The Last Summer of the Camperdowns (11 page)
He looked at me sideways, his eyebrows forming two matching arcs in his forehead. Our eyes briefly met, me hoping that my expression conveyed the kind of world-weary acquiescence that I contrived to parrot rather than the shock and horror that I felt.
“What does Mom think?”
“I haven’t a clue.”
Inching forward in my seat, I held my head out the window, the wind flattening my hair and streamlining my features, compressing my view of things as it blew through me like a funnel, emptying my brain of all its troubling thoughts. For a little while at least, I was a voluntary captive of the sun and the wind and the carefree road.
H
ARWICH WAS A POWERLESS
prisoner of the summer tourist season as cars jockeyed for position on the main drag. Parking spots were at a premium. “The nightmare continues,” Camp growled as someone in a jeep cut him off.
We parked in front of Pilgrim Congregational Church. I loved that little white church, plain and simple and resonant with clarity, its tall steeple frank and reassuring. We walked side by side down Pilgrim Road, crowds jostling and competing for sidewalk space, as I listened to Camp describe in detail his reasons for going to Vietnam. He was in the middle of explaining the difference between what had happened at My Lai as opposed to what had happened at Trang Bang.
“My Lai was murder, pure and simple and premeditated. Those soldiers are war criminals. The napalm assault on civilians in Trang Bang appears to have been unintentional, although . . .”
He was just getting wound up when we ran into the first of many friends, acquaintances, motivated strangers, potential supporters, the curious and the committed. In every case, Camp dropped anchor and talked and laughed and cajoled and expounded, riveted, and treating every conversation as if it was his both his first and his last.
“Jesus, is that the one and only Patrick Flannery? The world’s greatest defense attorney? I ran into James Connor last week. He told me about your courtroom victory against the mighty Andrew Peters. Congratulations on being the one who finally took that bastard down.”
Flannery beamed, the two men laughing as Camp praised and teased and challenged and gossiped. How he loved to talk, to listen, to kibitz, to dismantle, to fight! Mowing the lawn or mowing down the enemy, my father approached the mundane and the profound with equal intensity. Oh, I did my share of sighing and blushing, but I never tired of listening to Camp talk. So many people are limited in scope and opinion to what they’re doing for dinner—not my father.
“Camp.” Flannery’s tone changed as he brought up the case of a mutual friend who had been accused of embezzling funds from his employer. “His wife left him. He hasn’t got a friend in the world at this point. He’s lost everything and he’s looking at a prison sentence.”
“I’ll give him a call when I get home,” Camp said as the two men shook hands.
Even as a kid I knew I was in the presence of someone special.
A
S WE NEARED WELLFLEET
on the way back to the house, we noticed a large crowd gathered in a field just off the side of the road. Camp slowed the car, squinting in the direction of the assembled people—men, women, teenagers, even a handful of children—before pulling over.
“Wait here,” he said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
I sat for a while listening to the radio and then opened the door and climbed onto the hood of the car, where I roosted and watched what was going on. My father was talking to a man with black hair. Nearer to me, but set apart from the rest, was a young man on a horse. There were other riders that day, but I concentrated my attention on him. True to form, I looked at his horse first, a beautiful bay thoroughbred. The rider slid his helmet back off his head and held it in his hands. He appeared to be waiting for something to happen. He had russet hair, a woodsy color, distinctive. His hair had the dark and light and brown and red tones of sawdust and cedar chips.
I jumped, startled, as the driver’s side door opened. My hand to my heart, I slid down off the hood and into the passenger seat next to Camp, who put the key into the ignition and started the car. Hemmed in temporarily, we idled as we waited for someone to move.
“What’s going on?” I asked him.
“Search party. The police are working with a hired outfit to conduct a private search for Charlie Devlin.”
My interest piqued, I sat up straighter and took a long second look at what was going on around me. “Who was that you were you talking to?” I asked. “I couldn’t see his face.”
“That was the great and powerful Michael Devlin.”
“Oh.” I waited for more, but no more was forthcoming.
“I wonder who that is, over there,” I said, pointing to the young man with the russet hair on the bay thoroughbred. “I love his horse. Wow.”
