The Off-Islander (excerpt)

The Off-Islander

copyright 1993-2021 George Michelsen Foy

Chapters 1-5

He liked the long beach because he got colors from there he could find nowhere else, and because these colors were important to him, for reasons he never bothered to explore fully.

           The colors seldom existed alone, they informed and accompanied each other, and in a process he felt was parallel Z. rarely felt alone when he saw them either. It was as if the relativity in tone and shade of the different hues set off the common history he felt existed between him and the many forms of life that populated this part of the Island.

           Even in the midst of one season Z. thought of the colors of others. In spring he remembered the several layers of gray—one blue as a dove's breast, one hard like milled steel—that separated sea and sky in winter, when the wind had started to yowl but before the deeper storm arrived; he was aware of how the hard lamination of those grays was possible only when an inch of snow had first covered the beach in a sheet of white that sucked out light from the sea and added blue to the cirrus to create, for ten minutes perhaps before the storm crashed it all into wrack, exactly that sandwich of iron and pewter shades he must have sought in the first place, by going there at that stage of weather.

           Or the huge indulgence of greens offered by the summer evening, a billion scripts in colors never covered by the term "green;" jade eelgrass, olive shallows in the marsh, emerald curve at the heart of surf on the barrier shoal; the shiny aqua twist of horn in the shell of a mud crab, the flash of pea-colored nacre in a dart of stickleback, all brought out by mist rolling over the shore the way a brush soaked in water would conjure a scrawl of invisible ink on parchment.

           This evening, this particular evening came just past the end of summer, during the long in-between season before the first nor'easter brought home the realities of power to this stretch of coast.

           In fact a gale had come to the island two days before but it was southerly, hauling to southeast. The wind only blew forty or forty-five knots so it did not count as a legitimate storm the way Islanders understood the matter. Nevertheless the sea had risen and raged somewhat and presumably the roil and tumult of waters disturbed the shoals and sandbanks and, farther out, deepening canyons where the occult eggs and carcasses of the sea lay buried in their somber currents.

           The Island's habitual fog had been cleared by the force of wind and it was to find, in that unusual clarity, what had been stirred in the pelagic banks and drifted onto the shore that Z. had walked out here, to the Island's south beach, heading south and a little west along the trend of strand toward No-Man's Land Island. No-Man's Land that lay, barely discernible even on this clear day, at the very tip of the peninsula, to the south.

           Z. walked with medium strides, though his legs were long. He moved back and forth in a zigzag pattern, like a stitch across the seam of the high-tide mark; up and down the berm with his eyes cast low and his canvas boots digging into the hard wet sand. Always progressing southward, never lifting his eyes from what the sea brought in, he stabbed his thick beach-working stick ahead of him; seeking the shout of color, the excessive linearity that signaled a product not of growth but of human hands and tools.

           The pickings this day were slim. Among the sputum of whelk shells, mermaid's purses, sputnik weed, he had found only the usual detritus scoured from the mainland: the sad translucent membranes of discarded latex prophylactics; corroded shapes in aluminum, with the paint so faded you could not read the once-garish advertising displayed upon them; a couple of plastic hypodermic needles, one partly filled with dead, lavender bubbles. The mainland lay far away, probably to the west, no one remembered exactly where. The scouring of sea in the time and turbulence between rendered this stuff worthless even for Z., who could find use where most would leave it to the logical conclusions of decay.

           Back a couple of miles he had come across three fathoms of polypropylene potwarp of the kind no one on the Island had seen new for generations. He had coiled this hairy, sun-rotted rope around his waist. In a way he was glad to find nothing substantial, since the background headache that usually surfaced in the afternoon had shown up as predicted, and carrying heavy flotsam invariably made its throb more intrusive.

           The tide now was on the ebb, and he trudged far below the storm-surge, stooping occasionally to poke with his stick or pick up and dump in his canvas shoulder-sack bits of driftwood of a size and nature to feed the woodstove. The south wind stroked back his ragged gray hair as a mother would. He was past Naushon Hollow at this point, much farther to the south than Islanders normally ventured. The only living human Z. usually saw south of Naushon was the Doctor who lived back up the beach in a hut made of driftwood and pieces of old jalopy scarfed into the oaken flanks of a schooner that had been hurled ashore by a nor'easter so long ago even the Steamship Authority's weather records did not preserve its memory.

            The Doctor was not on the beach today. Z. had glimpsed him on the way up, through the windows of his shack, stoking his fireplace with salted wood.          

The south beach was full of wrecks such as provided the Doctor with the scantlings of his home. Most of the wrecks were ancient, though the shore held in its sandy vaults three or four steel ships, steamers, of which some record remained, as well as the rusted hulk of the Islander, one of the Authority's older ferries, that had been washed aground by a storm come quick and deadly from the east a generation ago. The sea broke them, buried them many fathoms in the sand, then, a month or fifty years later, returned casual as a grave-robber and stripped them of their damp winding cloth in a dozen hours of gale. The point of compass from which they came served as a selector, precise as a roulette wheel; southeast by a half east, the breakers dug out a whaling ship and the White Squall; south and west, Schamonchie, Lorna Doone, and an extreme clipper no one knew the name of. One of the wrecks lay not far ahead of him, and even at this distance Z. could tell its ribs and stem, chewed by the low gale, stood five feet higher from the beach than they had done two days ago.          

Low tide, Z. knew from the Almanack, preceded dusk by half an hour on this date. He continued to push on south but the light was failing. Through chinks in the cloud cover he saw the evening star burning in the pinberry purple of a fog-free sky and he stood a little amazed by the lambency of it.           

He could not make it to No-Man's Land tonight. He would go as far as Dead Neck and, if nothing else caught his eye, turn for home. It was precisely at the point where he made this decision that his gaze picked up a shape cresting gently over the wrack of codium and moon-snail shells on the high-water mark twenty feet ahead of him.           

The form of it was a curve so smooth that, although it could have been milled by some subtle process of erosion and change, it was much more likely to have been formed by hand; and as he got close to it he could see that it probably resulted from a combination of the two processes, having once been part of a ship, probably a beam-knee of hard oak, sanded by many years of wave erosion in a way no human could duplicate; for years of impossibly complex fluid interaction had changed the shape of it in ways already facilitated by grain and pre-existing form, the curve down allowing more erosion in that direction, the crosscut preventing it, in exactly the same way that the builder had intended for strength to mount across the grain and be released in the flow of wood; so that at length it had dwindled into the most delicate ghost of its former self, a gentle "S" that contained all the idea and none of the strength of the original design.

           Z. kneeled beside it. He reached out and touched the piece with his right hand. The wood was almost perfectly smooth. It had over decades of pickling in seawater turned a color that was a combination of silver and pewter and periwinkle blue but so soft you could not distinguish where the different elements of color met; this Z. thought of simply as the "shine" of driftwood. The ends had tapered away to delicate points. On one peak a nail had rusted away to nothing, leaving a hole like an eye, and an orange stain.

           It looked like the neck of a swan or, more proximately, like the stem in miniature of one of the clippers driven ashore on this beach. It was this resemblance that caused Z. to dig the driftwood out from among the kelp at the high-water mark, dust the quartz sand from its few crevices, and place the find in his driftwood bag with wood more suited for burning.

           He closed the flap of the bag with a feeling of furtive pleasure. The swan's neck would be fine for a carving project that had lain in the back of his mind for several weeks. His carving plans never made people happy; A. thought of them as a waste of time and tried not to criticize them with a scope of effort that made Z. sweat; but the thought of what he was going to do with knife, jigsaw and chisel used to make him want to laugh quietly with the delight of things ripe in potential. Even now, when little seemed to give him the pleasure it once had, and nothing at all made him laugh from the belly, he could still garner from the idea of carving a sense of what that joy had been like: a quick glow, like putting on pants that had warmed by the stove before you went out on a day of sleet.

           He looked up and down the beach. To the south, No-Man's Land had disappeared in a lack. That was the only way to describe it; the beach seemed simply to fritter away from lack of interest, losing first its colors, then its edges, then everything in between. The fog was returning. The distinctive anvil shape of the closest dune was still clear but, looking out to sea, he could barely make out the line of white that marked the shoal where they put out wreckers, on a low tide. Or, rather, where they used to; nobody had been executed on the Island for as long as anyone could remember.

           From the north came a moan so low and miserable it might have been the Island itself complaining of some deep, wasting pain. The keeper of Cape Pogue lighthouse had activated his foghorn, as required by the bylaws of the Authority.

           He turned the flap of his collar against the growing chill and followed the wind with his face. It was veering westerly again. The familiar sex-smell of marsh and salt and the milt of plankton made the drop in temperature seem more personal and biting. His headache, which had receded with his find, came back more strongly than before. He hiked the strap of his bag more securely on his shoulder, tightened the length of rope around the waist of his canvas coat and headed north, with the wind and mist, in counterpoint to the zags he had made on the way up so that his footsteps, as he walked homeward, completed a rough double helix, like the spiral branches of the brown kelp that were blown up on this shore in some profusion when the wind blew from any quarter but the west.

 

 

Chapter Two

 

 

By the time he got back to the village it had been black dark for over an hour but by a curious trick common to up-Island the white sand of the lane he lived on, and the shimmering gray humidity of the seafog, seemed to gain strength from each other. The sand absorbed in its microscopic facets the shine of mist until night and road each glowed with a vague and circular luminescence and he could follow the lane solely by its twin tracks of brightness under the pines. At regular intervals the broad blade of yellow from the Cape Pogue lighthouse scythed counter-clockwise over his head, charging the fog with a kind of tubular energy. Although it was early autumn the honeysuckle was still in bloom, and the fluid sweetness of its odor filtered through his breathing and cleared a little the ache behind his eyes.

           Z. lived in a house hunched against the carouse of jackpine and scrub-oak at the east end of the village, only a mile and a half from the saltmarsh. It was a small gray-shingled wooden structure with a roof extending almost to the ground on the northern side and a cluster of uneven windows facing south. You would have been hard put to distinguish which wall was which since the shingles were covered with a jungle of wild rosebushes, honeysuckle, lilac and jasmine planted twenty years before by Z.'s wife and allowed to run free ever since. Behind the vines every line of the house was curved, for it had been built a long time ago by shipwrights of the sort who had carved the swan's neck in his driftwood bag; men who took clean straight-sawn lumber and steamed it, as a matter of duty, into curves and crescents that would fit the slope and swell of wave.

           Next to the main house, connected to it by a breezeway, stood a barn built of the same materials. This Z. used as a workshop.          

The electric light was on in the kitchen. Z. noted this with automatic satisfaction. The Island's electric plant consisted of two 1,600-horsepower diesels from an Authority ferry vessel that had been obsolete ten years before the engines were handed over to generate power for the community. The engines tended to shut down at frequent intervals, especially when demand grew in the fall. He went in through the breezeway, hanging his driftwood bag and the polypropylene rope on pegs in the dark.

           The kitchen was warm. It smelled of honeysuckle and jasmine come winding in the open window on the same cooling breeze that brought the fog in. Z. noticed another smell underlying the flower scent in a layer of sweetness sharply distinct from that of honeysuckle; a broader, richer, mustier aroma.

           The small critter that Z. had found bleeding on the outskirts of the marsh last summer rolled out of the space it had been sleeping in and made churring noises based on sentiments of hunger and relief.

           He entered the sitting-room and found the pan lying under the woodstove, where she usually left it, covered with a red-checkered cotton cloth to keep the flies out. She had fed wood into the banked fire to warm the bread, leaving the vents half-open. He shut the vents down, took the pan into the kitchen, cut out a big wedge of the dark molasses loaf and covered it with butter from the icebox. The bread was still warm and it filled his mouth with the profound sugar of mythical islands far to the south where the sun would allow no fog to form. As he chewed he looked at the picture of A. and her mother that hung over the stove.           

