Prince of Peace (74 page)

I said, "Why the hell would he come out here?"

"This is why." Carolyn grimaced as the boat dropped.

"But if they came after him, there's no escape. It's a corner. He's put himself in a corner."

"You just wish he'd stayed in Manhattan, the island with bridges."

"Damn right I do. Maybe this is the wrong Monhegan Island. Maybe it's the name of a nice resort in North Carolina."

Carolyn shook her head. The message that fell through our mail slot, in Michael's writing, had said only, "Monhegan Island, Palm Sunday morning."

"Besides," she said, sliding her arm through mine, "they'd never think to look for him out here."

"They have their ways." I pressed her arm between my elbow and my ribs. The wind feathered the wisps of her hair, tugging them one after the other out of her scarf. Beads of water clung to her lashes.

One time we took the boat from Galway to the Aran Islands. The sea became rough and then rain began to fall. Neither Caro nor I became sick, but many of our fellow passengers did, and to escape the cramped, putrid space below we went up on deck and stood huddled by a lifeboat. The rain lashed us and the boat bucked like a bronco, but we loved it. When the tourists came crashing up from below to be sick, they rushed one after the other for the nearest rail, but that had them puking into the wind with predictable results. Perhaps it was cruel of us, but we laughed and laughed. We were on the largest of the Aran Islands for three days. It never stopped raining, but that did not faze us because we spent the entire time in bed. Our Irish hosts—we stayed in a small, child-ridden B&B—eyed us suspiciously during our rare forays downstairs for meals. That we scandalized them heightened our pleasure. What a surprise to both of us that a gloomy, puritanical outpost of the Kingdom of Repression should have been the scene of our greatest coital excess. Talk about broncos! Carolyn and I rode each other like champions. Because that dreary little world held nothing for us we could focus for a change entirely on each other. In that foreign place we could become the other people we wanted to be. We came together like sex-starved strangers. The weather, having transformed our tourist weekend into a tryst, was a problem in only one regard. Owing to the pervasive dampness, our sperm-soaked sheets never dried out and we were too embarrassed to ask the Missus for fresh ones.

Carolyn leaned toward the lobsterman. "How do local people get out here, if there's no ferry?"

He shrugged. His gaze was fixed on the island. His hands played the wheel, the spokes of which were welded bolts. "Not much call. Local people stay put. Mail boat on Tuesdays. That's it."

"Do they get television out here?"

"Nope. No phones either. Just two-way radio."

Carolyn looked at me and said quietly, "So he can walk- around without worrying about being recognized. That might be worth being in a corner."

I asked the lobsterman, "What about newspapers? What about
Time
magazine?"

He shrugged.

"You ask him," I whispered to Carolyn. "He won't answer me."

The boat wallowed as we hit what seemed to be a wake, a wave distinctly larger than what we'd been through. Then the boat's propeller bit again and we steadied. Carolyn hugged me. "I hate this," she said. "I hate it. I wouldn't do it for anyone else."

"Me neither," I said.

Irony does not feature in my recollection of that morning. Obviously my true feelings toward Michael and toward what I had done, was doing, were coated over by numbing layers. My mind was entirely taken up with the details of our journey, although I do recall thinking that my nausea, once I began to feel it, was fitting. Otherwise it seems to me I was moving through events the way a sleepwalker does, with no sharp sensations of anticipation, fear, bitterness, or guilt.

As we approached the small harbor nestled in the gut between Monhegan and its tiny satellite, Manana, the noise of our boat's engine grew louder, not that our reticent skipper gunned it, but that the sound bounced back at us from the island's looming mass. The irregular, insistent clanging of a floating gong filled the air with tension, then faded as we left it behind. Even before I could distinguish between the gray rock of the shore and the sharp line of scraggly green pine above it, the boat slowed. Inside Manana the water was smooth. When I leaned over the boat's edge I could see the reflection of my own face, which I barely recognized.

I saw no houses until we swung around the tip of a promontory. On the hill above were separate small clusters of rugged-looking cottages. A large white clapboard building with a covered porch and shuttered windows must have been the summer hotel. Poking up from the trees at a higher elevation were a church steeple and the round white tower of the famous lighthouse.

