The Fisher Boy (13 page)

I don’t know why, but I was afraid he was going to do something
.
What that might be, I wasn’t sure. Maybe it was no more threatening than just to touch me, to touch us, but he smelled so rancid and acted so strange that this seemed threat enough.

Then Roberto took control of the situation. “Nice meeting you,” he said, setting his hands on my shoulders and steering me briskly toward the exit.

The militaristic woman at the entrance was filling a rack with brochures about other attractions, everything from Plimouth Plantation to Aqua-World, the big water park in Hyannis. She handed Roberto the bag of licorice she’d confiscated earlier.

“There’s a man back there who’s acting very bizarre,” Roberto said. “And he smells.”

“We’re not responsible for our visitors’ hygiene,” the woman said crisply, stacking some brochures about dune buggy tours.

“He keeps pacing back and forth in front of
The Fisher Boy,”
I said.

“Thank you for your concern,” she said. “I’ll inform the guard.”

Afterward, we acted like tourists, strolling up and down Commercial Street. A hot wind was blowing through the town, like something you’d expect in Tangier, like something off the Sahara. It hadn’t rained for weeks, and the Christian Soldiers were claiming the drought was punishment from God.

We ate vegetarian sandwiches at a place with an open second-story deck. We could look down onto Commercial Street, where we recognized some of the same tourists we’d seen all day, traipsing up and down, over and over, looking more depleted with each trip.

The East End begins about there, the gift shops and restaurants gradually surrendering to art galleries of two distinct types: those selling Cape Cod landscapes paying homage to Edward Hopper, and, what might, at one time, have been called avant-garde art, Rothko knock-offs and sculptures of brutalized metal. Most of the tourists turned back at this point: day trippers seldom buy art.

Our sandwiches were delicious, bursting with a pasture’s worth of field greens, messy with soy sauce. I was pushing some stray dandelion leaves into my mouth, when, beneath us on Commercial Street, I saw a familiar—and unmistakable—head.

I nudged Roberto to bring the man with the golden dreadlocks to his attention. “Have you seen him before?”

“I can’t see his face.”

“How many blond Rastafarians have you encountered?”

His hair was platinum. He was formally dressed for Commercial Street, in an Oxford-cloth shirt with peppermint stripes, linen trousers, and tasseled loafers. “He was at Ian’s funeral!” I said.

“I can’t picture Ian having black friends.”

The man with the dreadlocks ducked into Scents of Being, a shop that specialized in home-made jellies and other Cape Cod products: bayberry soap, stoneware from potters in Welfleet, and potpourri originating in local herb beds.

We were still watching the shop, waiting for the man with the dreadlocks to emerge, when the sound of sirens ripped through the afternoon, startling the crowds on Commercial Street. People stopped in their tracks and began talking, pointing back toward the West End.

The boy busing plates at our restaurant, a townie about sixteen with a nose ring, leaned over the railing and yelled “What’s happening?” to a friend in the street below.

“Someone got stabbed,” the friend yelled, “at the museum!”

Roberto and I scrambled down the stairs, as if evacuating the place. We hit the pavement so hard the soles of my feet were stinging as we ran.

A crowd was collecting outside the museum. An ambulance and two police cars were parked on Commercial Street, in front of the building, and a fire engine was wailing up Center Street. Police and firemen were speaking into walkie-talkies. I noticed a paper plate lodged in the shrubbery growing flush with the foundation of the museum.

The woman at the ticket booth emerged from the entrance to the museum, her hands smeared with blood. She seemed to be in a state of shock: she kept touching the clasp of her white straw pocketbook, as if making sure that it was locked, as if this small gesture, this indication of normality, might somehow mitigate the horror around her.

“She wasn’t the one who was stabbed,” someone was saying, as the crowd in the street became more anxious.

“It was the guard, Mr. Peever,” another person said.

“The Christian Soldiers are behind this,” said a separate voice, and a number of voices answered in agreement, saying “Absolutely!” and “No kidding!” and “Something like this was bound to happen.”

Two ambulance attendants with a stretcher went running up the steps of the museum. Another siren, from Bradford Street, drilled through the air. The woman from the ticket booth, Roberto’s old adversary, was being helped toward an ambulance. She was soaked with gore; I thought I could smell it. It was the breakwater experience all over again.

Miriam came pushing through the crowd, asking, “What’s happened, what’s happened now?” Someone answered before I could speak and she began crying. “Oh, poor Mr. Peever, he’s on the board of our church, and his wife just died. Oh, this is awful!”

Then the ambulance attendants came out, carrying an old man whose face was obscured by an oxygen mask.

