Cape Cod Noir

by David L. Ulin

  “Don’t even think about it,” he said, pushing the point of the knife blade into his side.

  The old man didn’t answer, just kept driving. After a moment, he whispered, in a voice less afraid than tired: “Please tell me what this is all about.”

  And then and there, he knew that he could never do it, that he had fallen prey to inattention once again. He could almost hear his father, but they were too far from the house. What would he have said? What makes you think you have the stones? Yes, and that was true, wasn’t it? Even sitting here in the car, knife in hand, felt like a weird sort of dream to him—or not a dream but a nightmare. Everything had gone according to plan, even better than the plan, and yet, he knew now, he was not going to see it through. How could he tie a man down and cut up his body? How had he imagined that he could? Delusion … but, of course, delusion was in his genes, it was the family way. Right, Dad? he thought with rising bitterness. If I’m inattentive, what does that make you?

  The old man kept looking at him, as if waiting for an answer. They passed a restaurant and the Episcopal church. To their left, Wychmere Harbor opened up like a winter bloom, its basin devoid of boats.

  “Pull over here,” he said, gesturing at the empty parking lot of the ice cream shop.

  The old man maneuvered into a parking space and turned off the Jeep. In the stillness, the engine ticked down like a clock. They sat for a minute, two minutes, until the ticking stopped. Time’s up, he thought, game over; the clock has run out.

  “You don’t recognize me, do you?” he said to the old man. And then: “I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

  “Yes, you have,” the old man replied. “As for the rest of it, I don’t care.”

  “I used to work for you. You laid me off. Downsizing, you called it. But those were people’s lives.”

  “That’s what’s going on here? You’re a disgruntled employee? What are you planning to do? Hold me hostage until I give you your job back?” The old man looked at him, eyes as flat and gray as ice. “But that’s not how the world works, is it?” he added, with a touch of cruelty. And the unraveling began.

  The old man broke his gaze and opened the car door, sliding deliberately from the seat. The evening fragmented into a series of still images, black-and-white, stop-action, like a nickelodeon. First, he lunged at the old man, grabbing the sleeve of his sweater; it tore beneath his grasp. Then, he was getting out of the Jeep himself, heart beating frantically, breathing shallow, sweat pooling on his lower back and palms. “Wait!” he yelled. “What are you doing?”

  At the sound of his voice, a light went on in the retirement home across the street. He was coming around the back of the Jeep when the old man pushed the panic button on his keyless entry, and the night exploded in a screech of honking and flashing lights.

  “Motherfucker!” he shouted, and grabbed for the keys, but the old man was too fast. In one fluid gesture, he threw them into the scrub pines at the edge of the parking lot. The car alarm kept screaming, and more lights kept switching on. No, no, no, he thought. Then, without thinking about it or even meaning to, he was driving the knife hilt-deep into a gap between the old man’s ribs.

  The old man looked at him in silence; the old man never said a word. His face had a mocking look to it, as if, even now, a corona of blood expanding across the front of his sweater, he had somehow won. Now what are you going to do? he seemed to be saying. You really didn’t think this through. Then he crumpled to the ground, slowly deflating, like an old balloon.

  In a distant corner of the night, sirens rose and began coming closer, coming to where he was. He stared at the old man on the ground and understood he had to move. But something kept him there, a whisper of the moment past. It had only been a minute ago that none of this had happened; it seemed so close, he could almost reach out and grab it, like he had reached for the keys. Wasn’t that what the ghosts had been trying to tell him, that nothing is ever lost, not really, that history accrues and lingers, marking the spaces we move through with its residue? If that was the case, why was this so irretrievable? Why was there no way to take it back?

  The sirens were nearly on him now, and down Route 28 he could see the flashing of police lights. He cut across the street, hearing a shout of voices over the ongoing clamor of the alarm. He was running blind now, not even thinking in any conscious sense. All he knew was that he had to get inside.