We were cutting through a fleet of moored lobster boats essentially like the one in which we were riding. On their transoms were names like "Lu-Ann,"

"Beth-Marie" and "Sally-Jo." I nudged Carolyn. "Do you think the women out here have hyphenated names, or do the fishermen credit their wives and girlfriends together?"

Carolyn stared at me as if she hadn't understood. I was thinking that if she had a boat, it would be the "Michael-Frank."

Tied to the pilings at the single thrusting pier was a large oceangoing trawler, the only boat of its size in the harbor. It dwarfed us as we pulled in beside it.

"Goddamn!" the lobsterman said when he saw it. "What's she doing in here?"

There was an emotion in his voice—anger? alarm?—that disturbed me. "What do you mean?"

"These trawlers wreck our traps," he said. "They got no business in this close."

Close? It seemed to me we were halfway to Europe.

"She just better get out of this harbor before the tide goes. Ever seen a whale on the rocks? That's what she'll be."

With effortless skill he slipped in behind the trawler. I reached out to fend us off when we bumped the pier, but the boat slid up to it gently and stopped, just kissing the pilings.

I looked up at the trawler's looming black stern. Rust-stained white letters two feet high arched across it: "Sea Witch. Halifax."

A young man dressed for weather in a yellow slicker and watch cap greeted us from the pier. We clambered out of the boat, which slipped away then as smoothly as it had come in. I turned to thank the lobsterman, but he was intent on the helm and headed out with no farewell. As I watched him leave it was with a pang. Why didn't I just go with him?

The young man led us off the pier and up a dirt road that was lined with open oil drums. An unbearable stench came from them. They were full of rotten fish, lobster bait, and it was then that my nausea got the, best of me. I turned away and vomited violently on the side of the road. Carolyn tried to help but I shrugged her off. For perhaps two full minutes, though it seemed like hours, I retched. When the heaves subsided and I recovered some sense of myself, of my situation, I looked around expecting to see unfriendly men laughing at me the way I had laughed on the boat to Aran. But there were only Carolyn and our guide.

I followed them miserably.

I was quite aware that Carolyn could hardly contain her excitement, and only then did the bile coating my mouth seem truly bitter.

The young man led us up the steep hill behind the village, along a rutted dirt path. If there were cars or trucks on Monhegan I didn't see them, and I can't call the trail we followed a road. At the top of the hill was the lighthouse we'd seen from the water, a great phallus fifty feet high. At its base stood a neglected shed. No sooner had we come upon it than our guide turned and left us.

Michael came promptly out of the shed, walking vigorously. He too was dressed like a seaman, and his beard enhanced the ruddy image, but I knew him at once. Despite everything—what I'd learned and what I'd done—my first surge of feeling was of the old affection, the need.

When my father lay dying in a dreary Queens hospital in 1964, Michael never left us. My father had a terrible time. He knew he was dying, and when he was awake he was crazy with fear. His piety had failed him when my mother died several years before, and if it had been up to me to console him, he would have died in the throes of despair. But Michael knew how to help him, with a combination of silence and muted reassurance. Michael talked simply and directly of the Christian faith. He told my father, and me who listened, about the death of Lazarus, about the anguish of Jesus. Another priest had glibly begun describing the Streets of Heaven to my father, who had cursed him in a seizure of panic and railed, "Don't talk to me about heaven! Talk about my dying!" And that's what Michael did. Only when the full terror of that loss—Lazarus', ours—had been plumbed did he broach the subject of resurrection, but by then my father was ready to hear of it.

Eliciting faith from the wary is like getting a wounded bird to walk into your hand, but Michael, a natural priest if I ever knew one, could do it effortlessly. When my father died Michael was holding his hand and they were praying together the Hail Mary. It was the first prayer my father had uttered since my mother's death. He released his grip on life because Michael made him ready to. He believed in God, like me, because Michael did. If he had not been my friend, if he had only been the priest who sent my father on his way, I'd have been in his debt for the rest of my life. But with Michael, as with a brother, it was never a question of owing. At my father's graveside he said to me, "Now we really have to stick together."

