Water Dogs (15 page)

“Ah, good. Let’s get out the old paintball guns so I can blow a hole in your ass.”

“I’m tired, Helen. I can’t joke about it right now.”

She put her head against his chest and her arms around his waist. When he hugged her, the crutches clattered to the floor. They squeezed for a minute, maybe two. Then she leaned back and he looked at her up close—her shining eyes, the right one holding him captive. He pushed his thumb across her dark eyebrows. He said, “I’m sorry I got hurt.”

She said, “That’s not the point.”

“How about if you stop giving me shit about paintball?”

After a brief silence, she said, “I could probably do that.”

“You should try walking in the woods with a gun. It’s kind of fun.”

She squinted at him.

He nodded. “I know. You’re right. It was dumb.” All of a sudden he was ready to do anything, or at least say anything, to make peace.

“Can we go upstairs?” she asked. She looked at the crutches. “Do you need a hand?”

“I don’t think so,” he said, but he hadn’t yet tried a big set of stairs. The hopping tired his good leg. He stopped to rest every third step.

They went to her bedroom. The blue light of the lava lamp calmed
and comforted him in a way he hadn’t been calmed and comforted in what seemed like years. Life before the accident felt far away, but the blue light in Helen’s room was real. She asked him to lie down on her bed, on his back. She untied his boot and slid it off.

During their third date, Helen had told Bennie that after she graduated from Bowdoin, where she’d majored in geology, she’d thought about law school, and even medical school—she’d taken a bunch of biology courses, too, though she would have still needed more courses to apply—but cooking seemed like something she could do as a way to see more of the world first. She’d gotten a job doing prep work at a place on the West End in Portland called Vincent’s Bistro, and she’d been so fastidious and responsible that the owner was using her as the head chef within three months. The more time she spent at Vincent’s Bistro, the more she liked the meditative aspects of the job, and the more she was glad she didn’t have to talk much to others while she worked. As time went on, she was less and less certain she could hold a regular job—she liked an hour or two in the mornings to talk to others (she had lived for a while with a friend from Bowdoin), but otherwise she was glad to have much of the day and night to herself, living inside her own head. The job at the bistro ended up having too many social demands, which is why she’d moved to Musquacook and started working at Julian’s. Bennie thought about this often—he knew she was unusual. She was so unlike his mother, who even as a therapist couldn’t get enough time in the day to share her thoughts. His mother had lots of friends, and she always liked to talk about the complexities of her life. Helen didn’t share many of her thoughts with others. He seemed to be the primary person she confided in.

She wanted to see the cast. She pulled his sweatpants down over it, slowly and carefully. “Does that hurt?” she asked.

“Not a bit,” he said. He sat up to take off his shirt and she said, “Are you cold?”

“No.”

He put his arms in the air and she pulled the shirt over his head. He sat on the bed in his boxers and the cast, and she stood up in her bathrobe, walked to her dresser, and came back with a black felt-tip marker. “I want to sign it,” she said.

“Okay,” he said. He realized, then, that she was in a more playful mood than he was.

On the upper part of the cast she wrote in small letters:

“It won’t be long before the doctor takes it off,” he said.

“I know. I just want to mark the occasion.”

She tossed the marker to the floor and knelt on the end of the bed. It crossed his mind that he wouldn’t have ever again seen the freckle to the left of her belly button if he’d died in the quarry. She tightened the bathrobe and lay down beside him.

Helen reached down and put two fingers inside the top of his cast and asked, “Does it itch in there?”

“You have no idea.”

“I broke my wrist twelve years ago, and I remember. I wanted to chew my arm off.” She got up from the bed. “Let me find my yardstick.” From inside her closet she pulled out a long metal ruler with a thin layer of cork on one side. When she stuck it down into his cast, a cold tingle rose from his leg to his neck.

She knelt on the bed, the angles of her long body focused on scratching. All of a sudden she looked up at him, startled. “Bennie?”

He didn’t answer.

“Does that hurt?”

“Keep going,” he said, without breathing.

“You’re crying,” she said.

“The scratching feels good.” He let the tears roll down his cheeks. He put his hand up on her cheek and into her warm hair.

“You must have been scared, waking up in the hospital. Did you know what had happened?” She pulled the ruler out of his cast. He didn’t want her to stop, but he figured she had to, sometime. She straddled him, putting her hands up on top of his shoulders. He stopped crying.

