-- Tonight between the town and the ocean is the black car hunting the wharf, rolling in and out of light like a monster, and the other clichés, like the engine growling and such.
-- The black car is Lee Hunnewell who once had such a girl that the burned CD he found between the seats has him hunting the wharf for drugs. The songs are about her, to him; to us, without some translation, they have no more meaning than corn flakes, or the planet Neptune. In this a foolish song holds secret depth: if the music playing on the inside of the car could play outside it, over God's speakers as it would were this the introduction of a movie's hero, you'd hear happy songs pumped dry of meaning; with Treat Me Nice, or Satisfaction, you don't register a man not smoking the same cigarettes as you, nor how Elvis wants not soft, not loving, but pretty fingers run through his hair as if he's watching in a mirror the performance; but in these songs, so emptied out, is great space for little science fictions; cauldrons of secret depth, as when corn flakes equal the kitchen of the home you lived in when your parents were married; as when the planet Neptune is the cluster of baby desks you sat at in third grade when your imagination with all the new facts given it, fluttered and stayed aloft, or shut itself away from the vastness of life for awhile or forever.
-- Even as Lee knows the trail out of heartbreak can be burned on a disc, this twenty-seven minutes of music is an oval race track he's built; he's hurlied, he's burlied, he's all shook up; and there are laps left. So: to this crevice between the ocean and the town for the alchemy to smooth it out. For the seventh time since the new year he's getting high on the clock; reminiscing; his is a constipated heart.
-- Lee Hunnewell. He claims the black car he got in trade for the girl, that it is a spiteful trophy of what all went down, and how now it anchors him to this nighttime postmortem: drugs on the late shift. It's the story he likes, that he would trade a girl for a car, that his is not a shallow common misogyny, and his sad life how it's since come is kind of romantic with that girl his Capulet girl, and all those lobstermen Capulet, and he a two-card Montague, and finally the car playing like a Transformer, with Mercutio, Rosalind, and the Apothecary uploaded to it's AI.
-- The car holds up to the analogy better than he does: while Lee is soupy-eyed and gray, the car is the pin-up girl to any real man's heart; clean when he is filthy, lean when he is sloppy, strong when he is wheezing. The car is easily romanticized, whereas Lee is, well, what he is: a drug-addled thirty-something pizza delivery boy; and he didn't trade for the car, he stole the car; he tells people it was a trade, but the girl left him.
-- And now, as the narrator, I ask you, does this seem the guts of a good book? Has this taste put pangs in your belly? A woman wrote a book. She came to Rockland for fishermen and stoicism, but the story she stole south with was pizza boy and Mopar and soap opera.
-- There is a character in her book, a pizza boy she describes as having “the lanky charm of a cowardly german shepherd”. Nice. She made a name with that. So consider this - this manifesto - a rewrite of that other book. You are swimming in new language; corrections must be made before the big event.
-- For Lee, it's gooey noodles, her book; he loved, lost; by lost, traded; by traded, stole; was revenger and reveng'd: all of it now just fluff to villain this dingbat's version of events. Clichés! And now the poison's gone paperback, the book reviewers have tired debating the doppelganger the Dingbat did of him, and he’s still here; and not just here, Rockland, but here, the witching hour: six hours after the wharf, here is the black car out front of a high porch house on Broad Street, six pizzas on the back seat to be delivered to the apartment party above, and here is Lee sniffing a caterpillar of moon powder off the Criterion Yojimbo Blu-Ray case; a fool fallen off his own life; narcotic, masturbatory, dirty-hair alone. Feeding off lies the drugs tell him; no cares when the fishermen upstairs chide him for still fetching their food. Call it Pizza Boy Alone; the girl called her book, Must Lose Him.
-- Here's Lee Hunnewell who four summers ago met Anne Milton at a five/ten poker game on Owl's Head with the diggers and the fishermen. She was a pretty monkey perched in the kitchen with the females satellites to her skirt, dungaree bridesmaids waiting for their dates to go broke.
-- She made Lee eighty dollars that night as he watched her clippings in the shifts and grooves of the kitchen activity and folded Ace Jack, as he watched her for cues to which man in the game was hers, and folded Ace Three.
-- It took four cigarettes to meet her on the porch to look at her thick yet tidy nose and make it Germans breeding with Frenchmen; to look at her nose while she looked at the ocean, and have it naturally happenstance. She smoked a Camel. He smoked a menthol Camel. He says to her the path to the water looks like a trail the house made.
-- It is a trail, she said.
-- A leak. He says. Doesn't the house look like a turtle? He says, and says: From down there I bet it does. And he points the path to the sea.
-- When a woman smiles politely she's not smiling; especially when she is also prematurely stubbing her cigarette, and folding the filter up. And avoiding eye contact. And.. Well:
-- I'm sure from your boat it looks like a dragon. She says.
