Bunker 01 - Slipknot Read online

  Forgetting or ignoring the fact that he was no longer welcome on the premises, Clyde diligently made his way to the top of the dock, where he became busy shouting directions at the man behind the wheel of the ambulance. With the way his shouted instructions and hand signals diametrically opposed each other, it was purely coincidental that the con-verted bakery delivery van negotiated the tight three-point turn without meeting the demise suffered by Nick Dow. The makeshift ambulance came to a stop, followed closely by a

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  police car sporting bold lettering—hancock county sheriff.

  Two teenagers, one in fisherman’s boots and the other in styl-ish athletic shoes, stepped out of either side of the ersatz ambulance. Cal said hello to them, calling them by the names Eddie and Alex. Eddie, in the boots, had frizzy blond hair and eyes that had that puffy pot smoker’s look; Alex was clean and alert, with black hair and eyes that flashed with what I discerned as sheer irritation. I was certain Alex was the young man who had been humiliated in front of the entire town last night.

  Visibly uncomfortable with the task at hand, Eddie and Alex stood waiting for someone, anyone, to tell them what to do next. A uniformed officer emerged from the police vehicle. He stood erect and ceremoniously placed a wide-brimmed hat identical to the one worn by Clydie upon his flat-topped head, prompting the first greeting. “Howdy, partner.” Clyde swaggered closer. “I’ll bet you wish you’d depu-tized me when you had the chance. Could have saved you a trip today.”

  The sheriff dismissed the overzealous Clyde with what could have been interpreted as a nod but could as easily have been a nervous twitch with no intended significance. Clyde shadowed the sheriff as he conducted a thoughtful and methodical surveillance of the area, looking everywhere but at the body by Cal’s feet. The two ambulance attendants, still awkwardly awaiting instruction, stood dumbfounded, with their hands shoved deep into their dungaree pockets. Eddie’s jeans were well worn and ragged at the cuffs, which dragged on the ground. Alex’s Levi’s appeared to be new and had s l i p k n o t

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  crisp creases that ran the length of his lanky legs. Amused and intrigued, I found their unfamiliarity with this scene of death strangely refreshing.

  My presence was so conspicuous that the newcomers on the dock must have assumed I had a very good reason for being there—although all three waited for a clue to my identity rather than risk a question they figured even Clydie knew the answer to. I began double-checking all measurements and digital images I had captured thus far. The sheriff donned mirrored trooper glasses so that he could more discreetly watch my actions. Clydie patted his own breast pockets for sun-glasses and disappointedly came up empty. “Will you gentlemen please help me with Nick before the tide reclaims him?”

  Cal sternly yet politely interjected into the confused silence.

  “Sorry it took us so long to get here, Cal,” said Eddie, who, on closer inspection, indeed appeared to be stoned. He opened the back door of the van. “We were about to leave the dock at the sound of the cannon when Ginny called on the VHF and asked if we could help out by driving the bakery truck—um, ambulance. I was hoping we could get an EMT to come over, but I guess they’re both racing to get offshore for the new season, too.” Alex remained silent as he shot Eddie a look of disgust that I assumed was prompted by impatience with his partner’s apologies and explanations to the group of adults with whom Alex clearly had zero interest. The young men worked mostly against each other but finally managed to wrestle the stretcher from the back of the ambulance while Cal explained that it was too late for an EMT and that they needed only to deliver Nick to Boyce’s funeral parlor.

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  “Twenty minutes till the shot of the cannon!” Clydie enthusiastically announced, holding his wristwatch a mere inch from his face. “Eleven boats all fighting for next year’s quota. The newspaper says it will be like Survivor, The Amazing Race, and Deadliest Catch all rolled into one. The government’s really gone and done it this time. A lot of folks will be pretty upset about Nick’s pool, too. Hell, I put a ten-spot on the Sea Hunter myself. Guess I can kiss that farewell, to judge by the status of my bookie.” On and on Clydie rattled. The men, accustomed to his prattle, paid little attention while I discreetly took a few more notes. “Hey, his back pocket looks empty! Cal, did you take his black book? I sure would like to have my ten bucks back. Maybe the book and all of that money is drifting around the harbor!”

