American Morons

by Glen Hirshberg

  What I should have done was go to the police. Instead, I parked as close as I could to the temporary barriers the cops had erected, edged through the block-long crowd of gawkers, got the single glimpse I needed to confirm what the cameras had already shown me, then very nearly shoved people to the ground as I forced my way back out. My breath was a barbed thing, catching in the lining of my throat and tearing it. An older Hispanic woman in a yellow shawl threw her arm around me and made comforting shush-ing sounds. I shook her off.

  What I’d seen was blood, all right, splashed all over the vans, coating the wheel wells and even some of the windows. I’d seen doors flung open, some wrenched half off their hinges. What I hadn’t seen were clowns. Not a single one, anywhere. Just the wooden frames where they’d hung like bats to sleep off the daylight.

  I drove around and around downtown in a sort of crazy circle, Hillcrest, India Street, Laurel, Broadway, South Street, the harbor, the Gaslamp, back again. The clowns had been taken off, obviously. Ripped free in the fray, or pried away by police for easier van access. This was just another deflection, like my two-day fever, from having to deal with my own culpability. Then I thought of muffler men peering around trees. And I remembered the midnight phone call I’d received last night. Sometime in the late afternoon, I stopped the car, wobbled into a pay phone booth, dialed information, paid the extra fifty cents and let the computer connect me.

  The phone in Loubobland’s junkyard rang and rang. I let it, leaning my forehead against the sun-warmed glass, sensing the ocean scant blocks away, beating quietly underneath the boats and pilings.

  Several seconds passed before I realized my call had been answered, that I was listening to silence. No one had spoken, but someone was there.

  “The clowns,” I croaked.

  The person on the other end grunted. “I have nothing to say.”

  “Just one question.” I was blurting the words, trying to fit them in before he hung up. “The project.”

  “What?”

  “You told Jaybo the clowns were a failed project. I just want to know what it was.”

  Silence. But no dial tone. I heard fumbling, for a match maybe. Then a long, hitching breath. “Neighborhood watch,” Loubob said, and hung up.

  That was five hours ago. Since then, I’ve been holed up in my mother’s condo—it will never, could never be mine—thinking mostly about Randy. About his “Coming ‘Round the Mountain” whistle and his electric shock of joy-giving, his hand against the windshield as he waved goodbye. I hadn’t been considering joining them, I thought. Not really. Not quite.

  But I hadn’t called the cops, either. Because I was scared, maybe. But mostly because I hadn’t wanted to, wasn’t so sure who was doing good, being useful, making lives easier. And I’d liked the way they treated each other, the Safety Clown family. And Randy…I think Randy took me for his friend. Maybe I could have been.

  So I’d let them be. And the clowns had come.

  I’ve got the blinds thrown wide, but I can’t see a blessed thing out there through the fog and dark. I’ve kept the TV off, listening instead to the air-conditioning, while I wonder for the thousandth time if I was supposed to have called the police, and whether that would have saved anyone. Or me.

  Tomorrow, maybe the next day, if no one comes, I’m going to have to get up. Maybe I’ll go to the cops, and let them laugh. I’ve got to find another job if I’m going to go to school, have a life. But for now, I’m staying right here, in what’s left of the place I grew up in, holding my knees, while my ears strain for the clacking I heard on the phone two nights ago, the clatter of footless wooden legs on stairs that will tell me once and for all if what I do matters, and whether there’s really such thing as a line, and whether I crossed it.

  Devil’s Smile

  “In hollows of the liquid hills

  Where the long Blue Ridges run

  The flatter of no echo thrills

  For echo the seas have none;

  Nor aught that gives man back man’s strain

  The hope of his heart, the dream in his brain.”

  Herman Melville

  Turning in his saddle, Selkirk peered behind him through the flurrying snow, trying to determine which piece of debris had lamed his horse. All along what had been the carriage road, bits of driftwood, splintered sections of hull and harpoon handle, discarded household goods—pans, candlesticks, broken-backed books, empty lanterns—and at least one section of long, bleached-white jaw lay half-buried in the sand. The jaw still had baleen attached, and bits of blown snow had stuck in it, which made it look more recently alive than it should have.

