The Last Summer of the Camperdowns (8 page)

You could see the ocean from my bathroom, a kind of simmering, limitless horizon of hope or doom, depending on the day. We were on top of a cliff, the highest point of a series of graduated dunes—the lowest point towered one hundred feet above the Great Beach, which was accessible only by a narrow wooden staircase built into the sand on a sheer vertical angle. The obliterating view of the ocean and the sky from the edge of the bluff was nothing short of astounding, made all the more so for its utter lack of announcement—you couldn’t see anything at all until you were right at the edge and then you could see nothing else—and left the uninitiated wordless.

“Edmund Burke would say that what you’re experiencing is true astonishment,” my father used to tell gaping first-time visitors. “The terror and beauty of the sublime.”

“As a bonus, along with the view, comes instructions on how to stuff a wild bikini,” my mother would add, flicking cigarette ash onto the sand. No one knew how to rob a moment of its majesty better than Greer.

On rare occasions, including that night, rogue winds and wild weather patterns would join forces with the tide and the ocean would surge to the top of the dune, making you feel as if you were perched on the dark edge of infinity, as if the whole world was a giant witch’s cauldron, gurgling black abyss, sky overhead filled with steam, ruination everywhere. Even now, the thought of it fills me with desolation.

I caught sight of myself in the old iron mirror that hung over the sink. My tomboy cap of tropical red hair, hair the color of a geranium, rude hair that openly defied gravity by growing up rather than down, shrieked back at me.

There was an enormous clap of thunder followed by a ghostly quiet. From across the road came the sound of a loud boom, then the high-pitched whinnying of horses. I called for my father. He was already midway down the stairs, my mother following. He reached the last stair and sprinted toward the living room. My mother froze on the landing. I rushed passed her and ran after him.

She shouted out my name. “Riddle!” She called for my father. “Camp!”

Boom! There was a stupendous crashing sound. Through the living room windows I could see the contorted silhouette of the big cormorant clock tree and far behind it the silvery outline of the yellow stable as the sky blew up, turned red and gold, black and gray, ash and cinder and flames soaring beyond the trees. The ocean behind us was roaring in the background, rising waters like claws scraping away at the containing range of cliffs.

“Jesus Christ!” my father said. “Gin’s yellow barn is on fire.” He reached for the phone.

“My God!” My mother’s arms dropped to her sides.

I was standing at the window when I heard the explosion. The roof blew off the stable and the walls burst away from their foundation, windows detonating like small-arms fire, horses screaming, the line of oak trees melting, my father running from the house, across the fields, racing toward the fire that had become the whole world.

Chapter Seven

I
T WAS THE FIRST TIME I HAD EVER SEEN A MAN CRY. NOT JUST
cry. Sob. Wail. Wring his hands, tear out his hair and foam at the mouth. Gurgling and roiling—you could have gone white-water rafting on all that hysteria—Gin was bent over at the waist, clutching his abdomen as if he were trying to keep himself from ripping apart at the seams. A thin string of drool ran from his lips to the kitchen floor. One of the dogs hurried over to lick the slick little pool of spit off the wood plank.

Reaching down—Gin was always conducting a cursory self-inspection regardless of his personal drama—he brushed away a nettle loosely clinging to the hem of his shorts. He was crisply turned out, sharply pleated, meticulously pressed—ludicrously outfitted as if for a Patagonian safari—although his most dangerous meeting that day was with my mother. Which just goes to show that some people are never too upset to pay attention to how they look.

“All that’s missing is the pith helmet and veil,” my father had said as he watched Gin walk down the driveway to the house a few minutes earlier, hysteria preceding him.

“Calm down,” Camp said, his hand at the base of Gin’s neck, one part comfort, one part strangulation. His tone was flat but I could tell that he was making some attempt to control his disdain. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, a remote outcropping of frozen tundra, the temperature in her immediate vicinity several degrees lower than the air around her. My parents looked at each other and exchanged deadly sighs that only I could hear, my eyes and ears sharpened by years of exposure to their marital Morse code. I stood in the doorway, receding, one foot in the kitchen, one foot in the hallway.

“Three mares, three foals! Incinerated! The barn gone. It was the wretched cigarettes. I told you, Greer. How many times did I tell you about smoking? Oh, my God. Oh, Jesus.” Extending his arm in front of him as if he were trying to feel his way through a thick fog, Gin stumbled into the nearest chair where he collapsed, burying his head in his hands.

“It was a lightning strike. It was not a cigarette,” my father said, emotionless and matter-of-fact, countering Gin’s allegation with the intractable firmness that characterized most of his views.

“It was a cigarette! I’m telling you. If you don’t believe me then speak to the fire department. They found a charred package of Dunhill cigarettes at the barn. That’s your brand, Greer!” Gin pointed to an offending red package with gold lettering on the kitchen table.

