The Fisher Boy (17 page)

Chapter Twenty-four

I’d noticed them before, they were everywhere in Provincetown: groups of thin, straggly-haired young people, like time-travelers from the Summer of Love, asking for spare change and playing dulcimers and tambourines under the chestnut tree by the public library, and on MacMillan Wharf as the ferry from Boston was docking.

I’d noticed them, but paid little attention. I was too concerned about the fundamentalists, the Christian Soldiers’ holy war. “Have you seen all the street kids? There’s so many this year,” people would remark rhetorically, not expecting an answer, then go on to complain about the Bible-thumpers and the heat. “Lots of Scandinavians in town,” I’d heard someone observe, noting that many of them were fair and some were beyond their backpacking years. “We’re from Scandinavia,” the street kids would say, with no accent to their English, and, if you questioned them further, they’d just laugh or ask for more money. Once, I’d thought they were connected with the
Vasa,
the Swedish tall ship—everyone had. But not any more.

Miriam mentioned more trouble at her shop. She’d caught two of them, boys this time, stealing amethyst beads. They’d just laughed when she’d forced them to empty their pockets, full of hashish, and, of all things, gum drops. They’d wrapped the beads in cellophane bags with the candy. “Can I keep them? They’re my birthstone,” one boy whined to Miriam when she’d confiscated the amethysts.

“Were they Scandinavians?” I’d asked. “Dumb ones.” Miriam said they hadn’t even known about Dala horses. Miriam sold them, carved wooden horses painted orange, with folk art flowers, imported from Sweden. One “Scandinavian” called them “carousel ponies,” Miriam remembered. “That’s like a Dutchman not knowing Rembrandt.” Still, I kept my Truro trip secret, as secret as my alleged Drummond blood, secret from Miriam and everyone else.

I saw some blond teenagers on the beach back of the Boatslip, sitting in a circle, eating Milky Ways and cotton candy and sharing a bottle of tequila. Simultaneously, as unified as a school of fish, they turned to stare with dull suspicious eyes as I approached.

“How’s it going?” I said.

They didn’t so much as bother to shrug.

“This is the hottest July on record,” I said.

I didn’t recognize any of them. One boy drew a circle in the sand with a fish bone. A girl picked at her toenails. “Do you speak English?” I asked.

“We’re from Scandinavia,” said the boy sketching with the bone. His hair, like the girls’ in the woods, was fair as flax. Suddenly he seized the bottle of tequila, offering me a sip and laughing “Skoal!”

I had thoughts of hepatitis, even, irrationally, of poison, so I laughed too. “I’m on the wagon.” I edged away.

Within a minute, they were passing the liquor around again and divvying out pieces of pink cotton candy with eager, dirty fingers.

That night, while Roberto manned the desk and Roger Morton met with Arthur about the Swim for Scholars benefit, I slipped into the White Gull office to surf the Internet.

“Golden One,” I typed and the computer screen flashed and regurgitated listings for jewelry stores, metallurgists’ conventions, and Chinese restaurants. Not very promising. So I typed “cults” and the computer retrieved URLs of deprogramming groups and cult-monitoring organizations, plus stores selling relics of dead-at-a-young-age movie stars, no “Golden One” or anything to do with Truro or Thomas Royall. And typing “Royall” and “Truro” and “Cape Cod artists” yielded nothing of consequence. Just some websites of small galleries, none local, selling bad reproductions, mostly of
The Fisher Boy.

***

Then came the fundamentalists’ Public Relations Spectacle, the next Sunday noon, appropriately. It began with fleets of busses and cars clogging the town’s parking lots. They had southern license plates with peaches or palmettos, and from them streamed people of all ages, retirees in sunshades, young families, handsome men. They were casually dressed, but more formal than your typical tourists, in clothes so neat they might still be dangling in the dry cleaners’ bags.

We were bound for brunch: Arthur, Miriam, Chloe, Roberto, and I. We had just celebrated “a service of community healing” at the Unitarian/Universalist meetinghouse.

“They can’t all be heading to Spiritus,” Arthur said. “I know they’ve done miracles with loaves and fishes, but I don’t think pizza goes forth and multiplies.”

“I’ll bet they’re heading for the Christian Soldiers’ office,” I said, remembering its location opposite the landmark pizzeria.