  Selkirk rubbed his tired eyes against the gray December morning and hunched deeper into his inadequate long coat as the wind whistled off the whitecaps and sliced between the dunes. The straw hat he wore—more out of habit than hope of protection—did nothing to warm him, and stray blond curls kept whipping across his eyes. Easing himself from the horse, Selkirk dropped to the sand.

  He should have conducted his business here months ago. His surveying route for the still-fledgling United States Lighthouse Service had taken him in a crisscrossing loop from the tip of the Cape all the way up into Maine and back. He’d passed within fifty miles of Cape Roby Light and its singular keeper twice this fall, and both times had continued on. Why? Because Amalia had told him the keeper’s tale on the night he’d imagined she loved him? Or maybe he just hated coming back here even more than he thought he would. For all he knew, the keeper had long since moved on, dragging her memories behind her. She might even have died. So many had, around here. Setting his teeth against the wind, Selkirk wrapped his frozen fingers in his horse’s bridle and led her the last downsloping mile-and-a-half into Winsett.

  Entering from the east, he saw a scatter of stone and clapboard homes and boarding houses hunched against the dunes, their windows dark. None of them looked familiar. Like so many of the little whaling communities he’d visited during his survey, the town he’d known had simply drained away into the burgeoning, bloody industry centers at New Bedford and Nantucket.

  Selkirk had spent one miserable fall and winter here fourteen years ago, sent by his drunken father to learn candle-making from his drunken uncle. He’d accepted the nightly open-fisted beatings without comment, skulking afterward down to the Blubber Pike tavern to watch the whalers: the Portuguese swearing loudly at each other, and the Negroes—so many Negroes, most of them recently freed, more than a few newly escaped—clinging in clumps to the shadowy back tables and stealing fearful glances at every passing face, as though they expected at any moment to be spirited away.

  Of course, there’d been his cousin, Amalia, for all the good that had ever done him. She’d just turned eighteen at the time, two years his senior. Despite her blond hair and startling fullness, the Winsett whalers had already learned to steer clear, but for some reason, she’d liked Selkirk. At least, she’d liked needling him about his outsized ears, his floppy hair, the crack in his voice he could not outgrow. Whatever the reason, she’d lured him away from the pub on several occasions to stare at the moon and drink beside him. Once, in a driving sleet, she’d led him on a midnight walk to Cape Roby Point. There, lurking uncomfortably close but never touching him, standing on the rocks with her dark eyes cocked like rifle sights at the rain, she’d told him the lighthouse keeper’s story. At the end, without any explanation, she’d turned, opened her heavy coat and pulled him to her. He’d had no idea what she wanted him to do, and had wound up simply setting his ear against her slicked skin, all but tasting the water that rushed into the valley between her breasts, listening to her heart banging way down inside her.

  After that, she’d stopped speaking to him entirely. He’d knocked on her door, chased her half out of the shop one morning and been stopped by a chop to the throat from his uncle, left notes peeking out from under the rug outside her room. She’d responded to none of it, and hadn’t even bothered to say goodbye when he left. Selkirk had steered clear of
all women for more than a decade afterward, except for the very occasional company he paid for near the docks where he slung cargo, until the Lighthouse Service offered him an unexpected escape.

  Now, half-dragging his horse down the empty main street, Selkirk found he couldn’t even remember which grim room the Blubber Pike had been. He passed no one. But at the western edge of the frozen, cracking main thoroughfare, less than a block from where his uncle had kept his establishment, he found a traveler’s stable and entered.

  The barn was lit by banks of horseshoe-shaped wall sconces—apparently, local whale oil or no, candles remained in ready supply—and a coal fire glowed in the open iron stove at the rear of the barn. A dark-haired stable lad with a clam-shaped birthmark covering his left cheek and part of his forehead appeared from one of the stables in the back, tsked over Selkirk’s injured mount, and said he’d send for the horse doctor as soon as he’d got the animal dried and warmed and fed.

  “Still a horse doctor here?” Selkirk asked.

  The boy nodded.

