Water Dogs

by Lewis Robinson

  “He was talking as if Littlefield had something to do with LaBrecque’s getting lost. And he called Gwen a bitch,” said Bennie, realizing for the first time that he was out of breath.

  “Vin’ll throttle you, man. You should probably take off.”

  “Wow, I wasn’t planning on doing that. I had something I wanted to say to him—I had it kind of planned out, but then there it was,” he said, swinging his cast. “That felt great.”

  Julian lowered his voice, blinked his boozy eyes, and said gently, “Get out of here, buddy.”

  Bennie was hoping for a different response from Julian; a slap on the back, maybe, or at least a knowing look. Before leaving, Bennie asked, “What were you going to tell me when I was in here before?”

  Julian peered through the back window and scratched his head. “They need me at the bar.”

  “Come on, Julian. Five minutes.”

  He slipped his cigarettes from his coat pocket and tucked one behind his ear. “Okay, I’ll be right back. Meet me out on the porch. Don’t let anyone see you go out there.”

  The rain was turning back to snow, huge slow flakes. The porch awning was still folded up for the winter, and Bennie sat on a bench by the railing, out of view. The Weehauk was mostly frozen, and the recent rain made the surface look black. The tree branches on the far bank were already white with snow, but the river was still velvety slick. Bennie tried to retrace his thoughts—he couldn’t remember exactly what he’d been thinking when he kneed Vin in the crotch. There’d been some recollection of Coach, his righteousness. Coach would have stood up for Littlefield, too. He wouldn’t have resorted to violence, but he would have made his opinion clear—he would have bellowed his sincere rejection of Vin’s theory. Bennie knew that carrying out his legacy was inevitable—he only wished he could have done it more gracefully.

  When Julian finally came outside, he chose to stand. The snowflakes were getting caught in his long curly hair and on the shoulders of his wool sweater. He looked too tired to smile.

  “Vin shouldn’t have called your sister a bitch. That was out of line,” said Julian. He looked down at the deck’s wet floorboards. “But dude, I think your brother’s in for some trouble.”

  “Save it, J.”

  “Do you know who LaBrecque is?”

  “An urchiner,” said Bennie.

  “Yeah. And he’s also Martha’s boyfriend.”

  Martha was an old friend—a kind-of family friend—who that winter was a waitress at Rosie’s. Littlefield had been obsessed with her forever, though he rarely talked about her, except to Bennie. The first time he’d told Bennie about his interest was on a fishing trip eight years earlier, just an overnight to Green’s Island, chasing bluefish, and after several large sips of Canadian Club, Littlefield confessed he was in love with her, that he’d wait for her, as long as it took—and Bennie had said, “Martha who?” because it was unfathomable that Littlefield felt that strongly about anyone. It was only on rare occasions like this one that Bennie could see his brother objectively, as a loner who’d never had a girlfriend. The brothers had strung up a little tarp between two spruce trees even though there was no rain in the forecast, and they sat on the rocks by a fire beneath the high-water mark. They were both looking out at the blackening ocean. Bennie couldn’t believe how forthright and romantic Littlefield sounded. He expected that kind of talk from Gwen, or from some movie actor on the big screen. With Littlefield, because it was so shocking, it seemed wholly true. Bennie had no idea that Littlefield had spent any time with Martha since they were teenagers. He didn’t know, then, that Littlefield made regular trips to the bar where she worked at the time, the Black Harpoon.

  That Martha was LaBrecque’s girlfriend was going to make LaBrecque’s disappearance more interesting for Vin and others, but Bennie didn’t care much to hear this new information. What were the possibilities? Would Littlefield have left LaBrecque in the snow to freeze to death? Not in a million years. Like Littlefield had said, he’d lost track of the guy—LaBrecque had been good at the game.

  “The more they find out, the more they’ll come after all of us. Especially your brother,” said Julian.

  “Who cares if they come after us?” asked Bennie.

  Julian looked down, sucking hard on his cigarette. “I’m just saying, we’ve got to help out your brother. Stop kneeing old cops in the balls, okay?”

  “I don’t think I hit him that hard,” said Bennie, but he had a tinge of physical awareness, the feeling of his swinging leg being stopped abruptly, like he’d kicked a wall.

