The Fisher Boy (6 page)

“Are you leaving now?”

“Actually, I’m not.” I’d been ready to go for more than an hour.

“I’ve got to get back to Arthur’s.” Suddenly Edward was all responsibility. “I mean, those security people will be leaving pretty soon, and he won’t want to be all alone.”

He knew there was a shuttle between the bath house and town, costing all of one dollar.

“Hey,” he said, giving me his widest smile, “thanks for the ride to the beach.” Then he quickly dressed and packed up his things, Arthur’s things, and walked away.

I was picking the icing from an oatmeal cookie, worrying that my shins had gotten sun-burnt, when I heard someone call my name. It couldn’t be Edward, he was already miniature, far down the beach toward the parking lot.

“The other way!” the voice shouted.

Looking back toward Long Point, I saw Ian Drummond in the dunes.

“C’mere!” he called as dread flooded my system.

He was kneeling, his body hidden by the dunes and clumps of beach grass, that coarse grass that cuts your legs and stays green like conifers all winter. I hesitated, knowing I should yank on my pants, but if I did that, I’d just leave, head for the parking lot and ignore him. Exactly what most people would have done in my circumstances. After what had happened, after what he’d done.

“Come as you are,” Ian shouted, as if reading my mind.

He’d been drinking but didn’t sound completely polluted, the way he had the night of our show. He exerted a pull, not entirely due to his saving me in Gloucester. We were equals here on this naked sand and had unfinished business with each other that only we, alone, could conclude. This time there was no one to referee us, and Ian owed me contrition, an apology, for insulting my mother in public. As I walked across the sand that separated us—one of the longest walks of my life, even though it was two hundred feet or less—I actually wondered if this were some sort of ambush. Ian, after all, was the ambushing type.

“Mark, my man, welcome to my world.” He was as naked as I was, sitting on a towel in one of those hollows in the dunes that look like sand traps on golf courses. Hidden from the National Park rangers who sometimes patrolled the flat parts of the beach.

We hadn’t been naked together since prep school, in our pungent old gymnasium. For all his athleticism, for all his money and the ease it gave him, Ian had always been modest about his body, but it seemed that had changed now that he’d pumped himself up.

His chest was muscular in an exaggerated way, like some idealized ditch digger or dock worker in a WPA mural. He’d crossed his legs so that I couldn’t see whether he was aroused, but I confirmed my suspicion that he’d been drinking. A bottle of Russian vodka with St. Basil’s Cathedral on its label was propped against a wicker picnic hamper. Ian’s latest reading was an oversized paperback,
Chorus Against Fascism: The Greek Resistance During World War Two,
by Stavros Zarefes.

“Still reading about war?” I asked breezily, then regretted it. War was a poor opener, given our recent fight.

“It isn’t very good. He makes the Germans all but sub-human. The author obviously has an axe to grind. His uncle died being interrogated by German troops.”

Leave it to Ian to worry about demonizing Nazis.

“Have a seat. Don’t stand there on view for the Decency Patrol.”

I didn’t want to, not really, not my rational side. I kept remembering what he’d said that awful night of the performance at Quahog. His lip was still split, daubed with mercurochrome. Did that make us “even”? Could I ever be even with one of the Drummonds?

He pulled a peach, cold as a snowball, from his hamper. “Care for a fruit?”

“Thanks.” Saying that made it easier to sit on his towel.

I refused a Swiss Army knife to peel the peach.

“You’re buffed,” I said. Ian was tanning a caramel color, and shaving his chest; he was much less hairy than I’d remembered. He was handsome in a blond, heavy-jawed way, much more adult than, say, Edward. You can’t help but notice beauty, even in your enemies.

He inspected my groin. The wind sent granules of sand stinging against my body. Because I was conscious of him evaluating me, I was determined not to reciprocate. He uncrossed his legs, showcasing himself. He said, “It’s always good to get a rise out of people.”

He was going to play games. Very much in character.

“I saw you chatting up Arthur’s little protégé, his bit of beachcombing.” Then Ian crossed his legs, again censoring himself, again confusing me. His features tightened. “I haven’t been very nice to you, Mark.” He sighed while thrusting the vodka bottle in my direction. “I haven’t been nice to you since way back when. At St. Harold’s and in Gloucester, when we were kids.”

Feeling vindicated but slightly embarrassed, I took a slug of vodka.

“I’m sorry, man.” He never usually used “man” or other dated hipster slang, so perhaps this apology was equally bogus. He clapped his hands onto my shoulders so that he forced me to look directly into his face. He looked fatigued, gray around the eyes.

He squeezed my shoulders in a quick, confiding way, then drew me toward him so that our chests were touching. He licked at my ear and I could feel his hot breath as he nibbled my earlobe.

This is betrayal, I thought, of my mother whom he’d insulted, betrayal of all of my family, going back generations. But I took another swig of vodka, raw like paint thinner, down my throat. I remembered all he’d done, all he’d apologized for, then tried to stand but lost my balance.

