Blue Dog Mobile on Angusport Hill

Large hands trembling, Jack Burton Doyle, 43, opened his trip log, balanced it carefully on his lap, wrote in pencil:

15 September, Angusport, Nova Scotia--seacoast fishing village--R.V. parked with full hookup top of steep "Angusport Hill." Weather: clear, crisp. Five minutes ago, 1:40 P.M., heard (or damn well thought I heard) female mayday over C.B. radio, channel 11. Responded repeatedly, but no further transmission. Had definite sense someone was monitoring but could not raise him. Maybe did not want to get involved. Her call specifically as I read it: "Help, help me, please help...." Voice definitely young. Excellent 5 x 5 copy, no static (Angusport Base?). Background engine noise could have been local trawler; but most of those people talk some kind of Canuck French. Festival week here. Carnivals, parades, replica schooner due to arrive soon. Possibilities (1) somebody's prank; (2) my imagination, fantasy, whiskey dream; or (3) legitimate mayday, someone in trouble.

He paused, touched the tip of his pencil to his tongue, added:

So what does Doyle do now???

For openers, he poured himself a drink.

• • •

He had read in his tour guide that in 1815, one of the inland valleys of Nova Scotia had suffered an unprecedented invasion of mice. The mice had arrived without warning in early May and had by September laid such waste to the local crops that a near famine ensued. Doyle's own plagues had arrived the same way, without warning and in the spring. He had summed it all up one bleary night in the R.V. (Beacon Hill, Boston?--he liked hills) by printing in his trip log:

Dropped by Employer, Deserted by Daughter, Divorced by Wife.

signed D for Dismal Doyle

With his share of the money from the house sale he had bought the motor home, secondhand, from a retired U.S.A.F. pilot in Warrenville. A deluxe rig, 26 feet long, 8 feet wide, 11-1/2 feet high, it featured a twin-bunk bedroom aft, toilet with tub and shower midships, combination kitchen-dinette forward. A propane refrigerator and stove, two television sets, heat, air conditioning and stereo throughout completed the appointments. He had stocked its numerous cabinets with the best of what Jen had left him, his half of their linens, flatware, silver service; had laid in a store of good whiskey and wine....

"What are you going to do in that thing?" Mark Tolliver had wanted to know. "Besides visit old friends, I mean."

"Screw my brains out," replied Doyle, whose plan had been exactly that: a way of getting even, he supposed. Tolliver had looked on wistfully when Doyle rolled out of Pittsburgh. (Did he know Jen had been sleeping all those years with Russell Bird? Everyone else seemed to know. Everyone except Doyle.)

Other old friends looked on wistfully, too, in Wilkes-Barre, Paterson, Pittsfield, Boston.... Their wives, most of whom Doyle had never met, uniformly treated him as though he might be contagious. He discovered the phenomenon that in the homes of the married, unattached women are seldom seen. The girl hitchhikers he picked up usually traveled in pairs. Scruffy teenagers in Levis and denim (ah, Sarah! Only child of my flesh!), they would usually sit on the dinette lounge nearest the R.V. door and would, as he drove them to their uncertain destinations, answer his questions warily.

Except for an old hooker in Hackensack, he had managed to score exactly nothing in six weeks on the road. He ached for a woman, someone to sleep with, talk with, react to. Married 20 years, he had gotten used to that kind of company, had, he realized too late, come to take it for granted.

The citizen's-band radio helped. Out of his loneliness, he monitored it continuously.

• • •

He sat now in the high-backed swivel seat behind the wheel of the R.V., sipping whiskey from a china cup, listening attentively to the hum and buzz of his C.B. receiver. He was a big, still-solid man of expanding girth. For three years out of college he had been a defensive lineman with the Steelers (they had named him Blue Dog for his persistence on the field). He had had one fair season before he ripped up a heel cord and had to retire. The scent of a locker room could still make him giddy. He jogged when he could, lifted weights. Usually a careful, even fussy dresser, he had, since leaving Pittsburgh, taken to wearing sweat shirts, Levis, boots, an orange serape in place of a sports coat. Already these things had begun to seem familiar, as had the lengthening of his reddish-brown hair.

