Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin Page 0,60

and everything was recovering from the havoc of an August Saturday night and there wasn’t a single car. He felt a strange thrill when he realized he might be alone.

He tiptoed down the stairs—he was of course already dressed, you couldn’t go to the bathroom without being dressed—and opened the living room door. A newspaper had been left open on the green leather couch. A cup of coffee sat unfinished on a side table. He crossed to the kitchen. On the bare table was a note: Help yourself to food.

Hesitantly, he opened the refrigerator. There was milk and cheese and eggs and something they called linguica, plus a plastic container of cream cheese. On the counter were a jar of jam and a bag of rolls from the Portuguese bakery and a bottle of fizzy water. He poured himself some fizzy water and sat at the breakfast table.

The phone rang. He’d never answered it before. It rang and rang and rang. He looked at it; it was black with a rotary dial and appeared ancient. Was it ringing for him? He waited through the twentieth ring and then picked up.

“Good morning,” he said.

A man’s voice poured back at him, rushed and elusive.

In his best American, he told the man that he didn’t speak American so well.

The man offered a few choice words about that—what they were was anybody’s guess—and hung up.

He took the glass of fizzy water out through the living room to the front hall and opened the door to the driveway. He stood there smelling the salt air. Carefully he searched the sky above the pine trees that surrounded their partially settled neighborhood, cut off by Route 6 from the town. Just last week on a dune hike, they’d seen a shack practically spontaneously combust. What the hell was going on here?

Against the wall of the house leaned a lone motorbike. That would be his once Valerie left for Denmark. He looked at his watch—he’d never had a watch before—and saw that would be in just two days. In just two days he’d be free of her. She spoke to him more than anybody else in the family, but primarily it all revolved around how many boys kept telling her how beautiful she was. She was all right, but she was not beautiful. She had dark hair, for one thing. He couldn’t tell whether she was trying to provoke him into saying something like, But you are beautiful, or if she was just gloating. The town had never had an exchange student before, inbound or outbound. The silence was unstinting.

A car pulled into the driveway, spraying pebbles and seashells. Valerie and her parents were visible through its smudged oversized windows. He waved to them uncertainly. What was he supposed to do—go to the car, retreat into the house, stand there like a statue? Finally, Valerie got out of the car. She strode over to him and took his hand. She was an inch or two taller.

“Come,” she said with grim determination.

She led him into the house and through the kitchen to the refrigerator, still holding his hand. She’d never held his hand before. He wasn’t surprised that he didn’t like it. She opened the refrigerator and grabbed two cans of beer and shut the door with her hip and led him upstairs. At the top of the stairs she looked left and right, as if she’d never been there before. “Okay, okay,” she said, urging herself onward, still holding his hand. She’d probably held a lot of hands. He wondered if she’d had sex yet; he hadn’t, though of course it was never far from his mind.

They walked down the hall together, separately but side by side. He thought he could see a tear in the corner of her eye; he thought he could sense something awful waiting at the end of the hall. She opened the door to his room, pulled him in, shut it, sat him forcefully on the bed, sat beside him, opened a can and handed it to him, opened her can, and tried to smile.

“Skaal,” she said, perhaps her one word of Danish, tapping his can with hers.

“Skaal,” he said.

She took a sip and he took a sip.

“What have you been doing this morning?” she asked. “What have you heard?”

He looked at her. It seemed wrong, perhaps even dangerous, to admit he’d heard anything. “I was asleep,” he said.

“You couldn’t sleep through that.” She looked at him in frank disbelief.

“I don’t know what