“It’s got to be the older boy, Harry Devlin,” Camp said.
“How do you know?”
“Elementary, my dear Riddle. One: that is no ordinary horse, as you’ve already gleaned. Two: his hair color. His mother had the same unusual color. He obviously inherited it from her.” He laughed. “Polly had this great pelt of hair. She used to come to school looking like she had a wild rabbit perched on top of her head.”
I wondered if I looked as pale as I felt. The sun was shining down on Harry Devlin, his hair glimmering, all those autumn colors glowing under the shimmering light of early summer. My heart plummeted several stories, plunging out of control, as if someone had cut the elevator cord.
I had seen that hair color before.
Our way clear, Camp put the car into reverse and we headed for home.
“Why did we stop?” I asked.
“I offered to help search for the boy but Mr. Devlin wasn’t interested in my help,” Camp said as he swung out onto the highway. “To hell with him.”
T
HE NEXT MORNING, AFTER A SLEEPLESS AND FITFUL NIGHT, I
left the house early on the pretext of going for a morning ride. It was only seven o’clock and already sweat trickled down my face, from the moist border of my hairline to the damp point of my chin. After tying my horse, Eugene, under the long branch of a huge shade tree just out of sight of where the yellow barn once stood, I ventured tentatively toward the cold remains, still smoldering in my imagination.
I needed to go back, though it was the last place on earth I wanted to revisit. Standing amidst the blackened and scorched ruins of the yellow stable, I went looking for reassurance, for proof that the mares and their foals were the only ones to have perished in the fire that terrible night. Though the site had been investigated cursorily by insurance adjusters, all its unsalvageable debris disposed of and the few standing remnants of the barn demolished, I picked up a sharp stick and started to poke around the leftovers.
Using the tips of my boots I cleared a path through the cremated corpse of the stable, the blackened ground a barren soil. Brilliant sunshine illuminated my path, though even the summer sun wasn’t powerful enough to polish this slag pit.
I found a barbecued bridle, the caramelized residue of a saddle, a partially melted stirrup. I continued searching through the ashes. Down on my hands and knees, I was covered in charcoal and soot when I caught a glint of something else; something tiny and silver sparkled in the area where the tack room once stood. Taking a closer look, I saw a tarnished chain coiled under the corner of a cinder block. I stood back up with the necklace in my hand. It was covered in grime but otherwise intact. There was a medal on the chain, a religious medallion, familiar to anyone who attended Catholic school in that era, the miraculous medal, the nuns and priests dispensing them like candy. I had worn one myself briefly—my family was typical of so many Catholics, about whom Camp said that being lapsed was so common it should be made a tenet of faith. I wiped it off, rubbing the familiar oval between my thumb and index finger, the dingy image of the Virgin Mary slowly appearing. Clutching it, I squeezed tightly, pressing it against my heart.
All around me was quiet. I felt the dry pressure of a hand on my shoulder. Something familiar, the reptilian dispassion maybe, told me that it wasn’t a Marian apparition. Gula was standing behind me, right next to me, touching me, his head bowed, his face inches from my own, his breath a familiar, fetid, signature cologne.
My heart slowed. I hadn’t even heard him coming. My arm dropped to my side. I tucked the chain into my pocket.
“What are you doing here?”
Too weak to speak, I was leaking air, a hole in my composure that matched precisely the size of Gula’s hand on my shoulder.
“You were curious, is that it?”
I nodded.
“Not much to see is there? Devastation. Terrible.” He extended his arm over the stable’s foundation. “Well,” he paused surveying the ruins, “feel free to look around to your heart’s content. I must be on my way. The truck’s parked over there behind the trees. Much ground for me to cover today. I have many duties, you know. So, I shall leave you to your task.” He smiled. “Oh, but look how dirty you are getting.” He took my hand and held it in his, turning it over, examining it. I recoiled and pulled away. If my response was instinctive, then his reaction to it was primitive and swift. Lashing out, he grabbed my wrist and, yanking me into him, held me in place with the sheer power of his will, his strength of purpose expressed in that unbreakable grip.
Unable even to struggle, I felt as if I had been molded to him, as if we two were fused in an inglorious undertaking. Taking a handkerchief from his pocket with his free hand, he held open a corner of cloth and spit into it. He wiped my palm with the moistened handkerchief, rubbing until a small round patch of clean skin appeared.
