Dead Low Tide

by Bret Lott

  I looked at him. “But somebody was killed,” I said, and thought again of the green scope of sight I had, the woman’s teeth bared and grimacing, the swirl of her hair in the water. That blue crab, there at her ragged jaw. I swallowed, said, “A woman was murdered, and the body was anchored in the pluff mud at Landgrave. Does it matter if it’s only a coincidence?”

  “What do you propose we do?” Unc said, on his voice a kind of edge that made me feel twelve years old again, a kid too dumb to reason with. We were off the bridge, the freeway now a long concrete chute four lanes wide and crossing the dredge-dump flats this side of Daniel Island. Above the tree line up ahead I could see the lit-up arc of the bridge over the Wando a couple miles away, the long hump of it that dropped down into the promised land of Mount P.

  “We were interviewed by three pairs of detectives,” Unc went on. “Plus Tyler. It’s not like nobody gives a damn. So what if there’s nothing on the news about it. That don’t mean nobody’s working this.” I could see out the corner of my eye him turn full-on to me then. He said, “Do you understand, son?”

  “But I saw her,” I said, as though that would explain anything and everything. As if this were the only thing I understood about why I wanted something done to find whoever killed her: I saw her.

  Unc faced forward again, folded his hands in his lap. “I got no help for you on that one,” he said, quiet. “And for that I’m sorry. But it’s Prendergast the one we need to deal with right now. It’s him we have to think on.” He stopped, turned to his window again. “It’s him we have to keep from your momma,” he said, “because if we don’t, I’m afraid for what she’ll do to him. Not that I give a damn about Prendergast. But because of what it might mean for your mom. And the law against what she’s got every right to do.”

  He looked at me then. “You smelled the range on her, I hope.”

  I looked back to the freeway. We were already almost across Daniel Island, on the right the tennis center and its boxy stadium, just ahead the Grace Bridge rising over the Wando. Just ahead, too, lay poker night in Mount Pleasant, and whatever hand we’d play to see this to its end.

  “Yes I did,” I said.

  A car slowly cruised past us, a black Audi trolling for his own spot on the street, though there couldn’t have been any more of them this close to the Whaley house, and I leaned forward, looked in my side-view mirror to see how far back the line of cars went. Here behind us was another set of headlights easing up same as the Audi had: yet another player.

  I felt a drop of sweat carve its way down the back of my neck and into my collar, and sat back, forced myself to take in a deep breath. There stood the Whaley place fifty yards away, inside it Prendergast. And we were going on in there.

  It was a black Suburban coming up on us, slowing down even more the closer he got, and I imagined his Botoxed wife had gotten the Lexus tonight for her Pampered Chef party. He edged past us, touched the brakes a second in front of the house, almost like he was giving a thought to pulling right up on the lawn, to hell with all this street parking. But then he moved on, prowling for the sacred spot that meant he wouldn’t have to work up a sweat in the armpits of his silk shirt before he stepped into the casino. He’d end up parking on past the house, of course, and I saw beyond him the brake lights on the Audi flare a half dozen houses away, pull to the left and to the curb.

  I popped open my door then, the dome light cutting on above us, and turned to climb out.

  “No,” Unc said hard beside me, his hand a vise on my forearm just that quick.

  I turned to him. The bill of his Braves cap hid his face beneath the dome light, but I could see in the darkness the reflection of me in his sunglasses. Two of me, right there in the dark of his face.

  He wasn’t letting me go with him.

  “Close the door,” he said.

  “Unc,” I started, and made to pull away from him. But his hand on my arm went even tighter.

  “Huger.”

  I looked at him a couple seconds longer before I slammed closed the door, the two of us in darkness again.

  “You listen,” I started in, and felt my jaw go tight for the fight I was going to give him over this. He wasn’t going to leave me out here. No. “You listen,” I said again. “You need me in there. You need me. I’m not just your chauffeur. I’m not just your boy to drive you around and watch you do what you have to do without me there, too. I didn’t come all the way out here to—”

  “Huger,” Unc said again, but this time in a whisper.

  I took in a breath, surprised at the sound of just that one word. “You need me in there,” I said again, but already there was nothing in it, whatever words I’d lined up already breaking down.

  Because he didn’t need me. I knew that. He could just walk along this line of cars, a hand trailing rear fender to hood on each one, leaving two gaps for the driveways of the houses between us and the Whaley place, then head up the third one, his stick tapping out the length of it. With any luck either the driver of the Audi or the Suburban’d be hustling to the driveway at the same time, help him on up. They all knew him. And once inside he was, like every poker night, his own man. That was when I always went back to the Range Rover anyway, started in on my Maps app wanderings, my cellphone solitaire.

  Though I wanted to go in, I knew he was right. He could handle Prendergast all by himself.