“Is he dead?” a voice asked, sounding eager or excited or both.

“Oh, shut up!” Miriam snapped. “Have a little respect!”

“He’s alive—barely,” said one of the policemen, speaking to Sergeant Almeida.

Miriam was still crying, pressing a Kleenex to her eyes, when two other policemen led the squirming, screaming suspect down the museum steps. Everyone gasped.

It was him, of course—the strange man we’d encountered at the Royall exhibit. His Jesus hair was flying, his features contorted with rage. His denim overalls were splattered with blood.

“Good God!” Roberto groaned.

He lunged at his captors, as if trying to bite them with his broken yellow teeth. The police, wearing disposable gloves, were simultaneously restraining him and recoiling from him.

“Ashes, ashes!” he was yelling. “And the sun shall be covered in ashes!” he was shouting, as the police wrestled him into the cruiser and the crowds parted so that his captors could drive him away.

Chapter Sixteen

The Provincetown police station is small, a white clapboard building that would fit in a Fifties subdivision. All it’s missing is a black metal eagle above the door, or pottery cat climbing a chimney. The police had scheduled a press conference at six o’clock sharp, so vans from several Boston and Providence television stations were in the street, as well as many spectators, residents and tourists. Some gay activists were distributing hastily prepared flyers linking the museum stabbing and Ian’s murder to the Christian Soldiers.

“He was quoting the
Book of Revelation
,” one woman said.

“Don’t they all?” another asked.

Rumors were multiplying like tadpoles in a warm pond: that the assailant was Hollings Fair’s nephew; that the knife used to assault Clarence Peever matched “the fatal wound to Ian’s Drummond’s throat”; and that, during the struggle in the museum, Thomas Royall’s masterpiece called
The Fisher King
was slashed beyond repair.

“They must mean
The Fisher Boy,”
I told Roberto.

Miriam was accompanying us, with Chloe. Miriam spoke of how violent rhetoric spawns violent actions. “But I hope the police work him over,” she added, referencing the suspect.

A reporter and cameraman from a Boston UHF channel were sampling crowd opinion before the press conference. “People here seem to believe that a troubling murder mystery that has darkened this resort town this season may soon be laid to rest,” the reporter was telling the camera. “Is this incident related to the brutal murder of Boston socialite Ian Drummond? This town is wondering that tonight, and tensions are high. Police are guarding the local headquarters of a fundamentalist religious group, Hollings Fair’s Christian Soldiers, that has recently leased office space on Commercial Street…”

“Guarding murderers!” a voice yelled from the crowd.

“This will force them out of town,” said the voice that came from, yes—Arthur! With a faded tan but a vivid grin. He’d cut his gray hair short in a style at least a generation too young.

The UHF station reporter was weaving through the crowd, heading toward Miriam, who was still holding forth about a right-wing conspiracy. To save herself from being interviewed, Miriam tattled,
“They saw him
, earlier in the day—Mark and Roberto saw the suspect at the museum.”

“Sir?” Suddenly I found a microphone ready to broadcast my words, and the intense, powdered face of reporter Erin Leary asking for my “impressions” of the suspect.

But I was saved from responding, because, just at that moment, the Provincetown chief of police stepped up to the bouquet of microphones, his manner austere as a maximum-security cell. “At three-fifteen p.m., we were summoned,” he began. He described the stabbing of Clarence Peever in the most dispassionate manner possible: “knife wounds…lacerations…critical but stable condition…”

Already, the media people were impatient and began peppering him with questions.

“Chief, chief, what about the suspect?”

“Who is he?”

“Is he linked to the Drummond murder?”

“Is he affiliated with the Christian Soldiers?”

The chief stiffened and looked above the heads of the crowd. “The suspect was carrying no identification, no driver’s license. He has declined to answer any questions and refuses to speak.”

“He was carrying pamphlets from the Christian Soldiers!” a man shouted.

“The suspect was carrying a variety of literature—flyers and coupons—that are given away to everyone on the street here in town.”

“Born-again killers!” Miriam shouted.

“The suspect persists in quoting the Bible,” the chief said. “As far as we know, he was not an acquaintance of either Clarence Peever or Eileen Sturmer, the other museum employee he allegedly assaulted.”

“Don’t you love the ‘allegedly’?” Miriam said. “My God, there were eyewitnesses!” Ignoring the adult world, Chloe was picking at a Creamsicle somebody had dropped. Now, Sergeant Almeida was joining the chief.

“So, you have no idea who this man is?” Erin Leary asked.

“He is not known to this department,” the chief replied.

