by John Enright
“No, I did not bring enough cigars to be marooned.”
“Just don’t tell her you’re with me.” Emma laughed, almost a giggle.
The house was lit just by twin porch lamps beside the front door. It was not a big house nor at all ostentatious, two stories but humble, the traditional saltbox design. As they got closer Dominick could see why its style seemed so traditional—because it was an original. The house had to be at least 150 years old. From its stone front stoop to its shuttered second-floor windows the house was like a projection of the past emerging from the gloom, getting clearer and more real with every step. What had struck him first as humility now seemed better defined as forbearance.
Emma tightened her grip on Dominick’s arm. “Whoa. Stay close to me, Nickel. This place gives me the creeps.”
Theo unlocked the front door and turned on a hall light, then went to a keypad on the wall to punch in the code to disarm the burglar alarm. The house was cold, but warmer than outdoors. Theo switched on other lights and turned up the heat at a thermostat in the hall. The rest of them stood clumped together just inside the front door, like kids entering a Halloween haunted house.
“The place was supposedly haunted once,” Theo said, interpreting their obvious thoughts, “the keeper who died here in the ’38 storm that took out the lighthouse. But I had a priest out here to do the full de-spooking thing. No ghosts since.” Theo turned and led the way back to the kitchen, turning on more lights. “Something hot to drink, I think.”
“So, this was the lighthouse keeper’s house?” Atticus said.
“Yep, built in 1837 and abandoned a hundred and one years later. After the hurricane took out the light, they decided they didn’t need one here anymore. They just put a light buoy farther out. Coffee, tea, cocoa?”
“And how did you . . . ,” Atticus started.
“Estate sale. The island always had been private property, an old local family, but nobody wanted it. Basically, it cost me back taxes.”
“Theo, you have liquor here? Or was happy hour over on the boat?” Emma had let go of Dominick and was prowling around. The kitchen, like the rest of the house they had seen, was sparsely furnished, sort of like a barracks or a public place.
With a key from his crowded key chain Theo unlocked some cabinets. “We’re roughing it out here, Emma, only vodka or Canadian whiskey, and the cuisine is pretty much canned, but make yourself to home. Let’s find out if there was anything on the news. Dominick said there was a TV news team there.”
They left Emma in the kitchen as she fixed herself a drink and started looking through cabinets. Atticus and Dominick followed Theo through a swinging door into another room, which, when Theo clicked on the overhead lights, appeared to be an office with a couple of desks with computers and a big flat-screen TV. Theo unlocked another cabinet and threw some more switches. Off in the distance Dominick heard the dull throb of an engine start up. “Generator,” Theo said. “Solar batteries won’t last long with the heat on and all.” The house was slowly warming up.
Theo sat down at one of the computer keyboards, and within a minute the flat-screen on the wall came to life, a car chase scene with lots of shots being fired. “Satellite,” Theo said. “What channel was that news, Dominick?”
“The truck said Channel 4 News.”
Another channel jumped up on the screen, another cop show. “They have news at eleven,” Theo said, “another hour or so.”
“All they could report is that they have nothing to report,” Dominick said.
“Maybe the feds will have a statement to make.”
“Theo, what is this place?” Atticus asked.
“My summer place, a space I can escape to but not disappear, still stay in touch.”
“I don’t sense a . . . ah . . . woman’s touch,” Dominick said. Nowhere in the house so far had he seen anything hung on the wall, any carpets or curtains, any fabric at all really—all tile and plastic and dry wall.
“No reason there should be. Not too many women visit. The place is a lot easier to maintain and keep clean without all that extra stuff.”
“The soft stuff,” Dominick said, agreeing.
“The beds are soft enough,” Theo said, not looking up from his computer keyboard and screen, “but just sleeping bags, no sheets or blankets this time of year. The upstairs isn’t too well heated, I’m afraid. In fact, I’m going to turn the heat down in here as soon as the chill is off the house. It’s a big drain on the system.”
Emma stuck her head in from the kitchen. “I found canned beef stew and some cabin crackers. Anyone else hungry?”
