Water Dogs

by Lewis Robinson

Saplings raked the undercarriage. Rocks thumped against the soles of their sneakers. Martha was gripping the wheel with both hands, high beams on, accelerating. Branches slapped the car on both sides. The ground was frozen, but they could feel the different textures beneath—the hollows full of frozen oak leaves and thickets, the rough granite patches, and the ice when they spun through swamps. Martha avoided the big stuff, boulders and pine stands. She said the land east of the Masungun was intermediate terrain. They had no idea how she knew this. The car was tanking along, going faster than they’d been going on the road.

  “This is your dad’s car?” asked Gwen.

  “Yup,” said Martha.

  “Do you hate him or something?” asked Gwen.

  Martha glanced over at Gwen and smiled. “He taught me how to do this.”

  When Bennie scavenged for a seat belt, Martha said, “Trust me.” Gwen had her seat belt on in the front, but Martha didn’t have hers on. Bennie found one and clicked it in. Littlefield stayed unbuckled.

  She gunned it. Martha looked as though she were trying to pull the wheel from its steering column; her neck, her arms, her straight elbows, her fingers, all tense. Her expression stayed the same. Light from the high beams reflecting off the trees made her face glow.

  She turned to Gwen between pine stands, still tanking along, and she had to yell, because of the sounds the car was making as it rumbled through the woods. She said, “This might be what doing acid is like.” Then she clicked out the headlights again.

  Bennie reached over the far side of the seat and put his hand on Gwen’s shoulder. Even though she didn’t turn around, she knew what Bennie was saying. He felt glad to have her in the car with him. Not just because they were both scared, but because they were both amazed by what was being revealed to them, and it was good to have a witness. Martha was from a world they didn’t know.

  There was a small frozen gully just before the Shaw’s parking lot, and they hit it at top speed, jetting down and bottoming out before launching off the lip on the far side of the gully, wheels spinning in the air. Finally, Bennie closed his eyes and coughed up a small mouthful of puke. The landing was soft, though—he opened his eyes to the quiet, flat white of the parking lot spilling out in front of them. Martha clicked on the headlights. She slowed down.

  Sitting in the car, she gave everyone a code name—Bennie was Hickory, Littlefield was Dickory, Gwennie was Dock—and she tried to get them to shoplift in Shaw’s with her, but there were too many people working in the store at that hour, so they returned to the car. They drove to Sterling. Martha asked a few questions about the family, and Gwen told Martha about Coach being dead. They cruised around Sterling for a while before Littlefield spotted the little seafood shack—Sergeant Crabcakes—which was boarded up. SEE YOU ON THE FOURTH OF JULY was written in block letters on one of the boards.

  On their way back to the island, they stopped at Cumberland Farms, where Martha bought a twelve-pack of Coors using a fake ID and Littlefield’s money. They parked in the empty lot beside the Elks BPO lodge. The heater pumped hot dry air into the Caprice, and the plush seats felt like a living room couch. None of them was tired. Bennie felt like his life was opening up wide.

  Littlefield said, “I love beer.” The car was lit only by the dim orange sodium lights at the corners of the parking lot, but their eyes were adjusting as they all sipped slowly from the cans. Littlefield continued, “Let’s keep driving—let’s go to Canada.” They let that hang in the air. Bennie didn’t know his brother had already fallen for Martha, but he liked how Littlefield acted around her, deferential and hopeful.

  From then on, Martha always seemed single but never was. She and Littlefield had kissed the night they’d gone to Sterling—just as she was dropping them off at the Manse, right in front of Bennie and Gwen—and Bennie knew the two of them had hung out a few more times. Bennie wasn’t exactly sure why this didn’t continue, though he guessed that she realized how difficult he was to talk to, how much of a loner he was. It almost seemed that she and Littlefield came to an understanding: he would never make his affections too obvious or intrusive, and she would never make him feel like a desperate jackass. At the restaurant, Martha was always nice to him, like a cousin. She’d been waitressing at Rosie’s for five or six years, and for Littlefield, seeing her at Rosie’s was nearly the best way for them to interact. She was available to him, she was flirtatious and accommodating, but at the end of the night, she would stay to close the place down, and he would go home.

