Cape Cod Noir Read online

  This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2011 Akashic Books

  Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple

  Cape Cod map by Aaron Petrovich

  ISBN-13: 978-1-936070-97-8

  eISBN-13: 978-1-617-75061-8

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2010939098

  All rights reserved

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  ALSO IN THE AKASHIC NOIR SERIES:

  Baltimore Noir, edited by Laura Lippman

  Barcelona Noir (Spain), edited by Adriana V. López & Carmen Ospina

  Boston Noir, edited by Dennis Lehane

  Bronx Noir, edited by S.J. Rozan

  Brooklyn Noir, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth

  edited by Tim McLoughlin & Thomas Adcock

  Chicago Noir, edited by Neal Pollack

  Copenhagen Noir (Denmark), edited by Bo Tao Michaëlis

  D.C. Noir, edited by George Pelecanos

  D.C. Noir 2: The Classics, edited by George Pelecanos

  Delhi Noir (India), edited by Hirsh Sawhney

  Detroit Noir, edited by E.J. Olsen & John C. Hocking

  Dublin Noir (Ireland), edited by Ken Bruen

  Haiti Noir, edited by Edwidge Danticat

  Havana Noir (Cuba), edited by Achy Obejas

  Indian Country Noir, edited by Sarah Cortez & Liz Martínez

  Istanbul Noir (Turkey), edited by Mustafa Ziyalan & Amy Spangler

  Las Vegas Noir, edited by Jarret Keene & Todd James Pierce

  London Noir (England), edited by Cathi Unsworth

  Lone Star Noir, edited by Bobby Byrd & Johnny Byrd

  Los Angeles Noir, edited by Denise Hamilton

  Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Denise Hamilton

  Manhattan Noir, edited by Lawrence Block

  Manhattan Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Lawrence Block

  Mexico City Noir (Mexico), edited by Paco I. Taibo II

  Miami Noir, edited by Les Standiford

  Moscow Noir (Russia), edited by Natalia Smirnova & Julia Goumen

  New Orleans Noir, edited by Julie Smith

  Orange County Noir, edited by Gary Phillips

  Paris Noir (France), edited by Aurélien Masson

  Philadelphia Noir, edited by Carlin Romano

  Phoenix Noir, edited by Patrick Millikin

  Pittsburgh Noir, edited by Kathleen George

  Portland Noir, edited by Kevin Sampsell

  Queens Noir, edited by Robert Knightly

  Richmond Noir, edited by Andrew Blossom,

  Brian Castleberry & Tom De Haven

  Rome Noir (Italy), edited by Chiara Stangalino & Maxim Jakubowski

  San Diego Noir, edited by Maryelizabeth Hart

  San Francisco Noir, edited by Peter Maravelis

  San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Peter Maravelis

  Seattle Noir, edited by Curt Colbert

  Toronto Noir (Canada), edited by Janine Armin & Nathaniel G. Moore

  Trinidad Noir, edited by Lisa Allen-Agostini & Jeanne Mason

  Twin Cities Noir, edited by Julie Schaper & Steven Horwitz

  Wall Street Noir, edited by Peter Spiegelman

  FORTHCOMING:

