The Shore (2 page)

1995

T
ARGET
P
RACTICE

W
hen news of the murder breaks I'm in Matthew's, buying chicken necks so my little sister Renee and I can go crabbing. There isn't much in the way of food in the house, but we found a dollar and sixty-three cents in change, and decided free crabs would get us the most food for that money. Usually we use bacon rinds for bait, but we've eaten those already.

I'm squatting down looking at the boxes of cupcakes on a bottom shelf when a woman steps over me to get to the register. Matthew's is small and the shelves are crowded in; when Mama brought us with her to get food Renee and me would have contests to see who could get from the front door to the grimy meat counter at the back in the fewest hops—I could do it in seven. She's a big fat woman, with more of an equator than a waist; she steps heavy, all of her trembling as she does, and for a moment I'm worried she's going to fall and squish me. She dumps a dozen cans of pork and beans on the belt and gets out her food stamps, then digs down the front of her stretched-out red shirt and pulls a wrinkled ten-dollar bill out of her bra to pay for a
pack of menthols. “Hear what happened to Cabel Bloxom?” she asks the cashier. The cashier hasn't. “They found him waist deep in the mud in Muttonhunk Creek, had his face shot to pieces and all swole up with being in the water. His girlfriend had to identify him by the tattoo on his back.” The cashier's eyebrows jump up, and her eyes get big. I keep rummaging among the cupcakes. The cashier can see me, but they'll probably keep talking anyway; being thirteen doesn't get me noticed any more than being twelve did. My necks are starting to drip blood and chicken ooze through their newspaper onto my leg.

“They know who done it?” the cashier asks as she picks up the limp bill and unlocks the glass-front tobacco case.

“Not yet. Police say they used a slug-loaded shotgun. They couldn't find no cartridges, though.”

“That's a lot of help—everyone around here has one of those,” the cashier answers, and she's right. We've even got one, sitting next to the .22 by the porch door, in case deer show up in the yard.

“And that ain't even the half of it.” The lady leans in close, but her whisper is almost as loud as her talking voice. “They done cut his thang clean off!”

“Guess he won't be needing it anymore.” The cashier's face is lit up like Christmas as she bags the cans of pork and beans; not much happens worth talking about on the Shore. The woman waddles out with her cans, and I straighten up from the cupcakes and plop my soggy packet on the belt.

“You hear that, Chloe?” the cashier asks me as she runs them through and dumps them in a reused plastic grocery bag from the Food Lion up the highway. Matthew's is the closest
food store to home; it sits next to a taco van where the gravel turnoff makes a T with Route 13, halfway between the village of Parksley and the causeway to Chincoteague Island. It's also the cheapest food store I can get to, so all the cashiers know my name, even though I'm kinda fuzzy on all theirs.

“Couldn't help but hear it,” I answer.

“Sorry son of a bitch deserved it, though. Probably someone's daddy or husband decided that enough was enough.” I nod in agreement and count out my pennies and dimes, then take the plastic bag from her.

I walk my bike down the graveled road a bit before pulling the packet of chocolate cupcakes out of the leg of my shorts. They taste sawdusty, and the frosting's like vanilla lard, but it's better than nothing. There are two in the packet, and I put the second one in my pocket for Renee and start biking the three miles home. It's not a bad ride, if you avoid the dogs. Close to Matthew's there are single-story houses and trailers up on cinderblocks with cracked windows and mossy roofs—the sheds behind them could be toolsheds or could be meth labs, you can't tell until one blows up—but after the houses peter out the road curves through cornfields and you don't have to worry so much about seeing people. The road goes out to a creek, if you keep following it, and a dock and a cement slip for boats, but I turn off when I get to the farmhouse, the big place with the columns on the front where our landlords, the Lumsdens, live. Kids at school say the Lumsdens do black magic, call down hurricanes or dry up the sky or make it rain chickens, which I don't believe, but I don't like to hang around near their house one way or another. Lilly Lumsden is two grades ahead of me in school, and
she's nice, but her older sister Sally already looks like a witch—sometimes I run into her on the dock or out in the woods, staring at the sky like she's listening to something only she can hear.