  Julian shook his head. “You’re an idiot. We’ve got to look out for each other, man. Don’t do stupid shit like that. We’ve got to circle the wagons.”

  “Why are you boozing so much?”

  “Fuck off, Bennie. It’s mud season. This is how it goes.”

  There wasn’t much else to say. He just shook Julian’s hand, then gave him another hug and stepped carefully with his crutches as he left the porch and headed to his car.

  8

  He wasn’t slowed by traffic, but he was shocked by how many cars were on the highway. The Maine he knew was getting overhauled, burdened by interlopers and nostalgia-addled white-collar suburbs in the middle of the woods—Cumberland, Falmouth, Yarmouth, Brunswick, old towns with brand-new health stores and woodstove dealerships. Many of the cars he passed had vanity license plates—EX-BRIT, KAYAKR, SOCERDAD, DRMOM—and he weaved in and out of them for thirty miles, all the way to Portland. He got off the Franklin Street exit doing sixty, slowing when he got near the fancy part of town, to the small cobblestone streets. He looked for a parking space, his tires popping along the bumps. He nearly sideswiped a redheaded girl in a jean jacket carrying a snowboard. When she stepped in front of the Skylark, he wasn’t thinking much at all about the world outside his head. He was thinking about that bluefishing trip—after the moment the mosquitoes had finally left them when they’d built the fire, and Littlefield had started telling Bennie about Martha. Bennie wondered if there might have been something in his reaction that had irked Littlefield. Maybe Littlefield decided in that moment that no one, not even his brother, was worthy to know his feelings about Martha.

  Bennie was considering these possibilities when he saw the snowboard-toting redheaded girl, the back of her jean jacket flashing in front of the windshield. He swerved into the oncoming lane and turned onto Market Street, where he landed, somehow, in an empty spot. The redheaded girl shifted her snowboard from one arm to the other without turning around. Bennie gripped the wheel, breathing hard, the ignition switched off, looking down at his knuckles.

  When he got out of the Skylark, it was dicey navigating the cobblestones on his crutches, and the only calming aspect of the moment was the cold air coming up from Commercial Street, which felt good on his head now that the bandages were off. The pain he’d been feeling since Littlefield flushed his Dilaudid down the toilet was finally gone.

  As teenagers, Littlefield and Bennie were in constant competition. Both of them wanted to get championship times for Coach during the racing season, and the rivalry continued after the snow melted. The summer Littlefield was fifteen and Bennie was thirteen, most nights before he fell asleep Bennie wished his brother would disappear, join Up with People or get taken up by the derelicts who rode the freight train to Bangor. Littlefield had spent the spring designing something he wouldn’t tell Bennie about—he’d lock the barn doors from the inside. All Bennie knew was that Tobey Emerson, a car mechanic from Elmore Farms, had taught Littlefield how to weld, and Littlefield had bought a torch and a mask from him. At the end of that winter, Littlefield brought Gwen and Coach and Eleanor down to the public wharf to unveil his project. Bennie hadn’t been invited but he showed up anyway. Littlefield had the thing under a bedsheet, at the edge of the water. The air was humid for mid-June and mosquitoes peppered the air, but the family waited patiently. He tugged at the white sheet, which slipped across the top of his egg-shaped project—a plexiglass and
steel pedal-powered submarine he called Water Dog, named for the mascot of the island’s elementary school; it was what people on Meadow, especially the older generations, called each other. (Coach was a Water Dog, and he considered Gwen and Bennie and Littlefield Water Dogs, though it was a name most kids never used.) The cockpit of the craft, Littlefield announced, was fed air through a hose connected to a dinghy, which needed to follow the submarine’s progress as it moved through the harbor. Eleanor and Coach applauded, but they asked a lot of questions. Bennie, too, was skeptical that the submarine actually worked, and Littlefield evidently sensed this: after the unveiling he told Bennie he’d never have the privilege to drive Water Dog because it required a special kind of coordination Bennie didn’t have.

