by Hannah Tinti
The Colt was missing, which meant he had it with him.
Loo had handled these weapons hundreds of times. She knew them each by name. Laid out together, she hoped Hawley’s guns would create a map that she could make sense of and follow. Prove whether he was a criminal or a fisherman. A father or a murderer. She gathered the pistols and the automatics, the handguns and rifles, on the bedspread. Hawley had erased the past, both his own and his daughter’s. But there had to be some trace, some way for her to pull those lost stories into the present. Loo touched the cold metal. She closed her eyes and listened. But they would not give up their secrets.
Loo tied her hair back. And then she began to dig deeper. She searched underneath his mattress. She went through his sock and underwear drawer. She turned out the pockets of his jeans. She checked inside his boots. She put all the things she found on the bed next to the guns: six different kinds of hunting knives; brass knuckles; a box full of C rations; a spring-loaded pistol; a duffel bag stuffed with a change of clothes; ammunition stashed behind the laundry basket; a crank radio; a police scanner; a shillelagh. There was nothing surprising, not even a dirty magazine. If Hawley indulged in such things, he kept them out of the house.
Loo checked the back of the closet, then pushed aside Hawley’s shoes and tested for a loose board in the floor. She groped inside his pillows. She fanned the pages of his crime novels, looking for loose paper, and when she didn’t find anything she went into the living room and started searching through everything Jove had brought.
Jove was supposed to stay for only one night, but he had been with them for more than three weeks. His socks and T-shirts spread across the living room from the couch where he slept, along with piles of newspapers; a collection of half-full water glasses; the smell of aftershave, which he splashed beneath his arms instead of deodorant; and a dusting of small, white, downy feathers from a hole in his camouflage sleeping bag, patched on the outside with electrical tape, and quilted on the inside with images of ducks.
Each morning Loo would wake to the men talking and joking in the kitchen and cooking up enormous breakfasts—lobsters and steak and fried ham and even, one morning, a turkey, which Jove must have started sometime in the middle of the night. She caught him bent over the oven with a baster, sucking up the juice from the pan and spitting it out over the skin of the bird. “It’s like a baby in there,” he said with a sigh. “A little baby we’re going to eat.”
After breakfast the men worked outside on the new boat. Jove’s bag full of watches had been replaced by a wooden hull with a keel full of lead, resting on an immense trailer in front of the garage. There in the driveway the men scraped, sanded and recaulked. They worked until it was too dark to see, and then after dinner they turned on floodlights and worked some more.
After finishing a shift at the Sawtooth, Loo crawled out onto the roof outside her window and pretended to use her telescope, hoping to catch her father and Jove talking secrets again downstairs. But the men spoke only of Jove’s plans, unfolding maps and charting his trip, which now went from Olympus to the Hudson and all the way to the Carolinas, the Florida Keys and then to Cuba. Over the next few weeks, the men filled the garage with gear for the boat: a set of sails from the marine supply store; a fifteen horsepower motor that Hawley thought would be too slow but Jove insisted on keeping, to minimize drag; cans of gasoline; boat hooks; an anchor; life jackets; bailers; hurricane lamps; a flare gun and a navigation system.
That morning the hull had been dry and ready to go. The men hooked up the trailer to Hawley’s truck and drove off to the marina to get the boat into the water. It was the first time Loo had been alone in the house since Jove had arrived. She’d promised Hawley she’d meet them for the launch, waved goodbye from the porch, then opened the garage and jammed a screwdriver into the Firebird.
Now in the living room she shuffled through Jove’s meager belongings. Two packs of canceled playing cards from a Colorado casino; a pair of sneakers that smelled; some changes of clothes; a washcloth and a bar of soap in a baggie; a leather pouch full of receipts; two overdue library books—Great Expectations and David Copperfield—their plastic covers flaking at the spine, their pages stained with other people’s dinners; and a catalog for specialty clothes made just for boating, waterproof pants and scratch-proof sunglasses and captain’s hats with gold braid trim.