  He let go my arm, and I took in a couple defeated breaths, closed my eyes.

  And then I asked it, one more time. Because it was what I wanted to know of the deep down of all this. It was what I wanted to know, the why of the fact I couldn’t go with him, but Unc had to do this alone.

  I thought of my mom, and that gun centered neatly on the table between us.

  “What did he do to her?” I whispered.

  He took in a deep breath, held it a moment, let it out.

  He said, “Back in high school, seven boys on the football team got four girls to go with them after a game to a trailer up past Moncks Corner. Eugenie was one of them.”

  He said it with no measure to the words, no emotion at all. Only words out of him.

  He paused, took in another breath, and I fit my tongue in the side of my cheek, bit down hard for the feel of it, the pain. It was something I’d done since I was a kid, a distraction I gave myself when I knew the world was about to crash in. Here it came.

  “Prendergast the ringleader to it all,” he said.

  I’d asked for this. And already I didn’t want it. I didn’t want it, and I bit down harder.

  “Got them up there and drugged them. Give them something in their beers. This was back in ’seventy-six. Before roofies. But this stuff has been going on forever.” He paused, and inside the pain in my tongue I saw up ahead the driver of the Audi come around the tail of his car, cross the street for the house. “The girls wake up the next morning alone in the trailer,” Unc went on. “No car to get them home. Of course no cellphones back then. So they have to walk. And from that point on all four of them have a reputation. All four of them get known for being sluts, because Prendergast and the boys are already home on a Saturday morning and bragging to any school chum who’ll listen what they done to four girls in a trailer out to Moncks Corner.”

  I let up on my tongue, the pain no distraction at all. Only pain, already a kind that meant nothing at all. I said, “But couldn’t they report—”

  “This is thirty-five years ago,” Unc cut in. “This is four girls against seven boys, all of them first-string seniors on the Stall team. This is North Charleston, and girls with no proof they could know of other than the feeling of it.”

  He gave out a breath. “It’s only one girl, Gloria Deedham, decides she’s going to fight them,” he went on, only this time with his voice pitched in a strange way. Quieter, but given up, too. As though the words themselves had surrendered to the work they knew they had to do. “Gloria Deedham decides she’s going to report them to the police. And she does. Gets her momma and daddy to go down
there with her and file the report, but this is already a month after the fact. Still, she tries to charge these boys with rape, though it means admitting to going out to that trailer, and that she knew better than to go out there in the first place, and that she has no proof. Other than the feeling. The same feeling all four of the girls said they had when they went on home from that trailer.” He paused. “Gloria Deedham won’t name the other girls with her, either, because she wanted them to report it of their own accord, and because she didn’t want to bring them down into what she had to know could happen after she started this thing going. North Charleston police start asking questions, get nowhere, and meanwhile that girl and her family ends up with the tires slashed on the two cars they own three times in a month, somebody shitting on their front porch one night, and a word I won’t say painted in red full across her garage door. At school everything you can imagine. While the other three girls don’t say a word.”

  He paused, shook his head. “One of them transfers to a different school. Another one drops out altogether. But Eugenie stays on, though she won’t file, won’t say anything to any of the authorities. And does her best to talk Gloria Deedham into dropping the charges.” He took in a breath, sat quiet a second. “I know all this because it was your daddy and me and Alton Tyler she told what happened, when what Gloria Deedham was going through was at its worst. She told us because we were her friends, and had been since we were kids in junior high. She knew she could trust us, and trust us not to tell.” He stopped, and I could hear him swallow. “She wouldn’t even tell her own momma and daddy, your grandparents. They passed never even knowing.”

  “Unc,” I said. “Please. You don’t—”

  “The football team,” he went on, “ends up regional champs. The police get no one who matters to the whole thing to talk. And Gloria Deedham—” He paused again, leaned his head back to where it just touched the headrest. He took in one more deep breath, let it out slow.

  “One afternoon,” he whispered, “just before Christmas break, Gloria Deedham steps in front of a train out on the tracks behind Sunset Memorial, the cemetery up off Ashley Phosphate. And your momma there with her when she did it.”

  He swallowed again, and I closed my eyes tight. No need now to bite down on my tongue. No need for that ever again. Because there was no distraction for what I knew now. There was no going back ever again. And I’d been the one to ask for it.

  “Your momma and her was walking home after school that day, Eugenie still trying to talk her into dropping the charges,” he whispered. “And then Gloria ended it. Eugenie’s lived with that her whole life. Her whole life, and Prendergast showing up on her porch last night.”

  I saw again the reaction Tyler and Unc both gave when Mom told them he’d been at the house, the shock of it. And I saw Unc out on the dock, asking why he’d ever play poker with a man fundamentally bad.

