Cape Cod Noir (Akashic Noir)

by David L. Ulin

  Doyle dropped his mentholated butt on the dried seashellcovered ground and stepped on it. “Mac is in love with you,” he said in a neutral tone, and walked back toward the door.

  “It’s not like that between us,” I protested, wanting to explain, but when Doyle opened the door the music hit us like a detonation. It was useless to pursue the conversation.

  “Mac doesn’t pick up girls,” Doyle said sometime later, during another break. We were smoking out back again. “He’s not, I guess, relaxed about sex, would be my estimation. He’s a different kind of tense around you.”

  All these years we’d been friends and Mac had never made a pass at me. “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about!” I countered, sounding for a moment just like my mother.

  “You’re a rich girl, aren’t you?” Doyle said with a smile, sticking a fresh cigarette into the black gap between his teeth. I’d never before met anyone with an incisor missing. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

  “My mother was a debutante,” I replied with a nervous chuckle.

  “What’s a debutante?”

  I laughed. He leaned forward and kissed me, all menthol breath and vodka and orange juice. We’d been keeping up, matching each other one for one, all night.

  In the wee hours of the morning, after the nightclub closed, I wanted to go to an after-hours party with Doyle but Mac pulled me away and drove me back to the house. Bobby the wanted murderer was nowhere to be seen. I was sitting on the faded, wilted couch, when Mac leaned in awkwardly to kiss me. I tried to push him away with both palms. His eyes slipped out of focus, became glazed with rage; I recognized the look and felt a tremor of fear before defiance kicked in.

  “Don’t you know how you make me feel?” he muttered between clenched teeth. “You know, don’t you? You know.”

  “To hell with you, Mac,” I said, and in a flash he was on top of me. I struggled to free myself; I felt like I was lying under a refrigerator. He got his hands around my neck and started to choke me. Doyle came through the front door just as I was losing consciousness and he lifted the cheap trunk that they used as a coffee table and whacked Mac with it on the back of the head.

  Doyle pulled me up to sitting, Mac out cold on the floor beneath us. “You all right? He could’ve killed you.”

  I rubbed my neck, trying to catch my breath. “It’s weird,” I said, “at the time, I didn’t really care. I guess I’m drunker than I thought.”

  While Mac slept it off, Doyle and I walked around the neighborhood of one-story houses. We sat down on someone’s lawn, which was slightly pitched. It was very dark. “Sometimes Mac gets violent when he drinks too much,” Doyle explained, as if he were talking about his aging uncle’s blood pressure. “It’s like a switch goes off in his head. You can see it in his eyes. Tomorrow he won’t remember.”

  “I know,” I said. “Everyone always protected him at school. What’ll happen to him now that he’s back in the real world?”

  “Everyone will keep on protecting him.”

  We talked for a long time. There were no stars in the sky; the clouds had rolled in as they often do near the beach at night. I told him about my mother and her awful boyfriend, gambling and partying in the south of France. I told him about how my dad died alone, drunk and broken, in a flophouse in upstate New York. Even I had walked away from him, and he’d been the only person I ever loved. I explained to Doyle that sometimes being on the move seemed best. Four years of college was the longest I’d ever stayed in one place. But I knew the only chance I had was to finish, and to keep on learning. Reading and reading until I knew so much no one could hurt me. I didn’t know who I was or where I was going but I knew I had to keep on learning. I told Doyle these things I had never told a soul, feeling his warmth and his breath beside me but not able to see him. He told me he had a girlfriend who was in a Charlestown gang called the Stingers, all girls. He said if she ever found out he’d fallen in love with someone in ten minutes flat, she’d cut us both up, but good.

  “Is Doyle your first or last name?”

  “Last. My name is Bill—but no one calls me Bill except my parents.”

  The darkness gradually began to fade around us. I saw the house’s mailbox take shape, a set of lines forming a silvery rectangle in the darkness. Then I noticed the watery rose-colored sunlight on the wet grass; dew had soaked through our clothes. The pale green color of the grass was the same as his eyes.

