New Jerusalem News

by John Enright

  Dominick hadn’t thought through the rest of his day. Now he figured they would back the boat into the water on a ramp at one marina or another, and he would wait out Atticus’s return there, hopefully in a nearby pub. But where they stopped to put in was at a remote public park beach ramp. “Don’t belong to a marina anymore,” Atticus said. It wasn’t that hard launching the boat. Atticus did most of the work. They loaded the boat with the coolers and gas containers Atticus had brought along and parked the truck and trailer in an almost empty parking lot. Dominick had no choice but to get on board. He was already wet when Atticus handed him his foul-weather gear. He had been shanghaied. They motored back to a marina where they met up with the other small crafts and fishing boats before setting out. Atticus pulled a bottle of scotch out of a cooler, and they passed it back and forth. Dominick had to admit his adrenalin was up. “What exactly is it we are going out to catch?” he asked.

  “Them,” Atticus said, “the despoilers.”

  They never did catch them that day. In fact, in the fog and the failing light Atticus could not even find the park beach ramp where they had put in, and they ended up tied to the end of a marina dock. A fellow protestor gave them a ride home. Only the next day did Dominick ask about the backstory to what he now saw—in dry, warm, and well-rested retrospect—as a mini-adventure memory. By the time Dominick came down to the kitchen that morning, Atticus had already retrieved and returned the boat and trailer and truck, with the help of their owner, and was sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea. Atticus tried to explain it to him.

  “So, it was the Coast Guard we were looking for out there?” Dominick asked. “Isn’t that sort of backwards?”

  “No, no,” Atticus said. “They were supposed to find us, but I guess they never went out.”

  “Why were they supposed to find us? Were we in danger?”

  “No—Jesus, Dominick—they were supposed to find us because we weren’t supposed to be there.”

  “Where were we supposed to be?”

  “Not there.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the Coast Guard was running an exercise, a practice run for an LNG tanker entering the bay.”

  “Oh,” Dominick said. He had set about fixing himself a small pot of French-press coffee. He could not stand tea in the morning, and he was really no good before that first cup of joe. “What’s an elengied anchor?”

  “You really aren’t from here, are you, Dominick? I never did learn where you do hail from.”

  “My mother now lives in the Washington area,” Dominick said.

  “So, you haven’t heard about the natural gas terminal they want to put in up the bay? It’s only been the biggest political news around here for the past two years.”

  “I’m afraid I do not know what that is, a natural gas terminal.” Dominick brought his coffee to the table.

  “It’s a big shoreside facility where they unload liquid natural gas from supertankers, process and deliver it.”

  “And the problem is?”

  “The problem is nobody hereabouts wants it, and we mean to stop it.”

  Dominick knew he did not want to hear the reasons why this terminal was a bad idea, just like he did not want to hear why it was a great idea. “Which leads somehow to the Coast Guard running—or not running—some sort of anchor test?”

  “I swear sometimes you are worse than Lydia, Dominick. What are you talking about?”

  “Okay, let’s start at the beginning again. Why exactly were you and I and the others out there in our little boats yesterday?”

  “So that the Coast Guard would see that bringing one of those supertankers filled with liquid natural gas into the bay to go up to that proposed terminal was not possible.”

  “Ah, good tactic, preventative defense.” Dominick smiled at Atticus, who had begun to act a tad hyper. “And how were we going to show the Coast Guard this? Was someone going to blow something up and the rest of us were just out there as decoys?”

  “What? Are you crazy? No one’s going to blow anything up!” Atticus was getting excited again.

  “Calm down, Atticus. I was just joking—hoping—about blowing things up. Don’t we all sort of envy terrorists for their freedom to do outlandish things for a cause?”

  Atticus stared at Dominick for a full thirty seconds before answering, “No, I don’t envy terrorists. I despise them. Cowards hiding behind threats and the murder of innocents. And part of the problem. Because of your enviable terrorists, these liquid natural gas supertankers have become potential targets of mass destruction, ready-made floating bombs. We don’t want anything blowing up. We want them out of here.”

