TEN

“EVERYBODY AROUND HERE calls it the Crack for obvious reasons,” said Dwight at the helm as we neared the entrance. “Nobody ever calls it Kempshall Harbor.” He wrinkled his lip as if the words tasted metallic in his mouth.

The Crack. I’d already seen it from the air, but airplane dimensions had softened its effect at water level. Sheer pink-granite faces rose three stories straight up out of the water. The walls rose so steeply and the rock was so smooth that a swimmer could not have climbed out and would have drowned like a turtle pawing against the glass in a flooded terrarium. At the mouth, the walls spanned fifty feet of water, but inside they narrowed steadily to an acute angle, then to nothing. Brown, leathery kelp clung to the rock and undulated in the swell as if beckoning us to watery death. This was a primal place.

Some unimaginable force had cracked this island nearly in two. Did it crack gradually, eon by eon, or did it explode apart volcanically? Even Dickie shut up as we entered. The place seemed to demand solemnity from the people who entered, even those who did so often. I stepped from under the wheelhouse in order to look up. The cliffs loomed. Only lichens could live on them.

The Crack could be explained, it had a knowable geologic origin. Uplift, volcanism, crustal plate tectonics, glaciation, one of those world shakers, but the feeling of the place didn’t encourage that kind of curiosity. Entering the Crack called up primitive anxieties, the kind that probably brought shivers up the spines of our ancient progenitors huddled around the paltry light of a campfire in an utterly dark world. I imagined otherwise extinct predators, saber-toothed tigers, dire wolves, giant marsupials peering down at us from the rim, licking their lips. Fresh meat. It felt like we were entering the blunt mandibles of a monster sprawled on its side. Inside, daylight dimmed. The cliff walls fell away to a shallower angle, still too steep to climb up, but shallow enough to build stairs down to the water—

The apex of the Crack, the hinge of the creature’s jaw, formed a natural amphitheater, and there the submarine perched on a stand of interlocking railroad ties, a log cabin without a roof, twenty feet up on a ledge. The submarine was painted industrial orange, like the primer coat on highway bridges. The thing was as long as a pickup truck, but cylindrical, like a thick conduit. It was festooned with tanks, pipes, valves, hoses, connectors, adapters, nuts and bolts. It couldn’t be real. I looked through my new binoculars. It sure looked real. In front was a big Plexiglas bubble, like on those M*A*S*H helicopters. The captain would squat in there to con his ship. Its bulbous eye glinted in the sun.

Dwight had slowed his boat to a crawl. The span narrowed. Several motorboats were tied nose and tail in a line down the middle, making the quarters very close near the apex, in the shadow of the sub.

“Why did he bring it all the way over here to launch?” I asked.

“This is where he built it,” said Dwight.

“What? I thought there wasn’t any electricity on the island.”

“There ain’t.”

“He’s a genius,” said Dickie.

Dwight docked his boat against a narrow wooden float near the apex of the Crack. Strings of wooden stairs ran up the rock in switchback flights. Some stairs came only halfway down, as if the rest had dropped into the water. Some step units were old, the wood black and grainy, others were fresh, and the rest fell somewhere in between, all heading in the same direction like a visible demonstration of decay.

“There’s your boat,” said Dwight, tying his own to a corroded cleat on the float. “If you like it. I mean, you don’t have to take it. Don’t feel no pressure.” It was tied to the adjacent float.

I stepped up onto the floating dock, which needed a little more flotation. Water leapt up through the cracks in the boards. I leaned against cool pink granite and looked at my new boat. It was open, wooden, about twenty-five feet long with a faded red hull and white insides. There was a steering wheel with spokes mounted on a short pedestal in the center of the boat on the left side. Her ribs were visible, thick and closely spaced. Here and there rust streaked her red paint. This was a salty boat. This boat had been used, it had been out there. Things were worn in the way old craftsmen’s tools are worn, the way Dwight’s gear was worn. I was glad. I didn’t want a tourist boat painted metal-flake magenta like a motorcycle helmet. I didn’t want a boat that had molded indentations to hold your rum swizzle. I wanted a salty craft, and this was it.

