FOURTEEN

WE STOOD SIDE by side at the wheel. The sea was flat and friendly. Jellyroll stood in the bow, ears flapping.

“Gorgeous,” Crystal said of Cabot Strait. Her face was alight. “Does anybody swim here?”

“It’s pretty cold.” That was cant. It was bloody freezing. Briefly dunking my hand caused great throbbing, but maybe I was being wimpy. I didn’t want to discourage Crystal. Crystal loved to swim. And I could then strive to warm her up.

“Would you like to go to the submarine launching?” I asked. I had told Crystal by phone about Commander Hickle and Edith and the orange submarine.

“This is the guy who abuses his wife?”

“Well, maybe he’s just an asshole.”

“What’s the difference?”

“You don’t want to go?”

“Whatever you want, Captain.” She smiled at me lasciviously. I loved it when she smiled lasciviously. It wasn’t exactly a smile. It was barely even a grin. The corners of her lips turned upward, and her eyes glistened. That was the most erotic thing about it to me, her glistening eyes. However, I still needed to hit the island. There was still that. There was no smoke beacon going this way, and I hadn’t been paying attention to anything but Crystal. The wages of lust claim another small craft. I studied the lobster pots to see what the water was doing.

“What’s the matter?” Crystal asked.

“Oh, nothing. Us seamanly fellows are attuned to our environment. The minutest thing has meaning to us.”

“Oh.”

The lobster pots stood straight up, which meant that there was little current. I could see the smoke behind us. I looked at the compass. It said we were going in the correct general direction, but it didn’t feel right. Had I gotten turned around? Should I turn around? People who know more than their compass are never seen again. I had read books about it. That would be a drag.

“Would you like some water?” I asked.

“Water? No thanks.”

“Don’t want to get dehydrated.”

“Oh, look,” said Crystal. “Land.”

“Land?”

“Isn’t that land?”

Sure enough, land. Dead ahead, a hill just above the horizon. It was probably the hill the Castle used to stand on.

“Wow, Captain, well done,” enthused Crystal.

I supposed it was unseemly for a captain to slow like a boy of ten at the World Series in Ebbetts Field. Perhaps I could work up a stolid visage, exuding nautical confidence, jaw set. Perhaps I’d look for some sort of salty hat. Maybe a blue wool watch cap like the locals wore.

I showed Crystal the islands of Dog and Outer Dog, and she sighed with contentment. She said she loved Dog Cove. I pointed out the rocks awash in Dog Cove. “Dwight calls those sunkers.”

“I can see why.”

“There it is, the boathouse. Well, it’s not really a boathouse, but that’s what Clayton always called it.”

“Where?”

“I know. It’s hard to see. It blends with the surroundings.”

I docked us with some dignity, even some aplomb, against the flat rock, where we unloaded Crystal’s stuff. Then I put the boat on the mooring and dinghied back in.

Crystal loved the boathouse, too. We took a quick tour. I showed her all the food the Selfs had sent. And then we sort of dove out of our clothing. Perhaps we should just move here and live in sexual splendor for the rest of our days. I watched a single bead of sweat roll down the inside slope of Crystal’s right breast toward the sweet valley floor. I envisaged myself in lilliputian scale wallowing in bliss between the mounds.

Crystal heard it first. She stiffened, a move that would have sent the miniature me bouncing down her belly. “Hear that?”

“Dogs,” I said.

“What dogs?”

“Jellyroll, stay,” I said. “This pack of dogs runs wild. I don’t think they do any harm, but he wants to run with them, and I don’t want him to.”

“He’s the boss,” said Crystal to Jellyroll, who at the sound of the dogs had stood up at Crystal’s side of the bed and stared at her as if requesting that she intercede. “I can’t help you, pal.”

“Do you think I’m cruel?”

“He’s a city dog. He could run off a cliff.”

We went out on the porch naked. I thought of Clayton, who’d said we could do that. He was right. Hawley’s boat was gone, there was no one else around. It felt wonderful to be outside naked in the sun.

“Why don’t you take Jellyroll and me for a boat ride instead, Captain?”

“Really? You want to?”

“Yes, that was fun.”

“I’ll show you the Crack,” I said.

“What are you trying to say, Captain?”

“That’s what they call it…No, it is.”

“Look at this place—” said Crystal after a short gasp of amazement as we entered the Crack. The light dimmed, the cliffs loomed. Crystal moved from side to side to see each in turn. A few people looked over the edge on the left side, but I didn’t know any of them. A line of boats was tied nose to tail on moorings down the center of the Crack, a crowd for these parts, here to see the launching, I assumed.