A. had been six years old, and her mother twenty-five, at the time the painting was done but the two had shared a tint of hair and a pattern of freckles. The curves in mouth and eyes were as similar as curves built into wood by the same boatbuilder. It was a cheap pastel drawn by the artist on the amusement pier. The artist possessed enough skill to bring out the line of stubbornness in A. that (Z. now believed) was the first warning sign of the missionary aspect of her nature; and he'd caught, as well, the short hash-marks between her mother's eyes that Z. sometimes thought might have been harbingers of the pain that ten years later would envelope her in its smooth grip and wring her like a length of wet manila line until life could slip out through the unraveling strands of her body.

           A chunk of bread fell to the floor and as Z. bent to pick it up he noticed the note that must have been lying on top of the bread pan.

Where are you? Me and T. stopped by this p.m.. You're probably out beachworking but you better get in before dark, you don't want to get into trouble! We're going to the Zoetrope, I know you won't see the 'trope but maybe you can have a screech with us at the Oysterbar first. T. has great news! Come by the cottage!.           .

           Underneath, the circles and curves of A.'s usual writing lost their fullness in an addendum:          

7.20 p.m.. You're still not back, we went without you

           Z. coughed. He cut another piece of bread, buttered it, took a chunk of Portygee sausage out of the larder and went out to the workshop.

           The workshop consisted of one long room built of pine planks and sectioned off by the bulkheads of former horse stalls. A corner was confused with marine gear, and beachcombing and clamming equipment. On one end two armchairs attended a small potbellied stove and the eight feet of sagging rusted pipe that conveyed its tarry fumes into the air outside. Another corner of the structure was filled with wooden cupboards, benches and racks for tools, and shelves lined with small thick jars. Z. switched on the electric light and then lit one of the hurricane lanterns over the main bench as a precaution should the power go out in the middle of a delicate task. He threw a couple of small logs on top of the stove's embers. He found a coffee cup and filled it from the bruised enamel pot that stood permanently on the stove's hotplate. Then he sat down at the main bench and stared at the good expanse of polished mahogany in front of him, his hands folded loosely on the workspace, like another pair of specialized tools placed conveniently nearby for the time he would need them.          

Minutes passed. He sipped the coffee, which was gritty, strong and lukewarm. After another stretch of time he opened the daybox and removed a package wrapped in pages of the Island Gazette. Inside lay a sheaf of thin glass slides about ten inches by eight enclosed in delicate borders of tin. He took out the topmost of these and, holding it steady, rolled his chair on squeaking castors to a bench at right-angles to the first.

           He opened the back of a brass lantern bearing a complicated arrangement of lenses, brackets and levers on its front. He lit and trimmed the wick, squinting against the light that sought out the cracks and shutters in the lamp's structure.

           He dropped the glass slide in a slit on top: and against the boards of the barn's northern wall a tall woman dressed in long red scarves, a long black-trimmed red dress, a wide-brimmed black hat and sandals appeared. With all the suddenness, the brightness and the lost dimension of a wraith, in the middle of a hesitant gesture she smiled, against a crack in the whitewashed plank.

           Lucinda, Z. thought. He examined the picture for a while. Turning back to his bench, he opened a drawer and took out a perfectly unmarked glass slide from a stack of similar plates and laid it in the fulcrum of his workspace. He got up and walked along one of the long shelves of glass jars. The bottles each contained a different powdered pigment: cerulean, umber, royal- and navy-blue, persimmon orange. Some of the jars were heavy and old and only partially full. Occasionally Z. took a jar from the shelf and held it to the light so that its crystals of deep yellow or green made sparks in the weak electricity.

           Z. always thought of Lucinda, and of all the people he painted on the slides, in terms of colors. Lucinda, he felt, was mostly scarlet with an odd streak of dark-green and some purple in her emotional make-up. He could not have told you what the colors stood for individually. Lucinda possessed a passionate streak, a serious temper, and real doubts about her worth not only as a wife but also as the community's first female sea-pilot. The blend of colors, for Z., added up to a personality as distinct and defined as the crystals of pigment that lay, pure and cool, in the shade of the shelves around him.

           Z. was, and had been for thirty years, a 'tropewright. He had apprenticed under Stook, the greatest of them all, and for the last fourteen seasons had taken Stook's place as chief 'tropewright for the Great Zoetrope Theatre that stood like a cathedral to small stories at the tip of the Town's Great Pier. As chief 'tropewright it was Z.'s job to work closely with the Tropemaster and become intricately involved in the characters and storylines of the theatre's ongoing dramatic and comedic series and this Z. had always, and conscientiously, done.

           In the early days he had practically lived at the Zoetrope and attended most of the shows, reveling in the smells of hot wiring, paint and popcorn, and the sight of all the stark but beautifully registered colors that flooded the walls with every spin of the smoking, gleaming, brass-bound apparatus; waiting with real excitement for the next episode.

           His enthusiasm had faded somewhat over the years. Since A.'s mother died he had ceased going to the 'tropes altogether. Instead he read over the scripts at home and conferred with the Tropemaster only when necessary.

           He rolled the chair back and sat down again. From another wooden drawer he removed a handful of crowquill pens and thin brushes of otter fur.

           He took the slide from the lamp, laid the unmarked slide exactly on top of it, opened a small glass bottle of blue-white ink. Dipping one of the smaller nibs in ink, he began to trace the outlines of Lucinda's nose, almost on top of the nose of the Lucinda Hallett lying underneath but slightly to one side, where the trend of movement would have taken her in the instant of intervening story.

           Too far. In this sketch the separation of movement was good but the nose was not quite right. It was too delicate and snubbed for Lucinda, who after all had real stomach to get where she had gotten by her twenty-seventh year.

           He tried starting with the line of her neck—mindful perhaps of the shape lying dormant in his driftwood bag—but again he got the separation wrong.

           He took a bite of sausage and chewed the dry spiced meat with none of the enjoyment he'd anticipated in cutting the slice. It felt odd to make consecutive mistakes in a job he had done ten thousand times before. He picked up the crowquill and once more tried Lucinda's nose.

           Five minutes later he dipped the nib in a glass of water, laid the pen down on the mahogany, and closed his face with his hands, buffing his eyelids with the side of his thumbs.

           He could not concentrate—not on Lucinda, not on the 'tropes in general. What lay behind that inability was a more basic impatience, coupled with the ongoing headache that was either source or product of that impatience and which in any case he was in no position to fight.

           He stood up abruptly and walked behind what used to be a stall partition to the carving bench, drawing some pleasure as always from the rows of chisels, routers and carving blades shining covertly in the shadow of this part of the workshop. But he knew he had no business carving when a trope deadline was close. Also he suspected, and dreaded, that the impatience might well carry over into this, the craft he now chose to work at in preference to the 'tropes.

           It was craft, Z.'s father used to say, that gave a man his shape, but of late Z. had felt the solidity of his own shape lessening, the hard edges of his life losing their consistency, as if the Island fog could eat at them the way it ate at visibility. He was unsure if it was his craft that was losing form, as his father would have said; or if, rather, the life that lay around and under what he did, providing him with time and room to move, was being robbed of substance, itself subsiding into a shapelessness that sucked his craft in after.

           He left the workshop. Back in the kitchen the critter was awake now and rolling on the floor, churring its joy upon seeing him. He filled its bowl with pickled pogies and a half-rotted tomato. Then, putting on his hat and throwing his canvas coat over one shoulder, he left the house through the breezeway door, fired up the jalopy, and headed her through the fragrant mist into the silver night, down State Road toward Town.                                                                                                                                                                                

###

The woman lived in one of the cottages that stood inland from the Great Pier and to the east of Pleasant Street. The cottages were all similar in size and yet, in the boffo variety of carved porches, pilasters, and drip-edges decorating them, like girls with too much make-up, acquired their own overweening identity among the crowd. She had a small garden of neatly-tied tomato and pea plants that took up all the room between the house and the gingerbread fence. The porchlight was on, indicating she was not in, which he knew anyway since she always went to the Zoetrope this night. He let himself through the screen-door and lay on the wicker couch that filled most of the porch space, watching the wavering tendrils of mist creep along the lane like stealthy scouts for an advancing host, a commando of gray that froze every nine seconds as the searchlight beam of Monomoy Light probed overhead. He smelled the combination of odors, the mold of the couch cushion, the cowshit she dug into her tomato beds, the slight undertone of the perfume she used and, in the background, the perduring smell of seawater, salty and lascivious as the sweat that came with fucking.

           She woke him when she came in an hour later. She never used electricity in the house. She said the lantern's glow was more personal and anyway, in a comment not exclusively aimed at Island Power and Light, she preferred bad friends she could count on to good friends who disappointed her.

           The woman was not tall or short, not thin or plump, not plain and not pretty, her hair was neither curly nor straight; but the fact that she was not a lot of things did not prevent her from being soft in her curves and generous in her smile and in the arc of her touch; nor did it keep spring from her step or grace from the odd movement she made, in the corners of her life, without being aware, when surprise or habit divorced a motion from her usual rigor of plan.

           "It was a good one tonight," she said, "the Zoetrope." She folded her dress around her legs; she wore bright dyed cotton, like most Island women, with scarf and stockings and leather lace-up boots.

           "Where are they now?"

           "I can't remember the episode number, maybe seven?"

           "I mean, where's the storyline?"

           "Oh. Well, let's see." She threw her head back, the way she tended to when thinking of events past, as if backwards movement would elicit the same reversal in the arrow of memory. "Duke tricked that ship into coming ashore on Monomoy. And Dorian, well he was at the heart of it, because his bank wouldn't advance Duke any money for his Store bill; and Lucinda said she'd leave him, I mean Duke, if he didn't fix the jalopy, an'—"

           "Okay," he said, smiling. "I got it."

           "You asked."

           "Yeah, I did."

           She got out the bottle of screech and poured them both a glass. She nudged him aside and sat on the couch with him. The wicker creaked like a ship as they raised glasses or draped an elbow or wrist or ankle lazily across a joint belonging to the couch's other occupant.

           "You look tired," she said.

           "It's the light."

           "No. It's a good lamp."

           "It's dim."

           "I can tell. How's your head?"

           "My head's fine."

           She had very dark eyes, unlike A.'s, though she was a second cousin of A.'s mother, who also had come from Town. He sipped the rum, feeling it light small flames like signal fires to mark its track down the glum oesophagus.

           "I went down the beach," he said.

           "Find anything?"

           "No."

           "See the old man?"

           The "old man" meant the Doctor. He nodded.

           "A. wanted me to come," he added, after a pause. "To the Zoetrope."

           She lowered her head now, holding up the glass of rum, smelling its kick. "She stopped by the house," he continued, "I was still on the beach."

           "She stopped by here, too," the woman said.

           "Oh?"

           "You should try—"

           "I know—"

           "No, listen, Z. You should try and see her. She needs—a token of you—in her days."

           "I won't go to the 'tropes."

           "I know. I know."

           "She keeps pushing. I won't be pushed."

           The woman found Z.'s fingers with her own. She separated them, one by one. He removed his hand, as gently as he could. The woman examined her left hand, and touched the web between two fingers with a finger of the other.

           "She's worried about you, man. You can't blame people because they worry."

           The muscles of his jaw knotted. They sat for awhile in silence. He finished his rum, letting the liquor pool hot in the basin of his tongue; then, swallowing its warmth, he placed his glass on the arm of her couch.

           "I'm sorry," she said.

           He touched her hair.

           "I got to go," he told her. "I didn't work this afternoon.

           "She means well," he went on, "I know that; but part of her sees me as a project. You know, like a run-down cottage. A little tarpaper and shingles, a new coat of paint, I'll be good as new.

           "I tell you," he added, "people fix houses in their own image."

           "You could stay," she said. "There's plenty of screech."

            She was always trying to get him to drink more. She thought booze would introduce more fun into his life.

           He grunted, picked up his hat and coat and left.

