I haven’t been at Piper’s place ten minutes when Hawk bursts in the back door and swoops down to kiss her. He’s skinnier than I pictured, in flip-flops and turquoise swim trunks, and a full red beard that’s like a soft alarm constantly ringing. He brings the barbecue cloud, the tenacious odor of smoked meat and tangy sauce for which only he knows the recipe. I wonder how Piper can stand it. He also brings an honest-to-god parrot, red, yellow and blue, riding shotgun on his left shoulder.
When I rise to shake his hand the parrot takes flight, pounding the air with its wings, its shrieks deafening in the small, cluttered room. Piper and Hawk make loud clicking noises with their tongues until the bird settles on top of the TV, cocks its head and eyes us suspiciously. Every few seconds it flaps its wings as if shaking loose some biting pest.
“She don’t trust you yet,” Hawk says, his version of a greeting I guess. “Sally girl,” he calls, until the parrot flies back across the room and lands on his shoulder. With Sally pecking at his lips, he turns to me and offers his hand.
“Hawk, this is Jonathan, my old college buddy turned public radio hack — and consummate Yankee,” Piper says. “Jon-o, this is Hawk. And that’s Sally the scarlet macaw. My competition.” Sally has stopped pecking on her master to get a bead on me. She cocks her head, and for a second I can see her coming straight for my face, severing my nose with her terrible hooked beak.
“Pleasure,” Hawk says, and he and Sally disappear into the kitchen. I haven’t made it that far, but the cottage is tiny. I can see one wall with a large spice rack, frying pans hanging on nails, a dishtowel slung over the back of a chrome-legged chair. A fridge door opens and closes, and Hawk starts softly whistling some song.
“So that’s him,” I say. Hawk is why I’m here — or maybe I should say he’s my excuse for being here. One of the shows I’m a freelance producer for, the Hitchiker Gourmet, wants to jump on the barbecue trend, and Hawk, barbecue restaurateur and all-around character that he apparently is, is ripe for a story. The fact that he’s Piper’s boyfriend is, well, an exquisite convenience.
“I got to tell you Jono. He’s a little bit wary of this radio shit,” Piper says. She stretches her long legs out on the coffee table, which is really an old steamer trunk with peeling black paint and rusted clasps.
“It’s good press,” I say.
“Regardless. He’ll barely even agree to cater our friends’ parties. He wants to stay small, maintain what he’s got.”
“What do you think about that?”
She gives me a puzzled look. “I want him happy. He’s happy. I’m happy. I suspect neither of us would be equally this goddamn happy if he became, like, some barbecue mogul. Some rest-a-raunt-toor.”
“What happened to your plan to secure a rich patron?” I say. I’m grinning, but it feels all wrong. It was a long time ago, really, that I last teased her like this.
She smirks like she’s about to pelt me with an insult. That would be okay. That would be the Piper I used to know, whom I last saw here, in the Outer Banks. I’d driven down here with her after we graduated from college. We climbed to the top of the highest sand dune on the east coast in ninety-five degree heat. We drank beer all day, ate hush puppies and fried shrimp for dinner every night, compared our swollen guts and did it all over again the next day. But when I left, she stayed on. She’s been down here in Ocracoke, the southern tip of the barrier islands, ever since. She’s still writing — Google told me that much. Her name shows up in a few literary magazines and one bio says she’s working on a collection of pirate stories. From our brief conversation on the phone before I came down, I know that for a paycheck — surely a small one — she’s managing a place called Teach’s Hole Pyrate Museum and Specialty Shoppe. And she’s shacked up with the barbecue man.
None of which makes all that much sense. Even when she left school for a semester and did something in Memphis — we never understood quite what — Piper always seemed destined for New York, or possibly someplace cold and perpetually hip, like Stockholm.
“You look good, Jonathan,” she says, changing the subject. “I expected you to have gotten fat. How’s New York?”
“New York wonders why you’re still here,” I say.
“Well, maybe you’ll solve the mystery.” She raises an eyebrow — for a second there she is, the girl I knew. “I’m gonna go help Hawk out real quick. Make yourself at home.”
