On the Night Border

A Song Left Behind in the Aztakea Hills-1

A Song Left Behind in the Aztakea Hills

I slid the clipping of his obituary into the same crinkled manila envelope that held the handwritten pages he’d pushed through my mail slot the night before he ditched Knicksport and never came back. He had left town in ’64, only five years ago, and I’d always expected to see Jack Kerouac again.

His death from bleeding and booze filled me with a peculiar blend of relief and sadness over open questions whose answers I’d feared to know and now had died with him. All this only two weeks after Gregory dumped me, and that weird grief of losing someone unseen, unheard, unknown for years entwined with my heartbroken loneliness, two venomous snakes nested inside me.

Days passed with the distraction of work. On my easel sat a landscape in progress — the Martinson estate’s eroding cliffs prodding into Cow Harbor, commissioned by Saul Norris for the bank lobby — but my brush faltered upon those dark feelings of isolation and rejection. My hands wandered with my mind. Unwanted textures crept onto my canvas, lending unnatural life to sand, waves, sky, clouds, trees, and rocks as if weaves of ropy fibers writhed beneath the surface of everything. Voids in the composition reflected the absence in my apartment. Several times a day I glanced for Gregory’s lanky silhouette as he brought me coffee only to find myself staring at paint stains on sunlit floorboards. The freshly vacated slot in my toothbrush holder gaped like a hole I could fall through forever. I let my beard grow because the idea of shaving with our shared straight razor, left behind in the medicine cabinet, set my hand trembling, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to buy another.

I could’ve followed Gregory back to the city if he’d wanted that, but I didn’t know if he did. Nor did I know what else I could give him if all I had to offer had left him unfulfilled and restless. I’d left Knicksport at age eighteen and stayed away for two decades, but it was my home. My family built the building I lived in before World War I, and I knew the town’s streets, beaches, and secrets with the intimacy of childhood. By leaving, Gregory had rejected the core of me as if what he saw deep inside there repulsed him.

More than painting, drinking numbed my pain. I needed little persuasion to set down my brush, turn a blind eye to Saul’s deadline, and take a break across the street at Raker’s.

Once in a while, devotees of Jack rolled into town, mostly young, naïve, hopeful souls. The poets, the artists, and the songwriters, seeking to walk the same streets the King of the Beats had and breathe the same air as if they might inhale lingering particles of his greatness. Some of those folks knew by word of mouth that if they asked right and tipped well on nights when wind howled down Main Street and the stars wavered oddly in the sky, Spence at Raker’s might talk about the years Jack spent with us. And if Spence sensed a soft touch with a fat, loose wallet, he might even call me down to tell the story of the night Jack, me, and three would-be rock n’ roll stars hiked into the Aztakea hills south of town—which is how I came to meet the mathematician one evening in early November.

I strolled into Spence’s place, my fingers still gloved in the scent of turpentine and oil paint despite my having scrubbed them raw-pink. Stepping from a clear, starry autumn sky and dry air into a fog of tobacco smoke, hazy light, and the miasma of saltwater, sweat, and spilled booze felt like crossing between two worlds. Spence fixed me a gin and tonic with a bright wedge of lime smiling on top and gave me a warm nod. Most folks in town thought I’d lost a roommate when Gregory moved out—or at least they stuck to that idea as a discreet and convenient fiction. But Spence knew Gregory had dumped me hard and had lent me an ear and a shoulder and dragged me home safe when I drank far too much my first night alone.

Across the bar sat a man in his late forties, a sandy crewcut, tortoise shell glasses, short-sleeved, plaid dress shirt, and a sheepskin jacket draped over his stool. Spence poured bourbon into his glass, which the man clutched protectively. Nervous eyes stared out from his soft face into the murk of the bar as if he expected the rowdy locals to sense his weakness like wild dogs and pick a fight. Not that any would. Spence enforced a strict policy of peace backed by a well-worn Louisville Slugger kept near the bar sink. Outside Raker’s, though, the bay men — clammers, lobstermen, fishermen with sunbaked and wind-dried skin, perpetual squints, and calloused hands bulging with swollen knuckles — showed little patience for anyone different than them. They spent too much time alone on the Long Island Sound, dropping traps and pulling them up again, watching whitecaps rise and roll over, listening to the wind whine, gulls caw, and the sea whisper of things long swept away by its currents.

Being alone too much changes how you think. Rarely for the better.

Pool balls click-clacked under the rambling beat of Creedence Clearwater Revival on the jukebox, “Green River” giving way to “Suzie Q,” and I drank and smoked and eyed the man for as long as it took to finish both. Spence replenished my gin and tonic, and I carried it over beside the mathematician and eased onto an empty bar stool beside him.

“Thanks for the drinks,” I said.

He glanced at me, eyebrows raised. “What?”

“Spence has been putting my drinks on your tab.”

“Oh, you the guy who knew Kerouac?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’ve been sitting right over there for half an hour, keeping me waiting.”

“I finally decided you looked harmless.”

He processed that with a frown then shrugged.

“My name’s Fenton Grive. My field’s mathematics. My condolences on your friend’s passing.”

“Thank you. I’m Salvatore Cinelli. Spot me a ciggie-boo, wouldya?”