My heart was pounding the way it does when my blood pressure gets taken, when the sleeve begins tightening, crushing my arm.

“Hey, man, relax.” A sexy leer transformed Ian’s face. I had another hit of vodka then another, my eighty-proof excuse for what was happening.

“It’s not like we’re total strangers,” he said. Conservative in his politics and clothing, he was liberal in ways of the flesh. His chest was like stone. He was far from the beefy stripling of St. Harold’s. I’d done my time with free weights and jogged hundreds of weedy-smelling miles by the Charles, but I felt thin and naive at that moment compared to Ian.

I was enjoying the sex, but felt a little detached as though I were hovering above us in the hot, salty air, like a soul afloat above its newly-dead body. I was confused about the work my mouth and hands were doing—to someone I half-despised.

After it was over, he became brusque. He stared out to sea. The coast, the crook of Cape Cod stretching toward Plymouth, was grayish-blue in the distance. He lit a cigarette and smoked with a kind of hunger.

“You never used to smoke,” I said, and he snapped, “Don’t get on my case, okay? I don’t need an extra physician. I’ve got enough people on my case already, so I sure as hell don’t need you!”

He slipped the Swiss Army knife back into his wicker hamper, then brushed me and the sand from his towel.

“You’re not staying to watch the sunset?”

“You sound like a greeting card.” Ian sounded more weary than hostile. He pulled on his clothes roughly, as if they’d misbehaved. “If you want to watch something, I suggest you watch little Edward.”

“Why? Are you after him too?”

Hugging the hamper and his beach things, he headed toward the breakwater and his house.
“Vaya con D
í
os,”
he said, over his shoulder.

I felt very alone, and a bit drunk from the vodka Ian had insisted I share. He’d left me the bottle, now my only companion on this empty beach.

Why didn’t I leave right then? Why didn’t I pack up and return to the Herring Cove parking lot? I stayed, I suppose, because there was something magical about the beach at that hour, the cooling sand, the ocean like quicksilver, so dense and metallic, and the full moon white as a shaman’s bone amulet in the pale sky.

I swam, and the water was frigid. Colder currents must have come roiling in from somewhere out toward George’s Bank. When I ran to my towel, I was shivering, so, to warm my gut, I finished the last of Ian’s vodka. I meant to watch the sunset but my insomnia had kicked in since that awful night at the club, since my disgrace. Sleep overwhelmed me.

When I awoke, it was dark, nine-forty by my watch. I was alone in a black windy landscape. I didn’t want to chance taking the beach route back what with the threats from those Christian Soldiers. Provincetown was in such a mess. I wanted the lights of the shore road in my sight as a beacon, a kind of comfort. So I decided to cross the granite breakwater—the long string of stones across the inlet separating Herring Cove Beach from the mainland.

The breakwater seemed to stretch forever in the moonlight. The tide was in: you could hear it gurgling and sloshing between the stones. There’s no mortar in the breakwater; it’s just heaped together, like the stone walls marking the pastures of long-dead farmers in rural New England. It’s tricky walking. The stones, quarry scrap, are the size of car hoods, tilted every which way and sometimes loose, so you have to watch every step, plan every move. Even in daylight, you could slip and twist an ankle or break your leg.

The breakwater is long, a good half-hour walk. Soon, I began tiring, but with hundreds of yards behind me, I’d already gone too far to turn back. I was also realizing the foolishness of my choice; at least the beach route was relatively flat. But here you could see the lights of Provincetown, glittering along the harbor shore in an uneven tide, as if each building had been gently, haphazardly, deposited by a different tide.

I was relieved, happy, to see a man in the distance. Not a basher, I hoped, not some hostile visitor from the west. He was on the right side of the breakwater, facing the harbor, leaning against an upright slab of rock. At night, at high tide, you see people fishing here, but I couldn’t make out his line or reel.

Days, people nodded as they crossed paths here, those coming to the beach and those leaving it. Mostly men took this route, a lengthy but direct hike to the gay nude section of Herring Cove. Here the sense of “community” actually rang true: the handsomest men gave you a cheery hello, forced to confront you face to face on this narrow, slightly hazardous structure.

This man was just the other side of a part in the breakwater where the sea had knocked some stones askew, so that, at high tide, you were compelled to wade through about five or six inches of water where the breakwater is intact but not as high as intended.

Removing my shoes, I sloshed across this gap, not longer than a yard or so. I was just about to joke about this gesture, but wasn’t sure this was the right thing to do. I’d have ignored a couple who were here at night, figuring they wanted privacy in the moonlight and salt air. And if this man was fishing, I didn’t want to startle him, to make him inadvertently jerk his line, then lose his catch.

