The Fisher Boy (28 page)

The tree, the beech, next caught my attention. It had bark the gray of varicose veins and was thick, surely thriving when the crew from the
Mayflower
stole ashore to raid baskets of corn local tribes were stockpiling for winter. Hanging from the limbs of the ancient beech, among its reddish-bronze leaves, were dozens of tiny golden bells—and pieces of what might be beef jerky, buzzing with flies.

“What are these?” I asked.

“Cause for celebration,” Freya said brightly. “Offerings from births. We’ve had three this month.”

Hanging in the tree, rotting in the sun, the umbilical cords twisted in the hot August wind. This was their Tree of Life—the tree connecting heaven and earth—Yggdrasill, the Norse had called it, but the umbilical cords smelled like roadkill. Like the rest of this place, their Tree of Life emanated the stink of death.

Freya touched the umbilical cords, her fingers lingering on their scabby surfaces.

“We should go now,” Roberto said.

Something stirred in the shade of the tree. On the grass by the pond, half hidden by the rock, something moved with the awkwardness of exhaustion. I thought it was a dog, but then saw the gleam of naked flesh and the links of a chain connecting a human ankle to the tree.

Roberto hadn’t seen this. He was trying to disengage from Freya. “Thank you for everything,” he was saying, using all of his skills. “This whole day has been fascinating.”

It was a girl. Her head had been shaved and her back was shining with welts swollen fat like maggots. She was naked, so that the mud mingled with her wounds. She’d been chained by her ankle to the tree with its rotting umbilical cords.

Seeing me, she cringed, like a dog from a puppy mill that associates human contact with brutality. She wasn’t the girl from the Provincetown Public Library or the girl I’d encountered in the road in the woods or the child who’d served our food; it was someone else. She was crawling toward a bowl of water, which the chain prevented her from reaching. I gave her the bowl and she snatched it and rolled away, like a starving dog defending a hunk of gristle.

“How dare you?!” Freya was suddenly beside me. She’d bumped against a branch, jingling its golden bells.

“This girl needs a doctor!” I shouted. “Can’t you see that?”

The girl cringed, holding the bowl of water.

“Look how you’ve frightened her,” Freya said.

“She’s frightened of you, of whoever did this!” I said. “What did she do wrong? Do something inappropriate for her level?”

Roberto now saw her, saw the welts and the wound where the chain had grated away flesh. “Oh, God!”

They might be doing this to Chloe, I realized. Anyone who did this was capable of anything. “Undo that chain!” I said. “Undo it right now!”

“I think it’s time you went on your way,” Freya said.

“Not without her, not without taking her to the hospital,” I said.

“She is being healed right here,” Freya said, “by the air and sunlight, by the stone and the tree and the power of the Master.”

“That stone is a hoax!” I yelled. “The Norse never reached Massachusetts.”

“Now!” Freya called to a figure beyond Royall’s buildings.

From a distance, he looked like a welcoming sight, dressed in our century’s clothing, wearing a T-shirt, denim jeans, and orange work boots.

“He’ll show you out,” Freya coldly stated, and, as her colleague came closer, I saw that our argument was ended by what he carried in his hand—a very contemporary piece of metal, a gun.

His reflecting sunglasses made twin duplicates of my frightened face. He was swarthy, Mediterranean. Grit from a boat or garage had lodged permanently beneath his fingernails. He was missing his van with its backrest of wood beads and synthetic fur sheathing its steering wheel, and he was missing his soundtrack—the classical tapes he’d played louder and louder—after picking up a hitchhiker, a young man he knew, at the Orleans traffic circle earlier this year. The assault might have been fantasy, but the “assailant” from Edward’s story was here, exactly as described.

To see a gun pointed at your gut is to see a gun for the very first time. In a movie, it’s a prop; mounted on a wall, it’s a trophy; in a shop, it’s merchandise. But, loaded and aimed at your body, at the vulnerability of your flesh, it is something entirely different—the instrument of your destruction. Suddenly, your worrying about AIDS and finances and the loneliness of age falls away.

