The
Lighthouse ...
I
thought of that first night in Burnt Harbor, of Kenzie's white face
disappearing into the shadows, like a moth.
She
was looking for you,
Robert had said.
She said you were nice.
Well,
that was her first mistake.
She
said you were going to give her a ride.
My
stomach turned over, but not from the swell. I fumbled for the bottle of Jack
Daniel's.
She
wasn't running away. I knew that. Robert knew it too. She'd been looking for
me, but she'd run into someone else. I thought of the boat I'd glimpsed that
night in Burnt Harbor—its running lights, one red, one green; then darkness,
its engine silenced. I remembered the animal crouched in the tree, its wild
maddened eyes.
Fishers
never have the mainland.
"Whooee!
Wicked cold out there." Toby ducked beneath the dodger, shaking sleet from
his anorak. He stuffed the scoop back into its bin and patted my shoulder.
"You seem to have done okay. Here."
He
took the tiller and angled it slightly. The
Northern Sky
turned toward
the far end of the beach. "Now we're not going into the wind, we'll make
better time. If you can handle it for a few more minutes, I'll go down and fire
up the Coleman stove and heat us up some coffee, how's that?"
"Sounds
great."
He
grabbed the mugs and went below. I stood, brooding, as we drew closer to the
island. Great reddish boulders were scattered on the rocky shore. On the cliffs
above the beach, spindly stands of evergreen and birch. A glitter among the
trees indicated a house or outbuildings.
Toby
returned with two steaming mugs. "Here you go."
I stared
at the island. "It's so big."
"Don't
forget there was a whole village once."
I
raised the mug to my face, pressing it against my cheek until it burned.
"I can't believe you just come and go from here."
"Not
often. Fishermen do it all the time."
"Yeah,
and freeze to death for a living."
"You
think we have a choice? Places like Paswegas, we're like Custer's Last Stand.
People from away, developers—they're killing us. They move here from New Jersey
and New York and they don't want to let us hunt our own land anymore. The
fishermen can't catch fish. Red tide kills the clammers. We get your Lyme
ticks, and your Nile mosquitoes ... every bad thing we used to hide from, finds
us now. Away isn't 'away' anymore. It's here."
He
didn't sound angry the way Suze had: only resigned and sad. I sipped some
coffee and scalded my tongue. Didn't feel bad at all.
"I
saw something," I said. I backed up against the dodger, out of the wind.
"Back on Paswegas. An animal, in those pine trees by Aphrodite's house. I
think it was that thing you told me about. A fisher."
"What'd
it look like?"
"Kind
of big, or biggish. Black-brown, like a little bear but with a long tail. A lot
of fur. It snarled at me."
"Was
it on the ground?"
"It
was in a tree. Aphrodite's dogs came running up, and it climbed away or jumped
off or something. I'm sure it was a fisher."
"Huh."
Toby sipped his coffee and steered the boat toward a long pier that seemed to
be made of rusty metal. As we drew closer, I saw that it wasn't metal but stone,
the same bloody color as the boulders on shore. "It does sound like a
fisher."
"When
I mentioned it to Suze, she thought I was crazy. She said it was impossible for
a fisher to get out to one of the islands."
"Well,
that's true. But if you saw it . . . people see things all the time. Wolves,
mountain lions. Not on the islands, but back there-;—"
He
cocked his head toward the mainland. "People report them to Fish and
Wildlife, but the feds don't want to admit they're back in Maine. Once they
admit we got mountain lions and wolves living here, you have a whole lot of
issues about endangered species. Also a whole lot of pissed-off farmers and
hunters, 'cause the wolves and cougars eat their livestock, and they thin out
the deer herd. But they're here, all right."
I
felt a faint tingling on my neck. "So it's theoretically possible for a
fisher to be there, even if no one's ever seen one before?"
"Sure.
