Islands Off the Coast of Capitola, 1978 Page 4

  He hovers by the door. This time he doesn’t wink.

  “The movie, remember?! We’re going to see the movie!”

  “Bally, what—”

  You turn to Wilson. “You promised! We’re going to the drive-in by Pelican Bay!”

  Mom sighs. “I don’t know, Bally, I have a terrible headache.”

  “Take some Empirin! The tea’ll help, too.” Rounding on Wilson: “You promised.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He holds his palms up. “Okay. He’s like the tax man, Lila.”

  “I do recall you saying something, Wilson.”

  “A promise made,” he replies, offering a vast smile, “is a promise kept.”

  * * *

  You find last Tuesday’s Santa Cruz Sentinel. The movie doesn’t start ‘til 9:30, the first half of a double bill with The Other Side of Midnight. Wilson estimates an hour is required for a “leisurely” drive. That leaves the long afternoon and early evening for him to prowl.

  Careful that he doesn’t hear, you tell Mom that he’s ransacking the house, but she surprises you with a shrug.

  “He’s carrying off junk, Bally.” She lifts the mug of tea like it weighs ten pounds. “We’ve already found your favorite things, and they’re safe on the shelves in your room.”

  “You should call Clarissa.”

  “I’m almost certain she works today, honey. I’ll call her later.”

  You’re divided between staying with Mom—fixing her a bologna sandwich she pretends to find delectable—and monitoring Wilson’s progress through the first floor. After the Celestial Room comes the Sea Room with its old charts on the wall. These he has no eye for, but he somehow knows to pull up the carpet and find the trapdoor to the crawl space. But here, too, no treasure is found. He stacks up “interesting things to peruse” near the hall: copies of Look and a rusted boat anchor that you’d already summed up and dismissed. But he also finds something you’d never found in your explorations—a framed drawing of a human body all sliced up, tinted by age to the color of old wine, which he holds up at arm’s length and judges, “Worthy of a freak show, Scout.”

  You wonder what else you missed.

  After lunch—another round of bologna sandwiches—he starts on the second floor, beginning with the piano parlor. You’ve been through these rooms before. You know every nook and cranny, you’re certain. Watching Wilson go through it is like watching a rerun on television. You’re pleased that he finds nothing. But it’s when he nears the spiral staircase and glances up instead of down that you feel your stomach sink.

  You grasp the rail, barring the way.

  “So, as I recall,” he says, not seeming to notice, “up there was the ol’ Doc’s salon.” He says the word as if it was nothing like a salon at all. “I can see why you’d like it, all those secret spaces.” He pauses, waiting for you to contradict him—that no such secret spaces have been found, or only one such secret space, so you say nothing.

  “Suppose you’ve looked through everything there is to look through?”

  You say nothing.

  He scratches his mangy beard, giving a measured glance. “Know for a fact that your mom did a pretty thorough and professional job in cleaning out any remnants. Not to say I haven’t found some things they overlooked.”

  He reaches for the switch on the rail, flips it. High overhead your bedroom lights up.

  You tighten your grip, stiffen your arm, knowing all the while that it would do nothing to prevent Wilson from going up should he want. In that moment you feel a truth descend. Wilson may not have been in Diem Bien Phu, may not have died there, may not have gone under, but he’s an adult, and has the brute power and cunning of that breed. Even Ragnar, were he here, would likely fail against the absolute will of this adult.

  You feel a pang in the back of your throat and tighten your grip nonetheless.

  Everything depends on what Wilson does once he stops scratching his beard; once he decides.

  You’ve never felt so helpless.

  And it’s now, while you’re deep in thought, that you realize he’s looking straight down at you and has been for some time. He waits a moment then flips off the switch on the rail, and ruffles your hair.

  You resist shrinking back, but he’s already turning away. “You ever been to a drive-in, Ballou?”

  * * *

  You 10, says the mobile home, in the dusky gloom.

  The eucalyptus lean over the yard, shadows against the further shadow of the house. The air smells first of the sea then of the eucalyptus then gasoline. You hesitate before the lighted door and the metal stairs, remembering the dream. Wilson is inside, pretending this is your first time here.