  Bogotá Noir (Colombia), edited by Andrea Montejo

  Jerusalem Noir, edited by Sayed Kashua

  Lagos Noir (Nigeria), edited by Chris Abani

  Long Island Noir, edited by Kaylie Jones

  Mumbai Noir (India), edited by Altaf Tyrewala

  New Jersey Noir, edited by Joyce Carol Oates

  St. Petersburg Noir (Russia), edited by Natalia Smirnova & Julia Goumen

  Staten Island Noir, edited by Patricia Smith

  Venice Noir (Italy), edited by Maxim Jakubowski

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  PART I: OUT OF SEASON

  WILLIAM HASTINGS

  Falmouth

  Ten-Year Plan

  ELYSSA EAST

  Buzzards Bay

  Second Chance

  DANA CAMERON

  Eastham

  Ardent

  PAUL TREMBLAY

  Dennisport

  Nineteen Snapshots of Dennisport

  ADAM MANSBACH

  Martha’s Vineyard

  Variations on a Fifty-Pound Bale

  PART II: SUMMER PEOPLE

  SETH GREENLAND

  Hyannisport

  Bad Night in Hyannisport

  LIZZIE SKURNICK

  Wellfleet

  Spectacle Pond

  DAVID L. ULIN

  Harwichport

  La Jetée

  KAYLIE JONES

  Dennis

  The Occidental Tourist

  PART III: END OF THE LINE

  FRED G. LEEBRON

  Provincetown

  The Exchange Student

  BEN GREENMAN

  Woods Hole

  Viva Regina

  DAVE ZELTSERMAN

  Sandwich

  When Death Shines Bright

  JEDEDIAH BERRY

  Yarmouth

  Twenty-Eight Scenes for Neglected Guests

  About the Contributors

  INTRODUCTION

  SUMMER AND SMOKE

  I first began to think of Cape Cod in noir-ish terms during the fall of 1979. I say that, of course, entirely in hindsight, since noir was not then part of my lexicon. I was eighteen, just out of high school, on a year off that would later take me to South Texas and San Francisco. My best friend and I were making this journey together, and before we left, I spent a week at his parents’ cottage in Wellfleet, where he was living alone, working as a cranberry picker, stockpiling money for the trip. Every day, he would go to work, and I would pretend to write a novel, staring out the windows at the gray October sky. At night, we would go to bars. The house was on a marshy point of land known as Lieutenant’s Island, which was only an island at high tide. Some nights, we’d come back to find the road flooded, as if it had never been at all. I was not new to the Cape—I’d spent summers there, or parts of summers, since 1971—but this was a more conditional experience, more elemental and more charged. The same was true of the bars we frequented: dark places, their air thick with cigarette smoke and a kind of survivor’s tenacity. Cape Cod in the off-season was a hunkered-down place, if not in hibernation exactly then in a strange, suspended state. In those days, before the Internet, when even cable TV was still scarce, there was nothing to do but drink.

  Here, we see the inverse of the Cape Cod stereotype, with its sailboats and its presidents. Here, we see the flip side of the Kennedys, of all those preppies in docksiders eating steamers, of the whale watchers and bicycles and kites. Here, we see the Cape beneath the surface, the Cape after the summer people have gone home. It doesn’t make the other Cape any less real, but it does suggest a symbiosis, in which our sense of the place can’t help but become more complicated, less about vacation living than something more nuanced and profound.

  This, it might be said, is also the case with noir, which is the dime-store genre that exposes our hearts of darkness, the literary equivalent of the blues. In noir, bad things happen to good people—or more accurately, possibilities narrow, until every option is compromised and no one ever wins. How one deals
with that might seem a narrative question, but noir is less about the particulars of story than it is about point-ofview. As for the way such a point-of-view asserts itself, I think of it as stoic, stripped clean of illusion, like the faces I used to see in those off-season bars. In noir, we know that help is not coming, that the universe devolves to entropy, that everything goes from bad to worse. And yet, if this leaves us resigned or even hopeless, we have no choice but to deal with it as best we can. “I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun,” Philip Marlowe observes in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, a novel that helped define the noir aesthetic, and seventy-one years later, that air of desolate clarity, of a character staring into the abyss as the abyss stares back, is still the form’s defining sensibility, a cry in the darkness of a world that is, at best, apathetic, and at worst, in violent disarray.

  Cape Cod Noir is an attempt to pay tribute to that perspective even as it moves beyond the traditional landscape of noir. The idea is to stretch a little, to gather writing rich in local color, while remaining true to the ethos of the genre. Here, you’ll find a range of work, from the contemporary noir of Paul Tremblay and Dave Zeltserman to the more fanciful creations of Adam Mansbach and Jedediah Berry, whose stories go in unexpected directions, asking us to question our assumptions about the form. Dana Cameron’s “Ardent” takes us back to the eighteenth century, while Elyssa East and William Hastings portray a Cape Cod the tourist brochures don’t recognize, marked by hard luck, history, and loss. In some stories, noir operates mostly in the background, like a whisper in the air. But this, too, is as it should be, for if there is a principle at work, it is that noir has become, in its three-quarters of a century of evolution, both stylized and supple, less a way of writing than a way of seeing, less about crime or plot or killing (although there is plenty of that in these pages) than about how we live.

  What I’m saying, I suppose, is that noir forces us to face things, that it cuts to the chase. It functions, to borrow a phrase from William S. Burroughs, as a kind of “NAKED Lunch—a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” We expect this when it comes to cities, where noir grew up during the Depression, or in the rural corners staked out by authors from Edward Anderson in the 1930s to Daniel Woodrell in the present day. Still, what my experiences on the Cape suggest is that noir is everywhere. You can see it in the desperate excitations of the summer people, the desire to make their vacations count. You can see it in the tension of the year-rounders, who rely on the seasonal trade for survival, even as they must tolerate having their communities overrun. You can see it in the history of the place; the Pilgrims landed first at Provincetown, after all. And after Labor Day, once the tourists have gone home, it is still a lot like it has always been: desolate, empty in the thin gray light, with little to do in the slow winter months. You drink, you brood, you wait for summer, when the cycle starts all over again.

  When I was a kid, and first exploring my little corner of the Cape, I used to spend a lot of time alone. I would ride my bike or walk for hours, watching all the summertime activities, keeping myself a bit apart. Even then, I had the sense that there was more going on than I was seeing on the surface, that there were promises that had been left unkept. This, I’ve come to realize, is true everywhere, but it has a different feeling in a summer place. For me, Cape Cod is a repository of memory: forty summers in the same house will do that to you. But it is also a landscape of hidden tensions, which rise up when we least anticipate. In part, this has to do with social aspiration, which is one of the things that brought my family, like many others, to the Cape. In part, it has to do with social division, which has been a factor since at least the end of the nineteenth century, when the summer trade began. There are lines here, lines that get crossed and lines that never get crossed, the kinds of lines that form the web of noir. Call it what you want—summer and smoke is how I think of it—but that’s the Cape Cod at the center of this book.

