Water Dogs (26 page)

“You know, your friend Julian’s a real jerk. He really should be helping us.”

“He’s got other things going on,” said Bennie. As soon as he spoke, he didn’t trust his own knee-jerk defense of Julian.

“I don’t buy it. The restaurant is fine without him. He does nothing except drink and sit behind the bar. I think he’s just heartless. You’ve seen what a wreck Martha is.”

“What do you expect him to do?”

“Just what we’re all doing. He should be with us at the house. We should all stay together.”

Bennie agreed with this.

Helen continued, “I also wanted to say … I know these last few weeks have been incredibly hard for you, Bennie. You know, you’re not wrong to believe in your brother.”

He felt angered by this—not at Helen, exactly, but at her need to say this out loud. “I don’t need you to tell me that,” he said.

“Relax.”

“It just seems like no one is talking straight with me. Like everyone believes Littlefield is evil but they can’t say it to my face.”

“I don’t think he’s evil.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“I honestly don’t know. I barely know Littlefield.”

“I can read between the lines.”

“Jesus, Bennie, what do you want from me?”

“Just let me believe what I believe.”

“That’s what I just said. I want you to know you’re doing the right thing.”

After sitting for a few more minutes, feeling less defensive, he took Helen’s hand. Even when they stood up to brush the snow off their pants, the heron didn’t move from its spot. They left while they could still find their way through the woods.

Back at home, Gwen told Helen she’d gotten a few calls from the restaurant; nothing serious, but Hud Kenneally, the guy filling in as head cook, wanted to check in with her about how things were going. Helen was reluctant to return the call, so Bennie picked up the phone and dialed. He talked to Hud, who had plenty to say. When Bennie hung up, he said, “Yikes.”

“What?” asked Helen. “What is it?”

“It seems like Hud is really, really excited to be running the show while you’re away.”

“Oh, God,” said Helen. “Just don’t tell me anything else.” She held her hands over her ears.

“It sounds as though everything’s fine,” Bennie said, smiling. “He put up a New York Yankees banner behind the stoves. And he’s doing pigs in a blanket, corn dogs, and baba ghanoush appetizers. That’s all.” Hud had actually told him this.

“You’re lying!” cried Helen, reaching across the couch, trying to grab Bennie around the waist. He hopped to the other side of the rocking chair. “Don’t worry,” he continued. “Free corn dogs after every Derek Jeter spring-training home run isn’t costing the restaurant too much.” She leapt over the couch and grabbed him as he tried to escape.

They ended up on the couch, wrestling; she got the inside position and forklifted him onto the floor. He landed—
thud!
—on his elbow and hip. In his cast it took him a while to get back up, but when he did, he grabbed her wrists and pinned her to the couch. Her legs were kicking dangerously close to his crotch. “Uncle!” she yelled, but when he let her go, she shoved him hard and he landed on the floor again. He could tell she was worried she’d hurt him, so he faked a grimace, then grabbed one of her feet and tried to yank her down beside him, but she was well anchored and held her ground. Finally, she let him return to his seat on the purple couch, calmly. “Sounds like Julian’s really running a tight ship over there,” he said.

Waiting, in the abstract, was something that seemed a lot easier to do than it actually was. On the third day they sat together in the living room, Bennie started to wish Coach was around to provide a game plan or enforce the rules. What rules they needed, he wasn’t sure, but Coach would have known. He would have known how to reach Littlefield. He would have known exactly what happened to Ray. He wasn’t delicate,
or sensitive, but he probably would have known the right things to say to Martha, too.

After Helen and Bennie’s wrestling match, they all ate and napped, off and on, for the next couple of hours. Whenever someone would finish a bottle of beer, Gwen added it to the long line by the fire. They were all awake—Martha in the rocking chair, staring at the bottles, Helen and Bennie down on the rug beside the fire, and Gwen sprawled out on the purple couch. The sun had gone down so it was dark in the room except for the light from the fire, but still, everyone’s face was in clear view, orange from the firelight. Helen put more logs on.

