Water Dogs

by Lewis Robinson

  For now, though, he didn’t say anything. Despite his rationalizations he felt immature about playing paintball so often and didn’t think he could easily convince her that he was not. Just after they finished their omelets, they heard a car horn outside; it was Littlefield. The game started at noon. He gave her a kiss and told her he’d check in with her at the restaurant later in the day.

  Littlefield and Bennie drove across Musquacook to pick up Julian, who was slouching on the front steps of his house with a cigarette tucked behind his ear. Julian climbed in the backseat of Littlefield’s Chevette, then reached between the seats and popped Back in Black into the cassette deck. Bennie could see his own distorted reflection in Julian’s silver mirror sunglasses. “Gentlemen, no more tears,” said Julian. “I’m feeling it. We’ll win today.”

  Julian and Bennie always rented guns from the Dutchman, but Littlefield brought his own. With one hand on the wheel, Littlefield lowered the volume as they sped down Masungun Road, and took a cigarette from a pack on the dashboard. Littlefield was skinny, like Bennie, but his eyes were brown, the angles of his face more distinct, and he rarely shaved. The Chevette’s heater was broken, so Littlefield grabbed a wool hat from the dashboard and with one hand pulled it onto his head, covering most of his close-cropped brown hair, which—though he was only twenty-nine—was getting gray at the temples. He gently pressed in the lighter, rolled the window down an inch, brought the lighter to the end of his cigarette, placed the pack in his coveralls, and finally returned his hands to the steering wheel. Proud of this maneuver, he glanced over at Bennie. In the cemetery they passed, the snow was so deep that only a few of the headstones were showing. More snow was on its way that evening. Littlefield exhaled smoke over the top of the window.

  The Chevette was a new acquisition of Littlefield’s—Bennie had no idea where it had come from, and he didn’t ask because he knew Littlefield wasn’t happy to be driving it. His previous car, a Ford F-150, was rusty and temperamental but it had fit with his work as a builder.

  Julian was usually good for some pre-contest banter, but instead he was focused on Littlefield’s oversize paint gun resting in the backseat.

  “Why’d you spend money on this?”

  “You like it?” said Littlefield.

  “It’s not bad,” he said, turning it over in his hands. “But I don’t need it. The rented guns kill just as well.”

  “They charge you eight bucks every time you rent from them. We go every week. My gun cost one-twenty. It won’t be long before I’ve earned it back.”

  “Nice work, math whiz.” Julian put the gun back down on the seat. Bennie was embarrassed that his brother was earnest in his defense of this purchase. Laugh at yourself, once in a while, Bennie thought. It’s paintball. The gun’s a toy.

  The guns the Dutchman rented were low end, but for battles with the urchiners, precision often wasn’t essential. They tried to outfox their opponents and shoot at point-blank range. Bennie agreed with Julian: a poorly gauged sight wouldn’t cost you a win.

  Still, when they passed Rubin’s Small Engine Repair, Julian rolled his window down. He picked up Littlefield’s gun again and rested its muzzle on the car door and squinted his eye, lining up his sight. When he fired—missing a diamond road sign with a large black arrow—Littlefield shouted back at him, “Idiot!”

  Julian fired another one, and again the paintball sailed off into the woods. Then he brought the gun back to his lap and rolled up the window. “I can’t shoot for shit with that thing,” he said.

  “You think that moving along at fifty miles an hour has anything to do with it, douchebag?”

  As they pulled into the Dutchman’s parking lot, Littlefield opened his door and flicked the end of his cigarette to the snow. Littlefield pulled his Camel Lights from the front pocket of his coveralls, shook another one out, and lit it. Bennie tightened the cuffs of his gloves. Most of the time he found ways to get excited about paintball, but his brother’s foul mood made the whole charade cringeworthy.

