Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery (6 page)

“There it is,” said Ron.

At this speed, geography took form quickly and flitted away under our wings even faster. “Where?”

“The nose is on it…now.”

Two domes formed Kempshall Island. Both were wooded on their flanks, bald on the very top. The naked rock had a pinkish hue that glinted in the sun. The domes were soft and, compared to the other craggy and truncated islands we’d flown over, sensual, almost gentle. And then it was gone.

“No roads. You notice that?” said Captain Ron.

I hadn’t, no. How does the islander move about a roadless island? By boat, I guessed. Or he just stayed put. I liked that prospect. “Could we go around again, Captain?”

“Sure.” He called back to Dave, “Hang on, we’re going around again.”

“Okay,” called Dave. Then Dave told Jellyroll that we were going around again.

From the new angle, I saw that one of the domes had twin peaks with a low saddle joining them. In fact, the island was made
up of three, not two, domes, the sides of which plunged almost vertically into the surf.

“Look at that!” said Ron as we completed the turn.

It was a huge crack. Something had cracked Kempshall nearly in half. One dome lay to the south, the twin peaks to the north. What can crack a solid rock island? Volcanos? Time? The rift cut deeply enough into the island to form a long, narrow harbor. There were a few boats and docks inside. I could see stairways zigzagging down the rock face to the docks. And then Kempshall Island ducked under the nose. There were no more islands ahead.

We were over open water for about ten minutes before the mainland came into sight. I mused on isolation and solitude. Life out there on the island would be very different from that on the island Manhattan. There would be nothing on the islands to distract one from the inner life. You would need a well of inner resources to tolerate yourself in such solitude. You’d need something other than controlled substances to fall back on. Part of me wanted to retire Jellyroll, chuck in the whole career and make do with things as they are, tinker, plant, observe nature’s ways. Jellyroll would dig it, but would I turn sullen, distant, angry in the solitude, given to weird eccentricities and sudden psychotic outbursts? I didn’t know.

The mainland was equally unpopulated, evergreen forests right down to the black rocks and the white surf. Somewhere around here was a town called Micmac from which I was to catch a boat to Kempshall Island, but I didn’t see a single roof or road as we crossed the coast.

Captain Ron was talking about a summer camp he’d attended as a boy in this area. Apparently there were a lot of mosquitoes and bullies, but I couldn’t really hear. I nodded and grinned and longed for Crystal. The sun was going down, and I would be dependent on my own inner resources in the dark.

SIX

N
ow, in the falling light, I would try out the Jellyroll disguise. It wasn’t originally a disguise; it was a costume. A friend of his made it for Halloween out of fake fur left over from her production of
Cymbeline
. I think it was
Cymbeline
. Anyway, we went to the party as a couple of pagan village-sack-ers from the
Sagas
. It’s a tufted cape that fits over his back and shoulders and fastens around his chest and belly with elastic hasps. He didn’t like it then, and he wouldn’t like it now, but he’d comply. I asked him to stand up for a fitting. He did, but he was going to make me feel like shit about it. I held it for him to examine. There was a two-year, closed-closet whiff to it, but not bad enough to clear a room. At least not to the human nose. He looked up at me. “After years of loyalty, this is what I get from you, a stinking Shakespearean remnant?”

Nonetheless, I was committed to the disguise. He watched it go on, feeling sorry for himself. He blew out his cheeks in protest. I stepped back. Not terrible. I told him how pretty he looked, but he didn’t buy it. Sometimes I think he doesn’t respect me.

The copilot called back for us to take our seats and buckle up. We were landing. But where? I couldn’t see a single sign of civilization, not even a headlight. We were flying over wilderness. Suddenly a dim macadam strip popped from under the wing, and the pilots put us down with barely a jolt.

We turned at the end of the runway near the forest wall, taxied back past parked single-engine puddle jumpers and a lovingly restored DC-3 to a new, square, cinder-block terminal building,
where we stopped. OGLEVIE it said in spiffy aluminum letters, “Gateway to the North.” I couldn’t see anybody inside the terminal, and there was no activity out here, no fuel-truck drivers, baggage handlers, or small aircraft aficionados hanging around. To urbanites, absence of activity always seems menacing. But that’s exactly what Clayton told me to expect in Cabot County, exactly what I wanted.

The pilots opened the door. I thanked them very much. They said it was their pleasure, and they leaned down to pet Jellyroll— until, simultaneously, they noticed the ratty fake pelt on his back and they froze.

“He gets cold,” I said.

They nodded and went about petting him places the pelt didn’t cover. He licked their hands.

“Do you have children?” I asked.

Naturally, they both did. Daughters.

“Maybe they’d like a photograph.” I have glossies taken by a late girlfriend of mine. Jellyroll’s head is cocked to the side inquisitively, eyes alert and glistening at her behind the camera. It makes me sad to look at the picture, so I don’t. I gave them each one, shook their hands and deplaned.

The linoleum-and-fluorescent waiting room was abandoned, except for a guy manning the rent-a-car booth. Flesh spilled over the top of his starched collar, and the brown company blazer caught him way up the arm. Nonetheless, I’d try the Jellyroll disguise out on him. We were pretty conspicuous. How could you miss us?

But the rent-a-car guy did not bat an eye. Maybe he never batted an eye. He stood behind the counter staring forlornly at the opposite wall. His eyes were fish flat. Life hadn’t rewarded his hopes and dreams. He wasn’t alone in that, of course, but he seemed to be taking it particularly hard. Maybe nobody ever rented a car around here. I thought about renting one just to lend his evening some meaning, but there were no roads where
I was going. Directly outside the glass door, twenty feet away, the Airstream’s engines revved hard. The windows trembled, but he still didn’t bat an eye. He was not a good test of Jellyroll’s disguise.

I left our gear and took Jellyroll out front for a pee. It was chilly.

“Mr. Deemer?”

I spun—

“I’m Dwight.”

Clayton had arranged for Dwight to pick us up. He might have been seventy, but he could have been much younger. His face looked like a piece of old unraveled hemp. His massive shoulders strained the buttons of his flannel shirt, leaving vents. The hand he shook mine in was the size of a dinner plate.

“Call me Artie.”

Here was a man of the sea. You could almost smell the salt breeze and the fish gurry. I wish I were a man of the sea. I would like to look like Dwight when I grow old, weather-beaten, tough, yet somehow gentle, humble for having witnessed nature in the raw, but of course you can’t look like that unless you live the life. “This is the dog himself, huh?” Dwight leaned down to show Jellyroll his enormous hand. Jellyroll licked it.

“He likes you.”

“He does?”

“Oh yes, I can tell.”

“I wish the wife could see. She tapes his R-r-ruff Dog commercials, plays them back with no sound. I think he’s even cuter in real.” Dwight straightened, towered over me, and said, “Clayton told me I wasn’t to tell anybody this dog was coming to town, and I haven’t.”

“Thank you, Dwight.” I had the impulse to tell him about the stalker right then and there, he being so solid and dependable, but I resisted the temptation. A conical sign on the roof of his old station wagon said TAXI? CALL CAPTAIN DWIGHT.

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.