Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “Yeah, those poor people couldn’t even escape their masters in death.” Beth made a U-turn and proceeded down the street, where desolate-looking new houses huddled against freshly planted hedges.

  “Orient’s got a lot of cemeteries,” Mills said. “Is that all your historical board does, keep these old plots going?”

  “Among other things,” she said.

  Mills picked his teeth with his fingernail. “Dead people are easy to love.” He looked out at an unremarkable stretch of grass, identified by a plaque as the former site of an Indian village. “What about that cemetery we went by before? The one with all the marble.”

  “Oh, Oysterponds,” Beth said. “That’s not interesting. It’s normal.” She hesitated before adding, “It’s where my father’s buried.”

  He glanced at her, but she kept her eyes straight ahead.

  “Do you want to visit him?” Beth hadn’t visited the grave once in all the months she had been back in Orient. She pictured its smooth red marble, with two thin crosses etched on either side of his name. When she looked over, Mills was staring at her. The gold cross of his earring glinted in the sunlight.

  “I like your earring,” she said. “Were you raised religious?”

  “No,” he replied, touching it with his finger. “It’s just a reminder of someone I lost. Like the crosses families stick on the side of the road where a loved one died in an accident.” Beth had never visited the section of the New Jersey Turnpike where her father died. It had never occurred to her to place a cross at the scene of his accident; she was never really certain whether people left them as memorials or as warnings of sharp turns, anyway.

  “A reminder,” Beth repeated, strangely flattered that he had confided in her. Mills was like a refractory water pump: it took immense effort to get a flow going, but when a few drops dribbled from the spout, they felt precious, like something to drink. “Was it a friend?”

  “More like a stranger,” he said quietly. He stretched his arms and rubbed his scalp on the headrest. “Why don’t you show me a place without a plaque,” he said, laughing. “You’re from around here, right? There’s got to be something that’s just yours.”

  Beth steered the Nissan down Village Lane. The street followed the shoreline of the bay, past the long dock of the Orient Yacht Club with its moored sailboats blanketed in blue tarps. Newer houses competed for bay views, purposely built to emulate New England fishing cottages. She wanted him to witness the beauty of the water, its waves beating toward the tip in the pull of the current to open sea. It was beautiful, this stretch of Orient, wild with tawny sword grass that hushed in the wind and with seagulls rotating in the air. Like any resident forced to play tour guide, Beth turned tourist herself, taken aback by the beauty of the village, its monastic quiet interrupted by birds and frozen light. Why had it come alive for her only when Mills sat beside her? Why couldn’t she appreciate the view on her own?

  Two deer sprinted through the fields, flowing like a stream. She let the car idle on the road. From this vantage point, Bug Light projected from a mound of rocks one hundred yards out in the water, two floors of pristine lighthouse white over a brown cement base, like a fat woman lifting her skirt to pee. Behind it, the faint haze of Gardiners Island hung like a band of locusts.

  “Is this the bay or the Sound?” Mills asked. “I’m usually good with directions, but out here I keep getting turned around.”

  “It’s the bay.” She grabbed Mills’s hand and drew a flame shape on his palm. “You and I are in houses on the Sound,” she explained, pressing her fingers to his skin. “That’s north. In fact, if you walked the shoreline from Paul’s house, you’d be in my backyard in twenty minutes. And in another half hour you’d make it to the tip.”

  “Paul said his mom used to own a hotel out that way.”

  “That’s right,” she nodded. Paul’s mother had sold the farmhouse decades ago, and three or four Orient families had lived there before Luz Wilson and Nathan Crimp, Gavril’s artist friends, bought it at auction for an egregious price last May. The farmhouse wasn’t far from Jeff Trader’s mobile home. She seized the opportunity. “Do you want to see it?”

  “Maybe later,” he said. “I like it here.”

  They sat in silence, watching sailboats nod in the distance, and the silence remained with them as Beth finally shifted into drive and stepped on the gas. She didn’t ask Mills a single question about his background, not ancient or recent. She knew he was an orphan, and Paul mentioned that he had met some trouble in the city; drugs, she guessed. With so many topics off-limits, Beth fell back on the weather. “In winter, this all turns to ice,” she told him, pointing at the coves of water gnarled with marsh branches. “Sometimes, when a hard storm comes, it even cuts the causeway off from the mainland. Then you’re really stuck out here. You can go crazy waiting for the sun.”

