Water Dogs (12 page)

Julian wore an old dirty sweater and his shoulders were wide. Bennie didn’t usually put it in these terms, but when he saw him, he knew it: Julian was the best friend he’d made since high school. He was surprised to see that Julian’s eyes were red and his eyelids were heavy. It looked like he’d been drinking or smoking pot out back, which wasn’t something he usually did until after the restaurant was closed for the night.

Vin pointed at Bennie and shouted, “Here he is, back from the dead,” and even though he thought Vin was an idiot, the whole scene in the bar made him feel at home. Vin looked around at his audience and then pointed again. “This guy wanted to go swimming in the quarry in March. One problem, of course.” He raised a finger. “The ice is still about two feet thick.” A few guys laughed. Bennie laughed, too, to show Vin he didn’t care. (As Vin continued chuckling, Gwen’s use of the word “asswipe” came to mind. Before she’d moved to New York, Vin had put an arm around her at a hockey game and told her she should stop over at his house—he wanted to tell her some stories about
her dad. He smelled like bourbon, and she asked him how his wife was doing—Gwen wasn’t scared of him, only disgusted—and he’d responded: “She’s great. She’s down in Florida, which is the perfect place for her.”)

Vin stood up. He was off duty, but he was still wearing his tight blue cop pants, and a Bruins hooded sweatshirt. Despite his age and the weight he’d gained, he was still strong, sturdy, thick-necked like a work animal. There was one skinny cop in the area, Jim LePage, and one woman cop, Lynne Pettigrew, but most of the others lifted weights and drank beer by the caseful. Coach used to say Vin was laser quick on the ice and that it was difficult to forget what it felt like to get slammed against the boards by him. Coach had also said that Vin had made a play for Eleanor in the early days. She’d rebuked him and married Coach. After that, the two men hated each other. Once Coach died, Vin seemed to pass this hate on to the rest of the Littlefield family. “Come on over here, sharpshooter,” Vin said. “Let’s play some darts.”

“Actually, can I take a rain check on that?” asked Bennie. “I need to touch base with someone in the kitchen.”

“Just a quick game, Benjamin,” said Vin. He leaned over the bar and grabbed a fistful of darts from a tumbler next to the beer taps and then started walking toward the dartboard.

Julian smiled again and said, “It’s great to see you on your feet, man.” He stepped around the bar to give Bennie a hug. He squeezed hard, and when he let go he asked, “You okay?”

“Just a little out of it.” He had a weird jolt of familiarity standing there in front of Julian, as though he’d been standing in that very same spot having the same conversation just minutes earlier.

“Bennie,” Julian whispered. “Come back a little later, so we can talk.”

“I will.”

“There’s a bunch I need to tell you, man.” His breath stank of booze.

“Okay, I will,” he said.

“You better get going. Vin’s waiting for you.”

Bennie asked where Helen was.

“She’s been working doubles since you went into the hospital,” he said, filling a pint glass with Guinness. “I told her to go home, crack a cold one, sit on the couch.” Hearing this, Bennie knew she was probably working on some project at home—repainting the living room or building bookshelves. The couch made her antsy.

To get stuck spending time in a bar with Vin Thibideaux was one of the worst things that could happen to you in all of southern Maine. For the next half hour Bennie suffered through a game of darts with him. At first, they threw in silence. Vin was much better than Bennie. Vin stood near the line, his right foot forward and pointed slightly inward, his massive biceps parallel to the ground, his hand holding the dart gently. Then his forearm would cock back toward his eye and the dart would sail wherever he aimed. Bennie studied this form—he’d never been much for darts—but wasn’t able to copy him. He managed to hit the cork most of the time, but not once did he hit the number he needed. But Vin didn’t laugh at Bennie for being so inept; he was happy to win by a humiliating margin. All the while, he was ordering shots of Jack Daniel’s, one after the next.

After taking a commanding lead, Vin said, “I’ve been wanting to come out to the island and talk to you, Benjamin. Gwennie said you weren’t quite ready for me, though.” He kept his eye on the dartboard. “But I gotta say, you’re looking pretty healthy.”

He could tell Vin was getting drunker. “I’m doing all right,” said Bennie.
“She
might have been the one who didn’t want to see you, Vin.”

