by Max Winter
The characters in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Catapult
catapult.co
Copyright © 2017 by Max Winter
All rights reserved
eISBN: 978-1-936787-45-6
Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by
Publishers Group West
Phone: 800-788-3123
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016940589
Printed in the United States of America
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Olivia
Only the notebooks of my antiquarian uncle . . . revealed to me at length the darker, vaguer surmises which formed an undercurrent of folklore among old-time servants and humble folk; surmises which never traveled far, and which were largely forgotten when Providence grew to be a metropolis with a shifting modern population.
—H. P. Lovecraft
Everything should be kept. I regret everything I’ve ever thrown away.
—Richard Hell
Contents
Side by Each (Clay Blackall III)
Aloha (Vince Vincent)
. . . etc. . . . (Clay Blackall III)
Twinrock Caretaker’s Log (Rob Nolan)
(. . . . . .)
Exes (Alix Mays)
(. . . . . .)
Louder Than Good (Cliff Hinson)
(. . . . . .)
Class History (Jake Deinhardt)
(. . . . . .)
Jubilee (Mark Slepkow)
(. . . . . .)
Neoteny (Vivian Goddard)
(. . . . . .)
The Quaker Guns (Hank LaChance)
(. . . . . .)
Side by Each
Clay Blackall III
My landlord didn’t want to call the cops. For five years he’d been shuffling me from empty place to empty place while he fixed up the thirty or so eyesores my grandfather sold him. He felt bad about my brother, but bad only gets you so far. Smith Hill was the end of the line. Two babies had fallen out of windows that year alone, and now a guy was walking around with a sword. If you touched the stove and the refrigerator at the same time, you got a shock that felt like a punch in the heart. I’d wet my hands and grab hold and come to in another room.
I told him I needed one more month—for Eli—and he just shook his head.
“I could get six bills for this place, easy,” he said. “Seven even.” He cracked a window, zipped his jacket. He went to open the kitchen cabinets, which held what one expects to find in kitchen cabinets, but also other things.
“Five years is a long time,” one of us added.
“Ah, hell,” my landlord said—in a different voice. He was breathing through his nose, for one thing. “Your grandpa used to tell me I was like a Jew. ‘Luongo,’ he would say, ‘in my eyes, you’re a Jew.’ And from him, I took it. ‘I’ll take it,’ I’d say, like it was the first time he told me.” His eyes were wet, like men’s sometimes get near the end. He toed an unplugged cord to see where it led and shook his head when he did. “Jesus, Clay, this is your icebox. You were supposed to take care of things, keep an eye out.”
“That’s two different jobs,” I said.
A couple minutes later, and he was still shaking his head. I watched him through the bedroom window. For two blocks I could hear his truck rattle. No wonder Grandpa Ike liked him. He’d always known his grandkids weren’t cut out for the family business, but still.
My kid brother Eli’s first car crash into that house at the foot of Jenckes had wiped out his inheritance. His second crash wiped out mine. Now I only had a month or so left of walking-around money, and another year of eating money, maybe. But if I also had to make rent, forget it. Our sister, Libby, was doing okay, I guess, but I hadn’t seen her since Eli’s shivah. “This is my fault?” I asked when she made it clear she didn’t want to hug me.
“I was here for him,” she said. “Where were you?”
“He didn’t want to see me,” I said. I thought about it. “I reminded him of him?”
“Eli looked up to you.”
“He hated mirrors,” I said, touching the sheet on the one in the hall.
“Why can’t you see things for what they are?” she said, making a face that even I could get.
And now it had been five years. How many Mays are there in five years? May is always hard, but this one was cold and wet, like March. Maybe this was just what spring is for us now.
