We are alike in many ways. We’re the same height, virtually the same weight, and the same body type. Although he has very dark brown hair and eyes so raven-black that they seem to have blue highlights, we have been mistaken for brothers.
We both have a collection of surf bumps, too, and as he leaned against the refrigerator, Bobby was absent-mindedly using the bottom of one bare foot to rub the bumps on the top of the other. These are knotty calcium deposits that develop from constant pressure against a surfboard; you get them on your toes and the tops of your feet from paddling while in a prone position. We have them on our knees, as well, and Bobby has them on his bottom ribs.
I am not tanned, of course, as Bobby is. He’s beyond tanned. He’s a maximum brown sun god, year round, and in summer he’s well-buttered toast. He does the mambo with melanoma, and maybe one day we’ll die of the same sun that he courts and I reject.
“There were some unreal zippers out there today,” he said. “Six-footers, perfect shape.”
“Looks way slow now.”
“Yeah. Mellowed out around sunset.”
We sucked at our beers. Orson happily licked his chops.
“So,” Bobby said, “your dad died.”
I nodded. Sasha must have called him.
“Good,” he said.
“Yeah.”
Bobby is not cruel or insensitive. He meant it was good that the suffering was over for my father.
Between us, we often say a lot with a few words. People have mistaken us for brothers not merely because we are the same height, weight, and body type..
“You got to the hospital in time. So it was cool.”
“It was.”
He didn’t ask me how I was handling it. He knew.
“So after the hospital,” he said, “you sang a couple numbers in a minstrel show.”
I touched one sooty hand to my sooty face. “Someone killed Angela Ferryman, set her house on fire to cover it. I almost caught the great
onaula-loa
in the sky.”
“Who’s the someone?”
“Wish I knew. Same people stole Dad’s body.”
Bobby drank some beer and said nothing.
“They killed a drifter, swapped his body for Dad’s. You might not want to know about this.”
For a while, he weighed the wisdom of ignorance against the pull of curiosity. “I can always forget I heard it, if that seems smart.”
Orson belched. Beer makes him gaseous.
When the dog wagged his tail and looked up beseechingly, Bobby said, “No more for you, fur face.”
“I’m hungry,” I said.
“You’re filthy, too. Catch a shower, take some of my clothes. I’ll throw together some clucking tacos.”
“Thought I’d clean up with a swim.”
“It’s nipple out there.”
“Feels about sixty degrees.”
“I’m talking water temp. Believe me, the nip factor is high. Shower’s better.”
“Orson needs a makeover, too.”
“Take him in the shower with you. There’re plenty of towels.”
“Very broly of you,” I said.
Broly
meaning “brotherly.”
“Yeah, I’m so Christian, I don’t ride the waves anymore—I just walk on them.”
After a few minutes in Bobbyland, I was relaxed and willing to ease into my news. Bobby’s more than a beloved friend. He’s a tranquilizer.
Suddenly he stood away from the refrigerator and cocked his head, listening.
“Something?” I asked.
“Someone.”
I hadn’t heard anything but the steadily diminishing voice of the wind. With the windows closed and the surf so slow, I couldn’t even hear the sea, but I noticed that Orson was alert, too.
Bobby headed out of the kitchen to see who the visitor might be, and I said, “Bro,” and offered him the Glock.
He stared dubiously at the pistol, then at me. “Stay casual.”
“That drifter. They cut out his eyes.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “Because they could?”
For a moment Bobby considered what I’d said. Then he took a key from a pocket of his jeans and unlocked a broom closet, which to the best of my recollection had never featured a lock before. From the narrow closet, he took a pistol-grip, pump-action shotgun.
“That’s new,” I said.
“Goon repellent.”
This was not life as usual in Bobbyland. I couldn’t resist: “Stay casual.”
Orson and I followed Bobby across the living room and onto the front porch. The onshore flow smelled faintly of kelp.
The cottage faced north. No boats were on the bay—or at least none with running lights. To the east, the town twinkled along the shore and up the hills.
Surrounding the cottage, the end of the horn featured low dunes and shore grass frosted with moonlight. No one was in sight.
