“This used to be someplace,” she’s told me time and time again. “Oh, sure, you’d never know it now. But when my mother was a girl, this used to be a town. When I was little, it was still a town. There were dress shops and a diner and a jail. There was a public park with a bandshell and a hundred-year-old oak tree. In the summer, there was music in the park, and picnics. There were even churches, two of them, one Catholic and one Presbyterian. But then the storm came and took it all away.”
And it’s true, most of what she says. There was a town here once. Half a century’s neglect hasn’t quite erased all signs of it. She’s shown me some of what there’s left to see—the stump of a brick chimney, a few broken pilings where the waterfront once stood—and I’ve asked questions around the village. But people up there don’t like to speak openly about this place, or even allow their thoughts to linger on it very long. Every now and then, usually after a burglary or before an election, there’s talk of cleaning it up, pulling down these listing, clapboard shacks and chasing away the vagrants and squatters and winos. So far, the talk has come to nothing.
A sudden gust of wind blows in from off the beach, and the sheet of plastic stretched across the window flaps and rustles, and she opens her eyes.
“You’re still here,” she says, not sounding surprised, merely telling me what I already know. “I was dreaming that you’d gone away and would never come back to me again. I dreamed there was a boat called the Silver Star, and it took you away.”
“I get seasick,” I tell her. “I don’t do boats. I haven’t been on a boat since I was fifteen.”
“Well, you got on this one,” she insists, and the dim light filling up the room catches in the facets of her sleepy grey eyes. “You said that you were going to seek your fortune on the Ivory Coast. You had your typewriter, and a suitcase, and you were wearing a brand new suit of worsted wool. I was standing on the dock, watching as the Silver Star got smaller and smaller.”
“I’m not even sure I know where the Ivory Coast is supposed to be,” I say.
“Africa,” she replies.
“Well, I know that much, sure. But I don’t know where in Africa. And it’s an awfully big place.”
“In the dream, you knew,” she assures me, and I don’t press the point further. It’s her dream, not mine, even if it’s not a dream she’s actually ever had, even if it’s only something she’s making up as she goes along. “In the dream,” she continues, undaunted, “you had a travel brochure that the ticket agent had given you. It was printed all in colour. There was a sort of tree called a bombax tree, with bright red flowers. There were elephants, and a parrot. There were pretty women with skin the colour of roasted coffee beans.”
“That’s quite a brochure,” I say, and for a moment I watch the plastic tacked over the window as it rustles in the wind off the bay. “I wish I could have a look at it right now.”
“I thought what a warm place it must be, the Ivory Coast,” and I glance down at her, at those drowsy eyes watching me. She lifts her right hand from the damp sheets, and patches of iridescent skin shimmer ever so faintly in the morning light. The sun shows through the thin, translucent webbing stretched between her long fingers. Her sharp nails brush gently across my unshaven cheek, and she smiles. Even I don’t like to look at those teeth for very long, and I let my eyes wander back to the flapping plastic. The wind is picking up, and I think maybe this might be the day when I finally have to find a hammer, a few ten-penny nails, and enough discarded pine slats to board up the hole in the wall.
“Not much longer before the snow comes,” she says, as if she doesn’t need to hear me speak to know my thoughts.
“Probably not for a couple of weeks yet,” I counter, and she blinks and turns her head towards the window.
In the village, I have a tiny room in a boarding house on Darling Street, and I keep a spiral-bound notebook hidden between my mattress and box springs. I’ve written a lot of things in that book that I shouldn’t like any other human being to ever read—secret desires, things I’ve heard, and read; things she’s told me, and things I’ve come to suspect all on my own. Sometimes, I think it would be wise to keep the notebook better hidden. But it’s true that the old woman who owns the place, and who does all the housekeeping herself, is afraid of me, and she never goes into my room. She leaves the clean linen and towels in a stack outside my door. Months ago, I stopped taking my meals with the other lodgers, because the strained silence and fleeting, leery glimpses that attended those breakfasts and dinners only served to give me indigestion. I expect the widow O’Dwyer would ask me to find a room elsewhere, if she weren’t so intimidated by me. Or, rather, if she weren’t so intimidated by the company I keep.
Outside the shanty, the wind howls like the son of Poseidon, and, for the moment, there’s no more talk of the Ivory Coast or dreams or sailing gaily away into the sunset aboard the Silver Star.
Much of what I’ve secretly scribbled there in my notebook concerns that terrible storm that you claim rose up from the sea to steal away the little park and the bandshell, the diner and the jail and the dress shops, the two churches, one Presbyterian and the other Catholic. From what you’ve said, it must have happened sometime in September of ’57 or ’58, but I’ve spent long afternoons in the small public library, carefully poring over old newspapers and magazines. I can find no evidence of such a tempest making landfall in the autumn of either of those years. What I can verify is that the village once extended down the hill, past the marshes and dunes to the bay, and there was a lively, prosperous waterfront. There was trade with Gloucester and Boston, Nantucket and Newport, and the bay was renowned for its lobsters, fat black sea bass, and teeming shoals of haddock. Then, abruptly, the waterfront was all but abandoned sometime before 1960. In print, I’ve found hardly more than scant and unsubstantiated speculations to account for it, that exodus, that strange desertion. Talk of over-fishing, for instance, and passing comparisons with Cannery Row in faraway California, and the collapse of the Monterey Bay sardine canning industry back on the 1950s. I write down everything I find, no matter how unconvincing, but I permit myself to believe only a very little of it.
“A penny for your thoughts,” she says, then shuts her eyes again.
“You haven’t got a penny,” I reply, trying to ignore the raw, hungry sound of the wind and the constant noise at the window.
“I most certainly do,” she tells me, and pretends to scowl and look offended. “I have a few dollars, tucked away. I’m not an indigent.”
“Fine, then. I was thinking of Africa,” I lie. “I was thinking of palm trees and parrots.”
“I don’t remember any palm trees in the travel brochure,” she says. “But I expect there must be quite a lot of them, regardless.”
“Undoubtedly,” I agree. I don’t say anything else, though, because I think I hear voices, coming from somewhere outside her shack—urgent, muttering voices that reach me despite the wind and the flapping plastic. I can’t make out the words, no matter how hard I try. It ought to scare me more than it does. Like I said, one of these nights, they’ll do murder against me. One of them alone, or all of them together. Maybe they won’t even wait for the conspiring cover of nightfall. Maybe they’ll come for me in broad daylight. I begin to suspect my murder would not even be deemed a crime by the people who live in those brightly painted houses up the hill, back beyond the dunes. On the contrary, they might consider it a necessary sacrifice, something to placate the flotsam and jetsam huddling in the ruins along the shore, an oblation of blood and flesh to buy them time.