The submarine still sat on its cradle halfway up the cliff at the apex of the Crack. I could see Commander Hickle atop his steed. He fidgeted from thing to thing, tightening, adjusting, moving in sharp jerks almost like someone in strobe light. He wore rubber flip-flops and a yellow slicker that fell just below his knees with nothing visible underneath. His naked legs scurried like a little shore bird’s. Commander Hickle looked like a flasher. There had been a flasher disturbing the dog walkers in Riverside Park a while back. In the middle of a pizza-oven heat wave, he wore about ten layers of jackets and coats. It took him so long to flash that most people just walked off. Those who stuck around, for reasons of their own, said it was a frightening sight.

I was a little excited by the submarine. It touched a boyish chord. It could probably go deep without getting crushed like a Dixie cup. And maybe Dickie was right, maybe the Commander was some kind of genius mad scientist. What else could possibly explain building such a thing in isolation on an island without electricity?

But Crystal didn’t give a shit about any of that. I had told her on the phone that Hickle was mean to his wife, and that cooked his goose with Crystal. She hates all spouse abuse. There could be no redemption for Hickle, certainly not through technology. But cruelty notwithstanding, I liked the old coot’s contrariness, even though you could tell by watching him work up there that he was a wacko. The launching, apparently, had been delayed.

I stopped with reasonable accuracy at the Hampton boat’s old dock. As I did so, Crystal looked up—almost directly up—at the submarine on its rack of creosote railroad ties. I loved the curve of her neck seen from that angle and those two bones on either side of the indentation at the base of her throat.

Commander Hickle lifted a round hatch, dropped on his butt, and shimmied, hands overhead, down into the bowels of his submarine. He next appeared in the nose bubble. He had a walkie-talkie in his hand, and though we could hear none of it, we could tell he was screaming at Edith, out of sight on the cliff top, at the controls of the crane.

“Afternoon, Artie.” It was Alistair sitting in his boat with his feet propped on the transom as if he hadn’t moved since yesterday.

“Oh, hello, Alistair,” I said. “I didn’t see you there.”

“Man’s got to pay attention to his pilotin’. Woman, too, for that matter.”

I introduced Crystal to Alistair. He actually stood up and bowed slightly with a lecherous glimmer in his old eyes, which amused Crystal.

“You sell lobsters?” she asked.

“Why, I certainly do. I take pride in my lobsters. Between you and me, there are those who’ll sell you a soleless boot and call it a lobster, but I won’t accept that. And that’s why I can guarantee your satisfaction on every lobster.” He never took his old but twinkling eyes off Crystal through all that bullshit.

“Let’s get some, Artie,” enthused Crystal, making eyes at Alistair.

“Sure.”

His jaw bobbed twice before he could speak. “Tell you what I’ll do. Since you are new visitors to Teal Island, I’d like to welcome you with two nice ones free of charge.”

“Aww, that’s so nice,” said Crystal. “But I thought this was Kempshall Island.”

“Yes, that’s a common misconception. It’s always been Teal Island. Why don’t I hold on to your lobsters in their natural habitat until after the launchin’. ’Course that could take a couple of years.”

“So there have been other launchings?” asked Crystal.

“Many launchin’s,” said Alistair, “many, many launchin’s.”

“What happened?”

“Nothin’.”

Jellyroll started up the steps, and we followed. I found Crystal’s ass as she climbed as aesthetically pleasing as the environment itself. So did Alistair, I’d bet. On the way I told Crystal what happens in the winter when the northeast winds blow and people take everything apart and leave the Crack to nature. I told her why there were no trees around the Crack, and she said that it was hard to imagine waves breaking up here.

We sat down on a shallow dome of rock near the edge.

Then the black-hulled sportfisherman entered the Crack. Richard steered from up on the flying bridge. His son shot videotape from the low, open stern. They slowly made their way along the moored boats down the middle.

“See that boat?”

“The black one?”

I told her about how they’d made a beeline at us yesterday out by the Disappointments. “See the skinny guy at the wheel? He said he’d heard on TV that Jellyroll was being stalked.”

“On TV?”

“That’s what he said. That’s his son taking pictures.”

“Can I use your binoculars?” She looked at the father and then at the son as they passed directly below us, but there was nothing to be seen of Sonny’s face except for the camcorder.

“Everybody’s watching us,” Crystal whispered. Crystal and I hadn’t been together long enough for her to grow used to Jellyroll’s notoriety. For me, it’s been a way of life, and I’m still not used to it. In this country, pop culture makes you famous and fortunate, and then it kills you if you’re not constantly vigilant. Even if you are.

