Shadows Over Main Street, Volume 2

by Gary A Braunbeck

  Across the bar sat a man in his late forties, a sandy crewcut, tortoise shell glasses, short-sleeved, plaid dress shirt, and a sheepskin jacket draped over his stool. Spence poured bourbon into his glass, which the man clutched protectively. Nervous eyes stared out from his soft face into the murk of the bar as if he expected the rowdy locals to sense his weakness like wild dogs and pick a fight. Not that any would. Spence enforced a strict policy of peace backed by a well-worn Louisville Slugger kept near the bar sink. Outside Raker’s, though, the bay men—clammers, lobstermen, fishermen with sunbaked and wind-dried skin, perpetual squints, and calloused hands bulging with swollen knuckles—showed little patience for anyone different than them. They spent too much time alone on the Long Island Sound, dropping traps and pulling them up again, watching whitecaps rise and roll over, listening to the wind whine, gulls caw, and the sea whisper of things long swept away by its currents.

  Being alone too much changes how you think. Not for the better.

  Pool balls click-clacked under the rambling beat of Creedence Clearwater Revival on the jukebox, “Green River” giving way to “Suzie Q,” and I drank and smoked and eyed the man for as long as it took to finish both. Spence replenished my gin and tonic, and I carried it over beside the mathematician and eased onto an empty bar stool beside him.

  “Thanks for the drinks,” I said.

  He glanced at me, eyebrows raised. “What?”

  “Spence has been putting my drinks on your tab.”

  “Oh, you the guy who knew Kerouac?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You’ve been sitting right over there for half an hour, keeping me waiting.”

  “I finally decided you looked harmless.”

  He processed that with a frown then shrugged.

  “My name’s Fenton Grive. My field’s mathematics. My condolences on your friend’s passing.”

  “Thank you. I’m Salvatore Cinelli. Spot me a ciggie-boo, wouldya?”

  The mathematician slid a Marlboro pack from his pocket and shook one loose for me. In the match light, his face boiled with confidence born of something outside himself. He resembled a trusted clerk on an important business trip, a scent of chalk and after-shave hanging about him, but he made me anxious. Epiphanies and lies stirred behind his face and a faint sense of menace, not from him, but from what he represented, though I didn’t know yet what that was.

  “I guess it’s smart to be cautious. You get a lot of people asking about him?”

  “Used to back when Jack lived down on Judy Ann Court. They came banging on his door at all hours, swiping books off his shelves if he let them in. Not too many these days. Life goes on, you know?”

  “Time stops for no man as the saying goes. I hear you’re an artist.”

  “That’s right. A painter.”

  “Yeah, nice. Um, listen, I’m no good at small talk so I’ll cut to the chase. I’m moving into the Martinson place after the New Year while I do a fellowship over at Brookhaven National Labs. After that Kerouac fellow died, some folks at the lab and a few I’ve met in town said you might know something about him of interest to me. Professionally, I mean. An incident in the Aztakea Hills back in spring of ’64?”

  “Can’t imagine what that has to do with mathematics.”

  “Maybe nothing. Could be I’m wasting my time here. I can’t tell you much because most of my work is classified, but you ever heard of Walter Gilman or the Keziah Mason formulae?”

  I shook my head.

  “Not many people have. Among other things, I research sound. Frequency, modulation, pitch. There’s a lot of common ground between math and music. These KM formulae date back to the late 17th century and Keziah Mason, a character who lived up in Arkham, Massachusetts. Authorities threw her in prison for witchcraft but then she vanished inexplicably from her cell and into the shadows of history until around 1929. That’s when a student named Walter Gilman found some of her notes in a loft he rented in an old house. Turns out what passed for witchcraft in Keziah’s day may have been advanced mathematics. Pan-dimensional physics and space-time distortion, stuff scientists only started researching after Einstein. There’s the outer dimensions, the multi-planar angle paradox, honeycombs of non-Euclidian geometry, and the—”

  I held up my hand. “Fenton, I have no idea what the hell you’re jawing on about.”

