“Will you shut up, please!” There was strain, all right. “You know you aren’t half bad looking for a guy as gray as London in December. And if you really are the man who wrote this dark poem I just finished reading,” she ruffled some pages by her phone’s mouthpiece, “then we should be able to get through dinner without much bloodletting. Even if you don’t answer my inevitable questions. What do you say?”
“I say you’re tryin’ too hard,” I paused a few beats, “but it’s been a long time since anyone’s tried at all. So, yeah, sure. I’m game.”
“My digs. Eight, eight-thirty.”
The rest of the conversation consisted of directional babble: “Make a sharp left after the alley behind Smythe’s Antique’s. .” That sort of thing. Sound Hill didn’t really have a wrong side of the tracks, but her address was located in that part of town which came closest to qualifying.
I had neglected to ask what we were having for dinner. I guess I really wasn’t very interested. I was, however, very interested in her. I felt it in my head and in my pants. From her fall to my poetry to her apology, she had pushed every right button there was to push. I forgot about attempting to write or making long lists. What I did do was to recall, in detail, the nightmare I’d had on the evening of the yellowbird murder and to try and regain the feeling of Kate Barnum’s imagined breasts in my now curious hands.
Cat Sneeze
The Christmas lights were not so bright here. Residents of Dugan’s Dump were no less religious than other Sound Hillians. They just tended to be lower on the great American scale of the middle class. Besides, pronking reindeer with synchronous flashing antlers would have looked incongruous amongst the wilting wooden bungalows. Dirt was the major feature of Dugan’s Dump; dirt lawns and dirt driveways. And in every third yard the rotting hulks of lobster boats and Edsels waited patiently on cinder blocks and bent rims for the pick-axes of future archeologists. But the wanna-be artifacts that decorated this part of town had nothing to do with its appellation, at least not originally.
All of the Christmas Eve snow was gone; some back to the clouds, most back to the soil. Around here, that was trouble. And when I pulled off the pavement of Owl Lane, the reporter’s driveway started swallowing the tires on my old Volkswagen. But if fifteen-odd years of my driving hadn’t killed the clutch, this surely wouldn’t. That’s what I told myself. That’s always what I told myself.
There were no shipwrecks or encrusted cars in Kate Barnum’s front yard, just a lone dead apple tree and a corrugated garage waiting for a cat sneeze to blow it over. Her bungalow was a match for most of the others on surrounding plots; sturdy, but unspectacular. I followed the cracked flagstones to her door.
She was waiting for me in the vacated jamb, shaking her head and blowing streams of smoke through cracks in a cynical smile. The sleeves of her gray Yale jersey formed lumpy bundles above her calloused elbows. The collar of the ashen sweatshirt was slit into a V-shape and, intentionally or not, it accented the braless cleavage underneath. Her jeans were scratchy new and hid the necks of cowboy boots I’d seen once before. As I was about to take the singular step up to Kate’s pedestal, she flicked her cigarette into the night and kissed me.
It was a rough, tongueless kiss. We both kept wary eyes open and let the kiss die without any attempts to prolong it or move onto other things. I could taste her tobacco in my mouth. No bourbon, yet. It was more a message, I thought, than a kiss. I just had to learn the code.
I stepped up. She waved me in. The front door slammed. My eyes were immediately captured by the network of hand-hewn timber beams crossing above us and rising up to the roof. The walls and floors were an amalgam of broad planks, pitted, bowed and dark with years. She followed my eyes.
“I guess you didn’t know. That’s why they call this Dugan’s Dump,” my hostess explained.
“What?” I turned toward the crackling flames and disintegrating logs in the stone fireplace.
“They’re ships’ masts, carrying beams and parts of their decks and hulls. All the shacks in ‘The Dump’ are what’s left of Conrad Dugan’s whaling fleet. Here,” she threw back the frilled corner of a faded indigo rug that lay at the foot of the fireplace. Carved deeply into one of the wide floor boards were scrolled capital letters spelling, ‘THE DRAGON QUEEN.’
“Conrad Dugan,” Kate Barnum shook her head, “that stubborn old bastard. He ran Sound Hill in the whaling days. More than ten of my family manned his ships. Three drowned in the Atlantic while sailing this one,” she dragged her booted foot across the name carved into the flooring.
“How’d his ships end up out here?” I had a flare for predictable questions.
“When the whaling industry started its decline, Dugan’s advisers told him to sell off his fleet. Take the money and run. But like I said, Dugan was a stubborn old coot and refused. Seems he got this idea to turn Sound Hill into a combination Coney Island/Mystic Seaport type of affair. Really ahead of his time, if you consider it,” the reporter paused and considered.
“Well, the old guy figures the tourists would get a real charge out of staying in hotels built out of his old ships. He owned all the land around here. So he had his fleet sailed into Kaitlin Cove and hauled overland the rest of the way. Kind of tough dragging ships through dense woods.”
“That’s why there’s so much dirt!” I blurted out as if I’d stumbled onto the secret of time travel. “He had all the trees chopped down.”
“Right,” she gave a condescending wink. “That old tree out front came after the slaughter.”
“Sounds like an expensive proposition, all that chopping and hauling.”
“Bankrupted the old prick,” she lit another cigarette. “Coney Whale Land never had a chance.”
“But there was all this cleared land and the vessels were already on site.”
“Right again, Klein,” she flicked ashes into the fire. “The town fathers, in conjunction with Dugan’s creditors, had a mini Oklahoma land rush of sorts. For a fifty-dollar fee, any Dugan employee could receive a plot of land out here. The only condition was that the employee had to build a substantial dwelling on the land within two months.”
“Hence, Dugan’s Dump.” Satisfied with my inductive powers, I threw my flat ass onto a wicker sofa.
“Don’t get so cozy,” Barnum admonished. “We’ve got to go pick up dinner. I hope you like pizza.”
“Haven’t found any out here that compares with the city.”
“Yeah, I know, but you’ll like it better than my cooking. Come on,” she pulled me up and threw on that unclean ski jacket. “This place in Floyd’s Bend is pretty good. Besides, the walk will build up your appetite.”
“Walk!” I stepped back. “My appetite’s just fine. Floyd’s Bend is five miles from-”
“Two miles and I know a shortcut. Please.”
“Fine. Fine,” I relented grudgingly.
She kissed me again. This time it was soft and close-eyed and encouraging. “Thanks, Klein,” she opened the door. “Walking helps curb my thirst and I don’t want to drink around you. Not tonight, anyhow.”
The walking wasn’t bad, especially when we stuck to the blacktop. Kate Barnum surprised me with her relative silence. Oh, every now and then my guide would point out odd features of “The Dump.” There were the vaguely visible ruts the wheels of ship transports had left. She showed me where two of the bungalows had ship names still showing on outer walls. We even passed a shack Jackson Pollack had rented for awhile before heading farther east.
“Swede Thorson, the landlord, tossed Pollack out on his ass for ruining the floors. Dumb schmuck had the floors sanded and refinished,” Barnum put on a face of sad resignation and shook it. “Not much good comes out of ‘The Dump’ and stays out. Any good gets sucked right back in. It’s like our own little Dain Curse.”
I took that last bit of proud self-pity as a reference to her fall. I’d have to ask her about that fall. And speaking of asking; she wasn’t doing any. That didn’t fit. I’d pretty much figured this little trek of ours was a ploy on her part to get me alone, off balance and on unfamiliar ground. Lord knows, when we finally turned off the paved portion of our route, the ground became very unfamiliar. I waited for questions about the Christmas killing, about what had really been spoken between the dead Jane Doe and myself. My wait was in vain.