“I was nowhere near that barn! I was with you the whole time. Speak to a fireman?” Stimulated by digression, my mother had a habit of interrupting her own train of thought. “Are you serious? Have you ever spoken to a fireman—or to a policeman either, for that matter? Why not ask the refrigerator for an opinion? Dorothy has better instincts.” She gestured at the tricolor hound whose head was buried in a wastepaper basket. Hearing her name, she lifted her head and wagged her tail, an empty toilet roll in her mouth.

Gin was weakening under the onslaught. “Maybe you stopped in to look for Riddle on your way home. Maybe you were distracted. She went to the barn to see the new foal, do you remember? She went to look for the puppy. All those babies, burned alive. How could you be so reckless?”

“You go too far, Gin,” my father said, his eyes narrowing.

“How dare you?” My mother burst from her chair like a lit firecracker, sparks flying. Greer only ever operated at the two extremes of hot and cold. “You accuse me even after I’ve told you I was nowhere near there. I don’t care what they found, where they found it or why they found it. Have you ever known me to be careless about anything? You’re upset about what happened? Well, so are we all.”

Leave it to Greer to make it about her. I thought about the little foal and her mother. I rubbed my eyes, country dirt under my bitten nails. There weren’t enough sandbags in the world to prevent the flood of tears.

She bumped back down onto the seat of the chair. “One more thing, you little toad. If I were to set fire to your barn, you’d never know about it. What do you take me for? I certainly wouldn’t be stupid enough to leave behind evidence. To what end? The fire was an act of God. Who knows? Maybe God smokes Dunhill.”

My father looked at her, admiration evident in the flexible curve of his open mouth, ardor glistening like a polished trophy. He never could abide conciliation.

The best defense is a good offense.

It was silent except for the sound of the dogs panting and Gin’s loud sniffling. The furrow between his eyebrows deepened into a crevasse. His jaw clenched and twitched; he flinched. He was thinking about something and it hurt. His shoulders slumped and slid slowly downward in a defeated sag. The logic of what my mother said rang indisputably true—the fact is, she wouldn’t do anything that dumb, neither accidentally nor intentionally. Self-incrimination eluded her.

Finally, Gin spoke up in a voice more plaintive than belligerent. “Well, all right, if it wasn’t you, then who was it?”

My heart started pounding with so much force I thought for sure everyone in the room could hear it. My sense of complicity was so great at that point that I had convinced myself it was me.

“Who left the cigarettes at the barn? I mean, now I’ve let you off the hook, Greer, then you must be willing to at least entertain the idea that it was a cigarette that caused the fire.”

“Well, how should I know? Have you ever thought it might have been the Gypsy King?”

I sucked in a loud breath.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Gin said. “You might as well accuse me. Anyway, Gula doesn’t smoke. He loves those horses. He risked his life trying to save them.”

“Oh, what difference does it make?” Greer snapped. “What’s done is done. The stable is gone. The horses are gone. It’s sad, of course, it’s dreadful.” She watched Vera chase the other dogs around the base of the table. “You are insured, after all.”

My father raised his eyebrows and cleared his throat. I wondered where that came from.

“If this was a deliberate act or even if it was carelessness, shouldn’t I know?” Gin was begging for answers.

“Well, that’s up to you to pursue or not, but I don’t see the point. You’ll just be wasting energy better spent on rebuilding. Onward and upward and all that sort of thing.”

“But what about consequences, Greer? Surely, there should be consequences for someone. Why should I be the one to pay?”

“You mean now that your little plan to blame me has gone kaput? Why should you be exempt from the vicissitudes of daily existence?” How my mother loved to invoke humility as a status to which others should aspire. “That’s life, isn’t it? As far as that goes, you’ve done all right.” Her victory was complete.

My father, entertained but increasingly impatient, put a mug of coffee in front of Gin, who, shuddering, wrapped both palms around its steamy porcelain sides. He watched as Gin took a lingering sip and then he remembered the small matter of me. I had been at Gin’s, too.

“Riddle.” He swiveled round to face me in the doorway. “When you were at the barn, did you see anything suspicious?”

My mother and Gin looked over at me, but it was my father’s gaze that held my attention. His manner was casual, his tone friendly and interested—his relaxed demeanor a temperate oasis amidst the scorching intensity emanating from the other two. He glanced away and reached for a lone surviving scone in a basket on the counter. Breaking off a piece and popping it into his mouth, he waited for my response, comfortable that he could count on me to answer honestly.

Our eyes locked. Lie to my father? I had never lied to my father in my life. He trusted me.

“Riddle?” He looked amused. “Where are you?”

