The Off-Islander by Peter Colt

Author:Peter Colt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington Books
Published: 2019-08-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

I walked up the street and to the back of the hotel, where the Ghia was parked in the lot. I lit the pipe and sat slowly puffing on it as the mist cleared from the windshield and the wipers beat the rain away from it. I turned the radio on and eased out of the parking lot. I had to box my way around several blocks because of all of the one-way streets but eventually made my way to Orange Street. The Ghia slid up the hill, and I put a Steely Dan cassette into the tape player. Their mellowness went well with the pipe and the rain.

I followed Orange Street out of town past the densely packed houses that had been there for two centuries. I passed a package store, a bakery, a convenience store, a gas station that was also a package store, and just beyond that, a pizza joint and the Island Home for the Aged before I came to the rotary. I went around the rotary, past a bored-looking cop sitting in his cruiser in a parking lot, and turned onto Milestone Road. The houses and businesses fell away, and the road was bordered on both sides by scrub pines and telephone poles. Every mile or so there was a white-painted stone marker that gave the road its name. I followed the road out of town and up a hill, one of the few on the island, and at the top I could see the bogs below me and off to the north.

The wind was pushing the Ghia around like it was a toy, and between that and the rain it was taking a little effort to keep her on the road. I came down off of the hill, and the wind eased up a little bit, but the rain had picked up noticeably. Steely Dan was nice and mellow, and the inside of the Ghia was filled with pleasant-smelling pipe smoke.

I passed the road that I wanted to turn onto twice before I realized where it was. The Ghia bumped over the tarmac that was cracked from a few hard winters and a tight budget. The day was dark enough, but the road was darker still because of a wall of scrub pines, beach plums, and grapevines that were growing on either side of the narrow road. I slowed the Ghia down to a crawl, looking for the next road that I had to turn down. I didn’t like the idea of having to turn around on the narrow road.

The road that I wanted was a dirt road. Dirt was misleading; like all of the roads in the area, it was actually white packed sand. The Ghia turned off of the tar and onto the sand with a bump. I shifted into a lower gear and nudged the old girl down the road. The rear end of the Ghia occasionally slewed a little in a patch of soft sand but would right itself. The road couldn’t have been more than half a mile long but seemed to take a long time.

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