Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery Read online

We drove through utter darkness on either flank. The moon was up and the sky starry, but they seemed to bring no light down to the road. I kept expecting to pass a gas station, a convenience store, a private dwelling, a trailer, a hovel, but there was nothing human in sight except bullet-pocked road signs. Even though there were no abused, amoral, Glock-toting thirteen-year-olds out in that forest, no commuter-crazed pedestrian-killers from New Jersey, no psychosis at all, the darkness was still disorienting me. I decided to engage Dwight in conversation.

  “What are you captain of, Dwight?” I asked.

  “Not much now. Lobstered offshore all my life, but last winter I couldn’t face the cold no more. Man kids himself he’s tough enough to take it, but no, he ain’t. I stayed inshore this year. I’m gonna quit it altogether next year.”

  I had been thinking about doing a little boating myself. Lately, I’d been reading nautical literature, but I hadn’t done much actual boating. I asked him some questions about lobster boats and lobstering, and he asked me about life in New York City, which he kept calling the Big Apple. Dwight had always wanted to go to the Big Apple. In fact, when he was a kid he wanted to be a tugboat captain in New York Harbor, but he’d never been there. Later, he said, “We got a little problem with tonight’s lodging.”

  “What?”

  “Well, it’s too late to go out to the island, and there ain’t suitable lodging here on the mainland. This ain’t a big tourist area. I could take you up to the Double-O Truck Stop on the highway, but it’s two hours away, and you wouldn’t like it none, anyway. Drunk and lonesome, listenin’ to sad songs, them truckers start stabbin’ one another dead about this time of night.”

  “I think Clayton mentioned a bed and breakfast—”

  “That’d be the Indian Pipes Lodge. But it burned down.”

  “It did?”

  “Just last week. It’ll turn out to be somebody with the volunteer fire department. That’s usually a wintertime thing, but economy’s been slow—”

  “What is?”

  “Your arson by volunteer firemen. They get family troubles, financial difficulties, they sometimes set fires in order to put ’em out. Feel good about themselves as fire fighters. Most of those fellas is salt of the earth, but every so often one goes a tad funny. The wife’d be thrilled if I was to bring home the R-r-ruff Dog and his person, but you wouldn’t like that either. The Selfs is havin’ a big reunion. A Self reunion ain’t as dangerous as the Double-O, but it’s just as loud, and they’d never give your dog any peace.”

  “Are you a Self?”

  “No, I’m a Reed. There ain’t any more Reeds, but there’s still Selfs. Even out on Teal Island.”

  “Teal Island?”

  “Well, Kempshall Island. Used to be Teal Island. Until old Kempshall bought up the whole thing and put the families off who’d been out there two hundred years. Renamed it after himself. Now, nobody’s got anything against his son. Clayton was an innocent little boy at the time. I ain’t alone in sayin’ we’d like to have Clayton come up for a visit sometime.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Who?”

  “Clayton’s father.”

  “Compton. Compton Kempshall.”

  “He’s dead now?”

  “Can’t say. Nobody ever saw him again after his mansion burned down.”

  All this time, we had passed nothing at all.

  “If anybody defied him, he’d ruin that person.”

  “How?”

  “The bank’d call in the loan on his lobster boat, for example. Or he’d start havin’ IRS problems. Like that. Grown men feared Compton Kempshall. He put up a sign in town sayin’ that men must tip their hats and ladies must curtsy when they pass him.”

  “Did people do that?”

  “No, they closed the town. Everything closed. People from away need local resources, even if it’s just a roll of toilet paper… People’s spirits was being damaged treated like that. It was like occupation by the Nazis.”

  “Who lives on Teal Island now, anybody?”

  “No, there’s a few. See, when Clayton went twenty-one, he returned all the deeds to the original holders from when his old man bought them up. A branch of my wife’s family lives out there. You’ll be sharin’ a cove with Hawley Self. Plus there’s some summer people who bought in over the years, but it’s not a crowded island. I know you people from away like your solitude when you can get it.” Dwight didn’t say “from away” disparagingly, and I felt relieved at that. I wanted welcome. Welcome, especially at night, always bolsters the inner resources.

  The road grew curvy. I began to worry about Jellyroll’s stomach, but he seemed okay, sniffing the window crack. It was too cool to keep the window down.