  “You have the most beautiful eyes,” I told him. And kissed him again for a long time.

  “We better get back,” Doyle finally said. By now the sun was shining brightly and I felt dizzy and exposed. The birds had started chirping, making a racket. We walked back through the deserted neighborhood, all the houses one-story summer rentals set out in orderly crescents, with little square lawns.

  When we walked into the house, Bobby was packing up his stuff. He said he was driving back to Boston to turn himself in.

  He didn’t have much, an old backpack filled with dirty clothes. He was shoving socks in a side pocket. He said hiding out was too much for his nerves. Waiting all night for the cops to show up. It was an accident, he told us, as if he were practicing for his interrogation. He never meant to hurt the guy. It was self-defense, he added, suddenly inspired.

  He hesitated at the door, shuffling his feet. “Well, later then,” he murmured, and disappeared.

  Mac had gone into one of the bedrooms to sleep off his drunk. He would either not remember or pretend it had never happened; that was his way.

  I decided I should go also; perhaps the south of France was a better idea, after all. Doyle walked me to my car and leaned in through the driver’s-side window as I rolled it down. “Just know this,” he said. “This isn’t over.”

  He wrote his phone number in Charlestown on a corner of my map and I gave him my mother’s phone and address in the city. I promised to call him as soon as I got back to college and had a number of my own. He tapped the roof of the Rabbit lightly a couple of times, and I drove off.

  While I was a senior in college and then a graduate student at Columbia, I would go up to Boston on occasion to see him. Once, we rented a motel room off the interstate, and another time we spent a warm spring afternoon driving around Charlestown in my VW Rabbit, Doyle behind the wheel. The Mile of Terror, the townies called it. He showed me Bunker Hill. No one was home at the apartment where he’d been born—the Doyles didn’t trust hospitals, he explained—and he still lived with his family on Dunstable Street, in a complex of two-story condominiums with gray aluminum siding, all the units exactly alike. In the living room, on the wall above the gas fireplace, hung a family portrait of all six Doyles: father, mother, three sisters, and Bill, sitting in a field of flowers with an unlikely blue sky and white puffy clouds overhead. The artist had painted in Doyle’s missing tooth.

  He told me that night in another motel room that he was thinking of taking a trip across the country. I never found out if he went.

  Many months later, when I was beginning my serious downward spiral, Doyle called me one morning in my apartment near Columbia.

  “I got a big favor to ask you. If you can’t do it, just say so. I need three hundred dollars,” he said. “I got a debt to pay.”

  “Who do you owe?” I asked.

  “Filene’s Basement. I ran up a credit card.”

  I wasn’t rolling in money, but it wouldn’t be a hardship to give it to him. “How do you want me to send it to you? Is a check okay, or do you need cash?”

  “I can cash a check in the bar where I work.” After a pause, he added, “Thank you, Liz. I knew you’d come through, and I’ll never forget it. If you ever need anything, you know where I am.”

  A year passed and I was working nights as a temp in a law firm, trying to finish law school. I was sort of seeing a guy I’d met in the Marlin, a bar on 110th and Broadway, around the corner from my apartment. Drinking close to home, it was easier to stay out of trouble. Joe Giorno had a black mustache and a
Datsun 280z and lived in Hoboken. He worked for a moving company and dealt a little cocaine to Columbia students on the side. He said dealing coke was a lot easier and more lucrative than humping furniture around the city. One night we were in his 280z on our way to his place in Hoboken when he said he had to make a little detour. He drove down a street in the West 40s, slowing as we passed a parked car. There was a guy behind the wheel who wasn’t moving, his head thrown back and his mouth wide open. There was a muddy smear of blood on the window.

  “Shit,” Joe said. Then he turned to me: “If anybody asks, I was with you all night, you understand? All night.”

  I dug Doyle’s phone number out of an old address book and called him as soon as I got home the next morning.