Theo stayed behind while Emma, Atticus, and Dominick had their late night snack. There was nothing about the Bay Savers meeting or the raid on the late night news, after which Theo declared he would stay up late to see what he could learn on the Internet. Emma had made a big dent in the Canadian whiskey and now wanted to call home, but announced that she had “no bars” on her cell phone. Theo admitted he had a satellite cell phone there, but that it was only for emergencies as he did not want calls traced back to it. Emma conceded that her not getting home that night would not be deemed an emergency, and Atticus also passed, on the grounds that Lydia in the care of Ms. Arnold was better off not knowing, and besides he couldn’t remember the number. Dominick had no one to call. Theo took them upstairs and assigned them each their own bedroom and turned on the light in the bathroom at the end of the hall.
The rooms were like cloister cells or a dorm room at Kafka U—a single bed, a wooden chair, a two-foot-square table with a reading lamp on it, and in one corner a metal locker-room-style gym locker. There was a window, but the outside shutters were closed. The walls, the ceilings, and the locker were all painted an institutional off-white. There was nothing on the walls, although Dominick could easily imagine a crucifix above the bed or the portrait of some other fearless leader. Inside the locker was a rolled-up down sleeping bag, a hard pillow, and a towel. On the top shelf were some candles in a medal dish and a box of matches. Ah, minimalism, Dominick thought. He tested the door lock to make sure he would not or could not be locked in if he shut the door.
Dominick took inordinate comfort from the fact that the window and shutters opened. It might be a fifteen-foot drop to the ground below, but it was a second way out. One must always have more than one way out of anything, but tiny rooms rated up there. He unrolled the sleeping bag onto the mattress to let it fluff up. He was still wearing his peacoat and watch cap. He pulled the chair over to the open window, leaned on the sill, and allowed himself a goodnight cigar. He turned out the reading lamp behind him to see what he could see outside. The rest of the house was already dark, incognito. The Churchill tasted especially warm and sweet.
Beyond the window was black nothing, but an exceptional amount of it. Even the smell of the cold ocean was vast. From somewhere very far away on the bay, as if defining meaningless distance, came the hollow call of a foghorn. What an unsuccessful mating call that was, Dominick thought. Lonely loons on empty lakes sounded like better company than that. And here on Teapot Island there was no longer a lighthouse to answer. No wonder they were a dying breed, pushed to the edge of extinction.
There he went again, anthropomorphically sexualizing the inanimate world, a bad habit from which he should to try to wean himself, the stuff of mythmakers. What a fun job that would have been—the local mythmaker, supplying the etiological stories to explain and name natural phenomena, human origin stories because this would have been long before science and its alternate, inhuman stories. Yes, your ancestor dragged this island up from the sea as the wedding price for a goddess, which is why it is named after her. Yes, the same trickster god who was blamed when things went wrong was the one whose giant penis slammed into the mountain so that his people could scramble up it escaping attack. Yes, the moon gets eaten every month, which is why women bleed.
He would have a shaman’s hovel on the edge of the settlement, to which people would come when they need
ed an explanation for something. And he would make up something satisfying, something that fit at least loosely into earlier stories. Let acolytes and future believers make sense of it, if they wanted to. As long as they had an answer they were happy. He would be paid in food and cigars and someone to come and take care of the yard and shovel the walk in the winter. The distant foghorn pled again.
His cigar was nearly finished when the door burst open behind him.
“Nickel! Nickel, is this your room? Where are you?”
Dominick switched on the reading lamp. It was Emma, wrapped in her sleeping bag.
“He was in my room. He came in and wouldn’t leave. I had to run right through him to escape. You’ve got to protect me. My god, it’s cold in here.”
Dominick flipped what was left of the Churchill out into the yard, then closed the window. “Who was that?” He did not appreciate being jerked so suddenly back into the realm of other people’s problems.
“The ghost, the old lighthouse keeper. He smelled like he’d been pulled up out of the sea.” Emma made a shivering sound and dived onto Dominick’s bed, burrowing beneath his sleeping bag, hiding her head.
