Cape Cod (73 page)

“Do you have any ice?” She looked around for the refrigerator. But the dune shacks had no power. “Oh, shit, Georgie, you have to be more careful.”

“Helluva life, isn’t it? On top of all we go through, now we got Mother Nature shoutin’, Hey, faggot, be careful—disease.”

“I’m not Mother Nature.”

“More like Mother Courage, wandering the Cape with your children.”

“I’m not her, either. I’m just looking for Geoff, and you should be looking for some ice.”

“Geoff
is looking for Geoff, even as we speak.”

“Where?”

“Someplace with his list.” George looked around at the mess. “There’s something to this log-and-island business, Janice.”

“Maybe to the island business, but forget about the log.”

David appeared with a bucket of water. “It’s good and cool.” He dipped a cloth into the bucket and pressed it against George’s eyes.

George didn’t even flinch. He told Janice that when she found Geoff, she should warn him to watch out for the Humpster.

v.

Hammer drills. That was all Geoff could think of when he woke up. Hammer drills running inside his head.

The night before, he and Jimmy had killed a six-pack while they ruminated over the charcoal markings they had found in the barn cellar. And should they call the police about the breakin? But what would the police do? Dust for prints and keep them awake. So they killed another six-pack, which nearly killed Geoff by morning.

The only painkiller he could find in Rake’s medicine cabinet was a tin of crumbling Bayer aspirin. He took three and drove to the junkyard near Allen Harbor in Harwich.

Men with saws and drills and sparkling acetylene torches were working over the carcasses of dead cars, like morticians. It was a surrealistic place to match the surrealistic experience of having a construction crew working on your skull. And only a surrealist would have put a junkyard on a promontory overlooking one of the prettiest yacht-filled harbors on the Cape.

The two guys dismantling the Corvette by the gate showed him the ’68 Olds Cutlass parked among a half-dozen other relics of Suicide 6.

He didn’t dwell on the business end of the accident. One of the baloney-skin tires was blown—that could have done it. The hood was pleated like a piece of drapery. The windshield was an exploded star of glass. They said the old man was dead as soon as he struck. Geoff hoped so.

It was the rear that interested him, and just as the police had said, there was no sign of dent or scratch. The old chrome bumper was smooth and shiny.

But there was something the police had missed, assuming they had bothered to look: a little piece of fabric, caught on the corner of one of those long 1968 brake lights, blue nylon with a little anchor woven into it, about an inch square, ripped off of something. A skirt, maybe?

Right. A girl in a blue skirt pushed Rake off the road at fifty miles an hour. He put the fabric in his pocket.

Little men ran their hammer drills against the backs of Geoff’s eyes all the way home to Truro. When he saw Carolyn Hallissey waiting for him on the deck, it felt as if they had broken through.

Geoff had expected Janice, looking… contrite, pissed off… something.

This was not good.

He tried to be cool to her. “How’s your foot?”

“Better. I’m sorry about the other day.”

“Sorry about what?” He rubbed his forehead.

“I got a little mad about your speculations.”

She was acting… friendly? Seductive? What? “You came here to tell me that?”

“I came on a little too strong. It’s just that when it comes to history, we’re on the same wavelength.”

“Let’s forget about it.” He noticed the Polaroid 600 on her lap. “What’s the camera for?”

“I have a few ideas… about Tom Hilyard. I was hoping you’d show me your House on Billingsgate painting.”

He went into the house and got a can of Coke. He held it to his forehead to soothe the throbbing, then used it to wash down the last three aspirin. It was Tom Hilyard she had come to see, not him. But he was still operating under the assumption that whatever she knew could help him. Even if she had sent someone to Rake’s cellar the night before.

So he took her down to the barn. In his office he pulled the shades across the skylights. Only then did he dare take off his sunglasses.

“This is nice.” Carolyn’s eyes were drawn to the sketches on the drafting table; then she saw the painting on the wall above it.

“Before you tell me your Tom Hilyard theory, what does ‘Nance, Iron Axe, charcoal on the floorboards’ mean to you?”

“That someone’s dealing in non sequiturs.”