“You know, I was just at Julian’s,” he said. “And I got into a discussion with Vin Thibideaux. And I ended up swinging my cast into his groin.”

“Good,” she said.

“He’s a cop.” He wiped the tears off his cheeks.

“I know he is, but he’s a jerk, too. Somebody needed to kick him in the balls. You think he’ll arrest you?”

“Probably not,” he said. “But he’ll get me back, for sure. Can you grab my sweatpants?” She reached down beside the bed and handed them to him. He sunk his hand into one of the pockets, grabbed the stones, and held them out to her. In his hand they didn’t look nearly as interesting as they had when they were wet on the beach. They looked like rocks he’d found in her driveway. “They were nice in Singer’s Cove, when I picked them up,” he said.

She cupped her hands to hold them. “They’re magnificent.” She stood up again and went to her bookshelf, where she kept coins in a white bowl, and she dumped the change into a pile on the shelf. When she put the stones in the bowl, they looked better.

She returned to the bed and told Bennie she’d helped look for LaBrecque out at the quarry. Lots of people from Musquacook and the island had been there, walking the snowfields. Julian had said something about this.

And Bennie tried to imagine it. He knew exactly who would have participated: mothers, lobstermen, volunteers from the library, guys from the town office, George Pettiworth (his old PE teacher), and George’s three daughters. Helen said no one really knew where to look. After two days of searching, the rumor spread that LaBrecque wasn’t missing at all—he’d gone back up to New Brunswick, where he worked off and on for a logging crew. His motorcycle was gone.

In the light of the lava lamp, he said, “It’s good to be back here, in your room.”

With her head on his chest, she stretched an arm across his body, her wrist hanging off his hip. After a few minutes, she said, “What do you think happened to LaBrecque?”

He had a picture in his mind of LaBrecque high-stepping through the snow, falling off the quarry’s edge, then later, lying still, the snow landing gently on his quiet body. He said, “It’s hard to even guess.”

“Do you think there’s any chance he’s still alive?”

“I’m sure he is,” he said, almost without thinking. He tried stringing together the images—LaBrecque finding his way out of the woods, returning to Tavis Falls on his motorcycle in the snow, or heading all the way up to Moncton to skid logs.

After another period of silence Helen pulled her wrist off his hip and her soft hand landed on his stomach. It was warm, and she rubbed little circles with her smooth fingers. When the circles turned into squiggly lines, he wondered if she was writing out words for him, a secret message, but he couldn’t follow it if she was. The painkillers he’d been taking had kept him from having any interest in sex, but he’d been off them for a week. In the light of the lava lamp, she sat up, then climbed on top of him again, pulling his boxers off, down over his cast, her hair hanging in front of her eyes. She took her bathrobe off. Her stomach and her underwear and her thighs were all as white as the ceiling. She sat up on top of him, but her thigh was getting scratched by the edge of his cast, so she quickly grabbed a T-shirt from the floor and put it between the cast and her leg and slipped her underwear off. He liked that he had never felt lonely with Helen when he was naked in bed with her. He tried not to float away into his own thoughts. He kept looking for her eyes through her hair to make sure she wasn’t drifting off, either. He held her waist in his hands. He heard a diesel truck rumble down her street. She maintained a serious, concentrating expression—her eyes half open, her mouth tense. Before they stopped she fell down on top of him, squeezing with all her strength, pushing him down,
knocking the wind from him. It felt severe, like tackle football on a cold day. When she finally released him, he asked, “Why do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Trap me on the bed like that.”

“Are you asking why I hug you?”

“I like it,” he said. “I just … it’s sometimes hard to breathe.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. But I like it. I just wanted to see if you knew how hard you were squeezing.”

“I guess I didn’t.”

The liquid blue of the lava lamp made Bennie feel impervious—a million miles away from thoughts of the quarry and LaBrecque and kneeing Vin Thibideaux in the balls.

It was around four in the morning when he sat up, opened his eyes, sweating, feeling both hungry and sick to his stomach. She’d turned off the lava lamp and there were no streetlights near her house. She didn’t even have a digital clock in her room. He shook her shoulder. “Helen,” he said.

“Bennie,” she said. She was still asleep.

