Doug Byrne’s store, between Cundy’s Harbor and Five Islands, is a ramshackle Downeast barn. Some years ago, he painted the place white, a failed effort to hide the old green Mail Pouch Tobacco sign on the east side. Flaking red four-foot-high block letters over the door announce, “Hardware,” and three years ago, Doug decided to stencil his name down below, in smaller italics, with “Prop.” for a suffix. The shades of red come close to matching.
Inside, on the left, Doug keeps winch handles, foul weather gear, a couple of hand-held GPS devices, charts, shackles, snaps, and fittings, and various diameters of wire rope and fittings for standing rigging vie for space along with a variety of lines for running rigging. He has the things a desperate sailor might need to make a jury-rig repair and get to a real boatyard, Camden or Portland. The left side is shipshape. There’s a place for everything, and everything is kept in its place.
Farm and garden gear line the right side of the old barn. That display shows a woman’s touch and an artful eye. There’s even a nicely varnished hand scythe.
Most days are pretty quiet, the way Doug likes it. There’s a counter at the back with a blackboard behind it where his wife, Marcy, has made space for a little kitchen. Standing behind the counter, she’ll make the sandwiches she has listed on the board to order, fresh. She cuts them in half, wraps them in white butcher paper, and writes what the sandwich is on the outside with a red marker.
At 10:25 am on a rainy Tuesday morning, Danny Shapiro came in. He had hitchhiked to the store from Cundy’s, on the coast. Danny stood five feet ten and with shoulder-length black hair hanging in greasy strands, he looked like he had trapped a large wet animal between his reversed too-large baseball hat and his pale face. He was skinny, maybe 150 soaking wet, which he was. A too-small yellow slicker covered his faded rock-concert T-shirt from a long-ago Hootie & the Blowfish tour and dripped steadily onto the floor. His jeans were worn, not stylish, just ragged and dirty, and he wore ridiculously expensive Irish deck shoes, with no socks.
He turned his sunken, red-rimmed eyes to the left, the marine side.
#
Years ago, after graduating prep school, Doug signed on as a deckhand for a sailing school on an 88-foot schooner, a dream job. The “students” came from wealthy New York and Boston families who wanted their kids safely out of the city for the summer. Next year, he came back. The rest of the full-time crew included the captain, a marine mechanic, a cook, and two new deckhands.
The other full-timers referred to Doug as the “first mate,’” even though he didn’t have a piece of paper from the Coast Guard. He kept the decks shipshape, lines coiled, fittings polished.
On a Tuesday morning in early August, off Matinicus Island, with the captain at the helm and all hands on deck, they weighed anchor. Doug was on the foredeck with Levi, a skinny new “student” from New York. He tasked Levi with the controller for the power windlass. “Keep it on slow. Don’t move and don’t change anything. I want the chain wound flat on the gypsy.”
With all the anchor rope and twenty feet of chain safely into the locker, the captain eased ahead. Another thirty feet of chain and the heavy plough anchor hung vertical in the water, all the load on the windlass. Ignoring Doug’s instructions, Levi edged toward the bow to watch the chain straighten. His ancient tennis shoes slid like ice skates on the wet varnish. Startled, frightened, and falling, Levi clutched the controller, his thumb firmly on the reverse button. With a rattle that shook the entire hull, the drum broke. The chain flew out of the locker plunging toward the bottom, followed by the wildly whipping anchor rope, and a rag-doll that looked like Levi.
Some of the kids screamed. Others stood in silent shock.
“Doug, put a little slack on the anchor rope,” the captain said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, get on a wet suit quick and a mask. Quick. I’ll fetch a line from the locker.”
“Yes, sir.”
In less than three minutes, Doug returned with his gear.
“Take the bitter end of the line. Go hand-over-hand down the anchor rope and make your free line fast around an arm or a leg. Then come up and breathe. Don’t stay down and screw around. The body’s caught in a loop of the anchor rope. You go down the second time, I’ll slack it off more. Free him up. The body’ll float loose. I’ll bring him up. You come back up the anchor rope. Don’t let go of it and get turned around. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
Fifteen feet down, Levi hung, staring far beyond the empty sea. His hair floated, moving rhythmically up and down as the music in Doug’s brain thundered to a crescendo. Doug threw a clove hitch around Levi’s left arm, surfaced, dived again and freed the boy’s skinny right leg from a loop of anchor rope.
They hauled the body on board over the stern. The captain and the engineer pumped and breathed. Doug looked on, shaking uncontrollably, a combination of cold and sheer terror.
“Five minutes, no response. We should stop,” the engineer said.
“Doug, well done. Proud of you,” the captain said. “I’ll radio the Coast Guard.”
#
The apparition from Doug Byrne’s nightmares, just as he looked dangling fifteen feet down in the Atlantic, dripped his way across the store, looking for...
”Can I help you?” Doug asked. He walked briskly to the heavy cardboard reels of nylon line mounted on the wall, pulled off a ten-foot section of half-inch braided and tossed a simple overhand loop around Danny’s neck.
“What the hell?” Danny said.
“You came after me. I knew you would. I keep dreaming about you, pulling me down. I haven’t sailed again. I never go near the water. But you’ve found me. It’s time to end it.” Doug tightened the noose.
Marcy picked up the heavy knife from the sandwich counter. The two men struggled in a tangle of line. She shouted, “Cut it out! Someone’s gonna get killed here.” She plunged her knife into the confusion. Later, she said she had tried to cut Danny loose.
Marcy was right.
The front door blew open. She watched as Danny, standing in the middle of the road, flagged down the first vehicle he saw. The driver, a bearded Maine farmer of indeterminate age, bounced his rusty Chevy pickup ten miles or so north before he spoke.
“Anything goin’ on at the hardware?” he said.
“The guy tried to kill me. His wife had a knife,” Danny said.
“Eh?”
“I think they’re crazy.”
“Could be. I can let you out right on Highway One. Probably get a ride over to Brunswick pretty quick. Might want to let the cops know.”
#
How long does it take to go mad? Do the termites of crazy quietly chew away at the floor joists of your mind for a decade or two, until the structure of sanity falls in on itself? Or does something—an apparition, maybe—suddenly shatter your carefully constructed reality? Who knows?
Marcy ran the hardware store for a couple more years, while the police tried to reconstruct the story and close the case. Then she moved home, to Rhode Island. The police decided she had never intended to kill Doug. An accidental death, they said. Still, they would have been more comfortable had they found the kid in dirty jeans and a yellow slicker.
Too bad the cops never talked to the housekeeper down to the Comfort Inn in Brunswick. In a room that hadn’t been slept in, she found a pair of fancy Irish boat shoes, wet, barely used. She was going to take them home, then she realized they smelled like something had died and rotted in them and tossed them in the dumpster out back. But then, Danny couldn’t have gotten that far down the coast.