Prologue

The Hill

41 degrees 44'N: 70 degrees 17'W

From the second floor of the Hill I watch the bay change textures as the light dwindles and returns.

I never noticed so many textures before I was locked up in this cell.

In the morning the water goes from the deep matte of velvet, to the grain of worn dock pilings, to surfaces harsh as number two sandpaper.

Later the textures run back down the spectrum. They start with the rough edges and travel through a complex surface like the braided silver Caitlyn’s necklace is composed of. All the way to that indigo velvet, and then night, when you cannot see the bay at all because of security lights.

I am making a big deal of not much since even in the morning most of the bay is obscured by oaks and the bulk of the Superior Courthouse where they will arraign me later.

Gates clang and the deputies come through calling men for court. Silva yells, “Cahoon, you on deck.” The deputies have to treat us carefully because in J.D.-1 we are all on sick list. Still it takes little time for Silva to fold me into a wheelchair and snick one cuff on the frame and the other around my left wrist. Then he rolls me down a ramp and outside.

The fresh air tastes good. The flavors I make out in one sniff include applejack, maple smoke, car exhaust. Cold, and dust from piles of leaves that children kick through and cars scatter in their slipstreams.

I breathe as deeply as I can against the bandages, the little spikes of pain.

It always smells this fine, leaving the Hill. Traffic cones block the back entrance of the courthouse. Silva wheels me toward the front. The back hall was flooded in the storm, he says. The reason I am being arraigned in the old courthouse is this: The nor’easter dumped three inches of rain in Orleans and it leaked through the roof of the new Second District Court, where Chatham cases are tried. That was a state contract, and it went to Kiernan Concrete.

Kiernan always lowballs the bid and buys cheap materials to pad their profit margin.

In a weird way I am also here because of a storm. Because the kind of cheap materials I am built of were not able to keep me together in the strain that high winds bring.

The clock reads twelve minutes to eight. The morning crop of OUIs slouches from a line of rusted sedans across the bitter asphalt. Men, mostly, in windbreakers and workboots. Their eyes are bright with Visine, their breath sharp with mint. Most of them have gone this route before. The women laugh too loud and carry handbags that are plastic imitations of what tv actors carry. They fire up butts, sucking the smoke from Merits and Kents deep into the cave of hangover. Every angle of body screaming for beer.

I wouldn’t mind a beer myself. Or a Kent. We follow them around the building to the front lawn.

The lawyers already are shoaled there in camel’s-hair coats between an antique six-pounder cannon and a statue of James Otis.

I think it appropriate that a lush like Otis should have a place of honor among these Cape Codders.

The breathing of the lawyers creates short-lived silver fans in the chill.

They wear loafers, like summer people. The doors are not open yet. Silva shunts me up the wheelie-ramp to a position beside one of the columns holding up the courthouse cupola. In the OUI crowd I spot a guy I know. He crews on Elliott’s gillnetter. When he sees me, he turns away.

I am cold; the sun has not reached the courthouse. I touch the column, expecting a deeper chill from stone, but it is the same temperature as the air. The gray material sounds hollow when I knock on it.

They built these columns out of wood, fluting and painting them to look like granite.

I see Grealey first. Grealey, the Volvo-people’s lawyer. He moves with the same smugness as the other lawyers only more so: like a tanker bearing down on a fleet of mackerel seiners. The weimaraner lopes up from behind, overtaking, a black and fluid force—towing Skull, Thatch’s accountant, on a long lead.

Thatch Hallett walks behind. All three catch sight of me at the same instant. Grealey pretends not to. He hauls out a cell phone. The accountant looks at Otis. The dog scratches its stomach. Thatch, who is tall enough to see above the crowd, stares at me without blinking. That is when it comes back to me, how hard blue can get: harder than the North Atlantic in winter.

The last time I saw Thatch Hallett he was staring at me down the sights of a thirty-ought-six. It is those eyes that pressured me into the fists of the storm. It is they that direct a force bound to crush what I love to dust. My stomach loses mass. I find this odd. Eyes that hard should make everything they touch gain weight, become more rigid.

