Water Dogs (16 page)

10

T
he next afternoon, when he drove back from Helen’s house to the Manse, Bennie was relieved to see Littlefield’s Chevette parked by the side door. He sat in the Skylark for a few minutes as snow slowly covered the windshield and made it dark inside the car. He looked at the backs of his hands, their red chapped knuckles.

He hopped to the oak door, exhausted. It was locked. Bennie pounded on the door. He’d been in charge of the Manse for three years and had never locked it. Growing up they’d never locked it, either.

After Bennie shouted and pounded for a minute or two, Littlefield finally came to the window beside
the front step. His hair was combed neatly and he’d shaved. His shirt was wrinkled but otherwise he looked well rested and calm. He opened the door a few inches and said, “I’ll meet you by the porch. I want a cigarette.” Then he closed and relocked the door.

The snow had lightened, but it was still falling steadily, and Bennie tried to concentrate on the task at hand—walking on crutches through six inches of new snow—without getting angrier. He met his brother by the porch.

Littlefield was sitting on the wood box, his thin frame leaning over his knees, halfway through a cigarette. Ronald reclined in the snow, licking his paws. Bennie stood leaning against his crutches, out of breath. He said, “Okay, now should I ask why you didn’t let me walk through my own house?”

Littlefield reached down beside the wood box and picked up their two old Daisy pump-action BB guns. Keeping the cigarette in his mouth, he handed Bennie one of the guns. He started pumping the other one. “Vin Thibideaux. He keeps coming around. We’ve got to keep the doors locked.”

Bennie took the BB gun and held it loosely in one hand. He felt ridiculous. These were guns he’d seen in the back of the closet, but he hadn’t used them since he was eleven or twelve. “Couldn’t you have just let me in? We still could have locked the door, Littlefield.”

“He’s already been here twice. I don’t want to give him an inch. He could have been hiding behind a snowbank or something.”

It wasn’t an argument Bennie would ever win, so he said, “Right.” Littlefield finished his cigarette, then brought the little BB gun up to his shoulder and looked through its sight.

Bennie knew where he would aim—the birdhouse nailed to a birch tree fifty feet beyond the stone wall at the edge of the yard. Littlefield squeezed the trigger and an instant later they heard the hollow knock on the front of it. Ronald went bounding across the yard, not breaking through the crust of snow, looking for the wounded bird. He got to the birdhouse, circled it, barked twice, then ran back toward Littlefield.

“What if Vin drove up to the house now?” Bennie asked. “He’d find us back here, right?”

“Maybe. Then I’d shoot him in the ass.” He pumped the gun again, raised it to his shoulder, and squeezed the trigger. Again, the pellet knocked the birdhouse. Ronald sprinted toward the far end of the yard.

“Where’s Gwen?”

“God knows.”

Bennie shook the gun in his hand and heard the rattle of pellets. He raised it to his shoulder and lined up the sight. Without hesitating he fired. They heard the same hollow knock. They kept shooting—alternating, listening for the knock against the birdhouse, watching Ronald race across the top of the snow. The dog would never get tired. Bennie relaxed. All he thought about was the gentle squeeze of the trigger and the birdhouse above his sight. It felt like the afternoon was stretching outward in a comforting, enveloping way. Neither brother seemed disappointed that the target was easy to hit, and Ronald seemed invigorated by the game. After alternating shots six or seven times, Littlefield put his gun down and lit another cigarette. Bennie asked him, “Where’s LaBrecque?”

“I can’t fucking believe you.”

“Do you blame me for asking?”

“I just can’t fucking believe you’re still talking about this.”

“It seems like you might know where he is.”

“Think about the snow we got that night—what was it, two feet? We’re all lucky we got out of there in one piece.”

This was something Bennie felt deep in the center of his chest: he knew they’d lifted his unconscious body from the bottom of the quarry, they’d carried him out, they’d brought him to the hospital. They’d saved him. In a nighttime blizzard, you couldn’t get much luckier than that. Bennie had even tried to call Boak and Shaw from the hospital to thank them, though he hadn’t reached them.

