Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin Page 0,25

buried us in the sand.

4.

Rainy-day picture. The choice was go with Dad, who went off by himself to pick up groceries, or stay in the house and work on a puzzle with everyone else. I stayed. I hated puzzles, but I sat and listened to Def Leppard and the Scorpions on my Walkman.

No one really likes puzzles. Mom, Aunt Christine, Liz, and Ronnie don’t look excited or happy. You can tell by the way Mom has her arms crossed and is turned away from the table. They were all out of patience and annoyed with each other.

That’s how I remember puzzles ending: nothing getting solved and people walking away muttering to themselves.

5.

Here we are playing wiffle ball with the boys who stayed in the house next to us. I don’t remember their names. They were from Jersey. The tall redhead was my age and had terrible acne. Looked like his skin hurt all the time. The short redhead was a couple of years older than Ronnie, had round Mr. Peabody glasses, and his face was full of freckles. They were geekier than I was, which is saying something. Back home, kids at school and in the neighborhood picked on me a lot, and I never said boo. But Dennisport wasn’t home, it was somewhere else, and I became the de facto leader of our little summer group: me, my brother (Liz wouldn’t be seen with any of us), the Jersey Reds.

The first couple of days, we tried following around this girl from Italy, Isabella. Her name I remember. She was only twelve, maybe even eleven, but she looked older than me. She didn’t speak any English, had curly light brown hair down to her butt, and wore short-shorts with white trim. She tolerated us for a bit, but ended up hanging around with a group of kids older than us.

When we weren’t following Isabella around, we spied on my father.

6.

Yeah, I took a picture of my hand holding a glass bottle of Coke. There was this small motel down Old Wharf, right before one of the public beaches, that had an antique Coke vending machine. It was expensive, and the bottles held less than cans, but I was convinced Coke tasted better in glass bottle form.

It was down here at the vending machine where we first started spying on my father. Ronnie saw him walking across the sand-filled motel parking lot. Him in his thick black beard, already tan, and muscular in a wiry kind of way. I used to obsess over how different I was from my father.

Us kids instinctively ducked behind a parked car, wordlessly deciding we were going to jump out and scare Dad or try and tackle him into some nearby sand dune. No way the four of us could’ve taken him.

He didn’t walk by us, though. He veered off toward a set of motel rooms. He stopped seemingly at random and knocked on a blue door. The door opened and he went inside. No greeting or anything, he just went in and the door shut behind him.

Spying on your dad is a younger kid’s game. But being on vacation, away from home like that, away from who you were (particularly if you didn’t like who you were), was like permission to act younger than ourselves. Unless Isabella was around, of course.

So we tried waiting Dad out, but he didn’t walk back through that blue door. We got bored and went to the beach.

7.

Ronnie took this picture without me knowing. The younger Jersey Red said that maybe my Dad was cheating on my mother with the motel maid. So I jumped him, and put him in this headlock and forced him into the water. I remember not feeling all that strong, but he let me hold on and give him his fair share of noogies.

8.

That’s the same Coke-bottle motel. Early the next morning, Dad said he was going out for a jog. Ronnie and I followed him. We both stayed quiet, taking this much more seriously than the game it supposedly was.

I tried getting a shot with the blue door open, hoping I could see who was behind it, but clearly I failed. I mean, it’s partially open and when I first got this picture developed, if you looked hard enough, you could see the ghost of my father’s shoulder disappearing in the shadow of the room. But you can’t see it anymore.

9.

We’re in a record store in downtown Yarmouth. That’s a picture of the wall