Orson moved to the top of the steps and stood rigid, his head raised and thrust forward, sniffing the air and catching a scent more interesting than kelp.
Relying perhaps on a sixth sense, Bobby didn’t even look at the dog to confirm his own suspicion. “Stay here. If I flush anyone out, tell him he can’t leave till we validate his parking ticket.”
Barefoot, he descended the steps and crossed the dunes to look down the steep incline to the beach. Someone could have been lying on that slope, watching the cottage from concealment.
Bobby walked along the crest of the embankment, heading toward the point, studying the slope and the beach below, turning every few steps to survey the territory between him and the house. He held the shotgun ready in both hands and conducted the search with military methodicalness.
Obviously, he had been through this routine more than once before. He hadn’t told me that he was being harassed by anyone or troubled by intruders. Ordinarily, if he was having a serious problem, he would have shared it with me.
I wondered what secret he was keeping.
19
Having turned away from the steps and pushed his snout between a pair of balusters at the east end of the porch, Orson was looking not west toward Bobby but back along the horn toward town. He growled deep in his throat.
I followed the direction of his gaze. Even in the fullness of the moon, which the snarled rags of cloud didn’t currently obscure, I was unable to see anyone.
With the steadiness of a grumbling motor, the dog’s low growl continued uninterrupted.
To the west, Bobby had reached the point, still moving along the crest of the embankment. Although I could see him, he was little more than a gray shape against the stark-black backdrop of sea and sky.
While I had been looking the other way, someone could have cut Bobby down so suddenly and violently that he had been unable to cry out, and I wouldn’t have known. Now, rounding the point and beginning to approach the house along the southern flank of the horn, this blurry gray figure could have been anyone.
To the growling dog, I said, “You’re spooking me.”
Although I strained my eyes, I still couldn’t discern anyone or any threat to the east, where Orson’s attention remained fixed. The only movement was the flutter of the tall, sparse grass. The fading wind wasn’t even strong enough to blow sand off the well-compacted dunes.
Orson stopped grumbling and thumped down the porch steps, as though in pursuit of quarry. Instead, he scampered into the sand only a few feet to the left of the steps, where he raised one hind leg and emptied his bladder.
When he returned to the porch, visible tremors were passing through his flanks. Looking eastward again, he didn’t resume his growling; instead, he whined nervously.
This change in him disturbed me more than if he had begun to bark furiously.
I sidled across the porch to the western corner of the cottage, trying to watch the sandy front yard but also wanting to keep Bobby—if, indeed, it was Bobby—in sight as long as possible. Soon, however, still edging along the southern embankment, he disappeared behind the house.
When I realized that Orson had stopped whining, I turned toward him and discovered he was gone.
I thought he must have chased after something in the night, though it was remarkable that he had sprinted off so soundlessly. Anxiously moving back the way I had come, across the porch toward the steps, I couldn’t see the dog anywhere out there among the moonlit dunes.
Then I found him at the open front door, peering out warily. He had retreated into the living room, just inside the threshold. His ears were flattened against his skull. His head was lowered. His hackles bristled as if he had sustained an electrical shock. He was neither growling nor whining, but tremors passed through his flanks.
Orson is many things—not least of all, strange—but he is not cowardly or stupid. Whatever he was retreating from must have been worthy of his fear.
“What’s the problem, pal?”
Failing to acknowledge me with even as little as a quick glance, the dog continued to obsess on the barren landscape beyond the porch. Although he drew his black lips away from his teeth, no snarl came from him. Clearly he no longer harbored any aggressive intent; rather, his bared teeth appeared to express extreme distaste, repulsion.
As I turned to scan the night, I glimpsed movement from the corner of my eye: the fuzzy impression of a man running in a half crouch, passing the cottage from east to west, progressing swiftly with long fluid strides through the last rank of dunes that marked the top of the slope to the beach, about forty feet away from me.
I swung around, bringing up the Glock. The running man had either gone to ground or had been a phantom.
Briefly I wondered if it was Pinn. No. Orson would not have been fearful of Jesse Pinn or of any man like him.
