Cape Cod Noir (Akashic Noir)

by David L. Ulin

  He closed the phone and stuck it back into his pocket. I finished my drink. His eyes changed. He looked into me.

  “Can you get me a gun?” he asked.

  * * *

  I remember I didn’t sleep. I remember rain on and off for a week. Parked at the beach, I watched the storms roll in and the breakers snap in the wind. Because of my parole, I couldn’t drink a beer in the cab of my truck to help put it out of my head. Shit. Stay free. But he was asking me to go back in again. Not to jail, but to what went before it.

  Gleason didn’t say anything at work. Marcello and Rener acted like it was all the same toward me, and I was okay with that. DePuzzo showed here and there. Never sober. Still played his paycheck games. And when I couldn’t sleep, I heard Gleason’s tooth hitting the pavement in the rain.

  Stay free.

  Two paychecks later and still I had done nothing.

  Then it came on me like I was sucked out into those breakers, the air dying.

  I rolled out of bed before dawn, slipped on jeans, a T-shirt, a gray hoodie, and reached below my bed for the hollowed-out book. I took what I needed, closed the book, and stuck it back. My savings.

  I got into the truck and drove off the Cape to New Bedford, listening to Jimmie Rodgers the whole way.

  The pay phone was still outside Taqueria la Raza on Acushnet. Probably still had that girl’s number etched into the plastic handle. I went around back and knocked on the kitchen door. Balthazar opened it, sleep long out of his eyes. His old half-toothless grin lit up when he saw me. The Mexican flag tattooed on his forearm was still the same dull blue. We went into the kitchen and he made two stacks out of cases of beer for us to sit on. We sat and stared at each other and he reached out and slapped my shoulder. I told him in Spanish what I needed and he nodded.

  After some huevos rancheros, I left the taqueria and made the call at the pay phone. Then I drove down Acushnet toward Whitman, past old houses split into two apartments. Past their chain-link fences, dying grass, and silent doors. All of it looking back at me.

  Two hours later, my wallet empty, I headed back to the Cape, listening to the wind the whole way.

  I kept the .45 Smith & Wesson in an oiled rag in my truck. Just couldn’t bring myself to give it to Gleason right away. He was still breathing hard because of the ribs, but the green color had left his face. The scab was close to a scar. I worked and watched and tried to laugh with them, but the gun weighed on me. Everything left me but that.

  Gleason kept his head down. Instead of working hard to save some time before service at night, he began going out to the storage garage during prep time to make phone calls. He knew DePuzzo didn’t come around during the day, and he wanted to stay busy right through the afternoon into the night. He didn’t speak much to Marcello or Rener. Nothing was broken, it was just that those fists had taken something out of the air between them. That, or forged it solid.

  Payday came and DePuzzo showed with my p.o. DePuzzo was in his finest jeans and a black Harley Davidson T-shirt. My p.o. looked like his khakis and Oxford shirt would swallow him. His thin arms constantly moved, like bisected worms fighting for life. They laughed while DePuzzo gave me shit. My p.o. gave the Brazilians shit, poking them in the back and telling them to work harder. He went up to Gleason and leaned in close to the side of his face and whistled approval at the scab. DePuzzo laughed. Then my p.o. watched the paycheck routine. I waited, then went out back and watched the two of them get blowjobs from the busgirls with their hands behind their backs, each holding a paycheck.

  Dusk fell. The service began and time slid into speed, into work, into the heat and oil stink of a kitchen running at full bore. I stopped thinking, stopped feeling that weight, and kept my mind on salads, desserts, and calls for more lobsters from the line. The orders began to slow. Marcello and I stopped plating salads and desserts, and started repacking food into smaller containers.

  A waitress came into the kitchen, a tall woman with graybrown hair who’d been with DePuzzo from the get-go.

  “There’s an eclipse outside,” she said.

  We froze at the news. It was something natural, unlike our aprons and secrets. We followed her outside.

