The Season of Open Water (8 page)

He takes to the work quickly. He learns the rules. He sees into the guts of the business, and he keeps his mouth shut, his ears open. Working out of the wharf, he begins to sense the unsettled tension between rival gangs. Swampy Davoll is the lead man of the Point crew. Luce knows him by sight, a tall, big-shouldered man with a thatch of white hair turned early, a wind-scarred face. He carves wood and is known through town as a good man. Tough as dried codfish, he'll turn if you cross him, but the talk was he kept many a family in food and heat through the winter. If a fellow was hard up for cash, Swampy would give him thirty bucks and tell him to forget about it.

At the Point, the wharves are crowded with boats—a few built only for the rum trade that have never had another use. Others are work boats, cats, swordfishing vessels, draggers, a few skiffs. The Coast Guard cutter, patrol boat 317, keeps a space in a berth on the middle dock, opposite the boat Wes Wilkes runs with Caleb Mason, the
Mary Jane.

One blustery Sunday, mid-February, when Luce comes down to the wharf to check the engine, to make sure the cold has not seized her up, Swampy Davoll steps out of the Shuckers Club across the road from Blackwood's store. He lights up his pipe, takes a look around, and spots Luce down at the boat on the east pier. He walks over to him and asks him into the club for a game of cards. Luce goes. Three of them are already in there, at a table in one corner of the room past the slate pool table: North Kelly, one of the Masons, and Wes Wilkes, who is the youngest of Swampy's gang, a few years older than Luce. They offer him a drink and a smoke, and the liquor is good. Wes Wilkes deals out the cards and they play, and Luce can see that Swampy is sizing him up, seeing what kind of cat he is. They know who he works for. They don't like Honey Lyons, don't trust him. And it is in that card game, when Luce has lost two hands, but is betting high in the third with three queens in his hand, that Swampy remarks casually, quietly, tapping used ash from the bowl of his pipe, that he has heard talk that Johnny Clyde, the young fellow Luce works with, might be Honey Lyons's nephew, would Luce know anything about that? His voice is low, barely skims over the tinny sound of the radio set up on the ice chest. He matches Luce's bet in the pot, and the third man in, Mason, folds.

“I'm not saying I know for a fact that it's true,” Swampy murmurs when Luce doesn't answer. “I'm just saying you might want to watch your back.”

Luce will say nothing to Honey Lyons about that conversation, nothing about being invited into Swampy Davoll's place for a round of cards. He winds up winning that particular hand with his three queens that beat out Swampy's pair of aces. He says nothing to Johnny Clyde the next time he sees him, but he watches them both a little differently from then on.

When he is down at the wharf, working over the boat, scrubbing her deck, wiping down the salt spray caked on her pilothouse window, he listens. He hears all the talk outside the papers: of how they store the loads of liquor in horse barns, vegetable cellars, haylofts; how they run it to the city in school buses, hearses, pickups, and wagons, in new sedans and old Maxwell touring cars, their backseats pulled out, bottles hidden in every spare compartment. He hears the story of the man from Tiverton murdered and put in a barrel of cement because he talked too much, and that other one about Helmut Gifford, who took five slugs to the gut and survived. He hears behind-the-back-talk about the legends: the rumored sightings of Al Capone, the
Idle Hour,
the
Black Duck
and her captain, Charlie Travers, who works out of the Sakonnet and shows her heels to every patrol that tries to chase her down. He hears the tale of the old farmer's house over by Barney's Joy—a house that was gutted in 1921, then bought by a Syndicate man and rebuilt for the rum-running trade, with a cellar floor raised and lowered by hydraulic pumps, a second cellar hidden underneath. The house was known to be a haven for the rummies, and the Feds had searched it four times and never turned up a trace, never found the gin stored in the water tanks, gin running through the pipes, gin coming out the cold water faucet on the kitchen tap.

He hears lower talk, hushed talk, about mooncussing and the hijacks, the go-through men, the occasional double-crossing of one gang by another. He hears about the salvagers, local fishermen mostly, willing to take the risk, who scavenge drops made by the inshore crews. They will watch a chase from land and mark the crates of liquor dumped overboard; while the Feds and Coast Guard are busy chasing down the gangs, the fishermen will steal out with their dories and their skiffs. They will drag up the cases and the sacks with homemade grappling gear—oyster tongs and corkscrew poles. They will clear the load before the rummies have time to get back to it. They move it to their own hiding places and sell it in the city themselves.