           He walked around Town, circling the dark lagoon with its covey of oyster-skiffs roosting in the dark water, sails tucked on their booms like folded wings; then east, back into the womb of Town, down Water Street, navigating as much by smell and sound as sight; past the Oysterbar, with its raunch of beer and rum and tobacco-smoke and the boom-blare of the jug-band young T. played in sometimes; past Chester's boatyard opposite the Oysterbar, then Manley's yard next to that; hearing the wind frap the halyards in a big oyster-barge up the saturnic ways. He sniffed with some enjoyment the aroma of tar, barnacles, old hemp and paint that seemed to attach itself to all boatyards and even, for a little while till the sea licked them clean, to all objects coming out of them. He continued over the drawbridge, with the tide now three-quarters full mumbling its secrets in a code that spoke to the nose of the zygote-memories of alewives and other fish willing to fin three thousand miles to spawn and die at home; past the tall brick facade of the Store, its faint hint of coffee, of cinnamon and molasses and the dark Arab tobacco they imported in flats off the Authority ships.

           And so, almost in a concatenation of smells, diagonally across Front Street to the tall structure, built of mint-painted cement blocks, that housed the offices of the Steamship Authority. The building, with its arcades of ticket booths and offices and the attached supplies warehouse, lay between the two northward pointing piers serving to shelter the great ships that brought to the Island the goods and provisions it needed to survive out here in this twist of sand and circled currents.

           Z. walked over to the quay. The tar-smothered pilings reminded him of when he was twelve and had climbed on top of the highest dolphin on a dare from G., and dived deep into the inky water in the lee of Menemsha. No-one was allowed onto the pier or associated pilings, then or now. He remembered getting collared for it and marched home by the constable and his father wupping him half-heartedly with a frayed fan-belt for the offense.

           Certainly he had never pulled that trick again, but it was more because of the terror he remembered shrinking his throat and groin as he plunged down, helplessly driven by his own momentum, into the black-green depths around the dock; down, down into the still darkness where no men ever ventured and where, presumably, the many-tentacled creatures who thrived on oblivion held their own lean and venomous sway in the harbor ooze.

           Only one of the ships lay at the dock now. She was the Madaket, one of the bigger ferryboats. Looking up at her vast white-painted steel bulk rising till it almost disappeared into the dark mist, at the blunt bow with the scars and dents from docking mishaps or winter ice; at the tiers of half-lit decks, the plates rippled from stress of storm and welding-in-bulk; at the rows of yellowed portholes, the windows of saloons, and the black glass of the wheelhouse; at the confusion of masts and funnels, of gooseneck vents and davits, of antennas and signal pennants, all whistling gently in the low wind; hearing the generators mumbling obsessive to themselves in the engine room three fathoms under the waterline; observing, below the white range light on the forward mast, the ghostly rotation of scanners that allowed Madaket to see through the bank after bank of the seafog that kept this island hidden, or lost, depending on your point of view, in its private scend of saltwater; smelling the caked salt and davits-grease and redlead and diesel-smoke; he felt, with almost the same intensity he remembered from the age of twelve, the overwhelming power and mystery of these huge, battered vessels, whose arrivals and departures formed, as much as the semi-diurnal tides, as much as the planets and moon or the buzzing routines of men, the deepest pulse of this place he lived in.

           On Monomoy the foghorn lowed. As if he'd been waiting for its cue a man came out of a companionway twenty feet over Z.'s head, on "B" deck. He was no more than a dark shape with a red glow of cigarette stuck in the oval of his face.

           Z. put his right hand out to touch the cold chainlink of the gate that separated him from Madaket's pier. Islanders were not allowed on the pier, or aboard any of the ships. The only exceptions to that rule were the longshoremen, who worked the quay when a ship was arriving or leaving; the selectmen, who occasionally conferred face-to-face with Authority captains; and the Island pilots, who were hoisted straight up to the bridge from which they conned the great ships through the maze of shifting sandbanks, shoals and rocks. For the channels changed continuously with the storms and currents at work here. Like a neurotic sculptor, never satisfied with its own work, the ocean re-shaped, re-modeled, adding a million tons of sand this side, removing a half-million there, in the permanent process of geologic carving that had formed this place, that kept it alive now.

           The man flicked his cigarette—it left a wire of orange across the curve of Z.'s retina—and disappeared down a hatch. The dark-blue jalopy of the Authority constable ambled around the corner and on toward the Oysterbar and the inevitable OUI violations. A floppy-tan animal belonging to the pack of bum dogs that hung around the courthouse loped out of the shadows and drooled in friendly fashion on Z.'s boots.

           Z. scratched its flea-bitten ruff. He turned and continued down Front Street for the jalopy-park and home.

 

                                                                                                                                  

Chapter Three

 

 

He woke up at dawn. The jackpine thicket outside his bedroom window looked, in its cerement of fog, like dreams of trees not quite remembered. The house was cold and his breath crafted mist on the exhale. The critter was illegally buried in the folds of quilt at the foot of his bed.

           He went to the kitchen and levered water from the pump at the sink. The pump was large and ugly and made of drop-forged iron manufactured by his father when he ran the metal-shop down-Island. After washing Z. ate a slice of molasses bread; in the workshop he added dry maple to the stove, grounds and water to the pot. It all came together in the alchemy of spice, steam and heat, and he took a cup of the bitter result to his bench and sat down to work.

           His headache, although not gone, was weaker this morning. The work came alright and by noon he had finished half the scene leaders, the slides that would guide the men and women painting continuity plates in the Zoetrope workshop for the final episode, called Reavers, of the theatre's running production of dramatic stories.

           In this installment Duke finally was fingered by the constable as being the man responsible for luring ashore a ship filled with expensive and beautifully milled machine-tools. The crew of the ship had drowned, something Duke did not foresee, although his regret did not stop him from making a fortune selling lathes to the unscrupulous banker, Dorian. Lucinda was contacted by a mysterious woman hiding in the moors near Alewife Pond; she told Lucinda she had been a passenger on the wreck, and had gone to ground when Duke told her it was illegal for off-Islanders to come ashore. From her account Lucinda figured out where Duke's money had come from and, secure in her new job, left him to live by herself in a condemned lighthouse. Duke, in his cell at the Authority building, met a stranger from Sherburne who promised to spring him from jail and then help him gain revenge on Lucinda, as well as on Dorian, who also had betrayed him.

           Z. was well into the arrest scene when he heard the screen door at the front of the house crack shut. He kept working, drawing in the purple-dark bricks of the jail cell, but half his mind was listening for the sounds the visitor would make as he, or she, penetrated deeper into the house. He heard rough corners of vowel from a man's voice and then quick determined steps, the small weight driving firmly through the heelbone into the worn planks as she stepped down the breezeway.

           "Z.? Z., you in there?"

           She hadn't called him "Dad" since she was seven years old.          

           He rinsed his brush in the water glass and placed it in the drying can. He spun his chair around, knowing A. would stick her neck between jamb and door while she craned her head sideways to see what he was up to, but keep her feet on her side of the lintel; she had been taught to do this when she was young and he had to paint glass slides ten hours a day without interruption to keep her in milk and school dresses. Her head duly appeared.

           "Hello, love."

           "I bet you haven't had lunch."

           The man's voice rang again, dull in the kitchen now.

           "Is T. with you?"

           "We're on our way to Town. You never showed up last night. I tole him you wouldn't, what time d'you get in?"

           "Not that late."

           "Did you see her? I asked her to tell you."

           "She told me."

           "But you didn't come. To the Oysterbar, I mean."

           He opened his hands. He had big hands, cracked with work. They were covered in stains of red and black, green and purple, blue and yellow. He had never been neat when actually drawing and to a large extent this was because he liked spreading colors around, sharpening down the tip of the brush with his fingers and thumb, dipping it in his mouth to wet it, smearing off excess pigment with a knuckle—the way a kid got a feel for mud by wallowing in it till muck covered his face and clothes.

           "I haven't been to the Oysterbar," he said, "oh, in two years at least."

           A. continued to look at him. She was trying hard not to come off as didactic and the effort it took reinforced the impression she was trying to avoid. She had a small, delicate head and hands to match and a body only slightly bigger than was needed to support them. Her reddish-brown hair was neatly tied in back and half-covered in a wide Lucinda-style hat; her shirt and skirt, what he could see of them, for her body was still half-hidden by the jamb, were black and red. Most of the women under thirty took their cue from Lucinda these days and Z. found, while looking at his daughter, that this annoyed him extremely for no good reason he could think of.

           "You said you had news," he went on, in a tone deliberately mild.

           "How's your headache?"

           He shrugged. With the concentration of work lifted from him he found the ache had gathered strength. "It's fine."

           "No, it's not. I'll bring tea for you, next time."

           She had wide eyes of shallow-water blue like her mother's. No amount of interference from herself or from others could quite sand the edges off the curiosity trapped in that blue. Her nose was like Lucinda's, and this, Z. knew, was not a coincidence. A string of hair the color of young cedar fell over her nose-freckles and she blew it away by directing breath at it along the scoop of her lower lip. He smiled, recognizing a gesture she had performed since she was five.

           "What's so funny?"

           "Nothing."

           "I'll make coffee."

           "There's some—"

           The space between door and jamb was all at once excessively empty. Her departure had taken not just what she brought but had subtracted more, leaving the rectangle of air in deficit.

           In the kitchen T. was squatting and re-stoking the fire, neatly raking the embers down and arranging the fuel in temple-shapes so oxygen could funnel in more efficiently. This, Z. found, annoyed him also, for he had a personal relationship with flames that included in it his love for roughness and slack getting by.

           Also, on the piece of abandoned glacier-droppings that was the Island, the discipline of wood and fire formed a symbol of your ability to take care of yourself and it was quite likely that T. on a level he could not even conceive of was questioning Z.'s sufficiency—as the young out of blood and habit always questioned how much the old might be detracting from the economy of their world.

           Z. said nothing. T. closed the stove's gate, opened the flue a half-inch too wide and stepped forward to shake his hand. T. had the unboned face of a boy with eyes that, in contrast to how he built fires, never let in much oxygen and a smile, when he chose to use it, that made you feel valuable to him personally. He walked with light steps and usually wore what he had on today: the khaki shirt with blue Authority tabs; tan trousers and jacket and a blue pilots' cap. T. was a trainee in the guild of pilots that guided the big ships in and out of the harbor.

           They all made the accepted greetings and stood off the distance required by what both bound and separated them. A. leaned her buttocks against the counter the way she had always had done since her ass was high enough to perch.

           "Well, go on, T.," she commanded.

           The boy shrugged.

           "A. wants you to come. It's no big thing."

           "Oh for god's sake." A. pushed herself off the counter and hung off the boy's shoulder. "He's being trained for assistant docking pilot. He's going to warp the Madaket out today, you've got to come."

           "No, you don't," T. put in.

           "That's good," Z. answered sincerely. T. had been training for assistant station pilot but docking pilot was a better position, second only to shoals-and-channels and sea pilot in the hierarchy of the guild. T.'s father had been a docking pilot, Z. remembered, which must make T. feel proud somewhere deep. Although Z. had never seen much "shape" to the boy he believed the craft of pilot was a real and good one, and he supposed that the discipline and whip of it would form T. in its image, as it had formed other men over the years.

           "Really," T. said. His back was very straight. "It's not a big—"

           Z. looked from his son-in-law to his daughter and back again.

           "I was planning to work the beach this afternoon," he said, "another day would be better."

           "I should be on call every other week," T. agreed.

           "I can definitely come next week," Z. told him.

           "I'll let you know," T. replied, "what the schedule is."

           "Definitely."

           "I want to talk to him," A. said to nobody, and her thin, pointed jaw set like a foxtrap.

           T. looked at his wife, then away. A good pilot's eyes were always checking the different quarters that weather came from and although T. was not great at prediction, the kind of climate looming in this kitchen was as easy to read as a line of white squalls. "I'll warm up the jalopy," he said and, nodding man-to-man in Z.'s direction, walked sideways out the kitchen door.

           "He didn't want me to come," Z. got in immediately.

           "Yes he did. He's too proud to say so."

           "He doesn't want a big fuss."

           "It's a big deal for him."

            "A., don't start, please."          