  The moon was three-quarters hidden by a perfect shadow. Its light played out from the edges, leaving a crescent of ice blue along the rim of black. Its silence came at us clearly and quickly and we took it in. The waitress stood by the kitchen door. Rener sat on a flowerpot, and Marcello and I sat against the hood of a parked car. Gleason stood next to us. We craned our necks and tilted our faces toward the growing shadow, staring into the black. I could hear Gleason’s slight wheeze. The shadow moved, not slow or fast, but it moved, you could sense it more than see it. Just as the shadow was about to take the moon, Gleason’s cell phone rang. He answered without looking at who was calling. I was standing close enough to hear the voice come through the phone’s speaker, thin and electric.

  “Daddy, can you see the moon?”

  The eclipse passed. I grabbed Gleason’s wrist and whispered to him to wait. Everyone returned to work. I went to my truck and pulled the .45 from beneath the front seat. I closed the door and tucked the gun behind my back into my waistband. Gleason watched. He walked over to his car, a beat-up Pontiac Grand Prix with a green hood and silver body handed down through the Brazilian pipeline. He got in. I climbed into the passenger seat. The locks clicked, and I pulled out the gun.

  “It’s loaded,” I said. “It’s clean, meaning no one can trace it. When you’re done with it, dump it in a salt pond at night.”

  I handed him the weapon and showed him how to work the safety. The chrome slide was definite against the night in the car. The black pistol grip disappeared in darkness. He took it from me with both hands, half-cradling it like a broken bird.

  I spoke before he could. It was better that way.

  “Take care of yourself, Gleason. Stay free.”

  He didn’t smile, just stared at the gun. He looked at me and gave a short, sharp nod. I got out of the car and walked toward my own. Then I stopped and peered back in through the rear window. Gleason’s hands were spread out a little from his sides. He was looking at his kids on his cell phone in his left hand. The gun weighed down his right.

  I drove right out of that parking lot without looking back. Had to get a step ahead. After that, I lived in New Bedford for a few weeks. I stayed in a small apartment Balthazar owned down the street from Taqueria la Raza. It had a stove and a bookcase. He took the little rent he charged out of my paycheck. I worked the line with him in the kitchen, and he kept my name off the books.

  We kept our eyes to the papers, our ears to the radio, and Balthazar’s son checked the Internet at the library. We made calls from the pay phone. There was never any news. I couldn’t chance a run back up to the Cape, and it was only a matter of time before my p.o knew I had stopped showing for work. If he cared at all. On the outside, I’m a threat to him because he’s neck-deep in this shit too.

  I couldn’t stay with Balthazar long. No news came from the Cape. The night before I left Taqueria la Raza, I remembered the words that echoed down the tiers at me. They made me think of what we looked like beneath that eclipse, totally clear in the black, the guts of it all shining silver like an animal with its belly slit.

  I’ve got my savings. And illegals aren’t the only ones who can play tricks with Social Security numbers.

  I’m on the run. Movement is freedom.

  I hope he made it back to Brazil.

  SECOND CHANCE

  BY ELYSSA EAST

  Buzzards Bay

  Cunningham said that he had set up the reform school on Penikese Island so we could have a clean break with our pasts. We couldn’t walk home from out here in the middle of nowhere Buzzards Bay. Couldn’t hitch or swim here, either. Even boaters considered the currents dangerous where we were, twelve miles out from the Cape, past the islands of Nonamesset, Veckatimest, Uncatena, Naushon, the Weepeckets, Pasque, and Nashawena, just north of Cutt
yhunk. There was no Cumbie Farms, no Dunkin’ Donuts, no running water, Internet, or cell service here. Not even any trees. Just a house made from the hull of an old wooden ship that had run aground. Me and six other guys, all high school age, who were lucky to be here instead of in some lock-up, lived with Cunningham and the staff, most of whom were also our teachers. The school had a barn, chicken coop, woodshop, and outhouse. The only other things were the ruins of a leper colony, a couple of tombstones that Cunningham liked to call a cemetery, and the birds. Lots of birds. Seagulls, all of them, that hovered over this place like a screeching, shifting cloud that rained crap and dove at our heads all day.

  This was our clean slate, a barren rock covered in seagull shit.