“We have treated you as guests, but you have not responded in kind,” Freya said.

I heard the flies buzzing on the umbilical cords.

“Please see them out,” Freya said to the gunman. There was a gentle sadness to her voice.

Chapter Thirty-nine

We could’ve run, I suppose, but the weapon made us obedient, tethered us to this man, their Enforcer, the way the naked girl was tethered to their tree.

“The car is the other way,” Roberto said.

Him saying that flooded me with guilt, guilt at my involving him in craziness I should have left to the police.

“Your things are at the steam bath,” the Enforcer told Roberto, forcing us into the forest.

Were we really headed for the steam bath, or was he taking us deep into the woods to be shot? Or stabbed, like Ian, our throats cut ear-to-ear?

Now, like the night on the breakwater, everything became vivid—the sharpness of the briars, the gleam of the poison ivy, the corrugated texture of the bark on the oaks and pines, and the smell of heat and dry brush. The forest fire danger was “off the charts,” the radio had reported. I wondered, at this moment, was my mother painting? The thought of my mother painting brought tears to my eyes; it seemed like the saddest thing in the world.

We reached the steam bath. It was still fired up; genies of steam were seeping from its door. Our clothes, like rescuers, lay snagged on the same tree.

Roberto seized his.

“No,” someone said.

Beside the entrance to the steam bath stood Jason—and Edward, Arthur’s treacherous treasure. Edward was wearing his tie-dyed shirt and the gym shorts made of that icy-blue fabric, the clothing he’d chosen for Arthur’s party that grotesque Memorial Day weekend weeks ago. So he had abandoned the fundamentalists, just as he had abandoned Arthur—and his mother and these people in the past. It was part of his character, abandonment. Edward shifted from season to season, like the sandbars, like the shoals, of Cape Cod.

“No,” Edward repeated.

“What do you mean, No?” Roberto asked.

With the last courage in my system, I blurted, “Is Chloe here, Edward? Is Chloe Hilliard here? What in God’s name do you want with that little girl?”

“There is no Chloe here,” Edward stated.

“We just want to leave,” Roberto said.

“You must be cleansed first,” Edward said. He nodded toward the steam bath. “Go inside.”

They weren’t going to shoot us, they were going to scald us to death, they were going to scald us to death in the steam.

“Go inside,” Edward repeated, his voice the only cold thing at that moment. Then, lightly, he touched my shoulder—tentatively, as if to make sure that I was real. It was eerily like my gesture at St. Harold’s years ago, my touching Ian Drummond in the chapel.

“You’re a fool doing this,” I told Edward. “After what happened to your brother.”

He smiled, in his self-effacing way, the geisha’s smile he’d used at Herring Cove to beckon men to his blanket so he could rebuff them. Then he walked briskly up the trail until the vegetation closed over him and he was gone.

“Gentlemen,” someone said, “we don’t have all day.” It was Jason, in his Armani. But it was the Enforcer and his gun coming closer that made Roberto and me obey when the Enforcer commanded, “Give back our clothing.”

Naked, I felt that much more defenseless. There were two of us and two of them, but we stood still as the dolls in Mrs. Mikkonen’s shop. Was the Enforcer’s the last face Ian had seen? Would I die at the hands of the man who’d killed my brother?

Jason opened the door to the steam bath.

“Cleansing,” the Enforcer said.

As if we needed to be cleansed to
leave
their property.

Steam rushed from the door, in scalding, lethal billows.

We’d been allowed to eat the same food as the Master not because we were on his level, but because we’d been sentenced to die. We’d been sentenced to die before I’d derided their stone or demanded they free the chained girl. The Enforcer was waiting for Freya’s signal. They had meant to kill us all along.

“We just want to leave,” Roberto said. “We’ll leave you alone, we won’t say a word.”

The Enforcer advanced toward us, pointing the gun. In desperation, I remembered he had let Edward go. If Edward’s story was true, he had assaulted him, raped him,
but
ultimately he had let Edward go
,
let him flee to Provincetown, where Arthur found him, sleeping on the sand on the beach.