  The parking lot adjacent to Turners’ Fish Plant was quickly filling with cars and pickup trucks and a steady stream of employees. Women in hairnets, and men in the rubber boots that I had just now overheard referred to as Green Haven wing tips, trickled down the wharf and formed human puddles around the van they had come to know as the ambulance. Shallow gasps of scared surprise and sighs of sadness escaped the growing crowd of townspeople and plant workers as they realized the source of this highly unusual activity involving the county sheriff. The sheriff, clearly appreciating an audience, had scrambled down the ledge to join Cal, who had remained stoically by the body. With Clyde Leeman by his side, the sheriff tried in vain to appear at ease this close to a dead body in a town where, I couldn’t help but notice, the law was unwelcome. Except for Clyde, the Green Haveners s l i p k n o t

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  moved away from the sheriff as he passed. Some shot dirty looks in his direction. In an attempt to justify his badge, the sheriff began directing the young men carrying the stretcher.

  “Lug that thing down here. Give them some room, folks.

  That’s it.”

  Amazed and intrigued with the notion that perhaps nobody at the location—with the exception of me—had ever seen a corpse outside a silk-lined casket, I tucked my notebook into my messenger bag and closed my jacket over my camera. With hair that was neither long nor short, not really dark or light, and a build that could best be described as average, I had always been good at disappearing in a crowd. I wondered as I glanced offshore at the island that loomed in the distance, interrupting an otherwise pristine horizon, how my life would have been different had my mother not plucked me away from my island birthplace and planted me in South Florida. Yes, I thought, that must be the Acadia Island I had wondered and fantasized about. If I had been raised there, I wondered, would I be here now as a real member of this assembly? I must still have family there.

  Florida had been the most exotic and faraway place my mother could imagine when she decided to escape Maine with her two children; my brother, Wally, was just an infant. I thought the three of us were moving to another country by the time the Ford LTD station wagon rattled over the border of Georgia and into the state that would become our new home. Nearly thirty-eight years later, I could still hear the whoop my mother let out when she read the sign welcoming us to Jacksonville, as clearly as I had from my cozy nest of

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  blankets in the backseat of that old car. As if we had been chased the length of the eastern seaboard by something that couldn’t penetrate the northern border of the Sunshine State, my mother declared us free. So at the age of four, I decided that my mother was different from other mothers.

  My familiar stroll down this well-worn path of imaginative memory was cut short by a high-pitched screech and a flood of tears from a woman right beside me. Too well dressed to belong in the scene, I thought, the screamer stood out in the sea of long white lab coats—the plant’s traditional uniform.

  This woman’s reaction to the sight of Nick Dow’s lifeless body was telling. Perhaps they had been lovers. Except for this one outburst of emotion and a few gasps that had slipped from behind hands trying to contain them, this body had been viewed nearly as casually as an abandoned shell that once housed a hermit crab. I was struck by how different this scene was from the many I had witnessed in Dade County.

  Maybe this coolness was the Yankee way.
Or maybe no one had liked Dow much. Ginny Turner’s reaction was significantly different. Ginny was quite dismayed at her own misfor-tune of a delayed start to this morning’s schedule. If this had occurred on one of Florida’s beaches, a southern Ginny would have closed up shop for the week and been home bak-ing for the funeral festivities. There would be a lot of crying and carrying on. Someone would have thrown him- or herself on top of the body by now. These northerners were quite different. My mother had never meshed with Floridians. I was beginning to understand that the difference was in-grained. Although I had never known exactly what my mother s l i p k n o t

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  had fled, I understood that my retreat north was every bit as calculated as hers had been.