  It was at some point late in high school when Littlefield completed the transformation from rich kid to local—from a boy who’d trained hard for their father’s ski team, earning all-state honors in ninth and tenth grade, to a kid who sold an ounce of weed every week at the private school where their mother worked part-time as a counselor. When Littlefield finished school, he started learning how to build houses and started caring less about what the family thought of him. The change happened not long after their father died. Bennie and their sister, Gwen, helped their mother run the house, but Littlefield had always battled with Eleanor, so he moved in with Pete and Skunk Gould, sleeping on the couch in their trailer until she moved up to a place in Clover Lake. When she moved, she left the family’s house to the kids. That was when Gwen packed up, too, and started her life in Brooklyn.

  They zipped up their tan coveralls as they walked over to the office. Usually, Bennie liked watching Littlefield pull the headgear down over his face, the rigid mask with built-in goggles, and he admired Littlefield for his toughness, his stubbornness, his fierce approach to the game. He’d always been in awe of this, actually—Littlefield’s ability to stay focused, to take the game seriously, to want to win, always, to never let the thought of losing distract him. Watching Littlefield check his gun this time, though—making sure the reloading action was working, lining up the sight, pumping a few gumballs at a nearby spruce stump—reminded Bennie of how pigheaded his brother was in general, how he took himself so seriously. Littlefield had isolated himself after their father’s death—he’d become much more stubborn and smug—and while there were times when Bennie was envious of Littlefield’s confidence, this was not one of them. We’re playing a game. Take it easy.

  Through the scratched, fogging plastic of his own mask, Bennie saw the urchiners. Their masks were down, too, and they wore belted white snowsuits. They held their guns tight against their stomachs, each in the same way. They were rugged, but with their new matching snowsuits, they looked like happy snowmen.

  “Here’s the thing,” Julian whispered. “They’ve got a new guy. I don’t even know his name.”

  “LaBrecque,” said Littlefield. “Ray LaBrecque. The one in the middle.”

  Boak and Shaw were the veterans of the urchiner team—they were squat and muscular—and LaBrecque, the tallest of the snowmen, towered between them like an older brother.

  “Yeah, okay. Well, he’s their weakness,” whispered Julian.

  The game was better in summertime because more shots were fired and you sprinted around the course like a spooked dog; the anxiety about getting shot was heightened because you wore fewer layers and the paintballs left bigger welts. This was something the rookie paintballers didn’t consider: the incentive to avoid your opponents’ fire went far beyond just wanting to stay in the game. Getting shot was not like getting tagged in touch football. Getting shot hurt, like getting snagged on a barbed-wire fence. With paintball, you were always just one stupid move away from the shockingly sharp sting of humiliation and loss.

  In wintertime, this fear was lessened because of heavier clothes and snow bunkers, but the starkness of the weather added to the drama. The margin for error was small. There was no greenery, and the drifts were difficult to run through.

  Bennie and Littlefield’s understanding of each other was best in evidence at the Flying Dutchman. Their father had been a marine, which made running around with guns especially appealing to Littlefield. (It didn’t seem to matter to him that their father hadn’t gone to Vietnam but had instead served stateside as a “logistical specialist,” driving trucks.) Bennie, on the other hand, didn’t care for paintball itself, but he liked the camaraderie—most of the time, he liked being on his brother’s team. Julian competed for different reasons. He was both a pacifist and a hedonist, a guy whose idea of the perfect afternoon was getting stoned and reworking dessert recipes at his restaurant, thinking about pasta specials and new keg beers for the bar. Most people who knew
him would never have guessed he was a top-shelf paintballer—not exactly an instinctual marksman, but a sneaky, ruthless, no-conscience killer. He played because he hated to lose.

  The urchiners didn’t wait around to shake hands. When they saw their opponents arrive, they started walking to the west side of the field. Julian and Bennie still needed to pick up their rented guns. Gendron Knight, the overweight ex-con who ran the Dutchman, knew they were coming, and he lumbered out of his shack and handed them two semiautomatic markers without a word. They hadn’t been to other paintball courses, but they knew the Dutchman was a no-frills enterprise. It had banged-up rental guns and a wire-mesh fence containing an un-manicured thirty-five-acre plot of land with just about every possible New England geological variation: thick woods, fields, sand pit, low scrub, stream, pond, boulders, swamp, though the snow flattened everything out a bit. Even the man-made obstacles, plywood bunkers tall enough to stand behind in summertime, were half buried.