I stop and think for a moment about eating the second cupcake; Renee can't miss what she didn't know was coming to her, and I'm hungry. But I put my feet back on the pedals and keep going, down the oyster-shell road that meets the gravel road opposite the farmhouse, cuts through the potato field, and runs along the edge of the woods down to the little dock on a calm side creek too shallow for boating where the Lumsdens sink their crab pots.

Our house rises out of the heat haze like a turtle on the sand, just a little brown hump showing over a clump of evergreens and a few acres of potatoes. Some years they plant corn, and some years they plant soybeans, but mostly this field gets done in potatoes. They stretch out dusty green off to the left of the shell road, and the brambles and woods stretch thick and dark off to the right, and the knobbly white oyster-shell stretches out in front of me most of the way home, making my bike jump and judder and kick up dust. Mosquitoes swarm around me in the stillness, leaving quarter-sized welts. I'm gritty all over by the time I reach the end of the shells and have to get off and wheel my bike over the grass, around the evergreens and mulberry trees, and over to the screened-in downstairs porch. Our cat Mickle wanders out of the bushes and rubs against my legs as I drag the bike onto the porch through one of the big holes in the screening, and I scratch him a bit before going inside the house.

It's a little house, our house, one room downstairs and two rooms upstairs and a porch for each, and according to the phone
company and the electric company and the taxman it doesn't exist.

Renee's in the bedroom we share on the ground floor, and I throw her the cupcake. She crumbles it into little bites and eats it a chunk at a time while following me up the stairs. The dust is thick on my skin, and makes smears of mud on the dishrag that I use to wipe it off. She stays two steps behind while I dig in the kitchen dresser for the box of rounds and reach the .22 down from over the window—it's easier to handle than the shotgun, and the ammo is cheaper—and wanders after me out onto the upstairs porch.

“Thought we was going crabbing when you got back,” she says, her voice gummy and front teeth black with cupcake. The ripped screen door slams behind her.

“We are,” I say, and put the box of rounds down on the porch rail. “Just let me do some target shooting a bit. I'm feeling nervous.” I line up five rounds like Daddy does, flat base against my thumb and tip against my pointer finger, pinched in a row, and slot them into the magazine; they make a silvery sound as they slide down.

“What's going on?” she asks, and hauls herself up to sit on the porch railing. I've told her not to, it would be so easy to tip off backward and fall, but she won't listen. She doesn't like sitting on the one splintered bench we've got, and aside from that and the rain bucket the porch is empty. There ain't any mosquitoes up here, and we catch a good breeze. Behind her, the marsh stretches silver and gray and bright lime green, veined with creeks that reflect the blue of the sky, out to the gold smudge of barrier islands and white smudge of breakers at the horizon.
Off to her right is more marsh, the turtleback road down to the dock, with bits of roof or window from the trailers on the other side of the creek, the ones I'd passed on the ride home, flashing between the leaves if you really looked hard.

“Guess who got his self shot?” I answer her question with a question, and chamber a round.

“Who?”

“Cabel Bloxom.” The lawn is a big, raw square of marsh grass, soggy and soft in places, hacked short and littered with junk. I sight on a pink Kleenex box down near the far left corner, then set my foot up on the lower railing, so I can brace an elbow on my raised knee.

“You're kidding,” she says. I let a long breath out, and squeeze the trigger. Little clumps of dirt jump up. High and left. The hot cartridge pops out to my right, arcs inches above Renee's knees, then lands and rolls before falling through the splintery floorboards and hitting the downstairs porch with a little ping.

“Nope. Someone shot his whole face off. Get down from there, the cartridges are going to burn you.” I decide not to tell her the part about his missing bits. Squeeze. High and left, but closer.

“But if he's dead, what have we got to worry about?” She hops off the railing to sit on the bench behind me and be out of the way, her heels on the edge of the seat and knees tented up to keep her bare legs away from the splinters.

