Water Dogs (14 page)

“ ‘Scalped’?” he asked, looking down.

“He was a spy,” she whispered.

Later, when most of the teachers—including their mother—were hammered, nearly yelling the songs, they all snuck upstairs to snoop around. Bennie told Martha he wanted to look for Hatcher’s medals. That’s when she said she’d made up the Vietnam story. Bennie felt ashamed for being so gullible, but he also felt excited by the way Martha seemed to operate. Rules were big in the Littlefield household: politeness, firm handshakes, integrity, thoughtfulness, and, above all, honesty. Lying got you in big trouble with Eleanor. Martha didn’t seem to care about those kinds of things.

After the party Bennie suspected they’d never see her again, but
three days later she stole the keys to her father’s Caprice, an old orange cab he’d bought at an auction in Westbrook, and she called them, wanting to know if they had any interest in going for a drive.

As usual, their mother had turned out her light at nine; Martha called at ten. Gwen picked up the phone in her room, and then found Bennie. A sleeping parent doesn’t need to be lied to; the twins just had to make sure the front door didn’t make any sound. As they tiptoed down the upstairs hallway in their parkas, Littlefield emerged from the attic, where he’d been lifting weights.

“What the hell,” he said.

“Shut up,” Bennie whispered.

In a full-volume voice, he said, “You shut up.”

As Bennie and Gwen walked downstairs, though, Littlefield knew to ask them where they were going in a whisper. He followed them out onto the porch.

“That girl Martha, the caterer—she’s got her dad’s Caprice. We’re going joyriding,” said Gwen.

Littlefield chuckled and looked away.

“You want to come?”

“No, of course not.” It was obvious he didn’t like that Gwen was exposing him for being jealous of this late-night plan. Before he went back inside, he said, “I asked around about her. I heard she smells like fish.”

Gwen and Bennie met Martha out on the main road, where she was idling without the headlights on. She’d cut most of her hair off. It was the same length as Bennie’s. Somehow, she was even more beautiful—with her smooth pale skin and thin dark eyebrows and black hair—than she’d been at Dean Hatcher’s party. Her cheeks were red from the heat in the car. Shockingly, there were kids at Bennie’s school who wouldn’t have even considered Martha pretty because she had too much of an accent. “Where’s your brother?” she asked.

“He doesn’t want to come,” said Bennie.

“Tell him I want him to come,” she said.

He ran back to the house, opened the door again without a sound, and went upstairs to find Littlefield. He wasn’t in his room, so Bennie crept down the carpeted hallway into Gwen’s room, then into her closet. There was a cord hanging from the ceiling that opened a pulldown staircase to the attic. The faint sounds of the radio, “Lights” by Journey, drifted down the hatch. Littlefield was up in the crawl space. He was in the midst of a set of bench presses when Bennie told him Martha wanted him to come. Littlefield finished his last rep, pushing air through his teeth, then setting the bar in its steel cradle. “Of course she does,” he said. He put his parka on over his sweatshirt and he and Bennie ran back out to the Caprice together.

Gwen sat up front with Martha, and Littlefield and Bennie stretched out in back. As they crossed the one-lane causeway, Martha lit up a cigarette and didn’t inhale the smoke; she just let the haze provide atmosphere. They headed out the Masungun, which was straight and usually empty at night. It was snowing lightly; the snowflakes were being pulled up into the car’s grille. In a borrowed car at night in the winter, the next step, they all knew, was finding some way to get wasted.

Martha told them she wanted to try acid. She hadn’t yet gotten her hands on any, but she thought it would be perfect for the group. Beer was boring, she said, and it made your breath smell bad. “That’s what we do every weekend, right?” she asked, and the Littlefields stayed quiet. She continued. She said that acid was a creative drug, that her father had done it with her aunt and they’d climbed trees for thirteen hours. The Caprice had a red dashboard, which glowed through the smoke.