“It’s a Hampton boat,” said Dwight. “Well, I guess you’d have to say it’s a modified Hampton boat. I pulled up her sheer a little ’cause I liked a jaunty look in those days, and raised the stern some just for balance.”

“What? You mean you built this boat?”

“Yeah, but it was a long time ago. She’s gettin’ old now, on her way out, but she don’t leak too bad yet.”

Dickie said something about Hampton boats, but it was clear even to me he didn’t know shit. Dwight ignored him.

“She’s gettin’ a little hogged, as you can see.”

I couldn’t. I didn’t even know what hogged meant. She looked perfect to me. I wanted her. I had a feckless impulse to buy her right then and there, but I repressed it.

“Everything ends,” said Dwight.

Even so, building a complex thing probably develops one’s inner resources. Or did one have to have inner resources to begin building?

“Immediate problem,” said Dwight dryly, “is gettin’ to it.” The modified Hampton boat was tied to a float identical to the one we stood on, long and narrow, but fifteen feet of water separated us from it. There wasn’t enough room for Dwight to raft his boat outside the Hampton boat because another boat, a decaying red clunker, was moored lengthwise near the apex of the Crack.

Two-by-six planks braced somehow into the cliff formed a catwalk that technically spanned the rock between here and there, but it looked suspicious. Dwight was testing it with his foot.

“Say, Alistair,” he said to a guy on the red clunker.

I hadn’t noticed Alistair, my attention occupied with my own new boat. Nor had I noticed the carelessly hand-painted sign tacked to the roof of his boat, RED LOBSTERS. There was a crazy cant to the roofline. Green weed grew like long hair along the waterline. “Say, Dwight?” said Alistair, an old man with a face as granitic as the Crack itself.

“Would you trust that catwalk, Alistair, you was me?”

Alistair wiped his enormous hands on a mechanic’s cloth and scrutinized the catwalk in question. “Can’t say, Dwight. However, the last cat on that walk ended up in the drink.”

“What happened? Did the catwalk crack?”

“Weren’t no fault of the catwalk. Fault of the cat.”

“So did you rescue him?”

“Fuck no, Dwight. I’m busy sellin’ lobsters. I can’t be rescuin’ every damn fool falls off the catwalk. What do you hear about the killin’, Dwight?”

“Killing?” said Dickie, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, rocking the float. “You mean killings. Like a string of them. Like mass murder in Micmac.”

They ignored him.

“We better go up and around,” said Dwight.

So we did. For some reason stairs delight Jellyroll. He bounds up them and looks back at me with a big smile on his face. But I didn’t feel quite so confident of the stairs. They moved far too much. Dwight climbed casually, but I stayed a few steps behind so as not to strain the stairs.

The rock was not uniform here. At the mouth, it had looked uniformly brown, but back here veins of starkly different colors ran through it. Some were pure white and crystalline, others smooth and black, with complex branches reaching out horizontally, sometimes intertwining with veins of a different color, a petrified bloodstream.

As we went, Dwight said, “This all gets cleared out come November.”

“All what?”

“All you see. Stairs, floats, boats, everything. The whole harbor. All the boats get out by autumn. We take everything apart and store it up in the woods over the winter.” He paused on a crooked landing near the top and pointed toward the opening. “See, out there—that’s dead northeast. In a nor’easter the Crack is hell on earth. Water comes through that opening like a fire hose. We’d get swept away standin’ here in a weak nor’easter. In a strong one, waves’d be breakin’ up there in the woods.” Dwight’s face was largely immobile, but just then a look of respect, even awe, flicked across his weathered features at the image of the sea in the narrow confines of the Crack; then he said, “Of course, you don’t get nor’easters in the summer.”

I lagged for a moment trying to picture the scene. That kind of power was hard for a landsman urbanite and his dog to imagine. I followed Dwight up out of the Crack onto flat land.

Dickie tagged along, walking stiff-legged as if his scrotum itched.