  His face blanked then blushed before he re-engaged with humility.

  “Sorry. I get carried away. Bottom line, an acquaintance of mine acquired Gilman’s notebook. This man goes by the name Redcap. Lives in the West Village and plays at magic and witchery, mostly I think to get laid, though some folks believe in him, but he collects witchcraft artifacts. He gave me Gilman’s notebook to research, thinking the KM formulae equations might be replicated in properly composed and modulated sounds. If performed at certain key dates that coincide with planetary orbits and gravitational matrices, such sounds might open the way into non-linear realities outside our own—”

  I gripped his forearm and squeezed. “The bottom line again, Fenton.”

  The mathematician tugged his arm away from my hand. “I want to know about the band you and Kerouac met, the Sultans. I think they know something about this music.”

  “Fenton, my new friend, I’ve been asked some wild questions, about Jack, this town, and art, and life in general, but no one has ever hit me with the kind of mad ideas you’re spinning. How many bourbons did you drink before I got here?”

  Spence, pretending to clean glasses, kept close enough to eavesdrop, which I appreciated. That man had seen all of Knicksport’s ugliness in one form or another, and he looked out for his friends. I finished my gin and tonic and let him replenish it.

  “This is only my second bourbon.” Fenton pressed ahead as if he might agree with me if he took time to think about his words. “What can you tell me about the Sultans?”

  “Not much. They came from Rhode Island. They absolutely abused denim and paisley.”

  “They disappeared, right?”

  “So people say. They dreamed of being rock n’ roll stars like the Byrds or the Stones. They sure smoked grass and drank booze like it. Anything might’ve happened to them.”

  “What’d you do that night up in the hills?”

  “A little stargazing, some drinking. Jack and the Sultans got high, played music, sang.”

  “What kind of music?”

  “Psychedelic folk rock, I guess you could call it. One had a guitar. Another played the flute. The third one strummed an instrument I’d never seen before, a sort of short sitar with these asymmetrical branches and complicated strings. A lot of buzzing, popping chords. Sounded like someone shaking a wasp’s nest. Not my cup of tea. Or Jack’s. He liked jazz.”

  “You hear anything else up there?”

  “Wind creaking the trees when they stopped playing.”

  Fenton frowned. “Rumor is your friend and those rock and rollers heard something unusual. Maybe you did too?”

  “Yeah, Jack said he heard something wild in their music. He called it a turbulent bubble of sound like the world breathing across the top of a million open beer bottles, but he was high and even drunker than usual, which is saying something. Anyway, I didn’t hear it. We got split up coming back. I didn’t find him till morning. Neither of us ever saw the Sultans again.”

  “He ever say what happened to him after you got separated?”

  Pages cocooned in an old envelope. Ink decaying, black to blue to gray. Gaping holes in my memory, the whole world breathing across a million open bottles, and Knicksport is full of witches, Jack told me once in a late-night, inebriated confession. Full of witches, full of secrets, all hiding behind shadows and false faces—full of monsters, too, like me. Too ugly for Gregory. Too grotesque for the world. Too disappointing for the family I’d left and returned to, only after they’d all died. Knicksport is full of witches, said Jack, but to me it swelled with the angry ghosts and weeping wounds of the past.

  “Nothing bes
ides what I already told you,” I lied.

  Impatience backlit Fenton’s eyes. “How about you take me up there into the hills and show me the place?”

  I drank, long and slow, clinking ice gathering at my lips, freezing them a little, and then I set the glass down and shook my head.

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “I’ll pay you.”

  “You want to hear about my wild night in the woods with Jack Kerouac and a bunch of badly dressed musicians? Fine. I’m happy to let you buy me drinks and listen to me talk until closing time. But I haven’t gone up in those woods since that night, and I see no need to change that.”

  “So take me as close as you want and point me in the right direction. I’ll go the rest of the trail alone. You can tell me the story along the way.”

  “What exactly are you looking for?”

  “Not a thing. I’m listening. And I’ll know it when I hear it.”

