Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery (10 page)

BOOK: Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery
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“They will?”

“Fuck yes, they think the dogs are running deer. I say, ‘You inbred lout, there
are
no deer on Kempshall Island.’ And you know what they say to that? They say, ‘See, that proves it.’ Island wit. Have you met the cop?”

“No.”

“Nazi.” This guy was ardent, waving his hands before his face as if troubled by swarming insects. “That cop subscribes to
Skinhead Nation
. I’ve seen it folded in his back pocket. Kind of fucker who’ll beat you senseless, then ask for ID. I’ve seen it happen, but only to people from away. He’ll never beat a local. You know why? Because he married a Self. The Selfs are dangerous people, I’m telling you.”

“Where are you from?”

“Central Islip, Long Island. Not that that’s any paradise. You?”

“New York City.”

“Yeah. I like New York, weird kind of postapocalypse head to New York I dig.”

“What do you do here?”

“Here? I’m on the run. I’m underground. I’m hiding out from the FBI. They want me for sedition. Back in seventy. I’m Dickie the Red. Maybe you heard of me? No? Well, I got to get my dog before some inbred Natty Bumppo smokes her. Speaking of dogs, that one looks a lot like the R-r-ruff Dog. Maybe I’ll see you at the launching. Are you going to the launching?”

“What launching?”

“This guy built a submarine. I mean, a
real
submarine. Up scope, like that.”

“When is the launching?”

“I don’t know. You’ll hear. There ain’t all that many conflicting activities out here. When did you come?”

“Just now.”

“Then you were in town when it happened? The murders.”

“Murders?”

“Weren’t you there? A whole family got hacked to bits. These Christians are a dangerous element. They’ll hurt you.”

Dwight rounded the point going fast with a big white wave at his bow.

“Dwight Reed. Don’t trust him. He ain’t a Self, but he’s pussy-whipped by one. One of the
head
Selfs. The tribal leaders are always women, savage Brunhilda twats.”

Dwight docked against the flat rock.

“Hey, Dwight,” called Dickie, big smile. “What say? Long time.”

Dwight completely ignored Dickie. “I think I found you a pretty good boat. I used to own it when I first got married. It’s over in the Crack right now.”

Jellyroll and I climbed aboard. So did Dickie. Dwight asked him where he was going.

“Over the Crack.”

“What about your dog?” I asked, but Dickie didn’t answer.

TEN

E
verybody around here calls it the Crack for obvious reasons,” said Dwight at the helm as we neared the entrance. “Nobody ever calls it Kempshall Harbor.” He wrinkled his lip as if the words tasted metallic in his mouth.

The Crack. I’d already seen it from the air, but airplane dimensions had softened its effect at water level. Sheer pink-granite faces rose three stories straight up out of the water. The walls rose so steeply and the rock was so smooth that a swimmer could not have climbed out and would have drowned like a turtle pawing against the glass in a flooded terrarium. At the mouth, the walls spanned fifty feet of water, but inside they narrowed steadily to an acute angle, then to nothing. Brown, leathery kelp clung to the rock and undulated in the swell as if beckoning us to watery death. This was a primal place.

Some unimaginable force had cracked this island nearly in two. Did it crack gradually, eon by eon, or did it explode apart volcanically? Even Dickie shut up as we entered. The place seemed to demand solemnity from the people who entered, even those who did so often. I stepped from under the wheelhouse in order to look up. The cliffs loomed. Only lichens could live on them.

The Crack could be explained, it had a knowable geologic origin. Uplift, volcanism, crustal plate tectonics, glaciation, one of those world shakers, but the feeling of the place didn’t encourage that kind of curiosity. Entering the Crack called up primitive anxieties, the kind that probably brought shivers up the spines of our ancient progenitors huddled around the paltry light of a campfire
in an utterly dark world. I imagined otherwise extinct predators, saber-toothed tigers, dire wolves, giant marsupials peering down at us from the rim, licking their lips. Fresh meat. It felt like we were entering the blunt mandibles of a monster sprawled on its side. Inside, daylight dimmed. The cliff walls fell away to a shallower angle, still too steep to climb up, but shallow enough to build stairs down to the water—