She took a closer look at the receipts. They were from gas stations and diners and motels, from bars and fast-food drive-throughs. Organized and filed by date, as if Jove were a businessman getting ready to file an expense report. She found a handwritten list of watch manufacturers, itemized like a grocery shopping list. She found a nautical map of the North Shore. And she found a ripped page from a motel Bible. Across the text in black marker was the name of the street where Hawley and Loo had left all of the stolen cars.
Loo tore the Bible page into pieces, carried it into the bathroom, dumped the shreds into the toilet and flushed, the ink swelling and bleeding and then spinning down the hole and out of her life. Loo washed her hands at the sink, and then, when she turned off the faucet, she heard the toilet start to ring. The bowl had flushed fine but there was a vibration in the water. Loo jiggled the handle. The ringing continued. She jiggled some more. The ringing would not stop, steady and high-pitched and irritatingly insistent. She eased down the toilet seat, and then lifted the heavy porcelain lid off the tank.
There was something in the water. A row of containers set along the bottom, underneath the float. Loo reached down into the cold wet and pulled out a jar and set it dripping on the counter next to the sink. The glass was clouded, the metal top beginning to rust along the edges. She pulled out three more jars. Then she opened one. The metal ring left traces of red dust on her fingertips, and the scent of licorice filled the room.
The candy was long and thin as black shoelaces. Loo threaded her fingers into the sticky nest and felt something hidden underneath. She dumped the licorice into the sink and behind it came fat rolls of hundred-dollar bills, held tightly together with rubber bands. Loo pulled one loose and counted ten thousand dollars. The money was crisp and stiff, like it had never been used, and the bottom of each bill was stained a brownish red, the same color that had been left on Loo’s fingers when she’d turned the lid. She opened the other jars and dumped out the same candy and rolls of money. She counted it all. She counted it again. There was more than $450,000 in the sink.
Loo sat down on the edge of the tub. She tried to remember the last time she’d opened the back of the toilet. Was it two months ago? Three? There had never been anything inside but murky water. She picked up one of the billfolds and examined it closely, running her finger along the edge. The stain was not powder or rust. It was blood that had soaked through the bills to the center of Hawley’s money. All she could think about as she replaced the bandaged rolls, covered them with candy and set the jars back inside the tank was who that blood had belonged to. Then she reached into the water and adjusted the float and stopped the pipes from ringing.
—
SHE FOUND HAWLEY at the marina, surrounded by motorboats and catamarans and day sailors and cruisers of every shape and size—in dry dock or hitched up to moorings in the harbor. The crane operator was in the cabin overhead and calling down instructions and Hawley was securing chains and canvas straps around the hull of Jove’s sailboat, which was still perched on top of its trailer. They were using the basin’s stiff-leg crane, which was normally busy this time of year hoisting fishing trawlers and luxury yachts out of the ocean and onto their winter storage cradles. Loo locked her bike to the fence, then started across the parking lot, running into Jove as he came out of the harbormaster’s office.
“Good—you’re here!” he said, shoving his wallet into the front of his pants. “Now you can do the christening, and my send-off will be properly blessed. I’m sure you’re sick of having me hanging around the house.”
“I’m not a priest,” said Loo.
“You’re
a woman,” said Jove. “That’s close enough.”
He was wearing clothes from the catalog Loo had found at their house—fancy leather boating shoes and a windbreaker covered in reflective decals that was supposed to double as a tent in bad weather. He even had the captain’s cap, with the gold braid. He tipped the hat now at Loo, then hurried off to talk to the crane operator.
Across the dock, Hawley lifted his head when he heard her voice. He tied off the ropes he was handling underneath the boat and waved her over.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“I’ve got something for you.” Loo held out the Polaroid of Lily in the hospital, smiling and holding her newborn baby.
Hawley wiped his fingers on his T-shirt and grabbed the picture. It took a moment for his eyes to focus on the image and then—was it joy? Was that what she was seeing? It was as if the sun had shifted to brighten every inch of his skin.
