In November, the first heavy frosts arrive and the roads become treacherous, the blades of grass fragile as crystal, so that when you walk the ghosts of your footsteps trail behind like the ranks of lost souls. In the skeletal branches above, tree sparrows huddle together; cedar waxwings trapeze from tree to tree; and, at night, the hawk owls come, hunting for prey in the darkness. In Portland harbour, which never entirely freezes, there are mallards, and harlequin ducks, and eiders.
Even in the coldest weather, the harbour, the fields, the woods, all are alive. Blue jays fly, and brown winter wrens call; finches feed on birch seed. Tiny, unseen things crawl, hunt, live, die. Lacewings hibernate under the loose bark on the trees. Caddisfly larvae carry houses made from plant debris on their backs, and aphids huddle on the alders. Wood frogs sleep frozen beneath piles of leaf-mould, while beetles and back swimmers, newts and spotted salamanders, their tails thick with stored fat, all flicker in the icy waters above. There are carpenter ants, and snow fleas, and spiders, and black mourning cloak butterflies which flit across the snow like burnt paper. White-footed mice and woodland voles and pygmy shrews scurry through the slash, ever-wary of the foxes and weasels and the vicious, porcupine-hunting fishers that share the habitat. The snowshoe hare changes its coat to white in response to the diminishing daylight hours, the better to hide itself from its predators.
Because the predators never go away.
It is dark by four when winter comes, and lives are compressed to meet the new restrictions set by nature. People return to a lifestyle that would have been familiar in ways to their ancestors, to the earliest settlers who travelled along the great river valleys into the interior in search of timber and farmland. They move about less, remaining in the warmth of their homes. They complete their daily tasks before the darkness sets in. They think of seeding, of the welfare of animals, of children, of their old. When they do leave their houses they wrap up warm and keep their heads down, so that the wind does not blow the sand from the road into their eyes.
On the coldest nights, the branches of the trees crack in the darkness, the sky is lit by the passing angels of the aurora borealis, and young calves die.
There will be false thaws in January, more in February and March, but the trees will still be bare. The ground turns to mud in the warmth after the dawn, then freezes again at night; tracks become impassable by day, and dangerous by dark.
And still the people will gather in the warmth, and wait for the ice to crack in April.
At Old Orchard Beach, south of Portland, the amusement parks stand silent and empty. Most of the motels are closed, the AC vents covered with black plastic bags. The waves break grey and cold, and the wheels of the cars make a deep thudding sound as they cross the old railroad tracks on the main street. It has been this way for as long as I can remember, ever since I was a boy.
When the trees began to turn, before the paper birches changed from bone white to the colours of a beautiful decay, the grifter Saul Mann would pack his bags and prepare to leave Old Orchard for Florida.
‘Winter is for rubes,’ he would say, as he laid his clothes – his huckster’s ties, his bright JCPenney jackets, his two-tone shoes—into a tan suitcase. Saul was a small, dapper man, with hair that was jet black for as long as I knew him and a small belly that strained only slightly the buttons of his vest. His features were relentlessly average, strangely unmemorable, as if he had expressly ordered them for that purpose. His manner was friendly and unthreatening, and he wasn’t greedy, so he rarely, if ever, overstepped his own limits. He took people for tens and twenties, sometimes a fifty, occasionally, if he thought the mark could take the loss, for a couple of hundred. He generally worked alone although, if the con required it, he would hire a steerer to draw in the pigeons. Sometimes, if things were not going well, he would find work with the carnies and fleece folk with rigged games.
Saul had never married. ‘A married man’s a mark for his wife,’ Saul would say. ‘Never marry, unless she’s richer than you, dumber than you, and prettier than you. Anything less than that, you’re a pigeon.’
He was wrong, of course. I married a woman who took walks in the park with me, who made love to me and gave me a child, and whom I never really knew until she was gone. Saul Mann never had that joy: he was so worried about becoming a mark that life swindled him without him even noticing.
