THREE

The voices came to me at dawn. I listened to Hell-Town in the hour between waking and sleep.

“Oh, Tim,” the voices said, “you’ve burned your candle by both ends: the balls and the brain, prick and tongue, your bunghole and your mouth. Is any tallow left in your wick? As if the wicked could tell.”

They said, “Oh, Tim, don’t lick the thighs of whores. You come too fast tasting the old sperm whale. Give to us the dying salts. Give us back the scum of all who lost. Goodbye, sweet friend, I curse your house. I curse your house.”

Let me speak of the little I could comprehend. Horror films do not prepare us for the hours lost in searching after one clear thought. Waking from nightmares and sleeping in terror, I climbed at last onto one conclusion. Assuming I was no part of this deed—and how could I be certain of that?—I still had to ask: Who was? It must be someone who knew my marijuana patch. That spoke directly of my wife—unless it was her hair I touched in the burrow. So I had my conclusion: I must go back to the woods and look again. As fixed in my memory, however, as the flash of light that is followed by the thunder of pain when your shoulder is pulled out of its socket, was the remembered glimpse of that dirtied blonde hair. I knew I could not go back. I was a jelly. I preferred to molder in the last suppurations of cowardice.

Is it evident why I do not care to describe my night? Nor why each logical step cost so much? Now I understood how the laboratory rat develops psychosis in a maze. There are shocks at too many of the turnings. What if Jessica was there? Would I know then that I had done it?

On the other hand—and I could have driven a hundred miles in the time it took me to go back to this alternative—if Pond and Pangborn had returned to Boston, or were by now even back in Santa Barbara, or back wherever their fling would chuck them—then it had to be Patty’s head. That brought on a wholly unmanageable sorrow. Sorrow, and a surge of nasty vindication—which was only choked off by the onset of a new fear. Who could have killed Patty but Mr. Black? If that was true, how safe was I?

Do you feel a hint uncool around strange black dudes? Try such a thought in the night when you have come to the conclusion that the dude may be looking for you. Every wave that slapped on the shore, every gull that stirred, was an invader: I could hear windows raised and doors forced.

It was degrading. I had never seen myself as a hero. My father—with the best will in the world—had taken care of that. But I had usually been able to picture myself as not wholly unmacho. I could stand up for my friends; I could close a wound and keep the festering to myself. I tried to hold my own. Yet now, each time my mind was clear enough to bring forth a new thought, panic soiled me. I was like a puppy in a strange house. I began to fear my friends.

It had to be someone who knew where I kept my marijuana. That much was demanded by logic. In the false dawn, therefore, I realized that as I met my friends on the street in the day or two to come, I would distrust the look in every eye. I was like a man plummeting down a slippery slope who finds a little horn of ice to grasp, but so soon as he embraces it, the projection breaks loose. I saw that if I could not decide the first question, which was: Put it!—Was I the killer?—then I could not stop the slide, and madness would wait at the rim.

As dawn came up, however, and I had to listen to the solicitations of Hell-Town—why did these voices always call most loudly between waking and sleep, as if waking and sleep were a century apart?—I became aware at last of the chirks and cronks of the gulls, their gabble loud enough to chase the larvae of the night. But saying “larvae” now offered the minuscule pleasure that one word from Latin had come back in the midst of all this. You larvae, you ghosts! They taught Latin well at Exeter.

I clung to this thought. In prison, when one was at odds with another convict, and fear became as heavy as the leaden breath of eternity itself, then the smallest pleasure to reach your heart in such a state was, I learned, as valuable as a rope cast down into the abyss. Concentrate on the pleasure, whatever it was, and you could lash yourself to the edge. So, in this hour, I tried to embrace matters that were far away, and thought of Exeter and Latin, and by such means proceeded—not so much to calm myself as—to insulate the dread, and thereby manage to keep thinking about the little furnished room in a boardinghouse west of Tenth Avenue on Forty-fifth Street where my father now lived at the age of seventy. By the aid of such concentration I could see again the piece of paper he had tacked above his mirror and read again the words he had printed carefully on the paper. They said INTER FAECES ET URINAM NASCIMUR and beneath this, my father, with a flourish, had inscribed the name of the author: St. Odon of Cluny. My father’s nickname (which I like to present in this context) still remained Big Mac in defiance of all McDonald hamburgers.

“Well, what do you want with that?” I said to Big Mac the first time I saw the note on the mirror.

“It’s a reminder,” my father replied.

“You never told me you knew Latin.”

“Parochial school,” he said. “They tried to teach us. Some of the droppings stuck.”

“And how did you get this?”

“From a priest I know. Father Steve. He’s usually in trouble with the Cardinal,” remarked Big Mac in an agreeable tone, as if that were the first virtue to ask of a priest.

Well, I knew enough Latin to translate. “Inter faeces et urinam nascimur”—“Between shit and piss are we born.” Even culture came to Big Mac at the edge of a longshoreman’s hook.

But now the phone was ringing on the table by my bed, and I was ready to expect that it was my father. We had not called each other in a good while, yet I was sure it would be his voice. I had the faculty to be thinking of a friend even as he or she was picking up the phone to give me a call; this happened often enough not to surprise me any longer. On this morning, however, I took it as a sign.

“Hello, Tim?”

“Well, Dougy,” I said. “Let us speak of the devil.”

“Yeah,” he said. That told me how hung-over he was. His “yeah” could offer you the devastated landscapes of the brain after sixty years of drinking. (This is, of course, on the assumption he did a little boozing when he was ten.)

“Tim,” he said, “I’m in Hyannis.”

“What are you doing on the Cape? I thought you hate to travel.”

“I been here three days. Frankie Freeload retired up here. Did I tell you?”

“No,” I said. “How is he?”

“He passed away. I been at his wake.”

For my father, the death of an old friend would prove as awesome as a cliff by the side of your house crumbling into the sea.

“Well,” I said, “why don’t you come over to Provincetown?”

“I’ve been thinking of that.”

“Do you have a car?”

“I can rent one,” he said.

“No, I’ll drive down and pick you up.”

There was a long pause, but I could not tell if he were thinking of himself or of me. Then he said, “Let’s wait a day or so. There’s some loose ends here with the widow.”

“All right,” I said, “you come when you’re ready.” I thought I had offered no sign of my miserable condition, but Big Mac asked, “Are you all right?”

“My wife isn’t here. She took off. That’s okay.”

There was a long pause. He said, “Yeah. I’ll see you.” And he hung up.

He had, however, given me some of the means to rise from my bed and go about the day.

Speak of hangovers, I was like a man on the edge of an epileptic attack. If I watched each move and never stubbed my toe or took a misstep, if I did not turn my head too suddenly, nor make any motion not prepared in advance, then I might be able to carry myself through the hours without a seizure. Here, it was not the convulsions of my body but the caterwaulings of the witches that I kept away by the singularity of my thoughts, which is to say I only allowed myself to think of particular matters and no others.