  “Climb aboard and witness the wonderland.”

  You glance at the garage. The door with its seashells stands open, no doubt from Wilson prowling. Ghosts don’t bother to open doors. But you can’t help thinking that Wilson has somehow drawn the ghost into the open, and maybe aboard his home.

  “Mom?”

  “I’m right behind you, Bally.” She’s searching her purse for a Kleenex.

  You haven’t seen Ragnar today, other than in the panels of the comic book, and now you can’t see much of anything other than the lighted interior of the mobile home.

  “Climb up, champ.”

  You do, and in that instant you’re in your dream once more, only this time the ceiling isn’t impossibly high, and there aren’t any bolts of moonlight or heaps of jewels. Just the console chairs before the tall windshield and the tan carpet underfoot. Ahead of you, a linoleum table with small chairs. To the left, a kitchenette where Wilson stands, setting his flask and mug in the sink. Beyond him a sofa and the door to the bathroom.

  The stove and fridge are much like your dream, if smaller, and the cupboard above the sink is green.

  As you stare, Wilson takes off his cowboy hat and throws it on the sofa. He moves toward the console chairs. “Lila, please be my co-pilot.”

  “Bally, sit there.” She points to one of the little chairs at the table. “I thought God was your co-pilot, Wilson.” You look at the cupboard again, then sit down, removing the handful of Centurions and army men and the tyrannosaurus from your pockets.

  There comes a click as the key is turned, a growl and hum, and the whole home wakes and every surface has its own rattle and says its own things, none of which you can understand.

  * * *

  You face the side window, hands folded on the linoleum.

  At first you’re distracted by the novelty of the neighborhood made unfamiliar as it parades past your window, ghostly in pools of sodium light. There’s a pleasure to be found in a rolling home, sitting in a chair at a table and finding the far neighbor’s property slip past in the dark, the lonely driftwood and the boulders, here then gone. Eucalyptus branches shrug toward you, then the canted sign for Sparrow Ln. and—without you having to move an inch—the world revolves forty-five degrees as Wilson cranks the steering wheel. A new vista unfolds in shadow and sodium lamps, in swaths of headlights, glimpses of headland and black ocean.

  Allowing your eyes to adjust to the table and the wood-paneled wall, you find a switch just like the ones at home. It lights a frosted lamp overhead, enough to leave a pool of light on the table. Inside it, you arrange your soldiers and dinosaur around a coffee stain which becomes the crater of a volcano.

  Mom settles into the console chair like it was one from home. From time to time she murmurs something to Wilson, who says something back, but it’s lost in the noise of the tires. You line up the green army soldiers against the Centurions, then have three of the soldiers defect and use their guns against the others. Then all of them against the tyrannosaurus. At first you think the smell of firecrackers is their guns, firing uselessly.

  Ragnar’s shadow fills the space beyond the kitchenette. The cold gray of his eyes is the only thing that gives him away until he lifts his arm and points, emphatically.

  You rise from the chair, find your footing. You move slowly,
as though you were touring the mobile home, or fetching a glass of water or maybe one of the bologna sandwiches that Wilson said he stowed in his little fridge. Walking is tricky, like standing in the surf when its hisses back to sea. Ragnar’s eyes tell you he doesn’t want to speak. He nods to the green cupboard behind the sink. He too knows of its existence both here and in your dream.

  You stop before it. In the dream you slid it open to find the nine large-mouthed jars, in shadow.

  Now you watch your hand move once more toward the knob.

  You hope the cupboard is locked but you slowly and easily slide it open. Your hand is shaking. Even before you can properly see—before another of those passing streetlamps lights the contents—you know that a single jar sits on the shelf; a jar of similar proportions to those in which you store your beach rocks, if not the same proportions as the jar in the dream. Yet like in the dream this one is full of murky liquid and a hint of a delicate shape, now a languid wing, now the petal of a sea flower, and now nothing but shadows. Something dead, fermented.

  Your mother is a memory who swallowed a bird, Ballou.