There were two small barns or sheds with no windows near the apex. They were built on foundations of stacked logs. I realized that they, too, must get moved back from the reach of the sea. Within a block-long radius of the Crack there were no trees. Dwight told me that flying seawater had killed them generations ago.

“When I was a kid, we’d dare each other to stand close in a nor’easter. Like the city kids I read about that ride on top of elevators.”

“I’ve been goddamned near carried away when I was standing way over there,” Dickie pointed. “I remember one year—”

“Aw, bullshit, Dickie, you ain’t even been here in November.”

“Well, I stayed that one bad year. I gotta run anyway. Gotta get my dog. Hey, thanks for the lift. Boy, that sure looks like the R-r-ruff Dog,” he said, but made no move to leave.

Twenty yards away at the far end of the clearing, there was an abandoned red building that looked like a rural train station circa 1940. I looked at it through my binoculars. It was a train depot, in ruins now. Weeds and shrubs grew out of the windows and up through chinks in the walls. I could see the tracks in front.

“Kempshall built himself a railroad to take his guests and his gear over to the Castle. That’s what he called his mansion.”

We started down the adjacent set of stairs, even shakier than its neighbor. Jellyroll didn’t care, bounding ahead, having a grand time. I could tell by the way the stairs bounced that Dickie was still with us.

Descending, Dwight told me that the Hampton boat now belonged to a man named Roy. Roy and Dwight had gone to school together, played on the same line of scrimmage. “Roy had his esophagus removed back about two years ago, talks through one of them electric vibration devices. As a result he don’t like to talk to strangers. Thinks his voice sounds weird. Does.” So Dwight had already made a deal for me, but I didn’t have to take it, he assured me. Roy wanted eighty-five dollars a week. How they arrived at that, I had no idea, but it sounded great to me—

“Say, Alistair.”

“Say, Dwight.”

Dwight introduced me to Alistair across the water. He said he was proud to meet me. I said I was, too.

“Now would that be the R-r-ruff Dog?”

“Yes.” I had removed the disguise, not that it ever worked.

“Goddamn. The R-r-ruff Dog. Dwight, did you ever imagine the R-r-ruff Dog’d make it to Teal Island? That’s my favorite dog in all Hollywood.”

“Of course that’s the R-r-ruff Dog,” said Dickie confidently.

Dwight went aboard my new boat. Jellyroll leapt aboard, and I followed.

Dwight started the tour at the bow. “She sits low, so she’s gonna take water in any kind of chop. You can fold this canvas cover back a little ways to protect your valuables.” He moved to the control console built of plywood and showed me neutral-forward-reverse on the transmission lever beside the steering wheel. The chrome-plated lever with its red plastic knob was the only modern thing on my new boat.

“Okay, this is the most important thing—” Dwight kicked the engine box located near the stern. “This’s a gasoline engine. It ain’t a diesel engine. A gas engine can blow you to bits. You don’t ever want to start this engine without giving it the sniff test—”

A sudden whirring interrupted him. We looked toward its source—the top of the cliff above the submarine—but there was nothing to see. The whirring grew louder. The thing, the whirrer, was approaching the cliff edge. Then a white mechanical arm with a cable and hook hanging from it appeared. The arm extended out over the water, telescoped back into itself, extended again. It withdrew again, and when it next extended, a nearly naked man with an ascetic, wrinkled body stood in the hook hugging the cable with one arm and gesturing to the crane operator with the other—

“Take it down, Edith. Down goddamnit!”

He was a circumcised man in a tiny Speedo with stars and stripes. His only other clothes were work boots with woolen socks. He was old to be riding crane hooks in skimpy Speedos on cool days. The guy was easily seventy-five. His body was hard, tanned, and wrinkled like your father’s ancient old catcher’s mitt in the back of the closet. He twisted in midair on the hook. “Take it down! What language am I speaking, goddamnit, Edith? Down!”

The crane whirred, and he spiraled down.

“That’s Commander Hickle,” said Dwight.

“Stop!” shouted Commander Hickle.

