Water Dogs

by Lewis Robinson

  Julian and Bennie had only recently become friends. They’d been high school classmates, but Julian had spent most of his time working at the restaurant. The pub drew people down from Brunswick and up from Portland because of its views of the river, the tidal surge, the proximity to the ocean, its adequate food and comfortable atmosphere.

  After first seeing her, on his way home from work Bennie stopped regularly at the restaurant, where he thought about approaching her but instead stayed quiet at the bar. One unseasonably warm afternoon in late January, though, Julian placed a pair of sunglasses beside Bennie’s beer. “These are hers,” he said.

  “Why are you giving them to me?” asked Bennie.

  “It’s perfect. Just give them back to her. Say you found them outside. She dropped them.”

  Bennie looked at the black plastic frames. “You took these out of her bag?”

  “Look, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s a great opening.”

  “No,” said Bennie. “I’m not doing that.”

  “Bring them over to her. It’s a built-in conversation starter. The glare off the creek, how tough it can be when the sun’s shining. The angle of the sun. January thaw. You got it?”

  “Give them back to her.”

  “I’m leaving them with you,” said Julian, suddenly stern.

  Bennie folded Helen’s sunglasses inside a section of the newspaper and turned toward the kitchen to see if Helen had witnessed any of this. Julian was pulling back the Stella Artois tap, filling a pint glass, his hair hanging down in front of his face. Julian liked his place in the spotlight behind the bar, and at six-foot-seven, 230 pounds, with a booming voice, he was difficult to miss.

  Bennie slid the newspaper across the bar.

  Without looking up from the beer taps, Julian said, “You’re a wuss.”

  When Julian got closer, Bennie leaned toward him. “What time does she get here in the morning?” he asked.

  “Perfect idea,” Julian said, pointing at Bennie and smiling. “I love it. Come by in the morning. You’re the man!”

  Bennie glanced back toward the kitchen, but his view was obscured. “What time.”

  “She gets here around ten,” said Julian, leaning over the bar. “And she comes through the back alley. Bring the sunglasses. They could help.”

  “No. I’m leaving them here.”

  “Yeah you are, baby!” said Julian, swinging his fists like a prizefighter. “You don’t need nothing. You’re a killer!”

  So far the winter had been mild, though they’d weathered a few storms. Most of the snow had melted, as it sometimes did at the end of January, before the winter picked up speed again and kept everyone cold and snowbound until early May. For the past five years the January thaw had arrived predictably about a month after Christmas—rivers of snowmelt running along the shoulders of every road, everyone driving around in T-shirts, confused moose and deer trotting out of the woods to lick salt off the roads, causing accidents.

  When he arrived at Julian’s the next morning, Bennie didn’t go inside; he sat on one of the dented trash cans beside a storage shed, near the restaurant’s back entrance.

  There would be no way around the awkwardness with Helen. He’d just muscle through, skip the bullshit, flip past the usual channels. With Helen, he would be ready to put forward his best self. With Helen, he would make only occasional mistakes, and only mistakes that could be construed as charming and guileless.

  He arrived at nine-forty, giving himself some extra time to relax and acclimate. The time passed slowly, though when she finally turned down the alley, her clogs clapping the pavement, the hood of her sweatshirt bouncing around her neck, her approach was rushed—he hadn’t thought about giving her some kind of warning. He stayed quiet until she was just a few yards from the door, when he said, “Excuse me.” She slowed her stride but she didn’t look up.

  “Excuse me?” he said again, this time a little louder.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, looking at the ground as though she had dropped something.

  “Let’s go sailing.” Bennie was wearing his favorite windbreaker, with the stripe down the sleeve, army green pants, and running shoes.

  Helen removed her sunglasses—the ones Julian had stolen from her—and looked plainly at him. The muscles in her face relaxed. “What do you mean?” She wasn’t being cruel; it was a sincere question.

  “Well, the ocean is right over there,” he said, pointing east. “And it’ll still be warm tomorrow. And windy.”

  “Do I know you?” The sweatshirt was zipped all the way up, and she wore a calf-length jean skirt.