  We had to leave most of our things behind on the mainland when we were shipped out here on a rusty lobster boat called Second Chance, but our pasts couldn’t help but follow us here anyway. We were always looking over our shoulders and finding them there. Depending on the time of day, we were either chasing the shadows of our pasts or being chased by them. We cast them out over the water with our fishing nets. They were with us when we hoed the garden, split wood, and changed the oil to keep Second Chance, the school’s only boat, in working order. We watched them tackle and collide and fall to the ground next to us while we played football and beat the shit out of each other much like the waves that endlessly pounded this rock. I just wondered when our pasts would pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and walk away. You could say that’s what we all wanted them to do. Least that’s what I wanted for mine.

  I never meant to be in the car that killed that girl. It was like that was someone else, not me. Like I wasn’t even there. But I was.

  Mr. Riaf, my court-appointed lawyer, had said that the hardest thing out here on Penikese was figuring out how to survive the other guys. “Someone always cracks,” he said. “Don’t let it be you, kid.”

  Freddie Paterniti said that when D.Y.S. told him he could go to school on an island for a year instead of being thrown back in the can, he thought he was gonna be spending his days jetskiing. Everybody gave Freddie a load of shit for being such a stupid fuck though they had all thought the same thing. Me, I never admitted to knowing better.

  Instead of jet skis, cigarette boats, and chicks in bikinis, we got Cunningham, the school’s founder, an ex-Marine who fought in Vietnam and looked like Jean-Claude Van Damme crossed with Santa Claus. Cunningham believed that our salvation lay in living like it was 1800, but the lesson wasn’t about history: “You boys were chosen to ride Second Chance here because you have shown a demonstrated capacity for remorse for your crimes. We’re here to teach you that your actions literally create the world around you. By creating everything you need with your own bare hands, you can re-form the person you are deep within. And you can take that second chance all the way back to a new place inside.”

  That’s why we carried water, slopped pigs, caught fish, dug potatoes, gathered eggs, and built tables and chairs, and if we didn’t, we wouldn’t have had anywhere to sit and nothing to eat.

  We chopped a lot of firewood that was brought in on Second Chance from Woods Hole. If we got pissed off—which was often—we were sent out to chop more. At first our muscles ached for days. The feel of the axe ricocheted up our elbows, into our shoulders, our skulls. But we got stronger. Soon we split wood and dreamed of splitting the take, splitting open girls’ thighs, splitting this place, this life.

  We were constantly making our world in this nowhere place, chopping it to bits, and redoing it all over again, but we couldn’t remake what we had done to earn our way here.

  “Boys,” Tiny Bledsoe would say when we made the cutting boards that were sold in a fancy Falmouth gift shop to help fund the school, “consider yourselves to be in training for Alcatraz. Soon you’ll graduate to making license plates and blue jeans!” Each time Tiny said this Freddie hit the woodshop floor, laughing.

  Freddie and Tiny were an odd couple. Freddie: sixteen, short, oily, wall-eyed, with the whiniest high-pitched Southie voice you could imagine. Tiny: seventeen, a lumbering, clubfooted giant who came from East Dennis. They were nothing like me and my big brother Chad, but they reminded me of us in their own way. They both claimed to have killed people. That was their thing. Their special bond. Something that Chad and me have now too.

  * * *

  That girl’s mother sent me a picture of her, lying in her casket. It looked like one of those jewelry boxes lined in pink satin with a little ballerina that spins while the music plays. All you have to do is turn the key and that ballerina comes to life, but there’s no key on a casket. Just some motor at the gravesite that lowers the box into the ground. My little sister Caroline had one of those jewelry boxes. There was nothing in it but some rings she got out of those grocery store things you put a quarter in. The rings weren’t worth anything, but Chad convinced me to steal her jewelry box anyway.

  Freddie and Tiny. It was never Tiny and Freddie, though Tiny was a foot taller. Even Cunningham and our teachers caught on, always saying “Freddie and Tiny” like “I got Freddie’s and Tiny’s homework here!” “Freddie and Tiny are going to lead us in hauling traps!” “Freddie and Tiny …”

  One day early in the year, Ryan Peasely was rolling his eyes in mechanics class and mumbling behind Cunningham’s back, “Freddie and Tiny sucked my cock. Freddie and Tiny ate my ass.” It seemed like no one could hear him other than me, but Tiny had sonar for ears. He clamped down on Ryan with a headlock in no time flat. Freddie then whispered into Ryan’s ear that he would kill him by running a set of battery chargers off Second Chance’s engine block up his ass.

