Water Dogs

by Lewis Robinson

  He thought, too, about the bundle of raccoons he and Littlefield had left in the snow. Littlefield had assured him they were fine.

  After Gwen’s yelp—as Bennie was trying to fall asleep again—Helen started talking about Martha, and while he did his best to listen to her, in the midst of one of her questions he fell back asleep again. This annoyed Helen, of course; she nudged him and he felt guilty. She shoved his shoulder. “Bennie, Bennie,” she said. “Please. Let’s talk.” She pulled in close and her T-shirt was hot against his skin. He could tell from the moonlight coming through the window that her eyes were open, shockingly wide, and this startled him.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “Are you awake?” she asked.

  “Okay, okay. Start talking. I’m listening,” he said. He closed his exhausted eyes again.

  “Martha is strong as hell. I mean, Ray is dead … and she’s telling us these stories.”

  “You’re right,” he said, and it was true: Martha was tough. He tried to imagine what he would do if Helen was missing. He wrapped his arms around her.

  “Hey, Bennie?” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I think I know what happened.” The sound of these words spread over him like hot, slick liquid. It wasn’t just because he was half asleep; there was something about how she kept waking him up that both annoyed him and made him ready to believe anything she said.

  “You do?”

  “I’ve been thinking all along that Littlefield did something horrible,” she whispered. “But I don’t think he did. He just wanted to scare Ray, and when he fell—there were lots of places to fall—Littlefield couldn’t carry him out, because of the storm.”

  This seemed plausible, and it was certainly one of the scenarios that they’d all been turning over in their minds. As much as he wanted to, he just couldn’t believe it. Littlefield was strong. He would have found a way to get LaBrecque out of the woods.

  She whispered, “We’ll all get through this.”

  Bennie wasn’t sure this was true. “I hope so.”

  She said, “You know, Bennie … there’s something else I wanted to tell you.” He could feel that her warm hands were shaking gently. “I love you, too.”

  He felt a tug of resistance—she couldn’t be serious—but when she wrapped her arms around him, he felt her warmth, and he tried to ignore his doubts. He wondered if this was how it would always be, if he could really rely on her. He felt her chest rise and fall against his. He wouldn’t ever know what she was really thinking; he just had to believe her.

  It was Helen who fell asleep, then—she began to snore, a light, pleasant purr—and while he considered waking her up with a nudge, he decided against it.

  He dozed off and on for the next few hours. Clouds covered the moon and his room was now completely black. Then the rain came, faint against the shingles, then louder, hammering down, slapping the aluminum gutters. He couldn’t sleep. He realized that even though his leg continued to itch beneath the cast, somehow the leg muscles felt stronger. He crawled out of bed. He hopped quietly to the living room.

  “Gwennie,” he whispered into the darkness.

  “Hmmm,” she said.

  “Will you help me cut open my cast?”

  He knew the doctor wanted it on for at least a few more weeks, but he figured if he was careful, it would be good for the leg to finally get some air. She pulled herself out from under the blanket beside the fire. She plodded into the kitchen and turned on the overhead fluorescent light. Bennie sat on the counter and was able to saw a seam with a steak knife from the top of the cast while Gwen—through tired, nearly closed eyes—started working on the bottom. It took a while, and Bennie couldn’t reach down below his calf on either side, so Gwen finished the job, all the way down to his foot. She only got through to the skin with the steak knife in a few places, and Bennie was impatient enough that the cuts were barely noticeable. When Gwen cracked the cast open, Bennie’s leg was white and thin and he pounced, eager to scratch it, but the skin felt weak and raw. He’d been dreaming of this moment since leaving the hospital, but once the leg met the world again, it didn’t itch at all. His knee ached. His limp was pronounced as they headed back to his bedroom, his arm around Gwen’s shoulder. Bennie thanked Gwen for the help, and she whispered, “Couldn’t this have waited until tomorrow?”

