusty nails was piled in the flat bed. The Ice House itself looked just as bad. If there had ever been windows, they were all gone by now. Some of the large rectangular gaps had been boarded up, but the boards were partially ripped off. The brickwork was crumbling in places, and even the concrete was cracked, and large chunks of it were missing, revealing the steel supports inside.

  With the vandalized truck next to it, all the weeds and the battered chain-link fence, the Ice House looked like a bombed out building in a war zone. From the back it looked even more ominous, because the ground floor was open and most of the upper levels were almost completely exposed to the water and offshore wind. The walls had acquired a layer of moss and mold; vines crept up the sides and across the floors.

  While I was petting the cat and looking up at the Ice House, wondering if this were what Beirut looked like, I noticed a light shining on one of the interior walls on the fourth floor. It bounced around, disappeared, then reappeared through another opening. At first I thought it might be the beam from one of the lighthouses at Long Point, but then I realized they were too far away to make that small and precise a light on the wall in the Ice House. Anyway, the angle was wrong. Some curious passerby might be shining a light into the place from the ground on the water side, but again, the angle was wrong. The light had to be coming from inside, and on the fourth floor. How did someone get up there, I wondered, and why? The cat rubbed his bony head against my ankle.

  I crossed the front of the Ice House, reached the far side I headed toward the back, hugging the wall. I wondered what they were doing up there.

  When I reached the end of the building I squinted into the breeze gusting off the water. I could see a boat docked on the wrecked wharf behind the Ice House, Getz’s boat. While I was scrutinizing the boat that mangy cat scrambled up to me from behind, as if it had been spooked. It overshot me, with its spiny back arched and its claws out, squealed, and went skidding around the back of the building. The cat’s speed sent its back legs off in one direction and its body in the other, like a car spinning out. The cat corrected itself and began to prance forward, until it was out of sight behind the building. “Psst, kitty. Psst, kitty,” a voice whispered, as if that were the way to call a cat. It was Getz’s voice.

  “Hey, what the hell,” Harper Martin said from somewhere u
p above. “I’m up here getting my pants dirty and you’re playing with a cat.”

  “It was crying,” Getz said. “Some Tom is probably after it.”

  I peeked around the corner. Getz was standing on the ground with the cat in his hands. He looked up at Harper, who was on the fourth floor, at the ledge. They both had work gloves on, and a forklift machine was backed halfway inside the building on the ground floor, the lift jacked up to where Harper was standing.

  “These cats come with the building,” Getz said. “There’s probably a half dozen.”

  “Cats!” Harper said. “Cats! Have they gotten inside the crates? Are there cats at Hatches Harbor?”

  Getz put the cat down and shook his head. “Worry about the damp air wrecking your merchandise. Don’t worry about the cats.”

  Harper disappeared behind the wall. Getz lowered the platform on the loaded forklift and backed the machine onto the dock. Then Harper reappeared on the ground. While they were loading the crates onto the boat I realized that, unless Harper got in the boat with Getz, he would be leaving soon, and I was standing at the only exit, since there was a chain link fence around the other side of the building, and the ground floor was sealed shut in front. Harper put his hat on and shook hands with Getz. Getz got in the boat; Harper started in my direction. I scrambled across the dirt lot toward Bradford Street and my apartment.

  ***

  Hatches Harbor was the last stretch of beach at Herring Cove, past the gay beach where there were dunes and biting flies, past the lesbian beach, the family beach (that was near the hot dog stand), past the fishermen. At dawn I parked at the far end of Herring Cove Beach lot, closest to Hatches Harbor. Then, armed with a crowbar, I walked all the way to Race Point, where a sign on the low picket fence said, TERNS NESTING AREA/ OFF LIMITS. Angelo, the whale and seal expert, had told me that the terns were an endangered species on the Cape, so when they started nesting at Hatches Harbor the Forest Service had fenced the area off to prevent tourists from driving them away. I could not see any terns from where I was standing behind the fence. The shore went around the bend there, at a convex angle that obstructed the view. I walked along the fence toward Hatches Harbor Lighthouse. The terns seemed to congregate by the shore, in the low grassy dunes, and left the lighthouse to the seagulls.

  Hatches Harbor Light looked rusty and abandoned. The white paint was peeling off around the outer walls and the iron walkway just below the light was missing its railing in places. Thick cords of electrical wire twisted in large cables from a wooden shed to the lighthouse. On the door a sign said: DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE. DO NOT ENTER. The rusty metal door to the lighthouse stood slightly ajar.

  I could hear a humming sound and wondered if it were the high voltage wires. Then I noticed there was a dense brown paste of flying insects in the air, covering the shed and walls of the lighthouse. They started to buzz around my head. They were dragonflies.

  The wind was blowing, and no one else around for miles. I stopped in the low grassy dunes. Someone was walking out the lighthouse door. It was Harper. Getz came out behind him. They headed toward the shore, right through the middle of the Terns Nesting Area.

  I crouched on the far side of the fence and took a parallel path back to the shore. When I arrived I crept up the shore a few yards, trying to camouflage myself among the low dunes, found a safe vantage point, sat down and watched.

  Getz’s boat was idling in the water. Harper and Getz were standing on shore near the boat, talking. Angelo was poised on his windsurfer out a little distance beyond the boat, zig-zagging back and forth through the water. I wondered how he got involved in this. In the summer Angelo conducted the whale watch tours on the Dolphin II; throughout the year he spent his free time at the Terns Nesting Area or Race Point, observing the seals. Sometimes he used his windsurfer for transportation.

