“See there?” Toby gestured at a small, blunt-nosed sailboat bobbing a short distance from the end of the pier. “That’s her. Northern Sky. Know anything about boats?”
I blinked into the splintered blue-and-gold light. “No.”
“She’s what they call a gaff cutter. Twenty-six feet on the waterline. I bought her twenty years ago for a dollar, from the ex-wife of a guy in jail down in the Keys. You know the two happiest days of a man’s life? The day he buys his boat and the day he sells her.”
Out here the dank reek of the harbor was gone. The air smelled of salt and wet rock, with a faint undertone of diesel fumes. I shaded my eyes and looked for other boats.
“Are you the only boat out here?”
“The only sailboat, this time of year. There’s a few lobster boats. Bugs migrate to deeper water in the winter, so it slows down about now. In the summer there’s a bunch of people here—yachts, windjammers. But you want to get off the islands in a hurry, you need a power boat. That way you can catch your flight back to Florida.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Toby laughed. “Oh, it’s not that bad. Not nowadays. Fifty or a hundred years ago, then that would be bad, I guess.”
“What the hell do people do out there?” I squinted at the islands. “Besides fish. I mean, what do you do?”
“I go back and forth. Bring supplies out to the islands. I’m a carpenter, and I do heating systems. There’s a lot of rich people around. Summer people. Used to be everyone left after Labor Day. Now some of ‘em stay on till Thanksgiving, but they don’t winter over. Summer people, I mean. Islanders live here all year round. But they don’t need me to do their work for ‘em.”
He rested the oars and lit a cigarette, cupping his hands against the spray. “Aphrodite, I’ve done some work for her.”
“How long you been here?”
Toby exhaled a plume of blue smoke. “I came in 1972. Used to be a commune out on Paswegas, it was pretty well known back then. I came and hung out there awhile, ended up staying.”
“A commune? How long did it last?”
“Not that long. Few years.”
I zipped my leather jacket, shivering. “I wouldn’t last a week.”
“People been living on these islands a long time,” Toby said mildly. “The Micmacs were here for thousands of years. But no, that commune didn’t last long. None of them ever do. I guess that’s why they decided to rename it an artist’s colony. That was more successful. For a little while, anyway. That’s why they call it Burnout Harbor.”
I made a face, and Toby said, “Hey, I’m surprised you didn’t know about that. If you’re coming to see Aphrodite, I mean. She kind of started the whole commune thing, her and her friends.”
He fell silent, smoking and staring with narrowed eyes across the reach of blue water. Finally he said, “That’s what brought a lot of folks here. People from away. Back-to-the-landers. That’s why I came, actually. I studied at the Apprenticeshop, boatbuilding, but a lot of the folks I met then, they were real hippies. There was a lot of communal-type living going on. A lot of runaways. College dropouts. Kids from Boston and New York. Even kids from California. Some from around here. They wanted to, I don’t know what—build their own yurts? Raise goats? Whereas Aphrodite was more into art and, well, kind of a spiritual thing, I guess you’d say. Oakwind, that’s what she named the commune. That’s when I first met her.”
“Wasn’t she kind of old for the whole hippie scene?”
Toby frowned. “Well, no, I don’t think so. And she was really goodlooking back then.”
I did the math in my head: Kamestos was born in 1936, so…
“Well, okay,” I conceded.
“There were a lot of artists.” Toby took a final drag on his cigarette then began to row again in earnest. “A few photographers. Couple of writer types who were friends of her husband; one of them stayed on. Everyone smoked a lot of weed. There was a lot of acid. Aphrodite owned a big chunk of land on Paswegas, her and her husband. They’d let people squat on their property, build these little shacks and stuff. A few still live there; locals call ‘em the cliffdwellers. Aphrodite’s husband, he was dead by then.”
“Did you know him?”
“No. He killed himself. I never heard the whole story. I guess he was gay, and maybe that was an issue, or maybe it was drugs? Some weird stuff went on at Oakwind, the whole place kind of imploded. Everyone just went their separate ways after that.”
I rubbed my arms. “What kind of weird stuff?”
Toby’s gaze grew remote. He turned to stare at the green and black mass of Paswegas looming in the distance. “Out on the islands, every couple of years you get a witch hunt. People go crazy, cabin fever. Winter especially. Lot of times it’s directed at a schoolteacher, someone from away. Back then there was only about forty people living on Paswegas. Today there’s less than that. So the hippies came, and all of a sudden you’ve got, like, double the population on a place that’s not real used to having company, except in the summer. It’s a fragile human ecology, just like an animal ecology; you introduce a new species, even just one person, and everything goes to hell. Some bad stuff happened. Afterward most everyone split.”
“But not Aphrodite.”
“Not Aphrodite,” said Toby. “Maybe you could get her to talk about it. But I doubt it. Okay, here we go—”
We’d come up alongside the sailboat. A carved sign adorned the stern; Northern Sky picked out in gold leaf. Even beside the dinghy it looked small. I had a flash of panic: how could something so tiny hold two people, let along bring them anywhere safely? Toby grasped Northern Sky’s rail and pulled the dinghy against it. I stood and stumbled on board. Toby followed, then began tying off the dinghy at the stern.
“You go put your stuff below,” he called. “Just slide that hatch there, I’ll be right down. Watch your head.”
The boat was a pretty little thing. White paint, gray trim, mahogany accents. Bronze portholes verdigrised from age and salt air. I still couldn’t see how two people could move around without bumping into each other or tripping over a million lines, wires, sails, buckets, God knows what.
Not to mention ice—the deck was slick with it. Fortunately it was only three steps across the bridge deck to where the companionway led down. I skidded over and pushed open the hatch then climbed down a ladder into a space so densely packed it was like walking into a broom closet.
I had to stoop to enter, and even then my head grazed the ceiling. Forward, my way was blocked by the mast and, directly behind it, a sheet-metal woodstove roughly the size and shape of a large coffee can. Beyond this was the bow, a V-shaped berth crammed with boxes, milk cartons, power cells, books, ropes, tools, a small chemical toilet.
But where I was—smack in the middle of the main cabin—everything was meticulously, if eccentrically, organized. To either side was a bench covered with frayed corduroy cushions. Above these were amazingly carved shelves, pigeonholes, cupboards, and nooks, some no bigger than the pencils they held, others large enough to support rows of books and manuals. There were hooks carved like fingers, canned goods stacked behind carven filigree. Two copper gimbals shaped like mouths held kerosene lanterns. Crocheted nets dangled from the ceiling, filled with onions and garlic and sprouting potatoes. Tucked into an alcove by the ladder were a tiny alcohol-fueled cookstove and a NOAA weatherband radio beside a bottle of Captain Morgan’s Rum and several bottles of Moxie.
“You okay? Find a place to stow your stuff?”