SEVEN

THE BELGIAN’S BOAT had rocked us gently, creaking every now and then, wavelets lapping our bilge. We slept in peace and awoke new men. I could dig this whole littoral, nautical ethos with no strain at all. It was only six when we awoke. 0600. I never awoke at 0600. We bounded up the ladder into the cockpit. Well, technically, Jellyroll didn’t bound. He tried, but dogs are not equipped to bound up varnished ladders, so I gave him a boost from behind. Once up, we stood in the cockpit, our heads pivoting, absorbing our new environment, I with my eyes, he with his nose.

Thanks, Clayton.

The harbor was postcard material, yet there were no condo time-shares, no ye olde frozen yogurt and macramé shoppes, nothing whatsoever of popular culture. Except Jellyroll and me. There were some incongruous folks up the hill on the other side of the pier, but I didn’t pay them much notice.

I sat down in the back of the boat behind the steering wheel and breathed deeply. So did Jellyroll. I took the wheel in hand, stood behind it, fantasizing, like a little boy, that I was driving the big boat in heavy weather, sailing hard, water coming over the bow…I leaned out over the stern to see what her name was. Her name was Names. Hmm. Evocative, in a moody sort of European existential way. Everywhere I looked, buttery light sparkled on varnish and water.

We were tucked into a deep, round harbor, rocky and wooded with an equally round granite island lying just beyond the mouth as if it had been cookie-cuttered out of the mainland to make the harbor, then placed seaward a diameter to protect it. Shorebirds went about their business. Fractious herring gulls, beaks wide, screamed in each other’s faces. Cormorants dried their wings on various vertical perches. Waders I couldn’t identify, plovers or sanderlings, ruddy turnstones maybe, flitted in and out with the little wavelets on the gravel shore. I wondered if I could buy a bird book around here.

The shoreline seemed to consist of truncated and cracked rock shelves that slipped away beneath the surface at a shallow angle. Pink and black and white veins flowed through the granite. Why had this sublime little harbor not been nullified by hucksters, theme park moguls, image meisters, marketeers, and mass media shitheads? Maybe it was too far north to be vulnerable.

None of the stocky, seamanly fellows in high rubber boots unloading boats around us, throwing boxes of ice up onto the dock, seemed even to recognize Jellyroll. A forklift driver glanced our way but didn’t show a glimmer of recognition, even as he nodded at us. I wondered if that was because of Jellyroll’s disguise or because they’d never seen him before.

The smells were rich, almost psychoactive. Jellyroll’s nostrils were going a mile a minute. Fish, salt water, wood, creosote, low tide. Jellyroll with all that canine olfactory gear must have feasted on the newness of it. He looked up at me with a big smile on his face.

A man with powerful round shoulders and a weathered-granite face pushed a loaded wheelbarrow past the Names. It contained coils of greasy cable and massive metal fittings of some sort. “Mornin’, Cap’n,” he said cheerfully, passing.

“Morning,” I said.

That was a friendly little exchange. The “cap’n” irony didn’t escape me, but what the hell, smartass irony is much better than psychotic malice and senseless hostility. Delicate morning light, sweet salt breeze from the ocean, professional fisherfolk who’d never seen a R-r-ruff Dog commercial, this would do fine for a decade or two. The man wheeled the cable to the little ship at the end of the dock. From aboard, crewmen swung out a wooden boom to block-and-tackle the coils over the rail. I breathed deeply and wished Crystal were here. I always like to hear her responses to things.

Micmac consisted of four wooden stores, one with a new red paint job, standing side by side along the road that ran perpendicular to the dock. Micmac huddled around the harbor, and the dock was the focus of the harbor. The stores all had back entrances onto a wooden walkway connected to the dock. The half-dozen houses I could see all faced the water. In the old days, I imagined, life came from the sea. The continental forest to the west meant darkness and death. No wonder people imagined witches and hassled Hester Prynne.

The people up on the hill on the far side of the harbor were not moving. At first, I took them for members of a bus tour: Perillo’s Picturesque Harbors and Ports. But they weren’t just passing through after grabbing a few snapshots; they were acting like this was their destination. Besides, they weren’t looking at the harbor.

On their side of the dock, the circular shoreline continued its jagged bend, but the land rose abruptly from the water to form a stubby bluff with a craggy top and grassy slopes. There was a small, level, meadowy plateau on the slope. Something was happening on that meadow, something out of step with life down here.

They were clearly not locals—they were from farther away than me. They were all looking up at the same thing, like tourists at a rocket launching. All I saw was backs and craned necks. Whatever they were looking at was located up among the rocks and small crags on the top of the bluff. Some of the lookers had climbed beyond the plateau to the place where the grade grew too steep to walk upright. They shielded their eyes from the new sun with their hands or their hats. People pointed. A handful looked through binoculars.

Was it a jumper?