  “Do you have any children?” I asked.

  “Yes, I do. My daughter’s tryin’ to make it as a country singer in Nashville, Tennessee, and my son is growing salmon smolts up near Burntcoat Head in the Minas Basin. Gettin’ back to the question of tonight’s lodging, I’m doing a little yacht sitting right now. This Belgian fellow owns it, but he’s off in Belgium for the economic conference. There’s nobody aboard.”

  “Stay on a boat?”

  “Well, just for tonight.”

  “Terrific.”

  “Oh, you like that idea? Okay, good.”

  The town of Micmac was a mystery in the dark. It was tiny, that much was clear. Captain Dwight drove right out onto the dock. The ancient wooden beams and pilings clattered and groaned. It was a big, tarry industrial dock with full-fledged trucks parked on it. Salty workboats were tied to it, and at the end a small, brightly lighted ship was loading pallets of things. Jellyroll peed on a piling.

  I didn’t see my yacht until Captain Dwight walked us to the edge of the dock directly above it. The Belgian’s boat was huge. It was a ketch or a yawl. I couldn’t exactly remember which was which, but anyway it had two masts. Everything—deck, masts, cabin, booms, rails—was made of wood and richly varnished. The elegant curves made the Belgian’s boat look more like sculpture than a utilitarian object.

  “Hardest part of sittin’ this vessel,” said Dwight, “is keepin’ the bird shit off the varnish.”

  I giggled. I liked this place. I felt safe, bright, and wide awake. I felt that I was breathing off tension, filter-feeding on the air, expelling toxic waste.

  “Got a spring tide tonight,” remarked Dwight. “There’s a ramp over here—” The ramp led down to a floating dock against which the Belgian’s boat was actually tied.

  “Go,” I said to Jellyroll, who was taking in the sights with his nose. Delighted and surprised, he hopped aboard the boat. His toenails skittered on the wooden deck.

  I couldn’t see many details, but in places the varnish sparkled as if it had its own independent light source. Dwight led us back along the deck to the cockpit. In the dark I kicked a protrusion of some sort—there are many protrusions on boats—and I tried hard not to moan with the pain.

  The tongue-and-groove carpentry in and around the circular cockpit was dizzyingly complex. We went below, Dwight turning on the lights, into a mahogany sitting room with a buttoned banquette around a table decorated with a compass rose that was made of different-colored wood inlays.

  “This is some boat,” I remarked.

  “Yep, nothing wrong with this boat a chain saw wouldn’t fix.” He led us down another set of varnished steps to a bedroom with wood walls and round portholes. The smells were heady and complex.

  “You don’t like this kind of boat, Captain?”

  I think his nose wrinkled, but it was hard to tell with a face that rugged. “Sure I like it. Who wouldn’t like it? The only guy who wouldn’t’s the guy taking care of it. The marine environment eats stuff like this, not so bad as in the tropics, but it still eats wood boats. If you listen close as you go to sleep, you’ll hear the molecules chomping on the hull.” He laid a set of towels and bed sheets out on the built-in chest of drawers. “There won’t be any provisions in the boathouse. I co
uld pick up a few things on my way in to get you tomorrow. Eggs, milk, like that. I’m sure the Selfs’ll fix you up with enough food for everybody you ever met.”

  I passed Captain Dwight two hundred dollars cash.

  “What’s this? Clayton’s already sent me a check.”

  “Yeah, but this is for me.”

  “I’ll bet we can work something out, Mr. Deemer.”

  “Artie.”

  “I’ll be back first thing in the morning, Artie.”

  SEVEN

  The Belgian’s boat had rocked us gently, creaking every now and then, wavelets lapping our bilge. We slept in peace and awoke new men. I could dig this whole littoral, nautical ethos with no strain at all. It was only six when we awoke. 0600. I never awoke at 0600. We bounded up the ladder into the cockpit. Well, technically, Jellyroll didn’t bound. He tried, but dogs are not equipped to bound up varnished ladders, so I gave him a boost from behind. Once up, we stood in the cockpit, our heads pivoting, absorbing our new environment, I with my eyes, he with his nose.

  Thanks, Clayton.

