The Fisher Boy (27 page)

Chapter Thirty-eight

It startled me, his suddenly saying my half-brother’s name, his bringing murder into our meal, into this engineered Valhalla. But wasn’t that exactly where it belonged, where all of the events of this year originated—from Ian’s death to the museum assaults to Chloe’s kidnapping? So, when he asked the question, I felt a strange sense of relief verging on hope.

The little girl, in her dress bright with grease, took away our plates on her rickety cart. How could someone so fastidious tolerate someone so dirty serving him food? There was no logic to it. But expecting logic here was illogical. She was not the right “level,” so perhaps her presence didn’t count; Roman matrons went naked in front of their slaves, whose stares were no more embarrassing than those of the pet monkeys they’d imported from Africa.

His question was direct; so was my answer. “I knew Ian all my life.”

“And all his too? Right up to the end?” Smiling, he exposed his stunted teeth.

“I didn’t kill Ian,” I said.

“Somebody did.” He resumed typing on his laptop.

“How did
you
know Ian?” I boldly asked.

He set his laptop computer aside, on the tray with the paint-by-numbers roses and calabash of poi. “Ian came to me for nourishment,” he said, this most well-nourished of men. “Ian came to me for spiritual nourishment, he was a seeker.” The priest had used that word, “seeker,” at Ian’s funeral. “At least that was his initial guise.”

“He was a lawyer too,” I said.

The Master’s voice, once small, became large enough to fit his frame. “Ian was a swindler, a thief!” he bellowed.

“Master, are you all right?” the middle-aged woman asked him.

He ignored her. “Your Ian, your wretched Ian, knew the end was near.”

Loki had mentioned “the Fall,” while the Master spoke of “the end.”

“He negotiated the sale of your miserable school. He insinuated his way into the trustees’ confidence just as St. Harold’s was going bankrupt. Then he handled the sale to us, mishandled the sale
,
I should say. He cheated us blind—he sold land he’d promised us to a developer—and the land we bought by Lake Chiccataubett was useless! Useless—protected by the Endangered Species Act. Because some plant, some useless plant, the Berkshire bog orchid, was already growing there!”

I didn’t argue with his hypocrisy about biodiversity, why the Berkshire bog orchid didn’t merit preservation while the songbirds of Guam certainly did.

“I didn’t kill your friend Ian Drummond, but whoever performed that deed, whoever stabbed him through the heart, did a great service for a small multitude.”

The Master referenced only Ian’s chest wound, ignoring his throat, cut ear-to-ear. Like the media. Was it possible he didn’t know? Was it possible he was telling the truth?

“Whoever stabbed him only completed the work nature had begun. Nature, in her infinite wisdom.”

“About the tax matter, Master,” the middle-aged woman said.

“’Completed the work nature had begun’—what do you mean?” I asked as the woman approached him using a series of small bows, quick like spasms, then placed her bundle of binders and folders onto the metal tray, next to the calabash of poi.

“Ian sought my help because he was dying. He’d developed lymphoma due to a history of steroid usage.”

Lymphoma—was that possible?

“I met him through my mother’s business. His father visited my mother’s place of business. Ian had been using steroids for years. In larger and larger amounts. The result was a cancer, a lymphoma. So whoever killed Ian wasted their energy. Nature had already taken that assignment.”

Ian had certainly become muscular, very abruptly, and there
was
something unnatural about his body—it was swollen like the produce cultivated here. He’d changed during his time away from Boston. Yet he smoked and drank like someone from
film noir.
He’d littered his P-town bedroom with exercise equipment, which suggested an interest in bodybuilding, but whether that interest manifested itself through workouts or steroids, that was difficult to tell. No one had spoken of cancer—not his family and not the police—but the police had kept his throat wounds secret, so they might have kept his lymphoma secret too.

The Master drank from a pitcher of water with crescent moons of lemon floating through it. He seemed exhausted, spent by his anger or outburst, and his soft, wide face was covered in droplets of sweat. He clutched the pitcher with both of his hands, as if for comfort. “So we have met at last. And you have learned something, even you. About your insufferable classmate and the agricultural breakthroughs we’ve made here.”

Then the Master and the woman exchanged nods—all but simultaneously. I couldn’t tell who’d nodded first.

