Then what?
Okay, enough of philosophy. This is a crime story; the publisher, who thinks I can write and occasionally commissions something specific, is into crime now. He is a moral man, but there is an off side to his goody-goody character and just to titillate himself, and his goody-goody readers, he told me he wanted me to write some real bad stuff this time.
“Like true crime?”
“Not too true,” the publisher said.
He is usually here for the summer. In wintertime, bothersome folks leave us in peace. They think we have weather here. Sure, we do have weather, very nice weather, too. Ice, sleet, freezing rain, blizzards, sea fog drifting in from the ocean, and very clear days when the water is almost unbearably blue, the chickadees are singing, and Priscilla has her big-bellied stove going and we all toss in maple logs, and beech, and oak, and apple-tree logs even, and have to peel ourselves out of our layers of jerseys and sheepskin vests and the younger women show their cleavages again. We exhibit some musical talents. Ex-Harvard graduate lobster-man Tom Tipper on keyboards; I work my snare drum and a minimal set of cymbals; and Doc Shanigan plays weird but acceptable bass. Priscilla plays trumpet. Usually softly, intricately, setting a theme and then improvising in unexpected ways, with us right behind her. One wouldn’t expect that a huge woman could be subtle. Sheriff hums, his wife Dolly sings scat.
Yes, crime stories. I know.
Bad stuff happens in picturesque Downeast Maine?
Define “bad.” You mean involving “blood and gore”?
Let me describe, for your amusement, in as much detail as strictly needed, some recent local tales incorporating blood and gore, perhaps, on occasion, even featuring me as a player. No confession on my part — please. None of this never happened. When pressed by the authorities, such as they are, I will suddenly know nothing. The double negatives used are correct language here, due to the many French-speaking folks in northern Maine, although right here, in Down East, we generally try to speak one of the many brands of English.
“Down” indicates that boats, when helpless due to torn sails or a gummed-up engine, are pushed by the prevailing winds to the lower east. Our clear blue sea hides razor-sharp cliffs, surrounded, right now, by ice floes rubbing each other with a silver sound. Some cliffs are pedestals to bizarre shapes sometimes. Right in front of Big Bitch Island you’ll see a rock formation that looks, from a certain angle, like a giant mother Labrador, howling at the moon. Her tits are swollen and two puppies gambol between her feet. Little Bitch Island just shows one puppy.
There is true danger down here. Freak high tides flood anchored boats, low tides make them rip their bottoms on gravel or bottom ice. Our powerful currents — well, you just can’t figure them out, they change at will. We have sudden strong wind falls, called “cat’s paws,” that tear at boats. If a vessel collects heavy snow on her superstructure she is likely to flip. Happens every winter a few times, always at night, and tends to annoy the insurance people, who tell us that their statistics show that snow-flipped boats are always old and only recently covered.
Yes sir, we love to suffer all kinds of impolite weather that the forecast fools forget to tell us about.
Down East is littered with sunken wrecks, hiding, waiting, desperately looking for company. Torn up themselves, they want to share their fate. Dead cargo boats from yesteryear, nineteenth-century tea clippers, hundred-year-old ferry boats out of Boston are marked on the charts with deadly crosses, but wrecks shift, and they stick you with a sharp mast, or throttle your boat inside their ribs sticking up from the slime.
“One dark, stormy winter night, driven toward an inhospitable coast, a cargo of chained young noblewomen prayed for mercy.” That’s one way seafaring crime tales like to start off. But our crime tale #1 started off on a bright winter morning. Everything was just right, until Elizabeth spotted the bleeding chair on top of a huge floating navigation marker. The sea, supporting this horror, except for slowly swirling currents and just a touch of ocean swell, was calm.
We were enjoying a day of Indian summer that warms our coast for a week or so that time of the year. We had stripped down to our long silk underwear, which looked good on my stern man. The dog Tillie preferred to melt close to the You Too cabin’s kerosene stove. Our shouts brought the little mongrel out reluctantly.
Tillie sniffed, then barked. “Fresh meat?”
She looks cute, but a dog is basically a wolf. She was soon scratching the gunwale, wanting to climb the marker and lick the blood off the chair.
We are lucky here. While the rest of the coast freezes up, Bunkport bay and harbor, and the sea around Bitch, Little Bitch, Shanigan, Squid, Snutty Nose, and Evergreen islands stays fairly liquid. There must be quite a few sea-bottom wells here, spouting hot water. I came close to one while diving for scallops and nearly got burned. And tell you what: I was sure that I was seeing big pink toothy worms down there, twisting toward me. The fear made me come up fast, contracting a case of the bends on the way, a diver’s affliction that can be fatal. Doc “Fastbuck Freddie” Shanigan flew me to Bangor and the treatment out there cost me a handful in copay, in spite of my veteran’s insurance.
Bad days, good days. The day I took Elizabeth out was perfect. Good-tempered harbor seals grunted at us from their rocks and herring gulls swished their wings as they came down behind us, assuming we were out fishing and wanting to share our catch.
Elizabeth kept pointing at the top of the buoy.
We were looking up at a giant marker, a channel buoy just off Bitch Island, a steel monster painted in garish colors. It comes with radar reflectors, a gong, lights that switch on at sunset — an impressive gadget at all times — and it was carrying a big easy chair, securely fastened by thin lobster-trap lines. Getting the chair up on a twenty-foot-tall buoy must have taken some doing. Elizabeth climbed the structure and shouted down that the chair appeared to be riddled by what could only be bullets. Bullets that hit their mark, for each hole was red-ringed.
Elizabeth, who usually doesn’t use language, shouting down at me now, used language.
“Beeping blood.” She tweaked her nostrils to keep the smell out. “Beeping feces.”
She was right. Beeping human fluids, for sure.
She climbed down, her silk bodysuit showing off her long legs, slender torso, and rippling muscles (she likes rock-wall climbing, and yoga, and that Chinese movement deal where you don’t move much but it generates lack of interest in selfish worries). She jumped into my boat, the You Too, and blew the stench out of her nose. She reported.
Whoever had sat in that chair, and got drilled by bullets, was tied down with strong ropes, bits and pieces of which were still there. Most likely the ropes were cut, when subject was dead, to allow the corpse to slide into the Atlantic. A human corpse, Elizabeth guessed. She didn’t think anybody, using block and tackle (for only apes and Tarzans could have lifted the object that high), had hauled a porpoise or a seal up there.
Like you, the puzzling reader, we tried to recreate a situation. We weren’t sure. We weren’t there when it happened.
“We” was me and my stern man. The stern man, this time, was a woman, but we don’t use the term “stern person” down here. We don’t talk politically correct much, either. “Stern man” it is, whatever the gender. Regular good-old-boys, gay people, a beautiful city-lady like Elizabeth, a teener going out on a first try, your grandpa, you; stern men they all are if they back up the captain. I, for as long as I am in charge of the vessel, am known as Skip.