  “All we had in Modesto was sun,” Mills said. “It was constant there. And all the plants and dirt and skin were so brown that it seemed like the sun was still burning even when it was overcast.”

  “That’s like Orient but with fish,” she said, laughing. “Have you noticed how everyone’s skin around here is as gray as striped bass?” Mills reached his hand out the window to catch the wet salt air as it wove through his fingers.

  “Not you,” he said.

  She liked him, even without the compliment. She liked his frank way of talking and his even franker way of saying nothing for ten-minute stretches. She had cultivated the Manhattan tendency to admire those who felt no need to fill the silence.

  Two impulses Beth had long thought extinct competed for her attention as she drove from the bay. One was to mother him, to buy him lunch or simply press her palms to his forehead. The other was to paint him. Beth found herself examining Mills’s pale skin as it roped into shadow in the crooks of his neck and the wiry hairs of his sideburns creeping up into the liquid ink of black, loose curls. She thought of colors—ochers, emeralds, and blues—from paint tubes she hadn’t considered for nearly a year. It had been so long since she’d felt this way—inspired. She sped east on Main Road, racing toward the tip, afraid at any minute that she’d lose the sensation, this happiness for the company of a stranger who reminded her why she’d once enjoyed painting strangers in the first place. To love them, to—that terrible technological term now ruined for all time—connect.

  What Beth did not want to do was drive to Jeff Trader’s property. Strangled by a sense of duty, she finally forced the car to take the turnoff through the barren fields near the Point. On a corner lawn, an orange sign bowed in the wind. PLUM ISLAND HORRORS: DEMAND ANSWERS FROM OUR BOARD AT THE MONDAY MEETING.

  “I have a favor to ask,” she said, staring ahead at the road. “The guy you saw dead on the beach? We have to go to his house”—she purposely did not use the words break in—“to retrieve a book for my neighbor. She’s an old lady, probably crazy, but she was a close friend of his. I promised.”

  Mills tapped his feet on the floor and wiped his hands along his thighs.

  “So you have me stealing for you.”

  “With me, not for me,” she corrected. “I was scared to go alone.”

  “You were scared?” he asked, straightening up. “Okay. But in case we’re caught, it was your idea.”

  As the waters of the Atlantic gathered in the horizon, signs of personal ownership grew rare. Fields stretched in fallow creams and purples, blistered after a long summer by the sudden cold, and roads ended for no apparent reason, as if the developers had run out of ideas miles before the land reached the sea. After a series of labyrinthine turns, Beth pulled onto Beach Lane, a squalid, ramshackle foothold of civilization at the tip. She counted the houses that led toward the three acres of land on the Sound that belonged to Jeff Trader. A handful of disheveled single-story units appeared, built from wood and aluminum and oxidized gray from years of conflict with ocean squalls. Of no consequence to local history, they’d been allowed to steep in the salt air, littered with
rusted lawn mowers and splintered plastic baby pools and broken, netted porches. Here and there some recent, richer settlers had made a bit of headway, erecting bland suburban two-stories so fresh that trees had not yet been planted in their designated mulch beds. Slowing down to look for Jeff’s driveway, she noticed a young woman leaping off the front steps of a red, aluminum-sided bungalow.

  The woman looked familiar to her, vaguely, but Beth couldn’t pinpoint where or how. Her brown hair was twisted back in a French braid. She wore a pair of unseasonably tight turquoise shorts over tan, slender legs. A sweatshirt covered her chest, its Coca-Cola-lettered logo asking, WHY DON’T WE SAIL FIRST? As Beth slowed in front of the house, the young woman gazed nervously at the car, as if suddenly conscious of traffic. She pulled the sweatshirt hood over her head, turned around, and darted back into the darkness of the porch.

  “Who’s that?” Mills asked as he rotated to catch sight of her.

  “No idea,” Beth replied. “It’s the off-season—probably a girl from Greenport hiding from her parents.”

  “Finally, some trouble,” Mills said approvingly.

