Black Tide

by Brendan DuBois

  My chest was beginning to hurt from breathing so hard and my right hand ached, so I sat down on the steps and said, "Drew, the name is Lewis Cole, and I have no idea what you're talking about. "

  By now he was sitting up, legs muddy and splayed out, holding a torn and dull gray handkerchief to his nose. He eyed me suspiciously, as if I had just told him he had won the lottery, and he said, "You're not from Interstate Recovery?"

  "Who?"

  "The repo men," he said. "The repo men who've been looking for my wife's car."

  "No, I'm not a repo man."

  He blew his nose, whispering, "Ouch, damn it," and said louder, "Then who are you working for?"

  I said, "I work for a magazine. Called Shoreline."

  Drew still looked suspicious. "Prove it."

  From my wallet I pulled out my business card, which I designed and ordered on my own, and passed it over to him. The card is light blue and the magazine's logo is centered in the middle, the letters of Shoreline curling like a wave to a lighthouse. The ink is dark red and embossed, and my name is below the logo, along with the word "Columnist" in italics. There's my post office box number and home telephone number in Tyler just below my name. This little rectangle of cardboard and cheap ink was like a passport, opening up doors and people's memories, and it was rare that it failed me.

  Today was no exception. "Jesus," he said, looking at the card while holding it in his thick fingers. "I thought you were somebody else.”

  "Obviously."

  He slipped the card inside an overall pocket. "Those bastards at Interstate, they told me someone would be coming by today to get the car, and I told 'em if anybody stepped foot on my property, I'd bash their head in. Then I saw you drive up in your fancy four-by-four, and something just snapped. I grabbed that chain and came out here after you."

  He snuffled some more, looking almost amusing, like a black bear who was licking an ice-cream cone, and he added, "Well, shit, I hope you're not here trying to sell me a magazine subscription. I ain't got the money."

  I smiled at him. "No, I'm here looking for your neighbor, Craig Dummer."

  He patted his nose once more, and then carefully refolded his handkerchief. I noticed that he folded it so the worst of the stains were inside. He put the handkerchief away and said, “Craig. What a little shit. Look, I gotta put some cold water on my nose. Come on in and we'll talk. The name's Drew Kotowski."

  I held out my hand and he shook it firmly, not attempting any of that macho nonsense of squeezing until bones popped. “Nice to meet you, though I wasn't thinking that a couple of minutes ago."

  Drew grinned, and there were a couple of back teeth missing. "That's all right. Neither was I, if you're counting."

  I followed him over to his side of the duplex, and the chain that he was trying to use just a while ago to beat in my head was still on the ground. I decided it looked nice there, curled up in the mud and grass.

  It took Drew about ten minutes to clean up and I refused his offer of a beer, though he did get a Budweiser for himself. I followed him out to the steps on his side of the duplex. He seemed embarrassed at what the inside of his house looked like, though it seemed clean enough. A few dirty dishes in the sink, toys scattered across the faded kitchen tile and a refrigerator that had notes and recipes plastered on its door.

  He leaned against the side of the house and I sat on the railing and he said, "We're only two months behind on that car, a lousy two months, but the bank won't give us room to breathe. You see, my young 'un, Bridget, she's been in the hospital with this lung problem. No real health insurance and I've been payin' what I can, but I can't make that monthly car payment. Not yet anyways. I tried talkin' to them and it's like talking to a tree. They just don't listen. They just want their goddamn money. So they sent the repo men after us, and let me tell you, it's been like playing hide-and-seek ever since then."

  "Where do you work?" I asked.

  He took a swig from his beer. "Car repair shop in Manchester. Money's okay but they got a lousy health plan, and forget about retirement or bennies like that. My wife, Joan, now, she's been helping at a day care in Bedford and that helps, but not enough." Drew's nose was reddened and there were brown patches of dried blood underneath his nostrils. It seemed amazing that only a matter of minutes separated this cheery little conversation from when he was trying to wrap a heavy piece of chain around my head. My own right hand ached and the knuckles were scraped raw.