You'd like me better now, he thought, not sure whether he meant Sarah or Jen.

Through the rear windows of his vehicle he could see the outfits of the campers: cabovers and pop-up trailers, mostly; one big Airstream parked obliquely across the lot. Unable to sleep well for weeks, he had been dozing fitfully in the early afternoon when her voice had come to him: "Help, help me, please help...." That was all. Stunned with whiskey and fatigue, he had grabbed his mike and responded:

"This is Blue Dog on Angusport Hill. I copy your mayday. Come back."

The receiver buzzed, clicked; for a moment, he was sure someone was on channel, listening to him but not replying.

"Repeat, repeat," he called. "This is Blue Dog mobile on Angusport Hill. I've got a good copy on your mayday. Give me a call."

But she had not given him a call. Nor had anyone else.

He was parked facing east at the edge of the lot where the 1000-foot hill began its steep slope to the sea. Through the canted, buslike windshields of the R.V. he could see the parti-colored roofs of early-century homes, many of them newly and brightly painted, dropping in tiers of narrow, leafy streets to the wharves, where trawlers were moored. A stiff breeze was coming up onshore. Doyle watched it unfurl the campground flag, point it his way. Fifteen minutes had passed since the call for help had startled him out of his half sleep.

I heard it, he thought. I didn't make it up.

It was, he decided finally, an incident he should report.

• • •

The Angusport police station was located next to the brassworks on Q, a street that paralleled the waterfront. He arrived there shortly after two P.M., having jogged belatedly down the hill, his serape an orange cape tugging at his throat. The station anteroom was jammed: native Nova Scotians, U. S. tourists; all apparently in for the festival. Through air blue with cigarette smoke and a cacophony of dialect, Doyle shoved his way to the front desk as politely as he could.

"I've picked up a mayday on a mobile C.B. receiver," he said. "Who should I talk to?"

The desk sergeant led him to a small office away from the anteroom. The captain in charge, a slender French Canadian in powder blue, listened while Doyle, poised at the edge of a chair, heart beating now with a sense of mission, quickly related his story.

"You heard this call a half hour ago?" the captain queried.

"About that," Doyle admitted. "I probably should have gotten to you sooner, but I kept thinking she might come back, or we'd get a breaker...."

"Just the one transmission?"

"Right."

"On channel eleven?"

"Right. She sounded as if she'd managed to get to the mike just long enough to transmit that message: 'Help, help me,' and so on. Then it was as if somebody yanked her away, cut her off."

The captain nodded. "Of course, you know channel nine is the emergency channel."

"Sure, right. That's why I think she could be being held against her will. I know it sounds dramatic, but she might not have had time to get on nine, see what I mean? Maybe this guy was monitoring eleven and left it on--"

"This 'guy,' you say?"

Doyle shrugged.

"She sounded young," he said. "I've got a sixteen-year-old daughter and this one sounded about that age to me. She could have been hitchhiking and some guy with a problem, well, you know, could have snatched her. Believe me, it happens."

The captain smiled. Oh, boy, Doyle thought. Suddenly, he felt weak. Sarah had left in the middle of the night, had written him one letter since. She did not intend, she said, to choose between her mother and him. The postmark had been somewhere in Oregon. No return or forwarding address. Your fault, Jen had said. No. Yours.

"Did anyone confirm this transmission?"

"No. I think somebody else might have been monitoring--just a feeling I had--but nobody came up."

"Not much to go on, is it?"

"Well, to begin with, it was a good strong transmission with some kind of engine noise behind it, high-pitched, up and down--"

"Fishing trawler?"

"I don't know; I don't think so. I've copied them before. This sounded different."

The captain touched the tips of his fingers together, gazed through the spotless lights of his office window. The (continued on page 122)Blue Dog Mobile(continued from page 80) window faced Q Street. People were hurrying by, some in costume. Doyle heard a plodding clop of hooves, a squeak of wheel; impatiently, he watched an oxcart pass.