The hook and Hickle stopped a foot from the roof of his submarine. Hickle stepped off onto the sub. But then the hook started again. It clanked on the sub.

“Stop, goddamnit, Edith! Stop!”

“Goddamnit, Edith,” Alistair mocked, sitting on his transom. “Sparky’s been doin’ that all day. It’s cuttin’ into my lobster trade, Commander Sparky goin’ up and down. Gets the customers edgy.”

“The commander’s a genius,” said Dickie. “I worked with him on that sub.” Dickie stuck out his chin. “We consulted on certain hydrodynamical matters.”

“Yeah, right,” said Alistair, “then he ran you off for stealin’ his tools.”

“Slander.”

“Hey, Dickie, did Sheriff Kelso find you?” asked Alistair.

“What—?” said Dickie, deflating.

“Yeah, he looked pissed, if you ask me.” Alistair didn’t bat an eye, and I could see Dickie strain to figure out if he was being kidded or not, poor bastard.

Bored with the routine, Dwight continued with my orientation—“A cupful of gasoline in an enclosed space overnight can make enough fumes to blow your ass to bits when you go to start it next mornin’. I’ve seen it happen. There’s a blower—” He flipped a switch mounted in the steering console, and I heard a fan go on. “But don’t trust it alone. Lift up the engine box and sniff. If you smell gas, leave the box up for a while before you start the engine.”

Alistair said, “Yeah, you remember Russell Cass? Got blowed to kingdom come out in Cabot Strait. It rained Russell for two days.”

“Yeah,” said Dwight. “Used to upset my daughter to see gulls gulpin’ little floatin’ bits of Russell.”

“Around here lotta folks with gas engines don’t bother with the sniff test. They use Dickie to start their engines for them. How much you get per engine, Dickie?”

Dickie looked hurt, but he didn’t leave. He put his hands in his pockets and bobbed his head slightly as if trying to pump up a retort.

“There was one other thing, what was it?” Dwight asked himself, rubbing his chin. “Oh. The dinghy. Right there.” He pointed to a battered little fiberglass boat tied to the same float. “That’s yours. See, you can’t use that flat rock as a dock. Tide’ll come up and set your boat down on it. You got to leave your boat on the moorin’ and dinghy in.”

Alistair waved at somebody coming down the steps. He greeted Edith by name. Like the Commander, Edith was over seventy, but she was coming fast. I could see she had zeroed in on Jellyroll. You can always tell. He can tell, too. Edith wore a print shift and high-tech sneakers with ankle socks, the kind with little pom-poms at the heels. She held up the hem of her skirt so as not to impede her pumping knees.

“Hello, Edith,” said Dwight.

“Hello, Dwight.”

“Hi, Edith,” said Dickie.

“Edith,” said Dwight, “I’d like you to meet Artie Deemer. He’ll be staying at the boathouse for a while. Artie, this is Edith Hickle.”

She shook my hand warmly, even though she wanted to meet Jellyroll, not me. Many people aren’t nearly so gracious. I used to get trampled by cute-crazed fans until I learned to lean forward and put a shoulder into them. They don’t even notice when you put a shoulder into them. It’s a powerful urge they feel.

“And this is the R-r-ruff Dog,” said Dwight with a little ta-da move.

Edith’s knees crackled as she went down to his level. Jellyroll wagged his entire back end and licked Edith’s face in long laps. She moaned with delight and petted his back. Dwight was smiling with the happiness of it all.

“Edith, goddamnit, take it up!” bellowed the Commander from atop his sub.

“Just a moment”—she winked up at Dwight and added—“Sparky.”

Sparky must have thought Edith was still up in the crane. When he looked down and saw her on the float, he did a big take and bellowed, “Goddamnit, Edith, what are you doing!”

“This is the R-r-ruff Dog, dear.”

“The R-r-ruff Dog? Celebrity dogs? Do you know what celebrity dogs represent, Edith? A culture in decline! Decline, Edith!”

“Good luck with the launching, Commander,” called Dickie.

“You, goddamnit! Are you still alive?”

