Dark Specter (17 page)

I stopped at Dairy Queen on the outskirts of town and ordered a cheeseburger and rings to keep my indigestion up to speed. At the table across from mine, a couple of economy-size women in muumuus and elaborate perms were loudly discussing a friend’s colostomy in graphic detail. On the other side of the divider, next to me, a trio of teen tarts were rehashing their Saturday night live.

“So he goes, ‘No fucking way!,’ and I say, ‘Way!’ And it’s like I’m getting weirded out, OK? And I’m going, uh-oh! You know? So I tell him, ‘I’m outta here,’ ’cos I’m getting like majorly,
majorly
stressed. So I’m home later, and I’m like, wow, this is totally
out there.”

It was then that I remembered Sam. For the first time since leaving home, I had to make a decision. I could go north, or south, or I could turn back, but I had to decide. My week on the road had been interesting, but it had also been enough, at least for now. I couldn’t face the prospect of any more meals in truck stops where everyone was either on the move or wished they were, or any more nights in motels where I woke at three in the morning with images of David and Rachael swarming in the darkness all around me, and got up and sat on the tweed-upholstered sofa and watched CNN until it grew light outside.

Now darkness had fallen again, and Dairy Queen was filled with happy families who thought of themselves as unhappy, who squabbled and whined and bitched and left in tears, little knowing their luck, their incredible, unearned good fortune at simply being able to go home together. It was not their happiness that I envied so much as their unhappiness. I too wanted the luxury of carping and complaint, the safe thrill of sniping at sitting targets, of taking your distance from the place where “they have to take you in.” But I had no home to go to. The only person I knew for a thousand miles in any direction was Sam. In retrospect, it was inevitable that I would call him.

A man I didn’t know answered. Sam wasn’t there, he said. He’d try to contact him and have him call me back. I was at a pay phone outside Dairy Queen. It had started to rain, a fine persistent enveloping drizzle which furred my clothes and skin. I gave the guy the number, went back inside and had another cup of coffee. It was another forty minutes before the phone outside started to ring. It was Sam. He sounded preoccupied, and not particularly pleased to hear from me, as if I represented a problem of some kind.

“So where are you at?” he demanded.

“Everett. You know it?”

“Yeah. You’re pretty close.”

There was a pause.

“Want to come tonight?” he said.

“Well, is that OK? I mean I don’t have any other plans, but I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

“It’s OK,” Sam said flatly. “I just got to think.”

Another pause.

“You got wheels?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“What are you driving?”

“An old Chevy. Kind of a blue-green color. It’s got Minnesota plates and a big antenna on the back.”

“OK. Here’s what you do. Take 1-5 north to Highway 20, then turn off for Anacortes. Go into town and park on Main Street, across from the clock. Aim to be there in about an hour and a half. It’s less than fifty miles, so you can take it easy. I’ll send someone to meet you.”

“Hey, are you sure this is not a problem?” I said, slightly disconcerted by his abrupt tone. “I mean I didn’t let you know I was coming or anything, and …”

“I knew you were coming, Phil.”

I smiled at this hint of the old familiar bullshit.

“You did? That’s interesting. I didn’t know myself until a week ago.”

“I don’t mean I knew you were coming today,” Sam replied a little sharply. “It could have been any time, next month, even a year from now. But I knew you’d come in the end.”

I smiled secretly.

“You’ll really like it here,” he went on, seemingly making an effort to sound a little more enthusiastic. “You’ve got your own room and everything. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time, Phil. Believe me, it’ll be just great.”

“Sounds good,” I replied unconvincingly.

Traffic was heavy on the concrete ribbon of the interstate. Headlights slashed through the curtain of rain, passing trucks plucked and tugged at my old Chevy. I was glad to reach the exit.

Anacortes turned out to be a sprawl of modern homes and shopping malls surrounding the original town center. It was right on the water, and must have been a fishing port at one time, but its Main Street looked almost identical to many of those I had passed through on my way to the coast: a core of sturdy two-story brick business buildings with a scattering of big wooden houses. I had no problem finding the clock that Sam had mentioned, one of those models with Roman numerals and a double face standing on a wrought-iron pillar which jewelers used to put up outside their stores as an advertisement.