Since my immediate problems were as untouchable as a raw wound—even my tattoo began to throb if my mind cast a glance in its direction—so in compensation I discovered that to reminisce about my father was, on this morning, a palliative. I did not have to think pleasant thoughts, I could even dwell on old pains, but they were virtually agreeable to contemplate so long as they adhered to the past, old regrets serving as counterbalance to keep me from slipping back to where I was now.

For instance, I thought again of Meeks Wardley Hilby III. There had been a month in my life down in Tampa when I literally awakened each morning with the problem set before me: How were Patty and I to murder him successfully? Still that recollection caused no pain now. Indeed, it aided my concentration for two good reasons which served me like panniers carried on either side for balance. One was that I most certainly did not kill Wardley, even came to discover that there was no very determined assassin in me—not the worst thought to have on this morning! The other was that I was not thinking at this point of Mr. Hilby as I knew him in Tampa with Patty, but on the contrary, was remembering our curious bond at Exeter, and that had much to do with my father, indeed it brought back the best day I suppose I ever spent with Big Mac.

Meeks Wardley Hilby III, it may as well be repeated, was the only inmate I knew in prison who had also been in my class at Exeter. What always impressed me most about such a connection was the fact that we were also both kicked out of school on the same morning a month before graduation. Prior to that, I hardly knew him. Hilby had been a wimp and I had been a fair jock. He had gone to Exeter for four years like his father Meeks before him, and I put in one fall and spring as a Post Graduate on athletic scholarship after senior year at high school in Long Island. (My mother wanted me to go on to Harvard.) I had been trying to bring my promise as a Wide Receiver to an Exeter team that could not pass. (Have you ever seen Eastern prep schools play football?) We walked together out of the Headmaster’s Office the day we got the boot, and Meeks Wardley Hilby III was crying. The scuffed satin on the lapels of his dinner jacket and the heliotrope bow tie were like a costume to wear to one’s execution. I was sad. Even now, recalling the moment, I can feel the sadness in my limbs. I had been caught smoking marijuana (which was no small matter twenty years ago). The Headmaster was truly shocked—and Hilby’s case was worse. It was hard to believe, considering how slack he looked, but he had attempted to rape a town girl he took out on a petting date. I didn’t hear about it then. Nobody concerned wished to speak (and the girl’s parents were soon bought off) but Hilby gave me the story eleven years later. In prison, there was all the time to tell one’s tale.

So, on this morning in Provincetown, when I wished to keep myself apart from all that was on me, it was, as I say, almost agreeable to return to the dolorous day I left Exeter. I remember it was a beautiful afternoon in May twenty years ago when I said goodbye to the school forever. I packed my gear into two duffel bags, dumped them and myself on a bus, and my father (whom I had already phoned—I could not bear to call my mother) took the shuttle to meet me in Boston. We got drunk. I would love him for that night alone. My father (as you may have gathered from our conversation on the phone) was not often a man to do any more talking than the exigencies of communication would require, but he could soothe you by his silence. He was six-foot-three and at that time, in his fiftieth year, he weighed two-eighty. Forty of it he could have done without. It stood in front of him like the round rubber fender on an amusement-park car that bumps other cars, and he breathed heavily. With his prematurely white hair, boiled red face and blue eyes, he looked like the biggest, shrewdest and most corrupt old detective in town, but in fact he hated cops. His older brother, whom he never liked, lived and died on the police force.

This afternoon, as we stood side by side at an Irish bar (which stretched out so far into the interior darkness that it was long enough, my father commented, for the dogs to have a track) he put down his fourth drink—taken, like the first three, in shot glasses—and said, “Marijuana, huh?”

I nodded.

“How could you get caught?”

He meant: How could you be so dumb as to get nabbed by a bunch of Wasps? I knew his opinion of their wits. “What’s wrong with certain people,” he stated once in an argument with my mother, “is that they expect God to buy His clothes in the same store they do.” So I always reacted to Wasps through his eyes. Big Mac saw them as well-knit, silver-haired, gray-suited and forever speaking in such swell accents that they had to believe God was using them to display His decency.

“Well,” I told him, “I got careless. Maybe I was laughing too hard.” And I described the morning of the night I was caught. I had been in a sailing race on a lake near Exeter whose name I no longer remember (the wages of pot!) and the boats were still. They almost called the race off. I knew nothing about sailing, but my roommate did, and had me crewing for an old history teacher who certainly managed to fit my father’s idea of a Wasp. He was a good skipper, probably the best in school, and so contemptuous of his competition that he even took on an ignoramus like myself. In the race, however, we had light winds and bad luck. The wind would die, breathe us forward on a zephyr, then die again. At last we stood by the mast, our empty spinnaker hanging in the bow, and watched a boat creep ahead of us. At its helm was an old lady. She was much closer to land than we were, and had gambled that while there would not be wind anywhere this morning, she could count on a touch of current licking the lakeshore as it moved toward a stream. She counted well. She crept from three boat lengths back to eight ahead, while we, now down to second place, five hundred yards farther out from land, never moved at all. She had outfoxed our old fox.

After a while it grew boring and I began to banter with my roommate. The skipper stood it as long as he could, but the inert spinnaker finally did him in. He wheeled on me, and in his best master’s voice said, “I wouldn’t talk so much if I were you. It spills the wind out of the sails.”

After I told this story my father and I laughed so hard we had to clutch each other and whirl around for balance.

“Yeah,” Big Mac said, “with people like that, it’s a favor to get caught.”

That took away my need to tell him how I had come back to my room in a riot of laughter and fury. What retorts I had swallowed. One year at Exeter had obviously not been enough for me to learn the customs of the people who ran the works. (Oh, the English have airs in their nose and the Irish sprout hairs in their toes!)

“I’ll try to explain it to your mother,” Big Mac said.

“I appreciate that.” I knew he and she had probably not spoken in a year, but I could not face her. She would never understand. From the time I was eleven until I turned thirteen (and was outdoors every evening) she managed to sit beside me long enough each night to read one poem from Louis Untermeyer’s Treasury of Great Poems. To her credit (and Untermeyer’s) I did not hate poetry when I was done. All the more reason I could not tell her now.

Of course, I had to listen to my father repeat through each drink to come, “It spills the wind out of the sails.” Like many a good drinker before him, he was not above using the same remark for a different glass—but then, at this point, my recollections were shattered. The telephone began to ring for a second time this morning. I picked up the receiver with no sense of any good omen.

It proved to be the proprietor of The Widow’s Walk. “Mr. Madden,” he said, “I hate to bother you, but I couldn’t help noticing the other night that you seemed to know the couple who sat in the lounge while you were there.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, “we had a nice drink together. Where were they from—the West, wasn’t it?”

“During dinner,” he replied, “they told me they were from California.”