I mean, moose have swum out to the islands, and coyotes and foxes. Back a
hundred years ago, there was one or two winters so bad there were places where
the reach would freeze, and animals could walk over. You don't usually find big
pine trees on the islands anymore—they were all cut for lumber, or to make
masts. Plus they don't like the salt air. But there's a few
big pines on
Paswegas, and there's a couple of really big ones here on Tolba. So you could
have porcupines, and maybe you could have a fisher. Anything's possible."
I
finished my coffee. "You got any food down there?"
"Yeah,
go and poke around in the galley, you'll find something."
I
went below. It wasn't exactly warm, but it was out of the wind and rain. Quiet,
too. Well, not quiet, exactly, but the sounds were different. Rain slashing
against the porthole windows, mildly ominous creakings, the drone of the
engine. I sat and pulled a blanket around my shoulders. After a few
minutes
I went to the galley to see what I could find to eat.
There
was enough rum and Moxie to qualify as an alternative energy source, but not a
lot of what you'd call food. A few sprouting potatoes, a couple cans of tomato
sauce. I found a half-f bag of green apples that seemed okay, also a box of
blueberry Pop Tarts. I ate an apple then wolfed down Pop Tarts while rummaging
through cupboards to see what more there was.
String,
a corkscrew, plastic condiment packets. A bottom drawer held a first-aid kit,
fishing line and hooks, matches in a waterproof tin. Aspirin, Ipecac, Benadryl.
I shoved them aside and saw something else.
A
flare gun.
I
picked it up. About five inches long, made of plastic, with a black barrel and
orange trigger. I checked the barrel. There was a single red canister inside. I
held it, thinking, put it into the drawer and went back up on deck.
"Find
something?"
"Some
Pop Tarts."
"Yeah,
I bought a case of those for Y2K."
I
stood beside him at the tiller and watched black water slop against blocks of
rose-colored stone. In the sleety mist it was hard to tell where the pier ended
and the beach began. Granite blocks blended into boulders, boulders faded into
reddish sand indistinguishable from stunted trees killed by salt and cold. A
line of spruces well above the waterline glowed a green so deep it was almost
black. Here and there, a black gleam as of eyes gazed back from the trees. A
house.
"Is
that where we're going?" I asked.
"That's
it. Mr. Ryel's Dream House."
I
thought we'd pull up to the pier. Instead, the
Northern Sky
angled off
toward a pair of round floats. A lobster buoy bobbed nearby.
"Take
this," said Toby, leaving the tiller to me. "I'm going to cut the
engine. Try to keep us from drifting away from those floats."
He
went below. The engine died. The only thing I could hear was the roar of the
wind and the crash of waves on the rocky beach.
"This
is a good mooring," Toby shouted as he headed toward the stern.
"We'll tie up here and take the dinghy to shore. The boat'll be safer if the
weather gets rough."
"Will
it get worse?"
"Don't
know. It seems to be dying down now, but that could just be the eye. Whyn't you
get your stuff from below. That way if we end up staying over at Lucien's place
you'll have it."
He
started to tie off the boat. I climbed down to the cabin and got my bag, put my
camera back inside, checked to make sure my copy of
Deceptio Visus
was
still safe. I opened it, flipping through the pages until I found the prints
I'd made in the basement, the contact sheets and the other two. Aphrodite's
photo of the naked man I now knew must be Denny Ahearn, and Denny's photo of
Hannah Meadows. I looked at them then put them aside and stared at the snapshot
of Gryffin.
I
shut my eyes and recalled his face as I'd first seen it, the emerald flaw in
his iris.
The green ray.
I thought of the photo in Aphrodite's room—a
different green-flecked eye—and the larger picture of Hannah Meadows in Toby's
apartment. Painted eyes, one with a green star inside it.
I
couldn't make sense of it. There
was
no sense to it, not to anyone
except the person who'd shot those pictures.
I've
heard alcoholics say they can recognize another alcoholic without ever seeing
them take a drink, that they can read a book or hear a song and know that the
person who wrote it was a drunk. I'm not crazy 24/7, but I've been crazy enough
that I recognize someone else who's nuts.