“What you should be worried about now is that Vin Thibideaux will keep coming around,” said Littlefield. “He’s all riled up.”

“You heard I kneed him in the balls?”

“Yeah, I heard that.”

Bennie looked for a smile on his brother’s face—or any other look of approval—but Littlefield didn’t seem to think it was particularly remarkable that Bennie had done this. He turned toward the back door, unlocked it, and held it open for Bennie. Ronald squeezed past them.

After Bennie had walked inside, he asked, “You know LaBrecque is Martha’s boyfriend, right?”

“Of course I do,” said Littlefield, who pushed the door shut behind him.

The back hallway was full of fishing poles and empty bottles of antifreeze and cross-country skis and ski poles, so Littlefield took Bennie’s crutches in one hand and grabbed his other arm as Bennie hopped through the dark house to his bedroom. At the end of the hall Bennie turned on the light, but Littlefield reached across his brother’s body and switched it off. “No lights,” he said. “And don’t let your girlfriend park in front of the Manse.”

All Bennie managed to say was “Will you tell me if you find out anything, Littlefield?”

“I will,” he said.

Bennie collapsed on his bed, on the scratchy wool blanket, tired from the drive and from the sleepover at Helen’s. He didn’t even take his one boot off. Soon he heard the front door open and close. He pressed himself up from the bed and looked out the window to see Littlefield walking to the Chevette. He kept looking until its headlights blinked on and Littlefield drove away.

The summer after Bennie graduated from Brunswick High, he and Littlefield spent a week on Cuxabexis Island in the middle of Penobscot Bay with their uncle Theo, working the stern of his lobster boat, helping him haul, bait, and set traps. Theo wasn’t their uncle, exactly; he
was Coach’s second cousin. They worked long days and went out with him at night, from party to party. Bennie and Littlefield had felt like minor celebrities—Theo was a popular guy on the island, especially with single women his age, and it seemed everyone wanted to meet his “nephews.” At the end of each night Theo would drive Bennie and Littlefield to his cabin in the middle of the island, down a winding dirt road, tunneling through the mossy forest. Littlefield and Bennie slept on a mattress on the floor in the basement.

Sleeping side by side was something they were used to, from family trips; Gwen refused to sleep next to either of her brothers because she was such a light sleeper and both of them talked and moved around a lot at night. Bennie and Littlefield no longer hated each other like they had when they’d been competing, when Coach was alive. Bennie felt that they had an unspoken understanding now, that he and his brother would look out for each other. Gwen was working at a summer camp in Standish, getting ready for her first year at Vassar, but Bennie and Littlefield had no special plans for the coming year. Lying on the mattress, they could see the moon through one of the little windows near the basement ceiling. It smelled like earth and woods and new carpet. Their first night on the island Littlefield told Bennie, “I’d be happy living out here. Way out in the middle of the ocean.”

“I think I’d miss home too much,” said Bennie. They were both lying on their backs, wearing T-shirts and underwear under the covers in the dark.

“Out here, though, you wouldn’t have to deal with any of the bullshit.”

“What bullshit?”

“The bullshit. Stuff like taxes and … I don’t know … lots of cars driving around and … people getting in your business.”

“Meadow is an island, too.”

“Yeah, but it’s kind of a bullshit island. You can drive to it.”

“I think they probably pay taxes out here,” said Bennie.

“Uncle Theo doesn’t.”

“Well, you could probably stay on the mainland and not pay any taxes, too.”

“Whatever,” said Littlefield. “You know what I’m talking about. All that crap you need to deal with. It’d be simpler here.”

Bennie looked across the room at the window, which framed the moon and the clouds racing by. He wondered if his brother, whom he knew to be smart in school, was acting dumb just to trick him. But he liked listening to Littlefield’s voice, which sounded like his own in many ways. They sounded more alike than they sounded like Coach or anyone else, though Bennie thought of Littlefield’s voice as a little deeper and less tentative. They drifted off to sleep.

