Just a Corpse at Twilight Read online

  "What are the black-and-white days?" Grijpstra asked.

  "War documentaries," Ishmael said. "Kind of faded. That's how we saw it then, as little kids. Didn't care much then. No TV, no nothing."

  "Ah."

  "After Korea it was color."

  "To us World War Two was color too," Grijpstra said.

  Ishmael thought that was amazing.

  Ishmael, a small man, wiry, some fifty years old, wearing greenish wide-bottomed cotton trousers and a windbreaker, both well worn and faded, and a duck-billed hat, brand new and bright green, with a weathered face and a set of large very white teeth that he seemed to be holding on to, with his tongue perhaps, or with sucked-in cheeks, was a pilot. As he was bound for home, and the Point was close to Jameson . . .

  "I'll pay," Grijpstra said. As in Amsterdam there had been no time to change money, Grijpstra only had Dutch guilders, hundreds, two hundred and fifties and thousands, having grabbed a pile of notes from the basement before leaving. He displayed his wad.

  "That's money?" Ishmael asked, looking at the brightly colored notes of different sizes, which showed ornate faces of medieval Dutchmen, stylized flowers, fruit motifs, a bird even, ornamental bands, artistically drawn figures.

  "Guilders," Grijpstra said. "One guilder is about half a dollar. There should be plenty here."

  "Europe dollars," Ishmael said, shaking his head. "Can't rightly use those in Maine."

  Logan Airport was mostly closed inside. The money exchange wouldn't open until 9:00 A.M. There were coffee machines. Ishmael worked one and gave Grijpstra a cup. Grijpstra showed his Diners Club card.

  "Ah," Ishmael said. "Can't rightly use that in Maine either. Not where we are at. All empty coast, you know. The bank is a truck, coming in Tuesdays, and it does Visa, but only if you're known, cause there's no phone from the truck, and they only change Canadian dollars, not Europe dollars, I think."

  Grijpstra put back his credit card. "I see."

  "Bank truck doesn't take pesos either," Ishmael said. "Nothing personal, you know."

  "Got to get to Jameson," Grijpstra said. He explained about his friend watching nature out there from an island, Squid Island.

  "That's next to Bar Island," Ishmael said. "I fly around there some. Bar Island has this bar that connects to the peninsula ofJameson that gets submerged at low tide."

  "Jameson goes under water?"

  "No, just the bar to Bar Island." Ishmael's teeth clicked as he laughed. "Jameson too, when this ozone hole opens up a bit more. That hole is right above the coast of Maine, did you know that? That'll warm us up all right. What do you do for a living?"

  Grijpstra explained that he was a former cop, now a private detective.

  "Your friend on Squid Island, would he be a cop too?"

  That was amazing, Ishmael said, two former European cops watching nature on three thousand miles of Maine coast (counting all the nooks and crannies) not too well guarded by the Coast Guard, the Marine Patrol, sheriffs' offices, justice departments, the DEA, the what-have-you.

  "DEA?"

  "Drug Enforcement Agency," Ishmael said.

  "You got drugs in Maine?"

  Ishmaers teeth were clicking again. "You got drugs in Dutchland?"

  Grijpstra said he didn't care about drugs. He thought that over three thousand miles of not-too-well-guarded coast might attract some, though.

  "So," Ishmael said, "you're in a hurry to start watching some nature with your former cop friend out on Squid Island. Now ifyou rented a car, you'd be there in ten hours."

  "I'd rather fly with you," Grijpstra said. "I could pay you later."

  "You could," Ishmael said. He didn't like to fly in the dark, though, so they'd have to wait for daybreak, three hours away. Grijpstra slept in the lounge, waking up every now and then to listen to Ishmael snore in the seat next to him, or to accept more coffee or candy bars that Ishmael kept getting from machines.

  The plane was small, red and white, and had double wings, covered with what, to Grijpstra, appeared to be sailcloth. It was tied to the tarmac with ropes. Grijpstra helped undo them. There was only a small bench inside, with a little space behind it that Grijpstra's bag fitted into. Ishmael's bag balanced on top. The dashboard wasn't too complicated.

  "1949," Ishmael said. "A Tailorcraft. They don't build them now. You okay there?"

  Grijpstra was too big maybe but he didn't say so. He watched Ishmael turn the wooden propeller and listened to the little engine ahead, sputtering before catching. Ishmael hoisted himselfup, patted the dashboard, took out a portable radio, and called the control tower. The Tailorcraft began to spin as it reached the runway.