Luongo said I had a week to clear out and I could use the dumpster. So even though I didn’t know where I was going, I got going. It took two days. First I gathered what I needed—meaning everything I had about Eli, which wasn’t nearly enough, but also underwear and my dead father’s metal detector, the only thing he left me. Then I burned any documents I didn’t need but also didn’t want anyone to find in an old oil drum out back. I fed the fire with exed-out calendars and gas station porn that had long since ceased to do the trick. It burned green. I poked at it with a stick and took pulls off an ass pocket of red-hot schnapps I found under the sink—ginger, maybe, or cinnamon? In the dumpster, I threw things no one would want, no matter what mind they were in. The rest I left where it was or else put curbside. I swept the apartment. I swept and I swept and I swept, stopping now and then to clean the bristles. Dust is intimate. From under the couch I swept genetic information. From under the bed I swept Kleenex and the bits of glass that hadn’t wound up in my heel. From under the icebox I swept magnets, third and final notices, cards for unkept appointments with people who knew they couldn’t help me, and a yellowed Yankee Swapper clipping:
CARETAKER WANTED: Twinrock is a century-old summer cottage atop rock in Narragansett Bay. From Fall to Spring. No charges. 17 rooms. Fully stocked larder. No heat. No potable water. Some upkeep. Working knowledge of plumbing, carpentry, wiring, and masonry preferred. Must be able to swim and understand tides, storms and surges. Should cope well with solitude. No guests/pets. Contact Fud Mays at 351-5555.
Fud Mays’s niece was Eli’s ex, Alix. As far as I know, Eli spent only one awful night at Twinrock, but still. I affixed the ad to the fridge with the least greasy magnet and got started on the bathroom. I took off the shower curtain. I poured bleach and shuffled a towel around. I blinked at the clock. It was almost light out. I put on a sweater and smashed the clock with a hammer. I swept it up and shut the windows.
The metal detector just fit in the trunk of my grandfather’s last Skylark. I liked to leave the passenger seat empty, because you never know. The backseat had been full for some time. Twice a year, at least, our late mother would hand us two Almacs bags apiece and lock us into our rooms until we filled them. Eli, I would later learn, buried what he couldn’t part with in a secret spot beneath a terminal tower in nearby India Point Park—the nose glasses Mother hated, and the matchbooks and swizzle sticks our great-uncle Charles would mail us on holidays, but also his invisible friends: a pair of twins named Furry and Furry.
It was a Thursday; Friday was trash day. But it was early enough that folks would still get a crack at things they might want. “Hey neighbors,” I yelled. “Help yourself!”
A drunk on a bike coasted past. “Arrivederci,” he yelled back. His white T-shirt was gray and his white skin was red. His red hair, meanwhile, was white and mostly gone. “You white asshole,” he added, turning the corner.
_____________
Determining which skiff belonged to Twinrock wasn’t hard, because there was one with a flowerpot and a broken snare drum and a jar of pennies in it. A handpainted sign nailed to the skiff’s bench read CAN YOU SWIM TO THE ROCK? IF NOT, WEAR A VEST, with an arrow pointing to where there were no vests. I lowered in my things, the water jugs, mysel
f. I looked at the motor.
At camp, I had to start a boat once. I was seventeen, and covering waterfront rec for the normal counselor. The only kid who wanted to fish was a boy of nine or ten who had played a hot girl in the play the week before. After the show I’d overheard that normal counselor—who liked to pick fights with the Brits till they put sugar in his gas tank—say, “Fuck, man. I want to fuck Ethan Flashman,” then take a two-minute piss off the deck while humming an already-old “Wish You Were Here.” Back then, five years was a lifetime. As Ethan and I motored across the lake, I focused on the rudder and the throttle rather than on his knees, which were delicate but ashy. He caught a sunfish, and eventually I got a feel for the engine, but I wouldn’t cast a line, and we never talked. The whole time, “I want to fuck Ethan Flashman” kept looping in my head in a voice that wasn’t mine. Then, “Damn, damn, damn,” in a voice that might’ve been, if I could sing.
After a couple of priming pumps and three quick yanks, the Twinrock skiff came to life. Just like a lawn mower. Eli’s last job was yard worker. One time I drove by a place where he was working. In my rearview mirror, Eli banged his weed whacker against the sidewalk five, six times, threw it into the street, and grimaced into his fist. I ran my errand. On my way back he was fixing the thing in the driveway, an unlit cigarette stuck to his lip. I should have said hi. Offered him a light? I could’ve pulled over.