Especially
another photographer. Like Diane Arbus. She was a genius, and maybe I'm not.
But I know what she saw out there when she looked at the world through her
viewfinder. I know what she saw when she killed herself. Just like I know what
I saw when I watched Aphrodite die, what I felt: the stench of damage like my
own sweat, and my own reflected face like a flaw in her iris.
I
rode a wave of grief that left nothing in its wake, not memory or remorse or
rage. When it passed I looked down and saw Gryffin's photo still in my hand. I
slid it into
Deceptio Visus
and put the book into the bag with my
camera. I went back on deck.
"We're
all set," announced Toby. His cheeks were white with cold. "You got
everything? Grab one of those life jackets."
The
rain had nearly stopped, but the sky remained nickel colored, swollen with
cloud. I fished out another Adderall and washed it down with a mouthful of
whiskey. There was something behind those clouds, something behind that black
lowering bulk of granite and stunted trees, something I couldn't see yet. I got
the life jacket and waited in the stern by the dinghy. Toby returned with
another life jacket, the canvas bag, and a toolbox.
"I
think this is everything. You sure you're okay?" His brow furrowed.
"I
think so." I picked up the boat hook. "What about this? Can it come
along?"
"Yeah,
sure, go ahead and bring it. Just don't leave it behind."
We
loaded the dinghy then rowed to shore. It was rough but not scary. Or maybe I
was just getting used to it. I scanned the sea for signs of another boat, saw
nothing but a few floats. No planes in the sky, no sign of the mainland; just a
few black shapes that seemed to flicker above the dark water. Fish, I thought,
or maybe dolphins or seals. Toby said they were rocks.
"Another
reason Denny never leaves," he said, pulling at the oars. "Summer
it's okay, but winter—forget it."
We
reached the shore and got out. I helped him pull the boat well above the
highwater mark, kicking through tangles of seaweed encrusted with dead crabs.
When we were done, he straightened and shaded his eyes, staring out to sea.
"I
don't see Lucien's boat." He frowned. "Huh. Denny must've moved
it."
I
hoisted my bag and the boat hook. Toby dug a cigarette from his pocket and
looked at me. "So. What do you think?"
It
was beyond desolate: it was where desolation goes to be by itself. Stone
pilings reared from the water, skeletal remains of a dock. I couldn't see a
house. Surf-pounded stones lay on the beach between skeins of weed and
blackened driftwood. Farther up, those huge blocks of blood red granite were
the only jolts of color in a scoured gray world. My entire body ached with cold
and fatigue, but somehow that seemed like the right way to feel here. It was a
place that had the flesh stripped from it. Just above the shoreline reared a
stand of dead trees—cat spruce, said Toby—trunks bleached white and every
needle stripped from their branches. Overturned toe stumps surrounded them,
roots exposed like tentacles, and the wing of a seabird, its feathers eaten
away so it resembled a shattered Chinese fan.
And
everywhere, red granite. Not boulders or rocks but immense blocks and
overturned pillars, Greek columns covered with lichen, poison green, blaze
orange, white, half-carven angels and a monolithic horse and rider.
"This
is incredible." I walked to an angel whose face was veiled with black mold
and ran my hand across its eyes. "It's not all rotted away."
"That's
why they call it granite." Toby took a drag from his cigarette. "Back
when everyone left here, they just packed their clothes and what they could
carry. Obviously they weren't going to cart off the granite. They left things
you wouldn't believe. When Lucien built his place, I found saw blades and
drills. Beautiful stuff; I've got some of 'em back in my place. Not to mention
the carvings. They had a hundred guys out here quarrying the stuff, but there
were men stayed in the sheds and just carved stone. You know how you see all
those memorials from a hundred, hundred-fifty years ago? Well, a lot of them
were carved here then shipped out to Boston .and New York. Angels, statues ...
if the carvers made a mistake, they'd just leave it here."