  As I brushed by the sobbing, overdressed woman whose face was buried in the neck of a consoling bystander, I heard single chopped syllables staggering through all her gulps and sniffles. From what I could piece together of the almost unin-telligible hysteria, I knew that, at least in the mind of one woman, this death was not a simple drunken misstep off a dock. Something had “gone . . . too . . . far.”

  Alex and Eddie, I learned from Cal, were high school students fulfilling their civic requirements for graduation; they were also sons of two of Green Haven’s most prominent cod fishermen. The sobbing woman was Alex’s mother. The boys were working as a team to maneuver a backboard type of stretcher alongside the corpse. Cal joined the two in rolling Nick Dow onto the clean white sheet covering the thin mattress on the board while the sheriff and Clyde held the opposite side of the stretcher, keeping it from sliding away on the slippery rocks. The body slowly shifted from stomach to side and flopped bluntly onto its back in the middle of the mattress, giving me my first formal introduction to the face belonging to the man I was struggling to remain disinterested in.

  The air was still—even the gulls went mute. The five men surrounding the stretcher stiffened and immediately backed away. Spooked, Clyde Leeman stumbled and fell on his rear end, then crawled quickly away like a crab, his eyes fixed on what looked like a blood-filled hole in the middle of the deceased’s otherwise stark white forehead. “He—he—he’s been sh—sh—shot!” Clyde stuttered.

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  As naturally as the men had scrambled to distance themselves from the horror of murder, I moved in close with my camera clicking. The sheriff was on his radio, calling for assistance from the state police, as Ginny Turner tried unsuccessfully to pry her employees away from the scene and to their various jobs in and around the plant. A mixture of relief and disappointment was shared as I flicked the limpet from the deceased’s forehead. “Relax, folks. It’s just a seashell,” I said, impressed with my authoritative tone. The entire crowd let out a sigh. I zoomed in on the green campaign-style button pinned to the victim’s chest. I pulled out my notebook and sketched the pin with the same block letters: yes!; the “Y” was artfully drawn windmill blades. Just as I added a dot to complete a question mark, a shot rang out that momentarily stifled the chaotic motion and buzz surrounding the onlookers, now speculators and surmisers. I instinctively hit the deck by diving onto the beach. I rolled for cover behind a large rock and reached for the gun that I no longer carried. All jaws dropped, and eyes were on this strange woman lying in the seaweed.

  Stunned and confused, I remained behind the shelter of the boulder, gathering my wits. Cal approached slowly with both palms up, as if to say, “I’m unarmed.” He offered me his large hand, which I gratefully accepted. He helped me to my feet and said, “That was the cannon shot signaling the start of the codfish season.” I tugged my jacket back into place and pulled a tendril of hair from my eyes, tucking it neatly behind an ear. After making certain that the only damage I had sustained was to my ego, Cal added, “You ain’t in Florida anymore, girlie.”

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  by the time Nick Dow’s corpse had finally and officially been pronounced dead by the county coroner, who had driven all the way from Bangor, it had been in and out of the bakery truck four times that I had counted. I couldn’t avoid a silent comparison of Dow, all tucked in and shrouded by the traditional white sheet, to a loaf of bread being shoved in and out of an oven. When the bakery ambulance refused to start, it was towed off the dock behind a pickup truck fully loaded with a tower of lobster traps that until now I had assumed were nothing more than very popular lawn ornaments. This small town just kept getting smaller, I thought. The stack of traps pulling the bread van was followed away by the sheriff, a state police car, and a handful of kids on bicycles. From what I could gather, this was the only funeral procession Nick Dow would have.

  The morning air was so clear that it hadn’t taken long for the sun, now well above the horizon, to penetrate and soften patches of sand between the ledges steeping in the tepid yellow light. This June sunshine infused the mud, barnacles, and seaweed with warmth enough to send wafts of musty air

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  in the opposite direction. The incoming tide licked rings of salt from rocks along the shore and quenched its thirst in pools that had been left by the last ebb. Herring gulls left perches and worked feverishly over a school of bait fish that simmered in a malformed oval of the harbor’s surface off the end of the pier.