I crossed the porch, descended the three wooden steps, and stood in the sand, taking a closer look at the surrounding dunes. Scattered sprays of tall grass undulated in the breeze. Some of the shore lights shimmered across the lapping waters of the bay. Nothing else moved.
Like a tattered bandage unraveling from the dry white face of a mummified pharaoh, a long narrow cloud wound away from the chin of the moon.
Perhaps the running man was merely a cloud shadow. Perhaps. But I didn’t think so.
I glanced back toward the open door of the cottage. Orson had retreated farther from the threshold, deeper into the front room. For once, he was not at home in the night.
I didn’t feel entirely at home, either.
Stars. Moon. Sand. Grass. And a feeling of being watched.
From the slope that dropped to the beach or from a shallow swale between dunes, through a screen of grass, someone was watching me. A gaze can have weight, and this one was coming at me like a series of waves, not like slow surf but like fully macking double overheads, hammering at me.
Now the dog wasn’t the only one whose hackles rose.
Just when I began to worry that Bobby was taking a mortally long time, he appeared around the east end of the cottage. As he approached, sand pluming around his bare feet, he never looked at me but let his gaze travel ceaselessly from dune to dune.
I said, “Orson haired out.”
“Don’t believe it,” Bobby said.
“Totally haired out. He’s never done that before. He’s pure guts, that dog.”
“Well, if he did,” Bobby said, “I don’t blame him. Almost haired out myself.”
“Someone’s out there.”
“More than one.”
“Who?”
Bobby didn’t reply. He adjusted his grip on the shotgun but continued to hold it at the ready while he studied the surrounding night.
“They’ve been here before,” I guessed.
“Yeah.”
“Why? What do they want?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who are they?” I asked again.
As before, he didn’t answer.
“Bobby?” I pressed.
A great pale mass, a few hundred feet high, gradually resolved out of the darkness over the ocean to the west: A fog bank, revealed in lunar whitewash, extended far to the north and the south. Whether it came to land or hung offshore all night, the fog pushed a quieting pressure ahead of it. On silent wings, a formation of pelicans flew low over the peninsula and vanished across the black waters of the bay. As the remaining onshore breeze faded, the long grass drooped and was still, and I could better hear the slow surf breaking along the bay shore, although the sound was less a rumble than a lulling hushaby.
From out at the point, a cry as eerie as the call of a loon carved this deepening silence. An answering cry, equally sharp and chilling, arose from the dunes nearer the house.
I was reminded of those old Western movies in which the Indians call to one another in the night, imitating birds and coyotes, to coordinate their moves immediately before attacking the circled wagons of the homesteaders.
Bobby fired the shotgun into a nearby mound of sand, startling me so much that I nearly blew an aortic valve.
When echoes of the crash rebounded from the bay and receded again, when the last reverberations were absorbed by the vast pillow of fog in the west, I said, “Why’d you do that?”
Instead of answering me at once, Bobby chambered another shell and listened to the night.
I remembered Pinn firing the handgun into the ceiling of the church basement to punctuate the threat that he had leveled against Father Tom Eliot.
Finally, when no more loonlike cries arose, Bobby said, almost as if talking to himself, “Probably isn’t necessary, but once in a while it doesn’t hurt to float the idea of buckshot past them.”
“Who? Who are you warning off?”
I had known him to be mysterious in the past, but never quite so enigmatic as this.
The dunes continued to command his attention, and another minute of mental hang time passed before Bobby suddenly looked at me as if he had forgotten that I was standing beside him. “Let’s go inside. You scrub off the bad Denzel Washington disguise, and I’ll slam together some killer tacos.”
I knew better than to press the issue any further. He was being mysterious either to stoke my curiosity and enhance his treasured reputation for weirdness or because he had good reason to keep this secret even from me. In either case, he was in that special Bobby place, where he’s as inaccessible as if he were on his board, halfway through a tube radical, in an insanely hollow wave.
As I followed him into the house, I was still aware of being watched. The attention of the unknown observer prickled my back, like hermit-crab tracks on a surf-smoothed beach. Before closing the front door, I scanned the night once more, but our visitors remained well hidden.