“I’ll show our visitors out,” the woman said.

This woman might have been encountered bringing bread to a bake sale or sons to a soccer match. Her normalcy was putting us at ease. Ushering us outside the bunker-like building, she said, “There’s so much to see before you’re gone.”

The crowd on the grass had dispersed, Jason with them. It was a humid afternoon, the air thick and warm like felt. The woman introduced herself as Freya, so she’d earned her Nordic name—without falling out of favor, like the castrated Loki and battered Helga. “Your automobile is fixed,” Freya said. How she knew this, it was hard to tell. She had been with us the entire time during our audience with the Master or the Golden One, whatever that creature was called.

We were standing outside the bunker-like building, on a lawn so perfect it had no more weeds than the cellophane grass of Easter baskets.

“We can start with the history of this place,” Freya said. “Cape Cod has been occupied since Paleoindian times.”

Then, in the stillness, something shrieked—shrill and desperate. The sound stamped Roberto’s face with fear, and mine as well, I’m sure. Overlapping, we both asked, “What was that?”

Freya’s smile remained intact. “It must have been a bird.”

It had come from something larger than a bird.

“It sounded like
a child,
” Roberto said.

I thought of Chloe, of course, and of the frightened girl who’d served us food.

“It must’ve been an animal in the woods,” Freya said.

It was hard to tell where the scream had originated, back of the bunker-like building or elsewhere. Freya expanded her account, with a digression about the Native American diet and its archaeological evidence on their property: shell middens, the scorched bones of deer…The cry we had heard was human, I was certain—the girl who’d brought us fruit by mistake, being punished.

“…The Native Americans roasted lobsters, smoked them or put them in stews,” Freya was saying, taking us away from the Master’s bunker and any further disturbance. “But you’re interested in Royall, in his little experiment. At least you mentioned that on your first excursion.”

They knew everything, remembered everything, my exchange with the Giant in the road, for example, but at least Royall was a relatively benign subject, a means of diverting the discussion from my past probing—as we sought to talk our way out of this Hades.

She led us downhill. We did nothing more about the cry we had heard; fear kept us furious but silent. We went through woods with foliage dulled by dust.

“Most of the buildings from Royall’s time are intact. After his experiment failed so swiftly, so pathetically, the grounds became a series of summer camps, but Royall’s buildings were preserved.”

She was admitting they’d lied to me earlier; the Giant had claimed Royall’s buildings were destroyed.

Roberto, I sensed, was about to erupt. I prevented him by saying groups of artists had always intrigued me with the way they collaborated and cross-fertilized. “I worked with a group of actors in our comedy troupe.”

“Yes, Jason mentioned that,” she said.

I had more than enough material to approach the police—their link to Ian, the Master’s anger over Ian selling the property at St. Harold’s, and the sinister culture of this place. Yet the story of Ian’s cancer had jolted me. Those malignant cells were a wild card I hadn’t imagined.

“It strikes me as odd,” I said, “since you mentioned Jason, it’s odd that he’s African-American—”

“It strikes you odd that he’s African-American?” Freya said. “You are quite the Eurocentric.” With her gold and silver hair and her dress embroidered with acorns in metallic threads, she actually laughed, then, with seriousness, said, “Are you a racist?”

“It’s just that your emphasis here is on Norse culture, Norse names, these buildings inspired by the Viking age…And many of your people, like Jason, dye their hair.”

“Women in pre-contact Hawaii bleached their hair. Aboriginals in Australia have naturally blond hair, and they’re much darker than Jason. Dark skin and light hair are quite culturally compatible. Are you a racist?”

“Of course not.”

Her actions of putting us at ease had thinned, just as the woods had thinned out into a huge sunlit meadow containing four squat stone buildings resembling the hall with the sun disk we’d seen earlier. Beyond these—gray and flat, like an elephant shot on safari—was a glacial boulder. Shading this was a tree, a beech so ancient cables connected its branches to brace them. A pond glittered back of these, its surface rippled like chain mail.

“Jason was in a great deal of trouble when he came to us,” Freya volunteered. “In trouble with the law, in trouble with drugs. The Master saved his life. We’re not concerned with race per se
,
we’re concerned with preserving quality, the best of all life, animal and botanical, from the coming climactic disasters.”