  Bennie was lying on his back, wide awake, when Julian called. It was dawn. Not wanting to wake the whole house up, he started jogging to the kitchen to pick up the phone, but his knee ached too much, so he slowed to a walk. He picked up on the fourth ring, hoping it was Littlefield.

  Julian was quiet on the other end. “Dude, you’ve got to help me.”

  “What is it?”

  “Oh, man. I fucked up. I really fucked up. I’m so sorry, man.”

  “Breathe, Julian. What’s going on? What happened?”

  “Oh, it’s a fucking mess now,” he said, between breaths. “But I’m taking care of it. I just want you to know I’m sorry.” Then the line was quiet again.

  “Julian? What’s going on?”

  “I need you to do me a favor,” he said.

  Bennie waited for him to continue.

  “I need you to meet me out the Masungun Road.”

  “Now?”

  “I need you to help me with something.”

  “Julian, if you want me to help you, you need to calm down and tell me what the fuck’s going on.”

  “It’s been raining all night. The snow’s melting. I need you to help me,” he said.

  “Dude, you sound like a crazy person. What the fuck is going on?”

  “I know where the motorcycle is,” he said. “LaBrecque’s bike. I know where it is.”

  “What? I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t need to, not right now. I can’t explain it. Just meet me at the snowfields.”

  20

  The feeling of cold feet in wet sneakers was the feeling of summer biathlon. After the snow melted, their season continued, and it always involved wet sneakers. Running through the woods. Rifles on their little backs. Gwen’s long, skinny legs in front of him, Littlefield’s splashing footfalls behind him. Coach would be waiting by the targets, giving his kids instructions. They’d be setting up, lying down on the wet forest floor. He told them to rest their guns on their bones, not their muscles. He told them to keep a rhythm with their breathing. Shoot on the exhale, every other exhale. Squeeze through the trigger. Don’t hold your breath. Don’t wait for your heartbeat to settle; that just fucks up your eyes.

  They had three targets—one for each of them—and one long loop. In training, they’d arrive at the targets at the same time. Gwen had learned to be consistent with the rifle, Littlefield was a natural, and Bennie was often a deadeye but he sometimes got the shakes. Coach insisted they not pay attention to the shooters next to them, which made sense; in training, it was when Bennie heard Littlefield clang the targets that his hands would begin to shake. Not too much by normal standards, but enough to upset his aim so that he couldn’t depend on the rhythm of his breath.

  Coach wasn’t hard on them. He just wanted them to love it. He’d say: “You three are all better than I ever was. You three are champions.”

  Sometimes during training, if Littlefield had a hot hand, he’d clean his own five targets quickly—BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG—and then he’d clean Gwen and Bennie’s targets, too, before they’d even set up to shoot. This usually happened at the end of a training session, and Coach always shouted his disapproval—“Let them shoot their own targets, William!”—but Bennie knew his father was secretly pleased.

  When Coach died, Littlefield was working beside him—they were building a shed for the lawn mower. He’d left Coach in the yard to run inside and call Eleanor, but the switchboard at school was closed. He called 911, and after he reported to the emergency operator what had happened, he called Coach’s friend Bull Williamson, who worked for the Musquacook Fire Department. Bull was just down
the road. Coach was already dead by the time Bull arrived at the house. He waited with Littlefield for Eleanor to get home. Gwen and Bennie were at camp. Littlefield was sixteen.

  Littlefield had never said to his brother, or to anyone else, “I feel guilty” or “I feel regret” about any issue, any quandary, any event in his life. Bennie never found out what had happened, exactly, on the day of Coach’s death. It wasn’t something the family ever talked about. “They were building a shed together” was the story everyone knew. It was a father-and-son project.

  Bennie guessed, though, that Littlefield held on to the memories he had from that day. The startled look in Coach’s eyes. Maybe he’d dropped a T-square, or a tape measure, or a hammer, and it struck the plywood flooring with a loud bang. Maybe Coach gripped Littlefield’s shoulder for balance. Once Coach was on his back in the shed, maybe Littlefield had pounded on his chest, or tried to breathe air into his lungs, while the dog stood in the grass at the doorway, barking.