  You remember the Doctor reaching into the jar, lifting out a damp red bloom.

  On another shelf are coils of rubber tubing, little vials, and funnels. Cotton balls float like nightmare clouds.

  The jar, you note, is stoppered. The dusty label reads 18 August 1961 followed by some scientific names that you don’t let yourself see except for Doc Genius beneath the skull and crossbones. And you know that Wilson has found the essence of the House of 31 Sparrow Lane, the distillation of all the other jars, as shadows rustle around you.

  In the sink, the tarantula pluck-walks over Wilson’s flask. Or maybe it’s the tarantula’s ghost, for it moves effortlessly through the side of Wilson’s mug.

  How long do you stare?

  You feel sick with the smell.

  Doc Genius.

  When you finally return to the table, Wilson is finishing the end of a sentence to Mom, even though Mom appears asleep. “… and the Doctor, por favor.”

  His face doesn’t quite look like itself. You step closer. “Who’s the Doctor?”

  He seems surprised to find you there. Grinning, he looks ever more like an animal wearing clothes. “Why, that’s who we’re going to meet, Scout. A rendezvous with ol’ Doc Moreau.”

  * * *

  Squinting over your knuckles you see the Doctor’s laboratory rising thin as glass in the darkness, the tower seeming to float on the jagged island that is all but invisible, racing along like the moon. And you see your face in the glass, too, almost without realizing it until you fix on your piercing eyes, and both of you flinch.

  You turn off the lamp. Squinting over your knuckles, you try to find the island again. The click-clock of the turn signal precedes the engine’s growl, and Wilson manhandles the steering wheel to take you off the freeway, down a ramp. A headland rises up to block the ocean.

  When it ends, there float up one then two islands.

  Keeping pace.

  “Right on time,” Wilson says over the hum and rattle.

  If Mom’s awake, she doesn’t answer.

  Beyond, you see three islands now.

  The islands are identical, and you know it’s the water that’s doing it; refracting the image, like when you put your hand into the aquarium and your fingers displace an inch or so, as if they’ve been severed.

  A fourth island appears.

  You’re standing at the sink, not knowing how you got there, with the scent of chemicals tickling your nostrils, You feel like you did when you stepped into the garage and everything stopped, like they’d been caught in the midst of dancing.

  Mom stirs. She turns in her seat. “Bally, where are you?”

  If she hears the slithering of the chain, she says nothing.

  * * *

  You dare to level your head, finding in the darkness first the ocean then the five islands and their pale towers, two of them nearer to shore, the others staying back.

  The mobile home jumps and rolls like a boat. Wilson swears and slows down. It’s not quite a road anymore.

  Mom grips the arms of her chair. “Where are we?”

  “You remember, don’t you, Lila?” With a sidelong glance, he mutters, “Maybe you don’t.”

  “He’s been looking forward to the drive-in, Wilson.”

  In the headlights the wild grass is brown and startled before being run over. The ground comes at you then says it’s ending up ahead, and that’s when Wilson applies the brakes. “Can’t fit this thing onto the lot. So … abra … cadabra.” Taking both hands from the wheel he gestures to the panorama now revealed, as though conjuring the swell of silvery light and the field of toy cars all facing the hanging oblong sail that is the drive-in’s screen. “Just like when we were kids.” He rattles the gear stick into park. When he shuts off the engine you’re worried that the ghosts will make noise. But everything around you stays quiet, tensed up, holding its breath.

  “You planned this all along, huh?”

  “Not breezy,” he says. “Calm night, it is. Hey, Scout, you won’t believe how trippy it is to sit up top. The beach spread out below, and the screen like it’s floating in space.”

  Mom and Wilson exchange a look.

  Only now do you see the tarantula in the crook of his neck, almost lost in his hair.

  “Wilson…”

  “I want to go, Mom.”

  “Bally, you’ll get cold.”

  “No I won’t.”

  She should say, No, you can’t, and a part of you implores her to do so. But she gives up to Wilson with a nod, sagging back in her seat.