“When are you going to do something about what’s happening in this town?” Roberto had the audacity to demand.

“We have a suspect under arrest and the investigation is proceeding. The knife allegedly used in the assault is undergoing tests.” The chief leaned forward toward the microphones. “Thank you,” he said with finality.

A flurry of dismay and resentment ruffled through the crowd as the chief and his colleagues slipped back into the station. “Can you believe it?” people kept saying. I wanted to leave, to avoid being buttonholed by Erin Leary. Roberto hooked his warm, muscular arm into mine.

Arthur alone seemed satisfied, only hinting at his nervousness by playing with his oversized signet ring. “We can all rest easier,” he said. “The nightmare, the atrocity, is over.” He suggested we adjourn for an early dinner; he was dying for a good Portuguese fish stew. But Miriam had bought some sea bass and insisted she cook for us at her place.

But was it really over? Had I just met the man who’d slaughtered Ian? When I asked myself these questions, instinctively I answered no. Arthur was chattering away about the benefits of his new medication. He said, “I have a dry mouth but a light heart. Life is about tradeoffs. Smell that salt air! I’ll take it over Obsession any day!” We walked through the soft summer light, through the gossiping, agitated crowds.

Miriam’s studio was in the East End of town, an ex-fishing shack once plain as a mud hen but now a bright bird-of-paradise thanks to skylights, a deck, and coats of tangerine paint. Lots of buildings in Provincetown were like that: wallflowers made up to be supermodels. Miriam bought works from local artists, and, in the grass of her front yard, bleached yellow like corn silk, stood a sculpture of porpoise-gray stone called
Mother and Child
and a copper piece symbolizing nuclear war.

The house was filled with jars of beads, malachite and faience and jade, from Africa and Crete and Sri Lanka, and spools of wire and silver and gold—the stuff of her jewelry-making business. It was sweltering inside, even in the coolest rooms facing the water, so we opted to eat on the deck built over the sand flanking Provincetown Harbor. Miriam changed Chloe into a sun dress decorated with seahorses, and the little girl began thumbing through a storybook, the old classic
The Dragonfly’s Suggestion.

“I’d much rather have her read that,” Miriam said, “than some corporate commodity like
The Loneliest Starfish.
” She said this in Roberto’s presence, perhaps forgetting he’d given her the toy mermaid from that film. Noting his frown, she added, “She’s still upset that she broke her mermaid’s arm.”

Roberto volunteered to try mending the doll. I began reading Chloe the book aloud, the story of the little boy in the magic nightshirt who climbs onto the dragonfly’s back for the journey to the Snail King’s palace under the pond. My mother had read this to me when I was Chloe’s age, the same book, with lacy Victorian woodcuts. As I read and the fragrance of fish and asparagus cooking in wine came trespassing from Miriam’s stove—she was the sort of cook who dirtied innumerable dishes—the little girl edged closer on the settee as the hold of the story and her trust in me grew. Her skin radiated warmth.

Roberto used Krazy Glue to fix the arm, but told Chloe not to disturb the mermaid until she was discharged from the hospital. He made the doll a bed out of cotton batten and some ripped old crochet, and, speaking in a voice that was Robin Williams-does-Viennese psychiatrist, he told Chloe to let the patient get plenty of rest “until ze glue iz not zo crazy, understand?”

Miriam phoned Clarence Peever’s family and spoke with his niece. His vital signs were stable and he was holding his own; the doctors were “optimistic.” She seemed soothed by this, her movements in the kitchen became less frenetic. She stopped slamming pots and pans.

She served the sea bass on blue bubbleware plates she’d bought at an antique shop in Barnstable. Unusually for her, especially in the wake of her rhetoric, she requested we bow our heads before eating to pray. She prayed for Clarence Peever, “for his recovery, and for the recovery of our town, from violence and divisiveness.”

“May the same hold true for our country,” Arthur added. Then we devoured Miriam’s marvelous meal, and the peace of the moment soothed me. Provincetown Harbor filled with a light fog which seemed to glow like something holy and divine.

Finishing his meal, Arthur clasped his hands like a child in Sunday school. “I have egg on my face.”

“There’s no dairy in this recipe.” Miriam was as literal about food as the scorned Edward.

“Rhetorically speaking. Your plates, from the antique shop, prompt my confession. The candlesticks have come home.”

“Your
candlesticks?” Miriam said.

“The ones you said Edward took?” I said. “Has Edward brought them back?”

“No,” Arthur said, “he’s still gone with the wind. But I blackened his name a bit too thoroughly.”