Out of nowhere Gwen asked, “Hey, Martha, when did you meet Ray?” The question worried Bennie; he didn’t want her to say anything that she wasn’t ready to say. But Martha seemed almost relieved when she heard this. She looked down at her bottle of beer and smiled. She shifted her body in the rocking chair and told them that over the years she and Ray had crossed paths many times—they’d always known each other’s families—but the first occasion they spent time alone together was after they’d finished high school. Ten years ago. They were shocked by this. They’d never heard about Ray, but then again, most of what Bennie heard about Martha was what Littlefield told him, and even if Littlefield had heard about the existence of a boyfriend, he probably chose to ignore it.

When Martha started telling stories about Ray, she leaned back in the rocking chair, staring at the fire. Her voice was even and clear. She began with the afternoon Ray invited her to go four-wheeling in the sandpits; they’d seen each other at a town softball game and he’d heard about her off-road driving skills, so he figured it was a safe bet she’d want to go four-wheeling. She did. It was late July and the pits were empty. They rode around for a while, making long, sweeping runs down the steeps. She was sitting on the back of his Polaris Trail Boss and he had asked her to wear a helmet (he only had one for the two of them). At first she wanted to be the one driving, but after a while she
realized she liked sitting on the back; it was a cloudy day but the clouds were in large white puffy stands and the air was warm. They rode out of the pits to a trail in the woods behind Jackman Pond, deep lush green woods where the canopy was high above them, pine trees and moss and not too many rocks. They found a flat spot where Ray unloaded his backpack. Martha had tried not to show any surprise when he took out a blanket and a small black radio and a six-pack of High Life, but it was okay, she didn’t think it was creepy that he had a plan for them, and even though she wouldn’t have chosen to lie on a blanket with him in the woods on what was, really, their first date, she ended up enjoying herself, staring up at the pine branches, listening to the low sounds of the radio and occasionally a partridge flushing from the thicket. For a while, the bugs weren’t even that bad. They kissed, and then they fell asleep until the black flies came, at dusk. He gave her a lift home.

They started meeting up at night, regularly. She would sneak into his house after Ray’s uncle had gone to sleep. They were nineteen.

A few years later during a stretch when they saw each other only here and there—he would go to Montana and Idaho for months at a time to fight fires—he landed back in Tavis Falls for the winter and found a job plowing the town roads. She worked nights at the Black Harpoon in Harris and was trying to get an associate’s degree at USM, too, so she didn’t see much of him; it seemed to snow every night, and Ray was often asleep when Martha got back from the Harpoon. She had wondered about talking to him, trying to tell him she wanted to see him more often. One night she came over to his place and he was soaking in the bath; he’d just finished five hours of plowing and was reading a comic book—
The Thing
—and when she came into the bathroom she started telling him she was thinking about taking a break in her class-work, she wasn’t sure why she was getting the degree in the first place, and it would mean they’d have more time to spend together, and he continued to read the comic book. She said, “Are you listening to me?” and he said, “Yes,” but he kept reading the comic and she said, “It
doesn’t seem like it,” and he repeated her words verbatim. She was angry, but when he put the comic down, he looked at her, frank and clear-eyed. She remembered that look. He had never told her he wanted to be with her forever, never told her they would get married eventually; he had said he loved her, once, but it was when they’d been drunk in an aluminum bass boat on Jackman Pond. When he looked up at her from the tub, he handed her the comic book and said, “Will you throw me that towel?” He stood up out of the water and said, “I’m quitting the plowing job, if that’s what you’re asking about.” He never told her why, but she knew he’d wanted for things to work out between them.

But still, occasionally, months would pass and they wouldn’t see each other—Ray would have a job that would take him out of state, or up to New Brunswick, and sometimes he would leave without telling Martha. He would call her once he was settled in whatever town he was working, from a pay phone, and this was never the ideal arrangement, but they both seemed to know it was the way it had to be, at least for now. Martha had never really had another boyfriend, despite all the attention she got from Littlefield and others, so having Ray gone for months at a time, with uncertainty about his return, had become what she expected.

Martha stopped talking for a little while. Helen and Bennie were still lying on their backs, their heads propped up on a pillow, watching the logs burning in the fireplace through the long line of empty beer bottles. Bennie waited for Gwen to chime in again, to fill the silence, asking another question—but then Martha continued.