Alone in this little room with its mismatched furniture and piles of magazines and general Piperness floating in the air like spores, I remember how she used to make me laugh. And how mean she could be. I remember how, one of our last nights down here, I didn’t want to climb this magnolia tree on private property. We were both drunk, and she taunted me from where she perched in the big, glossy leaves, called me a flat-out pussy. “Jesus hell, Jonathan,” she said, “You don’t really know how to live, do you?” Nobody’d ever said anything like that to me, even her when she’d taunted me so many times before. I thought about walking away then, leaving her up that tree, but that seemed like the biggest pussy behavior of all. So I just sat on the grass. I never did climb — and once I realized she was actually mad, I was glad I hadn’t given in. At least I’d held my ground. Later, she apologized, even put her head in my lap. And I had thought the night could end with us finally fucking — roughly, leaving lots of marks, all that pent-up aggression from before poured into it. But I was wrong. We just walked down the beach and fell in with some guys and a girl who’d built a small fire. They shared their pot and we talked about nothing all night long. The sun rose, a dull burn in pink haze, and we went somewhere and ate pancakes and little link sausages.
Now she hands me a pulled pork sandwich clasped in a paper towel. The thick spicy sauce is already oozing through; the puny, enriched white bun looks more like garnish than something meant to contain the meat. For a second I wonder if this isn’t one of Piper’s jokes — watch the city boy get barbecue all over his designer jeans and Banana button-down. Then she plunks down a roll of paper towels and three plates. Hawk brings in a bowl of homemade slaw, made with red cabbage and mustard. I tell him it looks good, but I’ve always hated coleslaw. For that matter, I’ve never been too keen on barbecue.
Piper puts her feet in Hawk’s lap, sticks a paper towel in the neck of her t-shirt like a bib. Hawk hands saucy morsels of pork to Sally, who’s still riding on his shoulder. Maybe this is how they always eat.
“So with all due respect,” Hawk says to me. I see a fleck of slaw sail out of his mouth. He smiles. “Y’all food writer types don’t usually get good barbecue.”
I shake my head ‘no,’ as in, no, I’m not a food writer. The Hitchiker’s Gourmet is not the only show I work for, after all. But I can’t tell him this with my mouth full of tender, spicy smoked pork. It is good, and I can’t speak.
Piper nudges Hawk’s chest with her foot. “Tell Jonathan about that time you saw Blackbeard’s ghost. You know who Blackbeard is, right Jonathan?” Piper says.
“More or less,” I say, my mouth still full.
“More or less? He was only the freaking fiercest pirate ever. He blockaded Charleston harbor for a week for one chest of syphilis meds. Those pirates had some nasty syphilis. Finally this lieutenant from Virginia kicked his ass right off the coast of this island, but it took like 20 sword wounds and five gunshots. They cut off his head and nailed it to their boat. And they threw his body overboard, and it swam headless around the boat three times. He still haunts this place. Tell him, Hawk.”
Sally the macaw plucks another stringy lock of pork from between Hawk’s fingers. She shrieks, and the sheer force of it makes me bite my tongue. My eyes water. I reach for my beer.
“We’ll get to that later,” Hawk says. “You recording any of this yet?”
* * *
Hawk’s Hog Pit is off Ocracoke’s one main road. It’s a small, round wooden room with a low ceiling and open-air sides, like a wheel that rolled loose from some giant wagon and came to rest in a grove of trees. Out back is the smoker — a tank eight feet wide, three feet across. It’s here that Hawk slow-roasts hunks of pig. He tells me how the key to good barbecue, besides the smoke and sauce, is time. The pigs he uses are heritage breeds, raised on the Carolina mainland. The spices for the sauce are ground with his bare hands against a rock or something, I don’t know, anyway, it probably won’t make it into the story. My editor wants a character-based piece rich in setting, that happens to also be about food, which is what she always wants; there won’t be too much time for details about spices or pig lineage.
“Piper told me you attended culinary school in, um, Charleston, right?” I fumble with my note pad, and it occurs to me that I’m holding the mic out towards him like a peace offering. I can see Piper inside, sidled up at the bar, talking animatedly to one of Hawk’s bus boys. They probably all have crushes on her, too.