Dominick went to look out into the hallway lit by the light through the open bathroom door at the end of the hall. Nothing there, but the hallway was a tad warmer than his room, so he left the door open when he came back in. “Nothing there,” he said.
“A bad dream.”
“It was not a bad dream,” Emma said from beneath the sleeping bags. “Get your body in here and warm me up.”
Dominick looked at the bed, which with Emma in it looked already full. “Move over,” he said. “Make yourself skinny.” And he sat down on the side of the bed. He took off his shoes and his peacoat, but left on the rest of his clothes and his watch cap. He turned off the lamp. It took a bit of arranging and shifting around, but he finally got both unzipped sleeping bags on top of them with Emma curled up spoon-style against his back. He left the door open to let in what little heat there was in the rest of the house. There was the smell of Canadian whiskey beneath the sleeping bags.
“I need a big man like you to sleep with to keep me warm,” Emma said. She put an arm around him and tucked her knees into the backs of his. She too was still fully clothed except for her coat and shoes. “There aren’t enough big men like you left, in my opinion.”
“You know, Emma, we almost met once before.”
“I know. At The Harp. You were with Starks. I took you for one of his gay sailor liaisons, but you aren’t, are you?”
“No, I’m not.”
Emma passed a hand gently over Dominick’s face and beard. “No, you’re not. You are a ladies’ man. I can smell it.”
“They call you Queen Emma there at The Harp.” Dominick was talking into the cold, but his back, where Emma was pressed, was getting warmer. He shifted his weight and stretched. Emma moved easily with him.
“I wouldn’t know about that. That’s Stark’s special world. Faggots like to think that they are special, some sort of royalty. Sweet Jesus, you smell so good, Nickel. And you are so warm.” Emma cuddled even closer, pressing her nose into the beard beneath his ear.
This was all very good. Huddled together like this, they both would survive the night fine. But it had been a long time since he had shared a bed with anyone, much less such a narrow bed. He waited for his other brain—the one down beneath his waist—to kick in. This was, after all, a woman holding him, warm and purring as she went off to sleep. Would the shaman be paid with women as well? Once upon a time, in illo tempore, such proximity would have canceled all thoughts of sleep; testosterone would have accomplished the brain switch. But now he found himself drifting away himself, his eyelids heavy, his penis already sound asleep. Dominick’s final thought as sleep caught up with him was that this was probably a good thing. The old initial genital handshake had gone out of style. All those obligations of performance were bypassed. All those half-truths and false endearments could go unsaid. The lack of urgency itself was welcome. Maybe part of getting older and wiser was no longer being in a hurry. Shamans always took their time. Emma moved slightly behind him, filling in what gaps were left between them. Sleep was sweet.
“Hey, hey, Nickel, wake up. I got to pee.” Emma was shaking Dominick’s shoulder. There was a dim gray morning light coming in the window. Emma was up against the wall and couldn’t get out. Dominick had to sit up and put his feet on the floor for her to climb past. He got right back under the sleeping bag. Yes, that was snow swirling rather wistfully outside the window. Emma returned, and he had to sit up again to let her back into bed. She made herself comfortable. “Was it all the clothes?” she asked.
“All the clothes what?”
“I’m not used to going to bed with a guy and waking up in the morning unmolested.”
“You thought I would . . . ?”
“I sort of hoped you would. But you never even started anything. You just started snoring. It’s almost an insult.”
“Sorry, no insult intended. I guess we both were pretty tired. And all the clothes, yes.” Was he apologizing for not molesting someone, a stranger? “You could have said something. You know, asked or given me a clue.”
“Nice girls don’t have to ask, they just get drunk and let it happen. I may not be as cute or petite as I was twenty years ago, but I still know how to satisfy a man, even big guys like you.” Emma’s hand that had been resting on Dominick’s hip now reached down and grabbed his genitals through his trousers. She kissed his ear and whispered, “How about one of those nice extra hard morning boners for me?”
