Water Dogs

by Lewis Robinson

  When Martha started telling stories about Ray, she leaned back in the rocking chair, staring at the fire. Her voice was even and clear. She began with the afternoon Ray invited her to go four-wheeling in the sandpits; they’d seen each other at a town softball game and he’d heard about her off-road driving skills, so he figured it was a safe bet she’d want to go four-wheeling. She did. It was late July and the pits were empty. They rode around for a while, making long, sweeping runs down the steeps. She was sitting on the back of his Polaris Trail Boss and he had asked her to wear a helmet (he only had one for the two of them). At first she wanted to be the one driving, but after a while she realized she liked sitting on the back; it was a cloudy day but the clouds were in large white puffy stands and the air was warm. They rode out of the pits to a trail in the woods behind Jackman Pond, deep lush green woods where the canopy was high above them, pine trees and moss and not too many rocks. They found a flat spot where Ray unloaded his backpack. Martha had tried not to show any surprise when he took out a blanket and a small black radio and a six-pack of High Life, but it was okay, she didn’t think it was creepy that he had a plan for them, and even though she wouldn’t have chosen to lie on a blanket with him in the woods on what was, really, their first date, she ended up enjoying herself, staring up at the pine branches, listening to the low sounds of the radio and occasionally a partridge flushing from the thicket. For a while, the bugs weren’t even that bad. They kissed, and then they fell asleep until the black flies came, at dusk. He gave her a lift home.

  They started meeting up at night, regularly. She would sneak into his house after Ray’s uncle had gone to sleep. They were nineteen.

  A few years later during a stretch when they saw each other only here and there—he would go to Montana and Idaho for months at a time to fight fires—he landed back in Tavis Falls for the winter and found a job plowing the town roads. She worked nights at the Black Harpoon in Harris and was trying to get an associate’s degree at USM, too, so she didn’t see much of him; it seemed to snow every night, and Ray was often asleep when Martha got back from the Harpoon. She had wondered about talking to him, trying to tell him she wanted to see him more often. One night she came over to his place and he was soaking in the bath; he’d just finished five hours of plowing and was reading a comic book—The Thing—and when she came into the bathroom she started telling him she was thinking about taking a break in her class-work, she wasn’t sure why she was getting the degree in the first place, and it would mean they’d have more time to spend together, and he continued to read the comic book. She said, “Are you listening to me?” and he said, “Yes,” but he kept reading the comic and she said, “It doesn’t seem like it,” and he repeated her words verbatim. She was angry, but when he put the comic down, he looked at her, frank and clear-eyed. She remembered that look. He had never told her he wanted to be with her forever, never told her they would get married eventually; he had said he loved her, once, but it was when they’d been drunk in an aluminum bass boat on Jackman Pond. When he looked up at her from the tub, he handed her the comic book and said, “Will you throw me that towel?” He stood up out of the water and said, “I’m quitting the plowing job, if that’s what you’re asking about.” He never told her why, but she knew he’d wanted for things to work out between them.

  But still, occasionally, months would pass and they wouldn’t see each other—Ray would have a job that would take him out of state, or up to New Brunswick, and sometimes he would leave without telling Martha. He would call her once he was settled in whatever town he was working, from a pay phone, and this was never the ideal arrangement, but they both seemed to know it was the way it had to be, at least for now. Martha had never really had another boyfriend, despite all the attention she got from Littlefield and others, so having Ray gone for months at a time, with uncertainty about his return, had become what she expected.

  Martha stopped talking for a little while. Helen and Bennie were still lying on their backs, their heads propped up on a pillow, watching the logs burning in the fireplace through the long line of empty beer bottles. Bennie waited for Gwen to chime in again, to fill the silence, asking another question—but then Martha continued.

