The Season of Open Water (22 page)

Bridge

That night was a good sand night. The wind had kicked into the west just after sundown, and by ten it had driven the beach hard as new macadam. The tide was on the ebb. A dark sky. The moon slipping through the clouds.

They drive over the Point Bridge, down the beach road past the seasonal restaurant and over the low dune. They drive out onto the hard sand, then turn east and head toward Gooseberry along the water's edge with the headlamps out.

They park by the rocks below the causeway and walk across it to the island. They cut in on the old path, the one they had walked together so many times. Luce stamps down the overgrown places with his boots, and they wind through the middle of the neck past the inland pond. They cross out onto the beach that faces east. The boat is there. Luce had driven it over earlier in the day and left it anchored in the cove.

They wade into the shallows and wait, eels running over their feet.

He had laid it out for her as they drove. He had told her how it would all go down—and as they wait in the shallows, looking northeast toward Little Beach, it unfolds exactly as he said it would.

There was one rum-ship, a Canadian vessel, and two gangs. The gangs had split up the load, fifteen hundred cases, over a hundred thousand dollars' worth. It was a big operation, a Syndicate job. After unloading half her hold off Inner Mayo Ledge to Swampy Davoll's gang, who would then run it back into the Point, the rum-ship had come in past Hen and Chickens and anchored just offshore of Little Beach. There were dories waiting for her there.

“Isaac Bly's gang from Dartmouth,” Luce whispers.

Bridge strains her eyes against the darkness, looking out across the black water toward the far-off paler strip of sand. She tries to match the faint slight movements she can see with what she knows they are doing—unloading the crates off the smuggler into the smaller boats, then running them in, carrying the stuff up the beach, filling trucks and cars; crates of liquor heaped in piles at the edge of the shore.

She does not ask, but she knows that Luce must have tipped off the Feds, because she can see it does not surprise him when they come, swarming out of the night from the land-side, trapping the rummies on the narrow strip of Little Beach, and it is mayhem— distant black shapes running, shouts, gunfire echoing over the bay, truck engines starting up, headlights backing fast around, more shots. The dories are abandoned in the shallows, half unpacked, some with their full load still on them. The Feds will be vastly outnumbered, she knows this, because they have been split between the site at Charlton Wharf and the site on Little Beach that she and Luce are watching now. Her brother would have waited to tip them. He would have waited until it was late in the evening, too late for them to call up an adequate reserve. There are men at the edge of the shore now—Feds—they are firing out at the rum-ship. She has already begun to nose around. She cuts off her lights and throws her throttle open, heading straight out toward the black and heavy sea.

Bridge watches with Luce. She is close to him, less than three feet away. This is how he said it would happen, and they would wait, watching from the hook in the shore of the neck. No one would see them. No one would think to look for them there. The Feds would round up what they could of the gang and bring them in, but in the end it would be a numbers game. There simply would not be enough of them to deal with all that liquor. They would have to leave it, at least a good part of it. They would have to leave and come back with more men, more trucks, to haul it away.

And that, she knew, was what they were waiting for, that rip in the night when the land would fall silent again, the rum-ship gone, the gang scattered, the beach empty with those crates of liquor piled on the sand and lying heavy in the dories in the shallows. The Feds might leave a man behind, two at the most, but they would post them at the top of the road. No one would expect a boat to come in off the sea.

“Just awhile longer,” Luce whispers to her. “Not long at all now.” The smuggler speeds past them, headed toward open water. She has just come level with the tip of the island when out of the darkness the patrol boats appear, two lean fast shadows, engines roaring. Bridge hears the call of the Klaxon horn. One patrol throws a searchlight, but the smuggler revs her engine and refuses to heave to. The gunfire begins.

The patrol fires one burst—a stream of orange tracers beating through the night—and then a second. Abruptly, inexplicably, the rum-runner swerves. She takes a hard turn, a hundred and eighty degrees, and guns it. She comes back fast, headed straight for the firing patrol as if she would ram it. The patrol darts left, just barely avoiding collision, and fires another pan of machine-gun bullets toward the runner's engine room. The smuggler slows, then stops. She lies still, dead in the water. No sound off her. No light.

