Chapter 4: Captain Kevin Keeling and Poison Pete

The origin of Melancholy, so to speak.

When Melancholy returned, showing no outward signs of her trip’s affect on her, what I wanted to know was not where she had been or why she left, but why she had even come back.  The answer she gave, plenty sufficient in its vagueness, was “To leave again.”  The feeling of leaving Kevinsburg is so satisfying I can see why one would want to repeat it.

The town of Kevinsburg is situated on the very western coast of the American continent, founded in the late 19^th century as the fulfilment of manifest destiny, if you’re into that sort of thing.  It is pressed between the uncompromising unknown of the ocean and the rest of the nation in a way that, if you want to escape to anyplace meaningful, you have to double back to the places that have already been settled and tamed.  Sometimes it feels like nobody who has ever lived here has ever accomplished anything that matters to anybody outside of it.  It is a perfect, pristine realization of someone’s idea of suburban perfection, built to perpetuate an elaborate facsimile of a self-sustaining anyplace in the shadow of an inland valley.  And as countless angst-ridden teenagers learn every year, it is boring.

The town is named for the legendary seafarer Capt. Kevin Keeling.  In more liberal interpretations of history he is cast as an ocean-going militaristic proto-fascist with dreams of aquatic domination and economic exploitation, as well as significant if dubious evidence pointing to alcohol abuse, spousal abuse, and an almost perverse delight in racism.  But hey, what’s a hero without a few flaws?

After a distinguished landlocked career in the cavalry, the western frontier opened up, allowing Capt. Keeling the new challenge he so richly desired.  He bypassed the western plains for the Ocean and gained command of a Navy vessel as soon as there was command to be gained.  There, at the age of 36, (a significantly advanced age for a man back then) he first met his lifelong nemesis, Poison Pete, the Pirate of the Pacific.  Pete was known for smuggling the riches of the gold rush out to secret Asian trading ports (or so the story goes) and for poisoning his enemy.  Keeling and Pete engaged in game of cat and mouse with an almost religious zeal �" or even sexual, depending whose history you choose to read.  Their naval battles became the stuff of legend.  I imagine kabooming cannons and swinging from ropes and boarding each other’s ships for swordfights, and peg legs and sarcastic parrots and that sort of thing, but the truth is but the boring truth of it was probably less of what Keeling told his biographers and more about two disease-ridden men commanding ships full of other disease-ridden men racing back and forth trying to intercept each other’s gold.  Further diminishing Poison Pete’s pirate cred is the fact that artistic renderings of the pirate depict him with both eyes, but also a giant beard, which seems awesome to me until I think about all the organisms that were surely breeding in it.

Eventually, possibly due to Capt. Keeling’s actions or possibly not, Poison Pete’s ship sank and the good Captain claimed victory.  On the site where he believed Pete’s treasure to have been buried, he built a log cabin and began to dig in search of it.  As is likely to happen when rumours get started that there is gold up for grabs, a more and more houses grew up surrounding this dig project until a decade later, no gold having been found, the town of Kevinsburg decided to acknowledge its own existence.

That’s the legend, passed around for years to explain the existence of this place.  It has also been thought that Keeling made up the idea of Poison Pete’s gold in order to attract settlers to his new town: he knew there was no gold.  Hell, as time went by and scurvy (Keeling’s other lifelong nemesis) claimed his crew, there were fewer and fewer people willing to swear to Poison Pete’s existence, deeds and death, and it is now thought that Poison Pete may have been a myth, lie, a fabrication, a composite, or perhaps some kind of allegory for the elusive hopes and dreams of a generation ravaged by war and colonial expansion.  None of that, however, would explain the mysterious circumstances of the Captain’s death: face-down in his supper, apparently poisoned, and stabbed in the back with a gold-plated fork etched with Poison Pete’s signature phrase, “I’ll poison you, you son of a b***h.”

About a hundred years after Captain Kevin Keeling first set sail, there was Dr. Edwin Catatonia and his wife Paris, in the late 1980’s.  I can only speculate what it was like for Dr. Catatonia, a man of reserved emotions, and his wife, at the time a woman of disproportionate sexual appetite, to come to terms on sexual congress.  I imagine him pushing her away and hissing, “After Cheers,” as she licked his cheek. 

It would be awkward for anyone to relate any account of their parents’ sexuality, but Mel had a secondhand eyewitness in her brother, and a bizarre fascination with the details he had divulged.  Only four years old at the time, Soren was an eyewitness to what he believes to have been his sister’s conception.  As Mrs. Catatonia mounted her husband and began to writhe, the young boy stood there in the doorway silently, trying to make sense out what it was he was watching and only being jolted into recognition over half a decade later when an adventure in late-night TV brought him back to that place and time to realize what he had seen.  In the years between the incident and his learning the meaning of marital relations, the facts had not been bleached from his mind by time: Cheers was on, and she did all the work.  The fact that they did not notice their young son is a pretty good indication of the kind of relationship they had with him.