  She told them that when her grandmother died, Ray had just gotten back from a job in Canada and she’d taken him to see her grandfather. He lived on Route 46 just past Dixon Corners in Harris, in a tiny house where he and his wife had lived for fifty-eight years. Martha was nervous, because her grandfather—she called him Pop—was usually grumpy, and though she’d always been close to him, she’d never introduced him to a boyfriend. Martha had seen Pop at the funeral; she’d hugged him, but they hadn’t spoken much. After knocking they came inside and took off their snowy boots (he never came to the door) and they heard him bellow from the other room, “Put your goddamn boots back on.” So they came into the living room with their boots on, tracking snow in, and he was sitting in his La-Z-Boy, smoking a small black pipe with cherry-flavored tobacco. He looked at Ray—looked him up and down, twice—before saying, “Is that the Perkins boy?”

  “No, Pop, this is Ray,” Martha had said. “I told you I was bringing him.”

  “That Perkins boy is a fool,” he said.

  “This is Ray LaBrecque,” she said.

  “Hi, Pop,” said Ray.

  Pop said nothing. Then he said, “He talks like the Perkins boy, too.”

  “Eno Perkins? I know him. That’s not me,” said Ray.

  Pop exhaled a long plume of smoke. Again, there was a pause before he said, “You play football?”

  “No, I don’t,” he said.

  “Not like the Perkins boy,” said Pop.

  “I played hockey,” said Ray.

  “Never really cared much for that game,” said Pop. He rested the pipe on the arm of the La-Z-Boy. “All that for a little piece of black rubber.” He waved his arms dismissively. “Slapping it around. Seems kind of foolish. But they like it, the kids who play it; I guess they do. You might be one of them. You and the rest of the LaBrecques. French Canadian, right?”

  “Ray was the best on the team,” said Martha.

  “Is that what he told you?” asked Pop.

  “He was the best until he broke his leg, Pop,” she said, knowing he’d appreciate an orthopedic war story. “They had to put screws in.”

  “Screws? My hip was bad, and then they sawed the bone down and reattached it. I’ve got some screws in there myself,” he said.

  “How’s that working out for you?” asked Ray.

  “Good,” said Pop, and Martha was surprised he’d given an earnest answer.

  The house was clean, but the table in the kitchen was covered with a huge pile of dirty plates and brown paper shopping bags. “Looks better around here,” she said.

  “Your mother has been sending a cleaning girl over,” he said. “Waste of money. I told her if she touched my table or anything on it I was going to beat her silly.”

  “You didn’t say that,” said Martha.

  “Might as well have,” he said. “She got the idea. She’s been doing a good job. Still, it’s a waste.”

  “It’s pretty different without Gram around,” said Martha.

  Pop knocked the spent tobacco into his hand, then dumped it into a coffee can beside his chair. He put the empty pipe back in his mouth. “You’re right,” he said.

  If Ray had asked if he could help out in any way, with shoveling or splitting wood or chipping the ice off the eaves, Pop would have rejected his offer. Instead, Ray started visiting regularly, especially on the weekends when he wasn’t working but Martha had double shifts at the Harpoon, and he didn’t help out in any way, he just stopped in and took some abuse from Pop, occasionally firing an insult back—or at least that’s how he described the visits to Martha. Martha suspected they ended up watching television together, Ray on the couch in the corner, Pop in his chair, refusing to use the remote control, getting up to change the channel only when absolutely necessary, not let
ting Ray change it for him.

  It had been that way for the last few years. When he was around, he was part of her family. When he was gone, he was far away.

  In the months before he left to fish on the coast, though, Ray had started talking indirectly about their future together, a topic Martha avoided. Ray had said, “I’m going to be eighty-five and toothless and you’ll still be telling me to chew my food slowly.” He’d also said, “I think Ray would be a good name for a kid, but we’d have to come up with a nickname.” And when they’d passed the town cemetery on their way to go bowling in East Stockton: “If they ask you, let me be cremated. I don’t want to rot in the ground.”

  No one was making eye contact; Bennie was staring at the wall, and Helen was looking up toward the black windows. In the silence they all heard Ronald, who was curled up at the foot of the purple couch, exhale loudly through his nose, a dog sigh. Bennie couldn’t feel his own body, only the palm of his hand, where Helen’s fingers rested. Gwen looked asleep; her eyes were closed, but he knew she was listening. She said, “Tell us more.”