She told them that when her grandmother died, Ray had just gotten back from a job in Canada and she’d taken him to see her grandfather. He lived on Route 46 just past Dixon Corners in Harris, in a tiny house where he and his wife had lived for fifty-eight years. Martha was nervous, because her grandfather—she called him Pop—was usually grumpy, and though she’d always been close to him, she’d never introduced him to a boyfriend. Martha had seen Pop at the funeral; she’d
hugged him, but they hadn’t spoken much. After knocking they came inside and took off their snowy boots (he never came to the door) and they heard him bellow from the other room, “Put your goddamn boots back on.” So they came into the living room with their boots on, tracking snow in, and he was sitting in his La-Z-Boy, smoking a small black pipe with cherry-flavored tobacco. He looked at Ray—looked him up and down, twice—before saying, “Is that the Perkins boy?”

“No, Pop, this is Ray,” Martha had said. “I told you I was bringing him.”

“That Perkins boy is a fool,” he said.

“This is Ray LaBrecque,” she said.

“Hi, Pop,” said Ray.

Pop said nothing. Then he said, “He talks like the Perkins boy, too.”

“Eno Perkins? I know him. That’s not me,” said Ray.

Pop exhaled a long plume of smoke. Again, there was a pause before he said, “You play football?”

“No, I don’t,” he said.

“Not like the Perkins boy,” said Pop.

“I played hockey,” said Ray.

“Never really cared much for that game,” said Pop. He rested the pipe on the arm of the La-Z-Boy. “All that for a little piece of black rubber.” He waved his arms dismissively. “Slapping it around. Seems kind of foolish. But they like it, the kids who play it; I guess they do. You might be one of them. You and the rest of the LaBrecques. French Canadian, right?”

“Ray was the best on the team,” said Martha.

“Is that what he told you?” asked Pop.

“He was the best until he broke his leg, Pop,” she said, knowing he’d appreciate an orthopedic war story. “They had to put screws in.”

“Screws? My hip was bad, and then they sawed the bone down and reattached it. I’ve got some screws in there myself,” he said.

“How’s that working out for you?” asked Ray.

“Good,” said Pop, and Martha was surprised he’d given an earnest answer.

The house was clean, but the table in the kitchen was covered with a huge pile of dirty plates and brown paper shopping bags. “Looks better around here,” she said.

“Your mother has been sending a cleaning girl over,” he said. “Waste of money. I told her if she touched my table or anything on it I was going to beat her silly.”

“You didn’t say that,” said Martha.

“Might as well have,” he said. “She got the idea. She’s been doing a good job. Still, it’s a waste.”

“It’s pretty different without Gram around,” said Martha.

Pop knocked the spent tobacco into his hand, then dumped it into a coffee can beside his chair. He put the empty pipe back in his mouth. “You’re right,” he said.

If Ray had asked if he could help out in any way, with shoveling or splitting wood or chipping the ice off the eaves, Pop would have rejected his offer. Instead, Ray started visiting regularly, especially on the weekends when he wasn’t working but Martha had double shifts at the Harpoon, and he didn’t help out in any way, he just stopped in and took some abuse from Pop, occasionally firing an insult back—or at least that’s how he described the visits to Martha. Martha suspected they ended up watching television together, Ray on the couch in the corner, Pop in his chair, refusing to use the remote control, getting up to change the channel only when absolutely necessary, not letting Ray change it for him.

It had been that way for the last few years. When he was around, he was part of her family. When he was gone, he was far away.

In the months before he left to fish on the coast, though, Ray had started talking indirectly about their future together, a topic Martha avoided. Ray had said, “I’m going to be eighty-five and toothless and you’ll still be telling me to chew my food slowly.” He’d also said, “I
think Ray would be a good name for a kid, but we’d have to come up with a nickname.” And when they’d passed the town cemetery on their way to go bowling in East Stockton: “If they ask you, let me be cremated. I don’t want to rot in the ground.”

No one was making eye contact; Bennie was staring at the wall, and Helen was looking up toward the black windows. In the silence they all heard Ronald, who was curled up at the foot of the purple couch, exhale loudly through his nose, a dog sigh. Bennie couldn’t feel his own body, only the palm of his hand, where Helen’s fingers rested. Gwen looked asleep; her eyes were closed, but he knew she was listening. She said, “Tell us more.”