Good timing, he thought. And with even better timing, Janice pulled into the driveway. She got out of the car and gave a once-over to the Datsun 240Z parked beside Geoff’s Chevy, which sent the jackhammers into overdrive. Geoff told Carolyn to sit down and act natural.

Carolyn dropped onto the sofa and crossed her legs primly. “Will this do?”

“It’ll have to.” He pulled his stool as far from Carolyn as he could get.

And Janice pounded up the stairs. “I’ve been looking for you all morning. Where the—”

Geoff widened his stupid grin—very guilty—and introduced the young woman from Old Comers Plantation.

Janice seemed to step back, as though the name “Old Comers” had hit her in the solar plexus.

And Carolyn seemed to twitch nervously. Was this what happened when an offended wife met the offender? Did they give off some kind of scent?

“Pretty.” Janice looked her up and down. “Smart, too?”

Carolyn wound her fingers around the camera strap.

“C’mon, Janice. What kind of question is that? How do you think she got to be the director of Old Comers?”

“I could guess.”

“Hey, if I’m in the way here, let me just take another picture and I’ll take off.” Carolyn went back to the painting on the wall.

“No need.” Janice pivoted for the stairs.

Geoff pressed his thumbs against his temples to keep the jackhammers from lifting off the top of his head.

Janice stopped on the top step. “I’ve called after you everywhere. I’ve driven the whole damn Cape. But I guess talking with Miss Pretty Smart—or is it Mrs.?”

“Ms.,” answered Carolyn.

“—is more important than taking my call.”

“Janice—”

Carolyn raised the camera. “I’ll be done in a second.”

“When you are, chew on this: Georgie had the shit beaten out of him last night. And that log you’re so interested in… sometime around the turn of the century, it burned up in a fire.”

“What?” cried Geoff.

The Polaroid flash went off and blinded Geoff Hilyard.

CHAPTER 30

January 1885

Pilgrims’ Progress

Tom Hilyard’s artwork was considered a joke by his mates at the High Head Lifesaving station, yet he sketched every night.

“Hold still while I get the mustache,” he said.

“I’m like to get a stiff neck settin’ here,” said Jeff Parker, “and what good’m I with a stiff neck?”

“Better than you are with a stiff somethin’ else, or so your wife says.” Brawny Kimball sat by the wood stove, dealing out solitaire and insults.

Steam from the teakettle fogged the windows, not that the surfmen could have seen out; blowing sand had long ago pitted a permanent fog into the glass. Not that they
wanted
to see out; on nights like this, when the wind made the station rattle like a loose shroud, they most relished the quiet of the hearth, because on nights like this it was most likely to be shattered.

It had been calculated that if all the wrecks on the back shore were raised and laid end to end, a man could walk the forty-five miles from Race Point to Chatham without getting his feet wet. Cape Cod reached into the most important sea-lane in America, and like a toll collector, demanded a ship a month for the hundreds that passed safely. The U.S. Life Saving Service, organized in 1871 to replace the Humane Society, helped those made to pay.

“Patrol should be in anytime,” said Parker.

“Good reason to finish the mustache.” Tom Hilyard sketched with the tip and shaded with the side of the pencil, all the while keeping his tongue wedged firmly in the corner of his mouth.

He had a hard little face, pinched and withered by the wind, but the calm eyes of a man who had seen the worst nature could do and still saw her beauty.

“Never met a surfman liked to draw before.” Jeff Parker was new to the station.

“Been drawin’ since I was a kid. Thirty-three now.”

“What do you draw?” Parker pushed his tobacco plug from his right cheek to his left.

“People, things, but Cape Cod, mostly…. Put the chaw back in your right cheek.”

“Can I spit first?”

“Yes, yes, I guess.”

Parker hit the spittoon dead square in the middle. Surfman Smith stopped tootling his harmonica long enough to say they should sign Parker up for the Sunday spittin’ contests. Then Ellis and Doane came in, looking like two salt snowmen, oilskins covered with sleet and rime ice.

“Patrol’s back!” barked Captain Pervis. “Next shift!”

Tom finished the mustache and got into his gear. “How far can you see?”

“Forty yards, maybe, through the sleet,” said Ellis.

“We got much of a beam showin’ out there?” Smith asked about the Highland lighthouse.

