Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery (9 page)

W
e turned sharply around a rocky point and I saw the boathouse for the first time. Until my eye caught the straight-line roof, I didn’t realize it was a man-made thing because it nestled so gently into the forested hillside at the top of the cove. It was roofed and sided with spruce shingles painted forest green, and the foundation was made of shoreline stones cemented together. The window and door frames and the railings of the porch were painted the russet of autumn leaves. A wooden porch cantilevered out over the water.

Dwight slowed the boat, once inside the cove. He said something, but I didn’t catch it.

“What?”

“Sunkers.”

“Sunkers?”

“See, over there.” He pointed just off to the left where dromedary humps of black rock roiled the surface. Leathery kelp and black weed sloshed back and forth. A sunker.

“‘Nother off there to starboard.”

This sunker didn’t even break the surface, but I could see its menacing presence. I had stopped looking at my chart to take in direct reality.

“This is Dog Cove,” commented Dwight.

“It is?”

“Yeah. See the two islands out there?” He pointed astern.

Both were just beyond the mouth of the cove. About the size of toppled-over Upper West Side brownstones, they guarded the cove from the sea, calming the water inside.

“Near one’s called Dog Island, other one’s called Outer Dog Island.”

Jellyroll knows that word, of course. He clapped his jaws shut and looked around for one of his fellow men. “Why so many dogs?” I asked Dwight.

“You ever heard of John Cabot?”

“The explorer?”

“Yeah, him.”

About 1497, Cabot, a Venetian exploring for English merchants, made a successful voyage to Newfoundland. Some people think he came down this far.

“Cabot’s supposed to’ve heard barkin’ when he passed by here in a fog. Must’ve been terrifyin’ approachin’ this coast in them ships.” Dwight paused, probably to consider with a seaman’s knowledge the terror of doing that back then, then said, “Modern people killed off all the seals, so you don’t hear no barkin’ these days, but seals is probably what he heard.” Then Dwight seemed to muse on millions of murdered seals.

We slid past a big orange float, and I asked what it marked.

“That’s a moorin’. Belongs to Hawley Self. He’s an urchin man. He mostly lives aboard his boat on that moorin’.”

“Urchins?”

“Yeah, this Japanese guy in Micmac buys all he can get. They love their sea urchins, Japs. Urchin divers make decent money. If they live. Lot of ’em don’t. Drowned bodies never come up in these waters.”

“Why?”

“Because of the gasses.”

“What gasses?”

“The gasses in your gut. By-product of bacteria and so forth. That’s what causes a dead body to float up after a couple days.
Water’s too cold for the bacteria to grow. Cold like that day after day makes addled old men outta thirty-year-old urchin divers.”

There was another mooring float nearby. He said it belonged to Clayton. Dwight passed the mooring and headed for shore. He stopped his boat beneath the boathouse porch against a flat rock six inches out of water, put there by nature as if for a dock. Dwight stepped ashore and attached lines to rings imbedded in the boathouse foundation.

“Is this natural?” I asked.

“Nope. We cut it out.” Dwight started to unload. I passed things over the side to him. I was delighted with our new environment. So was Jellyroll, who leapt ashore and ran into the bushes. In two loads, we had our gear stacked at the foot of the steps beside the house leading up to the porch. This was the front entrance. There was another door at ground level in the back, but it opened onto the side of a steep hill.

Jellyroll struck up a relationship with a chipmunk inhabiting the woodpile near the back door. Shucking and jiving in and out, the chipmunk ran Jellyroll ragged.

Dwight and I picked up shopping bags full of food from the Selfs, and I followed him up onto the porch. This porch is where we’d spend our time, Crystal and I, sitting at the weathered picnic table peering peacefully out across the cove toward the Dogs and the empty ocean beyond. Sights and smells this sweet and gentle could change a melancholic back into a romantic. Upper Broadway raises calluses on the old worldview. I’d lose them here, but I supposed I’d raise others. I couldn’t imagine just then what kind they’d be. Jellyroll sniffed a circuit of the porch, glanced at the view, and decided he’d rather crash around with the chipmunk.

