Then everyone became businesslike, getting the boat ready to go. Martha carried the shovel as they walked down the hill to the wharf. She told them that even though she’d been working in the area for a long time, she’d never spent time on the ocean. She was from Maine, of course, and she’d been to Old Orchard Beach, and out on the Peak’s Island Ferry in Portland, but that was it. She had always liked to make comments about how different she was from them—she hadn’t grown up in a house on the water, she’d never gone to college, she didn’t have family money to fall back on.
Julian didn’t seem to know what to make of Helen outside the restaurant; he was careful with her. It was hard to make small talk with her in general, but at the restaurant especially, she was focused on her job. And Julian was her boss. Julian was wearing an Eskimo jacket with a fur-lined hood; even though Helen was tall, Julian looked like a giant next to her. When he took out his cigarettes and offered her one, she shook her head. He handed Bennie one without offering first, but he shook his head, and Helen caught the exchange. She said, “He doesn’t smoke,” though she knew he did on occasion. Julian didn’t say anything, which surprised Bennie—Julian was normally a loudmouth, especially given an opportunity to tease Bennie.
After Martha finished shoveling, Bennie started the engine, which needed a few pulls and a lot of choke. Once it fired up, it revved obediently. They let it idle for a few minutes. Julian took his seat behind the wheel, folding up his long legs between the thwarts. It was a small aluminum boat, the kind in which balancing weight is important—too much on one side, when the chop was coming at a bad angle, could flip it over. They all stayed in the middle, Martha and Helen on the forward thwart, facing aft; Julian at the helm with Bennie beside him. As soon as they got moving, the snow that Martha hadn’t been able to reach under the thwarts, beside the riveted seams, swirled up around them and off the stern.
Julian didn’t need to ask; he steered a course to Riverneck Island. Two miles would take them twenty minutes. They picked up speed between the long swells, but there was chop coming from the north, which brought big wings of spray over the bow. Whenever Julian slowed to lessen the spray, it seemed they weren’t making enough headway. But then he’d speed up and they’d get soaked again, although they were already wet, so it didn’t much matter. Bennie used an old Clorox bottle cut in half to bail seawater out of the bilge, off the stern.
They were halfway across the channel when Bennie caught up with the bailing and Julian asked him to take the wheel. Shifting weight while at full speed in a heavy chop crossing a deep body of water in a tin boat is tricky, but they moved slowly; he scooted over to sit where Julian had been sitting while Julian reached behind the seat to get the hand line. He said he wanted to troll. They were going much too fast, the water was too deep, the chop was too rough, and mackerel were scarce in wintertime—but Julian thought it was a good time to cast a line. Bennie wondered if Julian had swilled more than just a few beers. Bennie kept his hand on the throttle and didn’t slow down.
After letting out enough line so that the bright-colored tackle was no longer dancing on the surface, Julian tried to tie the other end to the boat, but Martha reached over and tapped him on the shoulder, putting out her hand to take the line. Julian seemed glad to know Martha was interested in fishing, too.
There were two lobster boats tied to the stone pier in the deep-water inlet on the eastern side of Riverneck Island. As soon as the pier was in sight, Martha started hauling in the mackerel line. It was almost flat calm once they got inside the northern point; the wind was still blowing, but there were no swells and the tide was nearly high.
Riverneck Island didn’t have many trees; its shore was all loaf-size granite rocks leading up to the field. A developer from Boston owned the island, though he never visited. He left a few head of sheep there to keep the grasses short, and for a few years he’d been letting urchiners stay in the shack at the top of the island—the change in usage gave him a deal on his taxes.
At first, Bennie planned on scouting out the shack on his own, but Martha and Helen climbed off the boat onto the pier and started walking up the well-worn sheep trail, brown in the snow. Bennie was slow on his crutches, and Julian hung back with him. The islands in the area didn’t usually get much snow, but Riverneck had plenty. They were making their way uphill to the only stand of spruce trees, at the top of the island, beside the shack, and they saw one of the men in the far distance sitting down between two trees in an orange rain jacket. When they got closer they saw he was naked from the waist down except for his boots, shitting. His back was to them. He wiped his ass, stood up, and walked into the shack.
