We left. We felt like jackasses. Eddie had put such a fear of the lord into our hearts that we drove like mad, crazed people all the way to Whale Beach, which wasn’t a short distance. And then we looked for Judy.
They were huge and white and towered high above our heads. I kept losing Frank in the labyrinth made by their huge, heaving bodies. The ones that had been dead a few days were starting to make a stench like nothing else. We shouted at each other, and sometimes it seemed as though their bodies were casting our voices like echoes, and Frank would turn out to be where I had least expected him. We didn’t find her. We didn’t find her strange tree of a tripod; we didn’t find any of her cameras. Even Hamilton couldn’t find her. He howled forlornly for his lost mistress. Then the sun set. We slept on the beach, with Hamilton between us for warmth. We didn’t sleep much, because he would wake up from time to time and howl as though his heart was breaking. With sunrise the mist rolled in.
When I woke up, I was face down in an alleyway that reeked of beer and vomit. It was the cockroaches that woke me up, them and the rats. They thought I was spending too much time in their territory.
I made the rounds of the streets and the bars for days. I was looking for Frank, I was looking for Judy, I was looking for Hamilton, for the Volkswagen, for the rented Toyota. I was looking for anything I knew. I would have been happy if I’d found Eddie and the Yellow Dog bar, but when I asked about it people just laughed at me viciously.
I found Judy’s tripod. It stood alone at the far end of the beach, pointed out to sea. What had she been photographing? The camera was gone. I took the tripod with me, that and the huge clean rib of a whale.
I hitchhiked back to the city, where I went to our old house. I set up the sad tripod on the roof, which was as empty as the house, except for the wake of bottles and cigarette packs remaining from the summer. The phone kept ringing, but it was always for Judy. They wanted to interview her about her Tobacco Fiasco research. I always told them I didn’t know where she was, and I never did see her again, except for maybe once, on the cover of Life Magazine.
Myrtle’s Marina
GOD KNOWS WHAT THEY FARMED, Peter thought. Stones, maybe. And turned away from the winter fields towards the water and the marina office: a little brown painted clapboard house with a pitched roof and small casement windows, a screen door, one large and three little rooms inside. It always reminded Peter of the cabins at Camp Wawanesa. He’d go to camp for two weeks in August before the family came here all together, to stay at Myrtle’s Marina. Since he no longer used it as the office perhaps he should open a little sailing camp, with rows of bunk beds. The counsellors could smoke up in the store room, looking out at the water, although, he thought, they usually did that in some locked room they’d swiped the keys to, a woods clearing, or beyond a place with a name like Cedar Point, on a scrubby, secluded little beach or island. Likewise where they went to have sex, discreetly, because getting caught meant getting fired. Although the kids always knew, he remembered, gossiping about things they were too young to understand. Had anyone known about Peter and Marti, either the other employees or any of the customers?
Probably.
The little house, situated as it was between the road and the boat launch, was intended to be the official entry point to the marina, containing in its large front room a solid brown desk and an equally solid oak swivel chair, the kind Peter remembered only the principal got at school when he was young enough to be impressed by principals. Now he was at an age where he could be one himself, figured it to be just another kind of job; not so different from sailing school really, just fewer water hazards. Better pay, though, and more regular. Peter went inside, sifting the dusty stillness. Nothing happened here, ever. Not since he and Marti used to come here to make love.
The old-timers understood when he told them why he came back. Because it was there, because his great-grandfather built the first version of the marina eighty years before, an eye on tourism as an upgrade from farming the stony unforthcoming fields. His parents and his brother, and even Aunt Myrtle no longer thought the old family farmstead on the water important, so why did he? Maybe because of that, because of them no longer wanting it.
“Our family throws everything of value away,” Peter had said, when his father had asked, perplexed; maybe one had to be eighty to understand a thing like that. Yet Peter understood, just as the seniors did. Was he so prematurely aged, inside, to believe something only very old people believed otherwise? “Someone has to stop it,” he’d said stubbornly, and bought the land back from the stranger Aunt Myrtle had sold it to. The stranger had taken a loss, sold it to Peter for less than he’d paid Myrtle, who had inherited it, along with Peter’s father.
“I wanted nothing to do with it. It going for even less should’ve been a sign,” his father had said, but Peter hadn’t cared. He didn’t want to be a doctor in Toronto like his brother Mark, who lived in a fancy condominium sixteen floors above Lake Ontario. He’d miss skipping stones from his private beach. What woman who wanted a family could resist this unkempt shoreline, these stony beaches? You’d look after toddlers here and not go stir-crazy, a stone’s throw from the lake. But Marti was gone, a goner. And if Peter chose to sell, he’d take a loss too, and lose his shirt. And so he stayed, year after year.
Usually he didn’t stay long, going back outside almost immediately to re-caulk the rental boats or back across the gravel road to the farmhouse to do his bookkeeping. He put the new computer on the main house’s kitchen table when he upgraded, and not in the little office building at all. He told himself it was so he didn’t have to heat two buildings. Most people who wanted him had learned to call at the house phone.
Peter remembered Myrtle telling him the office was spooky when she’d heard he was buying the place. They never saw one another much, although she only lived one township away. But she’d called him up, invited him to dinner when the news had broken of the sale going through. She looked good in her new blue sweater, better than she had when she’d run the marina, running around in old sneakers and an older anorak, her face drawn, always behind on the work and the bills.
“The old people always said it was haunted,” Myrtle said over salmon and white wine, “although I never saw or heard anything.”
“It’s not why you sold?” Peter asked.
“Oh no. It’s a money sink; the farmhouse is log. It’s never been re-chinked, because the repairs money always goes to the marina buildings across the road, it being the income generator. Ostensibly. And the barn’s fallen down so bad no one will ever get it up again.”
“Nobody’s going to farm, Myrtle. Don’t need the barn.”
“But you already know all that, you already know we all think you’re crazy to want it. Especially because you had to buy it, as me and your dad didn’t.”
“It’s my childhood,” Peter said, “and our family history.”
Myrtle had just rolled her eyes at his sentimentality. She had a gift shop in Buckhorn now. It didn’t make any more money than the marina, but it was a lot less work. Like Peter, she’d never married nor had kids. The marina required a man, and Myrtle’d had to hire them, although Peter had come and helped most summers when he was in college studying tourism, which was probably when he’d cemented his attachment. And then he’d bought it a few years later. Was it the second summer Marti came, or the third? He should be able to remember a thing like that.