  Fenton pulled money from his pocket and eased it across the bar, exposing enough from beneath his hand for me to see a hundred-dollar bill. Wide-eyed, I shook my head nervously.

  “Put that away. Are you nuts?”

  He did, clenching his jaw, mistaking my reaction for refusal when I only meant to spare Spence any possible embarrassment. Discreet fictions or not, people talked. Rumors about me and my lack of a wife cropped up now and then, very goddamn few of them even half true, but no need to grease the skids. Granted I’d downed three gin and tonics, but a hundred bucks and a night spent tramping around the woods appealed to me more than drinking myself numb again and fighting oil paint demons.

  “Another round, then we’ll go,” I said. “Pay me outside.”

  “Oh, sure, that’s fine.”

  “I don’t know what you expect to find, though.”

  “Like I said, I’ll know it when I hear it.” Relieved, Fenton waved for Spence to set us up once more. “Say, I’ve never read On the Road or The Subterraneans, and all those Kerouac books. Not my thing, I guess. What was he like?”

  “Not what you might expect. Came here to escape his own legend. It’s like two Jacks existed. One walked barefoot through town, jingling nickels for beer in his pocket whenever his mother, Mémêre, tightened the purse strings to curb his drinking. The other, forever youthful and windswept, sped over ribbons of endless, dusty blacktop in cars piloted by a crazy saint. By the time he came here, though, that second Jack lived only in his books.

  “The humble one, the one who tossed a football around the schoolyard on warm autumn days and wandered town in his slippers dragging groceries home in a beat-up, granny shopping basket—that’s the Jack I knew. He hung out in my studio, playing records or reading while I painted. A lot of nights we drank here. He really came to life in the bar with the bay men at the end of the day, some still gaffed in their hip-waders, stinking of fish and sea water, Jack jawing about this or that he’d done or seen zipping back and forth across the country until they bought him a beer to shut him up.

  “Once he started, sheer joy poured out of him. He was mad to talk, just like he wrote about, and he spun stories like no one I’ve ever heard before or since. Never about books or writing or literature but about real life, and women, and working-day sweat, which he knew as well as any bay man washing brine from his lips with beer.”

  “He drank a lot?”

  I laughed. “When Mémêre held back his drinking money, he snuck a bottle of Canadian Club in here in a valise and sipped it in the men’s room. Spence found out and banned him from bringing in any kind of bag at all. That happened about a week before the Sultans came to town.”

  I finished my fourth gin and tonic.

  “Ready?”

  “Lead the way.”

  Fenton scattered a few more bills beside his half-touched bourbon. Spence flashed me a questioning eye, and I winked to let him know all was well. Then we waded through the crowd and the acrid smoke to the cool outdoors. A run to my apartment across the road garnered some flashlights. I guided Fenton toward the harbor, shimmering with scales of moonlight, and then along the road to the woods.

  At the trailhead, I flicked on my light and handed the other to Fenton.

  He gave me the hundred and asked, “Why didn’t you take this in the bar?”

  “Spence is a friend. It might look bad for him if someone saw.”

  “Look bad how? You push dope or something?”

  “No, but I got a bit of an unearned reputation.”

  Fenton looked my skinny frame up and down, filling in blanks. “I had a sense you might be queer when we shook hands.”

  I glared at him. “You want me to take you into the hills or not?”

  “Yes. Doesn’t matter to me which way you swing as long as you don’t swing it my way. I didn’t come here for that.”

  “You got nothing to worry about there, Mister Math Whiz.”

  I stamped up the first rise of the trail, putting distance between us, making Fenton work. I considered running into the dark and leaving the bastard on his own for thinking I sold myself to anyone who stood me a few drinks or that I sold myself at all. My desire for Gregory to return and put things back how they used to be ached inside me. I should’ve been home in his arms, streaks of paint on my face, a glass of Cabernet on the table, and no worries about the frigid, black hills and empty shadows.

  Christ, how lost and alone I felt to walk back to those hills. Right then, though, I wanted to get close to Jack and the good old days we’d had, when I’d still had Gregory.