  "Hello?" Ishmael asked the plane. "Would you mind? Oh, I see."

  It was Grijpstra's right foot, depressing the plane's right wheel brake. The plane had double everything.

  "Don't touch nothing," Ishmael said. The plane finished its full turn and tried again. Ishmael was wearing little headphones connected to his portable radio. Control must have told him to go, for the plane took off, suddenly and bravely, into an empty sky that connected, Grijpstra reflected, to the rest of the universe, which was nothing really, a void, without coordinates except the lines that man had come up with.

  "Nothing," Grijpstra shouted over the engine's puny roar.

  "What?" Ishmael shouted.

  "Even less than your heaven," Grijpstra said, pointing ahead and to the sides, even to the rear, where, turning his head with some difficulty, he could see only the plane's toy tail, sticking up comically between two little white clouds suspended in an infinity of blues, in assorted shades, all transparent.

  "Heaven?"

  "Your restroom heaven."

  Ishmael shouted that he'd been dreaming about heaven before meeting Grijpstra. The Tailorcraft, flying horizontally now above the Massachusetts coast line, replaced its tiny roar with a quiet putt-putt. "Maybe you're the angel," Ish-mael said. "There should be angels in heaven, but in my dream, there was only the restroom and a uniformed guy shining shoes, a black, white-haired guy, he was Saint Peter, his nameplate said so, he wanted to know what I'd been doing."

  "In charge of thresholds," Grijpstra said.

  "That's him." Ishmael rolled a cigarette with one hand, out ofa can from the glove compartment. There was a soldier on the can blowing a trumpet. "You want one?"

  Grijpstra didn't.

  "They still smoke in Holland?"

  "Oh yes," Grijpstra said, reassured by the Boston suburbs below, crawling up along the coast in repetitive patterns. There were sailboats too, and ferries, busily connecting clearly visible points A and 6. He'd probably be fine, sitting on the plane's sailcloth wings, waving and screaming. Social suburbanites, sunning their worked-out bodies on their balconies, would pick up a phone, or old salts, ferry captains, weathered pleasure sailors, would turn a wheel. Not to worry.

  "They don't smoke here no more," Ishmael said. "Just me and Hairy Harry occasionally. Looks funny, puffy rosy cheeks and then that fat cigar. Where was I, Krip?"

  Grijpstra thought they were flying out of Where, if there were a Where anywhere now that they were out of coordinates below—no houses, no boats.

  "The dream." Ishmael blew thick smoke at the plane's cracked windscreen. "Saint Peter wanted to know who-what-where and I said I had been this Maine Pentecostal person. You know? Pentecost? Whitsunday? Holy Ghost coming down? You don't cut your hair much and the women wear long dresses and you go to chapel most of the time?"

  "Right," Grijpstra said happily. The shoreline had showed up again: some houses, a sizable boat.

  "You got the Holy Ghost coming down Whitsunday at your end too?"

  "Yes," Grijpstra said. There was an Uncle Joe who lived in the country, Holland's religious part, where kids weren't vaccinated against polio and everybody put out the flag on the queen's birthday. Uncle Joe was a healer.

  "Ever heal anybody?"

  Not to Grijpstra's knowledge but Uncle Joe did speak in tongues.

  "Like
you," Ishmael said, "in the restroom. Okay. So I told Saint Peter I had been doing that, and more, praying extra hours, going to chapel before breakfast, preaching, hollering and whatnot, guiding the congregation, rolling about the floor speaking in tongues, and he said, 'Very well, sir, that'll be the second door on the right then.'"

  The houses below were getting further apart and there was only one ship, a huge tanker, the size of some of the bigger islands they had passed earlier, that appeared to move just a little slower, it seemed to Grijpstra, than the Tailor-craft. Grijpstra remembered a yachtsman in Holland who washed up on the beach after his craft got torn up by a gale. The yachtsman told a TV interviewer he'd been floating on top of big waves and there were tankers everywhere and when the yachtsman looked into the tankers' portholes he kept seeing sailors enjoying their dinners, or watching TV, or un-centerfolding Playboys, and nobody saw him outside, begging and sobbing.

  "Second door on the right," Ishmael repeated, "and we're in the airport restroom, so that door would lead into one of the shifters. But that's where he said I had to go and he was Saint Peter—he had a label on his chest that said so."