“It seems you are still there underneath the soot and the grime,” he said affectionately, as if he were a parent talking to a child.
Letting go my hand, he watched as I let it fall limply to my side. Swaying in the breeze like the tall grasses outside the perimeter of the burnt ground, I was a captive of a fear so overwhelming it had stripped me of all but the most basic functions. Gula smiled, he laughed, he was enjoying my terror. His eyes shining with a kind of sadistic accomplishment, he looked me over with ruthless precision, as if I was a building project and he had just applied a final coat of paint.
“I’m off,” he said pleasantly. “I have work to do around the property. Mending fences. Checking the livestock. Got to protect against predators. Always circling. Always looking for an opportunity.”
He had barely turned his back before I spun around and took terrified flight. I ran to where I had tied Eugene, but he was gone. Panic-stricken and calling out his name, I looked everywhere for him. Finally, I found him just inside the woods, reins dragging, nibbling on a clump of grass at the foot of a tree. I threw my arms around his neck and clambered into the saddle. I didn’t need to ask how he had come free. I already knew the answer.
E
UGENE WAS FEELING THE
effects of the heat, after an initial wild getaway gallop. We had slowed down and were walking along the trail in the woods heading for home when I caught unexpected sight of Gula again, through a gap in the trees. “Shhh,” I whispered, reining in Eugene, not wanting to risk detection, lowering my head as I viewed Gula from between my horse’s ears.
He was climbing the side of a small hill, emerging from the pasture where Gin kept a small flock of sheep. Walking slowly, he was pulling something. As he drew closer I saw blood on his hands, on the front of his shirt, on the knees of his pants.
Dragging a dead lamb by its leg, he stepped up onto the pathway where I could see everything. The lamb flopped helplessly, lifeless, its throat ripped open, its white wool soaked in red, black eyes fixed and staring.
I don’t remember using my heels on Eugene. I have no memory of pressing him into a gallop. It seems to me he did it on his own, as if even he was responding to what we saw that day amidst the tall grass and the wild poppies. I held on for dear life as we raced past the forest and across the open field, and even after we arrived back at the little stable next to my house I was still shaking. Without the broad shoulders of my horse to support me, I would have fallen to the ground.
Sneaking into the house up the back staircase, I managed to avoid detection. I wasn’t in any mood to explain to my mother my resemblance to a chimney sweep or my disheveled emotional state. Running up to my bedroom, purposefulness fueled by panic, my mother’s copies of
Vogue
in one hand and
Harper’s Bazaar
in the other, I sat on the edge of my bed frantically and irrationally hunting for photos of people—models, actors, anyone—with hair the same color as Polly Devlin’s, the unusual forest-creature color she had transferred to her son.
There was a Belgian sheepdog in an ad that came close. I closed the magazine for a second to consider. Gula did say he was working on a secret project. Hadn’t Gin said he was from Belgium? Maybe he and Gin were planning to raise Belgian sheepdogs. It could have been a dog—maybe Vera and the dog were playing, which accounted for all that running and scrambling. So many maybes.
I started to wonder about what it was exactly that I had heard, what I had seen. Was it as bad as I thought it was? My imagination undermined my sense of reason at the best of times. Maybe I didn’t hear or see anything. Maybe Gula didn’t realize how hard he had grabbed me earlier, how tightly he had held me close to him, how he had twisted my wrist.
I retrieved the miraculous medal from my pocket. Gin had taught countless students to ride over the years; it could have belonged to any one of them. I brightened. For that matter, it could have been mine. Whatever had happened to mine anyway? Who knows how long it had gone undetected in the stable? I opened the top drawer of my dresser and hid it in the back corner.
So many thoughts running through my head, none of them having to do with what had just happened to me at the scorched site where the yellow barn once stood. I rubbed my wrist without thinking about why. It was much later that I noticed the bruising and felt the ache from the barbarian band, black and blue and red that wound round my wrist like a savage variant on a tennis bracelet.
M
Y MOTHER CAUGHT UP
with me a few hours later in the laundry room, freshly showered, my riding clothes churning away in the washing machine.