Dominick rolled over onto his back to look at Emma, who was propped up on an elbow smiling at him. She had let down her long thick black hair. She leaned in and gave him a playful kiss, then another, more serious one. “I like your beard,” she said. Her hand kneaded his already thickening member. In the next few minutes Dominick learned that Emma was wearing no underwear beneath her skirt and shirt and sweater, that her skin was smooth and her flesh soft and supple to the touch, that her nipples were large and black and hard as gum drops, that the lips of her vagina were wide and wet and loose and easy to spread and her clitoris could not—would not—be ignored. She squatted above him on her knees, straddling him. She loosened and pulled down his trousers and shorts, and as soon as she got his erection free and firm she gripped it with one hand and jammed herself down on it with a great moan, her head thrown back. She rode him like some rodeo bull. Yes, she needed a big man. He grabbed her flopping breasts, then her hips. With his thumbs he spread her outer lips and watched himself go in and out of her pinkness between the fur as she galloped and ground. Finally, she collapsed onto his chest as spasms spread from her groin throughout her body. “Oh, Nickel,” she said, “have you come? Please come and show me how beautiful I am.” She reached back and squeezed his testicles, pushing him as far inside her as he could go, and he came, a long and jerking orgasm as her vaginal muscles sucked every last drop of come out of him.
Emma stayed there on top of him, squatting on her knees, her head buried in the crook of his shoulder and neck, his cock still firmly inside her. He managed to pull a sleeping bag up over her back. They were very still, breathing together, with nothing to say.
“So, that’s where you are, Emma.” Theo was standing in the open doorway. “We don’t allow this sort of thing here, Dominick or whatever your name is, taking advantage of this poor girl. This is a good Catholic household. No seducers or fornicators allowed. You will have to leave immediately.” And Theo departed, slamming the door behind him.
After a half minute of silence, Dominick asked, “Are you Catholic?”
“Oh, Nickel, I’ll be anything you want me to be, just don’t come out of me yet. Can you get yourself hard again?”
Chapter 16
There was something eerily peaceful about being out on the bay in the snow. Start with the snow itself—large fluffy flakes drifting straight down with no wind, a uniform whiteness in all dire
ctions save down, where the surface of the sea looked like a piece of softly undulating obsidian silk. There was a stillness that swallowed everything—sight lines and sounds. The sharp-prowed speedboat was not speeding, so its passage disturbed little. Dominick and Emma were out on the deck. The cabin seemed all too confining inside this dome of porous whiteness. There being no wind, the air seemed almost warm.
Good to his word, Theo had immediately summoned his boat to come and remove the two fornicators from his Spartan Eden. There had been a breakfast of oatmeal and coffee and silence, Atticus clueless as to what was transpiring. Dominick thought Theo was acting like a jealous schoolboy, but no matter, as long as it got him out of there sooner. Emma treated them all as if they didn’t exist. The stairs down to the dock were slippery from the snow. Theo stood at the top like some sort of avenging angel as Emma and Dominick descended. The boat was waiting, purring at the dock. Atticus would not be coming. Theo needed him there for the time being to help in the crisis. Doing what? God knew. Dominick helped Emma onto the boat. Theo had already turned and left.
Dominick and Emma were now pals. It wasn’t the sex so much as the getting caught at it. If it hadn’t been for Theo’s interdiction, they probably would have parted amicably, happy to have had a warm bedmate for the night and a morning lay. But now as sentenced coconspirators caught in the act they were a pair as surely as if they were chained together. Not a pair of lovers, or even of friends, just a pair of pals, almost a Tom and Huck sort of thing.
True, Emma did make a joke about what a fine honeymoon voyage Theo had arranged for them. But they never touched one another, felt no impulse to. Emma left her sexuality in bed, where she let her hair down and lifted her skirt. Out here her hair was pulled back in a bun and she would show you who wore the pants.
“Did you really see the ghost back there?” Dominick asked.
“No, of course not. It was too cold for ghosts. I just wanted to get warm, and you seemed like the sole solution. But I needed a reason to burst in on you. What brand of cigar was that anyway?”