  At the house, he slipped along the driveway and through the back porch to the living room. It seemed like years since he had been here, since that summer maybe, when everything had begun. You happy now? he thought, or said aloud, he didn’t know. You happy now? he thought again, and the noise was like a roaring in his head.

  Outside, he could see flashlights. He went through the house, ending up in his old bedroom on the second floor. A bullhorn sounded, squawking words he did not care to hear. As if in a dream state, he opened the closet door and stepped inside, crouching low into the corner, willing himself to disappear.

  He didn’t know how long he stayed there, just that when he finally heard footsteps, he thought his father had come back. Then he heard the back-and-forth of voices and knew the cops were in the house. Again, without really thinking, he eased down the hall to the bathroom. It took a minute, but he opened the window and fought the screen out of its braces, giving access to the roof. Just like when he was thirteen, except that now his body felt so heavy he could barely bend it. Somehow, though, he managed to get outside, shoes slick on the wooden shingles, the ground a million miles below.

  “Hey, you up there,” a voice called out, and he was lit by a flashlight as he tried to work his way around. In his mind, a succession of phrases: The human fly. Why can’t you be normal? What makes you think you have the stones? The light was blinding, and in its glare, he tumbled from the eaves to the woodshed, the flat roof breaking his descent. His back was screaming, ankle twisted, but the fall had freed him from illumination, and he took advantage of the darkness to make a mad dash for the only refuge that remained. Down the ocean path to the dunes and out to the water, sand filling up his shoes. Beneath the evening sky, the beach glowed silver, waves rolling along the surf line with the fury of high tide. Breathing heavily, he pulled himself toward the jetty. Behind him, voices and flashlights cut the night.

  They had almost caught him when he reached the great stones of the breakwater and started out. But then, as he knew they would, they hesitated, giving him a second chance. He moved quickly, shoes slipping on the wet rocks, rough water pulling at his feet. Behind him, the officers had begun to follow carefully. He looked back at them, four men in a cluster, and understood, in a way he wouldn’t have expected, that it was they who had been chasing him all along. He took a step back, and then another, thinking that he ought to turn around before he fell.

  But as he pivoted, his twisted ankle buckled and he went down. He pulled himself to his knees just as a giant wave broke across the stones. The water was icy, full of needles, and as it pulled at him, he felt himself let go. He was aware of the roughness of the rocks as he scraped across them; he was aware of the beating of the air and ocean as the world went gray. He was aware of the policemen trying to reach him as he slid into the sea. But mostly, he was aware of the vision, aware of the ghosts. In his final seconds, he could see his father and the old man, faces looming like photographs. He could see himself as a boy, in this very spot, glimpsing his own death, he realized now. He could see his whole life whittled to a single instant. He had been here before.

  THE OCCIDENTAL TOURIST

  BY KAYLIE JONES

  Dennis

  Last April we were waiting with our twelve-year-old daughter at the baggage carousel in Orlando, Florida, when the elderly couple standing beside us struck up a conversation. “Gee, the bags are taking forever,” the wife said. “We never used to check them, but we’re getting old.” Her husband added that they’d been to Disney for their big anniversaries since they’d first discovered it with their kids. Were we goi
ng to Disney? Absolutely, said my husband with as much enthusiasm as he could muster—we’d resisted as long as we could. All during the flight, my husband had complained that for the same amount of money we could be scuba diving in Belize. “Oh you’re going to love Disney World,” the wife said. “Where you from?”

  “New York City,” I told them. They nodded knowingly, then the husband said they were from Charlestown, Mass. “Bet you never heard of it,” he added with a devilish twinkle in his eyes.

  Oh, I’d heard of it, all right. The Mile of Terror, the townies used to call it with profound pride. This was thirty years ago; more bars per capita than any other town in the United States. And the memories came flooding back. It was like finding an old shoebox in the very back of the very top shelf of the closet, filled with bright, sharp photographs.