  "Do you know Craig Dummer that well?"

  He shrugged. "Well enough, I guess."

  "Is he out working?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, is he coming back soon? I'd like to talk to him."

  "That so? What about? You trying to sell him a magazine subscription?"

  So another session of the Great Lie began again, and I said, “I'm writing a story about a place he used to work at, the Scriber Museum. He's got a couple of leads I want to check up on. I just need a couple of minutes to talk to him and that's all."

  "Hah." He shook the brown bottle around, churning up the beer. "If you want to talk to him, I'm first in line. The little bastard skipped out, about two, three weeks ago. Moved everything out and left me hanging with two months' rent."

  "You were his landlord?" "

  Yeah." Drew stood up from against the wall and said, "This house used to belong to my parents. After they died, I worked nights and weekends, subdivided it up so me and my family could live in one side, and we could rent out the other end. Craig came in quiet enough and didn't cause much trouble, though he was late on the rent every now and then."

  "No idea of where he went off too, I guess."

  "Not a goddamn clue. Even called the place where he worked s a security guard, and they didn't know squat."

  "Did he leave anything behind? Mail or belongings?"

  He scratched at his beard and said, "Tell you the truth, I cleaned some shit out of there a few days ago, but there's still some junk left. Let's go take a look."

  I followed him off the steps and we trudged through the wet grass and mud to the other side of the duplex. We went up the steps to Craig Dummer's place and Drew pulled out some keys and unlocked the door and we went in. We went into a kitchen, and right in that moment, in the sound that was caused by our steps and the smell of the air in the apartment, you could feel the emptiness, the quiet stillness. I felt a slight tang of disappointment. Ben Martin was dead, returning to the soil in a cemetery in Manchester. And Craig Dummer had packed up and was gone. Too much emptiness.

  Drew said, "I cleaned up some, but there's still a mess here. Lot of trash, stuff people don't like to bring with them when they get on with things. But I got lot more cleaning up if I want to rent this place out."

  The kitchen was cleaner than when I last saw it. The sink was empty and the pizza containers had been taken away. The floor was grimy, though, and my boots crunched on crumbs and other dirt as I went into the living room. I kept quiet as I looked around, and Drew followed me, beer in hand. I guess it showed how much things had changed in the last few minutes that I felt comfortable in turning my back to him. The room had light green wall-to-wall carpeting, and there was a couch along one wall, covered by a red-and--checked blanket. Two chairs were by another wall, and there was an empty bookshelf, the bookshelf being handmade from two cinder blocks and two lengths of wood. There were a couple of paperbacks, with their covers torn off, tossed in a corner near the shelves, resting atop a hardcover book. I squatted down and picked them up, the pages feeling damp in my hands. The books were part of a men's adventure series, taking place after World War IV or something like that. Not my brand of reading, but still, they didn't deserve to have their covers torn off.

  "You want to keep those books, you go right ahead," Drew said. "You working for a magazine and all that."

  "Thanks," I said, not wanting to disappoint whatever fantasies he had about magazines and their writers. "I just might do that."

  The hardcover book had
been dumped in water once, the pages curled and sticking together, the covers cracked and bleeding ink. It felt heavy and I thumbed through it. Art of the Medieval World, it was called. An expensive book, with lots of color plates and black-and-white photos. Too damaged to travel?

  I dropped the books, wiped my hands on my jeans, and went stairs, to a bedroom. The plaster was light gray and cracked, and there were evenly spaced holes along the walls that showed that posters had been tacked up there once. The bed was in the middle of the room, but it was just a frame and bare mattresses. There's something depressing about looking at a naked bed, as if something awful thing had happened there and the evidence had been stripped away.

  Under the bed I found some magazines. One Playboy. Some copies of Guns &Ammo, one Soldier of Fortune and one ArtWorld, which he subscribed to. Our Craig Dummer had some quirky tastes, not something that was easy to pigeonhole. Drew saw the Playboy and picked it up and kept it in his hands, saying with a grin, “Thanks for finding this. I'll get to read it 'fore the wife gets home."