  “I can understand that,” Dominick said, “but how does what we did yesterday . . . ?”

  “Because these LNG supertankers are so dangerous, special security measures have been invoked. Their arrivals and departures—at least three times a week—are unscheduled and kept secret, just announced at the last minute. In American waters—like our bay—the Coast Guard must enforce a security zone around the tankers three miles long and a half mile wide. No vessel is allowed inside that security zone, no vessel whatsoever, be it a freighter, a yacht, a lobsterman, or a kid in a Sunfish.”

  “That seems a bit extreme. Ferries and things too?”

  “The works. Nothing. Even bridges farther up the bay would be closed to all traffic.”

  “While these surprise tankers moved through.”

  “You’re getting the picture.”

  “So we were out on the bay . . .”

  “Because we got the Coast Guard to agree to make a dry run to see what it would take to clear the bay like that.”

  “And your tactic was to flood the zone.”

  “Right.”

  “And they never showed up? That was unsportsmanlike.”

  “Well, they won’t say, I gather. But if they did try to come through pretending they were a supertanker, no one saw them, and there had to be boats inside their sacred four-and-a-half-square-mile security zone. We had the outer bay covered.”

  The next day there was an article in the New Jerusalem News about the protest, under the headline “Anti-Gas Armada Stymies Coast Guard.” Atticus made a point of showing it to Dominick.

  “Stymies is not a good headline verb,” Dominick observed, putting the paper down.

  “No, read the article,” Atticus said. Dominick did.

  The article reported that the Coast Guard had gone ahead with its planned supertanker rehearsal run in spite of foggy conditions on the bay. A cutter out of Boston would escort a fictional LNG tanker through the bay, maintaining the proscribed security zone, including bridge closures. However, due to weather conditions and the cutter’s radar detection of “abnormally high vessel activity in shipping lanes,” the exercise was postponed.

  The protestors were calling it a victory for their cause. Atticus’s local group, Bay Savers, had been joined by national organizations Greenpeace, Nature Conservancy, the Wildlife Foundation, and others in mounting a Blockade to Save the Bay Day. International support was also mounting. “The British Green movement was represented by Lord Witherspoon, who spent the day on the bay with the other boating protestors.”

  Atticus had wandered off to another part of the house while Dominick read. Now Dominick went off to find him. He found him in his study, where he was watching the local news on TV. “What is this? What is this!”

  “I know, I know,” Atticus said, not even turning around. “That’s Lydia’s work. She knows the reporter. I guess she thought your presence would add a little punch to the coverage. We need all the traction we can get right now. Both the state and the feds have come out in favor of the terminal.”

  “But . . . but Lord Witherspoon . . . Lord Witherspoon isn’t green.”

  “Why not? Don’t chameleons change color?”

  “Lord Witherspoon is colorless.”

  “Was. Lord Witherspoon was colorless. Now he’s green, for the time being at least. What
’s the difference?”

  “I look awful in green. It doesn’t match my complexion, makes me look like a corpse.”

  “Talk to Lydia.”

  Lydia claimed to know nothing at all about how Lord Witherspoon came to be named in the article. “But most people,” she said, “would take some pride in having their name associated with such a worthwhile cause.”

  It was four days before the men in suits arrived. Dominick was home alone at Mt. Sinai when the front door bell rang. He ignored it at first, but whoever was pushing the button would not give up. Some variety of door-to-door Christian was Dominick’s guess. Well, he would give them a piece of atheistic dismissal. But the two men in dark suits and ties on the doorstep did not look like missionaries. They were empty-handed for one thing, no Bibles.

  “Mr. Jameson?” The taller one spoke. Why was it always the taller one who spoke first?

  “Mr. Jameson is out,” Dominick said, and instinctively he went to close the door. The taller one’s foot and shoulder stopped him. “And you are?” the man asked.