I watched Carolyn go into his arms.

They kissed the way I'd seen them kiss dozens of times before, not with great passion certainly—no one's mouth opened—but with forthright affection. Their bodies were pressed together, but not sensually. Still I saw their kiss and embrace differently, and though even then I could not have identified its signals explicitly I recognized the unmistakable reality of their intimacy.

I lowered my eyes. Was that an act of deference? Of bashfulness? Reluctance to intrude upon lovers? Wasn't it my acknowledgment of their right to be together? From the very beginning I'd been the outsider in the ill-fated trio. I was the interloper, the one who'd come between. Perhaps that knowledge was what kept my jealousy at bay. If I trembled it was with the weak-kneed vertigo of one who'd just puked his guts out. I was sicker than I'd felt in years. But emotionally I was in space, floating weightlessly, not like an astronaut, but like an astronaut's tube of toothpaste.

When Michael turned to me I found it possible to go to him and embrace him. I did not kiss his cheek.

Hey, I told myself, no big deal. These things happen. What the hell, he fell in love with the wrong woman, or I did. It wasn't the end of the world. Just a bit of nastiness between two mortals. He slugged me; now I was slugging him. It had been going on since Cain and Abel. No, since Eve left Adam for the snake. No big deal.

Then why were my legs trembling?

The lighthouse was in the middle of a clearing, but ringing it were wild, weather-beaten shrubs and vine-tangled trees. The undergrowth was too thick to see into. Where was the goddamn FBI? I wanted this shit over with.

Michael took my arm firmly between his two hands. "Durk, what's wrong?"

When I looked at him, the concern in his eyes, the friendship, was what set off the charge at last. This fucker! This son of a bitch! This self-proclaimed saint! How dare he manifest love to me! Or rather pity! Or was it mere guilt? Out with it, Fuck! Show me what you really feel, the smug superiority of the usurper! Oh, you tortured soul! How you condemned yourself for flourishing a bayonet at those Korean peasants, but what of the bayonet you plunged in me? My wife's betrayal is nothing to yours! My first friend, the one who taught me trust! But what is trust now? Now I feel it, that blade between my breast and its bone, cutting cleanly, opening a hole in which to bury all past and future, a hole...

I caught myself before I cried, "Ef
tu!"
No melodrama, no display. I would show the fucker nothing. I covered one of his hands. "I've been sick," I said.

"I think he may be dehydrated," Carolyn explained.

"There's a tap in the cabin. Come in." Michael led me into the shack and Carolyn followed. I put my mouth at the faucet and drank, an act full of history, for as boys we were always finding faucets to drink from. He might have slapped me on the back, "It's my turn, Durk, come on!" But he let me drink my fill. I remembered the Inwood summer ritual of opening the fire hydrants and dancing in the spray. This man was in the middle of every happy memory I had. He'd taken those from me too.

The water tasted of rust, but it soothed me and my stomach felt better at once. When I straightened I was less lightheaded, and I looked around the small shadowy room. Rampant cobwebs held the corners. In the center were two chairs at a plain table, the only furniture, and I took one of them. Carolyn and Michael remained standing, but I didn't care.

"A lighthouse?" I asked, "Won't the coast guard find you?"

Michael shook his head. "They run these things from Portland or someplace now. They're automated. These cabins haven't been lived in for years."

"How long have you been here?" Now when I looked around I noticed that there was no cot, no toilet, no sign of food. A blanket was bunched in a corner.

"Last night. I came out on a boat like yours."

"But you'll be staying here?"

He shook his head. "This was just a rendezvous. I'm pulling out right away."

"What do you mean?" Suddenly I didn't know what to feel or think. Would it be good news or bad if he escaped the FBI? Were they even then watching from hiding places in the woods?

"I'm going away." He looked toward Carolyn. He was explaining himself to her, not me. "That's why I wanted to see you. I'm leaving the country."

"For Halifax?" she asked. She'd been paying attention too.

"Yes."

"Then it's over?" I asked. "Your resistance is over?" Was it possible that the great hero had reached his limit? That the antiwar priest, having spent his passion for peace, would become just another convict on the lam?