Beside Saul as he packed, in a second, smaller, black patent-leather bag, were the tools of the bunco, the armoury of the short-con artist. There was the wallet stuffed with twenty dollar bills which, on closer examination, revealed themselves to be one twenty dollar bill plus half of the Maine Sunday Telegram carefully cut up to resemble twenty dollar bills. The con artist ‘finds’ the wallet, asks the mark’s advice on what to do with it, agrees to entrust it to his safekeeping until the legal obligation to hand it over is negated by the passage of time, encourages him to give over a one-hundred dollar deposit as a gesture of goodwill, just to be sure that he’s not going to swindle anyone out of a share of the cash and, hey, the con man is up eighty bucks on the deal, minus the cost of a new wallet and another copy of the Maine Sunday Telegram for the next mish roll.
There were fake diamond rings, all glass and paste and metal so cheap it took a week to get the green stain from your finger, and bottle caps for the three-shell game. There were cards with more marks than Omaha Beach on D-Day. And there were other, more elaborate cons too: papers, heavy with official-looking seals, which promised the bearer the sun, the moon and the stars; lotteries guaranteeing the winner precisely zero percent of nothing; cheque-books for ten or twenty different accounts, each with barely enough in them to keep them active but still sufficiently open to enable cheques to be successfully written on them on a Friday night, giving them a whole two days of fiscal respectability before they bounced.
During the summer months, Saul Mann would trawl the resorts of the Maine coast looking for pigeons. He would arrive at Old Orchard Beach religiously on the third day of July, hire himself the cheapest room he could find, and work the beach for a week, maybe two at most, until his face started to become familiar. Then he would head up towards Bar Harbor and do the same, always moving, never staying too long, picking his marks carefully. And when he had amassed sufficient funds and the crowds began to peter away after Labor Day, when the trees slowly began to turn, Saul Mann would pack his bags and move to Florida to scam the winter tourists.
My grandfather didn’t like him or, at least, he didn’t trust him, and trust and like were the same thing in my grandfather’s book. ‘He asks you to lend him a dollar, don’t do it,’ he warned me, time and time again. ‘You’ll get back ten cents if you get back anything at all.’
But Saul never asked me for a thing. I met him first when I was doing summer work in the arcades at Old Orchard, taking money from little kids in exchange for soft toys whose eyes were held in place by half-inch-long pins and whose limbs were connected to their torso by the will of God. Saul Mann told me about the carny, about the joint scams: the basketball shoot with the over-inflated ball and the too-small ring; the balloon darts with the soft balloons; the shooting gallery with the skewed sights. I watched him work the crowds, and I learned as I watched. He targeted the elderly, the greedy, the desperate, the ones who were so uncertain of themselves that they would trust another man’s judgment above their own. He sometimes went for the dumb ones, but he knew that the dumb ones could turn mean, or that maybe they wouldn’t have enough cash to make the scam worthwhile, or that they sometimes possessed a low cunning which made them naturally distrustful.
Better still were the ones who thought they were smart, the ones who had good jobs in medium-sized towns, who believed that they could never be taken in by a grifter. They were the prime targets, and Saul relished them when they came. He died in 1994, in a retirement home in Florida, among the people he used to take as his marks, and he probably swindled them at canasta until the last breath left his body, until God reached down and showed him that
, in the end, everybody is a mark.
Here is what Saul Mann told me.
Never give the suckers a break: they’ll run if you do. Never have pity: pity is the mother of charity, and charity is giving money away, and a grifter never gives money away. And never force them to do anything, because the best scams of all are the ones where they come to you.
Lay the bait, wait, and they will always come to you.
The snows came early that December to Greenville and Beaver Cove and Dark Hollow and the other towns on the very rim of the great northern wilderness. The first flurries fell and people looked to the skies before hurrying on, a new quickness in their steps, spurred on by the cold they could already feel in their bones. Fires were lit, and children were wrapped up warm in bright red scarves and mittens coloured like rainbows, and warnings were given about staying out late, about hurrying home before darkness fell, and stories were told in school yards about little children who strayed from the path and were found cold and dead when the thaws came.
