Cape Cod Noir

by David L. Ulin

What was it about that summer that had stamped him? It wasn’t like they’d ever belonged. As his father had tried to play buddy-buddy at the yacht club, he’d ridden his bike, day after day, alone, adrift, down the summer roads and pathways, inhaling the silence and feeling it take root in his lungs. Later that year, the bottom had dropped out on the family, and that, as they say, was that. Standing here today, though, looking at the weather-beaten shingles of the house, its eaves and dormer windows, he’d felt as if time had stopped. Briefly, he thought about checking it out, but he wasn’t ready; instead, he’d followed the narrow trail down the bluff. At the bottom, he stumbled through the dunes, ankle-deep in icy sand, until, after a hundred yards, he’d come out of the beach grass to see the flat green tumult of the Atlantic, and off to his left, the jetty stretching like a question mark across the water beneath the thin New England autumn light.

  That had been an hour ago, and he’d been on the jetty ever since. If he could have found the language, he would have said that he was waiting for the failing of the light. Although the tide was low, the wind was high, and it blew a bitter spray into his eyes. He touched his cheeks. They were wet, salty, as if awash in tears. He wiped the water away, hiked up the backpack, and buried his hands in the pockets of his pants. Seeing the sky drain of color felt like watching the universe fade out, and the thought brought back the memory of his vision, leaving him to wonder if there was a message in it, a warning sign of things to come.

  He waited until the night had wrung the last drops of light out of the sky, until the sand shone silver beneath an early smattering of stars. He waited until he was cold enough to feel as if the stillness of his body and the stillness of the rocks had frozen into one. He waited until the tide began to rise again, the water a series of slow caesuras lapping at the jetty in icy tongues. Then he went back down the beach to the pathway, and up the bluff to the house. For the first time, he allowed himself to take it in. From the outside, it didn’t appear any different, a classic Cape Codder, gray clapboard with light blue shutters, same as it had always been.

  As a kid that summer, he’d discovered all sorts of things about this rental house: the hidden room above the garage, with its stacks of derelict oil and watercolor paintings; the dusty corners of the basement, where old, overstuffed furniture from the 1940s sat neglected and unkempt. He’d spent days at a time climbing on the outside of the house, pulling himself atop the woodshed, then jumping to the kitchen roof and scrambling to the second floor, where he would crawl around to the upstairs bathroom window, and through it, slip in and out of the house like a ghost. Like a ghost, yes, and if he squinted now, he could almost see himself, transparent as an afterimage, smaller, lighter, not this heavy husk of a man so plodding on his feet. Another piece of himself lost, another incarnation. He shook his head, as if to loosen the web of memory, and came down the driveway, gravel crunching under his shoes.

  In the silence, the noise was sharp as gunshots, but the nearby houses were dark and no one was around. He paused for a moment, but this was what he’d been expecting, a community out of season, from the moment the plan began to gel. Back in Cambridge, he had gone on the realty company’s website, stared at photos of the house. It had looked the same inside also, iron beds in the bedrooms, the living room with its long couch and two wingchairs, and those shelves of ancient leather books. That was the appeal of it, his father had liked to say, that nothing ever changed on the Cape. It had been the same since the 1950s, the 1940s, the 1920s, those houses with their push-button light switches and mildew from the salt air, those social hierarchies. That summer, he’d thought of this as more of his father’s bullshit, when he’d stopped to think of it at all. But gazing at the website, he’d understood that, in this at least, his father was right, and what was more, that it would be of use to him, if he had the nerve to do what needed to be done.

  He moved lightly to the end of the driveway, and into the side yard to the back of the house. A canopy of trees stretched out its bare limbs in supplication to the sky. Here, a screened-in porch led to the living room. One more time, he glanced over his shoulder—nothing, no one—then put his weight to the screen door and broke the fisheye latch. On the porch, he was hit with an almost physical flood of memory, as if a wave had broken over him. He could see more ghosts: the whisper of his father, drink in hand, sitting in the corner, trying to impress some local blueblood; his mother moving in and out of focus, hands fluttering like little birds. He wondered if these images were real, if they resided in this place, if the house were a repository for every moment, every interaction it had ever contained. He didn’t know, hadn’t considered that memory would be an issue. Or perhaps it was just that he hadn’t wanted to think about that.