Dickie wilted.

Edith stood up, with a boost from Dwight. “How’s Phyllis?” she asked him.

“Fine. She told me to bring you her best.”

“Well,” said Edith, “we’ve been kind of busy what with the launching and…all.”

“She knows that, Edith. You’ll be back in touch soon’s it’s done.”

Edith squeezed Dwight’s forearm before she started up the steps with much less energy than on her descent. Jellyroll looked kind of sad to see her go.

Dwight started the engine after giving it another sniff for my edification. “Well, there you are. Ready to go.” He may have sensed my hesitation—the boat was pointing up the Crack; I didn’t see how there was room to turn around without hitting the rock or Alistair’s boat—because he said, “Hop in. You can save me a trip back up the steps. Plus you want to get your chart off my boat—” He took us backward around Alistair’s boat and out where there was room to turn. He brought us up against his boat with the gentlest of taps, my bow pointing out the Crack toward open water. He climbed into his own boat and passed me my chart. “Now you feel okay about the trip back?”

“Oh, sure,” I said. Did I?

I cleared the mouth of the Crack feeling good. I felt good all the way back to the cove. I was stoned on crystalline air.

I turned us into the cove. Remember the sunkers, I told myself. I saw them on the chart as well. It took me a couple of tries to pick up the mooring line. I overran it the first time, jerked it out of my hands. But I got it on. I didn’t know what kind of knot to tie, so I tied a lot of them.

I didn’t notice I was tired until I sat down at the picnic table on the porch at dusk. That long sweep of falling light, lengthening shadows, would have been a time of peace and introspection at the old summerhouse with the loved ones.

I’d brought a cellular phone. I used it to call Clayton to tell him I love it, thanks a lot, but he wasn’t home, and then I remembered he had told me he was going to California. I left the message on his machine. Then I called Shelly, but he wasn’t home either. And Crystal was en route to Memphis. Jellyroll, who seemed to have strong inner resources, had found his place. Dogs always need a place. His was against the wall near the bedroom door on a small hook rug with concentric rings of earthen colors. I unpacked our gear, finished putting away the food, and explored the boathouse more closely.

Its internal frames made a lot of horizontal surfaces. They were used as bookshelves and for displaying knickknacks. There were guides to reptiles, birds, mammals, mosses and lichens, mushrooms, butterflies, tide pools, marine invertebrates, wildflowers; the knickknacks were mostly things from the sea or from the woods collected over the years. Sea urchin skeletons, glass net floats, horseshoe crabs, round rocks, flotsam and jetsam. I didn’t see much that clearly belonged to Clayton. Guests like me could have collected these things and left them as thank-yous.

Jellyroll had already gone to sleep. Maybe that was the key to life, full days, early to bed, early to rise. Maybe one didn’t need extraordinary inner resources to live in the remote regions, after all. I had a meatloaf sandwich and went to bed with the wildflower guide. I didn’t get much further than the names, but they were wonderful. The names could hypnotize: hoary alyssum, pipsissewa, blind gentian, early saxifrage, pink lady’s slipper, painted touch-me-not, false Solomon’s seal, common fleabane, sandwort, spotted Joe-Pye weed, and pearly everlasting.…

Jellyroll started barking before dawn. I awoke with that odd feeling of not knowing where I was. I had to force myself to remember. Jellyroll pawed at the front door, barked, looked over his shoulder at me, and pawed some more. The rest of the house was pitch dark, and I had no idea where I’d left the matches. One had to remember matches if one lived in a gas house.

I groped into the kitchen for the flashlight I’d seen earlier. I was struck by the night fears, the little-boy fears. I managed to get the flashlight and shine my way to the front door. There was nothing on the porch, nothing lurking against the walls. I went out on the porch.

The dog pack. They stood in a semicircle below, near the foot of the stairs, but none made a move to come up.

“Stay,” I told Jellyroll.

We watched each other. I shone the light on them. A couple wagged their tails. Others milled and paced excitedly. Their tongues lolled. Their eyes glowed, startling yellow or green discs.