-- I don't have a boat.
-- And here finally she looked at him, and he took the opportunity to play a trick he called Blitz Interview - enlisting the woman on womans' subjects, like herself, herself, and food; he asked for her name, where she was from, did she grow up here, had she been to the Thai Place on Main Street, did she like breakfast for dinner; this, that, her name again, but not about a boyfriend. Not yet.
-- She asked him, What did he do?
-- What question else? By what do you do she meant not answers of the kind: read, write, watch old movies; beer, tequila, coke; women who let me, fantasies of women who don't, dreams of choking, dreams of imprisonment; one tear for a little fat kid walking home with no friends; she meant, by what do you do, what is your employment. Again, what question else?
-- I play poker with lobstermen. You?
-- I'm a student.
-- At Rockland High?
-- Funny.
-- Orono? Thomaston? Are you a student of human fallibility? Is this conversation independent study?
-- It's business courses. Online, not actually face to face school. My mother has a design company called True Vinal, spelled like Vinalhaven; I work there right now. It's interior design --
-- Where is this?
-- I like it, maybe as the company grows -- Where is the company? Not on Vinalhaven.
-- In Camden? Lee asked.
-- Why would it be in Camden?
-- Rockland doesn't need interior designs, we have a Walmart. Interior design in, like, Warren, is how high to hang the moose head.
-- The jokes died. She said, You are rather unformed.
-- Rather Un IN formed, rather. Dropping syllables. She was pissed.
-- He said, I wasn't putting it down. I deliver pizza: How could I? Online classes are, you know, classes. I'm a twenty-seven year old pizza boy, I mean, what's this online you speak of?
-- Her laugh was as good as her frog-kraut nose.
-- She said, the place on Route One you work?
-- That's it.
-- The Pizza Star, right?
-- Right.
-- I don't eat pizza, she said, laughing.
-- That's outrageous, He said.
-- He thought: I am unformed. You've un'd what form I have; scoop me up, lay me under your chin, I'll have your name the password to my e-mail; I'll have your eighth grade portrait hidden in my trapper-keeper; I'll steal toy jewelry from that Walmart and leave it on your windowsill, all of this while waiting for you to rebuild me!
-- Even as Lee was ready to hit himself with the same old line: Slow down, Lee, don’t goo-goo eye so fast, another woman did it for him. A squat girl with a pained look as if their laughing was something she had caught them doing, and here she was, designated by what God girls of clamdiggers believe in, to scold them before their sinning was irreparable. The poor smurf signaled Anne with shaky eyebrows. In himself, Lee named this interloper Smurf-Brow.
-- Smurf-Brow had to just say it, Anne not under the spell of her rising and half-penciled brows:
-- You wanna go in for a refresh, Annie? A'refresh our drinks? People are wondering where you are. Let's go in and refresh.
-- Smurf looked at Lee like she wanted to whack him with a newspaper, (German shepherd after all). Anne got embarrassed, and quickly she got inside without a goodbye. Lee played cool, finished his cigarette, and it wasn’t cool at all.
-- Anne was gone from the party soon after. And later when he walked the gauntlet with the money, the wives and the girlfriends re-sniffed Lee Hunnewell on his way out. Yes, he was a card-huck, a bar-hang who delivered pizza to their kids, his existence not worth half a minute of consideration; but now, here, months before the relationship was consummated, women of fishing folk wolfed his measure. This was Joe Shippey's girlfriend flirted on by the Pizza Boy - notice was taken; noted was the time, date, noted was the sea and moon; facial expressions were chiaroscuro'd on brain stems.
-- You know how people hate to leave juice on their ladder rung? Smurf-brow left the card game asking her man, Steve-something-or-other, what he thought about the thing that happened - Anne and the rendezvous on the porch.
-- Steve said, It's the Pizza Boy, to him, answer enough.
-- Smurf was nodding her head, Anne knows this happens to her, she said.
-- When this Steve said, Maybe Joe doesn't worry about Anne, Smurf snapped, I would'a got'a beat'n for what she was doin.
-- And he couldn't argue: he had socked her in the nose the weekend before for looking at an actor on TV.
-- Steve-or-Other had pleaded one last time against going down to the Toddy, making the mistake of saying to Smurf that Dickie would knock the Pizza Boy's teeth out - as in: it would not get to Joe, and Anne wouldn't catch any Hell; and her reply was: Why do you - You! - care about the Pizza Boy?
-- And she was smiling her smile that did not so much defy logic as prove that, with him, she could edit reality, and he would do what she said no matter if she changed her reasons twenty more times. But he was sober: this was the same smile that could get her hit the other way. Her smile showed she knew all this. And Steve thought, Did she want that Pizza Boy to look her way?, and a curdled jealousy was in him again. Fuel enough.