  Ryan is from Wellesley. Just cause he used to sell dope to his private school buddies he thinks he’s better than all of us, but Ryan just about shit his pants that day. Cunningham punished Freddie and Tiny by making them clean out the outhouse, but Freddie didn’t seem to care. He nearly died from laughing so hard.

  When Freddie laughs he sounds like the trains that went through the woods down the road from the cul-de-sac where I grew up back in Pocasset: “A-Huh-a-huh-a-huh-a-huh. A-Huh-a-huh-a-huh-a-huh.”

  It was also Chad’s idea to take Caroline’s jewelry box and set it on the train tracks. Bits of that doll went flying everywhere. You could still hear the music playing long after the train left.

  Caroline cried so hard after she saw her jewelry box was missing, I went out and gathered up all the pieces of the ballerina that I could find. I wanted to give them to Caroline and make her feel better, but Chad shook his head and said, “What people don’t know can’t hurt them.”

  I threw the pieces of the ballerina in the yard later on. I still remember watching the bits of pink plastic and white gauze fly from my hand.

  Chad came into the room we shared later that night and said, “You’re a real man now, you know that, kid?”

  I was only eight, and he was thirteen but he had started shaving. He knew what it meant to be grown up.

  Learning how to be a man is part of Penikese’s chop-woodcarry-water philosophy. Penikese isn’t like being in jail, boot camp, or even regular school, though we can earn our G.E.D. and learn a couple of trades like fishing and woodworking. It’s some of all of these things in an Abe-Lincoln-in-a-log-cabin kind of way. Cunningham leads us on walks and tells us stories about the island and calls it history. Wood shop is where Mr. Da Cunha teaches us how to make furniture, which is also his way to con us into measuring angles and calling it geometry. We whittle pieces of wood along with the time; we’re stuck here for a year unless we fuck up, which means getting shipped off to juvie, which none of us wants though there is something about this place that makes everything bad we’ve ever done seem impossible to escape. Like the fact that the house where we’re living is a ship going nowhere.

  At night we sit by kerosene lanterns and do homework around the kitchen table or play pool, except for Bobby Pomeroy who spends a lot of time in the outhouse where we’re all convinced he’s busy beating wood.
/>   Bobby grew up on a farm somewhere in Western Mass, where he was busted for assault and date-raping some girl. Cause he’s a farm boy, he teaches us things that even Cunningham doesn’t know. Useful things. Like how to hypnotize a chicken.

  We’d only been here for a few weeks when Bobby grabbed the smallest chicken in the coop by its feet and lifted it, so it was hanging upside down. The chicken was squawking and clucking, but as soon as Bobby starting swinging it around and around it quieted down. “That’ll learn ya,” Bobby said, then set the chicken back on the ground. Next thing you knew that chicken was walking in circles and bumping into things, like it was drunk. We all laughed our asses off, but for Tiny and DeShawn.

  “That’s not fucking funny,” Tiny said.

  “Whassamattuh?” Freddie said.

  “It’s just a little chicken.”

  “You feckin’ killed some girl and you’re getting ya panties in a wad over some dumb chicken that’s gonna end up in a pot pretty soon heyah?” Freddie said.

  “Just make it stop,” Tiny replied. His eyes were turning red, his lower lip quivering, but the chicken was still spinning around bumping into things. We couldn’t stop cracking up.

  “Fucking knock it off, you assholes!” Tiny yelled.

  Then the chicken lay down and stopped moving altogether. The chickens in the coop went quiet too. All we could hear was the wind whistling like a boiling kettle.

  “That’s fucking sick,” Kevin Monahan said. “You’re sick, Tiny. Killing your own girlfriend and defending some stupid chicken.” Kevin was in for burning down an apartment building in Springfield while cooking up meth with his father. Some old lady’s cat died in the fire.

  “Arson ain’t no big thing compared to killing a pretty little girl, pansy,” Freddie said.

  Bobby snapped his fingers over the bird, which rolled onto its feet and started walking again.