Nobody down here on the dock was paying the crowd any attention at all. Anyway, the bluff was too short for suicide. This would be the place to jump if you meant to tear some ligaments in your knee. The scene jangled me. There was something weird about it. I didn’t need to come this far for the weird. I could get weird any time I wanted it just by walking up to Broadway…Maybe they were bird-watchers here to spot some obscure species resting en route to spawning grounds in the High Arctic…

Others were arriving singly and in family units. Some carried aluminum folding chairs and Igloo coolers. What were they all looking at? They had turned their backs on the harbor, which must have been picturesque from above, to peer up at naked rocks. Geologists?

There were children, too. Some children watched as intently as the adults, but a few rolled in the grass. A couple of dogs wrestled. Here and there, people poured liquid from thermos bottles or ate pieces of fruit as if picnicking, yet nobody was relaxed. They were tense, expectant. They pointed up there for the newcomers. And again for each other.

“The Jesus people,” said the wheelbarrow man heading back empty.

“The Jesus people?”

He stopped, set down his barrow, wiped his forehead on his sleeve, stood for a while watching the people on the hill, his back toward me. From the cockpit I looked down on his bald spot. “Yeah, that’s what folks have taken to calling them. The Jesus people. But then I guess they got the right.”

“What right?”

“At least until they create an unsanitary condition.”

“What are they doing up there?” I asked.

“Waiting.”

“For what?”

“Salvation.” He picked up his wheelbarrow, but I didn’t want to leave it at that.

“Why here?”

“They got a sign. They got a sign in the fungus.”

“Fungus?”

“Lichens. That’s all a lichen is, fungus.”

“What was the sign?”

“The face of Jesus. Up on them rocks. Sort of in profile. There’s goin’ to be an unsanitary condition dependin’ how long it takes to get saved.”

“How did they know that there was a face in the lichens? I mean, in the first place.”

“Goin’ to be a parking problem pretty soon.” He walked away.

I watched the Jesus people assemble. I hoped at least a few of them would be saved. I took Jellyroll for a pee.

I didn’t get any coffee because the tiny restaurant was jammed with customers. I peeked in. It had a planked wooden floor and lovely glass and mahogany counters, little round tables with ice-cream parlor chairs, all occupied by people who would probably recognize Jellyroll.

He peed in the grassy strip beside the road. Traffic was beginning to congeal on this the only road into Micmac. I saw license plates from ten different states. Had they all come to be saved? A few people in the crawling traffic showed glimmers of recognition, so I hustled Jellyroll back toward the dock, toward the people who’d never heard of him. He didn’t care, it was all new and exciting to him. But I’d have to forget the coffee, and that made me a little edgy. I wasn’t certain I could be responsible for my attitude without coffee.

There was a marine supply store at the head of the dock. We went in. There were no displays inside or any other attempt at marketing. Heavy-duty chain was displayed by size in piles on the undulating wood floor. The old salts who shopped here knew what they wanted, and they didn’t want a load of advertising bullshit. Some very esoteric stuff was stacked here and there, suspended from wall hooks and left in packing boxes. I couldn’t even guess at the purpose of most of the objects hung on pegboards or stacked on olive-drab metal shelves. Oars, boathooks, fishing rods, antennae, and other long things lay across the rafters.

“Mornin’, Cap’n,” said the wheelbarrow man with the big shoulders from behind a dusty counter.

“Good morning,” I said. I liked that. Captain Deemer. “I’d like to buy a navigation chart of the local area.”

He spun on his stool to a wooden chest with thin drawers, whipped one open, and in a single motion swept a big paper chart back up onto the counter. The air settled from beneath it. It was beautiful. The land was tan and the water blue. He rolled it up, banded and handed it to me.

“Could I see those?” I pointed to a serious pair of binoculars in the case below the cash register. I supposed there were discount emporiums where the prudent seaman shopped. I’d pay top dollar here, but then people with wealthy dogs can engage in whimsy, while others must budget wisely, and still others live in pain and degradation. The world is not fair in that respect. I bought a top-o’-the-line nautical/military pair with a stout rubber covering, no metal exposed to the elements, but they were very big and heavy. These were the kind of binoculars you see around the necks of corvette captains on Discovery Channel documentaries about convoy escort duty on the Murmansk Run, not dudes with dogs from the Upper West Side, but I didn’t care.

“A pleasure doing business with you, Cap’n.”

“The pleasure’s all mine. Let me ask you something. Have you seen the face in the lichens?”

“Me? No.” He seemed surprised at the question.

“Do you know anybody who has?”

“Well, let me think now. No, can’t say I do.”

“It might not even exist?”

“Might. Might not. I don’t see it makes much difference.”

After we left the store, I showed my new binoculars to Jellyroll. He sniffed them skeptically.

Lobster boats with wire traps stacked in the stern were tied side by side three deep along the opposite side of the dock from the Belgian’s boat. Salty-looking lobstermen stood in a clot smoking, talking in accents so thick it sounded like they were speaking Norwegian. They giggled now and then at a joke. They nodded at us in a hospitable manner but didn’t say anything as we strolled by. Jellyroll sniffed their gear on the dock, nets and things, and one of the captains called him Bowser. Hell, maybe his disguise was working.