  Martha told them about a day she’d had with Ray in the fall; they’d met up in the afternoon when neither of them had anything to do. Martha was looking after her neighbor’s dog, Cleo, and they decided to take her out behind the house, across the fields toward the power lines, to see if they could make their way through the woods to her cousin’s property by the west branch of the Hollis River. It was October, but there was still a little warmth in the air, and the ground was solid and the wind smelled like beech leaves. Martha told them that crossing a few of the fields they held hands, but most of the time they were just walking side by side. Her legs felt strong and limber; she felt as though she could have walked across the state. Cleo was finding the swamps along the way, dashing through the thickets, popping up in unexpected places. And all along, Ray was keeping up, though she knew it was her job to navigate. She knew the acres behind her house, she’d walked to the West Branch as a kid maybe ten years earlier. They hadn’t checked the time before they left, but as they came down off the hill, the woods were thicker and they were losing daylight. They were no longer in the part of Tavis Falls where you could walk from field to field; the woods they passed through were old. She could tell Ray wanted to keep a good pace, but she also felt he trusted her judgment and wasn’t worried. They picked up a deer trail and followed it for a while, and when they stopped at a granite boulder beside a dense stand of pine trees, she stood, thinking, and when she started walking at a new angle, following a dried-up creek, Ray asked her if she was sure she knew where she was headed, and she said no, but he followed her.

  It was nearly dark when they heard water. At the first sounds, they stopped walking, held hands, and listened, and it was hard to tell how far away the roaring was, but they headed toward it. After ten minutes more of walking down into the valley they listened again, and the sound was the same, so Martha wondered if the sound was just wind in the trees, and she knew Ray was thinking the same thing, so she said it aloud, and he said, no, I think we’re close, but she could tell he was unsure. After another ten minutes the sound was louder, and then it was right in front of them, glinting rapids in the darkness, the wind still surprisingly warm, the moon giving them just enough light to see the rocks along the edge. They needed to cross the river, so they took off their clothes quickly and stepped into the cold water, Cleo right behind them. Ray held Martha’s hand at first but the water in the middle of the West Branch was deep enough for them not to touch bottom, so he let go and held their clothes above his head. As they swam, the currents pulled them downstream but they made it across. After getting dressed, they still had a few miles to walk but she could see a stone wall that she suspected was at the edge of the McCollough farm. It could have been any stone wall, of course, but she sensed they were close.

  It wasn’t a miracle that they’d made it through the dense woods in the dark, following the deer trail and the dried-up creek and the West Branch itself and the stone wall, but it felt great to be with him then, that whole afternoon and evening, safe.

  Whenever Martha stopped talking, they were all quiet. Gwen was not only silent but perfectly still, with her hands in her lap and her legs stretched out to the end of the couch. After Martha finished the story about her trip across the West Branch, Bennie took Helen’s hand and squeezed it. That’s when Gwen said, “I’ve never had a good boyfriend.”

  This felt like an odd thing to say—Ray was probably dead—but somehow Gwen could pull it off. She and Martha were old friends.

  There was a knock at the door. Bennie got up. On the front steps, Sergeant Lynne Pettigrew was knocking the snow off her boots; her cruiser was parked in the driveway, still running.

  “Sorry to bother you, Bennie. I know it’s late. I’m wondering if your brother is here.”

  “He’s not, Lynne,” he said.

  “You should know, Bennie—we need to talk with him.” When she stepped through the doorway, her glasses fogged.

  “I haven’t even seen him for a few days.” He wondered if by saying this he had already revealed too much. He even wondered, momentarily, if Lynne Pettigrew might be a good person to confide in. Maybe she could help his brother. She seemed reasonable, in her sharply pressed uniform. He could picture her talking to her hockey team before a big game. But all he said was “I don’t usually keep track of his comings and goings.”

  “We’ve gotten some new statements,” she said. “I spoke with Sherry Callahan at Rosie’s pub, who had plenty to say about your brother’s visits there. He paid calls on a regular basis to Ms. Martha Doyle—Mr. LaBrecque’s girlfriend. This mean anything to you?”

  “They’re old friends, he and Martha,” Bennie said, not wanting to speak too loudly. “That doesn’t seem like too much to go on.”