And in the woods, among the maples and birches and oaks, through the spruce and hemlock and white pine, something moved. It walked slowly and deliberately. It knew these woods, had known them for a long, long time. Every footfall was surely placed, every fallen tree anticipated, every ancient stone wall, long overtaken by the renewed forests and lost amid the undergrowth, was a place to rest, to draw breath, before moving on.
In the winter blackness, it moved with a new purpose. Something that had been lost had now been found again. Something unknown had been revealed, like a veil drawn back by the hand of God. It passed by the derelict remains of an old farmhouse, its roof long collapsed, its walls now no more than a shelter for mice. It reached the crest of a hill and moved along its edge, the moon bright above it, the trees whispering in the darkness.
And it devoured the stars as it went.
Chapter Four
I had been back in Scarborough for almost three months, back in the house where I had spent my teenage years after my father died and that my grandfather had left to me in his will. In the East Village, where I lived for some time after my wife and child died, the old lady who owned my rent-controlled apartment had ushered me out with a smile on her face as she calculated the potential increase she could apply to the next tenant. She was a seventy-two-year-old Italian-American who had lost her husband in Korea, and she was usually about as friendly as a hungry rat. Angel suggested that her husband had probably handed himself over to the enemy to avoid being sent home to her again.
The Scarborough house was where my mother had been born and where my grandparents still lived at the time of my father’s death. After three hundred years, Scarborough was already changing when I arrived at the end of the seventies. Economic prosperity meant that it was becoming a satellite town for Portland and, although some of the older residents still held on to their land, land which had been in some families for generations, the developers were paying premium prices and more and more people were selling up. But Scarborough was still the kind of community where you knew your mailman and who his family was and he, in turn, knew the same about you.
From my grandfather’s house on Spring Street, I could cycle north into Portland or south to Higgins Beach, Ferry Beach, Western Beach or Scarborough Beach itself, or down to the head at Prouts Neck to look out on Bluff Island and Stratton Island and the Atlantic Ocean.
Prouts Neck is a small point of land that protrudes into Saco Bay about twelve miles south of Portland itself. It was where the artist Winslow Homer set up house near the end of the nineteenth century. His family bought up most of the land on the Neck and Winslow vetted his prospective neighbours carefully since, by and large, he wanted to be left to his own devices. The folks out on the Neck are still that way. There has been a fancy yacht club there since 1926 and a private beach club with membership limited to those who live or rent summer homes in the area and who belong to the Prouts Neck Association. Scarborough Beach remains public and free and there’s public access to Ferry Beach, close by the Black Point Inn on the Neck. Since it was beside Ferry Beach that Chester Nash, Paulie Block and six other men had lost their lives, the Neckers were going to have a lot to talk about when they returned in the summer.
In the old house, the past hung in the air like motes of dust waiting to be illuminated by the sharp rays of memory. It was there, surrounded by remembrances of a happier youth, that I hoped to set about putting old ghosts to rest: the ghosts of my wife and child, who had haunted me for so long but had maybe now achieved a kind of peace, a peace not yet mirrored in my own soul; of my father; of my mother, who had taken me away from the city in an effort to find peace for both of us; of Rachel, who now seemed lost to me; and of my grandfather, who had taught me about duty and humanity and the importance of making enemies of whom a man could be proud.
I had moved out of the Inn on St John at Congress Street in Portland as soon as most of the house had been made habitable. At night, the wind made the plastic on the roof slap like the beating of dark, leathery wings. The final job left to do was the slating, which was why I was sitting on my porch with a cup of coffee and the New York Times at 9 a.m. the next morning, waiting for Roger Simms. Roger was fifty, a straight-backed man with long, thin muscles and a face the colour of rosewood. He could do just about anything that involved a hammer, a saw and a natural craftsman’s ability to bring order out of the chaos of nature and neglect.
