The men tipped back their glasses of beer and rezipped their coveralls. “We’ll meet here after the game,” said Littlefield. LaBrecque was the first out the door, and the rest followed.
They dropped Julian off at his house so he could get more clothes, and Bennie and Littlefield went back to the Manse and bundled up, too. They had less than an hour of light left, and the wind was picking up. The temperature was dropping.
Everyone met back at the Dutchman, where Littlefield climbed the fence and broke into Gendron’s office. When he came back with an armful of guns, Bennie felt a new surge of energy. His hands had warmed up. Littlefield tossed the gear over the fence. They walked as a group to the quarry.
The air in the dark purple woods was thick with quiet snow. They labored through the drifts, barely able to see each other, the wind cold on Bennie’s face. Even though Keep’s Quarry and the forest surrounding it was less than a quarter-mile from the road, it took them a half hour. With snow covering the thicket, every few steps someone’s feet would get tangled in brambles. The wind gusted in the trees and the shadows dulled as it got darker, and they had to pay close attention to the branches that hung down by their eyes. Everyone was winded and sweating. When they finally got to the woods, they stood in a circle and Littlefield said that he, Bennie, and Julian would take the far side. When the urchiners lined up on the near side, Bennie could see them, faintly, through the snow.
Littlefield signaled the restart by raising his arm. The urchiners jogged three abreast along the rim of the quarry, out of range. Littlefield turned to Julian and Bennie and said, “We only have an hour. Bennie and I will head up to the north edge, and we’ll try to flush them out in your direction, Julian. You stay put—we’ll get them out in view.”
Bennie’s legs felt weak. He said, “How about if Julian goes with you and I stay.”
“But he’s a better shot than you,” said Littlefield.
Julian shrugged. “Whatever, man. Let’s try it. Let’s kill these fuckers.”
Littlefield looked at Bennie, sternly, and asked, “What are you, tired?”
“I think … I’d just rather hole up right here,” said Bennie.
Littlefield shook his head. “All right, Julian. Let’s go. Just don’t fall asleep on us, Ben. Quit being a pussy and make sure you blast away when the time comes.”
Bennie wanted to respond, but his brother and Julian were already jogging to the north edge of the quarry, past the same spot where hippies jumped from the ledges on hot summer days. Bennie walked over to the spruce trees, hunkered in the deep snow, rested his back against the largest tree, and watched his steaming breath. There was still enough light to distinguish the sky from the canopy above.
It wasn’t long before Bennie lost sight of Julian and Littlefield, which brought him some relief—he was fine letting Littlefield lead the charge. It was Littlefield’s game, really, and Bennie was happy to let him win or lose on his own. Once the others disappeared, Bennie knew his only responsibility was to keep from getting shot. He did what he expected Boak and Shaw were doing: he dug a little trench and holed up and then pointed his gun out in the direction where he expected LaBrecque to be. He thought of Helen, briefly—the way her nose would have crinkled up if he told her about these war games, in the storm—but then his focus returned to the shadowy gray forest and his cold body in the snow, his back against the spruce tree.
He could have called it off then, could have yelled loud enough to bring everyone in. He could have surrendered. It’s what he’d wanted to do, not only because he was getting cold again but because he was suddenly worried someone was going to fall down and get hurt. There was a brief window, before Littlefield and the urchiners got too far away, when he could have stopped the game. But he didn’t want to disappoint his brother—chances were, everyone would be fine and it wouldn’t be long before they were back at the bar, warming up and drinking beer—so he kept quiet.
After twenty minutes of silence Bennie saw from a distance through the billowing sugar snow two squat figures moving from one tree to the next, crouching, the black barrels of their guns raised and ready, pointing out from the trunks of each tree they hid behind. They were making a wide arc toward Bennie through the woods. The figures weren’t running but they seemed to be moving steadily. With his eyes wide open in the dusk, through the blowing snow he could see their silhouettes blurring against the stands of spruce. He considered climbing the tree he was leaning against—they wouldn’t guess that in the faint light of the snowstorm with a Kingdom semiautomatic marker in his hand he’d be above them, in a tree—but the gorillas were getting too close and he didn’t have time. He tried to be a quiet rock beside the spruce tree. The urchiners continued to walk toward him in a nearly direct line, but they were still far enough away that through the snow he must have been invisible to them. Bennie kept his barrel raised, holding his breath.