  “Doyle,” I said, and he knew who it was. I started crying. He asked me for the details calmly, like a doctor listening to a patient’s symptoms. He wanted Joe’s full name and exact address.

  “I’ll make some calls,” he said. “Don’t worry about it anymore. But Liz, listen to me. If anybody comes looking for you, get up here as fast as you can. You’ll be safe here.”

  I never again heard from Joe Giorno. No one ever came looking or asking questions. He was gone, as if he’d never existed. I stopped hanging out at the Marlin.

  Doyle sent me a card on my fortieth birthday, to my mother’s New York City address. By then I’d moved around the city many times. By then I’d also been sober for nine years. The card had a bottle of French wine on the cover and the inside read, You’re just like wine, you get better with time. He’d signed the card, Love, Doyle.

  Standing in the Orlando airport waiting for our luggage with the elderly couple from Charlestown who loved Disney World, I considered asking them if they knew the Doyles on Dunstable Street. But there were probably hundreds of Doyles in Charlestown, and I did not remember his parents’ first names, if I’d ever known them at all.

  Later, in the rental car driving to Disney World, while our daughter slept sprawled across the backseat, I thought about telling my husband the story. But that girl no longer exists, and my husband has never met her. He’s never seen me drunk. He doesn’t know about Mac, or Bobby huddled in that Cape Cod living room, how close I came to the edge. I am now a mother who takes her daughter to Disney World, married to a man who does the same.

  I think of Doyle still, and my heart feels warm as I send good thoughts his way. From time to time I feel him thinking about me, and wonder how he’s faring.

  PART III

  END OF THE LINE

  THE EXCHANGE STUDENT

  BY FRED G. LEEBRON

  Provincetown

  The news started coming down Route 6 early that Saturday morning, a peculiar siren sound like a cross between a busy phone signal and an overworked synthesizer. It blasted into the house at 8:32 a.m. when the exchange student was woken by high-pitched keening from the downstairs kitchen.

  His eyes raced around the still strange bedroom. His halffull blue rucksack leaned in a corner, his Danish-English dictionary sat on a dark pine desk. He felt under the bed for his unpacked suitcase. Was it keening or was it wailing? He knew he should stay in his room until it passed. It became guttural, as if the voice were choking, and the only words he could understand were: “Now, now …” Doors were opening and closing all over the house. There was sobbing. He thought hard to the last time he had heard such emotion. There wasn’t a time. The reputation of New Englanders was that they were restrained, deeply reticent, until you got to know them, and that often took a good while. Even then, sometimes, you wouldn’t catch so much as a grin or a tear. He lay in bed. His new watch, waterproof to a depth of fifteen feet, told him that an hour had passed. An hour!

  It was only August. He still had eleven months left, if he were counting, which he was not. He was just trying to endure. His American brother frequented the gay discotheques, his American sister thought she must be far prettier than she was, his American father was a gnarled pontificator (about what wasn’t yet clear to the exchange student) missing a thumb—he ran a whale watching company—and his American mother seemed as old and stunted as his grandmother back home. Three weeks ago, when he’d seen this unlikely group at South Station in Boston along with all the other host families, he’d prayed they weren’t his—and he never prayed.

  Now it was 10:05 and the house was silent. It was always difficult to know when to appear and when to disappear. His room was tucked away in a far upper corner, and he could be as invisible as they needed him to be. He supposed he could use the bathroom.

  His trip took him past his sister’s room, which was empty, and to his brother’s door, which was thrown open to the usual mess of cassettes and records. His brother liked to quiz him on music and was appalled by his limited knowledge.

  The bathroom was pleasant and white and warm. It caught the morning sun through a skylight. He wondered where everyone was and what the hell had happened. When he was finished, he went into the hallway and looked out the window onto the driveway. Empty. It was a Sunday morning and everything was recovering from the havoc of an August Saturday night and there wasn’t a single car. He felt a strange thrill when he realized he might be alone.