The apex of the Crack, the hinge of the creature’s jaw, formed a natural amphitheater, and there the submarine perched on a stand of interlocking railroad ties, a log cabin without a roof, twenty feet up on a ledge. The submarine was painted industrial orange, like the primer coat on highway bridges. The thing was as long as a pickup truck, but cylindrical, like a thick conduit. It was festooned with tanks, pipes, valves, hoses, connectors, adapters, nuts and bolts. It couldn’t be real. I looked through my new binoculars. It sure looked real. In front was a big Plexiglas bubble, like on those
M*A*S*H
helicopters. The captain would squat in there to con his ship. Its bulbous eye glinted in the sun.

Dwight had slowed his boat to a crawl. The span narrowed. Several motorboats were tied nose and tail in a line down the middle, making the quarters very close near the apex, in the shadow of the sub.

“Why did he bring it all the way over here to launch?” I asked.

“This is where he built it,” said Dwight.

“What? I thought there wasn’t any electricity on the island.”

“There ain’t.”

“He’s a genius,” said Dickie.

Dwight docked his boat against a narrow wooden float near the apex of the Crack. Strings of wooden stairs ran up the rock in switchback flights. Some stairs came only halfway down, as if the rest had dropped into the water. Some step units were old, the wood black and grainy, others were fresh, and the rest fell somewhere in between, all heading in the same direction like a visible demonstration of decay.

“There’s your boat,” said Dwight, tying his own to a corroded cleat on the float. “If you like it. I mean, you don’t have to take it. Don’t feel no pressure.” It was tied to the adjacent float.

I stepped up onto the floating dock, which needed a little more flotation. Water leapt up through the cracks in the boards. I leaned against cool pink granite and looked at my new boat. It was open, wooden, about twenty-five feet long with a faded red hull and white insides. There was a steering wheel with spokes mounted on a short pedestal in the center of the boat on the left side. Her ribs were visible, thick and closely spaced. Here and there rust streaked her red paint. This was a salty boat. This boat had been used, it had been out there. Things were worn in the way old craftsmen’s tools are worn, the way Dwight’s gear was worn. I was glad. I didn’t want a tourist boat painted metal-flake magenta like a motorcycle helmet. I didn’t want a boat that had molded indentations to hold your rum swizzle. I wanted a salty craft, and this was it.

“It’s a Hampton boat,” said Dwight. “Well, I guess you’d have to say it’s a modified Hampton boat. I pulled up her sheer a little ’cause I liked a jaunty look in those days, and raised the stern some just for balance.”

“What? You mean you built this boat?”

“Yeah, but it was a long time ago. She’s gettin’ old now, on her way out, but she don’t leak too bad yet.”

Dickie said something about Hampton boats, but it was clear even to me he didn’t know shit. Dwight ignored him.

“She’s gettin’ a little hogged, as you can see.”

I couldn’t. I didn’t even know what hogged meant. She looked perfect to me. I wanted her. I had a feckless impulse to buy her right then and there, but I repressed it.

“Everything ends,” said Dwight.

Even so, building a complex thing probably develops one’s inner resources. Or did one have to have inner resources to begin building?

“Immediate problem,” said Dwight dryly, “is gettin’ to it.” The modified Hampton boat was tied to a float identical to the one we stood on, long and narrow, but fifteen feet of water separated us from it. There wasn’t enough room for Dwight to raft his boat outside the Hampton boat because another boat, a decaying red clunker, was moored lengthwise near the apex of the Crack.

Two-by-six planks braced somehow into the cliff formed a catwalk that technically spanned the rock between here and there, but it looked suspicious. Dwight was testing it with his foot.

“Say, Alistair,” he said to a guy on the red clunker.

I hadn’t noticed Alistair, my attention occupied with my own new boat. Nor had I noticed the carelessly hand-painted sign tacked to the roof of his boat, RED LOBSTERS. There was a crazy cant to the roofline. Green weed grew like long hair along the waterline. “Say, Dwight?” said Alistair, an old man with a face as granitic as the Crack itself.