The Enforcer jabbed the gun into my ribs so that my heartbeat amplified, filling my chest.

Roberto ducked into the steam bath and I followed.

Steam scalded my skin, made my whole body sting like a fresh cut.

“It hurts to breathe!” Roberto yelled.

We heard a bolt fall outside and lock the door.

I felt the skin around my nostrils begin scorching. “Get down,
get close to the floor!”

I thought the floor might be spared the rising heat, but the tile seared my hands and knees.

I found the altar through the thickening steam, but the potential weapons I’d seen during our “cleansing”—the iron tongs, the pokers, the jars of oils and herbs—had been confiscated.

“They’re going to kill us!” Roberto was yelling. “They’re going to kill us!”

I pulled him through the steam toward the entrance. I struggled to open to steam bath door, but the bolt defeated me. Scratching at the spongy wood got me nothing but splinters for my efforts. I could feel the arteries in my head pounding. In desperation, I threw my weight against the door again and again until something in my shoulder snapped.

Then, suddenly, coolness slapped my face. I wasn’t even aware the door was yielding; that was obliterated by the injury to my shoulder, a white-hot searing that made me urinate.

Someone seized my wrists, saying, “Hurry up, damnit!” and pulled me upright. It was Jason. He yanked out a gasping Roberto.

My chest and arms were, red, scarlet, as though I’d sustained a hideous sunburn. My eyes were runny, but, once they cleared, I could see the Enforcer sprawled still on the ground, next to his sunglasses and some tongs from the altar.

“Get dressed and hurry the fuck up!” Jason told us.

Baffled, stinging, grateful, we complied.

“He’s unconscious,” Jason said. “I just hit him.”

He was helping us, God knows why. He hadn’t pulled us from the steam to stab or shoot us. We pulled on our clothes. He showed us a trail that led to Old Barn Road. “There a gap in the fence there.”

“My car—”

“They abandoned it in Welfleet hours ago,” Jason said. “You were considered dead meat as soon as you drove onto the grounds. You’ve caused me enough trouble, now get the hell out of here!”

“What about Chloe? Have you got the little girl?”

“Get out of here!” screamed Jason.

We ran. My clothing chafed my scalded skin. The trail was confusing—overgrown, blocked by fallen branches, and, once, by a rotting possum, swollen with death. How close we’d come, I thought, how close we’d come to losing our lives.

At least water was not a factor interfering with our escape. The brooks we crossed were mere gullies of muddy stones; swamps, expanses of muck and straw. My calves cramped, I felt awful. “Rest, just a minute,” I begged Roberto, but, with his legs strengthened by bicycling as a courier, he refused. “Not yet. In a while.”

So, visualizing the Enforcer regaining consciousness, I ran. Why had Jason helped us? I kept wondering. Had the Master changed his mind and decided to spare us? No, of course not; Jason had stopped the Enforcer by force, by attacking him with the tongs, by risking his own life.

I was faltering again when Roberto plunged through a field of ragweed to call out, “Here’s the fence!”

Chapter Forty

But where in God’s name was the gap in the fence Jason had mentioned? We’d forged our own route from the woods through the ragweed. We traced our steps back to the woods then saw the answer. To the left, the ragweed was matted flat by foot traffic, matted like the hair of a dog with mange. We followed this path then located the gap in the fence, low, close to the ground, used by youngsters from the cult, I guessed. We had to squirm beneath the fence—worried that it might be electrified, which it wasn’t—tearing our shirts on the talons of metal, on the vandalized chain-mail guarding the Master’s kingdom.

But then we were free! We had reached Old Barn Road. I could’ve kissed its asphalt.

I wanted to contact the police the way someone stranded in the Sahara wants greenery and water. We saw a house a short distance away, and, aware of our bedraggled state, asked to wait in the back yard, under a pear tree with the hornets, while the baffled owner telephoned the police.