"Fisheries Festival week," the captain sighed. "We have a schooner due in the harbor soon, a parade that will take two miles to line up, a carnival, an exhibition ... I suppose we'll have answered a thousand questions this afternoon."

Doyle stood up, legs wobbling under him.

"Look, Captain," he said. "I'm not a kook or anything. I'm on a little vacation now, but I've got good credentials back in the States." Incredibly, he discovered that he was about to weep, blew his nose brusquely into a red bandanna. "That girl is in trouble," he croaked. "I know damn well she is. And I'll bet she's not five miles from here. You could run a check on your local bases. If somebody else was monitoring and picked up that call, maybe they'll confirm for you, even though they wouldn't for me."

"I'm afraid that wouldn't be practical," the captain explained, helping Doyle to the door. "We have over two hundred of those sets in the vicinity of Angusport. Most of them are operated legally and with a good deal of sense. Understandably, every now and then we do get a joker, someone with a few drinks, fooling around, especially at a time like this. Unless you hear something else, I wouldn't worry."

The bedlam had increased in the anteroom. Doyle blinked as he faced it.

"I don't think she was fooling around," he said. "I think she was earnest as hell."

• • •

Under a royal sky and yellow flare of sun, the street crowd jostled Doyle, pulled him along toward the waterfront. One little girl gave him a balloon, which her mother asked him to return. Pamphlets, fliers, programs of the day's events were thrust his way; a swarthy man in buckskins smelling of whiskey gave him a free ticket to the carny burlesque. Oh, Christ, Doyle thought. He wanted a drink; his hand shook. The anger he felt for having been written off by the police was only partially relieved by his awareness that had he been in their place, he probably would have done the same.

And if there was a girl and she was in trouble? He was trying to imagine her, trying to complete the image her voice had begun, when two men pressed behind him.

"We've got to do something about the bagpipers," one said.

"Where are they now?" the other replied.

"All the way at the end of the line. They're furious. They say they won't march."

"They've got to march. Put them in back of the horses."

"Lucien, the horses'll go apeshit!"

"Put them in front of the sonar float, then! We move out in half an hour!"

Doyle pressed his hand to his temple, stepped away from the crowd onto an abandoned pier. Clumps of green grass sprouted between its sun-bleached timber planks. At pier's end, he knelt and, clutching a piling with one hand, keeping his serape clear with the other, he vomited a half pint of bile into the suck and heave of the harbor sea. For 17 years with Pittsburgh Forge, a token vice-president in the public-relations department, he had never missed a day's work. When they let him go, after the merger, his friend Tolliver had wanted to quit in protest. "Forget it," Doyle said. He knew they had hired him only because he had played for the Steelers.

To prove his worth, to prove that they had made no mistake in taking him on, he had driven himself, had found things to do. The lower-echelon staff liked him, the secretaries and clerks. Whenever they were overburdened, as they often were, he would help them catch up during the early evenings and on weekends, rolling up his sleeves, stabbing at the keys of an old Hermes standard with his thick, broken-knuckled fingers.

"The old man wants to know what you're doing," Tolliver would whisper on his way out.

"Just giving the girls a hand," Doyle would reply.

"What about Jen?"

"I called. She's fine. She's got something on at the symphony."

In truth, he had wanted Jen to believe that his job was important, that it kept him tied up, that he was involved in the significant affairs of the company. She had always been ambitious for him, and at some point--he was not sure exactly when--he came to realize that her ambitions outran his own.

"Jack," she would say, peering over the top of her fashionable glasses, "you can't tell me you like that job."

"I like it fine," he would say. "I'm probably goddamn lucky to have it." And he would get up and fine-tune the TV.

Now, as the heralded schooner arrived, its great sails reefed, its shrouds bedecked with pennants, the town welcomed it with such a cacophony of siren and horn he thought his brain would explode. Small shops lined the waterfront. From the roof of Lucille's Mermaid II an antenna jutted.

"About one-thirty," he said, ordering a second double whiskey to go with the beer he had been nursing. "With that setup of yours, she should have blown the windows out of this place."