  The rivalry with the urchiners was the worst kind, because the urchiners didn’t consider Bennie and Littlefield and Julian much of a challenge. Once the game began, Bennie and his teammates moved around the course, sweating, squinting their eyes, searching the woods for any suspicious movement, wondering whether or not they’d get shot in the back. Bennie felt the urchiners’ presence behind every tree, every bunker, but catching sight of them was rare. On a small paintball course, games lasted five or ten minutes, but on the big open course at the Dutchman, with practiced, paranoid soldiers, games lasted much longer. For the first hour, Julian and Littlefield and Bennie stuck together, and they didn’t once glimpse the urchiners. They suspected the urchiners had taken hold of the interior, so they trudged their way along the fence. Littlefield didn’t make any sprinting forays. He was usually a good one for the kamikaze mission, swooping through enemy territory at full speed, making kills or flushing meat out into open ground for Julian and Bennie, but everyone was more tentative that afternoon. Because of the urchiners’ new guy, LaBrecque, Littlefield said they had a real chance to win.

  Boak and Shaw, the mainstays of the urchiner team, were glass-eating gorillas, burly and tough and unpredictable. They were cousins, and both of them had military training, which helped with the game, but what made them better than most teams was that they didn’t mind sitting in a snow hole for hours. They’d keep a man out front—in this case, LaBrecque, the rookie—and Shaw and Boak would bunker in the deep snow or camp out in the big plastic tunnel at the center of the course: “the snake.” They’d had a few matches with the urchiners in which Littlefield had gotten shot by both Boak and Shaw, from either end of the snake, the barrels of their guns pointing up through the snow. What these gorillas did for a living (maneuvering a small boat in shallow waters during the wintertime; diving with two tanks on their backs in the surge around the shoals in a dry suit that kept you just warm enough to stay alive, gathering sea urchins) got them accustomed to being patient and weathering pain. The best strategy with the urchiners was to do whatever possible to spring them from their little rat tunnels.

  The paintballer’s credo is to kick ass. To blast hard and fast and to kill indiscriminately, to model yourself after soldiers or Indians or gangbangers acting fiercely in battles you haven’t had to fight. Bennie tried to be fully compliant with the paintballer’s credo whenever he was at the Dutchman. It was guys like Shaw and Boak who had originally established the credo, actual vets—they’d been in Saudi during the Gulf War. They had a good handle on how to set the tone at the Dutchman.

  During the second hour, Littlefield ventured about twenty yards ahead—Julian and Bennie hung back in a snarl of spruce trees—but nothing came of it. As usual, the urchiners were perfectly happy just holing up, waiting for their opponents to make the wrong move. Just before the whistle blew, Bennie found LaBrecque. He was set up behind them, prone, most of his body hidden by a plywood bunker, but Bennie had a clear bead on his head. Because it was so late in the match, a hit would seal the win. Bennie locked him in. He had him fully FedExed (Julian’s term), but just before Bennie squeezed his trigger, LaBrecque must have felt his gaze. His head popped down, out of view. Gendron Knight blew his whistle.

  Ultimately, an uneventful match.

  When the whistle blew, Bennie’s fingers were stiff in his gloves, his back ached from crouching, and all he’d been thinking about (before he’d had the chance to aim his gun at LaBrecque’s head) was heating up some beef stew, filling the fireplace with wood, and sitting on the old purple couch with Helen.

  They all knew the Dutchman closed at two-thirty in the wintertime and that Gendron got crabby when he had to shut down late, so when the whistle blew everyone came out from the trees. Bennie was relieved, ready to end the game despite the tie score, but the urchiners were clearly annoyed. They all gathered by the frozen duck pond near the north fence, masks still on, as Boak and Shaw approached.