  The harbor was postcard material, yet there were no condo time-shares, no ye olde frozen yogurt and macramé shoppes, nothing whatsoever of popular culture. Except Jellyroll and me. There were some incongruous folks up the hill on the other side of the pier, but I didn’t pay them much notice.

  I sat down in the back of the boat behind the steering wheel and breathed deeply. So did Jellyroll. I took the wheel in hand, stood behind it, fantasizing, like a little boy, that I was driving the big boat in heavy weather, sailing hard, water coming over the bow…I leaned out over the stern to see what her name was. Her name was Names. Hmm. Evocative, in a moody sort of European existential way. Everywhere I looked, buttery light sparkled on varnish and water.

  We were tucked into a deep, round harbor, rocky and wooded with an equally round granite island lying just beyond the mouth as if it had been cookie-cuttered out of the mainland to make the harbor, then placed seaward a diameter to protect it. Shorebirds went about their business. Fractious herring gulls, beaks wide, screamed in each other’s faces. Cormorants dried their wings on various vertical perches. Waders I couldn’t identify, plovers or sanderlings, ruddy turnstones maybe, flitted in and out with the little wavelets on the gravel shore. I wondered if I could buy a bird book around here.

  The shoreline seemed to consist of truncated and cracked rock shelves that slipped away beneath the surface at a shallow angle. Pink and black and white veins flowed through the granite. Why had this sublime little harbor not been nullified by hucksters, theme park moguls, image meisters, marketeers, and mass media shitheads? Maybe it was too far north to be vulnerable.

  None of the stocky, seamanly fellows in high rubber boots unloading boats around us, throwing boxes of ice up onto the dock, seemed even to recognize Jellyroll. A forklift driver glanced our way but didn’t show a glimmer of recognition, even as he nodded at us. I wondered if that was because of Jellyroll’s disguise or because they’d never seen him before.

  The smells were rich, almost psychoactive. Jellyroll’s nostrils were going a mile a minute. Fish, salt water, wood, creosote, low tide. Jellyroll with all that canine olfactory gear must have feasted on the newness of it. He looked up at me with a big smile on his face.

  A man with powerful round shoulders and a weathered-granite face pushed a loaded wheelbarrow past the Names. It contained coils of greasy cable and massive metal fittings of some sort. “Mornin’, Cap’n,” he said cheerfully, passing.

  “Morning,” I said.

  That was a friendly little exchange. The “cap’n” irony didn’t escape me, but what the hell, smartass irony is much better than psychotic malice and senseless hostility. Delicate morning light, sweet salt breeze from the ocean, professional fisherfolk who’d never seen a R-r-ruff Dog commercial, this would do fine for a decade or two. The man wheeled the cable to the little ship at the end of the dock. From aboard, crewmen swung out a wooden boom to block-and-tackle the coils over the rail. I breathed deeply and wished Crystal were here. I always like to hear her responses to things.

  Micmac consisted of four wooden stores, one with a new red paint job, standing side by side along the road that ran perpendicular to the dock. Micmac huddled around the harbor, and the dock was the focus of the harbor. The stores all had back entrances onto a wooden walkway connected to the dock. The half-dozen houses I could see all faced the water. In the old days, I imagined, life came from the sea. The continental forest to the west meant darkness and death. No wonder people imagined witches and hassled Hester Prynne.

  The people up on the hill on the far side of the harbor were not moving. At first, I took them for members of a bus tour: Perillo’s Picturesque Harbors and Ports. But they weren’t just passing through after grabbing a few snapshots; they were acting like this was their destination. Besides, they weren’t looking at the harbor.

  On their side of the dock, the circular shoreline continued its jagged bend, but the land rose abruptly from the water to form a stubby bluff with a craggy top and grassy slopes. There was a small, level, meadowy plateau on the slope. Something was happening on that meadow, something out of step with life down here.

  They were clearly not locals—they were from farther away than me. They were all looking up at the same thing, like tourists at a rocket launching. All I saw was backs and craned necks. Whatever they were looking at was located up among the rocks and small crags on the top of the bluff. Some of the lookers had climbed beyond the plateau to the place where the grade grew too steep to walk upright. They shielded their eyes from the new sun with their hands or their hats. People pointed. A handful looked through binoculars.

  Was it a jumper?