Bennie awoke later—it felt like hours later, but he wasn’t sure—to what sounded like conversation. He blinked his eyes but he couldn’t see anything; the moon was gone. He waited to hear what Littlefield was trying to say.

“Hug me.”

“What?” Bennie asked.

“Hug me,” he said again.

“Are you awake, Littlefield?”

“Hug me,” he said, and he grabbed Bennie’s arm. His grip was loose.

“Why?”

“Hug me,” he said. His voice was pleading—not insistent, but close.

It had been a while since he’d given his brother a hug. He figured it was an easy enough request to satisfy. He leaned over and gripped his brother’s far shoulder and tried to give him a light squeeze.

This woke him up. “What the fuck?” Littlefield said, and jumped off the mattress. “What are you doing, Bennie?”

“You asked me to hug you.”

“Jesus, no,” he said. “I didn’t ask you to hug me! Damn! What are you, a homo?”

“You must have been dreaming.”

Littlefield paced around the basement, scuffing his feet against the carpet. “Jeez, my head’s spinning.”

The conversation ended there. Bennie didn’t expect Littlefield to tell him what it was he’d been dreaming about; Bennie didn’t even have a good guess. They didn’t laugh about it the next day, and when Bennie tried bringing it up a few months later, just as a joke, Littlefield shook his head and smiled dismissively. “I didn’t ask you to hug me, Bennie. You misunderstood me. That’s just you being a fruitcake.”

This was the push and pull with Littlefield—Bennie knew how much his brother depended on him, but he also knew how Littlefield needed to consider himself self-reliant. Bennie probably had some of the same inclinations himself, though whenever he talked with Gwen, she sympathized with Bennie’s frustration.

“He can be so selfish,” she had said during her first week home, for Christmas break. “He thinks he’s the only person in the world who lost a father.”

Bennie agreed with this. Littlefield
was
incredibly selfish, and he kept most of his opinions and judgments to himself, unless he was angry and he wanted to punish you. But Bennie reminded himself that when he and his sister were in high school they’d had friends, people outside the family who’d looked out for them. Littlefield had depended solely on Coach. There were entire days in the fall when the two would go off alone into the woods to track deer. He and Coach would walk slowly through the forest if the tracks indicated that the deer had been walking, and they would run together, Littlefield following their father, when they saw that the deer had picked up speed.

Vin Thibideaux came by the Manse four times in the next twelve hours, but each time Bennie kept the house dark. Vin would leave his police cruiser idling, come to the front door, knock, look in the windows on either side of the door, knock again, then return to the car, which labored
in the deep snow as it left the driveway. Bennie hid in the shadows of his bedroom.

The next day Helen called Julian to ask if she could skip her lunch shift—she said he was annoyed by this, but he allowed it—and Bennie picked her up in the Skylark. They drove out the Masungun Road, to Church Road, to a dirt road where they could access the snowfields and woods near the quarry. Bennie waited for the shock of recognition, a flicker of memory to illuminate his trip to the hospital, but everything along that route felt new to him. The wind was ripping through the woods from the east, the drifts were shifting, and the snow on the branches was dusting the road. They parked on the shoulder nearest the corner of the old stone wall—the same place they’d all parked the night Bennie had fallen into the quarry.

“You won’t be able to get down there on your crutches,” said Helen.

“I want to give it a shot,” he said. From the shoulder, Helen climbed down into the ditch, deep with plowed snow, then scrambled up into the field, trudging toward the woods north of the quarry, sinking in up to her thighs. She turned around and looked at Bennie, who was still up on the road. The wind blew hard at his back.

“The ground’s really uneven here,” she said. “I don’t think you should come. I’ll be right back. I just want to cross the field, get a sense of the area.” Bennie knew in the summertime the terrain was a maze of rocks and blown-down trees and brambles.