"Well, she didn't," Lucille said. Plump, sullen, her gray hair ludicrously bobbed, Doyle had already persuaded himself that she knew more than she was telling. The Mermaid II was waxy and dark. He sat alone at the bar, the only other customers three men in wool sweaters and watch caps who sat at a table behind him. They had not returned his greeting when he had come in. Next to the cash register, a C.B. radio hummed conspicuously. Illuminated by its channel selector, the number 11 gleamed, a small jewel.

"I told your police," he said testily. "They're not going to do anything about it unless somebody confirms."

Lucille lit a cigarette.

"I'm in the back sometimes," she said, exhaling a jet of smoke. "I don't hear everything."

"Where's the back? "

She looked at him.

"Where's the back?" he repeated, aware too late that the whiskey had reached him, that he should have eaten something first. "Goddamn it, lady, there's a girl in trouble in this town, fucked up somewhere, and I can't...." When he heard the sharp squeak of chairs behind him, he felt a moment of joy, as if in that instant he had been transported back to his college days, when things had been simple and clear-cut and he had been a good man in a brawl.

"Screw off," he heard. "Go back to the States."

They had him by the serape, were pulling him off the stool. "Bash him," Lucille said. Fists thudded against him. Lowering his head, he swung methodically, connected with nothing. The men closed in. He could hear them grunt as they delivered their blows, but he felt no pain. Furniture toppled, tables and chairs. Three against one, he thought. Look at this. I'm still on my feet. When at last his arms were pinned, his face jammed against the rough beery wool of a sweater, he gave it up and let them catapult him through a rectangle of blinding light. He was still sitting sprawled on the walk outside when a Cockney sailor who had been passing paused to look down. He was older than Doyle by at least a decade, with gray curly hair and a face like the back of a wagon.

"You all right, mate?"

"What's it to you?" Doyle grumped.

The sailor thumbed his nose, told Doyle not to get his knickers in a twist. Doyle pointed at the now-closed tavern door.

"She lied," he said.

"She did, did she?"

"Yep."

"That old scrubber runs this place, you mean?"

"Yep. Right through her teeth." Doyle (continued on page 199)Blue Dog Mobile(continued from page 122) stood unsteadily, dabbed at a bleeding cheek with his bandanna. The old sailor shoved out a hand.

"Rodney," he said.

"Jack Doyle." Doyle replied. "Pisses me off."

"Her, you mean?"

"Yep."

"Well, pull your finger out, lad. Go on back in and tell her to get stuffed."

"I've got a mind to," Doyle said.

"You'll catch the parade," Rodney said as he walked away, hands in the pockets of his coat, a rolling gait, "if you hurry it up."

Doyle sighed. In the distance, somewhere above him on the shining hill, he heard the blat of a tuba, thump of a bass drum. Russell Bird, his pip-squeak neighbor, he recalled, had played the flute for the Pittsburgh Symphony. Was that what Jen had seen in him? For three and a half years, right under his nose, while he, Doyle, except for a hooker now and then, had turned down every chance he'd had? He went up the hill as the parade came down with its whistles and bagpipes and marching bands.

She would be a pretty girl, he decided. Small, pert-nippled breasts, nicely rounded butt, sweet little powder puff of a bush. Strapped to a long wooden table, perhaps. Legs spread on either side of a whizzing blade. One single, harsh, unyielding light. Evil men gathered around.

• • •

He dozed in the R.V. until dusk, then broiled two steaks, ate them by candlelight, drank a bottle of Burgundy, Nuits-Saint-Georges. There was traffic on the C.B. receiver now, mobile units returning to base, trawlers returning to port. Much of the dialog was in French. When there were transmissions in English, he was too embarrassed to break in. What, after all, would he say? "Break, break, this is Blue Dog on Angusport Hill. Six hours ago, I heard a girl call for help." Maybe it had only been his own call for help, disguised and projected somehow through his set.

Jen had been a childhood sweetheart. In spite of his size, she had called him a pussycat. He had known her since seventh grade. They had gotten along fine--at least he remembered their getting along fine--until sometime after he left the Steelers. She had loved being associated with the team, had never missed a game. Whenever he played especially well, as he sometimes did, she got him into bed and worked him over until, by comparison, a game with the Packers would have been a relief.