  Selkirk paid the boy and thanked him, then wandered toward the stove and stood with his hands extended to the heat, which turned them purplish red. If he got about doing what should have been done years ago, he’d be gone by nightfall, providing his horse could take him. From his memory of the midnight walk with Amalia, Cape Roby Point couldn’t be more than three miles away. Once at the lighthouse, if its longtime occupant did indeed still live there, he’d brook no romantic nonsense—neither his own, nor the keeper’s. The property did not belong to her, was barely suitable for habitation, and its lack both of updated equipment and experienced, capable attendant posed an undue and unacceptable threat to any ship unlucky enough to hazard past. Not that many bothered anymore with this particular stretch of abandoned, storm-battered coast.

  Out he went into the snow. In a matter of minutes, he’d left Winsett behind. Head down, he burrowed through the gusts. With neither buildings nor dunes to block it, the wind raked him with bits of shell and sand that clung to his cheeks like the tips of fingernails and then ripped free. When he looked up, he saw beach pocked with snow and snarls of seaweed, then the ocean thrashing about between the shore and the sandbar a hundred yards or so out.

  An hour passed. More. The tamped-down path, barely discernible during Winsett’s heyday, had sunk completely into the shifting earth. Selkirk stepped through stands of beach heather and sand bur, pricking himself repeatedly about the ankles. Eventually, he felt blood beneath one heavy sock, but he didn’t peel the sock back, simply yanked out the most accessible spines and kept moving. Far out to sea, bright, yellow sun flickered in the depths of the cloud cover and vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. Devil’s smile, as the Portuguese sailors called that particular effect. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to Selkirk to ask why the light would be the devil, instead of the dark or the gathering storm. Stepping from the V between two leaning dunes, he saw the lighthouse.

  He’d read the report from the initial Lighthouse Service survey three years ago, and more than once. That document mentioned rot in every beam, chips and cracks in the bricks that made up the conical tower, erosion all around the foundation. As far as Selkirk could see, the report had been kind. The building seemed to be crumbling to nothing before his eyes, bleeding into the pool of shorewater churning at the rocks beneath it.

  Staring into the black tide racing up the sand to meet him, Selkirk caught a sea tang on his tongue and found himself murmuring a prayer he hadn’t planned for Amalia, who’d reportedly wandered into the dunes and vanished one winter night, six years after Selkirk left. Her father had written Selkirk’s father that the girl had never had friends, hated him, hated Winsett, and was probably happier wherever she was now. Then he’d said, “Here’s what I hope: that she’s alive. And that she’s somewhere far from anywhere I will ever be.”

  On another night than the one they’d spent out here, somewhere closer to town but similarly deserted, he and Amalia once found themselves beset by gulls that swept out of the moonlight all together, by the hundreds, as though storming the mainland. Amalia had pitched stones at them, laughing as they shrieked and swirled nearer. Finally, she’d hit one in the head and killed it. Then she’d bent over the body, calling Selkirk to her. He’d expected her to cradle it or cry. Instead, she’d dipped her finger in its blood and painted a streak down Selkirk’s face. Not her own.

  Looking down now, Selkirk watched the tide reach the tips of his boots again. How much time had he wasted during his dock-working years imagining—hoping—that Amalia might be hidden behind some stack of crates or in a nearby alley, having sought him out after leaving Winsett?

  Angry now, Selkirk picked his way between rocks to the foot of the tower. A surge of whitewater caught him off guard and pasted his trousers to his legs, and the wind promptly froze them with a gust.

  Up close, the tower looked even worse. Most of the bricks had crumbled and whitened, the salt air creating blotchy lesions like leper spots all over them. The main building still stood straight enough, but even from below, with the wind whipping the murky winter light around, Selkirk could see filth filming the windows that surrounded the lantern room, and cracks in the glass.

  The keeper’s quarters squatted to the left of the light tower, and looked, if possible, even more disheveled. Along the base, lime had taken hold, sprouting up the wooden walls. This would not be somewhere the Service salvaged. Cape Roby Light would have to come down, or simply be abandoned to the sea.