For me the hardest part is forgetting things, but also not paying attention the first time around. My car was parked in the brambles at the edge of a nearby land trust, and no one would find it until late fall, if I wanted. I closed my eyes and listened to the outboard. I let out the choke. Then I undid the rope and motored out to the house on the rock, which sat a couple hundred yards from the shore of Bull Point.
The rock was twice as wide as the house and half as tall. The house was three gray stories of sea-beaten shingle, and looked like someone had lived in, built, and designed it, in that order. I lashed the boat to the dock with a made-up knot, doubled up and irreversibly tangled, and took the rear steps to the cellar. From the door hung a frowning woman’s head in terra-cotta. She was an unsettling shade larger than life, and you could see the sculptor’s fingertips, rough and quick and deep, in her clenched jaw. I tried the knob, but the door was locked, and now it was fully dark. I tasted my breath and looked for a likely looking rock, the kind people hide keys under.
There were little rocks everywhere, of course, but an especially heavy and flat-bottomed one that had once been painted white caught my eye. It had since been repainted to look like a rock again, complete with dirt and moss and trompe l’oeil bird shit. Under it I found a marine-proof sleeve that held the hoped-for key. I slipped it out and tried the lock; the key wiggled fruitlessly. I looked around for a smaller lock, but found none. The wind picked up. I leaned into the door, but it wouldn’t budge.
The clouds had blown away, and the moon was so full and low it almost felt like day for night. The French call it la nuit Americaine because they love our old movies exactly as much as we think they hate our new ones. I looked for a door, a window, a box—anything. My vision doubled and I lost my footing, so I sat down and breathed into an imaginary bag till I realized that whatever I was sitting on was far too pointy to be a rock. I stood up and there it was: a model of the house itself, snow-globe scaled and cast in greening bronze. Because that’s exactly how these jokes work—the sort greenhorns won’t get. I turned it over and found a locked trapdoor. I steadied my hand until the first key fit perfectly. Inside was yet another plastic sleeve that held a larger, more suitable-looking key.
The door to the big house opened with a gritty little click. Inside, I fumbled for a light and held the wall while I climbed the basement stairs, which curved and had a net for a banister. The house’s interior walls were also shingled, so it looked like outside inside. Rooms whorled around and opened up into one another like nautiloid chambers radiating off the parlor, which had a ping-pong table where you’d expect a couch. Framed and taped-up articles about the house itself covered the walls in the kitchen and the dining room. They were varying shades of yellow and degrees of brittle. All but one of the clippings mentioned that Fud had been married four times, and featured slight variations on his punch-line-less joke: “They knew it wouldn’t work when they realized that I loved Twinrock more than them.” In the sole two-pager, his sister, Kit—Alix’s mother—added, “Twinrock eats women.” Above the mantel hung an enormous photo of the house itself, beneath which someone had taped a cardboard arrow that read YOU ARE HERE.
I looked around. It was the kind of house that had a cardboard shadow theater instead of a TV and, in the kitchen, a drawer full of scrimshaw “he’s-at-homes.”
The bookshelves held the collected mid-twentieth-century American notions of what the world was and had been up to that point, mostly in the form of field guides, incomplete encyclopedia sets, dog-eared fact books, and long-forgotten bestsellers you could tell had been read in the tub. The books leaned this way and that, in no discernible order, their spines bleached by the sun. Mixed in with these were thirty years’ worth of caretaker logs, a manila folder of well-thumbed grant proposals from 1998, a stack of dot-matrixed school papers, a couple of diaries, and bundled dime-store composition books belonging to the sort of writer who writes the same story over and over in longhand, changing only unimportant details from draft to draft. There were also at least two boxes’ worth of the self-published paperback The House on the Rock, an “intimate” history of Twinrock, by N. Hazard Aldrich, its cover a pen-and-ink illustration of the book’s subject. TAKE ONE HOME! exhorted the shelf tag taped beneath a particularly long stretch of them. I selected one with a bookmark. In the blurry black-and-white photo that was the book’s back cover, the author wore elbow and eye patches and smoked a pipe. As a boy, I had always thought it merely a matter of finding an area of expertise. My Twinrock. I read standing up:
FROM ROUGHLY the Middle Pennsylvanian to the late nineteenth century of our current epoch, the now ironical Twinrock appeared as the slightly squatter of a more or less matching pair of granite outcroppings sitting side by side* just off the coast of Jamestown, Rhode Island, near the mouth of Narragansett Bay. (The original Conaticut Indian name for the chain of rocks is lost to history.) Regrettably, the rock’s erstwhile twin was cannonballed into submarine rubble by army gunners stationed across the water.