  “No,” he said, without elaboration. He’d planned for this; he assumed she wouldn’t like a defensive stance. He stood by his answer.

  She folded the sunglasses and slipped them into her pocket. “Do you have a boat?”

  “No,” he said, and it felt even better this time. “My name’s Bennie. I eat here a lot. I’m a friend of his.”

  “I’ve seen you.”

  “You have?”

  “I think so.” Again, she maintained an even tone and didn’t smile. He had no reason to believe she was being coy. “Were you the one who returned my sunglasses? Julian told me. I must have left them on the bar.”

  During this first exchange he got a good look at her eyes, up close—they were, as he’d thought, brown, and big, and the whites of them were shockingly clear. Under her dark eyebrows, they were identical in color and shape and glossiness and brightness, but then you could see that her left one was pointed gently inward. Was this called a wandering eye? She told him her name, her full name: Helen Coretti.

  She’d never been sailing before. He picked her up on his motorcycle at one the next day, when it was so freakishly warm that it felt like early summer. He knew there was a good place to rent boats near Meadow Island, Sagona’s Marine, and he was surprised they were closed. He hadn’t expected they’d have boats to rent in January, but he’d assumed someone would be around to loan him one. The owner had been a friend of Bennie’s father.

  The big doors to the back of the boathouse were wide open, though, and Bennie spotted a few small fiberglass boats tucked in the corner. He asked Helen to help him drag one down to the shore.

  “Are you sure this is okay?” she asked.

  “He’s a nice guy, Mr. Sagona,” said Bennie.

  “Have you sailed this kind of boat before?”

  “This kind? I think so. What is it, do you think?”

  “I have no idea. It says ‘Sunfish’ here on the side,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Sunfish.” He’d grown up on Meadow Island; he’d been around boats all his life. He didn’t know much about sailing, but it didn’t take him long to figure out how to let out the sail and drop the centerboard.

  Out in the channel, even though they nearly capsized five or six times, it only happened once and they were able to climb back into the boat quickly enough. The air felt like June but the water reminded Bennie it was still January. Helen didn’t seem to mind. She reminded him of bookworms he’d gone to middle school with—those girls who seemed to know so much more about the world than he did. Helen was surprisingly strong for a skinny person. He loved how her face looked with her brown hair slicked back as she came out of the waves, her thick green sweatshirt heavy with seawater. Helen easily scissor-kicked herself aboard, but Bennie was flustered and weak from the cold, so Helen helped him back into the boat, and even though the physical aspects of the moment were awkward, he had the presence of mind to breathe deeply and forget himself for a moment and simply be in awe of how pretty she was with the water shiny on her face, a drip rolling down her nose. He gripped the slippery fiberglass and she grabbed both of his cold wrists and pulled him up as he kicked in the water. When he was aboard he said, “You’re like a nymph.”

  She waited a moment before responding, which made him nervous.

  “Like in the myths, or the bug kind?” she asked. She made little pinching g
estures with her hands.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Which one?” she asked.

  “Maybe both,” he said. She seemed to like this answer.

  Bennie had stopped thinking about how embarrassed he should have been for not knowing how to sail. Helen was shivering, and she looked out at the surrounding islands like she was flying through the clouds in a dream. When the wind gusted on their last tack across the channel, instead of flipping over they picked up speed. The wind died and they drifted in to shore, the bow pushing gently up onto the rocks. He still didn’t know Helen, but what he read from her eyes, and the way she huddled close to him in the boat, asking him for the names of the spruce-tufted islands they passed, was that she was glad to have involved herself in such a plan.

  The drive home on the motorcycle made them colder than the capsizing. Bennie usually drained the oil from his motorcycle by Labor Day. But after asking her to go sailing he thought a motorcycle ride would be perfect, so he charged its battery and checked its tires. He’d been riding it off and on for a few years—he’d bought it two years earlier from his boss at the animal hospital, Dr. Handelmann—but it was more of an amusement than a mode of transportation, something to be used during a few weekend afternoons in July and August. It was midday and warm when they’d arrived at Sagona’s, but when they drove home the sun was nearly gone and the wind was still blowing hard off the water. Their cotton clothes were sopped in seawater. Helen made it bearable, though. She latched on to him, pressing herself against his back. He tried not to make more of this than what it was; he knew she was cold. Still, ripping along those back roads, banking turns with Helen hugging him—it felt miraculous.