  He knelt beside the glass door to the living room. It was locked, as he had known it would be. Reaching into the backpack, he withdrew a pair of leather gloves and put them on. Then quickly, savagely, he drove his fist through the pane closest to the handle; it exploded into brilliant shards. The noise reverberated like a bomb blast, and he froze for a moment, before pulling his hand away, glove dotted with small, sparkling stars. Breathing evenly, he let the silence of the evening fall back into place. No ghosts now, no memories, no anything but the feeling that, in punching through the window, he had blown a hole through his own history.

  What he was here for, after all, was not nostalgia but the opposite of nostalgia, the end of memory. He had a plan, and it didn’t have anything to do with what he’d experienced, or who he once had been. He’d chosen the house because he knew it, and because it was near to where he needed to be. It helped that he had spent so little time here, a single summer, so long ago that it would be difficult to trace any connection to him. What about that? he found himself thinking. How do you like your Cape Cod dream now? It took a moment to realize that he was addressing his father, that just because he couldn’t see them didn’t mean the ghosts were gone.

  He reached through the broken pane and turned the deadbolt, took hold of the handle, and opened the door. Once inside, he locked the door behind him out of habit, before moving further into the house. In the darkness, he cracked his shin against a small end table but stopped himself before he could cry out. As he rubbed his leg, he let his eyes adjust, making out shapes in the gray blankness of the room. He couldn’t see much, just a few spare spectral outlines. The air smelled stale, like furniture that had been shuttered for too long.

  Now that he was here, he didn’t know where to start. It had seemed so simple back in Cambridge, thinking about the possibilities, watching them narrow down to one. All the pieces were in place: a deserted house in an empty summer town, the confluence of the Thanksgiving holiday, the idea that he would get in and out fast, like an avenging angel, vengeance is mine saith the Lord. He didn’t believe in that biblical crap, but he was more than happy to be the instrument, to keep the focus, to stand up, in one elusive gesture, for what was right. He had done some other research back in Cambridge, MapQuesting the old man’s house in Chatham, figuring out the routes. There wasn’t much he could do right now, but somehow he hadn’t planned on all this gaping silence, stretching into the darkness like an endless night. Typical, he heard a voice say, and for a moment he startled, unsure if it was real. Never prepared, never paying attention, and now he could recognize the intonations, the slight slurring of the consonants, the disdain just barely held at bay. Fuck, he thought, as the ghosts descended on the living room, and he could see—really see—his father’s form take shape by the window, in the wing chair he had favored that summer, sipping gin and tonic, dressed in khakis and Izod, trying to look like he belonged. You never were much good on the details, the voice went on, a voice like smoke, coming from nowhere and everywhere, flickering like bad reception but relentless as it had ever been.

  It had been a trainwreck, that summer. Of course it had. The rental had been too expensive, and his parents had fought about it every day. His father had seen it as a way to something, but to his mother this had b
een an empty faith. His father drank too much, and was too loud, too familiar; you could see the others wince as he closed in. And so, he had turned his frustrations first on his wife and then on his son, a scrawny kid then, the human fly, his father called him when he saw him scaling the exterior of the house. What are you doing? he would yell. Why can’t you be normal for once in your life? Everything had come to a head one afternoon, when his father had returned to the house to drag him to some useless function and found him hiding in the closet of his room upstairs, curled into a hopeless ball.

  It had been years since he’d thought about this, but being in the house brought the memory back in a rush. He could see himself in the corner of the closet, listening as his father’s footsteps neared but lacking the will to move. He could see the closet door pull open, feel the violence of it, and see his father’s face, flushed with anger, eyes darting as if afraid he would get caught. Goddamn closet case, the old man had slobbered, staring down at him. Then he had slammed the door and rushed heavily from the house.