  My flashlight narrowed the path in a wash of dusty, ivory brightness. Leaves crunched underfoot, and branches scraped my legs. I tromped up the steepening incline, Fenton panting and wheezing to keep up. Away from town, the darkness called me, like the unwanted shadows slipping into my painting, like words written in old ink fading on yellowing paper, like a forgotten straight razor and a cold bed, all things meant for me whether I wanted them or not.

  Fenton broke the quiet. “You were going to tell me about that night.”

  “Right,” I said. “So Jack was moping over his beer at Raker’s because Spence caught him with his whiskey, and Mémêre wouldn’t give him enough cash to drink how he liked. He lived with her most of his life, rushing off to see the world, always coming back to look after his mom, a good son for all his wildness. The Sultans came in, long hair, beards, beaded denim, paisley shirts and kerchiefs, with psychedelic patches on their jean jackets, embroidered with angel wings on the back. Half the crowd about laughed beer through their noses at the sight of them. The other half wanted to kick their asses to the street, but Spence doesn’t tolerate any dust-ups. They wanted Jack, and we gladly ran up their tab while they rambled on about ritualistic trance music that brought visions and raised consciousness to enlightenment about the universe. Jack dug it with his whole search for grace in the everyday world, feeling the beat of existence kick, but it didn’t interest me. They said they knew songs kind of like what you described. If played certain times in special places, the music unlocked new doors of the senses. They’d come from playing them up in Rhode Island in an abandoned house in Providence, then road-tripped down to Knicksport, chasing the next time and place, and they figured it’d be groovy if we went with them.”

  “You remember the songs?”

  “No. I heard them only once, not while sober.”

  We reached a plateau. From there the trail ascended steeper than before through a broken netting of trees branches and tangled brush. Sweat broke out all over me, chilling in the cold air. The town sounds barely reached us. I leaned against a tree. Fenton squatted on a fallen trunk.

  “Another hundred yards, up inside that ring of pines.” I pointed to dense foliage above us on the trail. A melodic whistling tickled my ears for half a heartbeat then fell to the wind. “Hey, you hear that? Someone’s up there.”

  “Who?” Fenton said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I didn’t hear anyone. Let’s keep moving.”

 
My head spun like an invisible whirlpool had sucked the breath from my body all at once, and I gripped the tree.

  “You okay?” Fenton asked.

  The sensation left me as quickly as it had come, and with a gasp, I straightened, restored.

  “Yeah, must have caught a chill.”

  “Maybe I ought to go on alone from here.”

  “No, I’ll come. The trail gets tricky.”

  I couldn’t have let Fenton go on alone, not with the whisper of that music in my mind, tugging on me, and my unexpected need to reconnect with that moment in the past I’d shared with Jack. Wind rustled the sparse leaves and dry branches as we climbed. Stars danced in the sky, as if knocked out of place and frantic to find their proper positions, ants scurrying around a boot-smeared anthill. Whistling pipe music flitted across my ears, gone as quickly as it came. I hesitated, gazing at the shadowed pines and birches atop the hill.

  “What?” Fenton asked.

  “Nothing. Keep going.”

  The air cooled and seemed to congeal as we neared the top, leaving a coppery, electric taste under my tongue. The wild drumbeat of my heart filled my chest. I wondered what world we’d stepped into when we walked out of Raker’s because it didn’t feel like mine anymore.

  Nervous, I said, “This one night Jack got so drunk he laid down in the middle of Main Street, right on the double yellow line, and refused to get up again.”

  “That right?” Apprehension in Fenton’s voice hinted he, too, sensed the change in the air.

  “Five or six of us tried to get him on his feet, tried to lift him, but he resisted.”

  “What happened?”

  White birches, striped by peeling bark, filled my light like posts in an invisible fence.

  “Gregory came down from our apartment, looked at Jack, and said, ‘Hey, Jack, does this mean you’re back on the road?’ Jack cracked up, jumped to his feet, always one for a good joke, and we went on drinking—listen! You hear that windy sound?”