“You’re not really that interested in barbecue, are you?” Hawk says. I look up, but the beard complicates matters — I can’t tell if his expression is more amusement or scorn. He can tell I was watching her.
“I’m sorry. I guess I’m a little distracted,” I say. It’s something I’ve learned in my years of reporting stories – just be upfront with your subjects. It’ll work out better in the end. That’s the conventional thinking anyway.
“Piper’s never mentioned you,” he says. He doesn’t sound hostile, just curious as to what part of Piper’s past I walked out of.
“We lost touch,” I say.
Hawk prods a slab with his finger, puts the top down on the smoker. “Look,” he says, “I don’t really care about being on this show.”
“I sort of gathered that,” I say.
“But I agreed to it and I’m happy to oblige. Because you and her’ve got some history. So maybe both of us can pretend to give a shit, right?” He raises an eyebrow. Sally, still riding shotgun, cocks her head and stamps her little claw feet on his shoulder, like she’s marching in place. She’s turned thug, ready to aim for my eye lest I show any more impudence.
I learn how the right ratio of hickory to cherry wood chips is key; how bourbon, off the record, is the secret ingredient; how Hawk came to Ocracoke one summer on a break from cooking school and just never left, same as Piper. I interview locals perched solidly on their barstools, all of whom heap encomiums on Hawk. The thing is, he’s genuinely humble in the face of their praise. It’s hard to dislike him. It’s easier to dislike Sally, who squawks shrilly every so often, as if we might otherwise forget she’s here. She sweeps the room freely, low above our heads like a searchlight. Nobody but me seems to even notice or care. I’ve almost gotten used to it myself when she ambushes from behind and lands on my shoulder. I go reeling into Hawk, sloshing his beer and nearly dropping my recording equipment. Sally holds on tight to my shoulder. Next thing I know, she’s pecking at my lips. She’s surprisingly gentle, just grazes the skin with her beak. I smell fermented seeds and damp feathers.
“Ah, she’s decided you’re alright,” Hawk says. Sally hops from my shoulder to his and I resist the urge to shudder like a dog let loose from a bath. Hawk explains that he rescued her from a very mean man, a thieving fisherman who decamped on the island a few years ago. “She just sorta took to me.”
At the end of the night, while Hawk and a handful of employees close the place up, one friend of Piper’s is left with us, a tall, blond guy named Jim. He has hollow cheeks and his skin’s pretty pale for a local — in fact he’s as pasty as me. When I try to ask him a few questions, he says he doesn’t each much barbecue. Piper mutters, “Correction: doesn’t eat much period.”
Jim either doesn’t hear or doesn’t care. I can feel his leg bouncing under the table, through the pine floor.
“Jim’s our ghost,” Piper says, smirking. Jim nods, almost imperceptibly.
“Jim, I had a dream just a few nights ago that you died at my house,” Piper says. I guess she’s drunk — she has had a beer in hand all night — but it’s hard to say for sure. “I found you dead on the porch, already stiff. And I was like, you can’t die, Jim, you’re already our ghost.”
Jim drains his beer, rises, retrieves a giant mound of keys from a hook on the wall. “See you in hell, Piper,” he says over his shoulder as he slips into the warm night.
Piper belts out a weird stage laugh, almost maniacal. She digs a pouch of tobacco out of her purse, offers to roll me a cigarette, but I shake my head. I quit years ago. She shrugs and says she did, too. “Suit yourself, dear.”
I see now that she’s got tattoos on her wrists—on one, a crude skeleton holding a spear aloft; on the other, just the tip of what looks like that same spear and the heart it’s aiming for — the blood-pumping organ, not the Valentine kind. She runs her tongue across the end of the rolling paper and taps the newly made cigarette on the table.
I like that she calls me dear.
* * *
It’s low tide, that time when the sea abandons its unlucky inhabitants to the air. Wet shanks of sea plants glisten, and crabs scuttle over the packed, blinking sand. Hawk left Sally back at the Pit; he doesn’t like to take her on the beach. He speculates that the water makes her nervous, reminds her of her former life with the mean fisherman.