            Her hands balled into fists now the way her mother's did on the rare occasions she let her anger run away with her. In A.'s eyes the reflection of lamps jerked like heat lightning. Her cheeks had gone the color of ripe peaches and her voice was low and a little rough.

           "You don't like T.. You know why don't like him? He's too normal, too—decent."

           "I like T.," Z. said. A. ignored him.

           "He makes you realize you don't fit in. You don't know what people say about you. They say maybe you're a little crazy, like that Doctor you always see on the beach—not regular, somehow."

           "Your mother didn't think so."

           "There!" A. crossed her fists under her throat as if to keep the response from strangling her. She glanced at the pastel of her and her mother over the electric stove. "I knew it. You always use her as an excuse."

           "I don't."

           "You can't hide behind her all your life."

           "I'm content, A.. Why don't you—"

           "No, you're not."

           Z. found he had leaned against the chrome-rich icebox in the shadow of the western gable, his arms crossed over his liver the way he used to stand in the moments he had to defend himself from her mother's fury. Very deliberately he let his arms drop, the considerable weight of his hands curling, uncurling, counterbalancing the impulse to fend her away.

           "It's my condition, love. Happy, unhappy, it's mine."

           She looked at him with eyes that could have opened a quahog. He smelled, quite strongly, the lavender scent she used.

           "I bet you still have that headache."

           "My head's fine."

           She stood motionless for a second. Then she spun, placed her knotted fists on the counter's rim and hunched over the pump-handle. A sound he had never heard from her, or anyone else, emerged from a spot so low in her chest it sounded like it came from the plumbing. Z. raised a hand toward her. The sound rose, turned into a ragged cry, and a crash, as her shoulders heaved and she swept the pile of coffee mugs on the shelf before her in a low arc that ended with one of the mugs smashed to small white cuneiform and the rest bouncing around the floor-planks.            

           Then she pushed herself backward off the counter and walked swiftly out the door. In the quick angle he had of her face he could see the light in her eyes and cheeks had gone blue and shiny with tears starting to run toward her chin.

           He stood, shocked into stillness by the speed and surprise of it, his hands immobile now in a sort of half clasp, his frame stooped in the poor light and woodsmoke. He heard the door of their jalopy slam. The engine idled for a moment, then ground up the gears and dwindled peaceably down the road toward Town.

           The scent of lavender remained as strong as before. It was five minutes before he realized that the trick with swept mugs was something Lucinda would have done; had done, as a matter of fact, in the episode of Reavers that had played at the Zoetrope theatre only three weeks previously.

           He followed them anyway two hours later, having checked the daybox schedule and realized that the first part of the next production would be due in ten days time and he needed to read through the new storyline in order to let characters and plot-turns simmer in his head a little. This was important to do so that his hands, when it came time to put the Zoetrope's people down in colored inks, would be somewhat prepared for their movements, and the occasional sudden departures they made from the accepted script. These discrepancies, he sometimes believed, formed the pith of their character; the quick, doomed sprints toward real freedom of personality, soon gathered in and readjusted by the inexorable churn of plot.

             He carefully packed the freshly-painted slides in the daybox. He went out to the field in back where he parked the jalopy. His jalopy was a large, dented green truck with worn tires and round panels and no bed. He drained the fuel sump of water, dried the points and got her, after a minute of whining, to fire off in front of a crash of combustion and a burst of blue smoke.

            There was a new, vague clicking in the engine's sound. He ignored it. He placed the box behind his seat and slowly, taking care of the rusted springs as well as the glass cargo, steered her down the sandy lane toward Town.                                                                                                                                                                                

### 

The Madaket was clearing the harbor breakwater as he got to the intersection Pleasant Street made with Front. He stopped the jalopy and watched her carefully between two buildings as the ship fed herself without hesitation into the gray threshing machinery of mist. He imagined one of the dots on the starboard bridge wing might be recognizable as T. so that he could tell A. he'd seen the boy conning the ship out to sea; but docking pilots did not do that and the dots were so small and the fog coming in so thick it would have been a lie anyway. He resisted the urge to check on his sailing skiff in Chet's boatyard. He took a right turn down Front till he got to the field where you parked to walk out to the Pier.

           When he was a boy, and especially when he was a teenager, Z. had spent most of his off-time at the Pier; to the point where, when he thought about being young, his thoughts consisted of a skein of small events largely stretched on the iron-and-timber frame of the Town's Great Amusement Pier and Entertainment Arcade.

           It stood before him now, more battered and uneven in places but otherwise largely unchanged; seven hundred feet in length, so long that when you stood on the shore end it was rare to be able to distinguish the tip for the fog drifting in between; sixty feet wide, an intricate runway of tarred pine boards surmounted by a quarter-mile of chipshops, cockle stands, popcorn vendors, merchants of fried fish and stuffed quahogs and razorclam chowder; also pinball dens and bowling lanes and fortune-telling booths and funhouses and rum-and-beer bars and the pastel portrait painter and an organ-grinder with a piebald cat.

           To someone who loved colors the way Z. did the Pier was a source of color second only to the south beach. The ironwork was painted royal blue with yellow and red trim, the arcades were of every bright hue available in chandlery paint; red lead and lifejacket orange, zinc white, buff and Nantucket green, combinations of navy blue, gold and scarlet drawn in circus designs; multicolored caricatures of starfish and whales and a thousand other seafront motifs.

            At its tip the Pier widened into an octagonal platform.          

A corner of this was occupied by an ancient, bucketing merry-go-round whose animals consisted of fish, mermaids and sea monsters. In the middle of the space, occupying the bulk of it, stood a tall eight-sided building, unadorned save by a shining fretwork of brass and polish. This was the Zoetrope Theatre. It was surmounted by a high latticed wooden tower from which a blue light shone bright and clear as a flare on performance nights.

           All in all the Pier was a powerful place, in color and sound, and though Z. did not spend the time here he used to he occasionally dreamed of it, in shapes distorted by night and his own uncertainties and the occasional difficulty in sleeping.

           Z., carrying his box of slides, walked down the wooden midway. From booths, now and again, he could hear the fake bells and toots of penny games. Here and there a shape shimmered out of the mist, propped silent near a black line of fishing pole on the weathered balustrade, but otherwise there was little activity. The portrait artist fiddled with his crayons, waiting for business. The organ-grinder cranked. A couple of boys snapped conkers at each other. The caped fisherman who always stood alone near the pier head kept vigil by his line, the humidity condensing and dripping along the rim of his broad black hat. Candlepins crashed in the bowling alley, the calliope wheezed and quavered, Monomoy light hooted mournfully down the coast.

           Z. let himself into the theatre, went downstairs to the studio, placed the box of slides on the foreman's desk, climbed the stairs again, and disappeared back into the thickness of fog at this end of the Pier, noiseless as he had come, like a fish withdrawing its caudal fin from the surface, returning to the comfort of the depths.

           When Z. parked the jalopy in the field behind his house he sat there for a moment, not moving, listening to the engine idle. That ticking in the block was not, as he'd hoped, created by his imagination, or unfiltered fuel. He watched the hounds of mist chase each other through the snarls of bayberry and blackthorn.

           He put his hands over his eyes to shove back the hum of headache behind. This did not work. He got out, went to the workshop and spooned more coffee into the pot and five minutes later found himself staring out a window he had left open so long over the warmer months that the honeysuckle had grown through it and into a corner of his shop, taking over an entire rack of adzes and odd-sized clamps. His mind resonated with voices that would not come out of the clutter surrounding.

           He checked the barometer, which read 30.32 millibars—it had been steady for the last twenty-four hours.

           Finally he walked to the breezeway, removed the driftwood from his shoulderbag, put on his canvas coat and his floppy canvas hat and canvas seaboots. The boots slid on easily, pleasing his feet where the curves formed by use settled around bone and cartilage.

           Through the kitchen door he could hear the critter whining because it did not like being left alone for long periods, and the sounds it made seemed to Z. like a taproot leading to the first well of isolation and sadness. Although he would have liked to go into the kitchen to take some sausage and molasses loaf, he thought it would be cruel to get the critter's hopes up. Without going back in the house he climbed into the jalopy again and headed down the road that led alongside the marsh to the place you parked for the cove, and the south beach.

           Today he worked his way along the inside, western arm of the south beach peninsula. There a string of small islets, only sandbanks really, protected the southern tip of the Island, allowing in the grace of that defense the formation of a wide saltmarsh.

           He saw a gray heron flap off, trying to fly in the clumsy, risk-intensive way they had, desperately trading speed for height, cutting skid marks in the oiled water with its trailing feet. A seal barked on one of the islets. Fiddler crabs, opening trapdoors of mud as the receding tide uncovered them, ventured out of their burrows. Melamphus snails rappelled down the eelgrass to feed on diatom buffets in the flats.

           As he walked between the cattails and the mud Z. spotted a raccoon bent over like a fishwife groping for oysters in a tidal creek. The animal was deeply concentrated on hunting and did not see him until he was ten feet away.

           When it spotted Z. it froze. Its ears perked and its eyes, in their dark bandido mask, went wide and black with a mime's astonishment. It ducked behind a fringe of eelgrass for a minute; then its head appeared over the grass fifteen feet away from its original spot. Again it spotted Z., and again repeated the maneuver, ratcheting a little in its outrage, that an intruder could so disturb a raccoon's fishing; but, while the guignol aspect of the animal's behavior caused a small ripple of amusement in Z.'s gut—although it once would have kept him going for hours, light with the jolt of humor—today it seemed dull and small reward for his hard trudge through soft sand.

           Midway down the peninsula he cut across the dunes to the ocean beach, coming into the crunch of surf and the smell of spray near a trio of granite boulders a little bit north of the Doctor's hut. The old man was sitting in the porch of his construction, by a fire built in a hearth of beachstones. A teapot, so black and misshapen it looked more like some product of volcanic extrusion than a fruit of industry, boiled busily. An ugly crow stood on the keel of his house, sidling back and forth, making suspicious raaks, gazing sideways at the newcomer.

           "Orrr," the Doctor shouted, waving then subsiding into his initial hunched immobility as, his back to the great theatre of surf and white-crested breakers, he nursed the driftwood fire.

           "Raak," the crow said again.

           "Gettin' any?" Z. asked as he drew level; it was the usual form of address.

           "Tea?" the old man offered, holding up a tin mug that had come from the same volcano as the kettle. His eyes were not particularly bright but amid the brindled gorse of beard and windburn they appeared quite startling in their intensity.

           "Well," Z. began, "no—"

           "Raak," the crow repeated.

           "Off with ya then," the old man grunted. "You'll be findin' the 'mastor soon."

           Z. frowned. The Adamastor was a wreck that was supposed to be laden with jewels and magical machines and other assorted wealth of the kind everyone knew never had existed in reality. She had foundered in a gale in a time of historical fog between the Days Before and the First Days of the Island. People said the Adamastor came back just before the very worst of storms. They said if you saw her running lights it meant someone in your family would not survive the night.

           "I like your hat," the Doctor said.

           "I'll see you," Z. replied.

           "Raak," the crow observed.

           The tide, coming in fifty minutes later every day, was five feet lower on the shallow slope of berm than it had been this time yesterday so Z. walked lower along the beach, between the zone of water retention and the zone of water resurgence, his eyes sweeping like scanners for anything that might have come in on the last flood. Sand-hoppers popped and jittered in transparent fronts before him, and yellowlegs tiptoed back and forth in neurotic imitation of Z.'s           own beachworker's walk. Once, by the anvil-shaped dune opposite Hommedieu Shoal, Z. found a clump of brown nudibranches waving back and forth in the shallows of a small tidal creek. He stopped to cut a bunch with his rigging knife, because the tea of nudibranches was good for coughs and all aches north of the navel. Bending over the water-polished weed, the auburn color of the nudibranches suddenly reminded him, first of A.'s hair, which was of roughly the same color; then of her mother's; and then, in a connection that did not make much sense to him, the critter's fur, which was more ochre than this. Unexpectedly the sense of sadness he had felt for the critter flooded his chest again.