“My kind of place,” said Martha.
“Do you want to wait outside?” Bennie asked Martha and Helen.
Helen shook her head dismissively and walked toward the door. Julian stepped in front of her; he wanted to be the first to enter. He knocked and no one responded. Then they heard someone shout, “Who’s there?”
When Julian opened the door, hot air struck their faces—a heat laced with the smell of feet, whiskey, and dead fish.
“Julian here,” he said.
The shack was one large room with a woodstove on the far end heating a wide cast-iron pot. The floor was covered by dry mud. In the corner there were two triple-decker bunk beds, and in the center of the room two men sat playing cards beneath a kerosene lamp hanging from the ceiling by a chain. One of them was Shaw—whom they’d battled that night at the quarry—and the other was Avery, the kid who’d stopped paintballing and let Ray LaBrecque take his place. Avery had lost most of his hair and had shaved the rest of it down to stubble. He didn’t seem to recognize Bennie. The short stocky urchiner in the rain jacket who’d just taken a shit on the lawn was pulling up his jeans near the bunk beds. He turned around; it was Boak, who, along with Shaw, had helped get Bennie to the hospital.
Helen and Martha and Julian and Bennie stood drenched in a tight group near the doorway.
The urchiners looked at the newcomers as though they’d just emerged from the depths of the ocean. Martha and Helen had their watch caps pulled down and their jackets zipped up.
“We’re looking for Ray LaBrecque,” Bennie said.
Boak said, “Well, he isn’t out here.” He sat down at the card table.
“Who said you could tie up to our pier?” asked Shaw. He stood up.
Boak stood up, too, and said, “Take ’er easy, Shaw.” Then he turned toward them. “We haven’t seen him since the night we went to the quarry.”
Shaw said, “We’ve been short a man ever since.”
Martha stepped between Julian and Bennie and said, “Is that all you care about, fuckface?”
“Quiet down, cunt,” he said, brushing his hand calmly over his crew cut.
Martha tried charging him, but Julian grabbed her arm.
“She’ll rip your head off, Shaw,” said Avery, laughing.
“Why didn’t you take better care of him?” asked Martha.
Boak said, “No one could see a goddamn thing that night.” He looked at Julian and Bennie. “You two could tell her that.”
“You’re all fucking wrong,” said Shaw. “I just think it was an easy way for him to skip out on work. I bet he took off for New Brunswick.”
“Don’t you get it?” asked Helen, in a steady, quiet voice. “He’s missing, and there are people who care about him. Don’t speak that way to Martha.” Before leaving, Martha looked back at the men; she seemed to want to say something else, but then she dropped her chin and turned for the door.
Bennie’s crutches slowed them up, but they moved purposefully down the muddy path, across the snowy field. When they boarded and Bennie was just about to cast off, he saw a squat figure in a raincoat coming down the trail. It was Boak. Julian cut the engine and when Boak reached the pier he said, “I’ll cast off your lines. It’s tricky to get pointed the right way in this wind.” Martha was sitting on the forward thwart, and he addressed her from the pier. �
�Ray was a good worker. Tougher than Shaw, when it came right down to it. I wish I could tell you where he was now.” When Bennie handed him the line, Boak grabbed Bennie’s arm and with his face close he said, “Your brother went off in the same direction as LaBrecque, before you fell, but that’s not telling you anything you don’t already know, is it?”
Bennie wanted to throw him off the pier, but instead he just stepped into the boat and let Boak push the bow out in the right direction.