  Grijpstra groaned.

  "Bad," Ishmael said, "but I'm from Maine so I don't believe nothing unless my parents tell me to and my parents are dead. So I just stand about for a bit and there's other people having their shoes shined and they never did the Pentecost and you know where Saint Peter sent them?"

  "No," Grijpstra said. He thought he shouldn't worry because this Tailorcraft had been around since 1949, with good people like Ishmael at the controls. Nothing to fear but fear itself. And say, just for argument's sake, that the plane did go down. This was not a good planet anyway. This might even be hell. To leave could only be pleasant. Nellie was okay perhaps but no more memory of the significant person in one's life means no more regret at being without that significant person. What else would death wipe out? Amsterdam traffic? Old age? Traveling in old unreliable mini-airplanes? More and more red tide in the sea and a lot of people being kept alive with terminal painful diseases? He should be grateful. Here he was having the last bad time ofhis bad life.

  "Second door on the right," Ishmael said. "All ofthem. All of them got sent through the second door on the right. One total asshole I knew, he'd lived in a commune—Zen, you know Zen?"

  "My friend does," Grijpstra said, looking straight ahead. "My friend Rinus, on Squid Island. Back in Amsterdam he'd go sometimes, Sunday mornings. Said he would sit on thin cushions, his legs all twisted, quietly, never mind if it hurt."

  "On Squid Island?"

  "No, in a loft, in Amsterdam. Lange Leidse Dwarsstraat honderd drie en veertig drie hoog."

  "You're okay?" Ishmael asked.

  "I'm sorry," Grijpstra said. "I thought you wanted to know where Rinus did Zen. That was the address."

  "In tongues?"

  "In Dutch."

  "What happens to Rinus when he does Zen?"

  "When he stops sitting his legs stop hurting. So where did your Zen man get sent by Saint Peter?

  "Second door on the right," Ishmael said. "Like everybody else. Never mind what he'd done. Maybe played golf and fished for trout all his life. Maybe nine to fived for IBM or Ford. Watched daytime TV. Same difference—all us suckers. But there were all the other doors too—those are big restrooms at Logan, fifty doors maybe—so I wondered where they led to. And there were all these folks getting their shoes shined by Peter, keeping the old boy busy so that he couldn't see what was going on behind him. So I sneaked around, tried all the other doors, and you know what?"

  "Duds," Grijpstra said. "Dud doors. Part of the wall between Now and Hereafter. Only the second door worked."

  "You had the same dream?"

  "Makes sense," Grijpstra said. "Doesn't it? You tried the second door?"

  "Sure," Ishmael said. "Led to Bliss. More of the same with the pain blocked out. Whatever you wanted to do you could do. All the shoe-shined people were there, looking for something to do. But I wanted to make music and there were these black guys who said they would let me play with them so I was going to do that for a while but they said it wouldn't satisfy me forever."

  "Yes," Grijpstra said.

  "You had the same dream?"

  "What's your instrument?" Grijpstra asked.

  "Keyboards." Ishmael had been rolling more cigarettes out of the trumpeting-soldier can and he had to crack a window to let air into the cockpit. There was too much wind whistling in to talk through but Ishmael pointed things out below, with the coast roughening up. No more townhouses on sand beaches raked by tractors but bays, coves, peninsulas, and ragged islands, each with its own moving luminous froth surrounding bare rocks leading up to carpets of shrubs and firs or pine trees. There were a few fishing boats thumping through turbulent seas, white wooden vessels, and a three-masted schooner with billowing brown sails.

  "Tourist charter boat," Ishmael shouted.

  There was a modern yacht, sleek, whizzing along under a cloud of white nylon. Grijpstra thought that the yacht was the ideal situation.

  Ishmael made the plane lose altitude. The Tailorcraft, its tiny wheels a few feet above the waves, circled the yacht. The crew waved. The crew looked young and beautiful, both sexes from late teens to thirties. Grijpstra thought that these had to be the Magazine Cover People, temporarily released from their second dimension. He noticed a white-maned, ruddy-faced, sharp-featured, tall rnilitary-looking authority at the wheel. The authority smoked a pipe. Grijpstra thought the authority could be General MacArthur, or the United States god. Grijpstra waved. General MacArthur or the United States god lifted an imperial hand in response. There was immense power in the figure.

  The little plane headed north again. Grijpstra thought of de Gier, subject to American authority now. "Do you know Sheriff Hairy Harry?"

