The Bone Bed

Bridges or whatever. You know, the movie. Tons of bowlers love that movie. Sort of a cult thing.”
    “So you’re following strangers and they’re following you.”
    “Yeah, I know how it sounds, and you’re right. No question I’d have a lot more followers and more people would tweet me back if I could be myself instead of in disguise,” he says.
    “Why is it so important to you?” I look at him as he drives slowly past the Italian restaurants and bars of the North End, where the sidewalks are busy as this hour but very little is open except coffee and pastry shops.
    “You know, Doc? You get to a point when you want to see where you fit in, that’s all,” he says. “Like the tree falling in the forest.”
    His big face is pensive, and in the sun shining hotly through the windshield I can see the brown spots on the tops of his muscular tan hands and the fine lines in his weathered cheeks and the heavy folds around his mouth and that his close-shaven beard is white like sand. I remember when he still had hair to comb over, when he was a star detective and was always showing up at dinnertime in his pickup truck. We’ve been together since it all began.
    “Explain the tree and the forest,” I say to him.
    “If it fell, would there be anybody to hear it?” he ponders, as we bump over pavers along a side street as narrow as an alleyway.
    At the end of it I can see Battery Wharf and the inner harbor, and on the other side of it, the distant brick buildings of East Boston.
    “I believe the question is, if there were nobody to hear it, would it make a sound?” I tell him. “You always manage to make a lot of noise, Marino, and all of us hear it. I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about.”

seven
    THE WIND GUSTS SHARPLY OUT OF THE NORTHEAST, pushing water in swells, and where the harbor is shallow it is green, and farther out a dusky blue. From my seat to the left of the pilot coxswain, who is chiseled and young, with ink-black hair, I watch seagulls lift and dive around the pier while Marino continues to be ridiculous.
    He is combative and loud, as if it makes any sense to declare war on a five-point harness because its sub-strap and large rotary buckle of necessity must lodge snugly between one’s legs. The life vest he has on makes him look bigger than his more than six-foot frame, and he seems to fill half the cabin as he resists the assistance of a boatswain I know only as Kletty, having met this crew for the first time but a few moments ago.
    “I can do it myself,” Marino says rudely, and it isn’t true that he can do it himself.
    He’s been fussing with the straps, trying to defeat the buckle as if it is a Chinese puzzle, making a lot of impatient clicking and snapping noises as he turns the rotary and attempts to force metal links into the wrong slots, and I can’t help but wonder what Bryce said, exactly, when he called the Coast Guard a little while ago.
    What persuasion of his resulted in the vessel we’re on?
    Typically a 900-horsepower 33-foot Defender with shock-mitigating seats that restrain us like fighter pilots isn’t necessary for what we do. One doesn’t need maneuverability or high rates of speed when there are no arrests or rescues, and then I recall snippets of what my chief of staff was describing over the phone, painting a morbid scenario about putrid human remains and hosing off the deck and double pouching. Better to be on a bigger boat with an enclosed cabin so we can rocket back to shore with our antisocial cargo, I suppose.
    “It’s tricky,” says the boatswain named Kletty, as he finishes strapping Marino into the seat behind me.
    “Don’t need it.”
    “You do, sir.”
    “Sure as hell don’t.”
    “Sorry, but we can’t go anywhere if everyone’s not strapped in.”
    Then the boatswain checks my harness, which is fastened correctly, the sub-strap and rotary buckle wedged where they belong.
    “Looks like you’ve done this before,” he says to me, and I sense he might be flirting, or maybe he simply is relieved that I’m not going to give him an argument about Homeland Security protocols.
    “I’m all set,” I reply, and he takes a seat next to the redheaded machinist mate, whose name I think is Sullivan, the three members of the crew friendly enough and quite compelling in navy blue fatigues and caps and blaze-orange life vests.
    When so many young men I come across are very nice to look at, it reminds me I’m getting old or acting as