I shook my head until I thought it would fall off. “I didn’t see anything. I wasn’t there for more than a few minutes.” I took a deep breath and felt my spine stiffen—it was an unpleasant sensation. I was proving to be an astoundingly resilient liar. My fear of discovery was so great it had the ironic effect of making me heroically duplicitous. Shoulders back, chin forward, it was official, I had become the ferocious guardian of a terrible secret, a sudden sharp jolt of self-knowledge shredding all that I had believed about myself and the kind of person I was. Of course I was confused and upset by what had happened in the barn, but at that point I was more troubled by my cowardice. Now I had lied to my father.

Gin stared dully back at me. Then his eyes popped like the flash on a camera. “Riddle, you weren’t smoking, were you? Experimenting maybe? Did you take your mother’s cigarettes? Tell me, please. I won’t be mad.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” my father said.

“Well, she wouldn’t be the first kid to sneak a cigarette,” Gin said.

“No. No,” I said, my face reddening. I felt as if someone was blowing up a balloon inside of me. With each pump the pressure intensified until I exploded. “It wasn’t me!” I was shouting. I was aware of the proviso about excessive protest and its relationship to guilt, but I couldn’t seem to help it.

“No one is accusing you of anything, Jimmy,” my father said.

“Why are you crying?” Gin asked. He assumed that the right to weep was his alone.

“I’m not crying,” I wailed. “Don’t say I’m crying when I’m not.”

My mother was watching me. I could feel her piercing scrutiny from across the room. Her eyes widened and then elongated. She leaned back in her chair. Then she leaned forward and with two twists she crushed her cigarette into an ashtray, grinding it into ash.

“This is bullshit,” I said, taking two steps back. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t see anything.”

“Yes, this is bullshit,” my mother said. “Run along, Riddle. This has nothing to do with you.”

Heavy footsteps on the front porch started a deafening round of braying and barking among the dogs. “For heaven’s sake, who is this?” my mother said, furious at yet another intrusion.

It’s the infamous Mr. Nightjar,” my father said as the dogs flowed out onto the verandah to greet our visitor.

“Gula! What now?” Gin said.

Gula. I couldn’t feel anything at all.

My father opened the door. I looked at him in disbelief. He opened the door! Let him in? Had everyone gone mad?

“Don’t let him in!” I said. Covered in sweat, my clothes felt wet—I was saturated in terror, practically marinating in guilt. I kept expecting the police to show up at any moment—or worse, God Himself.

My mother and Gin looked over at me. My father hesitated and frowned. “Why not?” he asked, even as he gestured for Gula to come inside.

“Because . . .” I said. “Because he . . .” I stole a glance at Gula. His eyes met mine with the force of a lunge, his quiet violence quelling my voice like fingers wrapped around my neck.

“Because he what?” my father persisted impatiently.

“What have I done now?” Gula said, half in, half out of the kitchen. “Whatever it is, I plead guilty to all charges.” He looked over at me and smiled, a silent, wet snarl.

“Riddle?” Camp said.

“Because . . . He’ll see that I’m crying,” I said finally.

Gula stood on the opposite side of the screen door, his long black shadow casting about, searching and filling every corner, a vandal on the prowl, his smile acting as camouflage. Instinctively, I pressed my back up against the wall, flattening myself against the rippled palm plaster, hiding in plain view.

Gin was needed back at the house, he said, hesitating for a moment, seeming to want to come in even as he was backing away, head slightly bowed in arrogant impersonation of deference.

“I should go.” Gin stood up with a grimace, the backs of his thighs sticking to the seat of the wooden chair. “Ouch.”

“Serves you right,” my mother said. “Those shorts are an abomination.”

Gula’s eyes shifted sideways, contempt flickering briefly then just as quickly dissipating. I averted my glance, but not fast enough. The trace of a smile lingering on his face as he caught me staring at him, he nodded in my direction as he held open the door for Gin. I watched him as he walked down the lane, his car parked behind Gin’s, and drove away. I wanted to make sure he was gone.

My mother, whirling with fury, picked up Gin’s coffee mug, walked to the kitchen garbage receptacle, stepped on the foot lever and dropped the cup into the trash. “Who does he think he is, coming into our house and accusing me of such a thing? Why not just connect me to the Manson murders while he’s at it?”

“Greer, relax,” Camp said as he stood at the kitchen door and observed Gin clamber behind the wheel of his station wagon. “Why would you take anything that a narcissist like Gin Whiffet has to say seriously?”

She grabbed a wet dishcloth and began to wipe down the counter furiously. Any attempt at housework on her part was a sign of incipient madness. “I’m sorry if I’m a human being and feel the need to defend myself against false accusations, regardless of their origins. Camp, you know as well as I do that he’ll tell everyone who will listen that I set fire to that stable and killed those horses.”

“It doesn’t matter. No one pays any attention to anything he says. He’s been making a fool of himself since he was a kid. His universal status as a flibbertigibbet is firmly established. What I don’t understand is why you continue to have anything to do with such a duplicitous man.”