  Wilson rises, and this time you don’t step back. You make him go around you and you hear the surprised little sound he makes between his teeth. But maybe that’s for the ghosts now gathered in the shadows. Does he see the pig, who can hide most of its body beneath the table but not its glowing eyes? Or the tarantula on the counter? It’s in plain view, and you think you see Wilson shivering as he walks to the back, to where the first door leads into the bathroom and the second into a narrow closet. He opens this and rummages around, and if he sees Ragnar pressed into the back he says nothing.

  “Best seat in the house,” he says, coming back with a folding chair. “Out and up, Champ.”

  You pop open the door, and the ocean is there in full, wide and dark except for a band of silver which are the clouds on the horizon. As you climb down, the grass waves and engulfs your shoes and bell-bottoms, and you hear the faint sound of music behind you. Wilson clambers down, having to move sideways to bring the chair with him. You lead him to the back of the Winnebago, and the ladder, and it’s the ladder on the Doctor’s tower, lonely in the breeze against the ocean, with the top as tall as the tower when you crane your neck.

  A shearwater wheels against the dim clouds, catching the faint pulsing light of the drive-in screen.

  “You ready, champ?”

  But you’ve already gripped the edges of the ladder before he says it; it’s your idea to climb, your idea the whole way, now; the demented cries of the shearwaters rasping at the air, urging you to climb up.

  You find the bumper with your shoe, then the first rung.

  When you’re up, the breeze runs through your curls. You squint at the flat stage before you, the top of the tower elongated to lead your eyes to the very edge, where the faint flickering light is paired with music, distant, like something heard underwater.

  “Here you go!”

  Wilson’s now no taller than you, offering up the chair, which the wind threatens to take. For an instant he stands there with his mouth open. You know he’s feeling how tall you are; startled as you’d been startled at the spiral staircase at home, when it seemed he was going to climb up. He’s feeling his place in the rushing grass and even seems to cringe as another shearwater darts past, making its nervous sound. “Can you grab it?!”

  You lean down, strong as Ragnar. The chair is effortless to lift, awkw
ard only because it threatens to flip and tear away from your hand, but you wrangle it onto the roof.

  Below, you hear Wilson say something about stomping if you need anything.

  You stand up, taller than you’ve ever been, tall as the Doctor’s tower over the ocean. Your bell-bottoms riffle like sails. Slowly, you walk, your Keds set firm on the deck, two paces, three, your eyes on the far end and that flickering light, and the small glowing screen now revealed. It’s no larger than your television at home, but it glows, and the toy cars are set before it like you’ve just lined them up to play, and at this instant the screen fills with the wide bright sea and a lone raft that you know is the sailor’s, bound for Moreau’s island.

  Beneath you comes the bang of the door; Wilson, inside once more.

  You walk to a handsbreadth of the end and unfold the chair, fighting with it against the breeze and watching, dizzily, as another shearwater makes a W in the sky, out and out over the screen, where the raft is now lost in the immensity of the sea.

  You set down the chair and, feeling both chill and hot, you sit.

  You try to ignore the islands.

  * * *

  “I rather prefer the older version. Island of Lost Souls.” The Doctor stands beside your chair, tall as a tower. His white coat rustles in the breeze. “Laughton makes you believe the madness. His ‘Doctor’ slyly harbors both grandiosity and pity.”

  You look to the screen, where Logan, running through the island forest, falls into a pit, watched over by a mysterious man on a barrier wall—Moreau.

  When you look back, the Doctor is removing an elegant cigarette case from his coat, along with a silver lighter.

  “That bygone year I came to the coast, the town was not far removed from its frontier days. Camp Capitola, named for the heroine of a popular novel.” He pauses to remove a cigarette from the case and return the case to his pocket. “It was a sullen place, those years. I found a haven in which to conduct my experiments, and a willing populace among the sea birds.” He draws on the cigarette, now lit, and, exhaling, ponders the ember at its tip. “When the times changed, and the spirit of the town changed, I found another willing populace. I offer no apology, just as I offered none then, the night they found me in the salon among my treasures. And hanged me from the stairwell.”