Bill Pronzini: The Lighthouse

She hurried to the car, set her carton down, caught hold of Jan’s arm. “Come on,” she said, “let’s get the rest of the groceries.”

“All right.”

But he hesitated, because Red was back near his master, circling again, his tail sawing the air, and both Mitch and the dog were between the station wagon and the store. Another man had joined the two women, Alix saw, drawn from Bob’s Barber Shop next door. She also saw Lillian Hilliard watching through the front window of the general store. The woman had been firm with the two fishermen earlier; why didn’t she do something to defuse this?

Mitch sat on his heels, put one hand on the dog’s collar. But his eyes were still on Jan. “You hurt my dog, damn you.”

“No I didn’t. Look at him. Does he act as if he’s hurt?”

Surprisingly, as if he felt as Alix did about avoiding a fight, Hod Barnett said, “He’s right, Mitch. Hell, Red’s not hurt.”

Mitch was silent, glaring. His hand moved protectively over the animal’s somewhat shabby coat. Alix watched him tensely-they were all watching him that way.

The frozen tableau lasted another three or four seconds. Then Mitch let go of the dog and stood up in slow movements. Some of his anger, Alix saw with relief, seemed to have dissipated.

“Yeah, all right,” he said to Jan. “But you listen, mister. Maybe where you come from it’s all right to kick another man’s dog, but not here, not in Hilliard. Don’t ever do it again, hear?”

Jan said without inflection, “I hear.”

Mitch turned abruptly and went across the street toward the Sea Breeze Tavern; Hod Barnett and the dog followed, Red now nipping at his master’s heels. The other three locals also stayed where they were, their expressions watchful, cold-accusing. Lillian Hilliard had vanished from the window of the store.

Alix let go of Jan’s arm. He bent over the tailgate and pushed the cartons inside with agitated movements that belied his calm exterior. Then he said, “I’ll get the other things,” and walked off to the store in a stiff, jerky stride.

Alix went around to the driver’s side. The three watchers moved then, too; the man returned to Bob’s Barber Shop and the women continued on to the store, their glances sweeping over the imitation-wood-paneled length of the new Ford. When they were past, one of them pointed at the rear license plate and said in a voice obviously intended to carry, “Califomians.”

Everything was said in that one contemptuous word. Some Oregonians, Alix knew, resented their neighbors to the south, looking scornfully upon the Golden State with its urban sprawl, its fast-paced and often eccentric lifestyles, its prosperity. It had never bothered her before; even the rash of bumper stickers a few years back-DON’T CALIFORMCATE OREGON-had amused her more than anything else. But this was different. This was personal.

When Jan returned with more cartons she slipped in behind the wheel, sat huddled inside her pea jacket. The overcast sky seemed even bleaker now, the village’s shabby buildings more uninviting-part of a foreign and incomprehensible landscape. And the wind, gusting in across the bay, was a bitter, icy cold.

The first lighthouse, a marvel of structural engineering not incomparable to the great pyramids, was the Pharos of Alexandria, completed under Ptolemy II in approximately 280 B.C. “Admirably constructed of white marble,” according to Strabo, it stood for two centuries near the mouth of the Nile; what finally destroyed it is a secret lost in antiquity. No accurate description or representation of the Pharos has survived these past two thousand years, although an imagined rendering appears on many Roman coins. Edrisi, the Arabian geographer, described it in 1154 as “singularly remarkable, as much because of its height as of its solidity… During the night it appears as a star, and during the day it is distinguished by the smoke.” The fact that it was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World has nowhere been disputed in

No. Too flat, too pedantic. The Pharos must have been awesome; it deserved better than this. Sparkle. Flair. Make the student-excuse me, the reader — see the sun on the white marble, the smoke from its open fire, the glow radiating out to the Mediterranean sailor in his galley.

Jan ripped the sheet of paper from his old Underwood portable, crumpled it, chucked it at the cardboard carton he was using as a waste receptacle, and inserted a fresh sheet. His fingers felt cramped; he flexed them. He still wasn’t used to working on a manual typewriter-any kind of typewriter, for that matter. He had a secretary at school; she transcribed his dictated tapes on an IBM word processor.

All right. Try it again.

In the Romance languages the word for lighthouse is pharos. a word derived from the world’s first and most remarkable safeguard for the mariner, the Pharos of Alexandria. Completed under Ptolemy II in approximately 280 B.C., this marvel of structural engineering stood sentinel at the mouth of the Nile for two centuries, by day sunstruck and wreathed in smoke from its slave-tended fire, by night sending out its beacon across the dark waters to the unwary sailor

For God’s sake, no! Childish. Like a bad freshman composition. No one would publish this sort of drivel.

The pain intensified behind his eyes.

It was no longer sharp; it had modulated into that bulging ache again, as if the pressure might pop his eyes right out, roll them down his cheeks like sunstruck white marbles. Wait it out, that was all he could do. Just when he felt he could suffer it no longer, it would subside and he would begin to feel normal again for a few days. Then it would come back, as it had tonight, after a full week of relative peace, to remind him of what the future held. Sharp and pulsing. Dull and pulsing. Savage. Nagging. Bulging. That was the worst, the bulging

Damn you! he thought suddenly, savagely, and drove the heels of his hands against his eyes. His vision blurred, shifted; he endured a panicky moment until it cleared again. Calm, he thought. Calm. He reached for his pipe, loaded it with McBaren’s, set fire to the tobacco.

On one comer of the table that served as his desk, the stack of finished manuscript pages caught his attention. He picked it up. Nineteen pages so far. Not bad, really, considering how much time in the week they’d been here he’d spent on housekeeping matters, on preparations for work on the light, on organizing his notes and research material. Introductory remarks, a prologue comprised of an edited-down version of Anderson’s taped reminiscences about his days as keeper of Washington’s Destruction Island Light, and a scant beginning for the general-history chapter. And now he could not seem to get past the Pharos of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

The title page seemed to stare back at him, mockingly.

Guardians of the Night

A Definitive History of North American Lighthouses

By Jan H. Ryerson

He replaced the stack, got to his feet, and paced the room. The smoke from his pipe formed an undulant line, like marshy vapor, just below the low ceiling. He felt restless now, disinclined to work, disinclined to do anything and yet in need of movement, activity. After a time he stopped pacing and began to rummage manically through the file boxes of research materials he had brought from home. Photostats of old newspaper, magazine, and book articles. Books and pamphlets of utilitarian value, some of them quite rare-A. B. Johnson’s The Modern Lighthouse Service, for one, published by the U.S. Government in 1890. Annual reports of the U.S. Coast Guard. Departments of Treasury and Commerce lists of Lights and Fog-signals, 1900–1954. Lighthouse Service Bulletins, 1866–1939, and Lighthouse Board Reports, 1920–1939. Transcriptions of taped interviews with four men who had worked as lighthouse keepers in various parts of the country-one of them Anderson-and two others who had worked under George R. Putnam, U.S. Commissioner of Lighthouses in the 1930s. Copies of the Journal of American History, the New England Historical Quarterly, the Oregon Historical Quarterly, National Geo graphic, and several other publications-all with articles by him on various lighthouses and aspects of lighthouse history that he planned to incorporate into Guardians of the Night. An extra copy (why had be brought an extra copy?) of the small-press edition of his Ph. D. dissertation, Lighthouses of the Upper New England Seaboard, which in revised form would comprise from one-quarter to one-third of Guardians.