“I brought the Firebird back to Mabel Ridge,” Loo said.
Just as quickly as it had come, the happiness drained out of Hawley’s face. His hand tightened around the photograph. “What did she tell you?”
“She said you left me after Mom died.”
Loo could tell this was not what her father had expected to hear. His gaze faltered and drifted back to the picture, so that when he finally spoke, it was as if he were talking to Lily and the baby instead of her. “I never wanted you to think I didn’t care,” he said. “That’s why I never said anything.”
“So it’s true.”
“Yes,” said Hawley. “But I came back.”
“After four years?” Loo said. “What the hell were you doing?”
Hawley would not look at her. He stared at the photo instead. Then he tucked the picture under his palm and slid it into his pocket. Loo realized, as she watched him steal it away, that he had probably been the one behind the camera, framing the image, adjusting the flash, taking the shot.
“Did you kill her?”
“What?”
“Did you kill my mother.”
Hawley took a step back, as if she’d just hit him with her rock-in-a-sock. She nearly felt sorry for him, even though she was so angry at him for abandoning her, even though she’d had to dig the truth about who he was from the back of the toilet with her own hands. Her father’s jaw went tight. She knew he was making up his mind how to answer. And then his face smoothed out, the way it did right before he was about to throw someone off a pier.
“She’d be alive if she hadn’t met me,” said Hawley. “So yes. It’s my fault she’s gone.”
Loo felt sick. Her father would not meet her eyes. He stuffed his hands in his pockets, but his voice remained steady and cold and hard as he told Loo the rest of the story she’d been waiting to hear. About a young family enjoying a day at the lake, about a shadow stepping in between them, about a baby and a gun and a father and a mother and a body slipping beneath the surface. As he spoke Hawley’s voice became more hollow, as if he’d created some distant version of himself, a shell that was standing in for his own body.
“Talbot came after us because of something I’d done. I’d hurt somebody he loved and he wanted to hurt me back. But your mother protected me. She protected us both.”
“So he killed her.”
“Yes.”
“And I was there, too?” It had never occurred to Loo that she had been a part of this story. That the blue dot on the map that fit beneath her finger had contained her as well as her parents. Somewhere, hidden deep inside her consciousness, were her own memories of what had happened. A thorn from a teacup fallen into a crack on the floor. If she could find the right tool to slip it loose, that day would no longer belong just to Hawley, and she would finally know what her mother’s breath had felt like on her cheek.
“Yes,” said Hawley. “But we made you safe. We made you safe together.”
The crane rose and the chains clanked into place. There was a groan as the sailboat lifted off its trailer.
“There she goes!” Jove cried.
Hawley put his hand on Loo’s shoulder. “I’m sorry you had to find out this way,” he said.
“You told me never to say I’m sorry.”
“You shouldn’t,” he said. “Those words aren’t for you.”
The hull rose until it was suspended over their heads, and then the sailboat began to move in the air as if it were flying. Hawley left Loo’s side and went down to the dock. He helped Jove catch the boat and guide it into place. Dangling over the wharf the sailboat looked beautiful, fresh paint gleaming in the afternoon sun, the mast high and proud, and then the hull sank into the water, and the weighted keel disappeared.
The men hurried around, connecting the electric pumps. The wood needed to swell for a day or two. Until then, the sea soaked into the caulking and filled the bottom of the boat, so that the hull rested low against the dock. Jove tossed the hoses overboard. Hawley pulled the cord on the motor. The pumps started up, sucking in and spewing out.
Jove stood on the bow and waved to Loo. He dug into his rucksack and pulled out a bottle of Champagne. “Get your ass down here.”
Loo crossed the aluminum boat ramp, feeling light-headed. The tide was coming in. She could hear waves hitting the pilings down below. The boat bobbed against the floating dock, so full it looked like it was sinking.
“It’s bad luck if the bottle doesn’t break,” said Jove. He handed the Champagne to Loo. He pointed to a large brass cleat screwed down on the tip of the bow.