  “A houseguest,” Dominick said. “Who are you?”

  Both men produced little wallets with gold badges inside. “Federal agents, ICE, conducting an investigation. May we come in?”

  Dominick was still examining their badges and photo IDs. “Why, of course not,” he said without looking up, “not without a warrant. This is private property, and not even my private property to give you permission to enter. What is it you want?”

  “Okay, play it that way,” the shorter one said, and they both took a step back from the threshold. “As a federal law enforcement officer I do have the right to ask you to produce some identification.”

  “Certainly. Wait here,” Dominick said, and he walked off into the house. His wallet with his driver’s licenses was in his back pocket, but he wanted a little time to think. He briefly imagined the two agents as lovers, then as a vaudeville duo. What an awful job that must be, being a cop—the chain of command and the bureaucracy and all that driving around in cars. He wondered if they were armed. Then he wondered what in the world they could want. Had Atticus and/or Lydia broken some federal law? Had their daughters called in the feds to evict them? And what was ice? “Federal agents, ice,” hadn’t one of them said? Dominick chuckled to himself, imaging the phrase as an ungrammatical autobiographical index entry—“Federal agent, I is.”

  Dominick stopped in the kitchen for a minute and pulled his wallet from his pocket. The simple truth was that Dominick had nothing to fear from the police state, even federal agents, as he had done nothing wrong, or at least chargeable. He walked back to the front door and handed over his Florida driver’s license. He chose that one because it was from the farthest-away state.

  The shorter man took the ID and examined it, then took a photo of it with his cell phone. He said thank you when he handed it back. “Is Lord Witherspoon at home?” he asked.

  “Who?”

  “Lord Witherspoon. We’d like to speak with him.”

  “I don’t know anyone of that name.”

  “An acquaintance of Mr. Jameson. We have reason to believe he is a houseguest here.”

  “The only people staying here are Mr. and Mrs. Jameson and myself.”

  The shorter one pulled a business card out of his coat breast pocket and handed it to Dominick. “Have Mr. Jameson give us a call. This is a Homeland Security matter.” As they walked back to their car parked on the road Dominick saw from the business card that ICE stood for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Perhaps it was time for Lord Witherspoon to disappear.

  Chapter 4

  Dominick was reading about New England privateers during the War for Independence, a book he had found in Atticus’s library. He was pleased to discover what an unruly lot of mostly freebooting anarchists they had been, many of them barely teenagers. In many of New England’s small fishing ports the entire employable male population would have been at sea as privateers, some in proper brigs and schooners but others in everything from coastal sloops to whale boats converted into temporary ships of war. High-seas piracy had become suddenly legal, or sort of legal anyway, with the proper piece of paper and a promise to share any prizes with the folks who issued the piece of paper.

  Israel Rutman was typical. He began a family shipping empire by running a fleet of small privateers out of several ports in Maine, harvesting seemingly at will the coastal British supply ships running down from Halifax to New York, then black-marketing the captured war supplies to the Continental Army. General Washington had his own set of high-seas supply captains, some of whom he had to fire for being too blatantly just pirates. It was a free-market war on this seaboard, with the merchants winning many more engagements than the military. Breaking the law for profit’s sake was what the revolution was all about, anyway—the birth of American industry, the eternal profits of a nation at war.

  It was Israel Rutman’s profits that several generations after his death had built Mt. Sinai for his great-whatever descendants. His portrait was in the library. When Dominick made the connection—Israel’s name was not only on the portrait but also first on the brass plaque inside the grandfather clock in the sitting room—Lydia filled in the details. The deep past was very clear to her.

  “Oh, yes, the commodore made the family fortune. After the war—which was very good for him—he got in at the end of the triangle trade and imported slaves. He had many. There are more Negro than white Rutmans in New Jerusalem County these days, you know. He once owned most of the docks there, controlled everything in and out. He knew General Washington, you know. They were friends. There are letters somewhere.”