"God, Jen!" he would croak.

"Damn it, I love you!" she would cry. "You're mine!"

They had things in common. They read books. He liked Fleming, MacLean, Dickey's Deliverance. She liked Updike, Roth, Bellow's Herzog. They listened to music through stereo headphones: he to popular, she to classical. She had never liked his job at the forge, had told him it paid too little, demanded too much. She thought he could do better, expected him to. He wanted more children, and they tried to have more, but she kept miscarrying, one after another. During moments of stress, he had tended to blame her for that.

"I just got bored," she explained at the end. He thought she seemed edgy. "I don't know just why, Jack. You were busy a lot. I just got so I didn't care anymore."

Sitting at the dinette, he emptied his pockets of the numerous pamphlets and fliers he had received during the afternoon, read from one an account of the brigantine Baltimore, which had, in December 1735, been discovered adrift in a nearby harbor, decks and cabins awash with blood. A lone survivor, Susanah Buckler, told authorities the ship had been attacked by savages.

"Damn right," Doyle said. "These things happen."

When he found his ticket to the carnival burlesque, he held it to the light. Admit One Free to Bigfellow's Hiawatha, it read. world Famous Dance of the Totem Pole. He had seen Bigfellow's bus on the Portland-to-Yarmouth ferry, imagined an unsavory performance: some old, baggy cunt doing the bump and grind. At his age, it depressed him to realize he would almost certainly wind up taking it in.

• • •

The carnival, set up in a field near the waterfront, was an explosion of light and sound. Doyle was dazzled by it. He wandered mesmerized from booth to booth, ride to ride, stepping over cables from the portable generators, smelling popcorn and fat.

The hucksters called him in. Firing a rifle at a moving target the size of a 50-cent piece, he won a small stuffed panda, which thenceforth he carried with him, tucked under one arm. At another concession he watched a flat disk spin and predicted correctly through which of its many holes a trained mouse would run to get a piece of corn. Perhaps his luck was changing. He rode the Ferris wheel. It carried him to its highest point and stopped, and with his panda sitting beside him, the seat swinging gently back and forth, he looked through a damp sea breeze to the harbor, where, flooded with light, the replica schooner rode at her moorings. In the old days, with primitive tools, men had designed and built such ships.

Here I am, he thought. Here we are.

Bigfellow was familiar, a swarthy man in buckskins who stood at the entrance of his decaying tent, flanked by gaudy posters the color of rouge. There was only one way, Doyle decided, that a man of such average size could have gotten such a name.

"You gave me a ticket," he said, handing it over.

"Asshole," Bigfellow muttered.

Doyle loomed over him. "What was that?" he said. Hard to hear now. A ride called The Octopus had started up nearby: whirl and grind of machinery, centrifugal screams....

"I was drunk this afternoon," Bigfellow shouted over the din. "I gave out too many of these. Give me a buck, will you, buddy? That's only half the regular price. You won't be sorry. Do me a favor, for Christ's sake!"

Annoyed at being hustled, nevertheless, Doyle produced his dollar and slipped inside. Here, under dim yellow light, a dozen men sat morosely on rows of wood benches facing a low platform. The platform was empty except for a varnished clothes tree to which a note had been pinned. Doyle, squinting, managed to read this message scrawled in purple ink: Totem Pole. Hiawatha Back Soon. Groaning, he took his panda to a middle bench.

"Come for the tit show, did you, mate?"

The old British sailor had been sitting alone, slumped in the last row. Now he lurched up, came forward, took his place next to the panda, produced a fifth from under his coat.

"Have a swig?"

Doyle did not hesitate.

Hiawatha was young, a teenager in buckskins, vest, short skirt, moccasins.... Her brown hair, done in a long thick braid, framed a face so innocent, vulnerable, unprofound that Doyle, at the edge of his seat, fell instantly in love. Through a speaker suspended above the platform, a worn record scratched The Sheik of Araby. Hiawatha moved seductively but never smiled.