Some of the visitors were carrying Bibles, others, small vials of liquid. We joined them surging up Commercial Street until we reached our destination. “GRAND OPENING,” read the sign in the office window. Pinned beneath the sign was an American flag on which fifty white crosses usurped the places of the states’ stars.

Sunday mornings were usually quiet on Commercial Street, and there were no police here, or none that I noticed. I recognized an exuberant man in a suit the gray of duct tape, escorted by what had to be bodyguards. This was not Hollings Fair but one of his less frenzied colleagues, a positive-thinking sort of evangelist.

The crowd applauded as the evangelist accepted a microphone from one of the Christian Soldiers. “On this glorious day, in the footsteps of the Pilgrim fathers, we too come here to bring new life. We too come here to heal…”

“Didn’t we just do this?” Miriam wondered.

Then Arthur gasped, but not at the preacher. “It’s him, that shameless little parasite!”

Indeed, Edward was at the evangelist’s side, wearing an electric-blue suit and a knitted fawn tie. His hair looked stiff, as if laden with old-fashioned brilliantine, so that he resembled a grammar school boy dressed up for his class photograph during the Depression.

“Oh, this is nauseating,” Arthur whispered. “This is positively vile!”

A beaming Roberto was enjoying the damage to Edward’s reputation. Edward himself didn’t seem too comfortable. His electric-blue suit looked heavy, wool possibly, and, being small and unimportant, he was overshadowed by the evangelist, his bodyguards, and the Christian Soldiers. When I stared in his direction, his eyes found mine and he hung his head.

“Let us pray,” the evangelist said, and hundreds of heads bowed, people shutting their eyes tightly.

Excusing myself from my companions, I threaded through the people praying aloud. I almost collided with one of the few African-American families from the busses and apologized.

A couple of buildings away from the Christian Soldiers’ office, I slipped down an alley, a sandy space where some acanthus trees were growing, until I came onto the beach by Provincetown Harbor.

Trying to appear casual, the toughest acting assignment you can have, I walked back toward the rear entrance of the Christian Soldiers’ office. Somehow, by luck or coincidence, I thought that eventually I might rendezvous with Edward there. I knew he knew something about Ian’s murder; he’d run away the morning his body was found. Seeking Edward was risky, but I’d seen him at the office in the past.

The rear of the cedar-shingled building was flanked by a Dumpster and some bushes of beach roses, their milky pink petals scenting the air. I pulled at the screen door just as a walkie-talkie crackled behind me.

It was one of the bodyguards, huge and menacing, even with no emotion on his face. “The service is out front, sir.”

“I know.” I wished I had my alibi, my olive wood cross.

“This door is locked. I have to ask you to leave.”

“What’s happening next?”

“There’s the prayer service, here on the beach.”

“Oh, right.” I said, “Thank you, sir,” like a motorist thanking a cop for issuing a warning instead of a ticket.

I re-joined my companions just as Miriam whispered to Arthur, “Can you believe he said that?”

“Said what?” I asked.

“‘Judge not lest ye be judged,’” Miriam said. She was almost disappointed, seeing an evangelist this equivocal, this mild. Certainty was their one enviable trait.

“We will now proceed in an orderly and respectful manner to the harbor,” the evangelist announced. Like graduates rehearsed for commencement, the flock knew precisely where to go. Sergeant Almeida came muttering along. “They don’t have a permit to do this.” He spoke half to us and half to himself.

On the beach near MacMillan Wharf, the evangelist led his followers in prayer, then suggested that those who had brought “water from the River Jordan” sprinkle it over Provincetown Harbor in a gesture of closure and reconciliation. “God bless you all,” the evangelist emphasized. “And may this blessed place be healed once again.”

This apparently concluded the service because the crowd became secular instantaneously. Their quiet conformity broke open and people remarked what a scorcher it was and began snapping photographs of the fishing boats and Pilgrim monument. “Is Plymouth Rock far?” one of them was wondering. None of them stared at our little group. With Miriam and Chloe, we passed for some sort of nuclear family.

Since the stands flanking MacMillan Wharf were handy, they raided them for lobster and soft-serve ice cream. “I want some clams,” a man with a string tie announced. “But I hope they take those bellies off them.”

They were all around us, overwhelming us, the way we overwhelm the year-round residents every summer. I told my group I wanted to check my apartment, since it was so close by.