  Boak was their captain. It wasn’t until all six men had gathered in a tight circle that he pulled off his hat and mask. His hairline was just a few inches above his eyebrows and his cheeks were badly scarred from acne and other aggressions. There weren’t many guys in town that just by standing in front of you made you consider exactly how to defend yourself. Boak looked capable of considerable bare-handed violence. The same was true of Shaw. The game was over and no one on his team had been hit, but still Boak looked like someone had kidnapped his sister. He was flushed and ugly. Shaw and LaBrecque removed their hats and masks, too. Bennie hadn’t seen LaBrecque before today—he was six or seven inches taller than Boak and Shaw, had wide shoulders, whiskers on his sturdy chin, and gray eyes. He was probably younger than he looked. He gazed out and nodded to Bennie, to Julian, and then to Littlefield.

  Boak said it was a cracker way to end the battle. Littlefield said he couldn’t agree more. Tying was not part of the paintballer’s credo. But when Gendron Knight came out on his snowmobile to reiterate the time issue, there was no room for discussion. That’s when the snow began to fly; the storm was starting, little light pellets landing on Bennie’s eyelashes. They all put their hats and masks back on and trudged to Gendron’s shack to return the guns.

  Within the hour, Bennie and Littlefield and Julian were bullshitting at Julian’s. Through the window near the end of the bar, they could see the snow falling—now a heavy sugar snow churning in the gusts of wind. The sun hadn’t gone down yet, though the light outside was dark blue.

  Julian was officially off duty, but he was keeping an eye on things and helping collect empty glasses for the bartender. Helen was finishing her lunch shift in the kitchen—they stopped serving at three, but Bennie knew she had to Saran-wrap food containers, wipe down the stove and counters, and prep for the dinner shift before leaving, when she would drive back to his place, where he’d heat up the beef stew.

  The beer made Bennie feel warmer, but his fingers were still numb. They’d just ordered their second round when Boak and Shaw and LaBrecque entered the bar. They’d taken off their white snowsuits. Each had a thin layer of snow on his head.

  “Good battle today,” said Littlefield. With the stubble, dark eyes, and angular features, Littlefield sometimes looked vaguely canine—especially when he was about to start an argument. Bennie knew the pleasantries were fleeting.

  Boak brushed the snow off his black wool jacket, hesitating before saying, “Yup.”

  “Three pints for these boys,” said Littlefield.

  They didn’t seem to know how to respond to the gesture, but each stepped closer to the tap. They stared at the Bruins game above the liquor bottles. Once they had the pints in hand, Littlefield stood and motioned for Julian and Bennie to stand, too. “A toast,” he said, looking at Boak and Shaw and LaBrecque. “To your good fortune.”

  Boak smiled tightly. “You’re the lucky one, friend,” he said. Everyone drank. Then Littlefield suggested they all go back to the snowfields to finish the game. Shaw and Boak were interested. Bennie stayed quiet, wanting someone, Julian pe
rhaps, to offer resistance. LaBrecque was nodding, his eyes fixed on Littlefield, and it seemed they knew each other from another context. Fishing? Logging? Construction? Dealing pot? If they didn’t like each other, Bennie didn’t notice, but Littlefield had plenty of enemies. Littlefield told them they could easily break in to Gendron’s woodshed, get the guns, play for an hour, and see who came out ahead.

  Just as he said this, Helen walked through the kitchen doors, toward the bar. She was untying her apron, a slick of sweat on her forehead, a small stripe of tomato sauce on her temple, her hair pulled away from her face. At the sight of her, everyone seemed to take it easy.

  She tossed the apron at Bennie and smiled. “I can’t wait to fall asleep on your couch. I’m completely wiped.”

  “Can I meet you later? Littlefield and I are going for a walk,” he said, glancing over at the others, who didn’t seem to be listening. “Out in the woods.”

  She was quiet, and then she said, “You know it’s snowing, right? I think that storm is coming over from the White Mountains.”

  “It’ll be a short walk, then.”

  He wasn’t sure if Helen had seen the mask atop Shaw’s head and the bag of paintballs still tied to Littlefield’s belt, but she shrugged and said, “Well, I’m headed back to my place, then. Try not to drive into a ditch, okay?” When she took the apron off his lap he tried to catch her eyes but didn’t; she’d already turned and was on her way to the kitchen.