  “This is an unusual situation, Bennie. I was very interested in what Sherry Callahan had to say. Sergeant Thibideaux was, too. I know you’re not in charge of your brother’s comings and goings, but if you happen to see him, please let him know that we’d like to talk with him. We’ve made inquiries elsewhere.” She looked down at her spiral notebook. “We haven’t yet spoken to anyone who’s seen him in the last few days. You know of anyone I might contact concerning his whereabouts?”

  “Why didn’t you come here first?”

  “Sergeant Thibideaux has been coming around. He said no one appeared to be home.”

  “Who have you talked to, besides Sherry?”

  She glanced down at her notebook. “No one else who helped any.”

  “Skunk Gould still hasn’t seen him?” asked Bennie.

  “No, Bennie. Now, who do you think we should be talking to? We’re hoping to find your brother before he gets himself in any trouble.”

  “If anyone would know, it’d be Skunk,” he said. He was sure they were looking for Martha, but without being asked directly about her, he decided it was best that he not mention that she was sitting in the rocking chair, about twenty feet away.

  She closed her notebook. “Good night, Bennie. We’ll be in touch.”

  As soon as he shut the door behind her, he felt ashamed. Why hadn’t he said anything else? Lynne Pettigrew could help. He wasn’t sure that he wanted the cops to find Littlefield before he did, but Lynne Pettigrew was someone he could talk honestly with, wasn’t she? She would understand that if something had gone wrong, Littlefield hadn’t done it intentionally.

  When he returned to the living room, Bennie could tell Martha had stopped telling stories; they were all waiting to hear why Lynne Pettigrew had come to the house.

  “They’re looking for my brother,” said Bennie. “I guess that’s not a surprise.”

  No one responded. Bennie expected Martha to say something, but even she kept quiet.

  They went to bed a few minutes later—Martha said she was exhausted. Gwen gave her the purple couch to sleep on and moved down to the rug by the fire. She could have braved the mouse smell and gone up to her own room,
but Bennie guessed that she didn’t want to leave Martha alone.

  From the bedroom Helen and Bennie could hear the clink of empty beer bottles—someone was dismantling the line and bringing them to the kitchen.

  Before they climbed into bed, again Bennie thought that if Littlefield had really taken off, he would have left a note. Helen stood in the doorway as Bennie searched his room; he moved the bureau and his trunk and hiked the end of his bed far off the ground, thinking that maybe Littlefield had written it on a small piece of paper and it had slipped underneath. Finally, he tore through all his clothes, unloading the drawers of his bureau, jamming his hands into pocket after pocket, spilling shirts and pants onto the floor. Helen stood back. Where the fuck was he? Bennie could imagine his brother sneaking into the room in the middle of the night, taking money from his wallet and leaving a note underneath the bowl of coins on his bedside table or in the front pocket of his jeans. It had to be there somewhere. He pulled out all of the drawers, rifling through the pants and shirts, anything with a pocket. He found nothing. How could Littlefield have done this? Nothing anywhere—no sign of him. Bennie wanted to bellow like Coach would have, but he just sat at the end of his bed, out of breath, surrounded by clothes. Helen started to calmly refold a pair of pants.

  “Go to sleep,” he said. “I’ll do this.”

  “Screw you,” she said, continuing to fold. They spent the next fifteen minutes putting the clothes back in the bureau.

  Some time after they’d fallen asleep, he heard Gwen cry out—a yelp of fear—which he recognized immediately, even in his disoriented state of semisleep, as one of the sounds she made when she was having a nightmare. Afterward he heard Martha consoling her, and then all was quiet again. As he tried to go back to sleep, he thought about when Coach was alive and they all lived in the Manse together: Bennie would wake up in the middle of the night often, not only because of Gwen’s nightmare yelps but also because he would have these large, windy thoughts about dying. He would think about the Pharaohs, how long they’d been dead, and he thought about the people who would be living on earth in thousands of years, and what he, Bennie Littlefield, would mean to them. Coach would welcome him into their bedroom at any hour of the night and let Bennie sleep beside him, and in the morning Bennie would try to sneak out before his parents woke up.