  Everyone else in the house was able to sleep through the heavy rain. When Bennie stepped outside in the early-morning light, the tree trunks nearest the house were dark brown, greasy with water, and there were wide, glossy puddles in the yard. Some overcast days in Maine aren’t gray—they’re a sickly pale yellow, muted and hollow. Rivers of snowmelt ran down the slope toward the creek in the woods.

  As he headed out the Masungun Road toward the snowfields, it was difficult to think above the sound of the rain on the car’s roof and the full-speed wipers. The rain fell in wide swaths, pummeling the snow. His breath steamed the windows.

  Julian had sounded like a kid who’d fallen on the playground—not only hurt, but confused. It made him wonder how well he knew his friend, and if Julian had ever let his guard down in front of him before.

  After parking the Skylark behind Julian’s Silverado in the same spot they always parked when they went to the quarry—on the shoulder of the road nearest the corner of the old stone wall—he walked in the melting snowpack along the shoulder toward Julian, who was crouching in the ditch, well down off the road. The telephone poles were shiny with rain. Rivers of water and sand and salt funneled off the shoulder into the ditch. In the woods and fields beside the quarry, briars poked up through the glazed sheet of snow. From his perch on the shoulder, Bennie watched as Julian used a pitchfork to probe the deep slush. He walked a step, jabbed the pitchfork into the snow, pulled it out, then walked another step. In the dim morning light, Julian had already shoveled out the chrome handlebars of the motorcycle, and half of the rest of its twisted body, which was sunk deep in the skeletal briars. He was using the pitchfork to search the surrounding area.

  “How’d you find that?” asked Bennie.

  “Get down here and help me,” said Julian.

  “Did you just find it last night?”

  “Look, the light’s coming up. This road will be busy soon. You’ve got to help me.”

  Rain pelted the hood of Bennie’s jacket. “Tell me now.”

  “At least come down off the road.”

  When Bennie scrambled into the ditch, his knee felt weak but overall his legs felt okay. Julian tossed him a windshield scraper. “Start digging around that back tire.”

  “I’m not doing shit until you talk to me,” said Bennie.

  Julian continued to jab the snow with the pitchfork. “I’ve got to keep looking. We don’t have much time.”

  “ ‘We’?”

  “Will you start digging out that fucking bike?” he shouted. “You’re looking for LaBrecque?” “Yeah,” he said.

  “Don’t you think someone would have found him here by now?”

  “That bike’s been here a few weeks and no one’s seen it,” Julian said. “And no one’s been using a pitchfork to find the body.”

  Bennie dropped the windshield scraper and started walking toward Julian, sinking to his knees in the slushy snow. When he got to him, he grabbed the pitchfork. “Jesus, will you stop that? Talk to me.”

  “We need to get out of view. Go back down in the ditch,” said Julian. They scrambled back toward the motorcycle and crouched beside it. “Listen. I’m not proud of what happened. I was drunk. Too drunk. The thing is, what I never told you was, LaBrecque—he got out of the woods. Your brother was chasing him, but he got out of the woods.” He looked down at his soaked boots. “All I know is, he got all the way out of the woods, to the road, and he got back on his motorcycle. He must have just been trying to get out of the storm—to save himself.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Because I got out of the woods, too. A while before he did. I didn’t know where anyone was. I was lost. I finally found my truck parked on the shoulder and I headed back to the bar. That’s where we were all supposed to meet, right? I stayed there for almost an hour. Then I heard you’d landed in the hospital—someone had just brought you in—so I drove back out the Masungun Road, toward the Adventist. No one else was on the road. No one else was crazy enough, I guess. But just as I came around the bend, right up that way”—he pointed back toward town—“the kid was just pulling out onto the road. When I came up on him, he was clear in the middle of the road. I had no time to turn the wheel.”