“Is that his wife?” Crystal nodded toward the woman sitting at the crane controls.

Since I’d last seen it, the crane had been reinforced with a wooden A-frame structure that was guyed by thick cables anchored with bolts and turnbuckles into the rock—so the weight of the submarine wouldn’t pull the crane off the cliff. Edith sat slouched in the seat under the A-frame and stared out across the Crack to the northeast. She seemed to be nodding every now and then at the invective coming in over her headphones. She glanced over to her right, in our direction.

“Look at that!” snapped Crystal. “She’s got a black eye—” Crystal was outspoken on the subject of female battery and abuse. She informed me early on in our relationship that if I ever belted her, I’d meet with an abrupt end. Something about an icepick thrust through my eye socket into my braincase while I slept. I would never belt her, but I didn’t doubt she’d do that if I ever did.

“Pardon us, but could we meet him? You probably hate people asking.”

“No, it’s okay. This is Jellyroll.”

Two women of about forty sat down on the rock across from Crystal and me. Jellyroll went to be petted, as was the routine. He smiled and wagged his tail as they fondled and rubbed him, making the usual sounds.

The woman who’d asked to meet him was stocky and muscular. She wore a halter top, an unbuttoned denim shirt over it, Bermuda shorts, and clogs. She might have been the star sculler in her day on the Vassar four. “Would you like some lemonade?” she asked.

Sure we would, and she withdrew a plaid thermos from the wicker picnic basket hanging on her arm. “I’m Eunice and this is Lois. We live over on the east end. We heard the R-r-ruff Dog was staying at the boathouse, and we couldn’t resist.” She had an endearing toothy smile.

The lemonade was homemade.

Lois was birdlike, light, angular. Who was she? I knew her face from somewhere. I remembered the long fingers with which, one hand at a time, she constantly touched her face as if she weren’t certain that it was firmly rooted and wouldn’t go careening off into the audience. She wore a bulky knit wool sweater with a high shawl collar much too warm for the weather. I wondered if she were ill, and that’s when I recognized her. I tried not to stare, but I’d definitely seen her before—

“Lois Lane?” I said.

“Yep, that was me. Way back when.”

“I thought you were brilliant.” She performed these wild theatrical pieces back in the late seventies, and I saw two early ones in Brooklyn. Both were on the same subject—a young woman’s relationship to her schizophrenia. She addressed it, her disease, as if it were another figure on stage, called it Carl. As she did so, she broke up Saltine crackers without remarking on the fact and dropped them on the stage until it was completely covered with crackers. Each step she took crunched.

“Do you live here year round?” Crystal asked.

“We have for the last two years,” said Eunice.

“I went insane,” said Lois matter-of-factly. “Eunice is hiding me out here.”

“We were having breakfast on the porch at the Cod End when that poor woman was murdered,” Eunice said.

“You saw her?” asked Crystal.

“When someone opened the door, there she was, sitting against the sink.” They both nodded silently. “Brains actually are gray. I always thought that was just a figure of speech, gray matter. Hers were, anyhow,” Lois said.

The sportfisherman had turned around and was now heading back out the Crack. I nodded at it. “Have you ever seen those guys before?”

“We saw them in Micmac the other day,” said Eunice. “Hard to miss on that big fancy boat. Lois thinks that’s Dick Desmond.”

“It is Dick Desmond.”

“What do you think?” Eunice asked Crystal.

“I never heard of Dick Desmond.”

I thought I remembered the name, an actor—

“The Ten Pins,” said Lois. “Remember that show?”

A chill went through me. The Ten Pins—It was a TV series, a naked rip-off of The Waltons, but cutesier, full of cheap sentiment. Instead of a farm, the family owned a bowling alley!

“Pins? Like bowling pins?” asked Crystal.

“Sure, bowling,” said Lois. “He was a star for a minute or two back then. I saw him close up in Micmac. I’m certain it’s him.”

“Did you talk to him?” I asked.

They shook their heads.

“The other guy is his son,” I said.

“Really?” asked Lois. “He looked about fifty to me.”

“You saw him without the camera?”

“Briefly.”

“Yeah, but that’s not Dick Desmond,” insisted Eunice.

“I’ll bet you a hundred dollars.”

“You’re crazy.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Hey, look—” said Eunice, nodding toward the crane and nearly whispering. “There’s Roxy. That’s quite a rare sighting, Roxanne Self in the flesh. She’s nearly a hermit.”

“Why?” Crystal asked.