  “He was a powerful man, then,” Dominick said.

  “Oh, all men want to be remembered that way, don’t they?” Lydia was dismissive. “He had only daughters, no sons. So the white side of the family name vanished. There is a Rutman’s Swamp up near Potters Falls, but that had nothing to do with him really, strictly coincidental and after the fact.”

  Dominick had found Lydia out in her combination gardening shed/artist’s studio. She had an easel set up in front of a pair of glass French doors that looked out and down over now almost barren treetops to the ocean and a distant horizon. It was a painterly view if the sky and the light were right, but the painting that she was working at on the easel was of a completely different scene, pastoral with cows and a distant windmill. It was chilly in the studio. Lydia was wearing many layers—all of which clashed—and a pair of gray yarn gloves with the fingers cut off. The backs of the gloves were many colors where she had unloaded or cleaned a brush.

  “Oh, men just love having things named after them,” Lydia said as she stepped back from her canvas and stared out at the view. “Macy’s, Neiman Marcus, Jacksonville, McDonald’s.”

  “Women don’t?”

  “Fahrenheit, Ohm, Watt, Doppler, Sandwich,” Lydia continued. “They even make a wife change her name to her husband’s, as if that would make a difference about how she feels.”

  “Well, there is the downside, too—Quisling, Ponzi, Edsel, Benedict Arnold.”

  “None of the elements are named after women, but there is Einsteinium and Fermium and Copernicium.” Lydia went back at her canvas with a brush.

  “Don’t forget Neptunium and Promethium.”

  “I never heard of those.”

  “They’re newer. Some guys just invented them. How about Curies? Stuff is measured in curies.”

  “Yes, but after Marie or Pierre? They wouldn’t even give the poor woman her own Nobel Prize. She had to drag her husband along to share the honors.”

  There was silence for a while as Lydia dabbed at her canvas. “Beef Stroganoff, Eggs Benedict,” she said.

  “Bloody Mary,” Dominick answered as in some church litany, “Margarita.”

  The silence returned. It was a nice silence, not pregnant with anything at all.

  After a while Lydia asked why Dominick had become interested in Commodore Rutman.

 
“Oh, Atticus and my little voyage last week you might say wetted my interest in sailing hereabouts. Just reading up on past bad guys on the bay.”

  “You know, I was very glad you did that with Atticus. He used to be much busier with things like that, water things I mean. But none of his old salt friends are still around. Why don’t you two do more things like that? Atticus doesn’t have much time left, you know. You’d be doing a good service to get him out more often.”

  Dominick had no idea about the state of Atticus’s health, nor especially did he want any. He said nothing.

  “Prostate, cancer, spread,” Lydia said, three separate words, each delivered with a stab at the canvas with her brush. “I’m not supposed to know. He hasn’t told me. As if you can keep something like that from your wife. But the prognosis is now measured in months. I don’t know, maybe he is in denial.”

  “Oh,” Dominick felt compelled to say.

  “But if he is, you can help him out. Get him out of the house more, you know, doing guy things. Keep his mind off it. Get out on the water, go golfing. I don’t know.”

  “It’s a bit late in the season for both boating and golf, I’m afraid,” Dominick said, glad to have something to say.

  “Well, whatever. He wants to do this alone, without me. That’s his choice, but at least he should be having some fun these last months while he still can. He’s not a bad guy, you know.”

  This was a new one for Dominick. He had become comfortable at Mt. Sinai. His days there were spent as he liked to spend them—unplanned. The essence of his existence was the absence of obligation. Did Atticus truly need a playmate? For the next few days Dominick avoided his host. The autumnal weather broke and gave way to one last glorious good-bye to sunlight and warmth, and each of them took advantage of those valedictory Indian summer days to be out of the house on their separate errands. But in course the skies lowered and closed and darkened again, and one early dusk Dominick and Atticus found themselves together in the den. Atticus was cleaning an old flintlock rifle. Dominick came in to fix himself a drink.