“Yeah, the Amazon bitch,” he said, laughing. He slapped Bennie on the back, hard. Bennie was balanced on one leg, so he had to grab a nearby stool to avoid toppling over. Vin kept chuckling and said, “Son, you okay? I’m just joking. Seriously, though, you seem to be doing all right, considering that nosedive you took. Compared to LaBrecque, I mean. I’d say compared to LaBrecque you’re doing great.”

“He hasn’t turned up yet?” Bennie plucked the darts out of the cork.

“Nope. And the state police aren’t calling it a missing person case because the guy was a drifter. He could be anywhere, they say. His motorcycle’s gone, too. But you know, Benjamin, they’re missing the point. We got two feet of snow in fourteen hours. And we’ve already gotten seventy-three inches this winter, total. That’s quite a bit.”

“You had dogs out there searching, didn’t you?”

“The staties did,” he said, burping.

“Maybe he got out of the woods. Maybe he went back to Tavis Falls.” Bennie handed Vin the darts.

“Yeah, Benjamin. Or maybe he got in a spaceship and flew to Uranus.” His laugh made Bennie want to shove a flat palm against the guy’s face. Vin had dark bushy eyebrows and long feminine eyelashes, and his oversize teeth were framed by his manicured goatee. Coach had said in high school he’d had relatively good luck with women, but Bennie didn’t understand how—he was hideous. There was a shot waiting for Bennie on a nearby table, so with the darts in his left hand, he picked up the Jack between his thumb and forefinger and drank it down.

Vin had already gotten the bull’s-eye he needed. He had one more nineteen to hit to finish the game. He paused before throwing. He said LaBrecque had come down from Tavis Falls for the urchining work and he’d just started going out in the boat with Boak and Shaw. They’d been planning to spend a few weeks on Riverneck Island, setting up camp there like their crew always did in March.

“The day after you fell, when it stopped snowing I brought your brother out to the quarry to help us look for the guy. Tried to get him to walk it through with us, show us where the six of you had been. Seems like he couldn’t remember it too well.”

“It was pretty hard to see that night.”

“ ‘Pretty hard’?” He turned to Bennie and laughed. “Really? I thought you jumped off the edge of the quarry for fun, Benjamin. Son, you’re a stitch.”

Vin had a talent for creating moments like this—Bennie had nothing to say. Vin cocked his arm back. He hesitated. Then he turned to Bennie, again, and handed him the darts. “You go. Let’s switch scores. I’ll spot you the points I’ve got and we’ll play from here.”

Bennie couldn’t hit the nineteen, and after each of his turns Vin nailed all his spots. He cleared the board before Bennie could hit the only spot he needed.

When they finished, Vin had emptied four shot glasses. Bennie had had three. Each little glass was turned over, resting on the nearby table like a shell game. “Good fight, Benjamin. Good battle.” Vin’s handshake was surprisingly light and soft. He said, in a whisper, “You know what I think, Benjamin?”

“What’s that.”

Up close, his greasy nose quivered above his goatee and his breath was foul. “I think—that night—your brother fucked up big time.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He smoothed the whiskers on his chin with his hand, staring at Bennie. “I don’t believe you.”

Bennie was sincerely confused by this. What reason would Vin have to think that Littlefield was in some way responsible for LaBrecque’s disappearance? “He was just playing the game, like we all were. But feel free to go after him. I’m sure he’d be tickled. Go right ahead.”

This time, the silence didn’t last long. “ ‘Go after him.’ You’re a stitch, Benjamin.” He slapped him hard on the back again—luckily, Bennie had the crutches in his armpits, so he was stable—and Vin said, “Pure comedy.”

Bennie turned to leave the bar. As he crutched toward the door, he told Julian he would come back later. He heard Vin yell in his direction, “Let’s play more darts again soon, Benjamin.”

Before going to Helen’s, he thought it’d be good to bring her some flowers, so he started heading toward town. He got about three miles down the road before he realized the florist probably closed at five. Queen Anne’s lace—or even hawkweed—wouldn’t be blooming for
months, of course, so he went down to the back shore, down the road toward Sagona’s Marine, to see if he could find some sea glass to give her.