We walked out to the end of the dock where the little ship was moored. It was called Slocum. It had a low center deck with the wheelhouse in the back and a high upswung bow in front—but it was tiny. Aboard the low center deck, sailors were lowering a refrigerator by rope from the stout wooden boom overhead. Jellyroll and I stopped to watch. Two burly guys waited with their arms up to receive it, while a third stood somewhat aside, at the base of the boom, and lowered away.

The third deckhand, the one lowering away, was a woman. She wore shorts with wool socks and heavy hiking boots. Her muscular legs were bent, her body centered. Her thighs twitched as she paid out the rope. It creaked around the cleat under the load. She wore nothing under her olive halter, and her arms squeezed her breasts together into a deep valley. I would love to see Crystal lower something heavy. Perhaps at the right moment, after a nice dinner, I could ask her to lower a major appliance.

But the fact is, just then, I was overcome with lust. I stood there staring at the deckhand’s straining body like a testosterone-crazed juvenile peeking through a knothole in the women’s shower room. Beads of sweat ran down her flanks as she lowered, and the curve formed by her neck and chin as she looked up, eyes fixed on the refrigerator, turned my knees to rubber. I couldn’t tear myself away from the sweaty physicality of her lowering. This was raw, inarticulate, pounding, boyhood lust. I forced myself to waddle off, disoriented, back toward the Belgian’s boat, where I meant to go below and consider the matter, but I didn’t get far—

A scream of raw female terror froze us all in our spots. Sometimes I hear screams like that in my neighborhood in the middle of the night. But here where human relations seemed simple and stable, the sound of terror in full voice chilled my blood. Jellyroll’s, too. The salts and I hunched our shoulders as if something were about to explode in our midst. When it didn’t, we uncoiled, only to be blown back by another peal. Everybody looked for the source.

The coffee shop had a back porch, with picnic tables, built out over the harbor. It must have been a nice spot for breakfast under normal conditions. Even now all the picnic tables were crowded with diners. That’s where the screams had come from. The commotion grew.

The woman began to scream again, now in short staccato blasts. She wasn’t very far away, a half block maybe, but I looked at her through my binoculars: She had bobbed black hair. She wore jeans and a Hard Rock Cafe sweatshirt. She was obviously from away. She covered her face with her hand as she continued to scream. She had bangs that she kept flipping away from her eyes. Her eyes were wide and round and darting.

She pointed at a wooden shed built into the corner of the porch. It seemed to have a door, but the door was closed. She was pointing at the door as she screamed, all the time backing away in mincing steps until she came up against the railing. There she began to sob breathlessly—

“Looks like they got some trouble up at the Cod End,” one old salt commented.

“Ayah,” another agreed.

“From away,” another said.

Some diners on the porch went to assist the screaming woman, while others started hesitantly toward that door and its terrible secret. Other diners remained frozen at their picnic tables, forkfuls of food halfway to their mouths. It’s troubling how human tragedy can often look so comic to the observer—

“Brains!” the young woman began to scream. I didn’t understand at first, but she said it again and again. “Brains!”

“What’s she say?” asked a salt.

“Didn’t get it,” said another.

“Brains,” I said.

“Brains?”

A man in a matching shorts and shirt ensemble boldly grabbed the door to the shed and flung it open—outward toward the dock, so I couldn’t see inside. The sign on the door said GULLS. The guy in the lime-green shorts recoiled from the sight inside. Somebody else looked in, then still somebody else. They recoiled. Everybody who looked in recoiled. They knocked cups and plates and maple syrup off the picnic tables as they recoiled.

A uniformed cop with a pear-shaped torso showed up on the porch from inside the restaurant. He held his holster down as he ran around the corner. Everybody pointed at the shed, and the cop looked in. I could only see his shoes from under the door, but he didn’t recoil. After a while, he closed the door, pointed to an ununiformed, lanky guy in the doorway, and motioned for him to stand in front of the door. The uniformed cop herded everybody off the porch. Most of the Jesus people had turned from the face in the lichens to look down at the porch.

“You know who he reminds me of?” queried a salt.

“Sheriff Kelso?”

“Ayah. He reminds me of that TV cop, the confused one with the wrinkled raincoat.”

“Colombo.”

“Colombo, right. What’s his real name?”

“Walter Matthau.”

“Ayah.”

I told Jellyroll to heel. We hurried back to the Belgian’s boat. We went below and just sat stiffly.

An hour later, Dwight showed up in his boat. It was that distinctive type of lobster boat almost identical to the salts’ boats across the dock. Dwight passed me a line, but I didn’t immediately see anything to tie it to, so I held on to it until he came aboard and took it from me.

“Do you know what happened at the Cod End?” he said. “One of the Jesus people just got murdered. Somebody chopped her skull in half, for Chrissake! She was taking a piss on the porch right over there at the Cod End, somebody split her skull in half. Literally in half. Whack.” He made a deadly chopping motion with his open hand. “Jesus. Somebody must have been in there waiting, but how the hell can that be? It’s a one-holer.” He kept shaking his head as I passed our gear to him over the rail. He had bags of food from the Selfs in his boat, and he had an old-fashioned plaid-painted thermos. “Want some coffee?”

“Deeply.”