They were good people, and they meant well, but they weren’t very enthusiastic about child-rearing.  I don’t suspect it was in Dr. Catatonia’s nature to nurture a child’s mind and heart.  He was a trouble-shooter, an ER doc.  Not a warm, caring parental figure or, from what I’ve heard, a particular generous lover.

Whether or not it was Mrs. Catatonia’s intention to get impregnated, it happened.  The good Doctor was given the painful task of sitting down with his son to explain the scenario:

“Son, over the next nine months, a sperm cell implanted in your mother’s uterus will grow into a foetal stage and then birthed into the world as your new little brother or sister.  I assure you this will have only a marginal impact on our expressions of--” slight sigh of exasperation for even entertaining the idea, “�"love for you.”

A congenial, practical back-patting hug was then conferred upon the lad, who was bewildered by his father’s polysyllabic explanation.  He may as well have been speaking in tongues.  What or where was this uterus?  What prisoners are kept in a sperm cell?  Before young Soren could even begin to express this confusion, his father had left the area, and another conversation would not be had about the matter until after the delivery room.

Soren Catatonia had to piece this business together, including what possible connection his mother’s rapidly expanding stomach may have to the possibility of having a new little brother or sister, as well as to his father’s recently-developed Nicotine gum habit.  Over the months, strange women visited the house to fawn over Soren’s mother’s large tummy, and Soren marvelled at how this invisible child could kick hard enough to be felt by these easily-impressed ladies, but somehow the hole Soren punched in the drywall went un-commended.  Instead, she got bellyrubs from strangers who remarked “Why are you due?  You’re about ready to burst.”  He imagined his mother exploding like a grenade: what would her insides look like?  Is that how he got here?  Things must be very bad in there if the baby would rather come out here.  A world of dads who came home late for supper smelling of sweat and blood and antiseptic, and moms who sat with their feet up on the coffee table rubbing their ankles, but if you walk on the kitchen counter in your muddy shoes, suddenly you’ve been a bad boy.  Four-year-old Soren Catatonia did not know the words “double standard” but he felt he was living in one.

Some things, you live through without exactly having the words to explain them.

According to legend, Melancholy Catatonia’s birth took 41 painstaking hours in the middle of a muggy August night so hot and so long that even in the dead darkness the concrete seemed to steam.  Mrs. Catatonia screamed and pushed the force of light out from someplace on her body Soren could not have known about.  Dusk gave way to dawn and midday and even at full dilation, no progress was being made and Dr. Catatonia, no stranger to blood and gore, paced in the waiting room stuffing piece after piece of Nicotine gum in his gob, sweating musket-balls.  As accustomed as he was to seeing the end of lives, he simply could not fathom being brought face to face with the beginning of one.  So he chewed, fearfully, his gum, and drank gin from a flask.

And then as the sun fell behind the hills, and the sky darkened to a cool blue orange-hued purple, with air conditioners and light generators working hard for their lives, the whole damn thing shut down.

All of it, all lights, all electricity, all broadcast, every appliance, every primitive computer, every electron passing along a conductive wire, shut down in an instant.  The whole grid collapsed, every light seen from the hilltop went out and nothing would be seen from up there but a deep, dark void.  The generator conked out.  Lifesaving doctors and nurses suppressed the urge to panic, doing their best to keep things stable in a dark, vulnerable hospital.  No beeping heart monitors, no wheezing breath machines, for at least an instant, as the sun sunk, the entire damn town and everything in it, whether it was “on the grid” or not, just went flat-out dead.

This remarkable, inexplicable, singular event in Kevinsburg history, occurred exactly at the instant of Melancholy’s birth.  The instant she slipped from the warm familiar confines of the womb into the comparatively harsh reality of life, the lights came back on.  The entire blackout lasted maybe a minute and a half.  An inquest was never able to pinpoint the source.  For my purposes, there are two possibilities, both equally unlikely: either it was caused by Melancholy’s birth, or its occurrence at that exact time is what gave her her unique properties.

You don’t have to believe either of these.  Maybe the reports from the power company, saying all their machines were in good working order, were a cover-up.  Maybe it was just a one-in-a-million co-incidence.  But I’d invite you to think back to it over the course of this story. 

It was not long after that that Dr. And Mrs. Catatonia arrived with their baby girl Mel, proud parents.  Well, proud mother and resigned father.  As they called through the house for their young son, “Soren, Soren, come meet the new member of our family!” they found him in the kitchen hunched over a bowl of cereal, scrupulously reading the nutritional facts on his Cap’n Crunch.  Looking over at them, he said, mouthful of milk and breakfast, “Hey, where’ve you guys been?”