“Yes, I have some recollection of that,” I said.

“The only reason I ask is that their car is still in our parking lot.”

“Isn’t that odd,” I told him. “Are you certain it’s their car?”

“Well,” he answered, “I do think it’s theirs. I happened to notice when they came in.”

“Isn’t that odd,” I repeated. My tattoo had begun to smart fiercely.

“Frankly,” he said, “I was hoping you might know where they are.” Pause. “But I guess you don’t.” “No,” I said, “I don’t.”

“The name on the man’s credit card is Leonard Pangborn. If they don’t pick up the car in another day or two, I suppose I could check with Visa.”

“I would think you could.”

“You didn’t get the lady’s name, did you?”

“She did tell me, but, you know, I’m just darned if I can remember it now. May I give you a ring if I do? I do remember, Pangborn was certainly his name.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Madden, to disturb your morning, but it’s just so peculiar.”

Count on it. After this call I could not recover my concentration. Every thought went rushing to the woods. Find out! But this loosed an unmanageable panic. I was like a man who is told he has a mortal illness, yet can cure it by jumping off a fifty-foot cliff into the water. “No,” he says, “I’ll stay in bed. I’d rather die.” What is he protecting? What was I? Yet the panic carried everything before it. It was as if I had been told in my sleep that the worst malignancies of Hell-Town were gathered beneath my tree in the Truro woods. If I went back, would they enter me? Was that my logic?

Sitting beside the telephone with a panic as palpable as physical distress itself—my nostrils were colder than my feet, my lungs burned—I began the work, and it was equal to labor, of recomposing myself How many mornings had I gone from a quarrel over breakfast into my small room on the top floor where I could look on the harbor and try to write, yet each morning I had learned how to separate out—and it was much like straining inedibles from a soup—all the wreckage of my life which might inhibit writing that day. So I had habits of concentration gained first in prison and gained again from learning to do my work each morning no matter how upsetting the fracas with my wife; I could keep my mind on a course. If the seas before me now pitched uncontrollably—well, I knew, if nothing else, that I must try at this point to think of my father and not ask any question that had no answer. “Do not attempt to recall what you cannot recall” was a rule I had long kept. Memory was equal to potency. To seek to remember what one could not bring back—no matter how urgent the need—was like calling for an erection when a girl was wide open before you, but your cock—that perverse cur!—was resolutely, obdurately, finally, refusing to stir. You had to give up. I would recall, or I would not recall what happened two nights ago—I would have to wait for that—but in the interim I had to build a wall around my panic. Every recollection of my father felt therefore like a good stone laid down properly.

So I went back to such thoughts, and knew the beginning of that peace which comes from contemplating the love, no matter how pinched, that one holds for a parent. Since I had poured myself a drink as the one legitimate sedative I could call upon this morning, and had gone to my querencia, that study on the third floor where I used to work looking out on the bay, so did I go back to the legend of Dougy “Big Mac” Madden and meditate on its great cost to him, and to my mother, and to me. Because for all his height and bulk we never had enough of him. A good deal of my father, I can tell you, was lost before he ever met my mother. That much knowledge I had already gained in childhood listening to the talk of his old friends.

I remember that they used to come out to our house on Long Island to visit him for an afternoon before they all went over to his bar, and since they were longshoremen and former longshoremen like himself, and almost as large, my mother’s modest living room would look, so soon as they all stood up, like an overloaded boat ready to capsize. How much I liked those occasions. I would already have heard, over and over, the story of my father’s great hour.

Years later I was told by a lawyer that if separate accounts given by two witnesses agree in every detail, you are listening to a lie. In that case, my father’s legend must have had a good deal of truth in it. All the versions varied. They could, however, agree this much: On a day back in the late thirties, at a time when the Italians were driving the Irish out of the leadership in the longshoremen’s union, my father—one of the leaders in the ILA—was parking his car on a side street in Greenwich Village when a man darted out of a doorway and took six shots at him with a .45. (I also heard it was a .38.) How many struck him, I do not know. It is hard to believe, but most of the stories said six, and I could count four gunshot wounds on his torso when he showered.

He was renowned in those days for his strength. A strong man among longshoremen had to be a phenomenon, but he must have been as powerful as a Kodiak bear on this occasion because he looked at his assailant and took a step forward. The gunman (whose .45, I assume, was now empty) saw that his victim did not drop. So he began to run. I find it hard to believe, but my father chased him. For six blocks along Seventh Avenue in Greenwich Village he ran after his assailant (some say eight blocks, some say five, some say four) but it took all of such a distance before Dougy recognized that he could not catch him and came to a stop. Only then did he see blood oozing from his shoes and realize that he was dizzy. He turned around just before the street began to turn around on him and saw that he was outside the emergency entrance of St. Vincent’s Hospital. So he knew he was in bad shape. He hated doctors and he hated hospitals, but he was going in.

The attendant at the desk must have decided the new arrival was a drunk. A huge distraught man with a considerable amount of blood on his clothing was teetering over the table.

“Please sit down,” said the orderly. “Wait your turn.”

While my father normally did no more than nod or frown as friends told the story, here he would sometimes speak up himself. When I was a child, the look of absolute murderous certainty that came into his eyes was so thrilling to my keyed-up young interior that once or twice I wet my pants a drop. (Although before such manly company, I kept the secret to myself.)

My father, in telling it, would seize an imaginary orderly by the shirt, his arm extended stiffly, his fingers clutching the collar as if his strength might be all but expired, yet what remained was enough to throw this specimen of unfeeling humanity through a wall.

“Take care of me,” Dougy Madden said in a low, deadly voice in my mother’s living room. “I’m hurt.”

He was. They kept him in St. Vincent’s for three months. When he came out, his hair was white, and he was done with the union. I don’t know whether lying in bed for so long a time took away a part of his massive nerve or whether the Irish leaders had lost. Maybe, by now, his mind was in another place, that far-off place, full of unspoken sorrow, where he lived for the rest of his life. In this sense, he retired before I was born. Maybe he was mourning no more than his lost eminence, for he was a labor leader no longer, merely a barrel of a man. In any event, he borrowed money from his relatives, opened a bar on the Sunrise Highway forty miles out on the South Shore, and for eighteen years was the proprietor of a place that did not prosper and did not fail.

Most bars, given this description, figure to be managed with economy, since they are usually empty. My father, however, had a bar that was like himself, large, full of generosity and only half managed, even if Big Mac did look like the bartender out of whom the mold was made.

He was there for eighteen years in his white apron and his prematurely white hair, his blue eyes measuring the drinkers when they got obstreperous, and his skin so red from the steady inflow of drink (“It’s my only medicine,” he would tell my mother) that he looked an angrier man than he was, fierce as a lobster making one last lunge out of the pot.