They still had an hour or so before it got dark. Helen put her arm around Martha; they huddled together on the forward thwart. The spruce trees on the back shore glowed orange and purple in the late-afternoon light. The swells had lessened a bit—now they were three or four feet high and endlessly wide. The wind had died, so when the sun started setting over by Sheep Island, the light was catching the crests of the waves and giving the channel incalculable depth, and in those last minutes before it got darker, before the water turned black, it looked as though the ocean went on forever. Helen and Martha had the latewinter light on their faces, glowing, looking like they’d just descended from the clouds. Bennie was glad to have a simple task ahead of him for the next few minutes. All he had to do was watch Helen and the ocean behind her while they crossed the channel.
The water was a full unknowable world. From across the boat he caught Helen’s eyes. She looked like she did when they’d gone out on the Sunfish six weeks earlier, when they were strangers to each other. The sun coming over the trees made her skin look peach-colored, and her hair peeking out from under her watch cap was blown back toward her neck. Martha set the line out again—it was evident from the ride over that the mackerel weren’t biting, but Helen gave her room to fish. Helen didn’t smile, though Bennie could tell she was thinking about the ocean in the same way that he was, looking at the water’s glinting edges, frigid and infinite. This was a comfort. She’d probably heard what Boak had said to him. He was sure now that she believed Littlefield was to blame for LaBrecque’s disappearance. Maybe everyone in the world believed this now. He wanted to talk to her, to tell her again there was no way Littlefield had done anything wrong, but he wasn’t sure he could form the right words. His faith in his brother wasn’t changing, he insisted to himself; he was just cold and tired. His mind felt sluggish.
When they came into the harbor, Martha started hauling in the line, winding it toward her chest. As they made the final turn, just fifty yards from the dock, she brought the jigs up into the boat, tucking their hooks into the wound-up line.
The harbor was still and silent. All other fishing boats, the scallopers and sea urchin divers, had been done for the day hours ago. The tin boat was again sheltered from the wind, but now that the sun was setting, the raw air crept up the cuffs of Bennie’s jacket. He could tell by the way Martha moved from the float to the ramp to the pier that her first priority was to warm up, though beyond that, too much was unclear. The light was going fast—the orange hue he’d seen on Helen’s face was completely gone from the world, and though it wasn’t snowing, there was a dark blue heaviness to the air that made it seem snow was minutes away.
“I hope Littlefield’s home by now,” said Helen.
“Me, too,” said Bennie.
As they stepped off Handelmann’s boat and looked up at the spruce forest, the land around them felt uncharted, untouched. Their bodies ached from the cold.
17
Nixon lived to be fourteen, which was a decent age for a large Labrador retriever—a big-headed chocolate Lab who was an expert at knocking over the kitchen trash can. She’d eaten a lot of extra food in her younger years. Whenever leftovers remained on the table—and no one was around—she would pull the tablecloth with her teeth, sending the pot roast (or turkey or fish stew or spaghetti) to the ground, where she could devour the evidence before anyone in the house responded to the sound of dishes crashing to the floor.
When Nixon was ten, several years after their father had died and Eleanor moved off the island, Bennie and Littlefield took the dog to the field by the technical college, and they brought a baseball and a bat. Since they’d entered their twenties, they only came out to the field once a year, for a game they called Man Versus Animal. Unlike the old days, the field was now well cared for—the maintenance crew at the college had mowed it recently—which made Man Versus Animal fast paced and exciting. This is how it went: Littlefield hit the ball, and Bennie stood in the field with a glove and tried to get it before Nixon did. The dog always got a good jump, so Bennie needed to chase down the fly balls, get under them, and reach up and swipe the ball out of the air before Nixon could jump up and catch it in her mouth. Ground balls were almost always snared by Nixon; she could charge toward the incoming ball and field nearly any bounce.
On that particular afternoon—late fall, just after the Cincinnati Reds had won the World Series—Bennie was feeling spry. He knew he was gaining an edge. Nixon was still energetic but on the decline, and Bennie was twenty—stronger and quicker than the last time they’d played (an autumn ago, after the previous World Series). Nixon had put together an impressive streak. She’d won each of the last four years, beginning in ’86, when the Red Sox collapsed against the Mets in the Series (that had been a tough year for Bennie—first the Red Sox loss, then humiliation in Man Versus Animal a few days later). But Bennie felt powerful. He’d eaten a good breakfast. And this year he’d found an old pair of soccer cleats in the closet. The field was slightly damp, but his feet felt sure in the grass.