           He continued working, deliberately cutting links with those feelings as he sliced through the soft, waterbulging branches of weed, numbing both his fingers and his reactions in the water. He stowed the weed and resumed his march.

           After another half hour of walking Z.'s pace locked rhythm with his breathing and he felt his thoughts fading out of association into anonymity, a lack of reference, that resembled and might have been partially caused by the sea `fog and the underlying rhythm of the Cape Pogue horn. He passed the abandoned lifeboat station and finally came to the great clay-streaked cliff that marked the very end of the south beach peninsula. The tide was right. Making his way along the maze of sandbars, he waded into the cold water, and sloshed waist-high through the tug of ebb to a half-submerged ledge of sand that led him across the quarter-mile channel to No-Man's Land.

           He turned back to look and saw that the tip of the south beach had quite vanished in the fog.

           No-Man's Land was not big, but it had dunes and a little patch of clay in the center in which grew a tiny oak and white pine bosk that usually sheltered deer. Hunting season on the main Island lasted six months but even the hunters never got to this patch of land so far and so lost in such contorted shallows that few could get there with a boat and only Z., who had explored this beach since he was seven, and the Doctor, who lived here, knew how to cross the channel on foot.

           Also, there must have been fighting here in the Days Before because the folds and hollows of No-Man's Land concealed decaying mines and other explosives and this too kept the casual at arm's-length.

           Z. walked down the eastern side, tapping ahead of him with his beachstick so he could feel if anything hard was buried in the sand, walking fast to warm up, as his pants and jersey were wet from wading across the channel.

He was halfway around the tiny island, past the loom of the southern dunes, when he first spotted the boat.

           It showed up clearly, a big mark of black in the gathering of gray that passed for evening in this place, strong against the matte expanse of low-tide beach.

           He halted for a second, trying to make out its shape, looking to the side and above it in the old way to let the target garner form in the wings of focus. It was too big for flotsam, and there were corners to it that did not fit with his first impression, that it was a whale, a blackfish washed up on the flood as they sometimes did. Anyway the moon was neither full or new to confuse the navigation of the big fish.

           As he approached, the graceful shape of a stern counter sprang fully blown into his recognition; then the curve of a stem, a bowsprit, what was probably a Charlie Noble stovepipe formed out of the general bulk. At a certain point he got close enough for the intervening fog to pull back wholesale from his vision and he could stop and for the first time make out exactly what the different bits of pattern amounted to in unison.

           She was, or had been, a sloop, a fat, graceful thing maybe twenty-eight feet long, built of carvel planks with an old-fashioned counter stern, a long keel and a clipper bow. The bottom was painted arterial red, the topsides mallard green with a canary stripe below the bulwarks. The tall trunk cabin, pierced by a couple of small portholes of deep-set brass, was colored buff. Or that was how she must have been, gleaming in new paint and varnish; but the sea had taken her and played with her like a cat would its prey, snapping her mast, batting her around with huge green paws, combing out her spars and stormsails, gouging scratches in her brightwork, punching in two planks just aft of the trailing boards, scraping paint, covering everything with codium and sand and tangled lines and finally tossing her up, coated with a saliva of seafoam, on this beach once it tired of the sport.

           The old stories had it that the Island once built boats this big, and even ships, clipper ships with royals set so high you lost them in the fog; and those same stories told of a time when the men and women of the Island went south beyond the fogbanks to places where the sun shone all the time and cats big as horses lounged in the warmth; or northward, to lands where the sun never shone and people lived in houses of blue ice.

           But those were stories. No one here had ever seen a boat like this, not in a hundred years or more, not a seagoing boat, just Island skiffs and oysterbarges and wrecks too old and smashed to recognize.

           Despite or because of their history Islanders preserved a certain heart and stomach for boats of any kind and Z. found himself looking at this one with his head cocked in sympathy at the mess the sea had made of what must once have been a lovely and tough species of craft; something you could, conceivably, have sailed anywhere, had you the will and leave to do so.

           He approached her once more, cautiously. The wind stirred the lines hanging bedraggled from her taffrail and he saw no other movement. Her starboard side was canted up, toward him, propped on keel and port beam. He walked around the boat, to the port rail, which was dug into the slope of beach. Weeds, wrack and sand had silted up her cockpit. Fog steamed the stink of iodine and brine generally off her planks.

           He clambered up the canted deck to the cockpit. The cabin hatch was half open and he peered inside, discerning, in the light from a porthole, bilges awash in sullen water and bunks covered in detritus. He straightened up, looking along the line of her cabin roof. A movement caught his eye. It was on a gray dune that marked both the edge of his vision and the southeastern corner of the little island.

           As he focused, and watched, a head, a man's head, rose out of the light dune grass, sank back behind the furze, and then rose over the horizon line to check on him again, much as the raccoon had done when Z. disturbed it in its hunt for mussels.

 

Chapter Four

 

 

Far away to the north, the horn of the Cape Pogue lighthouse mooed softly to itself.

           Z. stared at the spot where the man's head had been.          

Despite the slight graininess from intervening fog Z. knew, by the type of movement and the way the head was set on the man's shoulders, that the apparition was human, not a raccoon or a seal, and even that it was a youngish man. He knew also, because this alien boat was here, that the stranger must be from off-Island, and this gut realization crept out to the wells and extremities of Z.'s body and filled them with awe, and a variety of dread.

           Off-Islanders showed up on the beach once or twice a year, but they never had sloops and they were always in the kind of shape the sloop was in, gummed over and half-digested by the sea, their flesh green and white, eyes pecked out by gulls, thrown up by the retching flood to lie as bare of breath as the hull he stood upon.

           The stories also told of times when off-Islanders came here frequently and in all manner of vessels to trade with the Island in carnival echo of the traffic now conducted by the Authority's ships. But these remained stories and Z., as far as he knew, had never seen an off-Islander, excepting only the men who manned the Authority ferries, who in any case were exceptions, distant forms without articulate language that had taken on, with familiarity and time, the iron majesty of the ships themselves; become part of the davits and scanners and winches; something vastly more, and less, than human.

           This shape (now jerkily peering at him again) was human however, and alive. Or so Z. fervently hoped because the drowned men he had seen on the beach had taken over the category in his mind reserved for strangers; and even now he found himself thinking that the body hiding behind the beachgrass might well be one of them, one of those corpses come mysteriously to life in some process of sea and evil whereby the bitter regret in a dead man might overcome and even exploit the process of decay; eyeless things of mauve-ish flesh walking around after death, inflicting their boring complaint upon the quick ...

           Z. swallowed. He forced himself to move. The head dropped out of sight again.

           The act of moving set the cells in Z.'s brain in motion as well. He told himself quite firmly that if corpses could wash ashore then it stood to reason live men could make it under better conditions, and after all the gale two days ago had not been bad, and this sloop was well-found, or had been once.

           He stepped off the hull and walked slowly, deliberately toward the dune, and up the steep slope, holding his stick in a manner halfway between walking implement and weapon, till he came over the ragged rise and saw, in a saucer of sand ringed by beachpea and spurge, the man lying half on his side, watching him with eyes that, far from being pecked out by gulls, were alive and inhabited by a panic somewhat greater than Z.'s own.

           Z. stood very still, breathing hard, his legs braced against the slope of dune. His wet canvas coat flapped around his boots.

           The stranger was extremely thin and wore pants, a shirt and workboots and nothing else. The shirt was torn and stained and bleached by salt. The boots had crinkled and warped under the chew of sea. The stranger's arms, ankles and face were weatherburned and so shrunken that the various tendons and bones stuck out in exaggerated fashion. As Z. watched, the elbow on which the stranger lay propped gave underneath him and he collapsed, falling silently backward into a fold of rust-stained sailcloth. He must have dragged the sail up to create a kind of shelter.

           The stranger did not move again. Z. thought now the bobbing up and down behind the grass might have been due not to caution but weakness, a constant fighting off of syncope. Slowly, cautiously, Z. came closer.

           The stranger's eyes were shut and he was breathing in an odd, shallow fashion that brought to a curl of Z.'s brain the complicated memory of A.'s mother in the week before her death. He kneeled over him, close enough to see the faint shiver that blurred the outline of his bones and fingers. He was very sick, Z. thought, and putting down his stick extended his own fingers toward the man's neck, an instinctive gesture to measure the head of life in him, and ascertain how much of it was left.

           Z.'s hand stopped in mid-gesture. He got to his feet abruptly. He thought that very sound and strict laws had been set up by the selectmen of the Authority to deal with situations like these should they ever arise.

           Every Islander was taught these rules from his first day in elementary school.

           The refugee was young, he realized, maybe A.'s age, or less even; hardly older than a boy.

           The sailcloth was not canvas but a smooth, slick man-made material rarely seen on the Island, stitched and reinforced with rope braided of the same stuff. Z. leaned sideways to see if the whole luff of the sail had been reinforced that way, and in an odd sort of progression the high and mounting curiosity he was experiencing regarding the sail, and the sloop, extended effortlessly over the ripples of fear and suspicion to include her last surviving crewmember.

           Curiosity, Z. knew of old, constituted the greatest single wellspring for the activities of any beachworker. It was a bizarre motivation, and resulted in a powerful if sometimes inchoate passion that drove those afflicted with it to walk endless hours on the poor chance of finding, around the next bend of beach or bluff, something novel and full of questions and the never-before-seen—objects suffused with names that sounded exotic even if their exact meaning had been lost—Hanjin, Antwerp, Camcorder—or at least a turn of rarity, a quirk in the commonplace, a bit of relative treasure that could be used or sold or traded and whose discovery provided the odd boost in income for those who worked the beach as Z. did.

           There weren't many of them who worked that way. Except for the warm months when the kids liked to swim, and excepting the quahog and oyster fishermen who stuck to the coves and bays, Islanders adopted a certain blindness toward the sea and the long shore, knowing all the time that it was protecting their backs but turning the front of their mind in-Island, toward hearth and those they knew and the affairs that wove links between them. Z. was aware of four others who worked the beach as consistently as he and none, excepting the Doctor, who did not count, ranged as far south.

           Z. found that he wanted to pick over the castaway like a piece of driftwood and see how he was different.

           And on another level he recalled now that off-Islanders who did not come in with the Authority were considered "refugees" and therefore dangerous to the safety and health of the Island. This was the regulation that had affected Dorian in Reavers: refugees were to be considered sick, contagious-of-soul and apt to do physical harm to those protected by the Island's fecund strand. If a refugee should ever come over the high-water mark it was against the selectmen's rules to talk to or touch or have any commerce whatsoever with him; except that news of the refugee and his or her whereabouts should be communicated at once either to the selectmen of the Authority or the Receiver of the Vice-Court of Admiralty at the Island courthouse. The penalties for contravening those rules were among the stiffest, right up there with wreck-stripping, oyster-poaching and wanton violence. The rules ran through Z.'s head, quite overwhelming the first excitement in him, the background roar of surf, and the faint hum of ache behind his forehead as he stared at the stranger still in the dimming sand below.

           The wind blew sand on the refugee's face and the cords of his cheek twitched. Z. stood, feeling the damp of night creep in from the sea.

           Could it do any harm to touch him? To turn him over merely, and check his pockets.

           There were other rules that punished willful damage to valuable flotsam belonging to other people. Z. knew from research on Reavers that the rules concerning husbanding of jetsam took up dozens of pages in the sea law that formed the basis of the Island's legal code.

           He might argue that the refugee belonged to all Islanders in trust; that the refugee was visibly ill and most likely dying. For Z. to leave him alone and uncared for would break one of the basic rules of salvage that every Islander knew were even older, and more of a piece with their tradition, than the selectmen's rules.

           Anyway, Z. thought, no one could possibly find out what really happened here.

           He stood very still, listening to the different impulses, fears, and desires within him find their own ken and voice, talk back and forth, accuse each other; the swing of discourse passing to one side then the other so fast, the babble rising to such a volume, that it made his head throb as badly as it had done at any time over the last month.