  Ishmael discussed Hairy Harry while the Tailor-craft wiggled through the last hundred miles to Jameson, in between showing his passenger such curiosities as a finback whale coming up to spout between dives, over seventy feet of smoothly shaped gray-blue creature calmly pursuing a majestic existence framed by whitecaps on green waves.

  "Thirty elephants," Ishmael said, "thirty elephants wouldn't outweigh that mother."

  "Big mother," Grijpstra said, as the whale dwarfed the airplane.

  "Bigger than Tyrannosaurus rex," Ishmael said, "and that mother stood five stories. What did you hear about our sheriff?"

  "To stay away?" Grijpstra asked.

  Ishmael thought that might be a good idea. Grijpstra might think this whale was big but Sheriff Hairy Harry was bigger. Why, did Grijpstra know that Hairy Harry, ruler of Woodcock County, Maine, had bought a two-hundred-thousand-dollar house from Farnsworth for one hundred thousand, twenty-five down, and an easy mortgage?

  "From Flash Farnsworth?" Grijpstra asked.

  "So you know everybody?" Ishmael's dentures clicked in amazement, moved sideways a little, overadjusted, came back in place. "No. Bildah Farnsworth. He'd be kin to Flash. All Flash has is an osprey nest for hair and a half share in a leaky tub."

  Grijpstra said there had to be a slump on for houses to sell at half their value, and Ishmael said that would be so, but then there was always a recession in Maine. But Hairy Harry's house was custom-built, complete—turn the key and step into Hairy Harry Land, the sheriffs individually adjusted theme park. Country music on compact disc in an electronic jukebox loudspeaker-extended to all rooms, full-size snooker tables in the basement, inside golf carpet wall to wall in the loft, bar with foreign beers on tap, a gun room, a video room.

  Ishmael looked sly. Now he wasn't sure but just for the sake of argument, of pure cussedness, there might even be a supply of skinflicks there, no kidding around for Hairy Harry, the old in-and-out perhaps. Imported, most likely. Probably quite a collection. Ishmael liked to collect things himself and there was something to be said for naked women, okay? Grijpstra didn't mind his bringing up the subject? But they, the women, might make the viewer, Ishmael in this
case, kind of nervous, especially if they moved and talked, and had company and so forth. "You happen to care for that sort of thing yourself, eh . . ."

  "Grijpstra."

  "Kripstra," Ishmael said.

  "In Holland we get too much of that now," Grijpstra said. "Like masturbation classes on prime-time TV. Holland used to be Calvinistic all over but it's the other way around now. The Dutch are compulsive in any direction. Prescribed group sex and all that." Grijpstra didn't care for the activity himself.

  "What if they're good?"

  Grijpstra said he always preferred them to be out of sight, behind drawn curtains. "And quiet," Grijpstra said. "They better be quiet."

  "You could switch them off."

  Grijpstra said his girlfriend liked to watch sometimes.

  "You really don't like looking in?"

  "Makes me shy," Grijpstra said.

  "That's like Flash Farnsworth," Ishmael said. "Flash closes his eyes at the good parts."

  "Porno?"

  "No, regular," Ishmael said. "But regular shows it too. Flash says he can see it better in his head."

  "Flash with the bird's nest on top?"

  "Right." Ishmael made the Tailorcraft skim waves, nip between islands here and there, while he told Grijpstra about Flash, and while summer people, lounging on verandas of island summer houses, looked down on the antique airplane putt-putting bravely below.

  Flash Farnsworth, Ishmael remembered, was with the Coast Guard once, and a drinking lad at the time, until divine justice sent the big woman bouncing down the boulevard in Boston. So now Flash limped. "You see, Krip, that's what Flash finally figured out the big woman to be— heaven-sent. Get me?"

  Amsterdam police officers, in view of the city's partly alien population, are required to take English spoken-language exams. Grijpstra also watched American rental movies, with Tabriz, de Gier^ left-behind fat furry cat, bunched up on his lap, blocking the subtitles. On the other hand there were Ishmael's Maine accent and Grijpstra's fear offlying low in a small aircraft above turbulent seas. Nevertheless Grijpstra got the general drift of Flash's trial, which, Ishmael said, had to do with faith and reason, and the simplicity of Flash, who wanted God in heaven. One who accepts nothing at all, Ishmael said, has to look for reasons to hang his soul from.