Littlefield always promised to hit the fungoes in a random pattern, mixing in pop-ups, line drives, hard grounders, and fly balls. While Nixon and Bennie never knew where Littlefield would hit the ball, both man and dog took an aggressive approach, lining up side by side in the field only twenty yards from Littlefield. Gaining possession of the ball gave you a point, and the first to four was declared the winner.
After warm-ups, Littlefield smacked two balls high in the air, both of which Bennie fielded easily. He tracked the ball as it fell into his glove, out of Nixon’s reach. Then came a towering fly ball, well over both of their heads, but it hung up in the wind long enough that Bennie was able to chase it down, his quad muscles burning. He caught the ball over his shoulder. If it had hit the ground, Nixon would have gotten to it first—she was running wild circles around him, impatient with the game, ready to get her teeth on the ball. Littlefield hit a sharp grounder next, and with Bennie and Nixon playing a little too deep—because that last ball had been hit over their heads—Nixon was able to outsprint Bennie, getting to the bounding ball with ease, snapping it up in her jaws. She took a few jaunty laps around Bennie, wheezing with the ball in her mouth—it looked like she was smiling—and Littlefield cheered. Littlefield rarely showed allegiance to either Bennie or Nixon during these contests, but he encouraged displays of arrogance.
The next few balls were grounders, too, and Nixon got to them easily, dashing through the short grass, getting the ball lodged far enough back in her mouth that she coughed. The score was three to three; the next point delivered bragging rights for an entire year. Bennie checked to see that he didn’t have clumps of dirt caught between his cleats, and he bent over to stretch his hamstrings. After three grounders in a row, Bennie was guessing that Littlefield would smack a ball high in the air. But if Littlefield hit another grounder, Bennie couldn’t afford to let Nixon take the lead, so he took a few steps closer, and he stayed up on his toes with his glove at chest level, ready to spring into action as soon as the bat struck the ball. Nixon took a few gingerly steps toward Littlefield, too, all of her muscles tense and ready.
Bennie heard the crack of the ball against the bat and tracked the line drive as it hit the dog cleanly between the eyes—thwack!—and while she stayed on all fours, her face looked puzzled, panic-stricken. Bennie had never seen Nixon like this. Her whole body quivered: her head, her chest, her legs, her back. She didn’t go after the ball, which had landed a few feet in front of her in the grass. Bennie’s first worry
was that someone was watching, that their cruel treatment of this innocent animal would be witnessed. Littlefield dropped the bat and jogged out toward Nixon, and for a few seconds the two brothers stood in front of the dog and waited for her to notice the ball. She didn’t look hurt, exactly, and she wasn’t whimpering, but something was clearly wrong.
“You okay, girl?” asked Bennie.
“She’s definitely not okay,” said Littlefield.
“You hit it right at her,” said Bennie.
“I know I did. I was trying to get it over your head. I guess I didn’t get under it enough.”
Nixon was panting, a slick of drool oozing from her gums. Then she lay down in the grass, rested her head on her paws, and stopped shaking. She was down for a few seconds, then she stood up, walked over to the baseball, and picked it up gently. She lay back down, panting, with the ball in her mouth.
“That’s four to three,” said Littlefield.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Bennie.
“That makes five straight years of Animal dominance. Animal wins!”
“How can this be an official victory?” asked Bennie, but he felt immediately ashamed for complaining.
Littlefield sat down next to Nixon, scratching her back. Nixon rolled over, giving him access to her stomach. When Littlefield rubbed her stomach, she stretched out and yawned. “This is one for the ages. I hit it as hard as I could, and she still fielded the ball, knocked it down, then picked it up cleanly. If that’s not championship caliber, I’m not sure what is.”
Water Dogs Page 18