  He gave her a lift to her house, less than a mile from the restaurant. When they arrived she was shivering, and she looked startled as she took off her helmet. Her lips were blue and her shoulders were raised, as though she was trying to keep her neck warm.

  “Thank you, Bennie,” she said.

  He was too cold to speak, so he moved to kiss her, which happened at the same moment she handed him the helmet. This was a smoother exchange than he anticipated; he just took the helmet, instead of Helen, into his arms. He didn’t go through with trying to kiss her; even then he figured they had a future, and he could wait. But then she said, “I’ve got to get out of these wet clothes,” and she smiled brightly one more time and started walking up the sidewalk toward her house.

  He followed her. When they got to the porch, Bennie could tell she didn’t know he was right behind her because she opened the screen door and spun around. It looked like she was planning on waving to him as he drove away. But there he was, two steps back. The way she jumped—a tiny flinch—was almost imperceptible.

  She said, “Oh!”

  “Hi. Sorry.”

  “Do you need something?” she asked. Her eyebrows were arched and she seemed genuinely interested.

  “I guess not,” he said. “I thought you’d invited me inside.” All of a sudden he was aware that because he hadn’t been wearing a helmet (she’d worn his), his hair had dried like a stiff flag, flying straight back.

  “You thought that I’d invited you inside?” she asked.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Wait, I don’t understand. Why did you think that?” She couldn’t tell that he was dying inside. She was trying to be precise. She was still holding the screen door partway open.

  “Well, didn’t you say … that you needed to take off your clothes?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. Her hair had been matted down by the helmet. Her bangs stuck to her forehead.

  “Never mind,” he said.

  As he turned back toward his motorcycle, she asked, “Well, did you need to take off your clothes?” and she opened the screen door a little further.

  “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

  “But you don’t have other clothes to change into,” she said. “Do you?”

  “No, I don’t,” he said, deflated.

  “Then I guess you need to go home.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “See you later.”

  “Thanks again,” she said, and she winked her good eye.

  Later, when he got home, after lying in the tub for an hour, his brain thawed. He thought more about that wink. He remembered thinking how smart she seemed, how aware of everything she was. There was no way she could have been oblivious about her reference to taking her clothes off, even if she was planning to take them off on her own. But then again, aside from the fact she was a good cook, he didn’t know much about her yet; in her line of work, put the linguini on the plate meant put the linguini on the plate, and maybe she’d simply been telling him she was cold—just sharing this information.

  He wondered if it had really been a wink, after all. Maybe it was just a muscle spasm brought on by hypothermia, or a way to distract attention from her wandering eye.

  They saw each other a week after borrowing the Sunfish from Sagona’s. It was their second date and they went to the Musquacook Public Library, where they were showing Babe, the movie with the talking pig. Afterward, Bennie declared the movie stupid. “Talking animals—doesn’t it seem silly?”

  “I thought it was pretty cool,” she said. His Skylark was in the shop and it was too cold for the motorcycle, so she’d picked him up, and was now dropping him off. They were parked outside the Manse in Helen’s old Jetta, which she rarely used. If she had a shift at the restaurant, she walked.

  “I mean, everyone hopes a pig or a dog or a horse will talk. Of course we do. But the whole point is … the thing about animals is … well, that we want them to talk and we think they might be able to talk, but they can’t. They just can’t.”

  She was staring out at the darkness through the windshield. She paused a beat before saying, “What?”

  “It’s too easy. It’s like a person being able to fly, and making a movie about it.”

  “Like Superman?” she asked.

  “I guess,” he said. He was feeling grouchy. He wanted her to understand his annoyance.

