Who is Charlie Conti? (20 page)

Like I said, half the scallops I catch go to Captain Dawson, the other half I sell at the loading point. I make just about enough to pay for the cabin and to eat, then I come home and write until I fall asleep. A couple of nights back Captain Dawson invited me to his house to have dinner. He lives by himself in a yellow painted wooden house a short walk from the port. I’d been home to change after a day on the water. When I arrived at Captain Dawson’s house he was sitting outside on the low rocky outcrop in front of his porch, peeling potatoes and throwing the peel into the sea. He went in to get me a beer and then we sat outside peeling until it got too dark to see. It looked to me like we’d peeled a lot more potatoes than we needed but Captain Dawson said he always made a big seafood stew at the beginning of the week and that lasted him until the weekend. I was glad he’d invited me round on a Monday.

We went inside and I put some more wood on the fire and Captain Dawson picked a live blue lobster out of a bucket and dropped it into a pot of boiling water. After a few seconds there was a screaming noise but that’s just the air expanding and escaping through the joints in the lobster’s armour. I feel sorry for them being boiled like that, but I guess they die pretty fast.

Captain Dawson let the lobster cook for a while, then he took it out of the pot and cracked the bright orange shell and scraped the meat into the stew. He started cooking the scallops while I walked round the sitting room looking at the old framed photos. Captain Dawson had been with the Marines during the war. There was a photo of him looking young and handsome in white uniform on the deck of a destroyer.

Seeing me examining the photo he called out, ‘That’s the
Yorktown
. I was with her from ’43 to ’45. After that I was stationed in Naples, right up until ’49. Didn’t come home once. Wonderful place, Naples.’

‘Really? My mother was from Naples,’ I shouted back.

‘Huh?’

Captain Dawson’s hearing wasn’t so hot, so I shouted again, ‘My mother was from Naples.’

‘Wonderful place, Naples. Loved it there. We all did. Happiest time of my life.’

Captain Dawson placed the stew on the table and we started eating. It’s tiring to have to shout the whole time so we ate in silence but Captain Dawson didn’t seem to mind. Also I’d gotten to thinking of Naples and running around on the whitewashed roof, between the fluttering sheets, with the islands like spaceships
in the distance. It was a happy memory.

‘So Charlie, what yer writing?’

‘Actually I wanted to talk to you about that,’ I said. I had decided to ask Captain Dawson to do me a favour, but it was important that he didn’t misunderstand what I wanted him to do, or why I wanted him to do it. And it was an odd request. So I said: ‘I’ve been writing a true story, except there are some people who might not believe it. So I wanted to ask you, if I gave you a copy of the story, and if something happened to me – if I disappeared or whatever – do you think you could mail it to a publisher? I’ll give you the money and all. It’s something I want people to know about.’

‘You want me to mail your story to a publisher?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I mean, only if it’s not too much trouble. Maybe send one copy to a publisher in New York and one to a publisher in London. But I don’t think you’ll have to mail it – it’s only if something happens to me.’

‘What’s gonna happen to you?’

‘Nothing. I don’t think anything will happen to me. It’s just a back-up, that’s all. You know, just in case.’

‘If you’re in trouble Charlie, if you need help, then you just have to say. I’ll help.’ Captain Dawson looked at me and his eyes in that gnarled old head were bright and concerned and I realized that maybe he understood more about me than I had thought. Maybe he’d known all along that I just needed some time and some space to work things out, and that’s what he’d given me. I felt very fond of him at that moment. Then he said, ‘But if you just need me to mail a manuscript, then sure I can do that.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It means a lot to me.’

And it’s true, I really was grateful to Captain Dawson. He was the only person I could have asked.

I guess I’m about at the end of my story now. I know I’ve gone beyond the facts a bit, but facts by themselves don’t tell the whole story. Tomorrow I’m going to hitch a lift to Machias, then I’m going to make a couple of photocopies of everything I’ve written since I’ve been here and I’ll mail both copies to Captain Dawson. After that I’ll go to the police and tell them everything and hand over this account. I guess they’ll want to keep hold of me for a bit, while they inform the FBI and contact LAPD and all. Maybe Ray has already been caught and has confessed to everything and my bank accounts have been unfrozen and debts have been cancelled and I just get a caution for letting him sell blow in my house. That’s the best that could happen.

The worst is that the police don’t believe anything I say and they think this account is fictitious and that I’m responsible for the drug smuggling and for Jeanine’s disappearance and all. I get arrested and taken back to LA where I can’t pay bail. There’s a court case which I lose and I end up in the State Penitentiary without a cent to my name, or even a name to my name. That’s the worst that could happen.

There’s a third possibility too. Maybe the police don’t bring any charges against me, but they still don’t believe that I am Charlie Conti. Maybe they think I am a fantasist or a liar, and they won’t
think otherwise until Ray is caught and confesses. In that case I guess I’ll have to go back to LA to look for Ray myself. The thought scares me, scares me a lot in fact. But still, it may be what I have to do. There must be people who know where he is, his friends like Sammy or like the sketchy characters at the Hog’s Back. And if something happens to me, at least I know that Captain Dawson will mail my story to a publisher and maybe it’ll get published and then people will realize that this kind of stuff really goes on.

So, I guess if you’re reading this, and if you don’t know me, and you’re not in the FBI, well, then I guess things didn’t turn out as I’d hoped. If you’re reading this and you’re rich and you want to do a good thing, then maybe you’d send a Sopranos DVD box set to Izzy Conti at Happy Lives in Paradise, Maryland. It would be a very kind thing to do and I’d really appreciate it. I’d hate her to think that I’m the kind of person who doesn’t keep a promise.

Charlie Conti

Machiasport, Maine