“There's always someone to worry about. Anyone that knows that we're out here alone, for starters.” This time the box flips. The next two aren't centered, but they hit.

The Shore is flat as a fried egg; on a clear day from our upstairs
porch it feels like you can see into tomorrow, and usually you can just about see the dark smear that is Chincoteague Island off to the northeast. We are one of three islands, off the coast of Virginia and just south of Maryland, trailing out into the Atlantic Ocean like someone's dripped paint. We take the force out of the hurricanes, grow so much food that a lot of it rots on the vine because there's too much to pick or eat, but people say that the government doesn't ever remember we're here, that we get left off when they draw the maps. Accomack Island, the big one, is closest to the mainland, has edges laced with barrier islands that change shape and size with each passing storm, a highway up the middle with bridges to the mainland on the south and north ends, and little villages all the way up its length, and that's the island we live on. Then comes Chincoteague Island, off the northeast coast of Accomack. It's much smaller and squarish, not quite a town but bigger than a village, where most of the people with money, people that weren't born here but came across from the mainland, have summer homes; in the winter it's just as empty as anywhere else. Assateague Island is the farthest east, where there used to be a village but where no one lives anymore since it became a national park. It's long and thin and has the sandy beach that you can swim from, and the wild ponies. All three of the islands together is the Shore.

I take the gun with us down to the dock, unloaded, with some shells in a plastic case in my pocket. If I can't get it loaded in time I can probably beat someone's head in with it; the bitch is heavy.

The tide's running fast and clear, and we can see crabs underwater, walking sideways along the bank. Usually we drop a chunk of raw flesh, bacon rind or chicken neck on a string under
the dock, but if we're fast we can net some of the walking ones too. The hardest part is getting them to let go of the bait. It's like they don't realize they've been caught; all they think about is getting the food to their mouths. They're pretty—chalky white with smudges of bright blue like someone's brushed them with ladies' eye shadow—but they pinch like a motherfucker. Sometimes we net up two at once, a male as broad as the length of my hand holding tight to the back of a tiny little female. I always pull them apart and throw the females back.

No one comes to bother us, and we fill an old detergent bucket with crabs. They're mostly just under keeping size, but we aren't having any of the deputies over for dinner or anything. On the way back we root around under the light brown crust of topsoil in the field next to the house and pull up handfuls of potatoes the size of eggs. You dig from the sides of the hills, so the plant stays standing up; it makes it look like there're still potatoes there. Daddy says it keeps the Lumsdens from getting downhearted about having nothing left to harvest at the end of the year.

Daddy's home when we get there, and I sneak the .22 back to its place over the window, and the rounds into the top drawer of the kitchen dresser. He thinks I'm too young to hold it, let alone shoot, but Mama showed me how when I was five. He's brought a package of discount chicken with him—he doesn't often remember to get food—but we put that away for later and cook the crabs instead. I don't eat chicken if I can help it. We've got three plants out here, and seeing the trucks stacked with cages full of birds to be slaughtered, all huddled up, half-plucked and sick-looking, some of them dead already with their heads dangling
through the bars, just turns your stomach. Daddy works in one of the plants now, on the killing floor. Way before that he and Mama worked construction, fixing up old houses to be sold, but she got kicked off because she was pregnant, and then he got kicked off because no one was buying houses anymore, and he could only do the heavy labor, didn't know electrical work like Mama did. He hates the plant, the killing floors more than anything else, but it's the only work around.

We found a pullet that had gotten away, once, and kept it as a pet till it became a hen. Its chest grew so big that it tipped over on its front and couldn't walk, just flapped around in the dust in the front yard. Mama said it was 'cause of what they fed it at the farm, and wrung its neck to put it out of its misery. We buried it in the backyard with the other dead things, mostly birds and rabbits; the stone's still there.

Daddy's in a brooding mood, so we crack our crabs quietly and suck out the meat without hardly making a sound, then rinse off the dishes in the buckets on the upstairs porch and skibble down to our bedroom. He can find out about Cabel Bloxom on his own.