“Sergeant Crabcakes has acid,” said Bennie, but they ignored him. Littlefield stared out the window, saying nothing. Bennie didn’t know much about Sergeant Crabcakes except that he was a guy who lived out in Sterling. Kids talked about him at band practice.

Martha clicked off the headlights, slowed down to around twenty-five miles per hour, cracked the windows, and slid the bench seat back
far enough that her hands just barely reached the steering wheel. She had the radio tuned to a country music station, the whine of a steel guitar just barely audible. They proceeded this way for a while. Two or three smooth miles. Between streetlights they were blind except for the red glow of the car radio.

Bennie’s eyes were open to the darkness. Then Martha clicked the headlights back on. He felt the car leave the road, go over the shoulder onto loose ground. They were in the woods and snowflakes were jittering in the headlights.

Saplings raked the undercarriage. Rocks thumped against the soles of their sneakers. Martha was gripping the wheel with both hands, high beams on, accelerating. Branches slapped the car on both sides. The ground was frozen, but they could feel the different textures beneath—the hollows full of frozen oak leaves and thickets, the rough granite patches, and the ice when they spun through swamps. Martha avoided the big stuff, boulders and pine stands. She said the land east of the Masungun was intermediate terrain. They had no idea how she knew this. The car was tanking along, going faster than they’d been going on the road.

“This is your dad’s car?” asked Gwen.

“Yup,” said Martha.

“Do you hate him or something?” asked Gwen.

Martha glanced over at Gwen and smiled. “He taught me how to do this.”

When Bennie scavenged for a seat belt, Martha said, “Trust me.” Gwen had her seat belt on in the front, but Martha didn’t have hers on. Bennie found one and clicked it in. Littlefield stayed unbuckled.

She gunned it. Martha looked as though she were trying to pull the wheel from its steering column; her neck, her arms, her straight elbows, her fingers, all tense. Her expression stayed the same. Light from the high beams reflecting off the trees made her face glow.

She turned to Gwen between pine stands, still tanking along, and
she had to yell, because of the sounds the car was making as it rumbled through the woods. She said, “This might be what doing acid is like.” Then she clicked out the headlights again.

Bennie reached over the far side of the seat and put his hand on Gwen’s shoulder. Even though she didn’t turn around, she knew what Bennie was saying. He felt glad to have her in the car with him. Not just because they were both scared, but because they were both amazed by what was being revealed to them, and it was good to have a witness. Martha was from a world they didn’t know.

There was a small frozen gully just before the Shaw’s parking lot, and they hit it at top speed, jetting down and bottoming out before launching off the lip on the far side of the gully, wheels spinning in the air. Finally, Bennie closed his eyes and coughed up a small mouthful of puke. The landing was soft, though—he opened his eyes to the quiet, flat white of the parking lot spilling out in front of them. Martha clicked on the headlights. She slowed down.

Sitting in the car, she gave everyone a code name—Bennie was Hickory, Littlefield was Dickory, Gwennie was Dock—and she tried to get them to shoplift in Shaw’s with her, but there were too many people working in the store at that hour, so they returned to the car. They drove to Sterling. Martha asked a few questions about the family, and Gwen told Martha about Coach being dead. They cruised around Sterling for a while before Littlefield spotted the little seafood shack—Sergeant Crabcakes—which was boarded up.
SEE YOU ON THE FOURTH OF JULY
was written in block letters on one of the boards.

On their way back to the island, they stopped at Cumberland Farms, where Martha bought a twelve-pack of Coors using a fake ID and Littlefield’s money. They parked in the empty lot beside the Elks BPO lodge. The heater pumped hot dry air into the Caprice, and the plush seats felt like a living room couch. None of them was tired. Bennie felt like his life was opening up wide.

Littlefield said, “I love beer.” The car was lit only by the dim orange
sodium lights at the corners of the parking lot, but their eyes were adjusting as they all sipped slowly from the cans. Littlefield continued, “Let’s keep driving—let’s go to Canada.” They let that hang in the air. Bennie didn’t know his brother had already fallen for Martha, but he liked how Littlefield acted around her, deferential and hopeful.