  Years later, when his father was dying, he’d mentioned the memory to see what he would say. He didn’t know why—to settle the score perhaps, or maybe he just wanted some vindication, an acknowledgment of how it had been.

  That never happened, his father had whispered. I don’t know what you’re talking about. But ghosts didn’t lie. Or did they? One way or another, he was going to find out.

  In the morning, he awoke from uneasy dreams on the living room couch. His back was stiff and his head hurt as if he’d been drinking. For a moment, he couldn’t place himself, the angles unfamiliar, light bleeding through the windows in a pale yellow wash. Slowly, awareness crept in: the house, the vision, the jetty, the intercession of all those ghosts.

  He sat up, rubbed his eyes. The room was empty, as far as he could see. In the thin November blankness, there was nothing, no whisper of the past. That was good because today he was going to need to be present, he was going to need to pay attention, no matter what his father might have thought.

  He pissed for a long time in the downstairs toilet, but the water was turned off so he couldn’t flush. No matter, he thought. He wasn’t going to be here that long. In the kitchen, he found a box of Cheerios and ate a handful even though they were stale. That summer, he had spent every morning in this kitchen, staring down the endless emptiness of the days that loomed ahead of him like open questions, his only goal to stay out of his father’s way. Funny how he hadn’t remembered that until he got here, funny how it all seemed to fade away.

  At some point, he was going to have to eat something more substantial than stale Cheerios, but he put that in the category of later and returned to the living room. The backpack was just where he had left it, in the middle of the floor. Who’s paying attention now? he almost said aloud, but didn’t—a brief flash of restraint that made him feel momentarily lighter, as if his burdens had become diaphanous, little more than veils.

  The backpack contained four items: a hatchet, a roll of duct tape, a rope, and a six-inch Bowie knife. Like the pieces from a game of Clue, he thought. Junk bond trader in the basement with the hatchet. Ha, ha. He had bought them all in Boston, in four separate locations, using cash. For a while, as he’d gathered materials, he had found himself dreaming through the situation, as if sleep had become less a matter of rest than of rehearsal, a kind of psychic run-through. He would see the house, the basement, the old man duct-taped to a kitchen chair. Or, at least, he thought it was the old man; in the dreams, he could never quite get close enough to tell. All he knew was that things had been reversed, that power lay in his hands. As to what happened next, the dreams offered no oracle; he always woke up before the denouement.

  The plan was simple: He was going to take the RTA to Chatham and kidnap the old man. Then, he would force him to drive back here, where he was going to exact an appropriately ruthless revenge. Downsizing, they had called it when the layoffs started. The company was downsizing. It was the type of corporate speak that drove him crazy: meaningless, a lie. His father had been a master of such double-talk, always saying the opposite of what he meant—Why can’t you be normal? when the real question was why couldn’t he be normal, why couldn’t he be like the other dads? What was it that made him see in his son his own legacy of failure? What was it that made him attack? It’s a harsh world, he liked to say, I’m just trying to prepare you. But this, of course, was just another lie.

  Stop, he thought. Forget about him. You’ve got bigger fish to fry. He shook his head, trying to still the voices, took a deep breath, and exhaled. Backpack in hand, he went to the kitchen, grabbed a white wicker chair from the dinette set, and humped everything down the basement stairs. He had meant to come down here last night, but it had been so dark, and he had felt so buffeted by history …

  It didn’t matter. He was here now.

  The basement had been cleaned out sometime during the last quarter century and left as empty space. For a moment, he was startled—there had been no photo on the realtor’s website—but then he realized it was better, a template on which he could erase the past and write whatever future he wanted, not that there would be much for the old man. The idea was to get him down here and show him a new way to think about downsizing, to show him what a word like that really meant.

  That was what the hatchet was for—to downsize the old man digit by digit, limb by limb. That was why there was rope and duct tape, to keep him in the chair while his fingers, those greedy little fingers, were pared from him one by one. Talk about severance, he thought and laughed once, short and sharp. In the empty basement, it echoed like the barking of a dog.