-- To the Toddy he went, and the truth: he was scared of Dickie LeDeau. Dick to rat out Anne? Over the Pizza Boy? Dick was known from Belfast to Warren for laying hands on people. Dickie LeDeau went two-forty. Dickie knocked out a Canadian one night at the Clambox with an open hand. Dickie beat up Spilly and two of Spilly's cousins at the same time. Dickie punched Brat Donnal in the stomach at some party and Brat shit his britches from the impact.
-- Steve walked in to the quiet afternoon hideout of the Toddy, bought two beers, went to Dickie's table in the back, where the man was alone, reading a book. Steve apologized for bothering him, asked how was the reading going, giggled in terror, and remained standing.
-- It's a good book, Steve. I'm real into it.
-- Dickie LeDeau was a good listener; he would closely listen against the speaker’s body language asking him not to; you learn, listening to mutterers intently. It took awhile but Dick sifted Steve’s story and he knew the house where the poker game took place, and imagined up Anne, and orbited all of what he knew her to be, and he knew her. He was back with the girl she used to be, daydreaming I guess you’d call it, when he heard Steve-or-Other apologizing for bothering him over something so stupid, and Dickie thought: She’s there. It’s a few minutes of conversation on a porch at a poker game, but it was snapping neatly into place under this portrait of Anne the platelet engraved: Unhappy Girl Wants a Push.
-- These digger-hicks saw something. Opportunity.
-- As a girl she wore barrettes in her long brown hair every school day. She was how Dick LeDeau first learned he was the poor kid. She had friends, pretty little girls with little ponies and neon green pants and crimped hair. Girls who protested Anne picking Dick on her team for the kickball game. He could kick the ball out to where the school’s playground sloped down to an old stone property marker and the pine woods beyond, a forbidden place to them. He could get the ball there without really trying, but the kids wouldn’t pick him.
-- Some times he’d dive bomb the slow roll of the kickball, and take it hostage, daring them to stand up to him. When they would go to the teacher he’d pinball it to the pine trees. But Anne picked him. It seems such a small thing. Like her barrettes. The Ostrich Lady taught them about the Indians and Thanksgiving she wore yellow and brown barrettes for corn. She wore blue to match the shirt Columbus wore in their social studies book. And the day after Dick won the kickball game with four homeruns she wore dark orange for the paper tickets he carried to get breakfast at the cafeteria. These fascinated her; she thought he ate twice: when he explained to her he did not eat breakfast at home she did not understand what that meant. She didn’t believe his house didn’t have cereal.
-- He never was her boyfriend in that he kissed her, but he liked to think that beating up the ones that did got him close. Elementary, Junior High, High, even after he dropped out he kept most guys away from her, and then one day she was gone off to that first attempt at college, and Dickie had some thinking to do on what purpose could he serve now. Rockland weren’t much without her in it. And all he had were memories of how she never seemed to mind that much that he cockblocked her boyfriends with his jab.
-- There was a day she came back having quit university, but before that day Dickie was taken on the Roland to fish lobster for Ellis Winthrop -- an old drunk who usually was too weak from his cancer to work; it was a boat for lost, unlearned, washed up; you couldn’t call them fisherman, they were leftover hands by the season. Dickie had been recruited out of the bars having beaten the previously mentioned Spilly and Cousins, who had been thought tough fishermen. Dickie was nineteen, and to the Roland crew, his best use was back on land, back in those bars; they made him their bodyguard. He called himself a fisherman -- who would challenge it? For Dickie, with a father who never worked a job long enough to take that work as his title in town -- carpenter, mechanic, construction worker -- just old Jim LeDeau, trailer seventeen, who could be seen riding a cavitied ten-speed to the convenience store every day for his Miller beer, this job was status.
-- The truth was, whatever that ladies’ book claimed, Dickie, to quote him: weren’t ever a real lobsterman. However he were a legbreaker, and it were the Roland crew he ran with when he first met the guaranteed first ballot hall of fame, soon to be King of Rockland, Mr. Joseph Paul Shippey the Third.
-- Shippey had come down from so far north that, like a wrestling heel, he hailed from points unknown. He used to say the name of his hometown was a number. He walked into the Toddy one night looking for work, ended up breaking a pool cue on the head of that same Captain Winthrop’s doper son, Ellis Jr, so that by the time Dickie got a hold of him, Joe was famous. Dickie caught him hiding out in Camden with the tourists, got him cornered in the bathroom of a chowder house, while old Massholes drooled clam. Joe Shippey was no coward, but there were weight classes between them, and he knew about Dickie. So Joe asked for mercy in his way, and Dickie, for whatever reason, let him out of that bathroom. A weekend of partying later Dickie brought Joe in front of the Rolanders, Ellis, Junior, and the rest, and Joe did what Joe always did: aligned the stars.