  That summer, Littlefield kept Water Dog tied to the town pier, where it listed to one side and collected a thin film of algae beneath its water line. When Bennie asked his brother how it was running, Littlefield told him he was still in dry-land training, preparing for the maiden submergence. When Bennie asked him, again, if he really thought it would work, Littlefield swept Bennie’s legs and pinned him on his back, held his arms down with his knees, and put his forearm across Bennie’s neck. With his free hand he rapped his knuckles against Bennie’s chest. When Littlefield released him, Bennie asked if he could float in the dinghy above during the submarine’s first trip and Littlefield said, “No, you’ve been cut from the team, douchebag. I’ve got Gwen—she has better eyes.”

  Water Dog never made it off the pier; that fall, when the town needed to put the floats up for the winter, they dragged the submarine up the concrete landing, then hauled it to the dump. When Bennie told him this, Littlefield shrugged. “That’s yesterday’s news, Bennie. The harbor’s too cloudy, anyway. I’m working on a glider now, and no, you can’t help.”

  Bennie wondered if his brother was going to be an inventor, or a pilot, or an engineer. He never helped Littlefield with his projects, and despite hating him, he had secret faith in his brother. He felt Littlefield was capable of doing whatever it was he pleased.

  Rosie’s was rarely noticed by the out-of-towners who swarmed the Old Port, even though it was only a short block away from the always teeming corner of Fore and Exchange. Bennie loved its exhaustive menu—you could get pancakes or a bean burrito, a grilled cheese or chicken cordon bleu—though he usually ordered their open-faced turkey sandwich and Hooker Ale. Bennie stepped into the restaurant, awkwardly rubbed his lone boot on the mat, and looked for Martha behind the bar. She wasn’t there. He figured that she and the other waitress were probably out back, so he peeked around the dumbwaiter toward the dartboard, but she wasn’t there either.

  He felt feverish—he needed to see either Littlefield or Martha, soon. Gossip was common, but if you really wanted answers you needed to seek the primary sources.

  Gwen and Bennie were in ninth grade when they met Martha, Littlefield in eleventh. Back then their mother still had a part-time gig at Musquacook Academy, which often hired a small catering company to cook for the faculty parties. Martha worked for the caterer. It was 1985, and Martha kept her black hair in a tight ponytail, and she always wore black jeans. Most girls Bennie knew, Gwen included, wore baggy sweatshirts and corduroys. The first night they met her, at Dean Hatcher’s house, Martha was wearing a white tuxedo shirt with her black jeans—the party was in its third or fourth hour and she was sitting across the room, staring at Gwen and Littlefield and Bennie unapologetically. Even when Bennie would turn away to say something to Gwen about how they were being stared at, Martha just kept her gaze on them—not looking especially fascinated, but not looking bored either. There weren’t any other teenagers at the party. When the dean sat down at the piano and asked people to sing along, Martha came over and sat between Gwen and Littlefield. She was still on the job, but all the adults were so drunk, she didn’t care. Her tuxedo shirt was too small—the sleeves were short and the buttons were straining—and her thighs looked strong in her jeans. She was wearing light blue eye shadow to match her eyes. Gwen and Bennie and Littlefield stole glances at her as she looked back in the direction of Dean Hatcher and the piano. Then she said, in a hushed voice, that the dean had “killed seven gooks in ’Nam with his bare hands.”

  Bennie stared at the dean, a lanky guy in tweed pants and a sweater vest. He was proficient at the piano and he was smiling enormously; he had a toothy mouth like a horse. Bennie squinted and imagined him younger, stronger, a war hero.

  Littlefield said, “No fucking way.”

  “ ‘No fucking way’? Guys have weird priorities sometimes,” said Martha, and she explained that Hatcher had fallen in love with a transvestite in Hanoi whose brother had been scalped by the North Vietnamese. The light blue eye shadow gave Martha the look of a gypsy. Sitting near her made Bennie feel skinny and shy.

  “ ‘Scalped’?” he asked, looking down.

  “He was a spy,” she whispered.

  Later, when most of the teachers—including their mother—were hammered, nearly yelling the songs, they all snuck upstairs to snoop around. Bennie told Martha he wanted to look for Hatcher’s medals. That’s when she said she’d made up the Vietnam story. Bennie felt ashamed for being so gullible, but he also felt excited by the way Martha seemed to operate. Rules were big in the Littlefield household: politeness, firm handshakes, integrity, thoughtfulness, and, above all, honesty. Lying got you in big trouble with Eleanor. Martha didn’t seem to care about those kinds of things.