  “Holy shit,” said Bennie. “You’re telling me the truth?”

  “I’m telling you the truth, man. I tried to find him in the woods, but I couldn’t. I found his bike in the ditch. I looked for him, but the storm was so bad then, I couldn’t see anything.”

  “You left?”

  “What else could I do?”

  Bennie barreled into Julian with his shoulder down, knocking him to the bottom of the ditch, where he landed on top of him. He pinned his arms down with ease; Julian wasn’t resisting. Bennie said, “They’re after Littlefield. You know that.”

  Julian’s face was red and wet with rain. “I thought I had some time. I know I fucked up. I thought I had some time to think this over, before the snow melted.”

  Bennie stood up and walked back to the Skylark, not looking behind him as he drove away, leaving Julian on his own to look for the body. He felt alone in the quiet car; his mind reeled. He kept seeing his friend’s panicked face, and the way he stabbed the snow with the pitchfork. It wasn’t until he arrived back at the Manse that he realized he was still shivering from the cold rain.

  He assumed everyone would still be asleep when he got back, but he heard Gwen call from the living room when he was pulling his jacket off in the kitchen. “There’s a message from Mom on the machine. She must have left it last night,” she said.

  “I can’t talk to her now,” said Bennie.

  “She’s coming down today, remember?”

  “I need to talk with you and Martha and Helen first.”

  He brewed a full pot of coffee. Soon the four of them were reassembled by the fire. His voice didn’t waver when he looked across the room at Martha and told her that Ray had been hit by a truck that night—by Julian’s truck—and that Julian had never reported it. He said Julian had looked for Ray but he hadn’t found him. He probably hadn’t looked for him for very long, though. It was the middle of the night, the middle of the storm, and Julian had been scared about what he’d done.

  “There’s a chance he’s still alive, then,” said Martha.

  “No,” said Bennie. “He died in the crash. I saw the bike, Martha. Julian never found him. He must have been thrown into the woods.”

  “We still don’t know,” said Martha, staring back at Bennie. Then it looked as though all of the muscles in her body relaxed; she exhaled, lay back against the couch cushions, and began to cry.

  Helen got up off the rug and sat beside Martha, putting a hand on her shoulder, and Gwen stood up from the rocking chair and went to the couch, too, holding Martha’s hand as she cried.

  “Is Julian insane?” asked Gwen. “How could he do this? How could he keep this from us?”

  “He’s a criminal,” said Helen.

  Bennie said, “He was scared. He didn’t know what to do.�
��

  “That doesn’t excuse anything,” said Gwen, and Bennie knew, of course, that she was right.

  21

  Nixon had wanted to be alone when she died; she must have known it was time, so she went down the hill to the creek and curled up in a patch of grass beside the water. It was August of 1994; major league baseball players were striking, and would continue to strike through the fall and into the winter. The World Series was canceled for the first time in ninety years.

  They couldn’t play Man Versus Animal, so Bennie asked Littlefield if he’d be willing to go on a short camping trip. Littlefield agreed. They picked a weekend in early November. They were hoping to drive up to Baxter State Park, but when the weekend arrived it was thirty degrees. They decided to drive south. Littlefield was in charge of finding a campsite, but he didn’t know southern New England very well. They brought a road atlas and hoped for the best. Bennie said he’d heard good things about Cape Cod. They left Maine in the early afternoon and hit heavy traffic in Boston. The skies were clear and the air was warmer than it had been in Maine. By the time they reached the South Shore, they decided to start looking for a camping spot—in the dark, they weren’t sure it was worth driving an extra hour to get to the Cape. The road atlas suggested they’d find camping in Plymouth, but when they got off the exit, they found a campsite that had closed in October, so they pulled into an empty parking lot and pitched their two-man tent in the back of Littlefield’s pickup. They played gin rummy for an hour, drinking whiskey, before turning off their flashlights.