A few hundred yards of black water separates her from the shoal at the tip of the island. There is a sudden explosion, the night shattered, a burst of flame—yellow, orange, red, blue. Fire roars off her deck, a huge ball of fire soaring up into the sky.

Bridge grips Luce's arm. “Did you do this?” she whispers. He shakes his head, staring, his face lit by sheets of rippling orange flame. She can see it all reflected in his face. He pulls her down to kneel in the shallows. They crouch behind the rocks. Her coat sleeves drag in the water, and she can feel the cold soaking through to her skin. Still they watch, as the wind blows strong out of the west and drafts the flames high. The fire arcs up like a demon, sparks shooting out and falling onto the deck of the patrol. The patrol backs away as the fire leaps out, then edges in again. There is the smell of burning. There are men screaming. Bridge can hear them—the rumrunner's crew, six or seven crowding against the deck rail. She can see their hands, their faces, their coats on fire, and they jump, first one and then another, then the rest at once. They jump off the starboard side, their arms like freakish orange birds, into the black water. The ship falls back into flames, the sound of timbers cracking as her hull caves in and she is consumed. She lists to one side, then begins to sink, her bow nodding up as her stern drops. Lower and lower in the water she goes. The flames thin down. The steam hisses off her, rising like a fog on the black surface where she disappears.

The two patrol boats come in from either side toward the men in the water. They pan their lights over the waves. They steer carefully through the wreckage and pick up the men from the smuggler's crew. The men are shrieking, some of them, crying from their burns, lost in the water, their arms flailing. But the patrols find them. They come alongside each man and hoist him up onto deck, and when the last man is found, they turn and speed off through the night heading east-northeast up the bay toward New Bedford harbor.

Bridge and Luce don't speak. Still they wait. They crouch behind the rock, watching. The darkness falls still. The sea quiet. The land quiet. Their boat is lying in the cove, still at anchor behind them. As the moon slips into the clouds, they crawl out from behind the rocks and look back toward Little Beach. The shore is empty. There is no sign of movement, of men. But they can see the cases, heaped in piles on the beach, and the dories still loaded full, aground at the edge of the sand.

Luce doesn't ask her if she still wants to go. He doesn't assume that her mind might have changed either way. He touches her arm and, without a word, begins to wade through the shallows toward the boat. She follows him. They climb in, over the side, and he draws up the anchor and coils the line. As he walks to the stern to push them off, by some uncanny instinct, some queer thrust of the moon, he glances up at the beach, toward the higher ground, and catches a glimpse of tweed in the brush. As he is reaching for his gun, tucked between the fishbox and the gunwale, he sights the arm. He follows it down to the wrist, the long pale fingers of the hand resting on the knee. He knows, as he raises the rifle to his shoulder, who it is. He squints and tracks his eye down the barrel. He knows there is no threat, but he is already aiming at the cloth, the inner part of the arm. He is already shifting the end of the barrel by the exact fraction that will equal the distance between the edge of a man and his center. The smooth wooden gunstock rests in his hand. He clicks the safety. He hears his sister turn behind him, the sharp gasp of her breath. The slightest cry. He fires.

Bridge

She sits in a chair in the bedroom, turned away from the bed, facing the window with the lamp off. It is almost three in the morning. The moon hangs over the ocean, and the sea is still. She had told Luce to get gone. Just to be gone. That was all she wanted from him.

They had brought the body back to the house, and it is lying on the huge oak table downstairs, a blanket pulled over the face. She had done that. She did not want to see his face.

The moon begins to set, and when the clock strikes four, she lights the lamp. She goes down the hall to the water closet, fills a pitcher of water from the sink, and brings it back to the bedroom. She takes the ivy plant down from the window and waters it, then turns it and hangs it again. She sets the pitcher on the small table by the door. She will bring it downstairs. She makes the bed, turning back the edge of the sheet, and smoothing it over the blanket. She props the pillows against the headboard and pulls the coverlet over them. His flannel shirt and pajama bottoms are on the floor. She picks them up, folds them, and sets them, folded, on the chair. She turns off the lamp and leaves the room, closing the door behind her.