  Gavin McDermott was on a football scholarship at our Little Ivy League college in Connecticut. He was a Boston Irish Catholic boy from Dorchester. “You’ve heard of a mick,” he’d say, “well I’m a BIC.” Good thing he was proud of it because he couldn’t have passed himself off as anything but. Tow-headed, blue-eyed, with a shovel-shaped Irish nose that reminded me of the snout on a great white shark, Mac had been a Golden Gloves champion in high school, and in college he was an extremely fast and enormously strong cornerback.

  One night there was a big keg party at DKE, the fraternity of which he was president. I was standing at the basement bar drinking Mount Gay rum and pineapple juice when a DKE brother squeezed in beside me. “Liz, you’d better come quick, Mac and Sean McDermott are about to start fighting again.” Sean, no relation, was from Chi Psi, the other Animal House frat on campus. The two McDermotts, who were no relation, had a long history of getting blotto and beating each other to a pulp; no one knew what had started it.

  Though I didn’t know the first thing about boxing, my father had also been a Golden Gloves champion, and then a pro for a while, and this, along with the fact that I typed Mac’s English and social studies papers, often making corrections, was the foundation of our long and abiding friendship. I did not feel the slightest ripple of fear as I walked up to the two towering McDermotts, who stood nose to nose, eyes glistening madly, faces pale and tense, and told them to cut it out. Mac’s eyes were blind with rage. For a second I thought he didn’t recognize me. Then he backed away, mumbling, “Liz, you’re nuts. One day you’re going to get yourself killed.”

  No one knew, least of all me, why I had this effect on Mac. Once, when I wasn’t there to talk him down, he kicked and punched in the windshield of some innocent car parked on the street and the police arrived en force, three squad cars with lights and sirens blaring. He hid in DKE’s secret room, behind a wall in the basement, where they brought the pledges to meet the Witch. I knew this because I’d been the Witch during Pledge Week.

  No one turned Mac in to the cops.

  There were nine kids in his family and sometimes a few of them would come down from Boston to watch him play football on Saturday afternoons. His sisters looked so much like him that one of his DKE brothers beside me in the stands said, “What’s Mac doing sitting in the bleachers in a fright wig?”

  The summer of my junior year, after I got fired from my waitressing job in the Hamptons for telling off my boss, Mac invited me to visit “me and my buddies” on Cape Cod. He’d just graduated and had no idea what he was going to do come fall. For now, though, summer was in full swing and he was planning to play on the Cape as long as he could. “Coolest place you ever saw, Liz. I got a job as a bouncer in this nightclub in Dennis. Me and my buddies, we got it great. You can sit at the bar and drink all night for free. No one’ll bother you.”

  My mom was in the south of France with a guy I couldn’t stand. My dad died of a heart attack when I was a senior in high school; I knew long before he did that he should never have married my mother, a debutante who was looking to shock her parents. I weighed my options—south of France or Dennis, Mass. Never one to turn down a free drink, I took the Orient Point ferry to New London and drove up the coast in my old VW Rabbit, following the signs to the Cape. “There’s only one road,” Mac had said, “you can’t get lost.”

  You couldn’t get lost, but you could certainly get stuck in traffic. It was bumper to bumper all the way. I finally arrived around four in the afternoon.

  Mac came out of the long, narrow clapboard house and sprinted down the short driveway to my car. He gave me a quick hug—never one for physical displays—and said, “Now, Liz, these guys, they’re from Charlestown,” as if this was supposed to mean something to me. I waited. “They’re a little rough around the edges,” he continued, “if you know what I mean. They never saw a college like we went to.” He winced and cocked his head, a typical Mac expression that could mean any number of things, but mostly that he was uncomfortable with the topic and didn’t want to discuss it further.

  Inside the narrow house the cheap wood paneling made the living room dark as a vault. Sitting upright on the wilted couch was one of his sisters—Mary or Cathy—who especially in the dark did look an awful lot like Mac in a fright wig. The girls in the McDermott family were quiet; I don’t think his sisters ever said more than three words to me. I’d try, God knows, to engage them in conversation, but they just wouldn’t talk. In any case, my attention was soon diverted; the house was filled with people. One very pale fellow with mussed hair sat hunched in a corner of the living room, beer in hand, legs jiggling up and down. Every time the phone rang, he jumped up out of his seat.