  When Bennie walked into Rosie’s, Sherry Callahan, another waitress he knew, was in the far corner delivering food to one of the tables, so he sat on a stool nearest her station, by the beer taps. The ceiling was strung with white Christmas lights, glowing down on his arms as he rested them on the bar.

  Sherry was taller and heavier than most waitresses in Portland, with a handsome face and a quick temper. Her skin was orange in the Christmas lights. She poured him a Hooker Ale. Aside from the large round silver stud in the middle of her tongue, she looked like a mom. “Your brother just left,” she said.

  “He was here?” Bennie asked.

  “Of course he was here. Just like most Tuesdays.” Then she started counting her fingers. “He bugs Martha. He drinks. He plays trivia. He bugs Martha again. Then he leaves. In that order.”

  “Sorry about that,” said Bennie.

  “Oh, I don’t care,” said Sherry Callahan. She was trouble—Bennie knew from Martha she had a coke problem and was hell on her boyfriends—but still, as a waitress, she could wax angelic with ease. She was always in control, like a bully. “I’m surprised he didn’t know she wasn’t working tonight. So, you feeling better?” she asked, sticking a pen behind her mannish ear. “The fall you took, that sounded nasty.” She glanced at Bennie’s crutches. “Maybe they need to put an electric fence around the quarry.”

  “No, Sherry. They don’t.”

  “Or barbed wire. Then you wouldn’t have ended up in that cast, right?” She smiled and folded her tan arms beneath her breasts. “I’ll tell Martha you were asking for her. I like the haircut.”

  “So Martha didn’t work tonight?”

  “She went to Tavis Falls,” she said. “She’ll be there for a few days. With Ray out of town—wherever he is—it makes sense for her to be up there. I think she’s got a shift or two back here on Monday.” She pulled out another glass and filled it, setting it in front of Bennie, beside his other full pint. “Here you go, Bennie. On the house. Good to see you’re out of the hospital.”

  He ordered the open-faced turkey sandwich, choked it down, watched Nomar hit one out to left center—one of the few home runs the shortstop hit that spring training—and gave Sherry too large a tip before leaving.

  9

  After leaving Rosie’s, he went to Helen’s house and parked in her plowed driveway. He hadn’t seen her for a week. All of her lights were out, but from the glow of her lava lamp he knew she was in her bedroom. He crutched his way to the porch and rapped on the heavy door. He was nervous to see her, excited, but also worried about how she would react. After a minute or two, she opened the door wearing her bathrobe. Her hair was wet, and in the dim porch light he could see her watery brown irises perfectly.

  She said, “You’re on your feet.”

  “I’m on one of them.”

  “I was wondering if I’d ever hear from you.”

  “I’ve been trying to get better. I wanted to get a little better before coming over.”

  She put her hand lightly on Bennie’s head, rubbing his short hair gently with her fingers, avoiding the scar. “They shaved off all your hair.” She looked down at the cast, then back up at his face. “Your eyes look good,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Aren’t you freezing?” she asked. She helped him maneuver himself and his crutches through the screen door. When he rested his weight on his armpits, she said, “You smell like beer. Are you drunk?”

  “A little.”
/>   “Ah, good. Let’s get out the old paintball guns so I can blow a hole in your ass.”

  “I’m tired, Helen. I can’t joke about it right now.”

  She put her head against his chest and her arms around his waist. When he hugged her, the crutches clattered to the floor. They squeezed for a minute, maybe two. Then she leaned back and he looked at her up close—her shining eyes, the right one holding him captive. He pushed his thumb across her dark eyebrows. He said, “I’m sorry I got hurt.”

  She said, “That’s not the point.”

  “How about if you stop giving me shit about paintball?”

  After a brief silence, she said, “I could probably do that.”

  “You should try walking in the woods with a gun. It’s kind of fun.”

  She squinted at him.