I sat there for over half an hour, getting colder and colder and wondering how reliable Sam and his friends were. There was hardly anyone around. By now it was after nine o’clock, and the citizens of Anacortes were presumably hunkered down in front of the TV or tucked in with a cup of cocoa. So when the headlights appeared behind me, I noticed them at once. The only vehicle which had passed me so far was a cruiser with a cop in a Smokey the Bear hat who had given me the beady eye, as if I were casing the jeweler’s premises across the street.

A VW van pulled up alongside me. I could just make out the silhouette of a man sitting in the driver’s seat. He seemed to be looking in my direction. The van was covered in garish magic-bus artwork, amateurish swirls of color depicting naked bodies in various poses surrounded by stars and flames. There was a brief peep from the VW’s reedy horn, then it revved up and proceeded down Main Street. I restarted my motor and followed.

We drove in tandem out of town along the highway I had come in on, then turned off down a narrow road winding through dense woods. The rain had ceased by now, and the clouds were breaking up, allowing glimpses of the almost full moon. After several miles, the VW slowed down and signaled left. A battered mailbox with a number crudely painted in white was nailed to a post at the entrance.

We turned on to a dirt road which zigzagged steeply downhill. It was pitted with potholes filled with water and ruts formed by the runoff. The Chevy scraped painfully several times, and I had visions of losing my muffler. After about five minutes the ground leveled out, the woods dropped back, and we emerged onto a patch of level grassland. Up ahead was an isolated house. As we approached, an external light high on the eaves came on, the door opened and a figure appeared in silhouette. I assumed at first that it was Sam, but as my headlights passed the doorway I saw that it was a man I didn’t know.

The VW drew up beside one of the barns. I parked behind it and got out, savoring the odors of pine sap and salt water. I could hear the ocean somewhere close by. Sea gulls circled invisibly overhead, screeching intermittently. A light breeze stirred the tall, seemingly impenetrable barrier of conifers all around.

The man who had emerged from the house walked over to the VW and spoke briefly to the driver, then they both came over to where I was standing. The driver was in his late thirties, short and chunky, with a soft beer gut. His face was chubby and battered, and he had a droopy mustache and long hair pulled back in a ponytail. The other man was taller and sparer, with the kind of leanness which looks like the result of malnutrition or bad genes, not diet and exercise.

“I’m Rick,” the driver said. “This is Lenny.”

“Phil,” I replied. “Good to meet you.”

“We’ve got some stuff to unload,” Rick remarked, jerking his thumb at the VW. “You want to give us a hand, it’ll go quicker.”

“Sure thing.”

When I looked more closely at the kitschy designs painted on the VW van, they reminded me of something I had seen before, although I couldn’t place it—an album cover, maybe. Rick opened the side door, lifted out a large package and walked off with it. Lenny did the same, and then it was my turn. The inside of the van was filled with shrink-wrapped multipacks and rows of institutional-size drums and jars. There were packs of canned spaghetti and wieners and nukable chicken noodle soup and industrial desserts and containers of peanut butter and ketchup and Coke like characters from a child’s nightmare, the familiar form and features swollen to monstrous proportions.

I chose the lightest-looking item, a plastic bag containing sixty packs of cheese-flavored corn snacks, and set off the way the other two had gone, following a barely visible path in the rough grass. The sound and scent of the ocean grew stronger. Then the moon glowed from behind the clouds and I saw it, a seething dark surface stretching away on all sides. The house, I realized, was built on a promontory. The next moment the ground beneath my feet turned hollow and I stumbled on something, almost falling.

“Take it easy,” said Lenny. “We don’t want to lose any of that stuff.”

I discovered that I was standing on a narrow pier of wooden slats built out into the water. There was a boat alongside, and what I had stumbled on was the heavy metal ring to which it was moored.

“Just set it down here,” Lenny told me. “Rick’ll load her.”

He brushed past, heading back the way we had come, his lanky figure outlined against the yard light on the house.

It took us another twenty minutes or so to lug all the groceries down to the water, while Rick manhandled it aboard the boat and stowed it away.