  “What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

  “That’s Bobby,” Mac murmured as he showed me around. The walls were thin, the doors made of hollow plywood. There were three or four beds in every room. I had no idea where I was going to sleep but I didn’t want to make a point of bringing it up. “Bobby had a little tussle a couple nights ago. He’s kinda laying low for the time being.”

  A typical Mac dysphemism. Next came the diversion: “How about a cocktail?” He rubbed his hands together vigorously and opened a kitchen cabinet.

  I knew him well enough to stop asking questions. The cabinet was filled with bottles, every kind of alcoholic beverage imaginable. Mac, bless his heart, had stocked up on Mount Gay rum and pineapple juice.

  By the time we got to the nightclub, I was feeling no pain. The place looked like a former warehouse, corrugated siding and tiny windows way up high. The bar was in the center of the cement floor and had four sides with the bottles stacked in the middle on shelves, so no one was at risk of ever having to wait too long for a drink. Within minutes of the doors opening, the place was jammed. Mac led me to an empty stool at the bar and sat me down, then went back to the door, where he was collecting the cover charge and barring unsavory types from entering.

  One of the Charlestown roommates, Doyle, was behind my section of bar. There was a disco ball spinning in the background, projecting galaxies on the walls. People danced. I was careful not to wobble on the high stool and planted my elbows firmly on the shiny wood bar top. Doyle was missing a top incisor, which gave his face a strange, lopsided look. Every time he smiled or laughed, the black hole in his mouth was a shock. He liked to stick the filter of his menthol cigarette into the hole and leave it there while he puffed away, squinting against the smoke. He made sure my Mount Gay and pineapple juice never got below three-quarters empty. Earlier in the afternoon I’d watched him iron his jeans on a board in the living room, precisely and crisply, taking his time, making sure the crease was perfect. He wore a clean, ironed, button-down preppie shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The music was so loud it was impossible to have a conversation, but a great deal could be communicated, simply by the delicate lighting of a cigarette or the pouring of a drink, or the replacing of a wet napkin, or the clinking of glasses in a toast. Doyle was good at his job, elegant and efficient. I tried to push a twenty-dollar bill toward him for the tip jar but he pushed it back without a word. They were hospitable, these Charlestown guys.

  Every t
ime a stranger approached me and tried to start up a conversation or buy me a drink, Doyle would whisper something in his ear and the fellow would scurry away. I gathered Gavin McDermott, guardian of the gates, had at some point gotten drunk here and lost his temper, just as he had in college. Pretty soon I had a two-foot-wide berth around me, even though the place was packed like a subway car at rush hour. I was delighted with my new status.

  When Doyle took his ten-minute break around back, I decided to join him. He was of medium height and very slim, with a dark, golden tan and pale brown hair and large, round eyes of an almost translucent cerulean green. I’ve only encountered that eye color one other time, in a little girl in my daughter’s ballet class. I mentioned how beautiful the color was to the girl’s mother and she said they were from Estonia; the color was fairly common there.

  But Doyle was from Charlestown, born and bred. Earlier in the day, while he was carefully ironing his jeans, he’d told me that the only place he’d ever been besides Boston was the Cape. Now, as we were leaning up against the corrugated metal wall of the nightclub around back, alone, blowing smoke up into the night sky, I asked him what happened with that guy Bobby. Why did he keep jumping out of his chair every time the phone rang? And why had he opted to stay at home alone tonight rather than come to the club?

  “He got into it in the Combat Zone a couple nights ago with some guys that bat for the other team, if you get my meaning. He stabbed one a them and the guy died.” Doyle’s voice was even, as if he were discussing a friend’s unfortunate and inconvenient ankle sprain. “Cops are looking for him.”