She will have to call them at some point, she thinks, as she walks down the stairs.

In the kitchen she does not look at him lying on the table. She keeps her back turned as she cleans out the icebox. She empties a bottle of milk, half a bottle of wine, and a jar of iced tea down the drain in the sink. There is an open can of cut pears and another of asparagus spears, two apples, and half a stick of butter. She throws everything into the trash and wipes down the empty shelves with a damp kitchen cloth. She rinses out the rag and leaves it hanging over the faucet.

She goes to the phone in the hall, turns the crank, and dials.

When she hangs up, she brings the water pitcher into the front room. Fine light streaks in the east have begun to break up the darkness. They will be here soon. She has half an hour at most. The thought frightens her suddenly. This is the last time she will be alone in this house. His house. She crosses the room to the jasmine. She tilts the pitcher and floods the dark earth. The water fills the dish under the pot, then spills out onto the floor. She wants to take the jasmine home with her, but she won't. This is the light that it knows. She sets the pitcher down on the desk and opens the long drawer. She picks through his pens, a deck of cards, a few stray keys. She closes it again and looks around the room, aware that she needs to find something, anything, something that matters that she can take with her. She looks through his papers, his records, his books. She lifts the lid on the sea chest and draws out the heavy leather-bound notebook. She opens it, then closes it. She puts it back into the chest.

Across the room, he lies on the table under the blanket she drew across him. She wants to go to him. She wants to lie down with him under that sheet. She puts her fist to her mouth.

She hears them coming toward her down the road—the low sound of car engines. They grow louder, nearer. She turns toward the window. The sun has risen. The clouds are banked over the ocean, a long flung line, their tops sifting off into looser strands. The light spills through them. It spills over the causeway and across the water, sheets of silver light, so stark and free that for a moment, she forgets. A catboat threads its way from the mouth of the harbor toward the bell, then farther out into the bay.

Cars pull up in the drive outside. She looks down at her hands resting on the window ledge. She hears steps on the porch, a rapping at the door. She notices a small ashtray at the corner of the desk closest to the window—a folded sheet of paper inside it— the note she had written to him the day before—and then deeper in the shadow of the bowl, a small and odd-shaped piece of lead. She tips the ashtray, and it falls out into her hand. A .22-caliber slug, its head flattened over, mushroom-shaped. Her fingers close around it, its strange cool hardness digging into her palm, as she walks to the door to let them in.

Luce

The dawn comes fast. He dreads it. The light filling the room, illuminating every crack and hole and brokenness. A single bird has begun to sing in the woods outside, and he sits quietly, as he has sat all night, in the large downstairs room at the pesthouse. There is moss on the walls, grass growing up through the floor. He has not slept. He has not closed his eyes. They ache now, from dryness, from staring at the rubble of an old fireplace on the opposite side of the room.

Earlier, after he had left Bridge with the truck at the cottage on the beach, he had run. Up the road toward home, toward any solace, comfort, salve, his feet pounding, mile after mile, and at last he had reached the house on Pine Hill Road. He had stopped at the edge of the yard. Noel's wagon was parked in the drive, a few pieces of Cora's laundry strung on the clothesline. Every window in the place was dark. Luce had stood for an hour in the trees, and by then he knew that no matter how long he waited, the door would not open. He could not enter.

So he had come here. He had found this corner and pushed himself against the wall, trying to find some meeting of hard surfaces that could hold him. He had picked one shadow apart from the next. It was the first night in months that he had had no fear. The night sounds, the night smells, were everywhere around him—a sort of wild reckoning—and at one point he had almost managed to convince himself the day would not come.

There is a pain in his head, a shooting pain, the two sides of his brain still split: the feverish side, the cool side, the side with passion, the side with none. The side that made him do what he did and aches for it now, the other side that can explain it—he did not know who it was, he did not aim to kill.

He knows what is lie. He knows what is truth. And as the morning light settles into the torn room, he cries for the wreck of every structure of his world.