“You’re not going to watch them send their clam bellies back?” Arthur asked. My companions would wait for me by the public telephones by MacMillan Wharf.

I felt a little afraid, unlocking my apartment. I was after my olive wood cross; I could use that as my excuse to again tour the Christian Soldiers’ headquarters. Of course, all of the faithful from the busses wore laminated IDs with their photographs.

The heat made me a little stupid. I kept trying keys from the White Gull in my apartment door. Finally, I fitted the right key and the lock was pleased enough to let me enter.

The contents of the apartment, the things in the kitchen, the bedroom furniture, had not, as far as I could tell, been touched since my last visit.

I’d propped the olive wood cross on my pillow on my bed. I was picking it up when I heard him in the kitchen.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said, in the doorway to my bedroom, in that awful electric-blue suit.

I should have been glad to see him, I’d been looking for him back of the Christian Soldiers’ office, but something—him surprising me instead of the reverse, I guess—made me furious. “So, is it Edward or Paul you’re going by this morning? What’s your alias of the day?”

“They’re…both real. My middle name is Paul,” he said. “I never liked it,” he added, almost eagerly. “There are lots of things about myself I don’t like.”

Since he knew the location of my apartment he could have been the one riffling through my things. But he couldn’t have known about the towel, unless
…

“Have you been here before? Did you break into this place, by any chance?”

“Of course not! I followed you here. You’d been staring me down. Obviously you wanted to talk. Mark, please
.
I can explain everything. Almost everything.” Unknotting his tie, he sat wearily in one of the metal tube chairs at my kitchen table. “May I have something to drink? Not alcohol. Just juice or some Coke.”

I remembered Arthur finding the white powder in his bathroom. “I don’t have any cocaine. I don’t do drugs.”

“My God,” he said, “you sound like one of those nutcase evangelists.”

So he was ready to betray them too, so soon. Squirming out of his suit jacket, he caught his elbow in the lining and began snickering. He seemed to be snickering at me, and at everyone foolish enough to trust him. It was all a joke, a summer hustle: him startling me, Ian’s murder, him pulling a fast one and ditching Arthur.

Then it happened—I hit him. To make him care, if caring was possible. I just walked across the room, across the kitchen, and hit him. I hit him harder than I’d intended, punched his shoulder so that the silvery lining of his suit jacket tore open.

Shielding his face with his hand, he began whimpering. “Please, oh, please!” he whispered as the whispers turned to sobs, first quiet then louder, and his face became the red of an awful sunburn. “Don’t hurt me, Mark, please, I’ve been hurt enough!”

I yanked open the refrigerator. I had nothing to drink but a carton of cranberry juice, so old its spout was soft and dog-eared. I poured him a glass and slid it onto the table. He nodded a thank you and began gulping it down.

I was feeling ashamed. “I’m sorry, I got carried away.”

He’d stopped crying.

“Who is the Golden One?” I asked, quietly.

“I can’t tell you.”

I pounded the table so that the salt and pepper shakers, ceramic pigs, leapt up.
“
Damnit! I want some answers! There’s been a murder, there’s been a stabbing, and some idiot has killed himself in jail! And you’ve got something to do with it all, haven’t you?”

“
NO!” he screamed in the ragged cry of a toddler. “I just spent some time with your stupid friend Arthur! Is that a crime? To make a lonesome old man a little happy?”

He began coughing, coughing into the glass of cranberry juice as he drank. Then he set the glass on the table and pulled something from his pocket and held it to his mouth. His inhaler, for his asthma—what Ian had mistaken for amyl nitrate at Arthur’s party. On that we’d judged him too harshly.

I poured him more juice and his coughing subsided. Helping him out of his jacket, I realized I needed to be persistent but less abrasive in my questioning. Like Sergeant Almeida had been with me. “Why did you leave when you did? Why did you leave Arthur’s the morning after Ian was murdered?

“Because the old goat kept copping a feel.”

“Why can’t you tell me about this Golden One? You warned me I was in danger, and I appreciate that. You warned me in your note at their office.” I found that I was speaking almost tenderly to him, like a lover after sex in a shared bed.

He unbuttoned his shirt, so that I could see the sweat trickling down between his nipples, down his breastbone. He was wearing an olive wood cross on a chain, like the one he’d sold me earlier in their office.