A man from Remembrance of Things Past, the antique store in Brewster, finally returned with the candlesticks. Edward had sent them out to be repaired, at Arthur’s request, as Arthur himself belatedly recalled. That was why he had associated Edward with the candlesticks—Edward had sent them away when Arthur was at a medical appointment in Boston. “I’m afraid I began drinking when Edward was with me. It was the thrill of having something so beautiful under my roof. So Edward wasn’t a thief after all. Vulgar, tongue-tied, and narcissistic, yes. But not a thief. He stole only my heart. But that has returned too.”

As Miriam cleared the blue bubbleware plates, the fog thickened like a sweater that’s too heavy. Then Miriam herself broke the taboo she’d imposed before dinner. While serving us chocolate cake drizzled with raspberry sauce, she asked, “Do you really think this is it? The arrest of that creature at the museum? I don’t feel closure, I don’t feel safe. The Christian Soldiers are still here, with police protection. The police are functioning as enablers.”

Arthur was sectioning away the frosting from the cake so that he could devour a cornice of it first. He said the Christian Soldiers would be on their very best behavior, for the short time they’d dare remain in Provincetown. They’d barged in here to attract media attention. They knew they couldn’t close the gay businesses here; we were far too essential to the economy. Their efforts in Provincetown were simply a trial balloon for their real ambitions out west—defeating gay rights initiatives in Oregon and Colorado. “Their presence here has been
a disaster
—Ian’s death and now this assault on an elderly, straight, year-round resident…”

“But why?” I asked, as the foghorn sounded over the harbor. “Why did this violence happen?”

“Because they’re evil,” Miriam said.

“Homophobia,” Roberto added.

“So that explains Ian’s death and the dog on Arthur’s doorstep, but why would they attack Mr. Peever and Eileen Sturmer?”

Their expressions went slack with bafflement, then Roberto resumed his line of thought with irritation. “Well, he slashed
The Fisher Boy,
isn’t that homophobic enough? He slashed your fantasy.”

That was rumor, I reminded them. Confirmed by no one.

“But why Ian? Why at night on the breakwater?” I turned to Arthur: “And why you? Why your party?”

With patience and pride, Arthur said, “I’m a prominent person in this community. So was Ian.”

“There are much bigger targets,” I said.
“Nationally
known gay people who summer here.” Like the lesbian author, the kung fu movie star, a closeted conservative columnist.

“Perhaps he wanted to start small and go big, with his targets,” Miriam said.

Arthur removed a raspberry from his chocolate cake. “Raspberries don’t agree with me,” he said. Neither, apparently, did being called a “small” target.

Miriam cut into her cake with confident strokes. She pointed out that knives had been used in Ian’s death and in the museum stabbings. All of this had happened since Hollings Fair’s people had come to town. “It can’t all be a coincidence. That creature was quoting Scripture! You saw him! You saw how strange he was! You’re acting as noncommittal as the damn police!”

“You said a bad word,” Chloe told her mother.

“He was different from those right-wing people,” I said. “He was different from those people with the petitions, the people who picketed the White Gull. Look at his hair, it was long, like something from the Bible…”

“Exactly!” said both Miriam and Roberto.

“Ian knew his killer,” I said.

Miriam turned toward me. She used the low, cold tone of a prosecutor. “Well, then, you’d be a very logical suspect in Ian’s murder, now, wouldn’t you? You’d known each other since St. Harold’s and before. He’d made your life like something from
Lord of the Flies
.”

She was savoring this mini-attack, the self-righteous part of her, the leftist crusader.

Ian and I were like brothers, I almost said. “What precipitated the attack at the museum? I mean, that man had been there all day.”

“He took a swipe at
The Fisher Boy,
so I understand,” Arthur said. “Clarence Peever tried to stop him, so he stabbed him. He slashed Eileen Sturmer when she came running to help Clarence, when she heard Clarence screaming in the exhibit.”

“But if that was his plan, attacking
The Fisher Boy,
why didn’t he do it right away? Why did he linger all those hours? Why didn’t he do it after Eileen Sturmer told him he couldn’t bring his lunch inside the museum? That’s when he was maddest.”

“Mad—exactly,” Arthur said. “You expect logic from someone who uses the
Book of Revelation
to plan his actions?”

“What was he like, Roberto?” Miriam asked.

“Like a street person who puts you on your guard. The kind you cross the street to avoid.”

“Was he muttering anything anti-gay?” I said. “No. Was he quoting Leviticus about Sodom? No. If he was so anti-gay, why didn’t he attack
us
—or some other gay couple instead of two straight staff from the museum?”