           Physical discomfort forced him to move at the end. Without coming to any decision one way or another he crouched out of the bite of wind and dumped the contents of his driftwood bag on the sand. He kneeled two or three feet away, trying to measure the boy's breath. Light had been draining from the fog like water from a tub, imperceptibly yet fast, and he could no longer make out the shift of movement communicated by the boy's lungs to the chest above.

           Eventually Z. stood up again, his knees cracking like pistols. He had settled on no particular idea but he moved anyway, treading on tufts of dunegrass so as not to disturb the remains of what ordnance might lie below the sand. Down the leeward side of the dune, following the sandy valley toward the center of the tiny island. Where the clay substrate began he found shadblow, bayberry bushes and cordgrass from which he cut dry leaves and branches with his rigging knife. He brought the dry bracken back to the saucer of dune and scooped out a small hollow a few feet downwind from the sailcloth shelter. He built up layers of grass and twig and then, working upward, thicker and thicker lengths of dry, teredo-riddled wood from his bag. Taking the wooden matches from his breast pocket, kneeling close to the stacked combustibles, he lit the grass and blew hard on the smoke and flame till he had a sweet controlled flame snapping yellow, orange, red in the tiny hearth.

           Using stones from the beach he built up a sheltering wall around the flames. Then, he left the shelter, and crossed the dunes again to the back of No-Man's Land. He followed a small creek down to the corner of marsh that had managed to form in the protecting curve of the little island. It was almost completely dark now and only a shimmer of light collected from the stars and magnified through different lenses of fog allowed him to see where he was going. Working by feel he picked a bunch of blue mussels and periwinkles. He dug four or five large quahogs from the muddy rim of marsh and stuffed them in the now-empty driftwood bag.

           On the landward side of the marsh he pulled up a row of cattails, cut off and cleaned their fibrous white roots, and added these to the bag. He dropped off his bag on the dune-top then walked down the ocean beach in the direction of a rusted can he recalled seeing earlier; it was not where he remembered and finding it again took him as much time as the rest of his scavenging. At last, tin in hand, he scraped out a deep hole in the intertidal zone until he got to the level where sand had filtered out most of the salt. He filled the can with brackish water collected in the hole and climbed back up the dune. He put the mussels, cockles, quahogs and cattail roots in the water together with bits of red samphire and the algae he'd collected earlier and set the lot to heat over the fire. When the mixture had cooked for half an hour he took it off the heat, let it cool, and tasted it. The broth was salty and sweet with the shellfish. The cattails had the proper turnipy flavor. He fished the meat from one of the mussels and chewed.

           Leaving the can by the fire, he went over to where the refugee lay in almost the same position as Z. had discovered him in.

           The refugee's eyes were dark. In the penumbra his body seemed to have grown planky and stiff as a three-hour-old codfish. Z. could not tell if he was alive, and suddenly a fear rose in him, that he had let this flotsam die while he was eating. He touched his shoulders and the castaway groaned and Z. pulled away from the shirt as if he'd been burned.

           In all the time he had been working the marsh, his eyes and fingers automatically coordinating to mine its small treasures, parts of Z.'s mind had been hooking together just as automatically, assembling a weight of thought built of elements as disparate as A.'s voice, the distance built into legal opinion, and Z.'s ancient shame at the fear he'd found below the deep pilings of the Authority's dock.

           Whatever the reason, it was only to connect two halves of an equation he already had largely constructed that Z. put his hand out again and shook the boy's thin shoulder. Z. refused to talk to him; in that at least he obeyed the rules. He grabbed a corner of the shirt and pulled harder, gesturing toward the fire; and the boy understood in some way because he tried to raise himself a little, rolled toward the small yellow flames, then dragged himself on his elbows until he was several inches nearer the source of warmth.

           Z. took the can of broth and placed it in front of him. The dance of flames transformed the boy's hollow face into a cavern of unquiet. He squirmed closer and smelled the strings of steam wafting out of the rusted container. He tried to sit up but could only lie like a broken reed, half sprawled across his own bent knees.

           Eventually Z. pulled him all the way upright and held the can for him while he drank. He pulled out the orange mussel-meats with his knife and fed them to the boy one by one and it was then, with the sweet brine simultaneously dribbling down his fingers and the boy's chin, that he fully understood how far he had gone in this.

           The boy lay back, exhausted. Z. covered him with the sailcloth and then hunched up himself, next to the fire, and thought about what he should do now. The tide was well on the flood by this time and he would have to wait till early morning to get back to south beach and the main island. Z. did not think the boy was in any state to see the difference between ghosts and reality or furnish any recognizable details if questioned. This meant he could go to the Receiver or the Selectmen and explain to them that he had gone farther than he meant to and missed the tide and, because of that, way out on the farthest tip of No-Man's Land, had stumbled upon the wrecked boat and the refugee; only of course he would not have touched or spoken to the boy, in the tale he told the officials.

           The wind sharpened. The volume and spume from the breakers' repetitious crash, boom, suck, grew against the windward side of the dune. The fire spat and flickered. Z. watched the play of colors inside its heart and thought, as he sometimes did when he was chilled and alone, that fire might possess the power of talk if you only could understand its pops and flaring.

           Twice Z. rose to haul up the sandy slope big logs of driftwood, which he pushed into the fire inch by inch as they were consumed. Once, when the wind shifted, he hauled the boy out of the smoke and closer to the flames on the windward side. Z. dozed against a clump of beachpea, his thick coat tight around him, the canvas hat jammed low over his ears. Sandfleas danced on the heated sand. At one point a log crashed asunder and woke him and he got to his feet, wrenching himself around the various aches in joints and muscles, and went to the leeward side to piss.

           When he came back to the hollow of dune he noticed the boy was lying farther away from the fire. The flames shone in the facets of his eyes as he looked at Z.

           "Narr," he said, or "Nor," it was hard to tell.

           Z. looked away. He sank against his hummock of dune and pulled the hat low over his eyes once more.

           "Boat," the boy whispered, and, more urgently, "my boat?"

           Z. shook his head.

           "I can't talk to you," he said after a long pause. "Not s'posed to."

           The boy gasped. Z. made the mistake of glancing at him. He had levered himself up on his elbow. Z. was shocked by the steel fear that seemed to spring from shadows in his gaunt features.

           "Then—" the boy said, and his chest rose up and down like the breast of a bird. "Still there!" The last words squawked out of him like a gull's complaint.

"Yes." Z. looked away again. "I just can't talk to you anymore."

           "They'll kill me," the refugee said. His voice was a bit stronger now, as if the hope that lay at the root of fear had gone, and nothing but hard certainty was left. "You know." He clutched at the sand with one hand.

           Z. grunted uncomfortably. He felt a sudden, urgent need to ask this boy questions, any number of questions, connected or not, and recognized it as the same impulse he felt when, coming on a piece of carved wood or molded steel, with spikes and rusted-out pieces of engineering protruding at weird angles to the whole, he turned it over and over in the light, trying to figure out how it had moved, the way it worked, how it was put together, where it fitted into the larger world beyond the horizon of mist and breakers.

           Instead Z. got up and refilled the can with water. When he returned the boy had sunk back into unconsciousness.

           Dawn seldom came to the Island except as a change in the relationship of fog to light, whereby the mist stopped shedding its radiance and instead started taking it in till it seemed to glow internally, like the phosphorescent noctiluca plankton that floated in the lagoon around this time of year.

           When the luminescence woke him Z. took another piss then stood on the crest of dune, looking at the wrecked sloop below, which had not shifted much in the intervening push of tide because she was already sucked firmly into the sand, slightly diagonal to the waves, at the level of the storm-surge. In another three months, or three hours of nor'easter, whichever came first, she would be buried like the schooners and steamers down-beach, with only a spear of stem or mast left above the level of the grasping sands to mark her grave.

           He had to leave soon, to make the low tide and get back to the main island. He collected a couple more pieces of log from the high-tide mark and dragged them to the dune hollow. He picked up the empty driftwood bag and slung it over one shoulder. He grasped the can in one hand and finally, not quite looking at the refugee, shook him by the arm till his eyes flew open.

            He uttered, "God, ah god," in waking.

           "Listen," Z. said. "Use this, to dig for water. Keep the fire going. You understand? The fire. Water." He sloshed the can's contents by way of illustration.

           The boy's face seemed all holes; eyes, mouth, cheeks. His hair was matted and the growth on his chin rapidly was achieving the length and fullness of a man's beard. Z. grunted impatiently.

           "Just stay here," he said. "Understand? I'll get people—people to help. Somehow." Still without looking directly at the refugee he stood and picked up his beachworking stick. "I'm not s'posed to talk to you," he muttered, "I'm not talking to you," and strode out of the hollow and down the dune toward the sloop.

           There were rules to think about here as well, complex and ancient laws relating to whether any boy, cat, dog or chicken was alive on the boat when she was wrecked, and if she grounded below the mean low-water-mark; but Z. had found the sloop floating persistently in his mind all though the restless night and he knew it was beyond his power to depart without some kind of salvage.

           He fished out one of his markers from a pocket in his bag—it was a length of wood, painted gray, cranberry-red and blue, with a long piece of marline attached, a code of color that had been Z.'s father's and his father's before that and which identified possession of flotsam to other Islanders. Then, thinking of the dubious legal status of all he had observed here, he dropped the marker back in his pocket.

           The sloop had never possessed much hardware. Z. removed two blocks that once must have guided the mainsail sheet. He cut off and coiled a good four fathoms of the synthetic line. In the depths of her little cabin he found hanging from the forward bulkhead a tarnished brass anchorlight that was as pretty a piece as he'd seen in years. A small repeating compass over the starboard bunk was deeply set into the deckhead and would require more tools to remove cleanly.

           Z. peered around the cabin for a minute. Despite the wrack and the poor lighting he could see this once had been a trim, neat place of clean oak frames and painted pinewood, each pencil and instrument in its proper slot.

           He felt a strong, deep urge to repair the hull and drag her off at the next spring tide, but of course that was pure fantasy and wholly impossible for a slew of reasons. The light coming in the porthole told him it was now ten or fifteen minutes past low water. He unfastened the anchor light and climbed off the sloop without further hesitation and started walking swiftly back toward the channel leading to the southern peninsula and home.

 

 

Chapter Five

 

 

He had walked halfway down the south beach and, in the dream state of his nervousness and fatigue, was watching buffleheads dive and surface when he spotted a jalopy jouncing goonily along the washboard pattern left on the long flats by receding tide.

When it got closer he saw it was the Town Volunteer Fire Department beach-rescue jalopy with G. hanging off the cab in the open, holding onto his helmet with one hand and the roof with the other, as each hard jounce projected him two inches in the air.

The jalopy geared down as it drew level; its wide tires made a fat hissing noise on the wet sand.

"Well, dammit boy," G. called, "we been lookin' all over for you."

The fire department's assistant chief was driving. He leaned out of his window with all the gravity of his great office. The Volunteer Fire Department was perhaps the single most important citizens' body on the Island, if you excluded the board of selectmen of the Steamship Authority which was made up of men from the Island but which, because of its realms of competence, could be fairly considered to be somewhat apart as well. "You all right?"

"I'm fine." Z. looked from one to the other of the men. "What's up?"

"You were reported missing," G. began, but the assistant chief leaned out a little farther and said, "Be quiet, I'll do this. Your daughter said you'd gone on the beach," he continued, and spat weightily on the sand. "You weren't back by nine last night so we went to look for you."

"Well," Z. said, "son-of-a-bitch."

"It's a waste of time," the assistant chief grumbled. "You know the selectmen already gave warnings about that, I mean going out on the beach after dark."

"Yeah."

"You gotta fill out a report."

"Well at least you're okay," said G., who had been a friend and ally of Z.'s since elementary school, even in conkers games.

"Might as well hop up," the assistant chief added, "I shoulda known it would come down to a buggy-ride," and without waiting for a reply began turning the jalopy in a slow circle back the way he'd come.