***

Roberto sat in the station, drinking cup after cup of spring water while I recounted our story and my theories about our day, Ian’s death, and the probability the Master had kidnapped little Chloe. One policeman, Sergeant Colby, summed up, “So you’re saying that these people tried to kill you?”

“That’s a fact.” Roberto channeled his impatience into crushing his paper cup.

“Why were you visiting these people in the first place?” Sergeant Colby asked me.

“They killed my brother, Ian Drummond—”

“
And you visited them? Believing that?”

“The man with the gun, their Enforcer, killed Ian. Clark, the schizophrenic, couldn’t have done it, he was too incompetent.”

Sergeant Colby, who had also been drinking a Dixie cup of water, began scraping the wax from its rim. He chose his words with equal care. “There are some solid leads in the Drummond murder and Hilliard kidnapping. In regard to the situation at the former Royall property, that is a very volatile group of people, with a history—”

“They tried to scald us to death!” I shouted. My head was throbbing as though I was still in that hellish steam. “There are children being abused—”

“We know,” Colby said, “we’ve heard these allegations. Yet you say this African American—”

“Saved our lives,” Roberto said.

Sergeant Colby stopped his scraping. “Isn’t that a bit contradictory?”

“What about Chloe?” I asked.

“We hope that case will be resolved shortly,” Colby said.

“Resolved” sounded grim.

Did the police believe us? They advised us to avoid the cultists at all costs. It would be best, in fact, if we could lie low a few days, stay clear of our customary Provincetown haunts in case the Master’s protégés tried to pursue us. My Volvo, ditched in Welfleet, according to Jason, had yet to be found, but the police would give us a ride anywhere in Truro.

Barton Daggett, the rotund St. Harold’s alumnus who’d been at Ian’s party, owned property in Truro. It was ten-ten, a bit late, but I phoned him from the police station and told him quite truthfully that my car had been stolen and asked to spend the night at his house and bring a friend.

He was most hospitable, picking us up in his Alfa Romeo. He’d shed a few pounds since our last meeting and developed a teak-dark tan. I withheld the exact circumstances of my Volvo’s abduction until I was deep into a vodka Collins, on Barton’s back porch. Like Ian, Barton was an amateur military historian. The walls of his porch were a virtual armory of swords with gleaming blades and degenerating tassels. Insects, moths and mosquitoes, clung to the exterior of the porch’s fine black screens, unable to reach the light or flesh they craved.

As the vodka worked to loosen my tongue, I felt compelled to confess what had happened to us earlier. We were, after all, in hiding under Barton’s roof, possibly luring killers to these premises. Draining the last of my drink, I told our tale. Barton registered no more reaction than Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, on the cover of the book of Matthew Brady photographs on the coffee table in front of us, next to a pipe, an ashtray, and a pewter lighter shaped like the battleship
Maine.

“…So we barely escaped with our lives,” I concluded. Then I remembered: “At Ian’s party, weren’t you complaining about these people being disruptive?” And, looking at the insects clinging to the fragile black screens separating the porch from the outdoors and the dark woods crowding the yard, I remembered, with fright, that this house abutted the Master’s fiefdom.

“Indeed I was complaining and I was
wrong,
” Barton stated.

Roberto, exhausted, was sleeping in a big Eastlake rocker.

“I spoke in haste when I characterized them as ‘hippies.’ A good number of their company are crackerjack scientists, including their leader.” Barton lit his pipe with the battleship
Maine.
His next thought seemed inspired by the lighter. “Once, I would have said they weren’t worth the powder to blow them up with, but a month ago, I changed my mind.” Barton certainly had his Gothic touches; that might allow him to excuse some of the Master’s behavior.

The screens on the porch were soft; they belled in the hot wind and could easily be cut. And we could easily be watched, from the woods. I couldn’t believe Barton as he puffed his pipe and speculated that our experience with the Master was “probably some sort of misunderstanding.” He’d had words with a man named Badr, “a fellow about seven feet tall,” the Giant, surely; they’d argued about noise, about their shooting in the woods, culling deer what with the Lyme disease outbreak. “Of course, I agreed with their constitutional right to bear arms. It was their firing them in proximity to my house I objected to, but we settled things amicably enough.”