  The closets were empty, save for a sweaty smell and some wire hangers. I guess it's a rule that you always leave a place with more wire hangers than when you arrived. I closed one closet door and said, "Where did you say Craig worked?"

  “Some computer place out near Bedford. DiskJets or something like that. He worked as a security guard, afternoon shifts."

  ''And they don't know where he went off to?"

  "Nope. Right around the time he skipped out on me, he also quit his job. Just phoned in one day and said he was leaving."

  From the bedroom I went into another room that could have been a second bedroom, or a study, but from the square impressions on the light green carpeting, it looked like it had been used as storage. I stood in the empty room, looked out the windows down at my Range Rover.

  "Relatives?" I asked. "Does Craig have any family in the area?"

  Drew thought about that for a moment and said, "No, not that I know. He never talked family."

  Off in the distance the clouds were breaking up, and it looked like I would have some sun with me on the drive back to Tyler. Some consolation.

  "Did he ever tell you about a job he might have had, five years ago or so, at the Scribner Museum?"

  Drew laughed. "Listen, the only time I ever talked to the little bastard was when it was rent time. That was it. Most of the time, he did his thing and I did my thing, and we left each other alone. That was fine, right up until he left. Tell you what, you do find him, I'll give you a finder's fee or something. That rent he owes could practically make up the two car payments I owe the bank. "

  "I'll see what I can do," I said, which was about one step up from a lie. With that over, we went outside and I shook his hand and headed over to the Rover.

  Drew stayed with me and said, "So this is going to be in a story someday in a magazine?"

  "Maybe so," I said. "Sometimes, though, you do the research and things just fall apart, and there's nothing there to write about."

  "Hmmm. Writing. How many pages do you write a week for your job?"

  I thought for a moment and said, "Six, maybe eight."

  "Six or eight pages a week? And you get paid for it, enough to live on?"

  "Yeah, that I do."

  He shook his head in wonderment. "Man, you poor bastard. I couldn't imagine working like that. Jeez, what I do, Kenny --- my supervisor ---- he says, change the oil. Or adjust the plugs. Or check the belts on that Chevy's engine. Something right therc that you can touch and work on, and it's not going anywhere. It's right there in front of you. That's a job you can like, even though it don't pay much. But writing… Jesus, trying to think of things and give' em the right words…"

  It seemed as though Drew shuddered and I said, "Like to ask you one more thing, before I go."

  "Sure." I opened up the door of the Rover. "You knew I was coming. Not because of the phone calls from the repo company, but because your neighbors let you know that I was poking around. Am right?"

  Drew grinned and held up his beer bottle in a salute. "Hell, you're right. We look out for each other in this part of town, keep an eye on the houses and everybody's kids." Then he looked bleak for a moment. "No one else will."

  I got into the Rover, and as I went out the driveway I looked in the rearview mirror, seeing him trudge back to his house with beer and Playboy in hand, and it felt good for a moment, knowing that he pitied me.

  As I headed east to the New Hampshire seacoast on this Friday evening, I stopped at a convenience store on Route 10 1 to get something to eat. The store was called Greg's Place and had a set of gas pumps up in front and two picture windows that were covered up by posters announcing yard sales, pancake breakfasts, a school play and a couple of lost cats. The store was typical New Hampshire rural, with cans of motor oil and brake fluid two aisles over from soups and canned meat, and there were fresh homemade pies and muffins in one corner. .

