Reed Coleman: Little Easter

“Ain’t it grand, though,” I paused. “I know there’s a point here somewhere and don’t tell me you really called to apologize.”

“It gave me a convenient opening,” she admitted easily enough.

“To. .” I wondered.

“To invite you to dinner tonight.”

I answered with silence. The kind of silence heavier than spent uranium wrapped in lead. The kind of silence louder than sonic booms in the Grand Canyon. She understood.

“No,” she replied to the unspoken questions, “my motives aren’t purely social. And yes, I’ll probably ask about the dead woman and your lame story concerning the events surrounding her demise. Look,” she cleared her throat, “I was a bit of an ass the other night-”

“A bit,” I agreed.

“Thanks for making this so easy,” Barnum replied sarcastically.

“Think nothin’ of it.”

“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.

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.”