Z. clambered awkwardly on the back of the jalopy, which was nothing but a basic bed with balloon tires, a gasoline-powered pump, and a couple of surfboards for rescuing swimmers. Making sure his driftwood bag was secured around his shoulder and that the salvaged anchorlight was snug and deep enough inside its canvas folds that it wouldn't bounce out, he stood next to G. and hung on, one hand on his hat and the other on the roof-bracket.

The assistant chief worked up to speed and the jalopy galloped and bucked across the sand ridges and the breeze of their passage carved a channel through the fog that blew their hair back and made their eyes and nose run, forcing them to wipe the snot and tears on their sleeves; so that for a few minutes, in the body-memory of things he had done and enjoyed mostly when he was twelve or thereabouts, Z. forgot some of his more adult cares and preoccupations and took comfort in the small thrill of speed and, when the jalopy hit a particularly hard bump, the rarer joy of flight.

"I saw A.," G. yelled over the roar of engine and the rush of wind, "I wouldn't go see her fer awhile if I were you."

Z. nodded.

"I never seen anybody so mad," G. added. "You shoulda seen her, jeez she was dancin' she was so mad."

G. didn't like people to get angry. He was a slow thinker and parents and teachers had yelled at him when he was in school and he assumed everybody felt the same way about getting yelled at as he did.

"She din used to get mad like that," Z. shouted after a while, "I don't know what's got into her lately."

Z. had no idea how A. had found out he was not back from the beach. She must have stopped by his house again, he thought in wonder. For A. to stop by more than once a week was unusual. Twice in one day was unheard of.

The jalopy veered left into a path between the dunes that took them across the peninsula. The trail wound inshore of the saltmarsh and up a brushy hilly to the moors where it finally met the shore road. For a while on the open road the jalopy picked up speed and even G. could find nothing to say with his cheeks stuffed full of wind. Then, nearing the Agie Hall at the crossroads where State Road branched off down-Island toward Town, the jalopy stopped and the assistant-chief leaned from its cab.

"We'll drop you here," he said, "we don't have more time to waste, runnin' you into the village."

Z. climbed down, keeping the driftwood bag tight against his thigh. The assistant chief withdrew into the cab and rummaged under his seat for awhile before leaning back out with a slightly wrinkled piece of paper clutched in one fat fist.

"Here, take this," he told Z., "fill it out an' sign it. You can drop it off at the firehouse, the courthouse, or the selectmen's office."

Z. took the paper and folded it. The chief watched him without approval.

"Next time, don' go out at night. An' if you do, you tell somebody."

"I got caught, is all."

"Yeah." The jalopy revved and moved, turning in a wide swing around the junction. "Don't forget that report."

"Hey, boy!" G. yelled, waving his helmet as he and the jalopy lost size in the distance. "Hooo, boy!"

Z. walked half the mile separating the crossroads from the village before getting picked up by a jalopy full of quahoggers from Sherburne who drove so fast their car was bashed sideways and everyway by frostheaves.

They dropped him off in front of the post office. There Z. hesitated, weighing the uncertain masses in his chest and bag against a certain reluctance to return to the normal shades and patterns of his house, his day, his work. Eventually, making sure the bag was still closed, he walked up the steps to the little white-painted cottage with the SSA pennant flying on a small pole out front and the sign that read Steamship Authority Mailings; Schedules and Parcel-Post, and pushed open the door.

Inside, the postmistress looked up in a cheery attentiveness that always lay just this side of inquisition. She had a pleasant face with slanted bright eyes and long black hair always fastened in an oily braid. Behind her the selectmen's notices blew in the breeze his entry had made; "Penalties for Quahog-fishing Infractions," one of them read, "(Rules of Wisby, para. 97); the Selectmen hereby declare the following prohibitions ..."

A short woman who lived with one of the longshoremen and enjoyed the status of it looked around in the act of licking a stamp and refused to acknowledge him.

"Well," the postmistress said, "You're here! You know half the fire department was out looking for you last night?"

Z. stared at her. He had nothing against the postmistress normally, he did not even mind her nosiness since every postmistress he had ever known was too familiar with everybody's news and too weak to avoid entirely the power that went with that. Today however he felt somewhat abraded by the assistant chief and tired anyway by his night on the dunes and suddenly, in the implied demand the postmistress made, that he should explain his whereabouts to her; in the nervous, cool gaze of the longshoreman's girlfriend; in the newly resurgent sense that, by long-ago right, the beach south of Naushon was his to visit when and how he chose; he found a well of refusal pooling inside him, damming access to people, pushing him back to the solitary comforts of which he had a minute ago felt un-enamored.

"Yeah," he mumbled tiredly, "I know," and walking to the rows of brass-fronted post-boxes, took out the single letter that was his mail.

"His daughter was frantic," the postmistress told the longshoreman's girlfriend.

 "I keep telling 'em," the girlfriend replied, "they shouldn't let just anybody on that beach, you never know who might get hurt, like those kids skatin' on the ponds in winter, the fire department tests 'em."

When Z. walked in the breezeway entrance of his cottage he found that the encounter at the post office continued to elevate home somewhat higher in his regard than it had been. The hangover of night and beach and the strange events he had witnessed and in which he had even participated already had receded a bit, as if diluted by the banality of the post office. He hung up his driftwood bag and the line he'd salvaged from the sloop. Then, remembering, he took the anchor light from his driftwood bag, turning it in his hand, liking the round weight, the cool smoothness of the metal.

When he opened the kitchen door the critter was alternately rolling on the planks and then standing up on its short hind legs to mark its great pleasure at having company again. It churred without stop, a sound like a miniature bullgine of two-stroke gears and rattles. Z. chucked it behind the ears and then forked pickled pogies from the jar in the pantry into the critter's dish. The animal ignored its food and continued churring, rolling and standing as close to Z. as possible. Z. noted that it didn't seem to favor its wounded leg anymore. This further warmed the concept of home for Z. this particular morning.

Realizing he'd left the anchor light standing in full view on the kitchen table he picked it up, and looked around for a good hiding place. He'd not had to hide anything here since putting away sharp tools and swallow-able objects when A. was young. Finally he stashed it in the larder among the subtle shine of yellow bell peppers and orange peaches that the woman had laid up for him in the late summer.

He found the woodstove burned down to cool embers and had to use maple kindling to whip flame once more from its ashes. He went into the sitting room, keeping the critter out with one foot. His eyes moved automatically and with light affection down the rows of books, on tools and wood and pigments and woodworking and drafting, that lined the blue-painted shelves. A compound of edgy feelings made him realize that, on top of the doubts and fatigue of the last twelve hours, he was hungry.

Back in the kitchen he cut up the molasses loaf, which had hardened somewhat overnight, and slathered it with butter. He checked the icebox, expecting emptiness; he found instead that the kid from Hythe Dairy must have come by and stocked the racks with pints of goats' milk, fresh cream and two boxes of eggs. A box under the sink contained a handful of not quite rotten mushrooms from a forest expedition around the time the woman was canning. He washed and cut up the mushrooms and dumped them into a cast-iron skillet with a lump of butter and put the skillet on the woodstove. He jiggled the logs and flames into greater heat and added three eggs and cream. When the mixture was ready he dumped it steaming onto the molasses bread, poured himself coffee and ate eagerly, more than usually happy with the distinctive meaty taste of the Hythe Dairy eggs. The eggs reminded him of a story his father used to tell about Zebediah, the mythical pilot and schooner skipper who was supposed to have lived on the Island in the Times Before. Zebediah was known for his expertise in finding position by stars and currents, and leadline—the long rope, measured off in fathoms by cloth and leather markers, with a plug of cored lead to weigh down the whole. You used the leadline by throwing it overboard till the weight touched bottom, measuring depth by the line and seeing what kind of bottom it was by what got stuck in the plug's tallowed core. It was said Zebediah could tell where he was anywhere on the coast by tasting what came up in the core. Once his mate tried to fool him, by taking chicken shit from the farm of an old widow who lived near Alewife Pond, and salting the bottom of the weight with it. Zebediah sniffed the chickenshit, then tasted it and an expression of panic spread across his features. "Luff up, boys, luff up," he yelled, "there's somethin' awful wrong! We're smack in the middle of widow Bearse's chicken yard on Alewife Pond!"

Z. was wiping his pan with the last of the molasses bread when he heard a knock on the breezeway door. He waited expectantly but no one entered. Finally he walked over and opened the door and found the selectman, F., standing on the lintel before him.

It was so odd to find someone on the doorstep who did not know him well enough to enter without knocking that Z. said nothing, simply taking in F.'s features and putting them together with rough labels of name, role, the house he lived in on North Street, in town. At length the courtesy his parents had taught him reasserted itself. He stood out of the way, mumbling after F.'s name the usual terms of greeting.

F. was tall, with oversized mouth and eyes that goggled in a manner that was friendly rather than aggressive. He had a way of walking that put his hipbones a couple of inches ahead of the rest of him in a fashion made for settling hands on. His hair was yellow like old dandelions. He walked into the kitchen, surveying the little room, his well-cut longcoat making little draughts of dust in the corners, seeming to fill half of it with his air of surety, and at length he put his hands where they wanted to go.

Z. looked at him curiously. The selectman was standing next to the empty kitchen table. Only at that moment did the memory of what had been standing on that table a short while ago pull back to mind the possible, even likely reasons for the selectman's visit.

As far as Z. knew for sure F. had been here once before, or more precisely in the yard, at campaign time, conscientiously handing flyers and posters over the picket fence while he looked elsewhere for voters.

It would be wrong to say that Z. was frightened by the selectman's presence, for the links between F. and what had gone before seemed so stretched by intervening time, by fatigue and isolation, by the overall extraordinary nature of the shipwreck Z. had discovered on No-Man's Land, that it overtaxed his imagination to think of direct connection, or such immediate follow-up.

Yet in some part of his mind the laws existed, and they dwelled in proximity with the memory of the boy fetched up sick against the shining wall of dune and breakers and beach; with the fault Z. had committed, amid the exhaustion of his night and the sea-cursed curiosity of a beachworker, by addressing words, though of emergency and kindness, to a refugee, while the mist went silver with dawn. And in the part of him he'd thought was filled by eggs and bread and dark coffee he found a pocket still open where nerves could spark and twaddle and fool a bit with the smooth connections between his words.

"So—anyway. Would you like some, uh, coffee?"

"No thank you, Z.," the selectman replied politely.

"You—" Z. raked around his words and found he was all at once, and for no real reason, thinking like the kid who had jumped off the Steamship Authority dolphins in flagrant violation of selectmen's rules; and he drew himself straighter, in the hope and belief that sailing close to the wind did not count and could not count like going dead against it, no matter how harsh the current, or the relevant court.

The penalties of Admiralty law were odd and unclear, the associated trials notoriously tortuous. In any event no punishment had been meted out under the refugee bylaws for as long as anyone could remember.

Z. cleared his throat and said, "You must want the report? The one—the assistant fire chief—" he gave up. It was in his driftwood bag, next to the braided nylon line he'd got off the sloop. He should have hidden the line, not hung it up. Z. felt his hands grow hot. He sheltered them in his pockets, wiping off sweat on the lining. This was ridiculous, he thought.

The selectman sighed. He turned to the window, gazing out at the planes of honeysuckle, pines and fog.

"It's a nice view, Z."

"Yes."

"I haven't been here since your wife—she, er, hosted a meeting once, during hustings. It was my first campaign. You were out beachworking, I think."

Z. thought back. A.'s mother's sister had married a school-board member. She had asked Z.'s wife to hold an election party, three or four years before A. died.

"You want some molasses bread?"

"No, thank you."

"I haven't filled it out yet. The report, I mean."

The selectman turned away from the window. The insubstantial light, accumulating against his broad back, built up enough to give him real blackness against the panes of glass. He took one hand off his hip and wiped his brow with it, though the kitchen was not hot.

"Don't worry about the report."

Z. grunted.

"I'm sure the assistant chief hammered it into you but you can take your time."

"I let the tide catch me," Z. said. "I was on one of the little islands, in the marsh."