He heard it first, then glanced quickly over his shoulder, behind the tree he was leaning against. A white blur, silent, sprinting across the top of the snowpack. A snowshoe hare.
He could see they were watching the hare, and the commotion gave Bennie enough time to lock in on Boak. For a split second he felt sorry, knowing how seriously Boak took the paintballer’s credo. Bennie squeezed his trigger and sludged Boak in the shoulder. He fell to his knees. “Man down!” Boak screamed.
Shaw charged, and Bennie jumped out of his trench, turned, and ran. Shaw was pumping shots; one hit a tree Bennie’s shoulder brushed against as he fled. The snow was deep but he felt fast; he felt daring and purposeful and somehow he felt certain he would elude Shaw. The ground beneath the snow was now flat and hard instead of bramble, so he was able to pick up speed. Bennie was high-stepping, sprinting toward the wide gray clearing in front of him. The snow was not as deep, he was getting faster, and he glanced back—Shaw was close, but he had stopped, he had his gun raised—and when Bennie returned his gaze to what was in front of him, his feet were free and he was falling.
There was a second of calm—the wind felt different, it was warmer, his legs were still churning, and he was falling with the snow. He felt light and unencumbered. There was nothing to be afraid of. He had no idea what would happen next. He thought he had picked up so much speed, he was flying. Flying away from Shaw. In the instant before hitting the ice at the bottom of the quarry, he was sure that Littlefield would be proud.
4
They’d gotten into paintball because of hunting, and they’d only started hunting regularly after their father died. He’d been a hunter, and he’d also been their biathlon coach. Most people in Maine wouldn’t have any idea that there were kids of all ages who competed in a sport that combined cross-country skiing with shooting a rifle—and that these fledgling contests had begun in the late seventies. It had been William Littlefield, Sr.—known as Coach to everyone, including his children—who’d started the Saturday-afternoon races, which were still small-scale but were now happening everywhere: in Rumford, Ogunquit, Bethel, Waterville, Dover-Foxcroft, Brunswick, Bangor, Caribou, Cumberland, Blue Hill, and on Mount Desert Isle. Pulling his three-year-old twins, Bennie and Gwen, behind him in a plastic sled, Coach had gotten Littlefield on skis at age five. In his twenties, ten years after Coach died, Bennie had earned his fastest times, and his shot was finally steady. Comparing the sport to paintball was difficult: the course was much larger, you followed a track on skis, the rifles were real, and the targets were smaller. It was one of those sports, like iceboating or falconry, that was basic in concept but tricky to execute. After a while—as he kept trying and trying to get better, without noticing any results—Bennie started thinking of biathlon as that well-balanced, perfectly nutritious dinner that took too long to prepare and didn’t taste very good. As Coach had said to Gwen and Littlefield and Bennie when all three were still competing: “You each have talent. But to win you need guts and heart.” It took Bennie a while to understand what Coach meant by this, and once he did, he quit, and he was the last of the
three of them to stop racing. Like Littlefield, he started spending his Saturdays playing paintball instead.
Coach had been masochistic in his own training. After driving trucks at Camp Lejune, William Littlefield, Sr., trained his way onto the biathlon national team, and while he never competed in the Olympics, he finished thirty-fourth in the 1967 World Cup, cleaning all of his targets. He said if he hadn’t picked the wrong wax he might have made it onto the Olympic team. That was his story, and Bennie didn’t find much point in questioning it.