  As the last bicyclist pumped, crested, and vanished over the hill, the scene changed dramatically from chaos to all business. Cal Dunham was able to resume his duties as plant foreman and chased all employees off to their various jobs.

  As much as I wanted to pay Audrey a visit at the coffee shop and hear all of the scuttlebutt surrounding Dow’s death, I diligently stuck to the task at hand. I had been sent to the plant to perform the primary steps of a total value assessment and safety survey. Eastern Marine Safety Consultants hired itself out to insurance companies needing surveys, research, and other information pertinent to insure, reinsure, or settle claims. I was low man on the totem pole, performing the leg-work and making no decisions. Wishing to retain my new job and paycheck, albeit meager, I pulled the checklist from my bag and got busy. Although it was difficult for me to generate any excitement about my new career, I did have a spotless work ethic and a tendency to be a perfectionist. In doing appropriate homework, I had basically memorized the entire Occupational Safety and Health Administration website and every link to and from, so I felt relatively comfortable in spite of my lack of experience. OSHA set all federal guidelines for safety in the workplace, and I had been told I should consider their standards the Bible.

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  A hydraulic winch (no visible emergency shutoff ) hummed as it pulled blue plastic crates from the ocean and placed them one at a time on a digital scale (power cord exposed to elements) where two men (not wearing hard hats) worked together stacking the crates onto pallets (loaded beyond capacity) lifted and carried away gently by the tines of a fork truck (no clearly marked, designated traffic area). Each pallet of crates was delivered to the back of a waiting eighteen-wheeler where a husky man (inadequately clothed) in the refrigerated box worked expertly with a pallet jack (ergonomic nightmare) maneuvering dripping pallets (dangerously slippery—

  no nonskid) to fully utilize the tight (not properly lighted) space and fully load the truck. Okay, I thought, too much information. I might never get beyond this one workstation!

  Perhaps just a walk-through inspection with general com-ments would suffice for now. So I proceeded without the notebook and checklist and tried to get an overall feel for the safety of the work environment. I fought the urge to make a note of the absence of fire extinguishers and first aid equipment and, before I knew it, was making my way around much quicker.

  Tons of fresh herring were sucked through a giant straw-like duct from the belly of a boat at the side of the wharf as diesel fuel was pumped back aboard through a smaller rubber hose. The simultaneous pumping on and off came in surges of differing cadence, creating a syncopated beat to which the rhythm of the p
lant kept pace. From the other end of the duct, shimmering silver and blue cigar-sized fish leaped like spawning salmon onto a belt that conveyed them

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  through a stainless steel tunnel where they exited caked with salt. At the end of the belt, freshly salted herring fell into drums marked bait. After a drum had filled, it was whisked away by a young man wielding a hand truck. An empty drum replaced the one in motion at the end of the belt before even a single fish dove to the concrete floor. Impressed with the smooth operation, I winced at the thought of how much electricity the place used. No wonder seafood is so expensive, I thought.

  With the back of my hand, I parted the heavy strips of plastic hanging from the top of an extra-wide door frame and entered the plant. Still-steaming crabs were plunged from stainless steel vats into ice water and dumped onto a drain board lined on either side by women armed with miniature steel mallets and delicate picks resembling dental tools. The women brandished the picking tools with amazing speed and dexterity. Although I saw no headphones, each woman along the table appeared to be working to an individual and personal beat. Half-pint containers that filled quickly with tidbits and shreds from crab bodies were topped with whole clumps from sections of arms and claws placed artistically before covers were snapped and sealed. Clams were shucked and fish were filleted. Packers, sealers, and stackers all performed their parts with the grace of dancers. Hand trucks, pallet jacks, and forklifts transported product to and fro with the comfortable, calculated near-collisions of a synchronized trapeze act.

  Amid the bustle of the plant activity, I became the answer to the question “What’s wrong with this picture?” My mauve-on-plum mosaic blouse tucked into low-waisted s l i p k n o t