  David L. Ulin

  March 2011

  PART I

  OUT OF SEASON

  TEN-YEAR PLAN

  BY WILLIAM HASTINGS

  Falmouth

  There was a time, just after I was jailed, when all I did was work, deal with my p.o., and keep my nose clean. No more shit, nothing. Just work, cash that paycheck every two weeks, stuff the bills into a hollowed-out book beneath my bed, and count the days. What I was counting for I didn’t know, but looking back on it, I guess I was counting days for some type of clearing, like that moment just after a thunderstorm when the clouds part and a little light sneaks through. Except that when things finally did part and clear, I didn’t get much light, but I saw it all damned well. Nice and clear, the only way you can from inside it.

  To see the inside, I had to go back into a kitchen. It was a gig my p.o. lined up. He was tight with a restaurant owner. A tiny man, with child’s hands and a wide forehead, he smiled when he gave me that bit of news. The job took me back home, right back to the Cape. All I had to do was learn a new system and try to keep everyone happy.

  That first day I drove my old truck down Main Street, Falmouth, looking at what seven years had done to the place. A new library spread across the town green, its marble still white. The tight, weed-free circles of mulch around the trees looked fresh. The storefront windows shone, clean and filled with goods that seemed to smile at you. There were some new stores, mostly small boutiques that sold blue jeans costing more than I would take home in a single paycheck. I hung a left off Main, swung into the parking lot behind the strip of stores that housed DePuzzo’s Restaurant, and pulled up next to a dumpster. I watched a guy push a shopping cart full of used car parts through the lot.

  The kitchen was what I expected. It was Brazilians in the back, and they spent the whole day speaking Portuguese to each other and telling me what to do by pointing or demonstrating. They watched me and I watched them. That’s all I was there to do: get the job done. I had to. The four Brazilians back there with me had been at this together for close to eight years and they had it down fast. That’s how it was: two Brazilians on the line, a sauce/sauté guy and a grill/oven guy. Then there was me and another Brazilian as prep cooks. During service we did salads and desserts. An older Brazilian woman worked the dishwasher, slinging those greasy pots and pans and plates, working the steam and spray gun just trying to stay ahead. I didn’t see the owner until evening.

  He came in while we were winding down our prep and walked right up to me. He didn’t say hello or shake my hand. He looked at me and went to the space between the walk-in and the bakery racks where the large cutting boards were kept. He picked one out, laid it in front of me, and got a yellow onion. He slapped it down onto the board.

  “You know how to dice an onion?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I answered and reached for my knife.

  “No you don’t,” he said. “You don’t know shit about cutting an onion.”

  He took the knife out of my hand, split the onion in half from the root end, peeled the skin back, and did a large rough dice, fast, looking at me the whole time.

  “That’s how to dice an onion for the pomodoro sauce,” he said. He put the knife down and walked to the front of the house.

  I should have known better. It was his restaurant, his kitchen, his recipes, his system. I had to learn that, down to the finest detail. Even having done it before, I had forgotten to let it all go. Guess first impressions are best made through silence sometimes.

  The owner came back in, watched me work, then asked me to step outside.

  We went out the back door, into the parking lot where the summertime heat was cooking the dumpsters. There were so many flies I could hear them. I could also hear heavy traffic on the other side of the building running down Main Street. Cars driving slowly, checking out the walkers and the clean window displays. I swatted at a fly.

  “You get paid every two weeks
with a paycheck. I won’t take uniform expenses off the top, but you don’t tell them that.” He jerked his head back toward the kitchen door where the Brazilians were chopping and banging pots. “You call me Mr. DePuzzo,” he said. “I’ll call you whatever the fuck I please.”

  He turned and left me standing there, the Cape air just starting to cool with the onshore breeze. A gull picked at an old french fry next to a gutter. A woman came around the corner into the lot and parked in one of the spaces for the jewelry store. She was in a Mercedes with Connecticut plates. She stretched her tanned and sandaled legs and brought herself up into the fading sunlight. She looked at me in my apron and white T-shirt, turned, and walked quickly to the rear entrance of the store.

  The Brazilians were working fast to leave some sit-down time before dinner service began. Like all cooks, they wanted that time outside before the shit started. I went back to my cutting board and began prepping the garnish parsley. The other prep cook was working behind me. Something slid up between my butt cheeks and I jumped. The Brazilians all laughed. I wheeled fast and clenched my fist and the other prep cook raised a thumb in an all’s good sign.

  “You don’t know how to cut a fucking uneeon,” he mocked in English and laughed.

  “I tell you something,” one of the line cooks said. “You no say shit to DePuzzo, you follow us, you be okay.”