Dwight opened the little French doors. The interior space was proportioned like a large house trailer, because only a long and thin building could have fit on this site. The walls were unpaneled, joists visible, and like the floors and ceiling, they were painted gloss white, giving the place an open, bright air, like a house in the Bahamas.

“Still a little musty,” said Dwight. “I opened it up yesterday.”

I didn’t smell any must. It smelled like a seaside pine forest. I caught myself grinning with delight.

The bedroom was off the living room to the left, kitchen to the right. The kitchen was not separated from the living room except by throw rugs. I lugged over the foodstuffs. There was a genuine cast-iron stove with lion’s-paw legs. It had burned wood before somebody, maybe Dwight himself, had converted it to gas. There was an old-fashioned refrigerator, the kind with the rounded tombstone top and deco flourish of chrome. Windows looked out on Dog Cove and the wooded hills beside the house.

The Selfs had made me a lasagna, a meatloaf, a stuffed chicken, twelve fish cakes, a lobster casserole, a corn chowder, and a deep-dish apple cobbler. I sort of wanted to go to the Self reunion. We would see each other as exotic, maybe share with each other the best of our foreign worlds.

“Now you got no electricity out here on the island,” Dwight was saying, emerging from the bedroom, opening windows, finally inspecting underneath the refrigerator. “But the propane tanks is all full, and everything works. I checked myself yesterday.”

“Please thank your wife and the rest of the Selfs. Anytime she wants to meet Jellyroll, please tell her she’s welcome—”

“I will.”

The furnishings were summerhouse simple. A wicker couch stood in the center of the living room on an ancient, threadbare Chinese carpet. There was an embracing, high-backed armchair, and an oak table with four distinctly mismatching chairs.

“Dwight, is there a boat I could rent?”

“Like for transportation? Or are you a high-speed recreationist?”

“No, transportation. I want to pick my girlfriend up in Micmac. She’ll be coming in a day or two.”

“You know how to operate a boat?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, don’t worry, you already got the binoculars for it.” His face didn’t move, but his eyes twinkled in a boyish way. “Just don’t take nothing for granted. That’s when people get in trouble around here, when they take things for granted.” And Dwight went off to see what he could do about my boat.

I watched him go. I listened to the water sluice over the round, cue-ball-sized rocks beneath the porch. What did he mean? Take what for granted? Birds flitted in the trees and floated on the water. I spotted a great blue heron slow-marching in the shallows and put the glasses on him—

I have a fantasy. There is this family of which I’m a member; it is big and close, tolerant, even nurturing of its members’ eccentricities, interests, phases. You can be yourself in this family without fear of losing its support. Its extended members gather annually for summer holidays when the evenings are endless, bathed in limpid light, fireflies blinking at dusk, a place just like this, bigger maybe to support the various branches that come from far and wide with smiles on their faces. I’ve never known such a place, such a family. Jellyroll and I could have bought a summerhouse that matched the fantasy as nearly as anything concrete could, but it wouldn’t be the same. After all, the fantasy is about the family that inhabits the place, and Jellyroll couldn’t buy that. I sat at the picnic table and grew pensive. The island promoted pensiveness. I stared out across Dog Cove, where life probably hadn’t changed since the Pleistocene…

And then I began to feel that flood of eroticism again. I could almost
hear
the hormones roar, as if I were paddling toward a waterfall in the wilderness. My feet itched, my torso tingled. Just like back at the dock when the muscular woman lowered the refrigerator, the same mindless adolescent eroticism, and just like then, it was interrupted, not by someone screaming bloody murder but by strange howling.

Jellyroll heard it first. His ears pricked. He snapped to his feet, cocked his head. Then I heard it, too, or I thought I did. Was it a
howling? It was more like keening. We were both unacclimated to the absence of sirens, horns, alarms, explosions, salsa. Maybe in the silence, like in one of those sensory-deprivation tanks, we were hallucinating. My dog and I are very close, but not so close we share hallucinations. No, the sound was real, it existed. The hairs on the back of Jellyroll’s neck stood stiffly erect. The sound was moving fast, changing in pitch and quality…

Dogs! Christ, that’s all—dogs. A pack of barking dogs, in Dog Cove, which was sheltered by the Dog Islands. Jellyroll began to bark his high-pitched, excited yap-yap bark.