  At the rear of the store, by a deli-type counter, I ordered a steak and cheese sub to go, and a man about my age with a chest-high white apron began slicing up a roll. His hair was thin and blond and it looked as if he made a big production of keeping each strand in place. As he worked, I wandered over to a cooler and picked out a bottle of lemonade. As I did I looked through an open door, and saw that I was looking into someone's living room. A young boy and girl were sprawled out on the floor, drawing on pieces of paper, while a small-and-white television set showed some evening game show. A tired woman, her hair done in curlers, rested in a chair, holding a sleeping baby in one hand holding up her head with the other. She wore pale pink slippers that had scuffed bottoms, and she would not gaze in my direction. The two kids on the floor looked up at me with a blank stare and I backed away. While my steak and cheese was on the grill, I went outside and filled up my Range Rover with gas. Traffic went by, a car every three or four seconds, and I tried not to think about the future waiting for those children.

  After paying for my meal and the gas, I drove east, eating, with one hand, tossing some things around in my head. It seem so odd, didn't it, that at about the same time Felix was getting phone calls and messages from people about the location of that safe house, Craig Dummer would up and leave both his job and his home. And it also seemed odd that when I asked Justin Dix about Craig's home address, he said the museum always knew where Craig Dummer was living. Yet he had been gone for at least a couple of weeks when Justin gave me his Bainbridge address.

  Then there was the matter of Ben Martin, retired Manchester police officer, who was the one who let the thieves into the museum, and who was found dead two years later in his car, and there's no autopsy, no records of anything being mentioned about his death having any connection with the theft of the paintings. Nothing. Body found and in three days Ben Martin is in the ground.

  And then there's Cassie Fuller's information, about Justin Dix and his problems. What kinds of problems?

  A lot of odd things, either pointing to sloppiness or pointing to a plan.

  When I had finished with my evening meal, such as it was, I was about fifteen miles from Tyler, and the traffic on Route 101 was beginning to fill up, as it seemed everyone in the central part of the state wanted to get to Tyler Beach this evening. Traffic jams are rare in New Hampshire, but I was tired of dealing with this rarity, so I fooled everyone and got off at an exit in Exonia. By traveling through back roads that didn't have traffic lights and never experienced traffic jams, I was in Tyler Beach in almost no time at all.

  At home I ate a couple of apples, to add to the nutritional balance of my on-the-road meal, and I watched a little television, one of those PBS programs that have journalists stationed in Washington trying to tell the rest of us what in hell was going on down there. As I watched the program, listening to the predictions and ruminations, I felt one of those odd tastes of nostalgia, sitting there in my quiet living room in my home in Tyler Beach. There had been a time when I was in that world of the Beltway and powerful men and wome
n, of sharp decisions made and awful stories buried or hidden. There had been some quiet and also some frenzied times back then, when I worked for the DoD and learned so much in so little time. On some evenings with Cissy, we would watch one of these programs, sharing a bottle of wine after a wonderful meal, and for dessert we would giggle at how wrong all of those bright and self-important reporters were. Once Cissy was wearing nothing save a silk robe and she had her head on my shoulder, saying, "Sweet Lord, Lewis, if those well-paid morons know so little about the stuff we work with, can you imagine how wrong they are about everything else?”

  I told her I could imagine, and I could imagine other things as well…

  With a sharp movement I shut off the TV and went out to my rear deck, breathing deeply of the salt air, not even being bothered that much by the pungent odor of the Petro Star's gift to these shores. I was brooding, and brooding is hardly ever healthy.

  I held on to the railings of the deck and looked out at the familiar lights of the Isles of Shoals, and something made me stop thinking, so I stopped.

  I looked out again, to the Samson State Wildlife Preserve and its rolling hills and trees that mask the concrete bunkers and old foundations of the Coast Artillery Station. The park closed at dusk, and since it was already a good couple of hours past sunset, the park should have been empty. Yet there was someone there, standing on one of the low hills looking in my direction.

  I shifted and tried to look again, without appearing obvious. Not that my night vision is that great, but there is usually a faint glow on the horizon in that direction from the city of Porter, and the person's shape was silhouetted against the evening sky. Sure. Just a stargazer, or someone waiting for a girlfriend or boyfriend.

  And then the person started moving, clambering down the small hill, heading south. Toward my beach. Toward my home.