“So?” She eyed me with suspicion. “What brings you in here?”
“I could ask you the same question,” I said.
“What happened to your wrist?”
“Got caught up in the reins. I was walking along the road, cooling down Eugene when he got spooked and bolted.”
She disappeared behind her sunglasses. “I’m heading down to the beach.”
I surprised both of us by asking if I could come with her.
“P
LEASE USE SUNTAN LOTION.
I’m starting to see spots,” my mother said, peering at me over the top of her open book as right before her eyes all those red freckles started multiplying under direct assault by the sun, covering my exposed face and my body like paint spatter.
Giving her the silent treatment, I lay down on the sand, warm turquoise beach towel at my back, and closed my eyes, covering them with the flattened palms of my hands, shutting out my mother’s penetrating glare, the hard edges of the sun’s unyielding rays slowly burning me to a crisp, baking me so thoroughly that at one point I thought I could smell smoke.
T
HAT NIGHT, I STAYED
up late watching TV, my parents already in bed and asleep as I tiptoed past their bedroom door and down the long corridor, its red walls glowing, golden light from intermittently placed antique sconces illuminating paintings stacked in sophisticated profusion, the way my mother liked. I opened the door at the end of the hall and crept up the stairs to my bedroom. My room was steeped in a disorienting blackness, the outline of my antique four-poster bed barely visible. I stepped off the cool hardwood, my bare toes skimming the worn surface of an ancient Anatolian kilim rug, an exotic fading remnant of my mother’s childhood room.
Sitting at my desk, by the warm gleam of a dim light, I pulled out the picture of the Belgian sheepdog from inside the drawer. Already I had made it into some sort of talisman, obsessively consulting it, begging it to tell me what I so desperately wanted to hear—that mysterious, missing Charlie Devlin had never been inside a yellow stable, that he had never worn a soft leather topsider, that he had never met a soft-spoken European man with a way with horses and a handshake so warm and woozy it was like dipping your fingers into a kiddie pool.
I pulled back my quilt and climbed into bed, chilled by the night air and the memory of my afternoon run-in with Gula. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. Emotional overload tended to render me comatose.
Whoomph!
Oh, my God, what was that? Rocked by instant terror, my body stiffened as I lay rigid, pinned against the mattress, chest heaving. Whomp! Another dull thud. My brain was running wild in the street. I eyed my bedroom door and prayed that my legs would move fast enough.
When I realized what was inspiring all that terror, I felt like a fool.
“Jesus! Dorothy?”
Relief and annoyance washed over me. It was the big muffled smack of a dog paw, wide as a baseball mitt, battering against the door, scratching and clawing from within the closet. Her tail was banging away against my clothes—the basset-hound equivalent of nervous laughter. This was perhaps the millionth time she had managed to lodge herself in one of the house’s many inhospitable tight spots.
Briefly considering the idea of leaving her locked up, I abandoned my impossible dream of sleeping dog-free and threw back the covers. Indulging in a round of inspired profanity, I pushed open the door. The closet’s dim light clicked on automatically.
Dorothy rushed out at me, the musky smell of her captivity filling the room. Shocked and unprepared, I squealed and fell onto my backside. “Dorothy!” From my spot on the floor I looked up. Amidst the chaos of my closet, random strewn shoes, rumpled sweaters, crumpled jeans tossed on the floor, shirts turned inside out and carelessly dangling from bent hangers, was something I’d never seen before. Something that didn’t fit. Something that didn’t belong.
There was a small rag doll propped up against the top shelf. A doll with no face.
The doll was faded and diminished. Her hair was made of black wool, and her little dress was torn. She was old and she was dirty. Lifting her warily from the shelf, I carried her to the bed and stared into the featureless fabric, the place where her face should have been, and I wondered where she had come from. A humble no-face doll, its poignant anonymity conferring a message that spoke to me in a secret language I couldn’t understand.
When I was little, I used to put my dolls in the closet at night so I wouldn’t wake up to find them staring at me in the dark, so fearful was I of seeing the slow methodical blink of an eye, the hint of a mysterious smile, any furtive sign of animation, the world awash in possibilities, not all of them golden.