“Would you trust that catwalk, Alistair, you was me?”

Alistair wiped his enormous hands on a mechanic’s cloth and scrutinized the catwalk in question. “Can’t say, Dwight. However, the last cat on that walk ended up in the drink.”

“What happened? Did the catwalk crack?”

“Weren’t no fault of the catwalk. Fault of the cat.”

“So did you rescue him?”

“Fuck no, Dwight. I’m busy sellin’ lobsters. I can’t be rescuin’ every damn fool falls off the catwalk. What do you hear about the killin’, Dwight?”

“Killing?” said Dickie, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, rocking the float. “You mean killings. Like a string of them. Like mass murder in Micmac.”

They ignored him.

“We better go up and around,” said Dwight.

So we did. For some reason stairs delight Jellyroll. He bounds up them and looks back at me with a big smile on his face. But I didn’t feel quite so confident of the stairs. They moved far too
much. Dwight climbed casually, but I stayed a few steps behind so as not to strain the stairs.

The rock was not uniform here. At the mouth, it had looked uniformly brown, but back here veins of starkly different colors ran through it. Some were pure white and crystalline, others smooth and black, with complex branches reaching out horizontally, sometimes intertwining with veins of a different color, a petrified bloodstream.

As we went, Dwight said, “This all gets cleared out come November.”

“All what?”

“All you see. Stairs, floats, boats, everything. The whole harbor. All the boats get out by autumn. We take everything apart and store it up in the woods over the winter.” He paused on a crooked landing near the top and pointed toward the opening. “See, out there—that’s dead northeast. In a nor’easter the Crack is hell on earth. Water comes through that opening like a fire hose. We’d get swept away standin’ here in a
weak
nor’easter. In a strong one, waves’d be breakin’ up there in the woods.” Dwight’s face was largely immobile, but just then a look of respect, even awe, flicked across his weathered features at the image of the sea in the narrow confines of the Crack; then he said, “Of course, you don’t get nor’easters in the summer.”

I lagged for a moment trying to picture the scene. That kind of power was hard for a landsman urbanite and his dog to imagine. I followed Dwight up out of the Crack onto flat land.

Dickie tagged along, walking stiff-legged as if his scrotum itched.

There were two small barns or sheds with no windows near the apex. They were built on foundations of stacked logs. I realized that they, too, must get moved back from the reach of the sea. Within a block-long radius of the Crack there were no trees. Dwight told me that flying seawater had killed them generations ago.

“When I was a kid, we’d dare each other to stand close in a nor’easter. Like the city kids I read about that ride on top of elevators.”

“I’ve been goddamned near carried away when I was standing way over there,” Dickie pointed. “I remember one year—”

“Aw, bullshit, Dickie, you ain’t even been here in November.”

“Well, I stayed that one bad year. I gotta run anyway. Gotta get my dog. Hey, thanks for the lift. Boy, that sure
looks
like the R-r-ruff Dog,” he said, but made no move to leave.

Twenty yards away at the far end of the clearing, there was an abandoned red building that looked like a rural train station circa 1940. I looked at it through my binoculars. It
was
a train depot, in ruins now. Weeds and shrubs grew out of the windows and up through chinks in the walls. I could see the tracks in front.

“Kempshall built himself a railroad to take his guests and his gear over to the Castle. That’s what he called his mansion.”

We started down the adjacent set of stairs, even shakier than its neighbor. Jellyroll didn’t care, bounding ahead, having a grand time. I could tell by the way the stairs bounced that Dickie was still with us.

Descending, Dwight told me that the Hampton boat now belonged to a man named Roy. Roy and Dwight had gone to school together, played on the same line of scrimmage. “Roy had his esophagus removed back about two years ago, talks through one of them electric vibration devices. As a result he don’t like to talk to strangers. Thinks his voice sounds weird. Does.” So Dwight had already made a deal for me, but I didn’t have to take it, he assured me. Roy wanted eighty-five dollars a week. How they arrived at that, I had no idea, but it sounded great to me—

BOOK: Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery
11.96Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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