  “Oh, so a dead body and a break-in aren’t enough for you?”

  She pulled into Jeff Trader’s driveway. The lid of his mailbox hung open on the post, its mouth jammed with withered memorial carnations. Just as Magdalena had said, Jeff’s white truck was parked at the end of the driveway, though Beth was surprised not to see yellow police tape on the front door. The mobile home had sunk so deeply in the earth that wheat grew around its cement blocks. A jerry-rigged front deck hung with tools and empty plant basins. The windows were shut and curtained, a few starred with masking tape to prevent shattering in hurricane winds. Beth took a breath, reminded Mills what they were looking for—a leather notebook of some kind, probably hidden behind cereal boxes in a kitchen cabinet—and got out of the car. “Let’s be quick. Then we’re done, and neither of us gets arrested.”

  They climbed the oak steps, eaten soft with mildew, and tested the locked doorknob.

  “Let’s try around the back,” she said. The temperature had dipped, and their breaths left their mouths like smoke from separate campfires. The cement walkway, slippery with moss, disappeared into firmer grass patched with dandelions. The last monarchs, migrating south, clung to the trunks of cedar trees. Three cats, two gray and one marbled yellow, ran from a crevice under the mobile home and wove around their ankles. Mills squatted to pet the smallest one, but it deflected his hand, scurrying between Beth’s legs. It bowed its yellow back against her calves.

  “They must be starving,” he said. “And there are more. Listen.”

  Beth heard low groans that intensified as she and Mills rounded the unit, a chorus of neglect. A wooden barn had been built against the back of the house, reeking of hay and the sweat of livestock and manure. “Baap-meh,” “baap-meh,” came the moans as they entered the darkness of the barn. She could sense things moving in the blackness. She saw flashes of eyes as the animals drove their bodies against the stable gate.

  “Have they even been fed?” Mills asked, leaning over the pen to see five bleating sheep, as dirty and thin as old pillows. “Jesus, has anyone bothered to feed them since he died? They don’t even have water.” Mills’s eyes adjusted to the darkness faster than Beth’s did. He located a garbage can full of feed and dispensed five shovel scoops into their trough. He filled a metal bucket with water from a spigot next to a lassoed hose.

  “He didn’t have children,” Beth said, “or any other relatives. I don’t know who owns this place now. The village, maybe. There was no one to come.”

  “No one to come?” Mills repeated. “Someone should have known to. You don’t just leave things to die if you don’t own them.”

  Beth proceeded blindly toward the house, groping along the wall, her knuckles knocking against tools, until she found the back door and turned the knob. She entered the stale, dank camper. The windows were covered with shades that drew faint outlines of light. In that minute, there was only the ticking of clocks, out of sync, their heavy tin beats resonating against the thin metal walls. When her eyes acclimated, she found herself in a room that looked as if it had been picked up and shaken. Books were scattered on the floor, papers strewn across the table; a painting that must have hung over the sleeper couch had been slashed, its frame in splinters on the carpet. Jeff Trader’s home appeared to have been ransacked, by probing police detectives or by vandals who had heard of a local’s death or maybe by someone else. Beth stiffened. Was that person still here? There was no other car in the driveway.

  “Hey,” she called. “Can you come in here with me?”

  She tried to swallow her fear. The clocks weren’t helping—each stroke invading the room, each perfect tick out of place in the home of a dead man. Clocks needed people the way longitudinal lines needed latitudinal lines to cross them, or an hour hand needed a minute hand to counter it. Without Jeff Trader, the clocks weren’t calibrating anything but eternity. Beth felt sick in Jeff Trader’s house the way she hadn’t in any of the graveyards they had visited, because here life had not been put to rest. It just continued on without the living, in credit card statements and phone numbers tacked to particleboard and a candy bar left half eaten on the coffee table.

  Beth leaned against the grooved metal wall, where a row of clocks hung: a waxy grandfather etched with angels, an alpine cuckoo with a pinecone pendulum, two chrome-plated tide clocks reading the six and twelve of high and low water, a boat-wheel clock registering the phases of the moon. Sea people relied on these clocks. The sea was a clock too. Her father had always told her that. Just like the sun. And so was the fetus inside her, counting down or up. A thought that made no sense crept over her, and there was nothing she could do with it once it arrived: I’m scared of what happens to me when I die.