  The Voodoo Woman was walking through the dunes toward Harper and Getz in her leopard outfit. It was a one-piece cream color skin suit with black spots on the legs and torso. Over the leotard she wore a tunic that swept around her in folds, like the draperies on a Greek sculpture. She wore a thick black leather belt around the waist of the tunic, with a silver buckle that had a leopard’s face imprinted in it. The leopard was baring its teeth. Usually she wore black canvas elf shoes or for the evening, black leather ankle boots with stiletto heels made out of teak. But today she was barefoot, and had on layers of ankle bracelets that jangled when she walked. When she reached the spot where the three men were standing, she started dancing around them, swooshing her tunic this way and that in the wind. She was chanting an incantation, and shaking the layers of bracelets around her wrists. Getz and Harper climbed into the boat and sailed off. Angelo picked the Voodoo Woman up on the windsurfer, and rode away with her.

  When they were out of view, I stood up and walked through the dunes out to the shore, and down to the other side of the fence. I returned to the lighthouse, stepping carefully among the seagulls. I waved the crowbar around my head to keep the dragonflies off. I wondered if they liked the electricity, or the damp, brackish air.

  As I approached the lighthouse door, a crowd of seagulls lifted up off the ground and flapped above my head. Some circled the top of the lighthouse, and some were crowded on the steps. I walked up the steps and went inside the lighthouse. The cavernous room was empty except for a half dozen crates that were stacked at the far end, a canvas tarp thrown over the top. I folded back the tarp. The crates were wooden, had no markings, and were hammered together strong and solid.

  It took about 20 minutes, but finally I had a lid off. This crate was filled with straw and sawdust. I put my hand in and moved the straw carefully until I could see something. It was a grey, porous stone material. I pushed away more straw, revealing the side of a face, an ear. I uncovered the rest, and pulled it out.

  It was a little man made out of pumice or lava. He was sitting cross-legged with his forearms resting on his knees. A plain smooth mask stretched over his face and the top of his head, with holes for the eyes, mouth and ears. The mask was tied with strings at the back of the head, in an elaborate knot carefully etched in the stone.

  A plain jumpsuit stretched tight over his arms and legs. There were no markings on it, except for a few stitches over the heart. The jumpsuit was tied with strings in the back at the shoulders, and lower, at the kidneys. Again, the elaborate bow ties were etched carefully in the stone. At the stone man’s wrists, limp hands dangled down from his jumpsuit the same size as his own hands. It was as if he had stepped into another man’s skin, but for some reason was reluctant to put on the other man’s hands.

  I set the little skin-suit man down on the crate next to the open one, and reached back into the straw. I moved it around until I could see a shape, then brushed the straw away from it. The object felt like clay, and was the color of sand. When I had moved enough straw away to recognize its shape, I pulled the figure out. It was a clay woman, with one head but two faces, right next to each other, as if it were a record of a sudden movement, leaving the image of her face in both positions; like a Picasso drawing of multiple profiles. The woman had a long strand of hair over each shoulder that fell down almost to her navel. Her stubby arms reached only part way down her long thin torso, then her wide hips and thighs curved out into an arc like the bottom of a vase, and tapered suddenly into the curved tips of tiny feet.

  I set the two-faced woman on the crate with the skin-suit man, and searched again in the open crate, moving the straw very gingerly until I saw dark brown clay in the shape of a deer head. I pulled the figure out. The deer head was the high elaborate headdress of an old man wearing a long cloak and huge circle earrings. The headdress looked so heavy, I could not understand how he could have supported its weight. A young woman sat in the old man’s lap. She too had on a long robe and a coiled-snake headdress, almost as high as the deer, but not tilted back as precariously. She was looking benignly at the old man, and her hand was raised to his cheek. His hand was wedged between the girl�
��s legs. On the back of the figure a mouthpiece for a reed instrument was inserted. I put my mouth to it and blew; the clay couple made a shrill whistling noise that caused the seagulls outside to flap their wings and lift off the dunes in

  a flock.

  I set the whistling couple down and moved more straw aside in the open crate. I saw a stone arm, incised with intricate designs. I moved the straw away from the figure and pulled it out. It was another stone man, standing up. He was stiff and geometrically shaped, with a cone hat that had chevron designs etched in the headband. He wore hoop earrings and a blank expression on his face. His whole body, his skirt and shoulder pads, were tattooed with minute shapes: swirls, braids, triangles, hieroglyphs. On his back were more hieroglyphs, swirls, snakes and imprints, the back flaps of his skirt, and a quiver for arrows. Instead of hair or a smooth surface on the back of his head, the man had a second face — the face of a skeleton.

  The gulls were squawking. I went to the window and looked out. The sun had moved and the shadows were slanting at shorter angles. I had no idea how long I had been rummaging in the crate. I decided I would look at one more object, and then go back. I pulled out another figure. Made from a smooth blond stone, it was a man, seated on a stone block, naked except for a huge wildcat headdress. The face of a tiger or a jaguar maybe, it had sharp triangular teeth, and a geometric shaped head with rectangular slabs for the ridges of the nose. The naked man was slouching under the headdress, and pressed his hands against the stone seat, as if to support the weight. He looked bewildered.

  I put the jaguar man back into the crate in the exact spot where I had pulled him out, then padded him with straw. I put the other figures back — the skeleton man, the whistling couple, the two-faced woman — trying to figure out what each one meant. I put the lid back on the crate, and used the flat side of the crowbar to hammer the nails back in. The little skin-suit man with the dangling hand-gloves was still sitting on the other crate. I was going to take him with me.