Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin Page 0,24

and you’ll find many answers here.”

NINETEEN SNAPSHOTS

OF DENNISPORT

BY PAUL TREMBLAY

Dennisport

1.

That’s me standing on the porch of the summer house we always rented. I drove by the old place today. Sunset Lane, just off Depot Street. The house still has that aqua-green paint job. Four other summer houses crowd around it, almost like they’re boxing it in, or protecting it. I don’t remember those other houses being so close, taking up the whole lane. Everything seemed bigger back then.

Look at me. Hard to believe how skinny and little I was. She’s not in the shot, but my sister Liz, who was one year younger, towered over me, and probably outweighed me by a solid twenty pounds. Would you just look at that kid? Those legs are skinnier and whiter than the porch slats. This was, what, 1986, so I’d just turned thirteen. It’s the first picture on that vacation roll. I always had to be in the first picture by myself. It was my thing.

2.

That’s my mother carrying the towels. She already looks aggravated. I would’ve been too. None of us kids helped to unpack. The other woman is her younger sister, my Aunt Christine. She was my coolest aunt. She lived in Boston and always liked to play games or take us kids to the movies. I think that’s an emergency rainy-day puzzle box tucked under her arm. Aunt Christine and my parents were in their mid-thirties. Jesus, everyone was so young. People don’t do that anymore, do they? Have kids so young.

My cheap camera makes everyone look so far away. It broke before the end of the summer. That group of people running away, on the right side of the house, they’re hard to make out, but that’s my younger brother, Ronnie, slung over my dad’s shoulder. He stole Dad’s floppy Budweiser hat and tried to make a quick escape. You can kind of see the hat bunched up in one hand. Ronnie was eight and built like a hobbit. Liz was tickling Ronnie, trying to help Dad. She always took his side over ours.

3.

Here’s Ronnie and his summer buzz cut, standing in a big sand pit we spent most of the day digging. Can’t really tell in the picture, but he had this white patch of hair on the right side of his head. Buzzed that short, it looked like the map of some island country.

The sand at the bottom of that pit was shockingly wet and cold. I couldn’t admit it to Ronnie, but we got to a point where I didn’t want to reach down to dig anymore. I was a big scaredy cat. Always was, especially compared to Ronnie.

We’re on one of those Nantucket Sound beaches off Old Wharf Road. I remember the road as a long string of nameless hotels and motels and restaurants and beaches fitting together, squares on a chessboard. In this picture, we’re at the public beach next to what’s now called the Edgewater Beach Resort. I don’t remember what was there back then. Isn’t that terrible? So many of the little details always go missing. Maybe if I hadn’t been so preoccupied with taking pictures, I would’ve remembered more.

Check this out: I caught it by accident, but those legs there, upper right corner, those are my dad’s legs. He was following Aunt Christine to the water, but then he stopped to talk to some big guy wearing long pants, shoes, and a yellow shirt. The yellow shirt I remember vividly. I didn’t get a great look at him otherwise, but I remember him being bigger and older than my dad.

I asked Ronnie who Dad was talking to. Ronnie didn’t know. We waited for Dad to come back, we wanted to bury him in the pit since it was too deep for either one of us. When he got back and we asked who he was talking to, he said, “Just some guy.” We were all used to Dad talking to random people: grocery store, baseball game, walking down the street, didn’t matter to him. Used to embarrass the hell out of us (especially Liz). Talking to strangers and getting them to laugh or at least smile was what he did.

Ronnie and I tried to sneak up behind Dad and push him into the pit. He threw us in instead. I knocked heads with Ronnie. We were fine, but I got real mad at my father, mad like only a new teenager can. Dad didn’t care. He held us down and