Barton had to admit he’d been as prejudiced as we were before he’d been invited for a tour of their compound by a lovely woman about his age, Freya. Had I seen their greenhouses and the laboratories in the concrete, modern building? They were growing Inca corn from kernels found frozen with a mummy, a child sacrifice in the Andes.

“Yes, they’re keeping up the tradition. They sacrifice children today—and castrate adults.”

“I didn’t get that intimate—”

“How did this tour of yours come about?” I asked, not having found these people initially welcoming.

“Oh, I’d threatened to sue the pants off them,” Barton said. “I mean, they’d caused a godawful racket, all that gunfire, but Ian told me they were essentially harmless. We discussed them at his St. Harold’s bash.”

But the Master claimed Ian had swindled him, I said, on the deal about selling St. Harold’s.

“Oh, yes,” Barton said. “They’d thought Ian concealed the fact that the meadow adjoining Lake Chiccataubett couldn’t be developed because the bunny-huggers had snooped around and found some damn endangered plant. But Ian claimed it was all a misunderstanding. He hadn’t known that plant even existed.”

“They killed him,” I said.

“No.” Barton kept smoking his pipe. “They’re hardly killers, just a band of idealists who take
Prince Valiant
too seriously. Why Ian and their leader, Mr. Big, go way back.”

“Mikkonen.”

“Enormous man. Very brilliant.”

“Did you meet him?”

“Very briefly, in his lab. He was engrossed in some problem about their aquaculture business, raising tilapia.”

The tanks of rotting fish in our old chapel.

“Ian knew Mikkonen from his mother’s shop in…what’s that tourist trap?”

“Rockport.”

Roberto snored peacefully. More and more insects were collecting on the outsides of the screens.

“Correct, Rockport. I ate some bluefish there that was out of this world.”

“Ian knew Mikkonen—”

“Because of Papa’s sticky fingers. Papa Drummond would come strolling into Mrs. Mikkonen’s shop and clip things, forget to pay for things. Bad form.”

“Dementia, Alzheimer’s.”

“Well, one day, a few years back, Mikkonen and Ian crossed paths when Ian stopped by to return a Cossack doll Daddy had lifted…” Barton seemed to consider this whole history a string of amusing
faux pas
. “But it wasn’t real estate or kleptomania that brought Ian and Mikkonen together. It was God.”

He was relishing my skepticism.

“I know spiritual is about the last adjective you’d couple with the Drummond clan, but Ian came to me, he sat right in that chair—” He pointed to where Roberto was now snoring.

“When? This year?”

“Last year, last June.”

When Ian allegedly was in San Francisco. Had the Master’s story about Ian seeking spiritual nourishment been true?

Barton blew smoke from his pipe on a mosquito that had breached the screens and was circling his arm. “Ian told me he found Mikkonen poised to make a killing in biotechnology. But Mikkonen offered Ian something more.”

“Like what?”

“Something he’d never found in that competitive family where everyone was always chasing some cup or blue ribbon. A sense of peace.” Barton stated it as a kind of challenge. Barton said Ian had been “instructed in meditation” by Mikkonen, that he’d even attended retreats at the Truro compound.

“Before or after their quarrel about the land, about St. Harold’s?”

“Before, I believe. Sorry, I didn’t offer you a refill—”

“Did you tell any of this to the police?”

“Heavens, yes!” Barton said. “I hightailed my way to the Provincetown police the morning poor Ian was found! But they seemed preoccupied with those Christian Soldiers, they thought Ian’s murder was some sort of ‘hate crime.’”

I couldn’t believe what Barton was telling me, confirming Ian’s links to the Master, and, incredibly, confirming that the police knew all about these links all along. So why hadn’t they arrested Mikkonen, or connected Clark to Mikkonen and confirmed who he was, linked their John Doe in the pauper’s grave with the panhandlers and that massive man who’d ordered us scalded? Barton showed no reaction when I’d quoted Mikkonen claiming Ian was seriously ill. I mentioned it again: “Did Ian have cancer?”