  He knew they were working their slow way toward an awkward goodbye, a silence in the car, the gearshift and emergency brake sentinel between them, so he told her they should do something like this again, smiled defensively, climbed out, then bent down and waved to her through the window, walked to the house, opened the door, and shut it without looking back toward her car. Of course he had wanted to kiss her. The logistics had seemed untenable, but now he suffered searing regret. After drinking half a beer and brushing his teeth, he climbed into bed. He hadn’t even thanked her for driving. An hour later there was a knock at his window. She was wearing sneakers and a dark blue tracksuit. Bennie opened the window. It made sense to him that she was standing there, out of breath. He wanted to reach his arms out the window and give her a hug, but instead he said, “Do you need something?” She didn’t get the joke. She just hitched an ankle over the sill and started climbing in.

  “I can go open the front door,” he said, but she ignored him. She didn’t speak at all. She had a fistful of condoms. He didn’t have a chance to turn on the light; she kicked off her shoes, crouched on the bed, and unzipped her tracksuit. He couldn’t see her face very well, but he could see nervousness in her smile. She reached her hand into his and relinquished the rubbers. All but one fell like playing cards to the floor; there must have been six or seven. “How long are you planning on being here?” he asked. When she lay down on top of him, her breasts and her stomach were soft and warm. They kissed and it felt almost argumentative, and he liked the feeling. He put his hands on her small breasts but she grabbed his wrists and pinned his arms to the bed. He tried to move but he couldn’t; she pressed him more firmly against the mattress. She released him momentarily to take off her tracksuit pants. Then she pinned him again, but only one of his arms, so he reached out and put his hand on her ass, which was cooler than the front of her body. He imagined her at the restaurant, dominating the kitchen, which Julian didn�
��t dare enter. Her physical strength was a secret: the people who ate her food didn’t know how heroic she’d been when the Sunfish had capsized. Soon she was squeezing him so fiercely, he couldn’t see straight, and usually this would have made him want to escape, but somehow he recognized that being trapped beneath Helen was an almost perfect place to be.

  3

  Bennie loaded the raccoons into his car, including the mother, who had eaten the sardines and was sleeping in the trap when Bennie came onto the porch at dawn. He wanted to take them down to the ravine before Littlefield woke up, but as Bennie was backing out of the driveway, Littlefield emerged from the house and climbed into the passenger seat. “This is a stupid idea,” he said.

  They parked on the high shoulder near Esker Cove, and when they got to the bottom of the ravine, Bennie put the babies, first, on a flat spot in shallow snow beneath a gnarled spruce tree. When he released the mother, she darted away. Bennie and Littlefield waited beneath the crooked tree to see if she would come back for the babies, but after a few minutes she was still gone.

  “It’s because we’re sitting here,” said Littlefield. “As soon as we leave, she’ll come back.”

  “You’re probably right,” said Bennie. They walked out of the ravine and returned to his warm car. Bennie was certain that in the cold the babies would die within the hour.

  “They’re rodents, man,” said Littlefield. “They can survive anything. They’ll be fine.”

  Later in the morning, Bennie and Helen ate cheese omelets at her house, listening to NPR, a report from California about the rise in the price of pine nuts, and a story about the beginning of Clinton’s second term. Bennie wasn’t paying close attention; he knew his brother would be picking him up soon to take him to the Flying Dutchman. Bennie hadn’t yet told Helen about his involvement in the paintball league—the dynamics of competition, the protective masks, the highly pressurized plastic semiautomatic paint markers, what it felt like to run around in the snow at the Dutchman, playing on the same team as his brother—because they hadn’t been dating for very long. He guessed she would have some kind of ethical resistance to the whole idea. He also suspected that she would enjoy it if she tried it; she’d revel in the irony. It would make her uneasy, like the zombie movies she loved to watch, but she would get caught up in the competition. She would be pleased to find how safe the game was, and that what they did in the woods was closer to cops and robbers or hide-and-go-seek than it was to war. It would surprise her. Maybe he’d take her to the Flying Dutchman for her birthday.