Later, Bennie learned that Gwen called from New York several times, leaving messages, telling Bennie her flight-arrival time—midday on his birthday—so that he could pick her up at the airport. Littlefield didn’t check the messages for several days. At the hospital, Bennie was propped up on pillows, drifting about. The doctor had piped a feed of liquid drugs directly into his arm: first morphine, which helped, then Dilaudid, which helped even more. He had remote controls: a red button in his right hand fed more narcotics, and the nurse call button was within reach of his left hand. He talked on the phone with Julian, who told him he’d visit as soon as things at the restaurant quieted down. Littlefield didn’t visit, either—like their father, he hated hospitals—but he called Bennie’s room the next day and said Listen up, it’s your brother, and he told Bennie he’d be feeling better in no time. High on the painkillers, with the static on the line and the certainty in Littlefield’s voice, Bennie felt like they were characters in an old-style radio drama.
“That kid, LaBrecque. He’s still missing.”
Bennie wanted to know the details, immediately, but the shock he felt in his chest made him afraid to ask.
“Bennie, are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“LaBrecque got lost in the woods. He might have fallen into the quarry. Like you did. But no one’s found him yet.”
“People are still looking?”
“The cops. Folks from Musquacook and the island. But he might have skipped town, too. Hard to say right now.” Before he hung up, Littlefield told Bennie to get home as soon as he could.
It wasn’t the head injury that had him fouled up, or his broken leg. It was knowing that surely he could have died. Waiting to be released, Bennie had a decent amount of time to think about dying. Where was LaBrecque? Had the same thing happened to both of them and only Bennie was saved? In the bed, Bennie was floating, encased in softness, a quiet ocean. Once he even had a vision of raccoon babies, a tight bundle of fur beneath the spruce tree, at the bottom of the ravine. Under normal circumstances, he wasn’t one to think much about mortality, but in the hospital he started seeing himself disappear, melting into the snow right beside LaBrecque, the guy he didn’t know, with the gray eyes and the large white snowsuit. The way it seemed to have happened was that when Bennie fell off the edge of Keep’s Quarry he’d landed in the clean sheets and soft blankets of Parkview Adventist, and suddenly there were round-faced nurses wearing colorful shirts delivering food and checking his blood pressure. Where had LaBrecque landed? Bennie knew his own body was twisted up and broken, but he couldn’t feel any of the pain. In addition to the concussion and broken leg, his hip and left shoulder were bruised. When the nurses asked him about the accident, though, the drugs he was taking kept him from the shame he might have felt for being a grown man playing paintball in the first place.
On Helen’s first visit to the hospital—the day after his fall, she’d heard about the accident from Julian, at the restaurant—she’d walked slowly into his room, unannounced, and Bennie mistook her for a nurse. He lowered the volume on the TV and brought his arm up out of the covers for a blood-pressure check.
“Hi, Bennie,” she said. She was holding one arm behind her back.
“Oh, wow,” he said, blinking. Her cheeks were bright from the cold outside. His vision seemed especially sharp—just minutes earlier, he’d pressed the pain button for a surge of Dilaudid, which had settled him, and brightened the room—and he focused on her eyelashes, both above and below each eye.
“I brought you a present,” she said, looking down, then bringing her hand out from behind her back and placing a miniature sailboat on the bed. “I don’t think this one’s a Sunfish. But I thought it was cool. They sell them in the bookstore, in the back, with the kids’ books.”
He looked down at the boat, with its blue hull and white sails. “It’s amazing,” he said, dreamily, indebted to her. “You’re amazing. I love you.”
Helen smiled, but her eyes showed some concern and she took a tiny step away from the bed. It was quiet for a minute before she said, “So things are going okay in here? You’re getting better?”
“What I mean is, yeah … you’re really great for coming. Sorry to … well, I’m just kind of out of it right now.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m glad you like the sailboat.” She smoothed a spot to sit at the end of his bed, then turned and sat in a chair in the corner.
“You can sit up here,” he said. “I won’t tell you I love you again, I promise.”
She stood up from the chair and sat down on the bed. “You were hunting out there?”