“Showin’ half a mile, no more,” answered Doane. “Kind of night a schooner makes ice in the riggin’ every time she hits a wave. Good luck.”

“You have to go out, but you don’t have to come back,” said Tom. Somebody, in every one of the thirteen stations between Provincetown and Chatham, repeated the surfman’s psalm of duty before every shift. Between every two stations, at every hour of the day and night, ten months of the year, there was a surfman walking the beach, watching.

Tom did not mind the solitude of the work or the communal life at the station. In childhood he had grown used to both.

His mother had been lost at sea while running slaves to Nova Scotia in 1859, leaving Tom in the custody of his two half brothers, who considered him no more than a product of their mother’s bad judgment. They invested his money, along with their own, in Shiverick clipper ships. Then they sent Tom to a miserable Boston boarding school where a boy was taught a trade rather than the classics.

Tom learned sums, sentence diagrams, and sailmaking. Physically small, he learned to defend himself like a badger. Naturally withdrawn, he learned to find companionship in his own creations. And he came also to sense that he was different in other ways.

When he was thirteen, he lied about his age and joined the Thirty-third Massachusetts as a drummer boy. He was as brave as any in his troop, but when the men guffawed at bawdy jokes, he merely smiled. When they spoke lecherously of the corseted figures on playing cards, he said nothing. And when he drew the human figure, he never drew women.

He was different. So was a rangy Roxbury lad named Jack, whose hands were rough, whose face was gentle, and who, at age sixteen, knew much about the world. Tom believed that what they did in the midnight shadows was wrong, but still they did it, two motherless boys embracing in the bloody spring of 1864. Then came the day at Cold Harbor. One instant Jack was there, pounding retreat beside him, and the next he was gone, beheaded by a Confederate cannonball. Blood splattered in Tom’s eyes, and Jack’s body fell, hands twitching drumsticks, neck pumping blood, a grotesque sign of God’s anger at his sin.

Such a deep scar made it hard for Tom to see the familial irony of the war: his mother had done her part to bring war about, and war had brought about the demise of the Shivericks, the clipper ships, the American Merchant Marine, and the fortune that her first husband had accumulated. When it was over, one of Tom’s half brothers lay at the bottom of the Atlantic, sent there by a Confederate raider, the other had sold Heman Bigelow the Sesuit house and gone west. And Cape Cod itself was slipping into an economic backwater where it would stagnate for fifty years.

Tom went home to Jack’s Island. His uncle Ephraim taught him how to work handline and hoe and keep his belly full in bad times. His stuttering aunt Ruth taught him that if bad memories arose, whether from a bloodbath in a Cape Cod fish weir or on the drummers’ line at Cold Harbor, you
made
something. Ruthie made hair wreaths and tea. Tom drew pictures and joined the Life Saving Service.

Now he glanced up at the lighthouse, as he did every night. He gauged the wind at a steady thirty knots out of the northeast, shooting sand and sleet like needles against his face. He bowed his head and pointed himself into the roaring black solitude.

On clear, calm nights, there was a majesty to earth and sky that made him feel a small part of some grand design. But on dirty nights like this, the sleeted cold blew through the holes in his wool muffler and under the brim of his sou’wester, his ears ached, his chin went numb, the blowing sand scoured his skin. And no matter how much wool he wore under his oilskins, his toes and fingertips soon felt like pieces of lead.

So he sought a steady pace, his lantern swinging rhythmically before him, his eyes turning like beacons every twenty seconds to the sea, and he tried to think about pleasant things like a sketch pad or—

Suddenly a flare showed through the sleet. A hundred yards offshore, the sea was bursting over a medium-size schooner and her sails slatted like cannon fire in the wind.

The first time he heard cannon fire, he had shit his pants. But in the Life Saving Service, he had learned to conquer his fear by following the drill. He lit a red Coston flare and drove it into the sand. Then he hurried back to the station.

“All turn out!” shouted Captain Pervis at the word.

The doors of the boat room slammed open, and out clomped a big old mare pulling the surfboat on a wide-wheeled cart. Directly behind her pounded five surfmen in the traces of the gun cart. They weren’t big men, but there was an almost simian strength in the slant of their gait and the slope of their shoulders, and it took them less than ten minutes to get back to the flare.