“Helen, I’m sorry,” he said. He couldn’t see her, not even her silhouette.

“What is it?” she asked. She groped for his pillow, then his face. She was always kind in the middle of the night, even when he woke her up for stupid reasons, like when he’d walk out to the living room to doublecheck that he’d turned down the heat.

“I’m sorry,” he said, again.

She was waking up now, and so was he. “Why?”

He didn’t know what to say, exactly. He’d been dreaming. But he knew he wanted to say something. “I’m sorry, I guess … that I haven’t told you more about my family.”

“What do you want to tell me, Bennie? Should we talk about it tomorrow?”

He reached over and felt that she was propped up on an elbow, facing
him. He was still partway asleep, because he had a whole stampede of thoughts. Maybe a good starting place would have been Gwen and her nightmares, and Littlefield and his stubbornness. Or Nixon, the prize dog, and the day Coach saved her, the way Coach looked as he came out of the water at Cape Fred, his hair matted, his body paler than anything Bennie had ever seen, his strong, cold limbs. He could have explained to Helen the feeling of the damp wind on their faces and the thickness of the clothes they spread over Coach and Eleanor in the backseat, or the taste of the salt on his tongue, or the feeling of not knowing, the feeling of wanting to guess what would happen next. Before Coach died, before he saved Nixon, there were plenty of things to say about him—Coach was hardheaded, a lot like Littlefield, but that wasn’t the whole story. Their mother was devoted to him, but she would often say that she’d never fully understood him because his family was different, and what she meant by this was that she was from money and he was not. Bennie never worried that his parents hadn’t loved each other, but he felt sadness sometimes, looking back, realizing how estranged they were from each other because of their backgrounds, their families. Bennie’s mother never came to the Littlefield reunions, which happened every year. Coach disliked Christmas because of the hallowed traditions in Eleanor’s family: cutting down a huge tree from their land in the Carrabassett Valley, endless caroling, fig pudding, presents for the dog.

The problem about talking to Helen was not where to start but what to include. What he wanted to explain to her was that there’d be a time, in the not-too-distant future, when she would know him better and understand the subtleties of their family dynamic. He couldn’t think of the right way to say it, but he told her, “Littlefield wrote something for my dad’s funeral. I don’t remember all of what he said, exactly, but I remember being impressed that he had written it and that he had the balls to stand up in front of everyone and read it. Can you believe that?”

“I can,” she said in the darkness.

“What he said made everything—for at least a few minutes—seem so easy to understand. It was as though there were certain rules in the world, and the rules he laid out seemed really easy to follow. Everything made sense when he said it. I remember he said something about how Coach was true to himself, and that made things hard sometimes … Littlefield probably didn’t put it exactly that way, but he made that part of it clear, that Coach had been tough. But he also said we wouldn’t have wanted him any other way. Mom didn’t want anyone except the minister to speak, but Littlefield did a fucking good job.”

“That must have been difficult for him. To stand up in front of everyone.”

“It’s still hard to believe.”

They lay in silence for a minute.

“You know,” said Bennie, “I’d like to be true to myself, like Coach was.”

“How do you mean?” she asked.

“Not letting anyone down.”

Their eyes were slowly adjusting to the darkness. He wanted to say more; he could have said that he really didn’t want to screw things up with her, and that he believed he could live up to his potential—the path Coach had set out for him, of being true to your word, hardworking, honest—but when she put her hand on the back of his neck, he decided he didn’t need to enumerate. She curled up against him and said, “It sounds like it might be good for you to talk to him—tell him some of this.”

He nodded, but he knew he wouldn’t talk to Littlefield about Coach’s funeral. After a few minutes he said, “You know, when I think about my fall that night, and everything that was involved in saving me … well, maybe LaBrecque didn’t make it out, Helen. All I know is that Littlefield didn’t do anything wrong.” They stayed awake for a while longer, listening to the steel chime of the bell buoy near Esker Point. As they neared sleep, Bennie thought about turkey hunting with Coach and Littlefield, all of them dressed in camouflage, trudging
through the cold mud and brambles to a spot far from the road, huddling together against the same tree, Coach teaching them the difference between a cluck, a cackle, a yelp, and a purr, all of them waiting patiently together for a tom to parachute down from one of the pine stands.