The rambling, slate-roofed, and eponymously named house on the rock was built atop Twinrock in 1903 by family scion Rear Admiral J. Ambrose Mays, a former Know-Nothing gubernatorial candidate whose prior Jamestown retreat, Ewelysses, had been seized by the federal government in the expansion of nearby Fort Wetherill. Twinrock was the crusty sea captain’s rebuke. “I will build it where no man can bother me,” he said. “But where I can still keep an eye out if I want.”
*Or side by each, as publicly or parochially schooled locals like to say.
I was about to settle into the parlor’s least fragile chair with The House on the Rock when I realized its bookmark was an envelope addressed—incompletely and optimistically—to Twinrock, care of Eli’s ex, Alix.
I held the letter up to the light. Someone had steamed it open and resealed it. Fud? Surely not Kit. Eli? I checked the date on the California postmark. Not Eli. It hurt to swallow. I tested a corner with my thumbnail, but my hand was so shaky that I risked tearing the flap.
I tucked the still-sealed letter back into the book and wiped my face with an antimacassar that stunk of mold and, oddly, gribenes. My left ear began to ring. Silvery little exes glimmered at my vision’s periphery. I gripped the mantel and caught both my breath and my haggard reflection in the house’s many windows. I remembered all those homes on the shore, sitting in plain view of lit-up Twinrock. I retrieved my flashlight and ran about the house flipping off switches and yanking cords.
The house was dark, and quiet. In my current state, I didn’t trust myself with either the envelope or its contents. Who k
nows what I’d find. When had I last slept?
Twinrock’s sole windowless room was a linen closet. I removed half the shelves and bedclothes in order to accommodate a lamp and a milking stool. To wind down before bed, I played Clue against myself. The set was cobbled together from multiple editions from different eras. It was short the rope, the knife, and the revolver; and Mr. Green had been replaced with a lucky Jew figurine. I made up the statistical loss of murder weapons by adding an equivalent number of rooms within the preexisting rooms with a chisel-tipped marker. Nevertheless, I quickly lost to myself by jumping to Colonel Mustard—whom I always blame—with the candlestick in the kitchen shitter. It was Green all along, with the same item in the hall closet.
I tried to sleep beneath a coonskin coat that smelled like a failed expedition, but every time I almost went under, I would see Eli and my old man, feel like I was falling, and jerk awake. My heart pounded and so did my head, which now also had N. Hazard Aldrich’s voice in it, narrating through his pipe. I got up and worried at the envelope, turning it over and over in the lamplight. It could wait till daybreak. Until then, I settled into a wicker club chair with a view of the increasingly blue edge of the sky’s predawn black. If I had a pipe, I’d’ve smoked it, offshore glow be damned. But I knew elbow patches were meant to cover holes. My old man had taught me that. I felt like his human time capsule. I let him fill me up.
Eli and I were both born at Lying-In Hospital and brought up in a crumbling Angell Street Victorian at the foot of College Hill, along with that leggy elder sister I’ll go some lengths not to discuss. But in the spring of 1974, when I was eleven and Eli seven, our father crashed his plane—a fork-tailed doctor killer that also held his wife, our mother—into the choppy waters off Block Island’s southeast shore. The official story was a freak storm, but I later learned, thanks to my parents’ lawyer, that in the air Father liked to pass around a bottle of Calvados. I wasn’t surprised. Pa always did dig le trou normand and, from lunch on, favored pullovers, slip-on loafers, and pants with hidden elastic. Mother, meanwhile, locked up the lawn darts and, over her husband’s slurred cheers of encouragement, scolded us down from steep, slippery things. By bathtime matters only worsened: “Look, boy,” Pa would say, teetering on the tub’s edge and pointing toward the vanity, where his open-gowned wife readied herself for bed and five-six minutes of coitus. “Your mother’s beaver.”