Luce works through the weeks, the months, toward the first thaw. He does his jobs for Honey Lyons, and he keeps his head down. He learns who can be trusted and who to keep an eye out for. He hears what kind of graft is going on, who can be bought with a bribe, and who is tipping what. He stores away what he overhears, and from time to time he has the sense that he is ordering these details for some future ambition, some future use.

Down at the pier one afternoon as Luce is straightening the kinks out of the anchor chain, he overhears a row between Honey Lyons and Swampy Davoll. They are sitting on the bench underneath the Sinclair gasoline sign, and it is queer enough to see them sitting there, two men who are known as enemies, as unmixable as oil and water, to see them sitting there like an old bickering couple at opposite ends of the same bench. Watching from the corner of his eye, Luce notices that when they speak, they do not look at one another, they look straight ahead. The other men from Swampy's gang have moved off the bench and given them room, a wide berth. They talk low, but the wind is out of the northwest, behind them, and their voices carry across the pier to Luce. They are talking about Dirk McAllister, still gone missing.

“Coming up on three months now. I know you know something, Lyons,” Swampy Davoll is saying.

Honey Lyons shrugs. He palms his pack of cigarettes. “From what I hear, your man Dirk was skimming off what wasn't his. Talk is he made south with quite a piece of cash.”

Swampy looks across the water toward the Point Bridge and beyond it, upriver toward Ship Rock. “Bullshit. Cuts no ice with me.”

Honey Lyons lights a cigarette, throws down the match. It settles in the dirt at his feet. “I'm sure he'll turn up one of these days. Maybe toward spring.”

Swampy gives him a long cold look. He is a good eight inches taller than Honey Lyons, and his hands are tremendous, but sitting that way, on the bench, they seem nearly equal size.

On the other side of the mud dock, Caleb Mason and Wes Wilkes push off, bound on the
Mary Jane.

The young Coast Guard officer on the deck of patrol 317 waves them off. “Have a grand time out there tonight, Wes.”

“Sure.” Wilkes grins. “You, too.”

“See you out there then?”

“Not if I can help it.”

The
Mary Jane
circles away from the wharf, out into the channel, then heads toward the mouth. The Coast Guard patrol pushes off a few moments later. She backs around and trails them from a distance.

“You're off your hinges, Lyons,” says Swampy Davoll. With his eyes, he follows the two boats as they head off down the river. “Someday they'll find your elbows under a pile of stones.”

Lyons laughs. “Don't be so worried after your man Dirk McAllister. Like I say, I'd take a bet with you that sooner, more than later, he'll turn up.”

Noel

Noel knows what his grandson does. He doesn't like it, but at the same time he knows it is not bad work for Luce. His grandson has always had a ken for danger, a nose for it. What surprises Noel is how Luce keeps his mouth shut. Over that first winter and into the spring, he doesn't talk about what he does or where he goes, not even to Bridge. He'll bring home small gifts for Cora, which she accepts without a word: trinkets, plum sweets, a jar of fancy southern marmalade. He buys a new pullover for Bridge, and a pair of oxford bag trousers and a trilby hat for himself. Apart from that, though, he seems to have his mind set on saving up his money.

Sometimes on a morning after he has been gone half the night, when Bridge and Noel are working in the shop or in the garden, they will break for a cup and a smoke, and Bridge will read from the newspaper aloud. She will read through the headline news about the mill strikes in New Bedford, the bread lines, the picket songs, and the rallies. She will skip ahead a page and find a smaller piece that reports on the exploits of the
Black Duck
or the
Eider
—a harrowing chase, an exchange of gunfire, an arrest or two, aliases given, and a wry line about some other men that slipped away. The silence will heave up between them as they both wonder without saying what part, if any, Luce had played—if he had been in the thick of it, or on the fringe. They wonder what it was he had done the night before that made him sleep so deep into the afternoon. Even when he wakes, groggy, ravenous, they can see the adventures still in his wrinkled clothes, dark things not yet shaken out of him.

“It's nothing you should think about being mixed up in,” Noel says to Bridge one day. It is a warm afternoon, toward the end of March, and they are sitting outside in the sun. There are new buds on the swamp maples, and the world seems to tremble, on the verge of breaking out into spring. Bridge is bent over the newspaper, reading.

“Wherever he is,” Noel goes on, “is no good place for you to be.”

Bridge glances up at him, surprised. “I really don't think of him at all,” she blurts out. Then she bites her lip, her face flushed, and he realizes that she has a secret.

“You don't think about who?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh yes, there was something.” He smiles.