  He nodded. “I know. You’re right. It was dumb.” All of a sudden he was ready to do anything, or at least say anything, to make peace.

  “Can we go upstairs?” she asked. She looked at the crutches. “Do you need a hand?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said, but he hadn’t yet tried a big set of stairs. The hopping tired his good leg. He stopped to rest every third step.

  They went to her bedroom. The blue light of the lava lamp calmed and comforted him in a way he hadn’t been calmed and comforted in what seemed like years. Life before the accident felt far away, but the blue light in Helen’s room was real. She asked him to lie down on her bed, on his back. She untied his boot and slid it off.

  During their third date, Helen had told Bennie that after she graduated from Bowdoin, where she’d majored in geology, she’d thought about law school, and even medical school—she’d taken a bunch of biology courses, too, though she would have still needed more courses to apply—but cooking seemed like something she could do as a way to see more of the world first. She’d gotten a job doing prep work at a place on the West End in Portland called Vincent’s Bistro, and she’d been so fastidious and responsible that the owner was using her as the head chef within three months. The more time she spent at Vincent’s Bistro, the more she liked the meditative aspects of the job, and the more she was glad she didn’t have to talk much to others while she worked. As time went on, she was less and less certain she could hold a regular job—she liked an hour or two in the mornings to talk to others (she had lived for a while with a friend from Bowdoin), but otherwise she was glad to have much of the day and night to herself, living inside her own head. The job at the bistro ended up having too many social demands, which is why she’d moved to Musquacook and started working at Julian’s. Bennie thought about this often—he knew she was unusual. She was so unlike his mother, who even as a therapist couldn’t get enough time in the day to share her thoughts. His mother had lots of friends, and she always liked to talk about the complexities of her life. Helen didn’t share many of her thoughts with others. He seemed to be the primary person she confided in.

  She wanted to see the cast. She pulled his sweatpants down over it, slowly and carefully. “Does that hurt?” she asked.

  “Not a bit,” he said. He sat up to take off his shirt and she said, “Are you cold?”

  “No.”

  He put his arms in the air and she pulled the shirt over his head. He sat on the bed in his boxers and the cast, and she stood up in her bathrobe, walked to her dresser, and came back with a black felt-tip marker. “I want to sign it,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said. He realized, then, that she was in a more playful mood than he was.

  On the upper part of the cast she wrote in small letters:

  HELEN

  MUSQUACOOK, 3/15/97

  “It won’t be long before the doctor takes it off,” he said.

  “I know. I just want to mark the occasion.”

  She tossed the marker to the floor and knelt on the end of the bed. It crossed his mind that he wouldn’t have ever again seen the freckle to the left of her belly button if he’d died in the quarry. She tightened the bathrobe and lay down beside him.

  Helen reached down and put two fingers inside the top of his cast and asked, “Does it itch in there?”

  “You have no idea.”

  “I broke my wrist twelve years ago, and I remember. I wanted to chew my arm off.” She got up from the bed. “Let me find my yardstick.” From inside her closet she pulled out a long metal ruler with a thin layer of cork on one side. When she stuck it down into his cast, a cold tingle rose from his leg to his neck.

  She knelt on the bed, the angles of her long body focused on scratching. All of a sudden she looked up at him, startled. “Bennie?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Does that hurt?”

  “Keep going,” he said, without breathing.

  “You’re crying,” she said.

  “The scratching feels good.” He let the tears roll down his cheeks. He put his hand up on her cheek and into her warm hair.

  “You must have been scared, waking up in the hospital. Did you know what had happened?” She pulled the ruler out of his cast. He didn’t want her to stop, but he figured she had to, sometime. She straddled him, putting her hands up on top of his shoulders. He stopped crying.

  “You know, I was just at Julian’s,” he said. “And I got into a discussion with Vin Thibideaux. And I ended up swinging my cast into his groin.”

  “Good,” she said.

  “He’s a cop.” He wiped the tears off his cheeks.

  “I know he is, but he’s a jerk, too. Somebody needed to kick him in the balls. You think he’ll arrest you?”