“Or maybe Blackbeard taunts her,” Piper says. “His ghost’s been spotted walking right along here, you know.”
There’s a small dock about five hundred feet away, with a little restaurant rigged to it. It sags toward the water as if in resigned solidarity, strung halfheartedly with colored lights. Waves shrug onto the beach. It’d be good to see Blackbeard’s ghost right about now; I’d like to be swept up with Piper and Hawk, all three of us in some clutch of fear and wonder. But there’s nothing but a weak fishy wind, starspecks and a lopsided moon, this place tiny and vast all at once. When Piper told me years ago that she wasn’t leaving with me, I knew it was finally time to give up my dream of her and me together. After all, she’d never given me all that much reason to believe in it. Her friendship had been arm’s length; I was her plaything. I couldn’t see it clearly back then, but I can see it now. Everything and nothing has changed. Still, I am fighting the urge to tackle her, reel her in, haul her away from here.
Hawk says, “Mostly people see Blackbeard down near Teach’s Hole, where Piper works. He died there — that’s why it’s called Teach’s Hole; his real name was Edward Teach. They say he was probably from a rich family, ’cuz he knew how to read and write.”
“He only pirated for about two years,” Piper says. “But in that time he got about 700 men to join forces with him. Girl pirates, too. What a fucking life.”
“He shows up now as lights in the water, usually,” Hawk says, “but one time I saw him pretty near where we are right now — with all the scabbards and a big-ass cutlass and pistols and whatnot strapped to his chest, and that big nasty beard all smoking and twisted into braids. He used to stick these cords of hemp rope in the braids and under his hat and light ’em on fire before battles, so he’d look demonic.”
“Did he say anything when you saw him?”
“Nah, he just gave me this sly smile, kinda like the Mona Lisa. Kinda badass. That was about fourth or fifth time I’d seen him. I think he was ready to make friends. The other times he was swimming. Headless.”
Neither he nor Piper show any signs of kidding around. I’d been wishing I’d left the recorder running — like too many times before, I’ve missed some of the best stuff, even if it’s not stuff Hitchiker’s Gourmet would’ve used. Maybe it’s not too late — it’s never too late. I reach into my shorts pocket and turn the recorder on now. The mic is still clipped to my shirt. I’m about to ask Hawk, in my best earnest-yet-obviously-skeptical public radio voice if he’s always believed in ghosts, when he ruffles Piper’s hair, kisses her forehead, and says he’s going back to the Pit to get Sally and take her home. He’ll meet us back at the cottage a little later.
Earlier Piper gave me a black satin eyepatch, like she sells at the gift shop. I put it on now, hoping it’ll make her laugh, but it doesn’t. What I want to say is What is it that drew you to Hawk? Was it Sally? The beard? I mean, is it like, the whole crazy pirate shtick?” But I can’t say that. I ask her to tell me more about Hawk and his barbecue.
“His great-granddaddy knew barbecue,” she says. “He’s got the stuff in his blood. He works hard. He could turn the Hog Pit into a big goddamn franchise if he wanted, but he won’t. That’s not him.”
“And what about you and him?” I say. It just slips out.
She half-shrugs and gives me a knowing smile. “He’s a great guy. He makes me laugh and we don’t rub each other wrong. Oh, and? I like the way his beard feels when he goes down on me.”
“Is that on the record?” I unclip the mic and push it closer to her. “What are those tattoos on your arms all about, Piper?”
“It’s Blackbeard’s flag,” she says. “Let’s walk.” Then she’s loping away, and I have no choice but to follow. We make our way down the beach in silence for a while, and then she says, “You know, the ocean’s eating this place up. Nibbles a little bit more away every year.”
“Why live in a place like that?” I say. I want this question to float on a black backdrop, but it’s surrounded by the rubbery crunch of sand under our feet, those shushing waves.
She stops short. “Hmm. I guess you could say I stay in the Outer Banks because they’re washing away and I’m, like, drawn to some tragic metaphor for life. How’s that?”