She detailed the evidence that things already were awry: alien species crowding out native life, tropical diseases like dengue fever creeping north. Glaciers were melting like unplugged freezers, the ozone layer was rupturing. Why these verified concerns should excuse child abuse and a Hitlerian fringe of eugenics, she didn’t specify. She ran her fingers through her hair, so that her head moved and her sea glass earrings tinkled like wind chimes on a country porch. “Our hair is an expression of unity—and respect for our Master’s heritage.”

Freya unlocked the door to one of the low buildings. As she turned the iron key, rust crunched in the lock. Inside, the room smelled of decay, of wood rotting and metal corroding. There were windows in the room, but any light they might have shed was censored by heavy shutters.

Beds lined the long room. They were without mattresses; ropes sagged where cushions or mattresses once belonged. What were their lives like, the men who’d used these beds, these sons of Civil War veterans, who’d worn condoms made from animals’ skins, who’d ridden so many horses and never heard of a virus? What was it like sleeping in these stone dormitories on these beds Leif Ericsson would have found familiar? And what charisma, what force, made artists from the Appalachians to the Cascades forsake their known lives for Thomas Royall’s regimen? Mikkonen too possessed this power, the ability to inspire, to compel others to heed his wishes. Shamans and inventors had this too; they could expunge doubt from their personalities, squeeze it out like splinters.

The starkness of the artists’ beds contrasted with the majesty of one chair, carved with gods and gnomes in never-ending battle.

“The beds were used by the artists. This throne was used by Royall when he paid them a visit. Royall was very hierarchical,” she said, as if their community was as democratic as a New England town meeting.

“The metal-workers slept in this dormitory.” On a table, through the murk, I could see an array of swords, axes, a pike, even an iron bird, all vulnerable with rust.

“Why did they come here? What attracted them to this land?” I asked, remembering the museum exhibit and assuming the stone just ahead was the same one in the old photographs.

“They passed nothing on,” Freya said.

Roberto picked up an axe. Rust dropped from its blade onto the table.

“They passed nothing on,” Freya repeated. But of course. The Master was concerned with procreation, the begetting of cells, not art, so Royall’s community, and Roberto and I, met with pious disapproval.

Their ecological doomsday festered in their imagination as vividly as any revelation John experienced on Patmos. It was a wonder these people sent their low-caste children to panhandle among us in Provincetown; it was a wonder they hadn’t teamed with the fundamentalists against us. But perhaps Royall’s all-male enclave—dead by Harding’s inauguration—was scapegoat enough.

Freya now spoke in the singsong tone of a docent at a historic house: how the men were divided “by muse and material,” how the metal-workers’ forge had been struck by lightning and now lay in ruins under poison ivy, how local anti-German sentiment flared up after the Kaiser’s submarine shelled Chatham. “And then, in all the ruckus, Gilbert Dyer killed Royall.”

Gilbert Dyer—the model for
The Fisher Boy
in the Provincetown Municipal Museum. “What?” I said.

“Dyer killed Royall,” Freya said.

History, the authorities, the media of the day, had said Royall had disappeared. His clothing and car had been found in Truro, on the town’s Atlantic coast, at Skusset Beach. She laughed. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see the stone walls had been plastered then whitewashed and painted with figures, with naked blond men wrestling and swimming in some vague summer landscape all conifers and fiords. Except for the absence of women, this display of Teutonic flesh might have suited the Master and his followers just fine.

“They found Royall’s grave in the woods,” Freya said, “while they were gathering mushrooms.” She shooed us out and was about to lock the door. “My sons found him,” she said, and her voice broke.

Then I knew—who they were and who she was
.
Of course, she handled the community’s finances—and she’d had two children, both of them sons.

“It got to my older son,” she said, banging shut the door, as if shutting out the memory of her older mad son, shutting out the memory of both sons…

As we neared the rock, I could see it was a boulder, scoured by a glacier from some place further north—the tundra of Canada, the mountains of New Hampshire—then transported here by that grinding sheet of ice. Scratched into its sides were graffiti of sorts, something patterned on the script of a dead people, a dead culture. Were they Norse? Probably not. But the markings on this rock had lured Royall to this land, and, in a sense, exerted significance for these people.