“Luce,” she says. “We were talking about Luce. Right?”

“I was. You weren't.”

She shakes her head and begins to fold up the newspaper. She folds it carefully, tightly, along its creases, then folds it again and puts it away into the pocket of her coat. “Come on, then,” she says, standing up. She brushes off her trousers. “Back to work. Don't get lazy on me.”

He laughs and follows her into the shop. He sits back down at the worktable with a pencil and several sheets of draft paper. He is drawing out a set of plans for a new dory Howie Sherman has asked him to build. Bridge goes to the corner and starts to sort through a pile of wood. They work in silence for a while, then Noel asks, “You think there's hope for the Sultan of Swat this coming year? You think he'll break his own record?”

“I doubt it.”

“You want to make a penny bet on it?”

“You're betting more than sixty home runs?”

“Yeah.”

“I'll take that bet.” But she doesn't look up. She keeps her head down, sawing out a length of wood. Her actions are quick and precise, her mouth in a thin stubborn line.

“What are you cutting all that wood out for anyhow?” he asks.

“I'm building you two new sawhorses,” she says, still working the ripsaw. “I told you that before.”

“You sure you're not just doing something to keep your mind off something else?”

She ignores him.

“Whatever happened to that fellow who gave you a ride home from the Grange a few months back?”

She freezes, but only for a moment. Then she puts down the ripsaw. There is sawdust on the sleeve of her shirt. “I don't have any idea what you're talking about.”

“Can't lie to me, Bridge, you know that,” he grins at her. He has guessed and she is furious, he can see it in her eyes.

“What are you digging for, Papa?”

“Is there anything worth digging for?”

“Absolutely nothing.” But her face is flushed, and she fiddles with a raw edge on a piece of the wood she has cut.

“The night you went to the Grange, you got a ride home. I recognized the old engine on that car from the sound, not many of those around, and I knew whose it was. I was surprised when that car pulled up in front of our house, more surprised when I saw you get out of it.”

“Oh,” she says. “That car.”

“You remember now?”

“I think so. But that was no one. Just a man I met at the Grange. We didn't really meet. I started walking home. He happened to drive by. He saw me walking and offered me a ride. It was a cold night. A ride home. Nothing more. That's all it was. I don't know why you're getting so worked up about it.” She walks across the shop. From the shelf on the wall, she takes down a mallet, a few pieces of sandpaper, a tin can of pegs. “Is this all the sandpaper we've got?”

“He seems like a good man.”

She is poking around in the tin can. “He might be. I have no idea. I don't know him at all. I don't think about him. I don't know why you think I do.”

He smiles. “I didn't say you did.”

She puts the can back on the shelf.

“All I'm saying, Bridge, is that you might do well to let a man like that into your thoughts now and then.”

She turns to look at him. She stares. “That's enough, Papa. You have to stop talking about it, or I'll have to shut him out of my thoughts for good.” She is gripping the mallet in her fist by her side. Her eyes are serious, and she is so obviously rattled and trying to keep herself in order that he bursts out laughing. She grabs a small chunk of wood and throws it at him. He ducks and it hits off the stovepipe. Now she is laughing too.

“Not another word about it,” she says.

“Not a word.”

She wipes her arm across her face. “It's hot in here, don't you think?”

“Don't feel hot to me.”

She shoots him a look and he grins. She walks to the door and cracks it open. Cool air rushes in.

He knows her well enough to let it go. He does not bring it up again. But he notices small changes—how she files her nails, how she takes a little more care with her hair. That man has gotten under her skin, he thinks. That lucky man.

They plant peas and onions the first week of April. The herring are thick in the run. The days pass quickly, and the air is full of signs, as if the world has accelerated, new life swept into a small tight space and moving fast. Noel can feel it in the river, the brown water swelling up against the banks with the runoff from places higher north. He can smell it in the sweet tannic reek of rotten leaves.

Early May, schoolie bass come into the river. Noel and Bridge go down to the dock to ready the skiff. They throw burlap sacks down along the bottom and fill the hull with buckets of riverwater so the wood swells. For the first several hours, the water dribbles out between the seams. When the boat has drained, they fill it again and leave it there overnight. By morning, there are no leaks left at all. Noel bails the boat and takes it out to set his crab traps and his eel pots. He staggers them along the ledges and the rocks between Hix Bridge and Indian Hill.