  Selkirk rapped hard on the heavy oak door of the tower. For answer, he got a blast of wind nearly powerful enough to tip him off the rocks. Grunting, he rapped harder. Behind him, the water gurgled, the way spermaceti oil sometimes did as it bubbled, and though he knew it wasn’t possible, Selkirk would have sworn he could smell it, that faint but nauseating reek his uncle assured him was imaginary. That was the glory of spermaceti oil, after all, the whole goddamn point: it had no significant odor. Every day of that dismal fall, though, Selkirk’s nostrils had filled anyway. Blood, whale brain, desiccated fish. He began to pound.

  Just before the door opened, he became aware of movement behind it, the slap of shoed feet descending stone steps. But he didn’t stop knocking until the oak swung away from him, the light rushing not out from the lighthouse but in from the air.

  He knew right away this was her, though he’d never actually seen her. Her black hair twisted over her shoulders and down her back in tangled strands like vines, just as Amalia had described. He’d expected a wild, white-haired, wind-ravaged thing, bent with age and the grief she could not shake. But of course, if Amalia’s story had been accurate, this woman had been all of twenty during Selkirk’s year here, and so barely over eighteen when she’d been widowed. She gazed at him now through royal blue eyes that seemed set into the darkness behind her like the last sunlit patches in a blackening sky.

  “Mrs. Marchant,” he said. “I’m Robert Selkirk from the Lighthouse Service. May I come in?”

  For a moment, he thought she might shut the door in his face. Instead, she hovered, both arms lifting slightly from her sides. Her skirt was long, her blouse pale yellow, clinging to her square and powerful shoulders.

  “Selkirk,” she said. “From Winsett?”

  Astonished, Selkirk started to raise his hand. Then he shook his head. “From the Lighthouse Service. But yes, I was nephew to the Winsett Selkirks.”

  “Well,” she said, the Portuguese tilt to her words stirring memories of the Blubber Pike whalers, the smoke and the smell in there. Abruptly, she grinned. “Then you’re welcome here.”

  “You may not feel that way in a few minutes, Mrs. Marchant. I’m afraid I’ve come to…”

  But she’d stepped away from the door and started back up the stairs, beckoning him without turning around. Over her shoulder, he heard her say, “You must be frozen. I have tea.”

  In he went, and stood still in the entryway, listening to the whistling in the walls, feeling drafts rushing a
t him from all directions. If it weren’t for the roof, the place would hardly qualify as a dwelling anymore, let alone a lifesaving beacon and refuge. He started after the woman up the twisting stairs.

  Inside, too, the walls had begun to flake and mold, and the air flapped overhead as though the whole place were full of nesting birds. Four steps from the platform that filled the lantern room, just at the edge of the spill of yellow candlelight from up there, Selkirk slowed, then stopped. His gaze swung to his right and down toward his feet.

  Sitting against the wall, with her little porcelain feet sticking out of the bottom of her habit and crossed at the ankle, sat a nun. From beneath the hood of the doll’s black veil, disconcertingly blue eyes peered from under long lashes. A silver crucifix lay in the doll’s lap, and miniature rosary beads trailed back down the steps, winking pale yellow and pink in the flickering light like seashells underwater. In fact, Selkirk realized, they were bits of shell.

  Glancing behind him, Selkirk spotted the other dolls he’d somehow missed. All nuns. One for every other stair, on alternating walls. The others were made mostly from shell, as far as he could tell. Two of them were standing, while a third sat with her legs folded underneath her and a stone tucked against her ear, as though she were listening. At the top of the steps, still another nun dangled from her curved, seashell hands on the decaying wooden banister. Not only were her eyes blue, but also she was grinning like a little girl. Momentarily baffled to silence, Selkirk stumbled the rest of the way up to the lantern room. There, he froze completely.

  Even on this dark day, even through the dust and salt that caked the window glass inside and out, light pierced the chamber. None of it came from the big lamp, which of course lay unlit. Assuming it still worked at all. Across the platform, a pair of white wicker chairs sat side by side, aimed out to sea. Over their backs, the keeper had draped blankets of bright red wool, and beneath them lay a rug of similar red. On the rug stood a house.