There were only two sandy beaches on all of Meadow Island (there were also no meadows, but plenty of woods, and, in the summer, wellcut front lawns). The beach he checked was a place called Singer’s Cove, near where Handelmann lived. He parked on the shoulder and hobbled through the woods to get to the shore. The trail was covered with slushy snow and he had to hop carefully in places to avoid getting his cast wet, but he made it down to the beach with a few minutes of daylight left. It took him a while to find one piece of green sea glass—and the edges hadn’t been fully worn down—so he decided to look for rocks instead. There were some shiny egg-shaped stones nestled in the sand by the water’s edge, which he thought Helen would be keen on. He found a few with white rings of quartz around them—it was a trick to bend down and pick them up wearing the full-length cast and with the shots of whiskey in his blood, but he grabbed them and held them in his hand and looked out at the gray water. Despite the blustery weather, the waves were small. A group of buffleheads bobbed in the swells.

From here—as from much of the eastern shore of Meadow Island—he had a good view of a wide stretch of the bay. The waves spread in the sand by his feet, and the sun had already dipped below the tops of the trees behind him. The beach was gray with a few brilliant squares of orange where the sunlight filtered through the spruce forest, and the sand looked as smooth as eggshell.

As he stared at the calm little waves, it became clear that he needed to finish his conversation with Vin before going to Helen’s. No question. He pocketed the rocks, made his way back up to the woods, and returned to the Skylark.

On the drive back to Julian’s, he thought about how booming Coach’s voice would sometimes become, and how decisively Coach could act when the pressure was high. He seemed able to do the right
thing every time. Even so, he didn’t take the moral high ground. Littlefield made mistakes all the time, and each time Coach would step in and defend his son—he never made him feel like a fuckup. Which is not to say he didn’t lean on him sometimes. Coach could be tough. But Coach was also the only one in the family who seemed to understand why Littlefield was hotheaded, defensive, and impulsive. They all missed Coach, and everyone except for Littlefield talked about missing him, though it was he who probably missed Coach the most.

The itch under Bennie’s cast made him squirm, but all he could do was step on the gas. It started raining again, hard. It was fully dark now. There was something appealing in knowing he was about to say something that would get him yelled at, and soldiering forth anyway. He left the car running out in front of Julian’s with the hazards blinking. He grabbed his crutches and hobbled to the door, and when he stepped inside, the same crew was there. Vin was still holding court, telling another story—“…  the old guy’s sitting in his car, and when I walk up beside him, he doesn’t see me coming, and I notice he’s dead asleep, so I pull out my gun and squeeze off a few rounds …”—but when Bennie came up behind him, he stopped talking, turned around, and grinned. Bennie smiled back without showing his teeth. Vin said, “Hey, hey, it’s the comedian.” Bennie took his crutches out from under his arms and leaned them gently on the bar. They started sliding toward the floor, but Julian reached over and grabbed them. Bennie sized up Vin’s ugly smile, though when Vin saw Bennie’s expression up close, he stood up and stopped smiling.

Bennie said, “Littlefield hasn’t done a goddamn thing wrong.”

Vin seemed drunker now, from the cast of his eyelids and the color of his cheeks. He folded his arms on his chest and smirked.

“And another thing,” said Bennie. “Gwen is not an Amazon bitch.” As the sentence formed in his mind, as it came from his mouth, he assumed it would sound valiant, but he was immediately conscious of his whining tone.

Vin looked over his shoulder, then back at Bennie, and laughed.

Without hesitation, Bennie swung his cast forward—a swift pendulous leg kick that landed, squarely, between Vin’s legs. It wasn’t until Vin hunched over and clutched himself with both hands that Bennie realized he’d really done it: he’d hit a cop in the balls with his plaster-covered knee. Three or four guys at the bar sensed the commotion and immediately surrounded them.

Wheezing through clenched teeth, Vin said, “Hummmphttttt.” When he finally stood up straight, two of the guys from the bar held his arms and struggled to keep him from swinging at Bennie. Vin said, “Just like your dad was, and your brother—total psychos. You all are.” He coughed; his eyes were watering. “Your dyke sister, too.”

Bennie felt the anger surge up in him again, and even though he didn’t move, there were two guys from the Iron Works behind him who grabbed his jacket and held him back. They didn’t know that Bennie wasn’t much of a fighter. He’d wrestled with Littlefield plenty, but that was about it.

Julian came around the bar with Bennie’s crutches. He took him under the arm and helped him out the front door.

The rain had lightened up. The brackish river smelled faintly of dead crabs and herring. The sound of the water surging through the narrows was calming. Julian said, “What did he say to you?”