“Nobody really knows, but some people think because she’s atoning for the murder of Compton Kempshall.”

“I met Hawley Self, and he told me he killed Kempshall.”

They nodded. Hawley apparently told everyone that.

“They never found the old man’s body,” said Lois.

“No,” said Eunice. “In fact, some people say he planned his own disappearance. He was about to be indicted for selling defective stuff to the navy during World War Two. There’s no reason to believe Roxanne killed him, or that there ever was a murder.”

“That’s her husband over there, a tough old bird named Arno Self. His family’s been here since before this was a country.”

I briefly put the binoculars on Arno Self. He was an old salt with a big gray beard. He was watching Roxanne talk to Edith Hickle.

The crane whirred, the cable came taut on the sub and twittered vertically. The cables and rock anchors counterbalancing the submarine creaked and strained. You could see the strain in the cables. But nothing moved. That would be a crashing anticlimax. No, it was lifting the sub. The railroad-tie rack moved first, then the sub itself visibly rose but only slightly at first. The crane whirred louder, and then the sub rose off the rack. People applauded nervously. Edith looked tense. I’d look tense, too, sitting under all those desperately straining cables. She hunched her shoulders, but that would have done her no good had one of them snapped. I’d read in books about that happening on ships. The cable snaps back with force enough to cut a man in half. We all hunched our shoulders for Edith. Roxanne Self stood near the crane and watched the proceedings sourly.

Then the sub eased away from the cliff and out over the water. Nothing snapped. Hickle’s island engineering had held. When Edith stopped the outward movement, the suspended sub swung gently back and forth and began to pivot slowly. As it came around, sunlight glinted cheerfully off the bubble canopy. Hickle was crouched inside, but he was clearly unhappy about something.

I looked with my binoculars. Joystick in hand, the bony, nearly naked old commander crouched on a bicycle seat, his face twisted with hostility, screaming silently at Edith over the earphones. The cords in his neck were yanked as tight as the cable that supported him. He repeatedly pounded his knee with his fist. Up on the crane seat, risking decapitation, Edith nodded regularly, calmly. The sub’s bubble nose pivoted slowly away from us.

Then the sub started down at a controlled rate. We all applauded—there weren’t that many of us. But again we applauded as concentric rings rolled out languidly when the bottom of the sub touched the water. Was that the actual moment of launching, I wondered?

The sub never actually paused to float on its own, but we figured that was probably in the nature of submarine launchings. Undramatically, it went right under. We hustled toward the edge to see. It looked like some extinct benthic giant as it submerged, as it broke apart into orange slivers and finally disappeared completely.

Now what? How long does a sub need to stay down to be considered launched? One wondered about the protocol of submarine launchings. As far as we knew, the commander could stay down for days. Edith gave no hint. She was leaning over the edge of the crane listening to Roxanne, who was tapping the palm of her hand with the back of her other hand, making serious points. After a while, Edith shook her head no, sat up straight behind her levers, and folded her arms.

I’m not certain how much time passed before the crane whirred, again, long enough for the spectators to straggle back to the places they had occupied before the launching. We all looked toward Edith, who was taking up the slack in the cable, which when it came taut transferred its load back to the crane, the scaffold, and the cables anchored into the rock. They creaked and cracked. Edith cringed, but again Hickle’s engineering held fast. The sub was surfacing.

We gathered again at the cliff side to watch the orange flecks dance abstractly, then leap together into a vague sub shape—but something was wrong. The sub was surfacing tail first. A murmur ran through the spectators. We shifted closer to the edge as the tail fins broke the surface.

The sub had been launched suspended from its balance point, but now that point had changed. Now the sub was nose-heavy. What would change the balance point of a sub after submerging? There was only one answer to that, clear even to us low-tech lubbers. The sub broke free of the water entirely, and it didn’t stop until it came almost level with the top of the Crack. And there it hung, cascades of water pouring, pivoting torpidly around its new balance point.

At first we were silent. Immediate realization was unavailable to us. We saw it, our jaws gaped, we reached for each other’s arms, but it took a while to realize that the sub had suffered the most fundamental of submarine breakdowns. It had leaked. Bad.

The big bubble nose was filled with water, and Commander Hickle sloshed around inside like a dead guppy. He floated upside down, arms and legs akimbo like a skydiver, fingers splayed. His eyes were bugged, bloodshot, slightly crossed, and his lips were pursed in a cruel parody of a fish. He’d probably died sucking the last draft from the exhausted air trapped at the top of the bubble. I could almost hear that fatal, futile sucking.