“Well, not exactly. We were playing a game. Shooting each other with paintballs. I’m sure it sounds pretty dumb.”
“Kind of,” she said.
“I mean, we do it pretty often. We’re safe about it. We wear eye protection.” He had his ankles wrapped in two constricting sleeves that inflated every few minutes, to make sure his blood was flowing properly. The machine rumbled on, squeezed his ankles, then switched off.
“Do you do it in that kind of weather usually?” She wasn’t looking at him—she was picking little pills off the thin hospital blanket.
“No,” he said. He wondered if she had heard about LaBrecque, and whether or not to tell her.
She looked up at him. “And you were drinking, too—right?”
“No, not really. Two or three beers.”
“We don’t need to talk about it now, but … I really don’t like it. Like, I feel really strongly about it. It’s kind of like hunting and drinking? You know?”
“I probably won’t do it again.”
“Forget it. I just … wanted to get that out there.”
“Can we talk about something else?”
“It’s like … the kind of thing you hear on the news. Drinking and hunting.”
“It wasn’t the beer, believe me. And you don’t need to worry about me. I’m really … perfectly fine right now.” He felt this was true, despite the head bandage, and the leg cast, and the IV in his arm.
After she left, he thought more about what he’d said to her. The Dilaudid was wearing off, but before he gave himself another dose he let himself feel stupid about telling Helen that he loved her. His last girlfriend, Hillary Koeman, was so different from Helen—she was childlike and sweet, and she liked romantic dinners, and they saw each other almost every day and she even invited him to Vermont to meet her family, whom he envied (her parents and little brothers were all prodigies, or close to it, and kindhearted). But when he proposed to her after they’d been dating for six months, she thought it had come out of the blue. She was completely shocked. They didn’t break up right away, but it didn’t take long—perhaps a month of stalled conversations and halfhearted gestures of friendship.
After he’d first woken up in the hospital, one of the nurses had told him he had “blood on the brain” and that he may have torn his corpus callosum. They said he would be okay after a short recovery, and he agreed with them; his brain felt fine. The only problems came when he felt an itch. He would try scratching it but he couldn’t feel his skin. Even worse were those moments when the nurse’s aide attempted to give him a back rub—had the doctor called for this?—and as she did he could feel only the lightest touch against his skin. Nothing more substantial. He felt like he was wearing a costume and inside the disguise there was nothing but air.
He wondered about the latest news of LaBrecque. Maybe he had h
is own nurse, was getting his own back rubs. Bennie called home several times to see if there was any news, and he reached the answering machine.
The nurse’s aide had blond feathered hair, long fingers, and generously presented breasts, but in his bed all feelings were being fed to him or released from him through tubes and catheters. Bennie knew there might have been a world out there in which people were sitting in diners, eating real food, walking through the woods, talking about things as though they mattered, but that world felt distant. When the busty nurse’s aide left on his second night in the hospital, she bent down close to his face and told him, “It’s your job to just float there on your little raft.”
He flipped on the TV. He watched but he couldn’t concentrate. Animal Planet was often his best bet. Any show about pets and their doting owners. No matter what he watched, his mind often returned to the winter he lived in Brooklyn with Gwen, a year after she’d first moved there, right after he’d dropped out of college. It was almost hard to believe now that he’d gone to the city in his early twenties and worked as a truck driver, moving artwork for an outfit in Queens. The sapphire lights on the truck’s dashboard; stopping for eggs and potatoes in Williamsburg; nearly dropping an obscure gilt-framed Monet in a town house on the Upper East Side; napping on the subway coming back from the warehouse; meeting Hillary Koeman while she was taking classes at Hunter College; her fantasies about Maine, which he was happy to fulfill; his proposal and their breakup; accidentally stepping through the side of a crate containing a sculpture made of twigs he was late in delivering to Sotheby’s; getting fired; helping Gwen find a new roommate; having Littlefield come down late at night to pick him up and drive him back to Meadow Island; the queasy relief he felt coming up over the Piscataqua River.
Water Dogs Page 4