“You got any baggage?” he asked when we were done.

“Just an overnight case.”

“Better get it.”

I finally understood.

“You mean we’re going in the boat?”

Lenny chortled.

“You’d have one heck of a hard time driving there!” he said.

He walked back with me to the house, where I got my case out of the trunk of the car.

“Leave the keys with me,” Lenny told me. “I’ll put her in the garage later.”

I wasn’t particularly happy about giving my car keys to a total stranger, but presumably Sam’s friends weren’t going to rip me off. With a weak shrug, I handed them over. A diesel motor gurgled into life down by the water.

“Better get going, you don’t want to be left behind,” said Lenny, turning back into the house. A moment later the light went out. The moon was obscured again. I made my way slowly back to the pier, trying to dilate my eyes to the point where I could distinguish grass from rocks and land from water. The lights inside the boat were on, and once I found the pier I got aboard without difficulty. It was a surprisingly roomy old motor cruiser, with an enclosed wheelhouse.

While I stowed my overnight bag below, Rick untied the ropes and pushed us off from the pier. He put the engine in reverse until we were clear of the shore, then revved up and spun the wheel to turn the boat around. I peered out through the windshield. I could see nothing whatever. We appeared to be heading out into an expanse of total darkness.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

Rick stood grasping the wheel and staring straight ahead.

“Heading due wrest right now,” he said. “Once we get out into the strait we’ll turn north until we clear Orcas, then head on in.”

None of this meant anything much to me, but that’s usually the way I feel when I talk to boat people.

“So how do you know where you are?” I asked. “I can’t see anything out there.”

Rick tapped a circular glass inset in the dashboard. I leaned over and saw a white line revolving slowly around a screen. In its wake, a ghostly outline faded slowly until the line passed once again, refreshing its vigor.

“Didn’t use to be able to do this run at night,” Rick remarked with satisfaction. “Not till we got this baby. Cost plenty, but it’s doubled our mobility.”

The gadget was some kind of radar, I supposed. The ghostly outline was an image of the shoreline apparently moving past the boat, which remained eternally stationary in the middle of the screen. For some reason I thought of David, the still center of a world which seemed to move around him, safe and navigable, and something gave way inside me. “It will only get better,” the psychiatrist had advised me. “You will have bad patches for a long time to come, but they will be farther and farther apart.”

I was having one now. It was not just his death I was grieving for, I realized, but the brief life which had preceded it. Children are vectors aimed at the future. All the doubts and anxieties about how they will turn out are balanced by the knowledge that their course and final destination are ultimately out of your hands. Whatever happens to them will happen when you are different, or dead, and the world an unrecognizable place. But no such perspectives existed in David’s case. The only things that would ever happen to him had already happened. His death seemed to make a mockery of his ever having existed at all, and of my continuing to do so. For the first time, I understood why Rachael had decided that she could not go on.

As we emerged into the open channel, the waves grew steeper. We passed a large unladen oil tanker coming the other way, its high sides towering over us. Later a car ferry crossed our bows, decked out in lights from stem to stern. It was almost eleven o’clock by my watch when Rick finally eased the throttle and the roar of the motor died away to a gentle gurgle. The boat wallowed lazily on the slight swell. A few moments later, I made out a light in the darkness up ahead.

“Are we there?” I asked.

Rick’s head moved in what might have been a nod. He had hardly spoken a word to me the whole way. If the rest of Sam’s friends were as much fun as Rick and Lenny, this was going to be a visit to remember.

The boat crept imperceptibly toward the beacon. It was impossible to tell how far off it was, and I thought we still had several hundred yards to run when the light suddenly loomed overhead and we bumped heavily against something. The boat tipped, the door of the wheelhouse opened and Sam was there, flinging his arms about me.

“Phil! It’s so great you’re finally here, man!”

His manner couldn’t have been more different from his cool response on the phone. He stood there slapping me on the shoulders and grinning delightedly. I smiled at him with real pleasure. Sam’s was the first familiar and friendly face I had seen in what seemed like a very long time. My earlier doubts about the wisdom of coming were swept away.