"People think we only want to bust 'em," the selectman said in a quiet voice. "The quahoggers, beachworkers, the oystermen."

Z. grunted once more.

"Of course the rules are important. But we worry, you know. We have human concerns, even in the selectmen's office." F. grinned: a practiced grin, Z. thought, yet it worked. Z. automatically felt more friendly toward the man as soon as it registered.

"Islanders have to look out for one another," he continued, "it comes with living out here, among the shoals. One of us gets lost, and all of us are a little lost. I told your friend," he went on, mentioning the woman's name. "She stopped by to find out if you were okay."

Was it the grin, Z. thought, that made F. so attractive to women?

"I was never in any trouble," Z. said softly. "I only had to wait for low tide again."

"What was the island?"

"Muskeget."

Muskeget was not really an island, the way No-Man's Land was; just an overgrown sandbar, well in the shelter of the saltmarsh, that was dry except during spring tides. Z. did not know for sure why he lied, he was not in the habit of guilt or deception. The fact that both nouns realistically could be used to describe his behavior now did not change another, greater, truth, which was that, because it was not a continuing part of his long-term rhythms, a short excursion into legal problems did not result in Z. thinking of himself as a mooncusser or reaver or wreckstripper or any of the other criminal categories of the coast.

"Just wanted to check," F. said gently, "make sure you weren't hurt."

"Goes with the job," he added.

They stood in silence for a moment, the tall, heavy selectman framed by light and the thin, stooped beachworker illuminated by it. Z. felt a slight warming above the molasses bread and omelet. He was feeling better disposed toward F., prepared to consider the possibility that he had come more in help than retribution. The selectman moved first, taking his second hand off his hip to check the sit of his coat.

"Is there anything else, Z.? Anything I can do. Anything, while I'm here, you need. You only have to ask, you know."

"I'm okay. Thanks."

"Your wife was a good friend—a good wife to you."

"Uh huh."

The selectman nodded.

"We don't always have the quality of communication we want with the Village." He pronounced "Village" with a certain caution and a capital "V," the way it appeared on Town documents. Everyone called it "the village" although its real name, the name on the old charts, was "Hythe." "We don't always see you enough. Up-Islanders."

Z. nodded, not sure what F. was getting at, wanting only to indicate a general dearth of contradiction plus some gratitude for F.'s lack of criticism. The selectman drew his breath in quickly, in the manner of one wrapping up business.

"Well, that's fine, then. The report—"

Z. looked at him.

"Take your time, take your time. People get too wound up in paperwork. The main thing is, you're okay."

The selectman went out the way he'd come. Z. followed him but as far as he could tell F. did not notice the coils of braided nylon line hanging beside the driftwood bag in the deep shadow of the breezeway.

 

 

Chapter Six

 

 

Once the juddering of F.'s jalopy had dwindled down the village lane Z. went back into the kitchen. In his residual nervousness he cleaned up the dishes, swept the floor and re-arranged kindling in the woodbox. He checked the barometer, which was still holding at 30.32. He told himself the nerves came from not being used to dealing with selectmen and this was largely the truth.

 He opened the letter, which held daybox deadlines for the next Zoetrope productions, to be entitled Diggers Dark Suspicion.

He took the schedules to the workshop, lit the lamps, and stared at the clean expanse of varnished mahogany and the row of pens and pigment jars shining discreetly in ochre light and shadowed shelves, without feeling the slightest tinge of professional excitement or pride or even obligation. He spiked the daybox schedules on a nail over the shelves of pigment, where he could easily read the next deadline he must work to.

 He lit the lamp over the woodworking part of his shop and admired the other, similar spread of workspace that filled one side of the old horse stall. He took down a couple of chisels, one a quarter-inch, one three-sixteenths, from the rack they hung in and found the right thrill of sharpness and catch when he tested their edges against the pad of his thumb.

He replaced the chisels in their appointed slots and gazed at his carving desk once more. Then, still moving slowly and in no determined fashion, he turned to what once had been a feed cupboard and opened its heavy wooden door. The gloom within contained odd rectangular forms covered with linen cloths occasionally disturbed by egregious protruberances on the vertical. For a moment Z. looked at the dark outlines. He reached inside and, carefully grasping one with both hands, removed it from the cupboard and placed it on the clean bench, still covered in its protective cloth. He repeated the maneuver with two others, lining them up in a row. Finally he pulled off the covers and looked quietly and for some time at what had been concealed beneath.

They were dioramas, with miniature backdrops and props and actors creating a mouse-sized environment in three dimensions; tiny enclosed scenes from a private theatre. In each, three panels and one floor of painted hardwood enclosed a corner of world. Roof and front only were left open, that the action might be viewed from top and side.

The portion of world thus exposed was characterized by a very particular fixing in time and space.

In the first a woman, carved with utmost care from applewood, stood in the embrace of a long bed of flowers made of cloth and wire, stooping over an open bloom on a long green stalk while a butterfly hovered over another and a crow snickered in a dead pine above.

The second diorama contained a wooden man dressed in beachworker clothes of real canvas who stood, halfway down a stretch of well-picked beach, in much the same position as the woman had in relation to her flowers. To the back and side of him breakers rolled out of sea and sky and onto the lower strand. The man looked like Z. in stance and ranginess of frame but his nose was less pronounced and he was more even and good-looking generally. Like the woman, he stooped. Before him on the sand lay a tiny wooden chest.

The colors of the dioramas were very bright; more so, perhaps, than their natural counterparts would be. The flowers in the woman's garden bore startling splotches of deep red and orange. The bloom she bent to pick was bright yellow with a navy blue center.

Sparkling silver dominated the beach on which the beachworker stood; his clothes were of matte green and tiny dots of pink marked his wind-burned cheeks. In this scene the concentration of most vivid color lay in the box he bent over, which was a rich chestnut in tone, with bright golden hasps and hinges and bands of corroded brass encircling the whole.

In the third diorama, the graceful bow of a large schooner was thrust against a crack of tortured waters. One of its two remaining masts was caught in the act of tumbling into the backwash while great gray-green breakers tore at the crumbled stern. The broken ship gleamed a rich ebony, with a scarlet slash of paint at her waterline. A man, clinging to the broken rigging, was pulled inexorably downward, into the surge of waves.

Only this diorama was unfinished. A corner of the beach lay unprotected by glued quartzite sand. A slot existed to hold the mortise of some wooden presence on the beach, a wreck, another man perhaps; the hole remained unfilled, the presence undemonstrated. Each diorama was only sixteen inches long, and the figures inside them ranged from six inches high for the man and woman, to five-sixteenths for the heckling crow.

After looking for several minutes at the dioramas Z. leaned over, much as the man was doing, and pulled out a drawer concealed in the thick teak forming the base of the wreck scene. The drawer was hollowed exactly to hold a quarter pound of very fine sand that accumulated in the sump of it and could be let out by turning a tiny lever in a small cock in the bottom. Z. lifted the whole drawer over the top of the diorama, fitted the cock into a valve concealed in the rear panel, drained the sand, and flicked a catch.

Inside the concealed workings of the scene, the sand trickled as through the neck of an hourglass; its weight and momentum drove a thin wheel that in turn moved other gears and wheels; and suddenly the diorama began to move, for all the wooden designs and figures inside it had been carved and hollowed to the point where they had almost no weight at all and could be rocked on the hinges they stood on by the smallest push on levers concealed beneath. The waves surged, crashed, subsided, of a piece on the ship's taffrail. The bow juddered and cracked on hard sand; the mast tilted, almost fell, and repeated that arc; the man in the surf waved his arms three times and disappeared through an invisible slot in the swirling torrent around him, then surfaced to repeat his desperate semaphore.

Z. drove air from his nostrils, unconsciously imitating F. the selectman, but in amusement, for the sight of these tiny figures replicating adult life always created in him the approximation of a joke. He watched with great attention as the sand flowed out and the movement wound down. Once the ship diorama had gone still he took a cloth and polished dust off the corners of the various scenes.

 He could hear the critter scratching at the breezeway door. He realized then that he had not seen the animal for some time. He could not recall its presence since the selectman had walked in, and he wondered at this a little, since the critter was normally gregarious.

 Z. replaced the dioramas, re-arranged the dustcloths over each, and closed the door on his work. He went outside, and realized the jalopy was still at the marsh where he had left it. He walked down the trail to fetch it.

 When he got back he filled the woodbox in the barn but did not stoke up the fire. He returned to the main house and let the critter out in the yard for awhile and sat at the kitchen table while the critter hopped around the windows churring to come back in. He looked at the report the assistant fire chief had given him. It was printed on stiff linen paper with the big Authority symbol printed in blue with grand-looking serifs and scrolls from the rickety hot-type machines at the Gazette office that did all of the Island's printing. "Report on Emergency, Mortmain and Cases of Salvage: Registration of Flotsam, Jetsam and Lagan," it read in black ranks of Bodoni underneath. He tried to read it but found the effort immediately pulled from the cellar of his head the ache that until now had been lying, if not entirely doggo, at least quiet and polite over the last twenty minutes or so.

The squares of window changed qualities of gray, from opal to moleskin to ash to slate; then, bringing in tones of teal as the angle of light in the atmosphere above the Island altered in the slow villanelle of evening, went taupe, purple-gray, and finally lost entirely their hum of radiation.

Z. sat in what they used to call the "Aunt's chair," the deep armchair of his sitting room with his father's iron lamp shining softly in the gloom. He got up once to stoke the stove, and once to let in the critter and feed it dinner. He looked over last week's Gazette, which was full of news and high-minded editorials concerning a fight in the Oysterbar between drunken and unhygienic quahoggers. He switched on the radio whose speakers and batteries took up part of the bookshelf and waited as the machine warmed and glowed and came to life; and the suddenly charged blood of wires and current began to create sound, summoning from the depths of the bakelite a smell of cooked insulation and faraway voices in tongues that never seemed to get beyond the magnetic anomaly this Island lay beside; and, much closer to home, the Island radio station, with its jocular voices that never seemed to belong to the faces you saw attached to them at Store or 'trope or post office. The nightly rundown of fish prices at the Sherburne auction, the Steamship Authority report that listed delays due to weather or mechanical failure as well as the amount of cargo space filled on passages in.

Z. was not hungry. His headache was not worse. He took out from his shelves a thin volume on the boiling and refining of pitch-pine resin and alcohol to make an un-crackable varnish and found that while the reading did not seem to affect his headache much, he was not much interested. The critter finally clawed open the latch of the sitting room door and clambered its way up the thoroughly ripped upholstery of the chair to Z.'s lap; there, quite pleased with itself, it plumped down on his crotch and began licking paws which it immediately used to polish its black whiskers.

 "Hey! Where you goin'?" the radio sang, "We're going to Johnson's claaam-bar; 'cause that's where the tastiest claaams are. Johnson's—on the Pier! In Sherburne Port"

Z. sighed, and scratched the critter's ears. On a shelf of the bookcase, a life-sized doll's head of synthetic material that he had found near Dead Neck stared at him with its weighted, china-blue eyes. He had brought the doll's head home years ago, intending to fit a body to it for A., but had never got around to it. The doll's stringy artificial hair was still matted with seaweed.

He wondered vaguely why the events of the previous night did not take up more of his thoughts. He could sense what had happened; the discovery of the boat, then the boy, and the strange windswept time guarding the dune; all of it was silting up in the gray passages, as mud swirling from the marsh would accumulate calmly in a crook of sandbar, tricky to walk on and bad for scalloping but not a problem if you left it alone.

            "Wind southwesterly at seven to ten knots, veering westerly toward dawn," the radio announced. "Seas four to five feet up-Island, visibility one-eighth of a mile in haze, down to a hundred yards towards dawn." Then they transmitted music, a lilting syncopated song by the Jug Band in which T. sometimes played bullfiddle, recorded live in the Oysterbar where he had not met A.. The wind outside picked up a little, died down, and an owl hooted north on the South Hummocks and was answered, in the far distance, by another.