  Mills touched her shoulder and must have noticed her seasick face. He stopped the grandfather and the cuckoo with a still finger.

  “What went on in here?” he asked, taking in the mess. “Did the guy live like this, or was it searched?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Jajajajaja. Beth heard the sound and clenched Mills’s arm. The door that led into a connecting room, shut tight, jittered against its lock. But it kept jittering, jostled by air traveling through the unit. Mills laughed as he unclamped her fingers.

  “Stop it,” he said. “Are you trying to freak me out?”

  “Sorry.” Beth hadn’t told Mills about Magdalena’s idea that Jeff Trader was murdered, for fear he would have refused to come. Gathering her courage, she crossed the room and quickly swept the door open. Gnats spiraled through the kitchen, following a congested flight path above a bowl of molding fruit. The cabinet doors hung open on their hinges. Her feet kicked cans of tuna fish as she moved around the kitchen table. The sweet odor of a dead mouse wafted from under the sink. A minifridge hummed in the corner, its door open, watery ice trays on its racks. What would happen to all of this stuff without a relative to claim it? Beth wondered. Was there a special county task force allocated to clear out the homes of the unloved?

  “Nice neighborhood,” Mills grumbled, picking up the lime green pamphlet from the table. “You’re all worried about some dead mutant animal that washes up, but no one cares about the animals dying of starvation out back.”

  “It’s because of Plum,” she said as she glanced into the cabinets. “The animal disease lab. Orient has always been obsessed with the idea that the government is screwing with its wildlife. Or obsessed with not talking about it.” For a second time that day, Beth felt a wave of disorientation, not with space, not due to a lighthouse sketched in the wrong place in Paul’s painting. This was disorientation with time. It took her a moment to pinpoint the cause. She stared at the pamphlet in Mills’s hand.

  “Jeff died on the morning they discovered that creature.”

  “So?” Mills stepped into the pantry, pushing brooms and mops aside.

  “So,” she said. “H
ow did that pamphlet find its way into the kitchen? He’d already been dead by the time those were put on everyone’s door.”

  “Oh,” Mills responded. “Someone must have taken it from the door and tossed it on the table.”

  “Exactly. That means someone has been here. The same person who tore this place apart.” She sifted through the contents of the cabinets. Magdalena said that the book was hidden behind boxes of cereal. One shelf above the sink was devoted to cereal—expired granolas and sweeter, candied loops. She pushed the boxes aside and swept her hands into the depths of the cabinet, all the way to the wood, scooping at corners. She shook each box of cereal. “I can’t find it. Maybe someone else already found it. Shit. Magdalena will never forgive me.”

  Mills crouched below the sink and rifled through the lower cabinets of tools, extension cords, and fluorescent cleaning bottles. “It’s not here,” he said.

  “It’s brown leather,” she explained. “Like a navigational book.”

  He stared up at her quizzically. “I meant the cat food.” He slammed the doors and left her to look in the barn. Beth groped under the table in case Jeff taped the book to its base. She slid her fingers through the silverware. There was hardly any point in continuing her search. Whoever had been here before her had done an expert job ripping the kitchen apart. The book was gone, and she’d have to face Magdalena empty-handed three days after the old woman asked her to perform one simple favor.

  Mills returned to the kitchen carrying a brown paper sack. “I found it out by the stable. Not your book. The food for the cats.” He knocked the bowl of fruit to the floor as he settled the bag on the table, then took three plastic dishes from the sink.

  “I don’t think we should touch anything else,” she said. “I think we should leave.”

  “I need to feed them,” he said, glancing up at her. “If we don’t . . .”

  “Fine, all right.”

  Beth was touched by his concern. Maybe he felt a special compassion for the orphaned animals. If her doubts about motherhood grew, if they became too hard and suicidal, maybe she could give the baby up for adoption and it would end up like the young man in front of her—not a victim of abandonment, not scarred by the mistakes of his parents, perhaps better off for not having grown up with such parents. But of course it was an absurd thought: Gavril would never let her give the child away. As soon as she told him about her pregnancy, there would be no way back.