He got a fair daily crowd, a good Saturday crowd, albeit beer drinkers, and a heavy summer crowd, full of weekend lovers out on Long Island and fishermen going or coming. He would have been a prosperous man, but he drank a bit of the profits, gave back more across the bar, sent scuds of them across on free drinks to the farthest reaches of the room, let people run up a tab so large they could have paid the funeral expenses of their fathers and mothers and uncles and aunts, and he loaned money at no interest and didn’t always get it back, and gave it away, and gambled it away—so as the Irish say (or is it the Jews?), “It was a living.”

Everyone loved him but my mother. She came to love him less over the years. I used to wonder how they ever got married and finally decided she had to be a virgin when they met. I would suspect that their short and most loving affair (for long after they divorced, my mother’s voice would still be tremulous when she spoke of their first weeks together) was stimulated not only by how different they were but because she was also a liberal and wished to defy the prejudices of her parents against the Irish, the working classes and the smell of beer in bars. So they married. She was a small, modest, pleasant-looking woman, a schoolteacher from a nice town in Connecticut, as delicate as he was large, and she had nice manners and was a lady to him. I think she always remained a lady to him, and while he would never admit that his own great secret prejudice was just for that, for the high elegant splendor of a lady’s hand in a long glove, nonetheless, he adored her. He was terribly impressed that he had married such a woman. Alas, they remained a sad couple. To use his expression, neither could move the other a cunt-hair to the left. If not for my presence, they would soon have foundered in frustration and boredom. I was there, however, and their marriage lasted through my fifteenth year.

Maybe it would have gone all the way, but my mother made one error. She won a fundamental argument with my father and got him to move from our floor-through apartment above his bar, to a town called Atlantic Lanes, and that was a quiet catastrophe. The shift proved equal, doubtless, to the shock his grandfather took on leaving Ireland. The one major concession given my mother was the one he should never have agreed to. Dougy distrusted Atlantic Lanes on sight. Although it sounds, I know, like a bowling alley, the developers bestowed the name on their brand-new town because we were no more than two miles from the ocean, and our streets had been designed to show a few bends. (Lanes.) The shape of our twisting roads came from the draftsmen laying it out on drawing paper with French curves. Since the land was as flat as a parking lot, our S-turns served no purpose I could see except to make it easier not to have to look at your neighbor’s ranch house which was exactly like your own. It’s a joke, but Dougy could not find his way back when drunk. It was no joke. Something was leached out of all of us who grew up there. I cannot name it, although in the eyes of my father, we kids were awfully civilized. We didn’t hang out on a street corner—no right angles in Atlantic Lanes—we didn’t run in gangs (we had best friends instead) and once when I was having a fist fight, my disputant said in the middle of it, “Okay, I quit.” We stopped and shook hands. My mother was not displeased that (1) I won, since she had learned over the years that would make my father happy and (2) I had acted like a gentleman. I had shaken hands nicely. My father was intrigued. It was truly the suburbs. You could get into a fight and say “I quit,” and the winner would not celebrate by banging your head on the pavement. “Boy, where I grew up,” he told me (it happened to be Forty-eighth Street west of Tenth Avenue) “you never quit. You might just as well say ‘I die!’ ”

Once, a few years before the end of their marriage, I overheard my mother and father in the living room on a rare night when he was home from the bar. I was trying not to listen, in fact was staying away by doing my homework in the kitchen. When, on these rare occasions, they would find themselves together, they could sit for hours without speaking, and their mutual gloom often got so intense that even the audio on the TV seemed to quaver. On this night, however, they may have been close, for I heard my mother say in a gentle voice, “Douglas, you never say that you love me.”

That was true enough. For years I had hardly ever seen him give her a kiss and then only like a miser pulling out the one ducat he will spend this year. My poor mother. She was so affectionate she would kiss me all the time. (Out of his sight.) She never wanted him to think my habits were unmanly.

“Not once, Douglas,” she now repeated, “do you ever say you love me.”

He did not reply for a minute, but then he answered in an Irish street voice—it was his declaration of love—“I’m here, ain’t I?”

Of course, he was famous among his friends for such an ascetic view. In longshoreman days, he had earned another legend for the number of women he could attract and the powerful number of times he could do it in a night. All the same, it was his manly pride that he was never obliged to kiss the girl. Who knows what ice room of the heart my skinny Irish grandmother raised him in? He never kissed. Once, not long after I was kicked out of Exeter, I went drinking with Dougy and his oldest buddies, and he was meat for the roast on this matter of a kiss. His friends might be scarred and half toothless and in their fifties, and since I was twenty, they looked ancient to me, but, God, they were filthy-minded. When they talked, they rolled around in sex like it was stuck to their pants.

My father was, by then, not only divorced from my mother, but had, in the general waste that followed, lost his bar. He lived in a rented room, had a lady friend once in a while, worked in a barroom for wages and saw a lot of his old friends.

Every one of these old friends, I soon discovered, had a quirk, and the rule of the game was to kick your old buddy on the quirk. Some were tight with a dollar, some had foolish habits like betting long shots, one of them always threw up when he was drunk (“I have a sensitive stomach,” he would complain. “Yeah, we have sensitive noses,” they would reply) and my father always got it about kissing.

“Oh, Dougy,” his old friend Dynamite Heffernon would say, “last night I was with a nineteen-year-old who had the juiciest, sweetest, plumpest, loveliest mouth you ever saw. Could she kiss! Oh, the moist breath of her fine smile. Do you have any idea of what you’re missing?”

“Yeah, Dougy,” another would cry out, “give it a try. Break down. Give the broad a kiss!”

My father would sit there. It was the game, and he would suffer it, but his thin lips showed no pleasure.

Francis Frelagh, a.k.a. Frankie Freeload, took his swipes at the ball. “I had one widow with a tongue last week,” he told us. “She put that tongue in my ears, down my mout’, she licked my t’roat. If I let her, she would have swiped my nostrils.”

At the look of disgust on my father’s face, they laughed like choir boys, high-pitched and shrill, Irish tenors kicking Dougy Madden’s quirk.

He took it all. When they were done, he shook his head. He did not like to be performed on while I was there—that was the measure of his fallen state—so he said, “I think you’re all full of shit. None of you has been laid in the last ten years.” When they whooped at his anger, he stuck out his palm. “I’ll give you,” he said, “the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say you know a couple of girls. And they like to kiss. Maybe they even go down on you. All right. That’s been known to happen. Only, ask yourself: The broad is taking care of you now, but whose joint did she cop last night? Where was her mouth then? Ask yourself that, you cocksuckers. Cause if she’s able to kiss you, she can eat dog turds.”

This speech put his old gang in heaven. “I wonder who’s kissing her now,” they would croon in Dougy’s ear.

He never smiled. He knew he was right. It was his logic. I knew. I had grown up with it.