He arrived right on time, his aged Nissan belching blue fumes which tainted the air behind like nicotine on a lung. He stepped out of the car wearing paint-splattered, old man’s jeans, a denim shirt and a blue sweater that was little more than an assortment of holes held together by yarn. A pair of brown cowhide work gloves hung from one of the ass pockets of his jeans and a black watch cap was pulled down over his ears. From beneath it, strands of dark hair hung like the legs of a hermit crab. A cigarette dangled between his lips, a gravity-defying pillar of ash forming at the tip.
I gave him a mug of coffee and he drank it quickly while examining the roof critically, as if seeing it for the first time. He had been up there about three times already, checking the rafters and the roof supports and measuring the angles, so I didn’t think it was likely to hold any surprises for him. He thanked me for the coffee and handed back the mug. ‘Thanks’ was the first word he had said to me since he arrived; Roger was a great worker but the amount of air he wasted on unnecessary small talk wouldn’t have saved a gnat’s life.
It seemed to me that, by putting the roof on the old house, I was at last confirming my place in it. Stripped of its old broken slates and left with only the plastic to shield it from the elements, it had been reduced to a lifeless shell, the memories of the past lives it held within its walls reduced to dormancy as if to protect them from the ravages of the natural world. With its roof restored, the house would be warm and enclosed once again and I could become one with its past by guaranteeing its future and my presence in it.
We had already laid down straps in preparation for the shingles, using pieces of two-by-four cut lengthwise in half and oiled with wood preservative. Now, with the air crisp and cold and no promise of rain in the sky, we began the process of shingling. There was something in the placing of shingles, its rhythms and routines, that made it an almost meditative exercise. Travelling methodically across the face of the roof, I reached for a shingle, placed it on the one below, adjusted its exposure using a notch on the handle of my hammer, flipped the hammer, nailed down the shingle, reached for another and began the process again. I found a kind of peace in it and the morning passed quickly. I decided not to share my meditative speculations with Roger. Somehow, those who do jobs like roofing for a living tend to resent the musings of amateurs on the nature of the task. Roger would probably have thrown his hammer at me.
We worked for four hours, each of us resting when the mood took him, until I climbed carefully down and told Roger that I was heading up to the Seng Thai on Congress to get us some food. He grunted
something that I took as assent and I started up the Mustang and drove towards South Portland. As usual, there were plenty of cars on Maine Mall Road, people nosing about in Filene’s or heading for the movies, eating in the Old Country Buffet or sizing up the motels on the strip. I drove past the airport, along Johnson and, finally, onto Congress. I parked in the lot behind the Inn on St John between a Pinto and a Fiat, then headed down a block, bought the food and dumped it on the backseat of the car.
Edgar still had a crate of my stuff behind the reception desk at the inn and I figured I might as well pick it up while I was in the area. I opened the door and entered the ornate, old-style lobby, with its ancient radio and its neat piles of tourist brochures. Edgar wasn’t there but some other guy I didn’t recognise hauled the crate out, gave me a smile and then went back to counting receipts. I left him to it.
When I stepped back into the lot, I saw that someone had boxed me in. A huge black Cadillac Coupe de Ville, forty years old and virtually an antique, was parked behind the Mustang, leaving me with no way to get out. The car had whitewall tyres and restored tan upholstery, and the distinctive pontoon bumpers at the front were shiny and intact. A map of Maine lay on the backseat and it had Massachusetts plates but, apart from that, there was nothing about the car to identify its owner. It could have come straight from a museum exhibit.
I placed the crate in the trunk of the Mustang and headed back into the inn, but the guy on the desk said he’d never seen the Cadillac before. He offered to have it towed but I decided to try to track down the owner first. I asked in Pizza Villa across the street but they didn’t know anything about it either. I even tried the Dunkin’ Donuts and the Sportsman’s Bar until, still unsuccessful, I re-crossed the street and slapped the roof of the Cadillac in frustration.
‘Nice car,’ said a voice, as the echo of the slap faded. The voice was high, almost girlish, the words drawn out with what sounded more like malice than admiration, the sibilance in the first word almost menacing.