About half a mile away there appears to be a fire pit. We can hear shouts and laughter. Teenagers and bourbon, pot and Coors Light. “C’mon,” I say, hooking my arm in hers, “let’s go crash the beach fire.” She says nothing, and we walk, staying on the hard pack a few feet up from water’s edge. It’s hard to estimate how far away the fire really is, but already I can hear laughter. I picture the scene: a few couples, maybe a single guy who’s drunker than the rest and bumbling, but tolerated because he pays for most of the beer or brings the drugs. Cans in cozies and a boombox tuned to one of the several classic rock stations they get down here. Piper will say something funny and disarming to them; I’ll get it all on tape. I imagine editing it into a little postcard piece with ambient sound from around Ocracoke, and sending it to Piper on her birthday. She’d be surprised that I even knew her birthday.
It occurs to me that we’ve been walking like this — arm in arm — long enough for it to grow awkward, but it has not. Both of us carry our shoes dangling off our free hands. It’s both satisfying and sad to think that anyone who saw us would think we’re a couple.
Then suddenly she says, “Wait. I’ve got a better idea,” and pulls me up the beach to a boardwalk marked PRIVATE. It goes to one of the giant new beach houses that are replacing all the creaky gray, wind-and-water-warped cottages like the one Piper bought for a song a few years ago. We’re going up the stairs to the back deck, to the back door, and she’s digging a key and a folded scrap of paper out of her jeans pocket.
The house is dark, like most of the others that stretch down the beach for miles in either direction. “Wait a second. Who lives here?” I ask.
“Nobody. They come and they go.” By now she’s got the door open and we’re hit with air that smells new and recently scrubbed. Piper unfolds the paper and jabs a sequence of numbers written on it into a panel on the wall.
“But we’re trespassing,” I say.
“For Christ’s sake, Jonathan. Don’t you ever go where you’re not supposed to?”
“I came down here.”
She flicks panels of multiple switches, brightening every corner. The house is spotless and well-appointed in a beachy way. There are the expected watercolors of seashells, the shell collections in glass cabinets, a white sectional sofa. We drop our shoes at the door, and Piper disappears around the corner. I hear her in a nearby room; she’s singing something kind of mournful, the words are a slur. Then she stops, and there’s a heavy clunk, like a bust being knocked off a pedestal, or a head off a body.
I haven’t moved from my spot in front of the family room picture window when she drifts up behind me some small eternity later. I’m scanning the darkness for the prying beam of a flashlight, or maybe the glint of reflectors on a cop’s windbreaker. It’s hard not to see myself and Piper in reflection, though. My hair’s puffy and my glasses look too big for my face. Piper is just a bit taller than me, and though I haven’t noticed it much during the visit, seeing her now standing just behind me, her short floppy blond hair hanging in her face very boy-like, I am reminded of how uncomfortable even this little bit of height had made me when we first became friends — maybe because she was already so boyish, so lean and angular.
“You know what I want, Jon-o? I want a fucking category five to flatten these houses. They’re stealing the island from us. I want all of them gone.”
“What were you doing?” I say. “What was that noise?”
“Let’s go upstairs.” Her mouth is next to my ear; I smell the tobacco on her breath. I feel a sudden urge to grab her wrists, wrestle her onto the couch, but I would want things to turn tender– and they wouldn’t . I even wonder if she’d laugh — I can see myself looming over her, breathing hard, and her bursting into that same maniacal stage laugh from earlier, her spit-spray on my face.
She kneads my shoulders with her long, bony hands. “I’m going upstairs now. I think you should come with me.”
The second floor is lightless and stuffy as a closet, its hardwood floors slick as water under my bare feet. I can make out doors on either side of the long hallway, the dull glint of knobs. Piper brushes one wall with her hand, then the other. “Shit, where’s the light switch?” she says. “It should be right here.”