  He tiptoed down the stairs—he was of course already dressed, you couldn’t go to the bathroom without being dressed—and opened the living room door. A newspaper had been left open on the green leather couch. A cup of coffee sat unfinished on a side table. He crossed to the kitchen. On the bare table was a note: Help yourself to food.

  Hesitantly, he opened the refrigerator. There was milk and cheese and eggs and something they called linguica, plus a plastic container of cream cheese. On the counter were a jar of jam and a bag of rolls from the Portuguese bakery and a bottle of fizzy water. He poured himself some fizzy water and sat at the breakfast table.

  The phone rang. He’d never answered it before. It rang and rang and rang. He looked at it; it was black with a rotary dial and appeared ancient. Was it ringing for him? He waited through the twentieth ring and then picked up.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  A man’s voice poured back at him, rushed and elusive.

  In his best American, he told the man that he didn’t speak American so well.

  The man offered a few choice words about that—what they were was anybody’s guess—and hung up.

  He took the glass of fizzy water out through the living room to the front hall and opened the door to the driveway. He stood there smelling the salt air. Carefully he searched the sky above the pine trees that surrounded their partially settled neighborhood, cut off by Route 6 from the town. Just last week on a dune hike, they’d seen a shack practically spontaneously combust. What the hell was going on here?

  Against the wall of the house leaned a lone motorbike. That would be his once Valerie left for Denmark. He looked at his watch—he’d never had a watch before—and saw that would be in just two days. In just two days he’d be free of her. She spoke to him more than anybody else in the family, but primarily it all revolved around how many boys kept telling her how beautiful she was. She was all right, but she was not beautiful. She had dark hair, for one thing. He couldn’t tell whether she was trying to provoke him into saying something like, But you are beautiful, or if she was just gloating. The town had never had an exchange student before, inbound or outbound. The silence was unstinting.

  A car pulled into the driveway, spraying pebbles and seashells. Valerie and her parents were visible through its smudged oversized windows. He waved to them uncertainly. What was he supposed to do—go to the car, retreat into the house, stand there like a statue? Finally, Valerie got out of the car. She strode over to him and took his hand. She was an inch or two taller.

  “Come,” she said with grim determination.

  She led him into the house and through the kitchen to the refrigerator, still holding his hand. She’d never held his hand before. He wasn’t surprised that he didn’t like it. She opened the refrigerator and grabbed two cans of beer an
d shut the door with her hip and led him upstairs. At the top of the stairs she looked left and right, as if she’d never been there before. “Okay, okay,” she said, urging herself onward, still holding his hand. She’d probably held a lot of hands. He wondered if she’d had sex yet; he hadn’t, though of course it was never far from his mind.

  They walked down the hall together, separately but side by side. He thought he could see a tear in the corner of her eye; he thought he could sense something awful waiting at the end of the hall. She opened the door to his room, pulled him in, shut it, sat him forcefully on the bed, sat beside him, opened a can and handed it to him, opened her can, and tried to smile.

  “Skaal,” she said, perhaps her one word of Danish, tapping his can with hers.

  “Skaal,” he said.

  She took a sip and he took a sip.

  “What have you been doing this morning?” she asked. “What have you heard?”

  He looked at her. It seemed wrong, perhaps even dangerous, to admit he’d heard anything. “I was asleep,” he said.

  “You couldn’t sleep through that.” She looked at him in frank disbelief.

  “I don’t know what I heard.”

  She took up his hand again; at a point, he didn’t know when, she’d ceased holding it. “What you heard was my mother crying because my brother has been killed in a car accident.”

  As the words left her mouth, her face crumpled as if it had forgotten it had bones. Tears streamed from her clenched eyes. He reached for her because that was all he could think to do, and both their cans spilled and fell to the carpeted floor. Her chest heaved against his and he willed himself not to grow hard and was relieved to see that the effect at least for the moment followed the intent.