This was as much, however, as I could go on thinking about my father before the itch of my tattoo began to distract me out of measure. By a look at the clock, I saw it was nearly afternoon, and I stood up with the thought of taking a walk but had to sit down again beneath the sudden weight of fear that came upon me from no more than the thought of stepping outside.

Yet now I felt a whole decomposition of myself, a veritable descent from man to dog. I could no longer cower here. So I put on a jacket, and was through the house and into our damp November air with the jaunty sense that I had just performed a near-heroic act. Such are the warps of pure funk. It is a low comedy.

Once on the street, however, I began to comprehend my reason, at least, for the new fear. Before me, a mile away, was the Provincetown Monument, a pinnacle of stone over two hundred feet high, and not unlike the Tower of the Uffizi in Florence. It was the first sight of our town from the road or sea as one approached our harbor. It sat on a good hill back of the Town Wharf, indeed, so much in the middle of our existence that one saw it every day. There was no way not to. Nothing built by man was of such height until you got to Boston.

Of course, a native never needed to recognize it was there. I probably had not looked at it for a hundred days, but on this day, so soon as I turned to walk toward the center of town, my tattoo, like a meter to mark the pulsations of my anxiety, seemed to crawl over my skin. If normally I looked at our monument without seeing it, now I most certainly did. It was the same vertical tower that I had tried to climb on a drunken night almost twenty years ago, and I came so near to the summit as to reach the overhang of the parapet not thirty feet below. I had gone up the vertical, taking handholds and footholds where I found them in the granite blocks, enough at least for my fingertips and my toes. It was a climb to awaken me in the middle of many a night for years after, since in more than one place I had to lift myself by the strength of my arms alone, and in the worst places I ran into ledges wide as two fingers for my toes, but nothing for my hands—I could only mount palms flat against the wall—it is incredible, but I was drunk enough to keep going until I came to the overhang.

Now, I have talked to rock climbers since, and one or two have even looked at the monument with me, and when asked if they could manage the overhang, said, “A piece of cake,” and meant it. One even explained the technique he would use, although I hardly understood. I was no rock climber myself. That night was the only hour in my life when I lived on a wall near to two hundred feet from the ground, but it came to so poor an end that I never had the moxie to try again.

For I locked myself up, as they say, in the overhang. It seems I should have trusted the holds I had, and leaned out backward until I got a hand on the parapet—it was only a small overhang!—but I could not figure how to surmount it, and so I pressed instead against an arch just beneath, my back on one supporting column, the soles of my feet on the other, and there I remained, my body stuffed in the small arch just under the parapet until my strength began to go, and after a while I knew I would fall. Let me say I thought it was not possible, given the position I was in, to descend, and I was right. It is easier, I was told later, to go up a wall than to go down if you do not have a rope. There I perched, then there I clung, while all the collected valor of the spirits I had drunk began to wane. Then I was sober, and so frightened that I began to shout, and soon, I suppose, to scream, and to cut such recollection to its shortest, I was rescued by the Volunteer Fire Department in the middle of the night by a huge fisherman in a bosun’s swing (no less a person than Barrels himself) who was let down on a rope from the balcony above (having gone up the stairway within the tower) and he was able to grasp me finally while they hauled both of us up, but by then I was like a cat trapped for six days in a tree—I had smelled my death—and they say I fought him off, even tried to bite him when he came near. I suspect it is true, for in the morning I had a huge knot on the side of my head where he gave me one bang against the rock to chasten some of that lividity.

Well, I was also ready to take the bus that morning, and packed my suitcase and was going to leave Provincetown forever when some friends came by and treated me like a figure of valor. It seemed I was not looked upon as a fool. So I stayed, and came to realize why Provincetown might be the place for me, since no one ever thought I had done anything crazy or even particularly bizarre. We all had extraordinary stuff to get out of us, that was all. Do it the way you could.

Still, I kept that bag beneath my bed for all of the winter months I stayed that year, and I do not think there was an hour when I was not ready to decamp—one jeer at the wrong time would have been enough. It was, after all, the first time in my life I had to recognize I was not automatically sane.

Of course, I had some idea of what could be at the core of it. Years later, reading Jones’s biography of Freud, I came across a reference Freud made to what was “doubtless, an unruly attack of latent homosexual panic in myself,” and had to set the book down, for just so suddenly was I overcome with thinking of the night I tried to scale the monument. Now my tattoo throbbed. Was that unruly attack with me still?

Yes, was it not true that every place renowned for its colony of homosexuals invariably had such a monument? I thought of the men and boys who cruised the obelisk in Central Park, and the invitations with phallic measurements listed next to many a telephone number inscribed on the partitions of the public toilets at the foot of Washington Monument. What in me had I been attempting to extirpate on that lunatic climb? In Our Wild—Studies among the Sane by Timothy Madden.

There was one other man in town who could call himself my mate for he, too, had attempted to go up the Provincetown Monument. Like me, he had failed to solve the overhang and been rescued by the volunteer firemen, although this time (there are limits to symmetry) Barrels was not on the rescue rope.

His attempt took place only four years ago, but such are the number of freak-outs and flare-outs who bob in the churn of the great washing machine that is Provincetown in summer that no one remembers anything. My father’s legend has been walking along with his life, but here, by the time Hank Nissen made his attempt, all had forgotten mine—too many people pass through!—and sometimes I think Nissen was the only one who remembered that I had also tried.

I regretted, however, that our exploits were privately wed, for I could not bear the guy. Will it help to explain that his nickname was Spider? Spider Nissen. Henry Nissen a.k.a. Hank Nissen, a.k.a. Spider Nissen, and the last clung to him like a bad smell. He had a touch of the hyena for that matter—the same we-eat-tainted-meattogether intimacy that burns out of a hyena’s eyes behind the bars of his cage. So Spider Nissen would look at me and give a giggle as if we had both had a girl together, and each took turns sitting on her head.

He bothered me prodigiously. I do not know if it was our mingled glory and shame on the monument wall, but I could not see him in the street without having my mood altered for the day. I knew as much physical uneasiness around him as if he kept a knife in his pocket to use below your ribs, and indeed he did keep a knife. For that matter, he was the type to knowingly sell you pot ravaged with paraquat because he needed the bread to score for coke. A bad man, yet through the winter, winter after winter, one of my twenty friends in town. In winter we paid a toll not unlike living in Alaska—a friend was someone to pass an hour with against the Great Ice-Man of the North. In the silence of our winter, dull acquaintances, drunks, wretches and bores could be elevated to a species thought of as friend. Much as I disliked Spider, we were near, we had shared an hour no one else could comprehend even if our hour was sixteen years apart.