I run my fingers over the walls just as she did, stupidly –there’s nothing there. And for a moment we just stand there in the dark, inches from each other, and I think of that silly kids’ kissing game, Two Minutes in the Closet — which makes me remember the one time I did kiss Piper, during a rowdy game of spin the bottle sophomore year. I’d forgotten about that kiss. And as I’m struggling to remember it now in full, I hear Piper breathe in sharply. She steps backward abruptly, knocking into me. I turn, and see what she’s seen: a line of light has appeared at the bottom of the door at the end of the hall. The knob turns, the door slowly eases open with a high, thin squeak.
Piper grabs my arm and squeezes hard. “Oh god Jonathan, what the fuck…?”
It takes me only seconds to recalculate the data here, to see things for what they are. But even though I figure everything out pretty damn fast, before or at least just as she starts to laugh — a restrained, snorting kind of laugh that accompanies ridicule set free — I have already moved faster — I have yanked her halfway down the staircase, stumbling as my bare feet slide against the hardwood, reaching out wildly to recover my balance.
She is doubled over and laughing now, on the stairs at my feet. Above us, from down the dark hall, I hear a voice call out: Yo ho ho. . Arr, tha hearty lass be a scallywag, ain’t she? Caught ye lily-livered, me hearty! Which sets Piper off in fresh hysterics. Her face is crimson with the force of her giggles.
I look up and see Jim from the Hog Pit at the top of the stairs. The ghost. Of course. He’s laughing too, but when I look him in the eye he tries to adjust his face. He tries to look apologetic but Piper’s giggles are keeping his mouth from behaving, so he just looks squirmy.
I march back up the stairs, push past him into the lit room, a kid’s room, with bunk beds and a pirate’s chest toy box and a big, shell-shaped coin bank on the floor. I shake it. Empty. I bring it out onto the landing with me. Jim has joined Piper on the stairs, the two of them huddled and skinny, looking up at me both dolefully and quizzically. I’d vaguely wanted to throw the shell bank, but now, standing at the top of the stairs with them watching me, I feel like a child clutching his favorite toy. I drop the bank and it thuds dissatisfyingly on the floor.
“Oh god, Jonathan, I’m sorry,” Piper says. “We just — see, Jim cleans these houses between rentals. He has the keys and codes. One night we thought up this great prank — but there was no one to play it on. Until…you.”
“Don’t look at me, man. It was all her idea,” says Jim.
I brush past, out the front door and on to the porch. It grows quiet in the house behind me. It’s a clear night, and even though this house is on the main road, which is lit, you can see the stars plainly. For some reason I think of Hawk. I bet he knows the constellations, I bet he and Piper have sat on the beach together and mapped them. My coming here was foolish. There is no room for me under these stars, on these beaches. The story, when I finish editing and am rid of it finally, will be heard by a few hundred listeners, maybe, and forgotten.
And then I realize I have to go inside and retrieve my shoes: I left them by the back door.
Hawk is standing there in the kitchen with Sally perched on his arm, and I flinch when he speaks.
“Where’d you come from?” I say. “You’re in on this too. Great.”
“I tried to talk her out of it, but Piper gets ideas in her head,” he says, looking sheepish. “I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t really think you’d fall for it — not like that,” Piper says, coming up beside me. She puts her hand on my arm. “Oh, Jonathan.” And then she starts laughing all over again.
Apparently it upsets Sally when I fling loose from her grip. The bird bolts up, lands on a ceiling fan blade and dives back down again, her wings fanned out. She screeches ceaselessly, a glass-shattering, bone-splitting noise that is far from the happy, gurgly one she made back at the Hog Pit.
I’m oddly calm when she lands on my shoulder for the second time tonight. I wait for the gouging beak in my scalp or the ripping of an earlobe. Better not to fight, I think; better to play dead. Then she’ll fly away. She’s making a strange noise in her craw, less a screech than a squirlish chitter, like she’s intoning some sort of bird spell. Behind us Hawk is doing that clicking thing with his tongue, and Piper has finally shut up. Sally’s stamping her feet again, and I stand there between the floodlit, raised first floor of the summer rental and the warm salty dark, waiting for her to leave me. But she doesn’t return to him. So we make our way back from where we came, Sally and I, back down to the beach.
* * *
Infinite FiveChapters continues tomorrow with “Beast” by Peyton Marshall.
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