The December air has roughened Hallett’s nose and cheeks, turning them a light maroon.

Cold always changes the textures of things. I remember this now. Cold alters trees and skin in ways I do not expect. It changes the feel of my gut, the very mass of me, and no way of telling if that leaves me with more weight or less.

A van parking at the foot of the Hill blurs my line of thought. It bears a satellite dish on a boom and the words cape eleven news. Two men stack relays on the lawn.

Thatch’s lawyer submerges in the school of other lawyers. Thatch himself is dressed in a houndstooth jacket. He wears the same paratrooper beret he always wears. That green jungle-pattern stands out against the fractal branches, shifting as he tells jokes to Skull. He loves doing this because he knows, everybody knows, Skull never laughs.

A woman skirts the lawyers, peering nervously right and left. She wears thick eyeshadow and a worn kaftan. Her lips are painted, and ridged like a fuel filter. The crook of her elbow shelters a tangle of brindled fur.

I shift uncomfortably. I haven’t got a lawyer and Harriet’s presence with the cairn terrier too will only make things worse in the narrowed vision of a judge.

Grealey moves back into view around the OUIs. The courthouse door opens. A guard yells, “Upstairs for Superior and Grand Jury, downstairs for Second District.” Noise of shoe soles, “Take-it-easy’s,” “Hang-in-there’s.” The OUIs turbo down final drags of their cigarettes. Grealey climbs the steps and stops in front of me. He does not seem to like the wheelchair; he lifts his nose and stares down the ridge of it.

“You’re not represented by counsel,” he says. It is not a question, so I don’t answer. He peers at the wheelchair again.

“Why don’t you make him walk?” he asks the guard. “It’s just a tissue wound.”

“It’s the rules, Mr. Grealey,” Silva says. “Insurance.” He shrugs.

“He’s trying to look like the victim,” Grealey continues, “in court. But it won’t work.”

I peer at him. I barely register what he is saying because all the different surfaces and weights in my chest are pressing against the bandages holding them in and it kind of aches. Thatch strolls down the slope of lawn, turns seaward. The dog stampedes a squirrel. “Jesse,” Thatch calls. His voice is strong as a radio announcer’s. Grealey leans over and taps me on a bandage.

“It won’t work, Cahoon,” he repeats. “And you know why?” I follow Thatch’s gaze. A wedge of bay is visible between Barnstable Marine and the white dunes of Sandy Neck. Grealey was an assistant DA the first time I was in court, thirteen years ago. He doesn’t look any friendlier now than he did then.

“Because this has to do with events,” Grealey continues. “What happened to my client’s real estate, as opposed to what things look like. Facts,” he adds, as if I hadn’t understood him right. “Convicted felons should have some respect for facts.”

Set like a gem in that chink of ocean, a fishing boat with a white superstructure runs slowly to the east. It is three or four miles out so I cannot be certain if it is a dragger or a gillnetter. It moves steady and slow so it probably is a dragger; and, while I never really liked dragging, the sight of that boat creates a feeling in my stomach so powerful that it fills my gut and drowns out other pressures.

It feels like when I was in high school and I would walk to Casey Ryan’s garden at night and she would change into her nightdress at the lemon-colored window and know I was watching.

It feels like I drank a gallon of Might-E-Foam with a pint of catalyst and the chemical is expanding to a hundred times its volume in my leaky chest.

Grealey checks his watch and looks at Silva again. “The wheelchair won’t make a difference,” he says. “It’s his motive for what happened six days ago that’s important. Not the wheelchair.”

I stare at the fishing boat, trying to breathe against the bandages.

I want to tell Grealey, this has nothing to do with events. This has to do with textures; the textures of what we feel, and how they rub against the surface of the outside, and what results from that friction.

I am conscious of keeping my mouth shut and even. I watch that small window of sea.

The dragger hauls her net east, chasing a shoal of blackback flounder, or fluke or whiting maybe, into the brass reflection of the sun.

(c) copyright 2001