Besides, he was a writer. In winter we needed each other if only to be critical of our contemporaries together. One night we would look for the faults in McGuane, next came DeLillo. Robert Stone and Harry Crews were saved for special occasions. Our rage against the talent of those who were our age and successful made the marrow of many an evening, even if I suspected he didn’t value my writing. I knew I didn’t like his. My lips were sealed, however. He was my dirty, treacherous, raunchy neighbor-friend. Besides, one had to admire half his mind. He was trying to launch a series of novels about a private detective who never left his room, a paraplegic in a wheelchair who managed to solve all crime set before him through his computer. He would tap into giant networks, put knots in the CIA’s internal communications, mess with the Russians, but Spider’s man also took care of intimate deeds by peering into private computers. He’d locate the murderers through their shopping lists. Spider’s protagonist was a true spider. Once I told him, “We’ve evolved from invertebrates to vertebrates. You’ll take us on to the cerebrates.” Saying that, I saw heads with tendrils substituting for torso and limbs, but his eye glittered as if I had made a direct hit in a video arcade.

I may as well describe his appearance—it was by now obvious to me that I was on my way to his house. He was tall and thin with very long limbs and long thin blond hair that was near to blue-green from dirt, even as his faded blue denims were almost a dirty yellow. He had a long nose that went nowhere—that is to say, it had no climax, merely ended with two functioning nostrils and a nondescript tip. He had a wide, flat, crablike mouth and dark gray eyes. The ceilings in his house were too low for him. The exposed beams were only eight feet from the floor—another fish-shed from Hell-Town!—and so the place consisted of four small rooms at the top of a narrow Cape Cod stairway above four small rooms below, all reeking of some sad, dank aroma, of cabbage, the faded scent of wine, diabetic sweat—I think his girl had diabetes—and old bones, an old dog, spoiled mayonnaise. It was like the poverty of an old lady’s room.

But then in winter we huddled in our houses as if we belonged to the century behind us. His house was on one of the narrow lanes between our two long streets, and you could not even see its roof until you made your entrance through a gate in a high hedge. Then the door was on you. There was no yard, just the hedge encircling the house. On the ground floor, as you looked through each window, you saw nothing but that hedge.

I remember wondering on my walk why I was visiting him now, and soon recalled that the last time I had been at his house he had cut a plug from a melon, poured in vodka and later served it to all of us with hash cookies. There had been something in the way he cut the melon—a high surgical precision in the turning of the blade that excited me to the joys of using a knife, much as a man who is eating with a highly refined gusto can inspire your taste for the same food.

So it was that walking along the street, contemplating the monument and my tattoo, I thought not only of Spider Nissen but of the frightful scream he gave on the night of a séance over a month ago and the rare event that ensued: Patty Lareine had a most uncharacteristic fit of hysterics immediately afterward. With no more than this recollection of how he used a knife, and the quick but immaculate certainty (which came to me like an angel’s gift) that he might know how I received my tattoo, I was suddenly possessed of the conviction it was Spider’s knife that severed a blonde head from its neck.

All this at once. The most intolerable pressure in my head now released itself. It is agony to live without a clue when you are in peril whose depth cannot be measured. Now, I had a premise. It was to observe my friend Spider. I am afraid, after every bad remark I have just made about him, that I had still been generous enough to take him along on more than one trip to the marijuana patch. Our winter loneliness is, as I say, the source of half our actions.

Nissen’s woman, Beth, opened the door to my rap on the knocker. I mentioned earlier that there was no snobbery in Provincetown, and none there was, but you could still find a good many people to be offended. For instance, most of my winter friends never locked their door when they were home. You did not ring or rap. You walked in on people. If the door was locked, it meant only one thing—your friends were screwing. Some of my friends, for that matter, liked to make love with the door unlocked. If you came in, there was the option to watch or, given the phase of the moon, to join. There is not that much to do in Provincetown in the winter.

Patty Lareine, however, considered this trashy. I never came close to understanding her mores, since I think she would have cohabited with an elephant—but only to win a bet, a very large bet. Where she came from, white trash were always wandering around in one another’s bedding. So while my good wife could consider many a proposal, some touch of class had to accompany it. This Provincetown custom of one smelly joining two sleazos under dingy-gone blankets was revolting to her. They could go for it because they came from good middle-class families and were, as Patty Lareine once put it, “trying to get vengeance on their folks for giving them cancer!” Patty was having no part of that. Her body was her proud possession. She loved nude beach parties on the back shore and enjoyed standing (with her brown snatch limned in honey-gold by the sun) a foot away from the eyes of some potential lover on the sand who was eating a hot dog, one eye on the red meat covered with mustard coming up to his lips, the other on the copse between her thighs.

She could cavort bare-ass in the sea, her arms around two other naked women, her mean, pinching Southern fingers tweaking their nipples—nipple-pinching, tit-grabbing, ass-slapping being good girl sports in the waterholes she used to know, the splash-rope hanging from the big limb of the old tree up on the bluff.

She also liked to walk about our house in her high heels and nothing else, and it grated on her most sensitive tissues when some old parka with a man inside would fling our door open to ask, “Tim at home?”

“You stupid low crude son of a bitch,” she would say, “did you ever hear of knocking?”

So a law was imposed on our friends: Ring the bell before you come in. And we—meaning her—enforced it. We were looked down on for being so uptight, but as I indicated, reverse snobbery occupied our town in winter.

Therefore I made a point of knocking on Spider’s door and nodded at his woman, Beth, when she let me in. There was a submission in her so slavish to every one of Nissen’s whims that even the most gung ho women in town gave up on her. The irony is that Beth supported Nissen’s household; indeed, it was her little house and had been bought with money given by her well-to-do parents (corporation types, I was told, from Wisconsin). Yet Spider held the salt-box as his fief. The fact that it was her money that had bought his Honda 1200CC, his Trinitron TV, his Sony video camera, his Betamax recorder and his Apple computer seemed only to strengthen his power. Her poor sense of worth was kept dimly alive by surrendering funds to him: she was a quiet, pale, soft-spoken, furtive, dun-colored young woman with eyeglasses, and I always had the impression, even as Beth and I bobbed our heads and gave shy smiles to each other, that she had deliberately refused every small charm that could have attached itself to her. She looked like a weed. Yet she wrote good poetry. On reading what little she would show, I had discovered that she was cruel as a ghetto rapist in the brutality of her concepts, quick as an acrobat in her metaphors, and ready to slay your heart with an occasional vein of feeling as tender as the stem of honeysuckle on a child’s mouth. Still, I was only surprised, not dumbfounded. She was one weed that had been fed on radium.