The mathematician slid a Marlboro pack from his pocket and shook one loose for me. In the match light, his face boiled with confidence born of something outside himself. He resembled a trusted clerk on an important business trip, a scent of chalk and after-shave hanging about him, but he made me anxious. Epiphanies and lies stirred behind his face and a faint sense of menace, not from him, but from what he represented, though I didn’t know yet what that was.

“I guess it’s smart to be cautious. You get a lot of people asking about him?”

“Used to back when Jack lived down on Judy Ann Court. They came banging on his door at all hours, swiping books off his shelves if he let them in. Not too many these days. Life goes on, you know?”

“Time stops for no man as the saying goes. I hear you’re an artist.”

“That’s right. A painter.”

“Yeah, nice. Um, listen, I’m no good at small talk so I’ll cut to the chase. I’m moving into the Martinson place after the New Year while I do a fellowship over at Brookhaven National Labs. After that Kerouac fellow died, some folks at the lab and a few I’ve met in town said you might know something about him of interest to me. Professionally, I mean. An incident in the Aztakea Hills back in spring of ’64?”

“Can’t imagine what that has to do with mathematics.”

“Maybe nothing. Could be I’m wasting my time here. I can’t tell you much because most of my work is classified, but you ever heard of Walter Gilman or the Keziah Mason formulae?”

I shook my head.

“Not many people have. Among other things, I research sound. Frequency, modulation, pitch. There’s a lot of common ground between math and music. These KM formulae date back to the late 17th century and Keziah Mason, a character who lived up in Arkham, Massachusetts. Authorities threw her in prison for witchcraft but she vanished inexplicably from her cell into the shadows of history until around 1929. That’s when a student named Walter Gilman found some of her notes in a loft he rented in an old house. Turns out what passed for witchcraft in Keziah’s day may have been advanced mathematics. Pan-dimensional physics and space-time distortion, stuff scientists only started researching after Einstein. There’s the outer dimensions, the multi-planar angle paradox, honeycombs of non-Euclidian geometry, and the — ”

I held up my hand. “Fenton, I have no idea what the hell you’re jawing on about.”

His face blanked then blushed before he re-engaged with humility.

“Sorry. I get carried away. Bottom line, an acquaintance of mine acquired Gilman’s notebook. This man goes by the name Redcap. Lives in the West Village and plays at magic and witchery, mostly I think to get laid, though some folks believe in him. Anyway, he collects occult artifacts. He gave me Gilman’s notebook to research, thinking the KM formulae equations might be replicated in properly composed and modulated sounds. If performed at certain key dates that coincide with planetary orbits and gravitational matrices, such sounds might open the way into non-linear realities outside — ”

I gripped his forearm and squeezed. “The bottom line again, Fenton.”

The mathematician tugged his arm away from my hand. “I want to know about the band you and Kerouac met, the Sultans. I think they know something about this music.”

“Fenton, my new friend, I’ve been asked some wild questions, about Jack, this town, and art, and life in general, but no one has ever hit me with the kind of mad ideas you’re spinning. How many bourbons did you drink before I got here?”

Spence, pretending to clean glasses, kept close enough to eavesdrop, which I appreciated. That man had seen all of Knicksport’s ugliness in one form or another, and he looked out for his friends. I finished my gin and tonic and let him replenish it.

“This is only my second.” Fenton pressed ahead as if he might agree with me if he took time to think about his words. “What can you tell me about the Sultans?”

“Not much. They came from Rhode Island. They absolutely abused denim and paisley.”

“They disappeared, right?”

“So people say. They dreamed of being rock n’ roll stars like the Byrds or the Stones. They sure smoked grass and drank booze like it. Anything might’ve happened to them.”

“What’d you do that night up in the hills?”

“A little stargazing, some drinking. Jack and the Sultans got high, played music, sang.”

“What kind of music?”

“Psychedelic folk rock, I guess you could call it. One had a guitar. Another played the flute. The third one strummed an instrument I’d never seen before, a sort of short sitar with these asymmetrical branches and complicated strings. A lot of buzzing, popping chords. Sounded like someone shaking a wasps’ nest. Not my cup of tea. Or Jack’s. He liked jazz.”

“You hear anything else up there?”

“Wind creaking the trees when they stopped playing.”

Fenton frowned. “Rumor is your friend and those rock and rollers heard something else. Maybe you did too?”

“Jack said he heard something wild in their music. He called it a turbulent bubble of sound like the world breathing across the top of a million open beer bottles, but he was high and even drunker than usual, which is saying something. Anyway, I didn’t hear it. We got split up coming back. I didn’t find him till morning. Neither of us ever saw the Sultans again.”

“He ever say what happened to him after you got separated?”

Pages cocooned in an old envelope. Ink decaying, black to blue to gray. Gaping holes in my memory, the whole world breathing across a million open bottles, and Knicksport is full of witches, Jack told me once in a late-night, inebriated confession. Full of witches, full of secrets, all hiding behind shadows and false faces—full of monsters, too, like me. Too ugly for Gregory. Too grotesque for the world. Too disappointing for the family I’d left and returned to only after they’d all died. Knicksport is full of witches, said Jack, but to me it swelled with the angry ghosts and weeping wounds of the past.