  After the party Bennie suspected they’d never see her again, but three days later she stole the keys to her father’s Caprice, an old orange cab he’d bought at an auction in Westbrook, and she called them, wanting to know if they had any interest in going for a drive.

  As usual, their mother had turned out her light at nine; Martha called at ten. Gwen picked up the phone in her room, and then found Bennie. A sleeping parent doesn’t need to be lied to; the twins just had to make sure the front door didn’t make any sound. As they tiptoed down the upstairs hallway in their parkas, Littlefield emerged from the attic, where he’d been lifting weights.

  “What the hell,” he said.

  “Shut up,” Bennie whispered.

  In a full-volume voice, he said, “You shut up.”

  As Bennie and Gwen walked downstairs, though, Littlefield knew to ask them where they were going in a whisper. He followed them out onto the porch.

  “That girl Martha, the caterer—she’s got her dad’s Caprice. We’re going joyriding,” said Gwen.

  Littlefield chuckled and looked away.

  “You want to come?”

  “No, of course not.” It was obvious he didn’t like that Gwen was exposing him for being jealous of this late-night plan. Before he went back inside, he said, “I asked around about her. I heard she smells like fish.”

  Gwen and Bennie met Martha out on the main road, where she was idling without the headlights on. She’d cut most of her hair off. It was the same length as Bennie’s. Somehow, she was even more beautiful—with her smooth pale skin and thin dark eyebrows and black hair—than she’d been at Dean Hatcher’s party. Her cheeks were red from the heat in the car. Shockingly, there were kids at Bennie’s school who wouldn’t have even considered Martha pretty because she had too much of an accent. “Where’s your brother?” she asked.

  “He doesn’t want to come,” said Bennie.

  “Tell him I want him to come,” she said.

  He ran back to the house, opened the door again without a sound, and went upstairs to find Littlefield. He wasn’t in his room, so Bennie crept down the carpeted hallway into Gwen’s room, then into her closet. There was a cord hanging from the ceiling that opened a pulldown staircase to the attic. The faint sounds of the radio, “Lights” by Journey, drifted down the hatch. Littlefield was up in the crawl space. He was in the midst of a set of bench presses when Bennie told him Martha wanted him to come. Littlefield finished his last rep, pushing air through his teeth, then setting the bar in its steel cradle. �
��Of course she does,” he said. He put his parka on over his sweatshirt and he and Bennie ran back out to the Caprice together.

  Gwen sat up front with Martha, and Littlefield and Bennie stretched out in back. As they crossed the one-lane causeway, Martha lit up a cigarette and didn’t inhale the smoke; she just let the haze provide atmosphere. They headed out the Masungun, which was straight and usually empty at night. It was snowing lightly; the snowflakes were being pulled up into the car’s grille. In a borrowed car at night in the winter, the next step, they all knew, was finding some way to get wasted.

  Martha told them she wanted to try acid. She hadn’t yet gotten her hands on any, but she thought it would be perfect for the group. Beer was boring, she said, and it made your breath smell bad. “That’s what we do every weekend, right?” she asked, and the Littlefields stayed quiet. She continued. She said that acid was a creative drug, that her father had done it with her aunt and they’d climbed trees for thirteen hours. The Caprice had a red dashboard, which glowed through the smoke.

  “Sergeant Crabcakes has acid,” said Bennie, but they ignored him. Littlefield stared out the window, saying nothing. Bennie didn’t know much about Sergeant Crabcakes except that he was a guy who lived out in Sterling. Kids talked about him at band practice.

  Martha clicked off the headlights, slowed down to around twenty-five miles per hour, cracked the windows, and slid the bench seat back far enough that her hands just barely reached the steering wheel. She had the radio tuned to a country music station, the whine of a steel guitar just barely audible. They proceeded this way for a while. Two or three smooth miles. Between streetlights they were blind except for the red glow of the car radio.

  Bennie’s eyes were open to the darkness. Then Martha clicked the headlights back on. He felt the car leave the road, go over the shoulder onto loose ground. They were in the woods and snowflakes were jittering in the headlights.