She can't be more than 16, he thought. Don't they have laws? (And where was Sarah? Showing herself to a bunch of old farts on some jerry-built stage in Oregon?) Just to the left of the panda, Rodney nodded, eyes closed. Doyle helped himself to the fifth. It was not until just before the intermission that he noticed the bruise on Hiawatha's right arm.

The bruise was the size of a man's hand, purplish, angry, just above the elbow. Having played three times, the record finally stopped and the audience applauded. Hiawatha, in G string and pasties, went through a tent opening to Bigfellow's bus parked alongside. Doyle, spurred by an impulse, staggered up. "I'm here!" he called. "If you need me!" Rodney caught the serape, pulled him back to the bench.

"She's the one," Doyle whispered. "I know she is."

The sailor ignored him.

"That son of a bitch Bigfellow's got a C.B. receiver in his bus," Doyle went on. "I saw the antenna when we came over on the ferry. Listen to that noise out there, that Octopus or whatever it is. That's what I heard behind her transmission. He was drunk earlier today, he said so; and she's got a fresh bruise on her arm. He was probably working her over. God only knows what he did to her. She's too young to be in a show like this. He's probably kidnaped her and she's too scared to say anything. She hasn't smiled once; have you noticed that?"

The plain, broad features of the older man's face revealed nothing.

"Well?" Doyle insisted. "What do you think?"

Rodney pointed to the fifth.

"Swig it," he said. "Send it back."

During the intermission, Bigfellow collected a hatful of bills. Doyle glared at him as he passed. "You boys ain't seen nothin' yet," the swarthy huckster promised. "That little lady is just getting warmed up." What kind of terrible bat did he swing? Bigfellow, indeed. What was he capable of?

The music blared: Hank Williams this time, singing Kaw-Liga. Hiawatha returned and soon was moving naked on the stage. Her breasts, small as peaches, joggled sweetly; firm white bottom, puff of hair.... Doyle groaned, clutched his panda to his chest.

"Come on, boys, step right up," Bigfellow hawked. "Look all you want, but keep your hands to yourselves."

The audience crowded the platform, ogled under the music ("Poor ol' Kaw-Liga, he never got a kiss ..."). The bruise was terrible close up, Hiawatha's only flaw. She caressed the clothes tree, played with its pegs ("Poor ol' Kaw-Liga, he don't know what he missed ..."). At the end of her dance, as if the end had been preordained, she stood in front of Doyle himself and modestly opened her legs ("Is it any wonder that his face is red ...").

"I'm right here," he croaked, unable to look. "Old Blue Dog, remember? If you need help, just give me a call." He thought she smiled. Then Rodney took him gently by the arm.

"Come on, mate," the old sailor said. "Let's go out and air off a bit."

• • •

Before leaving the carnival, after Rodney had gone away, Doyle called the police. He got the captain on the phone and explained his theory, how it all added up. He had even spotted a poster not far from the tent, which said that if people were thirsty after the show, they should go to Lucille's for a shot and a beer. The captain satisfied Doyle that he would keep an eye on things. The carnival was expected to go on all night.

The hill seemed steeper on his way back up. He climbed its deserted streets slowly. By the time he let himself into the R.V., he was out of breath and his heel cord ached. The U.S.A.F. pilot had used the call sign "Poppa Wolf." Over the toilet he had stenciled a quote that read: Living Well is the Best Revenge. Doyle always smiled when he saw it.

"You stay here," he said, and he set the panda in the tub.

It took him an hour to get ready to roll. He disconnected the hookups, battened things down. When at last he sat in the driver's seat, letting the engine warm up, it was as if he were poised at the edge of a volcano, the orange-red swirl of the carny molten below him.

"There's supposed to be a good road between here and Halifax," he said, switching on the C.B. receiver, listening to its hum. Tomorrow he would see lovely sights, asters in the autumn fields, meadow rue in the swales.

Jen, he thought, eyes brimming. For Christ's sake, Jen.

He blew his nose, put the R.V. in gear, began to move out. He moved out slowly, so her china cups would be safe in the on-board cabinets where he had placed them.