Let me warn you, however, that her sex life with Spider—no mystery to any friend—was sordid, even for us. Somewhere along the way, Nissen had hurt his back and now had a serious slipped disc. Every few months he would have to take to the floor for a couple of weeks, do his writing there, his eating, and his fornicating. I think the worse his back began to treat him, the more he went at it, which had to make his spine worse. First he ground the meat and then the bones, and finally the tripe and offal of their attraction for each other as if during the length of this incarceration on the floor—speak of flattening time!—he had to keep plucking the one banjo string left to him until either his back would break, his mind would go screaming into outer space or she would slit her wrists. He used to make video tapes of them fornicating. Maybe as many as a dozen of us had been shown them. She would sit among us like a nun, silent, while he demonstrated his slipped-disc techniques. They consisted mainly of Spider on his back while she (and he was proud of her bone-slender body when it undulated on him) did all sorts of turns. They usually ended with her mouth clamped on his joystick and the crimp in his back vibrating like a dog’s tail as he gave it all to the video camera, coming at last in a flash, one spasm, no more, last thread of the last visible semen in a man who for want of other diversion had been screwing all day. It was awful to watch. He used to urinate on her, there also for us to see on the TV screen. He had grown a wispy light-brown D’Artagnan mustache which he would tweak like a villain while he hosed her down. You may ask why I watched, and I can tell you: I knew the great vaults of heaven were for the angels, but there were other conduits in the sky, and underground railways for the demons, and I used to feel as if Nissen’s house (although the owner’s name was hers, White, Beth Dietrich White) was one more station on the line. So I stayed to watch, not knowing if I was an acolyte or a spy, until at last his back, thank God, got a little better over the months, and he eased off from all that insane crossed-wires short-circuit fucking. Of course, in compensation, he now wrote long detailed descriptions of how he got it on with Beth, and he would lay this on you and you would read it and discuss the merits. It was the ultimate literary workshop.

I could have endured him, this Spider, this monster, who shared with me the feat of climbing seven eighths of the way up the stone phallus of the highest monument between here and Washington, D.C., if only he had believed in God, or the Devil, or both. If he had been a soul in torment, or wished to murder the Lord, or had kissed the Devil beneath his tail and was now a slave, I could have put up with heresy, fallacy, perjury, antinomianism, Arianism, emanatism, Gnosticism, Manicheanism, even Monophysitism or Catharism, but not this damn atheist who believed in spirits that came in electronic streams. I think his theological view came to this: there might have been a god once, but now, for whatever reason, It was gone, and had left us a cosmic warehouse where we could rattle around and poke our fingers into the goods, tap into all the systems. Yes, he was in the vanguard of the cerebrates.

On this day, as I came in, their living room was dark, the shades were drawn. Spider and two other men, whose faces at first I could not see, were watching the Patriots try to score from the ten-yard line. It had to be Sunday, a sign of how far I was removed from all about me. I had not even known. On any other Sunday in November I would have made my bets after much consideration and would have been ensconced here from the kickoff since, I confess, that no matter how I disliked Nissen, and did not take to watching TV for hours inasmuch as it leached me out as thoroughly as a dose of salts, still, if you were going to, there was no place for watching television like Nissen’s small parlor. The odor of stale socks and old spills of beer blended with the subtle scents of video equipment—scorched wires, plastic boxes. I could feel as if I were in a cave out there on the edge of the future civilization—out with the new cavemen of the cerebrates, anticipating the millennia to come. If Sunday afternoons were spent in the deep if much depressed peace of dissipating time, still the seasons could go by and I would know a dull happiness watching the Patriots, the Celtics, the Bruins and then, in April, the Red Sox. By May, the atmosphere changed. Our winter was over, the summer was in our minds, and Nissen’s living room would no longer seem like a cave so much as an unaired den. Now, however, we were at the beginning of hibernation. If this had not been so unusual an autumn for me, I might have enjoyed (in a sort of gloom) bringing a six-pack or quart of bourbon as my contribution to the cave and would have flopped without another thought on one of his two couches or three broken-down stuffed chairs (all of this crammed into a living room not twelve by sixteen!) stretched out my brogans on his rug to make myself one with all the colors in the room—the walls, carpet and furniture having by now faded, darkened, been bleached by spills and turned by stains into the ubiquitous colorless color of them all which was neither ash-gray nor washed-out purple nor dulled-down green nor a wan brown, but the mixture of them all. Who cared about the color? The TV screen was our altar of light, and all of us watched it with an occasional grunt or sip of our beer.

I cannot tell you how soothing this felt to me now. To someone living like myself these days, it was honest relief to sit among Spider’s guests, two dudes I could do without on better occasions, but today they were company. One was Pete the Polack, our bookie, who had a last name nobody including himself would pronounce twice in the exact same way (Peter Petrarciewisz may be the spelling) and I disliked him for being an unfair son of a bitch full of greed since he put a vigorish of 20 percent on all losing bets instead of the 10 percent you could get from the Boston books (“Make a phone call to Boston,” he would say, knowing his clients could get no credit there) and besides, he shifted the line against you if he had a clue which way you’d bet, a big surly kid with a sour face, an all-purpose ethnic: you would have taken him for Italian, Irish, Polish, Hungarian, German or Ukrainian if that was what you were told. He disliked me as well. I was one of the few who could get credit in Boston.

That Pete the Polack was here today could only mean Nissen had bet a lot on the Patriots. It was disquieting. Nissen might be unsentimental enough to piss on his slave woman, but he’d lick the shoelaces of any athlete godlike enough to play for the Pats. His paraplegic detective might be able to penetrate CIA computers and roll up friend or foe with equal panache, but Nissen was so metaphysical about his allegiance that Pete could make the team a six-point favorite on a day when I only had to give three in Boston. How many times the Spider had been trapped in the middle! I assumed the bet today was so large that Pete was here to collect if he won, and after five minutes knew I was right; the Spider soon began to shout at the set. Before long I was convinced he must have bet at least the value of his motorcycle on the game, and Pete was here to wheel it away if Nissen lost.

It is also worth stating about Pete that he was perfectly capable of letting Spider run up his losses in return for promises—“Carry me another week and I’ll take you out to where Madden keeps his product.” The stash had to be worth a couple of thousand dollars and Nissen knew it: he would not be above offering it as collateral.

The other man in the room I hardly knew. You would have cast him for a greaser. He had tattoos of eagles and mermaids all over his arms, and straight black hair, a low brow, a dented nose, a mustache and a couple of missing teeth. Everybody called him Stoodie because he used, when an adolescent, to steal nothing but Studebakers all up and down the Cape. That was the legend, and it was untrue—he stole all kinds of cars—but they called him Stoodie because it was a Studebaker he had been busted on. Now he collected on losing bets for Pete, and, as I had heard, was a machinist and metalworker (all learned in the pen at Walpole) good enough to change the serial numbers on the engine blocks of cars other people had stolen. However, he, I assumed, would not know of my small part of the Truro woods.

I mention this because like John Foster Dulles, who—whatever his sins—gave us the phrase, I was going through an agonizing reappraisal. I liked to look upon myself as a writer searching for a somewhat larger view of man. It did not please me to reduce everyone I encountered to the ranks of those who knew and those who did not know where Timothy Madden might keep his stash.