From then on, Martha always seemed single but never was. She and Littlefield had kissed the night they’d gone to Sterling—just as she was dropping them off at the Manse, right in front of Bennie and Gwen—and Bennie knew the two of them had hung out a few more times. Bennie wasn’t exactly sure why this didn’t continue, though he guessed that she realized how difficult he was to talk to, how much of a loner he was. It almost seemed that she and Littlefield came to an understanding: he would never make his affections too obvious or intrusive, and she would never make him feel like a desperate jackass. At the restaurant, Martha was always nice to him, like a cousin. She’d been waitressing at Rosie’s for five or six years, and for Littlefield, seeing her at Rosie’s was nearly the best way for them to interact. She was available to him, she was flirtatious and accommodating, but at the end of the night, she would stay to close the place down, and he would go home.

When Bennie walked into Rosie’s, Sherry Callahan, another waitress he knew, was in the far corner delivering food to one of the tables, so he sat on a stool nearest her station, by the beer taps. The ceiling was strung with white Christmas lights, glowing down on his arms as he rested them on the bar.

Sherry was taller and heavier than most waitresses in Portland, with a handsome face and a quick temper. Her skin was orange in the Christmas lights. She poured him a Hooker Ale. Aside from the large round silver stud in the middle of her tongue, she looked like a mom. “Your brother just left,” she said.

“He was here?” Bennie asked.

“Of course he was here. Just like most Tuesdays.” Then she started counting her fingers. “He bugs Martha. He drinks. He plays trivia. He bugs Martha again. Then he leaves. In that order.”

“Sorry about that,” said Bennie.

“Oh, I don’t care,” said Sherry Callahan. She was trouble—Bennie knew from Martha she had a coke problem and was hell on her boyfriends—but still, as a waitress, she could wax angelic with ease. She was always in control, like a bully. “I’m surprised he didn’t know she wasn’t working tonight. So, you feeling better?” she asked, sticking a pen behind her mannish ear. “The fall you took, that sounded nasty.” She glanced at Bennie’s crutches. “Maybe they need to put an electric fence around the quarry.”

“No, Sherry. They don’t.”

“Or barbed wire. Then you wouldn’t have ended up in that cast, right?” She smiled and folded her tan arms beneath her breasts. “I’ll tell Martha you were asking for her. I like the haircut.”

“So Martha didn’t work tonight?”

“She went to Tavis Falls,” she said. “She’ll be there for a few days. With Ray out of town—wherever he is—it makes sense for her to be up there. I think she’s got a shift or two back here on Monday.” She pulled out another glass and filled it, setting it in front of Bennie, beside his other full pint. “Here you go, Bennie. On the house. Good to see you’re out of the hospital.”

He ordered the open-faced turkey sandwich, choked it down, watched Nomar hit one out to left center—one of the few home runs the shortstop hit that spring training—and gave Sherry too large a tip before leaving.

9

A
fter leaving Rosie’s, he went to Helen’s house and parked in her plowed driveway. He hadn’t seen her for a week. All of her lights were out, but from the glow of her lava lamp he knew she was in her bedroom. He crutched his way to the porch and rapped on the heavy door. He was nervous to see her, excited, but also worried about how she would react. After a minute or two, she opened the door wearing her bathrobe. Her hair was wet, and in the dim porch light he could see her watery brown irises perfectly.

She said, “You’re on your feet.”

“I’m on one of them.”

“I was wondering if I’d ever hear from you.”

“I’ve been trying to get better. I wanted to get a little better before coming over.”

She put her hand lightly on Bennie’s head, rubbing his short hair gently with her fingers, avoiding the scar. “They shaved off all your hair.” She looked down at the cast, then back up at his face. “Your eyes look good,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Aren’t you freezing?” she asked. She helped him maneuver himself and his crutches through the screen door. When he rested his weight on his armpits, she said, “You smell like beer. Are you drunk?”

“A little.”