  Nobody down here on the dock was paying the crowd any attention at all. Anyway, the bluff was too short for suicide. This would be the place to jump if you meant to tear some ligaments in your knee. The scene jangled me. There was something weird about it. I didn’t need to come this far for the weird. I could get weird any time I wanted it just by walking up to Broadway…Maybe they were bird-watchers here to spot some obscure species resting en route to spawning grounds in the High Arctic…

  Others were arriving singly and in family units. Some carried aluminum folding chairs and Igloo coolers. What were they all looking at? They had turned their backs on the harbor, which must have been picturesque from above, to peer up at naked rocks. Geologists?

  There were children, too. Some children watched as intently as the adults, but a few rolled in the grass. A couple of dogs wrestled. Here and there, people poured liquid from thermos bottles or ate pieces of fruit as if picnicking, yet nobody was relaxed. They were tense, expectant. They pointed up there for the newcomers. And again for each other.

  “The Jesus people,” said the wheelbarrow man heading back empty.

  “The Jesus people?”

  He stopped, set down his barrow, wiped his forehead on his sleeve, stood for a while watching the people on the hill, his back toward me. From the cockpit I looked down on his bald spot. “Yeah, that’s what folks have taken to calling them. The Jesus people. But then I guess they got the right.”

  “What right?”

  “At least until they create an unsanitary condition.”

  “What are they doing up there?” I asked.

  “Waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “Salvation.” He picked up his wheelbarrow, but I didn’t want to leave it at that.

  “Why here?”

  “They got a sign. They got a sign in the fungus.”

  “Fungus?”

  “Lichens. That’s all a lichen is, fungus.”

  “What was the sign?”

  “The face of Jesus. Up on them rocks. Sort of in profile. There’s goin’ to be an unsanitary condition dependin’ how long it takes to get saved.”

  “How did they know that there was a face in the lichens? I mean, in the first place.”

  “Goin’ to be a parking proble
m pretty soon.” He walked away.

  I watched the Jesus people assemble. I hoped at least a few of them would be saved. I took Jellyroll for a pee.

  I didn’t get any coffee because the tiny restaurant was jammed with customers. I peeked in. It had a planked wooden floor and lovely glass and mahogany counters, little round tables with ice-cream parlor chairs, all occupied by people who would probably recognize Jellyroll.

  He peed in the grassy strip beside the road. Traffic was beginning to congeal on this the only road into Micmac. I saw license plates from ten different states. Had they all come to be saved? A few people in the crawling traffic showed glimmers of recognition, so I hustled Jellyroll back toward the dock, toward the people who’d never heard of him. He didn’t care, it was all new and exciting to him. But I’d have to forget the coffee, and that made me a little edgy. I wasn’t certain I could be responsible for my attitude without coffee.

  There was a marine supply store at the head of the dock. We went in. There were no displays inside or any other attempt at marketing. Heavy-duty chain was displayed by size in piles on the undulating wood floor. The old salts who shopped here knew what they wanted, and they didn’t want a load of advertising bullshit. Some very esoteric stuff was stacked here and there, suspended from wall hooks and left in packing boxes. I couldn’t even guess at the purpose of most of the objects hung on pegboards or stacked on olive-drab metal shelves. Oars, boathooks, fishing rods, antennae, and other long things lay across the rafters.

  “Mornin’, Cap’n,” said the wheelbarrow man with the big shoulders from behind a dusty counter.

  “Good morning,” I said. I liked that. Captain Deemer. “I’d like to buy a navigation chart of the local area.”

  He spun on his stool to a wooden chest with thin drawers, whipped one open, and in a single motion swept a big paper chart back up onto the counter. The air settled from beneath it. It was beautiful. The land was tan and the water blue. He rolled it up, banded and handed it to me.

  “Could I see those?” I pointed to a serious pair of binoculars in the case below the cash register. I supposed there were discount emporiums where the prudent seaman shopped. I’d pay top dollar here, but then people with wealthy dogs can engage in whimsy, while others must budget wisely, and still others live in pain and degradation. The world is not fair in that respect. I bought a top-o’-the-line nautical/military pair with a stout rubber covering, no metal exposed to the elements, but they were very big and heavy. These were the kind of binoculars you see around the necks of corvette captains on Discovery Channel documentaries about convoy escort duty on the Murmansk Run, not dudes with dogs from the Upper West Side, but I didn’t care.