He slapped a mosquito on his arm. “Ian was as healthy as a horse,” Barton said. “Look how he’d built himself up. He was what your generation calls buffed.”

“That might have been steroids.”

“Ian never mentioned any health problems to me.”

“Did he mention knowing an Edward Babineaux? Before this summer?”

Barton was flicking the battleship
Maine
lighter, but it had run out of fluid and was failing to produce a flame. “He didn’t mention any Edward at all.”

“How about a Paul?”

Barton shook his head, just as Roberto was blinking awake. “What time is it? I think I may have dozed off.”

I was sure I would spend the night awake, but fatigue overpowered me and I got nine hours of deep, dreamless sleep, in a four-poster bed with mahogany pineapples and a thermal blanket. I actually needed the blanket due to the aggressive air-conditioning. Roberto, beside me, claimed the cold kept him awake, his San Juan blood felt frozen.

Barton offered to let us remain with him, but I refused. “Where else can we go?” Roberto asked, using one of Barton’s disposable razors, standing at the bathroom sink wearing nothing but a foamy beard of shaving cream.

“What’s the least likely place we could go?” I wondered aloud, rubbing my showered body with one of Barton’s heavy towels, which could absorb a monsoon.

Just then a loud rap on the bathroom door made me jump. “The police are here, they’ve found your missing car!” Barton reported.

I’d braced myself for vandalism, for slashed upholstery and the radio ripped from the car, but my Volvo, found on Orcutt Road, Welfleet, was in pristine condition. In fact, it had been washed, in defiance of the ban due to the drought. And the theoretical puncture was, of course, invisible.

We agreed to leave Cape Cod. My apartment, Arthur’s house, the White Gull were all known to people like Edward, in league with Mikkonen. Yet I also felt responsible to tell Arthur all that we’d learned, for his safety and “for the record”—should anything happen to us.

We decided to phone Arthur later that morning, after first driving directly to Boston. I was doing sixty on Route 6, in Suicide Alley, that section of highway where you’re requested to keep your lights on even during the day, where the road is so narrow, one lane in each direction, a slot banked by high sandy hills. We were listening to music then the Boston news, ragged with static: “…A hiker in Provincetown made a grim discovery early this morning. He found the body of a young girl in the Province Lands…” Then the sound crackled off, as I pounded the radio and went numb then alert with panic. “…not known at this point whether the body is that of little Chloe Hilliard…”

I almost steered into the oncoming traffic, but Roberto yelled, so I braked, sending a pile of roadmaps from the dashboard into his lap. Instinctively, I turned the up volume of the radio, but the story already was over, succeeded by a commercial about a water park.

We turned around at the first opportunity, then roared back toward Provincetown. “There must be some mistake,” Roberto said.

“The mistake was the police not raiding those crazies.” I surged past a Chevy with Utah plates. I wasn’t even seeing the road ahead, I was bombarded by images of Chloe—dipping her mermaid into Arthur’s fishpond, collecting pebbles by the harbor, rubbing against Roberto’s legs…And I fought awful images—the young girl chained to the tree in Truro and the body in the woods in the Province Lands.

Finally we took the left into Provincetown proper so that dunes and ponds gave way to shingle houses with clotheslines and trellises of roses. Double-parking, blocking Commercial Street, I banged on Miriam’s front door until my knuckles hurt.

“She’s away!” I became aware of somebody calling. It was a woman with red braids, sanding something in the front yard of the house across the street. “You’re not a reporter, are you?”

“Of course not.”

“Miriam is at Arthur’s, the poor thing. What kind of monster—”

People in cars blocked by mine leaned on their horns. I responded by raising my middle finger.

Near MacMillan Wharf, we were delayed when a drag-queen, bulky and masculine as the Statue of Liberty, complete with silver lamé robe and tinfoil torch, crossed the street. She was followed by Superman and Mr. Peanut. Of course, I’d forgotten! Roberto pre-empted me by explaining, “Carnival.”