Now, however, my mind was nothing but this list. Nissen knew, and by extension, Beth knew. Patty knew. Mr. Black knew. For all I knew, I had taken Jessica and Mr. Pangborn there. Regency seemed to have a clear notion. I could think of others. I could even add my father. He had made unsuccessful attempts over the years to cut out drinking by the substitution of marijuana. Once, over a year ago, on the last visit to Patty and me, I had taken him out to my clearing and tried to get him interested in the crop. I figured if he saw the plants, he might respect them as much as hops. So, yes, add my father to the list.

But that was like urinating on Beth. Abruptly, I recognized the monstrousness of my new mental preoccupation. Everybody came out as items on a computer list. Was I becoming a cerebrate? So much had this activity taken over my head that I felt like a computer trembling on its foundations. I kept kicking my father’s name on and off the list. Give me, in preference, a storm at sea.

I watched the football game for as long as I could. At last, on a time-out in the beginning of the second quarter, Nissen went to the refrigerator for beers. I followed.

There was only one way to treat him and that was with no ceremony. Since he could show his wife and himself in a confetti of electronic dots, or ask you in the middle of biting a sandwich if you were constipated, I had no compunctions about injuring him with a quick question. Therefore I said, “Spider, remember the séance?”

“You forget it, man,” he said. “I can’t.”

“It was weird.”

“It was pure horrendous.” He sloshed his beer around a missing molar in his mouth, gulped the fluid and added, “You and your wife can go for that shit. I won’t. It’s too disruptive.”

“What did you see?”

“Same thing your wife saw.”

“Well, I’m asking you.”

“Hey, don’t lay it on me. Everything’s all right, right?”

“Couldn’t be better.”

“Sure,” he said.

“So why don’t you tell me?”

“I don’t want to get into that place again.”

“Listen,” I said, “you got to keep yourself pure today. You have a big bet.”

“So?”

“I’m asking a favor. Keep yourself pure with your buddies. Your team will cover the bet.”

“Don’t give me that mystical sauce. It went out with LSD. I don’t have to fucking keep myself pure by telling you what you want to hear. That’s desperate betting, man, that’s degenerate. I pick the Patriots on their merits.”

“You need my help today,” I said, looking into his eyes as if I wouldn’t relent.

“You’re crazy,” he said. “How many hundred thousand people betting on this game, two million probably, and I got to get myself pure with you—that puts the result where I want it? Madden, every one of you potheads is tipped. Cut yourself a little coke.” He slammed the refrigerator door. He was ready to go back to the game.

“You’re wrong,” I said. “You and me can help them cover if I am able to put my mind right alongside of yours.”

“I get no input whatsoever from you.”

“Well,” I said, “I hate to bring it up. But you and me have this one thing in common that two million other bettors don’t have.”

“All right.”

“We’ve been one special place together.”

As I said this, the most peculiar phenomenon occurred. I had never told it to anyone, not even quite to myself, but in that hour I was trapped beneath the overhang, the most terrible odor oozed out to me from—I do not know if it was the rocks or my own sweat—but a dreadful odor of corruption came up nonetheless, the way perhaps a battlefield of many dead would smell, or was it—and this was my fear—the nearness of the Devil waiting to receive me? It was, in all events, so terrible a smell that once I was down on the ground it remained the worst fear in days to come until I told myself, and for all I knew, this is true also, that I was sniffing no more than some old guano of the gulls magnified by my own terror into the stench of a satanic beast. But now, even as I said what should have remained unsaid, “We’ve been one special place together,” so did a whiff of that incredible odor come off of Nissen, and I think we both knew that the experience had been equal for both of us.

“What did you see,” I asked again, “at the séance?”

I could feel how he was on the edge of telling me, and had the good sense not to push further. I could feel the truth coming forth even as his tongue picked at his lips.

During the séance we had been six of us about a round oak table, our hands flattened out on the surface, our right thumb touching our left thumb, and the little finger of each hand in contact with the little finger of each person to left or right. We were trying to get the table to tap. Let me not even speak now of our purpose, but in that darkened room by the back shore (for we were all at a rich acquaintance’s home in Truro and the ocean waves were tolling on the back shore not two hundred yards away) it seemed to me that with each question asked, the table was actually coming closer to some small quiver when, right then, our communal senses were shattered by Nissen’s fearful scream. Having brought this much back for myself, I must have returned the memory to him as well, for now he said, “I saw her dead. I saw your wife dead and with her head cut off. The next fucking moment, she saw it too. We were looking at it together.”

In this instant the smell that came off him was overpowering, and I could feel a reverberation of my fear beneath the overhang. So I knew that no matter how I might like to banish the impulse, I had no choice: I must go back to the tree on the sandy ridge and discover whose head was in the burrow below.

Yet in this moment a look of incredible spite came into Nissen’s face and he reached over and squeezed my right arm beneath the shoulder with fingers that dug in like five spikes.

As I winced he laughed. “Yeah,” he said, “you got a tattoo. Harpo told the truth.”

“How does Harpo know?”

“How does he know? Man, you are so fucking spaced out that you need your wife. She better come back.” He snorted as if some grains of coke were leaking out of his nose. “Hey,” he said, “yeah,” he said, “I’m pure. Now, you get yourself pure.”

“How does Harpo know?” I repeated. Harpo was a friend of Nissen’s and raced motorcycles with him.

“Well, mate,” said Spider, “he gave you the fucking tattoo.”

Sven “Harpo” Veriakis. He was a short blond Greek-Norwegian on his father’s side, Portuguese by his mother, and built like a fireplug. He had been the third shortest man ever to play in the NFL (even if he only lasted for a season). Now, Harpo had moved to Wellfleet, and one didn’t see him often, but he had conducted our séance, that I recalled. “What did he say?” I asked.

“Who knows,” said Nissen. “I never can figure out what he’s saying. He’s a space cadet like you.”

Cries came out of the living room then, and imprecations. The Patriots had just scored again. Spider whooped and led me back.

In the intermission at half time, Stoodie began to talk. I had never heard him say as much before.

“I like to lie awake at night and listen to the sounds in the street,” he said to Beth. “There’s a lot of significance then. You must provide yourself with the proper framing of mind, and that makes it all pregnant with space. Pregnant with grace,” he amended, and nodded, and nipped on his beer. I was remembering something I had heard about Stoodie. He used to tie his wife by her ankles to hooks he had put in a ceiling beam. Then he would caress her. In his fashion.

“I admire the natural situation of the Cape,” he now said to Beth. “I will take an Indian summer over all. Strolling among our dunes, I have had the privilege of seeing another someone, a male or female person on another dune as much as half a mile away, but the glow of the sun is on them. They are feeling just as full of love for all this golden goodness as we are in our own feelings. That’s God’s blessing right there. No escaping it. Beauty inexorable.” He took a breath. “I mean beauty exalted.”

It was here I made the decision to add Stoodie to my list.