I saw the underbrush rustle and then, here and there, a flash of dog flesh. Ten dogs seemed to materialize from the undergrowth and gather in the clearing at the foot of the steps, where they swirled in excited circles. Jellyroll hesitated, watching the signals, then bolted down the steps to meet them.

Dogs are not mere will-less servers of a master. Dogs are egotists. Everything they do around people and their fellows is rich with self-awareness and expression. The pack, a mix of mutts and purebreds, froze as Jellyroll neared the ground. He stopped on the bottom step. Tails down, they all waited for the ritual to resolve itself. A well-bred chocolate Lab, the biggest dog in the pack, dropped into the play posture, forelegs on the ground, rump in the air, and barked once, the cue for everybody to chill, we’re here for fun, aren’t we? Then they all moved at once.

A springy Jack Russell bounced up on the steps to welcome Jellyroll, and he bounded into the play posture to accept. They swirled and sniffed and panted and leapt over each other’s backs. They had the look of a pack of hooligans feeding off each other’s energy. The Lab kissed Jellyroll, so did one of the two coyote types, then they all started running headlong back into the underbrush and up the hill the way they came. Jellyroll started with them—

I gave that some quick consideration—a city dog running with the local pack—and I whistled for him to stop. He did. He always does, but this time he didn’t turn around to look at me. A
couple members of the pack stopped, looked over their shoulder at him. Then they ran off and left him standing there. Their wild barks faded to that keening sound, then to silence.

I felt like a cruel bastard. Jellyroll still wouldn’t look at me. He didn’t return to the porch. He flopped on his side. No relationship can run smooth all the time. Even in a fantasy family.

Then from along the shore in the opposite direction, we heard something else. Of course, Jellyroll heard it first. Someone coming on foot, walking along a shoreside path I hadn’t noticed yet. Jellyroll forgot his despair. He began to bark. This particular bark sounds like a dangerous dog’s bark, and sometimes I like that.

Hands in his pockets, a gangly guy in his forties shuffled out of the woods into an open area at the side of the house, the only spare flat ground. He wore blue jean cutoffs, hiking boots, and heavy woolen socks. He had pale bird legs. His head bobbed forward and back with each step, like a great blue heron’s.

“Christ,” he exclaimed, “I thought you were Clayton Kempshall for a minute there. I thought I’d seen a ghost.”

“A ghost? Clayton’s not dead.”

“He’s not?”

“No.”

“…Are you sure?”

“I just saw him a week ago. He didn’t die since then, did he?”

“Oh no, years ago.”

“You must be thinking of someone else.”

“Clayton Kempshall?”

“Yes.”

“Not dead?”

“No.”

“Oh, man, I feel relieved…Look, I’m Dickie.”

“Artie,” I said.

Jellyroll watched him suspiciously.

“Wow, that’s really great about Clayton.”

“Uh-huh.”

“There hasn’t been anyone in the boathouse for years, of course.”

“Why?”

“Well, because of Clayton’s ghost, but now, of course, we know that’s bullshit, what with Clayton being alive. Yeah. I wonder whose ghost it was. You haven’t seen any…paranormal shit go down hereabout?”

“No, but I haven’t been here long.”

“Yeah…Maybe it was
Compton
Kempshall’s ghost.”

“People have seen a ghost around here?” People other than him?

“Locals, mostly. Don’t trust a local. Fuckers will hurt you. Have you seen a dog come by here?”

“A pack of them went up the hill a little while ago.”

“A pack? Christ! Fucking locals see some dogs playing in a group, and it gets them nuts. They get into some kind of crazed caveman head, competing predators, or some bullshit. They’ll shoot the dogs.”