  “Probably not,” he said. “But he’ll get me back, for sure. Can you grab my sweatpants?” She reached down beside the bed and handed them to him. He sunk his hand into one of the pockets, grabbed the stones, and held them out to her. In his hand they didn’t look nearly as interesting as they had when they were wet on the beach. They looked like rocks he’d found in her driveway. “They were nice in Singer’s Cove, when I picked them up,” he said.

  She cupped her hands to hold them. “They’re magnificent.” She stood up again and went to her bookshelf, where she kept coins in a white bowl, and she dumped the change into a pile on the shelf. When she put the stones in the bowl, they looked better.

  She returned to the bed and told Bennie she’d helped look for LaBrecque out at the quarry. Lots of people from Musquacook and the island had been there, walking the snowfields. Julian had said something about this.

  And Bennie tried to imagine it. He knew exactly who would have participated: mothers, lobstermen, volunteers from the library, guys from the town office, George Pettiworth (his old PE teacher), and George’s three daughters. Helen said no one really knew where to look. After two days of searching, the rumor spread that LaBrecque wasn’t missing at all—he’d gone back up to New Brunswick, where he worked off and on for a logging crew. His motorcycle was gone.

  In the light of the lava lamp, he said, “It’s good to be back here, in your room.”

  With her head on his chest, she stretched an arm across his body, her wrist hanging off his hip. After a few minutes, she said, “What do you think happened to LaBrecque?”

  He had a picture in his mind of LaBrecque high-stepping through the snow, falling off the quarry’s edge, then later, lying still, the snow landing gently on his quiet body. He said, “It’s hard to even guess.”

  “Do you think there’s any chance he’s still alive?”

  “I’m sure he is,” he said, almost without thinking. He tried stringing together the images—LaBrecque finding his way out of the woods, returning to Tavis Falls on his motorcycle in the snow, or heading all the way up to Moncton to skid logs.

  After another period of silence Helen pulled her wrist off his hip and her soft hand landed on his stomach. It was warm, and she rubbed little circles with her smooth fingers. When the circles turned into squiggly lines, he wondered if she was writing out words for him, a secret message, but he couldn’t follow it if she was. The painkillers he’d b
een taking had kept him from having any interest in sex, but he’d been off them for a week. In the light of the lava lamp, she sat up, then climbed on top of him again, pulling his boxers off, down over his cast, her hair hanging in front of her eyes. She took her bathrobe off. Her stomach and her underwear and her thighs were all as white as the ceiling. She sat up on top of him, but her thigh was getting scratched by the edge of his cast, so she quickly grabbed a T-shirt from the floor and put it between the cast and her leg and slipped her underwear off. He liked that he had never felt lonely with Helen when he was naked in bed with her. He tried not to float away into his own thoughts. He kept looking for her eyes through her hair to make sure she wasn’t drifting off, either. He held her waist in his hands. He heard a diesel truck rumble down her street. She maintained a serious, concentrating expression—her eyes half open, her mouth tense. Before they stopped she fell down on top of him, squeezing with all her strength, pushing him down, knocking the wind from him. It felt severe, like tackle football on a cold day. When she finally released him, he asked, “Why do you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Trap me on the bed like that.”

  “Are you asking why I hug you?”

  “I like it,” he said. “I just … it’s sometimes hard to breathe.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. But I like it. I just wanted to see if you knew how hard you were squeezing.”

  “I guess I didn’t.”

  The liquid blue of the lava lamp made Bennie feel impervious—a million miles away from thoughts of the quarry and LaBrecque and kneeing Vin Thibideaux in the balls.

  It was around four in the morning when he sat up, opened his eyes, sweating, feeling both hungry and sick to his stomach. She’d turned off the lava lamp and there were no streetlights near her house. She didn’t even have a digital clock in her room. He shook her shoulder. “Helen,” he said.

  “Bennie,” she said. She was still asleep.

  “Helen, I’m sorry,” he said. He couldn’t see her, not even her silhouette.