Loo swallowed hard. “Should I say something?” she asked.
“How about a prayer,” said Jove.
Loo tightened her grip on the neck of the bottle. The foil was starting to come loose.
“Bless this boat,” she said. It felt strange to say even that much. She’d never been in a church. She didn’t know the right words. She looked to Jove, who had pulled off his captain’s cap.
“Say something about new beginnings.”
“Okay,” said Loo.
“And no sharks. And no leaks. And no bad storms.”
“All right,” said Loo. “Yes. All those things, too.”
“No pirates. And no ex-wives, either.”
“Is there anything you do want?” Loo asked.
Jove shook his head. “This is the only thing I’ve ever wanted.”
A wave came in from an oil tanker. Loo bent her knees to keep her balance on the dock, the bottle heavy in her fist. It was as if she’d lost her sense of gravity and was spinning into empty space, circling away from Earth and past the other planets, to a distant, solitary orbit. Pluto. She was Pluto. Loo tried to remember the chart from the back of the Carl Sagan book. The numbers that told her how much she mattered. She could sense Hawley beside her. She looked only at his hands.
The sinking boat rose and fell.
“Somewhere,” Loo said, “something incredible is waiting to be known.”
They all stood quietly on the dock, listening to the sound of the pumps sucking and spitting. Loo lifted the bottle by the neck, so that it was over her shoulder.
“What’s the name again?”
“Pandora,” said Jove.
“What if the bottle doesn’t break?”
“Everything breaks if you hit it hard enough.”
Her father crouched down on the dock. He steadied the boat for the blow. Loo looked at the back of his head. For the first time in her life, it was Hawley she wanted to hurt. Smash the bottle against him instead of the boat. He’d built a shrine in their bathroom, mourned and worshipped the scraps of her mother’s memory, and all the while there was $450,000 hidden in their toilet, covered with blood, from the same criminal life that had taken Lily from them. Loo didn’t even want to know whose blood it was anymore. She’d uncovered enough secrets.
It was time to make her own choices. Create her own lies. Loo aimed at the metal cleat on the bow, the one meant for securing the anchor. And then she swung the bottle with all her might.
Bullet Number Ten<
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HAWLEY GOT AS FAR AS Denver, then took a prop plane over into Wyoming and landed in Sheridan. There were only eight seats on the plane and Hawley’s was right on the wing. He had to fold himself to fit. His knees jammed, his shoulder pressed against the aluminum shell as they banked steep over the Rocky Mountains. He watched the blades spinning and churning the air through the stained plastic of the window. The noise blocked everything, inside and out.
Once they landed, Hawley gathered his bag, which carried a change of clothes and the orange toolbox full of medical supplies he still had from the prepper in Alaska. He stole a car and then after one hundred miles he stole another. He found a pawnshop and picked up a .357 with a six-inch barrel. He drove to another pawnshop and got a decent shotgun and a rifle and ammunition for both. He stopped at a feed store in town and wandered the aisles with the cowboys and cattle ranchers and bought some basic camping gear, some Sterno and two blue tarps and some extra socks and a new pair of boots and some rolls of heavy plastic and tape and rope and trash bags and a fence clipper and a knife and a hammer and a metal file, and paid in cash.
He dumped the car and got a motel room and spent the afternoon taking the serial numbers off the guns. There was a baby crying in the room next door. Hawley had almost forgotten the sound. Twice in the middle of the night the cries woke him. The first time he got out of bed and stumbled into the wall, thinking he was heading into Loo’s room. The second time he stayed in the bed and stared at the slices of light across the ceiling from the blinds and scratched his beard until morning.
He’d stopped shaving and his beard had grown wild, spreading down his neck and setting out across his cheeks, as if it were determined to cross the bridge of his nose. It had taken twelve months to get this far, and each day the beard covered more of him. Here in Wyoming, Hawley had noticed, more than half the men had the same look.