  He set the chair in a back corner and laid the hatchet and the rope and duct tape on the floor. The Bowie knife he rolled in his right hand. This, he was going to bring with him to Chatham; this, he was going to show the old man. You’re coming with me, he would say, and then he’d stick him, just a little, not enough to hurt him but enough to break the skin. He could almost see it: a small pinpoint of blood, no bigger than a pimple, but at the same time, the biggest thing in the world. This would let the old man know he was serious, that it was his turn to be in charge. The old man would talk, trying to keep everything calm, trying to look for leverage, trying to make some kind of deal. Only later, when they got back here, would he realize that his bargaining days were behind him, and that all those things he’d valued—the suits, the cars, the houses—were forever out of reach.

  First, though, he had to wait, just a few more hours, just until the afternoon. He went back upstairs, through the living room, to the second floor. At the top of the landing was the room in which he’d slept that summer, with two single beds and a pair of dressers, the same as when he’d been a kid. Standing at the door, he was aware of a low buzzing in his stomach, not exactly nerves or anticipation, but something almost like dread. What makes you think you can do this? What makes you think you have the stones? The words were his father’s but the intonation was his own. So that’s what happens now? he thought. We blend together? That would be the cruelest fate of all. The closet door was to his right, and he moved to it as if drawn. Inside, the space was tighter than he’d remembered, which made the whole thing somehow more unbearable, more treacherous, a small boy huddled in a narrow space, as if he were trying to remove himself from the world.

  But no, he recalled now with a flash of recognition, that wasn’t how it had happened. Yes, he’d been trying to remove himself, but only from his father, not from the world. After the door slammed, he had unfolded and drifted down the hall. From the bathroom, he had climbed onto the roof, slipped down to the woodshed, and quickly dropped to the ground. The day had been silent, except for the buzz of insects and the shushing of the surf. And the gasping of the wind in his ears as he ran for the jetty, where he’d spent the rest of the afternoon.

  He looked in the closet again. He could almost see himself, but the image refused to coalesce. Good, he thought. No more time for ghosts. No more time for anythin
g. But that wasn’t true, not exactly, and in the few hours left before he went to Chatham, he knew where he wanted to go. He went downstairs, peered out into the morning to make sure no one was around. Satisfied, he let himself out of the house and headed for the beach path, to walk the jetty again.

  Chatham was cold, and the old man’s house overlooked the harbor, which made it colder still. He had timed it just right, disembarking at the rotary at five-fifty, full dark, staying to the shadows as he walked the empty streets. There were more year-rounders here, but that was fine; in a bigger town, it was easier to be anonymous. When he found the house, he walked right up to the front door and pressed the buzzer, not sure what he would do if no one answered, not sure what he would do if someone did.

  As it turned out, it didn’t matter because it was the old man who came to the door. They stared at each other, near mirror images of surprise. “Excuse me?” said the old man, as if he couldn’t place him, as if he weren’t sure of who he was. Until then, there had been a conditional quality to the whole operation, as if, in spite of everything, he could turn around and take the RTA back to Harwichport, or even to Hyannis, and then another bus to Boston, leaving all of this—his plan, the vision, the bitter ghosts of that summer, of his father—behind. Now, as he watched the old man, smaller in corduroys and a sweater, he felt his anger catalyze. Laid me off, downsized me, and he doesn’t know me? Without even thinking about it, he took the knife from his jacket pocket and pressed it into the old man’s guts.

  “You’re coming with me,” he said.

  For a moment, it seemed as if the old man might cry out. Then he looked at the knife, gleaming in the lamplight, and steeled himself. “What is this?” he said. “What do you want?”

  “Get your car keys. We’re going for a ride.”

  The car was a Jeep Grand Cherokee, leather seats and all the extras, four-wheel drive and GPS. He gestured the old man into the driver’s seat, keeping the knife against him, directed him back to the rotary and then east on Route 28. Along the way, they passed minimalls and seafood shacks, deserted as if summer would never come again. Just across the Harwich town line, a Chatham patrol car passed them going the other direction. He saw the old man’s eyes flash quickly, watched his hands tighten on the wheel.