By mid-June the summer people have begun to come back into town: window boards pried off the houses at the beach, rugs beaten and slung out to air over porch rails. The wind works through their fringes. Noel does not like summer. It brings the out-of-towners, their autos, their smells and sounds and crowds, their clambakes and surfbathing picnics on the beach, garden parties, lawn parties, men in white flannels and blue blazers, women in cloche hats and pongee silks. They alter the river and the light. The white sails of their teak boats dash like scraps of paper as they tack back and forth across the channel. They build angler stands in the mud off the islands in the East Branch. Their svelte new touring cars tail one another down the road, horns, shouts, brightly colored scarves waving. They clutter the space so the creatures of the off-season—the animals, the locals, and the dead—are not so free to move.

There is a loneliness Noel feels every year this season comes around, a loneliness in the long days of what they call “fine weather” and “fair skies.” The sunlight pierces his eyes like nails, and still the heat builds, day after day, implacable and sultry, heat clinging to the earth.

It is in the summer months that he feels the longing most, a nibbling in his heart for the sea and his old life. He will miss the company he used to keep—his old friend Rui and the other blue-water men. He will remember the long days on the Pacific as the ship passed through the equator line. Their skins grew parched and eaten by the sun, dark as tarred rigging. He remembers how once, between islands, they ran low on fresh water. His tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. His lips cracked and bled. The sea stretched taut, light splitting off the surface like a blade.

It is in the summer months that his mind is occasionally troubled. Haunted by old thoughts, shadow things. Hannah. He never felt a deeper, more devastating desire than the desire he felt for Hannah. It was a desire that made him cross oceans. A desire that complicated, even compromised, his love for her.

Hannah was a naturalist. She had the mind and the eye of a naturalist. A piercing mind. A ruthless, scientific eye.

By the time their life together ended, she had turned open nearly every pocket inside him. She had picked every lock on every door he kept closed. She had pried open every sealed window and stood in every walled-off room, and there was a part of him that had resented her for how she would always insist on peering into those dark and unmarked places not meant to be seen. Now he walks alone through those same rooms. He draws down old things from their shelves—a dream he had once of building her a house by the ocean. He had imagined a sunken front room, just lower than sea level, and built so that, on a surge, the waves would strike up against the window glass. She had laughed when he told her. “Such an impractical house, Noel,” she had chided him, “but then you are, of course, my most impractical fool.” Her eyes were light as she spoke (he remembers this), and she was happy. He had held her and said nothing more about it. He buried into her body, smooth and bare and young against him, a swift soft summer darkness. It came and went so quickly. Throughout their life together he would go on dreaming of that house. He did not speak of it to her again but he carried the dream. He swore that someday he would build that house for her and she would love it.

There was only one point of true soreness between them, only one point of disagreement where they cut up against one another and left wounds, and that was over God. If Noel saw God at all (and he rarely did), he saw God in the river, God in the clouds or in a crow's eye. He had no patience for Hannah's God—the god of churches, the god of men. Secretly, he felt it was the one place where she faltered—where her mind, ordinarily so brilliant, grew a blunt edge. It was a difference between them they noted early on, when they were still young together. They shrugged it off, joked about it even. It was a fissure, a hairline crack, nothing more. But it widened as they aged. It came to matter. When Hannah first got sick, it was her God she turned to. It was her God she clung to. Noel hated her God for that.

In August, he takes another job for Honey Lyons, another boat to refit. This one is not a good fishing boat. It has already been revamped, already junked once, which makes it easier. He does not feel he is taking something beautiful apart. But even so he imagines he can hear her—Hannah—mocking him for taking the work at all, for being so easily seduced by the lure of the cash. He hears her voice in his head and sometimes on the wind, calling him a scoundrel or a fool, as she used to do—with that gorgeous derisive glint in her eye that made him angry, that made him want her.

He begins to look for signs of the change of season: blue cornflowers, the first turning of the Virginia creeper vines toward a brilliant autumn red, the ripening of the corn and wild blackberries to their full sweetness, the first monarch butterfly, the goldenrod and yarrow. The days grow shorter, and then one morning, he steps out and feels that first glint of coolness on the air.

The following Sunday, a storm breaks up the air, brings in the high surf, and a front of cooler weather. The tide washes all the way up to the edge of the front cottage gardens. The morning after the rains end, Noel goes down to the beach early. The fog is still thick. He wanders along the tidal edge, pailing up sea clams. At the corner where West Beach ends at the causeway, he finds a body floating facedown in the shallows, the flesh gone, the rib cage full of crabs. There is a knife hooked to the belt, “D. McAllister” engraved into the blade.