So, I paused, momentarily, to study him. No, there was no fishing line, so it was safe to speak. “Beautiful night,” I started to say, but got only as far as the first syllable. I stopped when I saw his forearm—it was soaked in something thick, not the cold guts of bait…

He had a startled look, his eyes were open. So was his mouth. His throat was leaking streams of blood from a deep, ragged gash.

For an instant, I actually wondered whether he was still alive. That was before I realized who he was. His shirt was matted with blood, all but obliterating the Izod insignia. Instinctively, I reached out to touch his shoulder, but there was no place to touch, no part of his clothing or flesh not wet with thick arterial blood.

So, instead of touching him, I said his name out loud…

Chapter Eight

“…Ian.” I said his name in a whisper, as if frightened to confirm it.

Because, without a doubt, it was. I’d recognized the Rolex watch and the bodybuilder’s shoulders swelling the Izod shirt. I’d recognized those things before I’d admitted I recognized his face. I’d been postponing the decision it was him.

I couldn’t see his beach things, his hamper and towel and book on wartime Greece, but his killer could have taken these. The man who had saved my life had now lost his, and not to something impersonal like the sea or a car crash or a retrovirus. Someone had killed him. Someone had done this. Someone had stopped his existence.

I’d never seen so much blood. It was everywhere, gleaming in the light of the full moon. Blood had run down his bare legs, then dripped onto the granite slabs to collect in the grooves the stonecutters had drilled in the quarry. It looked as though someone had taken a saw to Ian’s throat and cut it through to the bone. There were wounds to his chest too; the fabric of his polo shirt was torn.

Nausea seized me like a tackle in football. I knew I was going to vomit, the way Miriam had at Arthur’s. But then I knew I couldn’t, that I’d be contaminating a crime scene. I’d also be leaving a clue that I’d been here. Because I knew, without a doubt, that I would not report this horror to the police. Everyone knew about my fight with Ian, my public brawl in the audience at Quahog. I would be Suspect Number One, or at least high on the list of people to question.

I pressed my arm against my mouth as bile rose then caught in my gut. To distract myself, I looked at the moon. Somehow, the spasms in my stomach eased. Then I covered my face with my fingers and began to cry, deep, ragged sobs until I bit my knuckle to make myself stop.

Someone had killed Ian, someone had cut his throat. I had to get out of here as soon as possible, but first I had to be sure that I didn’t touch anything, that I hadn’t touched anything.

Had I touched the stones? Had I braced myself against them in my shock, leaving fingerprints behind? I couldn’t remember. I stared at my hands. Thank God they were clean, thank God there wasn’t any blood on my hands.

Then I noticed my beach bag. I’d dropped it and scattered some of its contents: one towel, my sunglasses, the swim trunks I’d brought in case the National Seashore rangers came patrolling…A wind had risen, and the towel was whipping along the breakwater, as if to evade me. I stamped it down, then snapped it up. Then I grabbed my sunglasses and swim trunks.

Had I picked up everything? Yes, this was it. Had I touched anything else? Not as far as I could recall; I’d been careful. I bent to check a crevasse between the stones. Was that my comb in there? I reached…Then as I did, I felt something dislodge from inside the beach bag I’d wedged under my arm, something bright that caught the moonlight as it fell, hitting the stone then exploding into hundreds of incriminating fragments.

I swore, then wept. It was the vodka, the bottle Ian had given me. It had broken and fallen into the space between two chunks of granite. I picked up the neck of the bottle, still with its cap…For God’s sake, don’t cut yourself, I thought, don’t leave your DNA in addition to your fingerprints.

There was no comb, it was a twig of driftwood. I kept picking up glass. The more I picked up, the more seemed to appear, sparkling amid the straw, dried seaweed, and crumbly remnants of a styrofoam fishing float. My fingerprints were all over the bottle, I kept thinking; if I left even one shard of glass it could connect me to this murder. It could say,
he
was here, the man who fought Ian. I was stuffing the glass fragments into my beach bag. The label of the bottle, with its embossed design of St. Basil’s Cathedral, remained intact, clinging to the largest pieces of glass I could find.

There was no one in sight, but how soon would that change? I had to leave, I had to run. Clutching the beach bag, twisting it shut to prevent anything else spilling out, I leapt from slab to slab of rock and was soon out of breath. It was both dangerous and useless to hurry. It also looked suspicious, but then, anyone crossing the breakwater this night would look, in retrospect, suspicious. And if I
did
meet people—anyone—on the breakwater, what would I do? Ignore them? Speak, but turn away? They might continue along the breakwater far enough to find Ian, then remember my photograph, from our comedy troupe flyers, the ones I’d posted with Roberto all over town. In my mind, each flyer became a “Wanted for Murder” poster.

I met no one on the remainder of the breakwater, thank God, and my walk to my car in the Herring Cove lot was uneventful. I took the right side of the shore road, with the traffic to my back. When traffic approached me from the opposite direction, I hung my head, hiding my face, stared at my deck shoes.

Every step I took brought me farther away from murder, away from everything except the horror of the memory.