  My eyes still closed, I whispered then, “How could you?”

  The words came out through clenched teeth, though I didn’t know I’d clenched them. My hands squeezed hard on the steering wheel, though I didn’t know I’d taken hold of it.

  I whispered, “How could you play cards with him?”

  “I didn’t know he was there, back when I started up,” he said, then went quiet, took in a breath through his nose. “All I know is that one night maybe a month after I started Warchester introduced me to a man he figured I didn’t know, we three halfway through a hand already. ‘Don’t know if you know Commander Jamison Prendergast,’ Warchester says to me, and Prendergast says before I can blink ‘I know who he is.’ His voice all smiles.” He paused. “I played out the hand. And after that first one, the next one was a little easier. And then the next one. He was easy to beat. Easy to read, like I told you.” He paused. “None of that’s anything but an excuse. A sorry one. Though it’s no consolation, the day after Gloria’s funeral, Alton Tyler and your daddy and me showed up at Prendergast’s house and beat the living shit out of him and a couple-three of those boys over there with him.” He paused again, took in another breath. “And after all that, the whole thing disappeared. Those boys all seemed to just walk away. Seemed from then on to bow their heads and swallow hard and walk away. Not a word come out of anyone after that.” He stopped again. “I don’t know what come of those other two girls. Couldn’t give a shit what happened to any of them boys. But Prendergast ends up an officer in the Navy. No charges filed, no record.” He paused. “The Navy. I’ve known a thousand good people in the Navy. But here’s the one shows up at a poker table. The one shows up to our door, too.”

  I heard him turn in his seat then, toward me. “Your momma’s had this on her heart her whole life,” he said, his voice thin and ragged. “She’s had all of it. The fact of what happened with those boys, and the fact she was there when Gloria killed herself, and the fact she still kept quiet once that girl was gone. She’s had to live with that. And it’s me brought it all back to her with these goggles, and with this poker house.”

  He stopped, sniffed. He whispered, “I have to ask her forgiveness. And I will. Once this is all over. Because I have done the wrong thing. I have done the wrong thing here, and all the years we’ve been playing cards like this. To be playing with him.” He paused. “I just wanted to beat him at something, even if it was just cards. But that’s me being the selfish shit I am. It’s me doing the wrong thing all this while. But this will be the end of it.”

  He took in a breath, then said, “And I need to ask your forgiveness, too. I ask your forgiveness. Because I’ve been playing cards with this same man. Forgive me for sitting across the table from him, betting against his voice for the sake of nothing other than a game of cards and the pitiful joy of a handful of cash. But I aim to end that now. And that’s why you have to stay here.”

  I opened my eyes, felt the wet of them and the hot, and I turned, saw his shadow waver in the dark of the car.

  I said nothing.

  He leaned over to me, put his hand back on my arm, but softly, gently. “Huger, where I need you is out here,” he said. “You know I need you, but what I need is for you to stay right here and to stay put. I’m going in there and get this done.”

  He sat up straight, turned to his door and popped it open, the dome light on again, self-appointed and dull. Then he turned back toward me, and here was his face hidden in the shadow of his bill once more, inside it again those two reflections of me. Like nothing had changed between the first time I’d seen them tonight and this moment, here, now.

  “You stay put, you hear?” he said, and reached a hand into the pocket of his windbreaker, pulled out his cellphone, set it in the console tray, there with the bag of golf balls. He leaned a little forward, pulled from his back pocket his wallet, set it in there too, all while I just watched, nothing making much of any sense right now. Not much sense at all.

  He turned to the open door, climbed out and closed it, then opened the backseat door: darkness for a moment, then the dome light again. He reached down to the floorboard, picked up his walking stick from where it lay down there, took hold of the book bag.

  He looked at me again. “You stay in here, and just stay put. No matter what. Because that’s what I need from you.”

  I swallowed, nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “Good.” Like he’d been able to see me.

  He stood, started to close the door, but leaned in again.

  He looked at me, said, “I love you, Huger.”

  “Okay,” I said, my voice barely loud enough for even me to hear.

  He stood there a moment longer, then closed the door, moved alongside the Range Rover up to the hood, crossed to the silver Mercedes. He held the book bag in his left hand, in his right the walking stick, then shrugged the book bag over his shoulder. His left hand now free, he touched the rear fender on the Mercedes, started off, the walking stick in his right hand tapping out the curb.

  A moment later he was gone, hidden for the cars. Next time I’d see him from here he
’d be walking up the drive of the house.

  I breathed in, wiped at my eyes with the palms of my hands, then opened them wide, blinked and blinked. I took in another breath.

  No wonder Mom’d leaned in close to me last night when I finally showed up. No wonder she’d held on tight, her arm crooked at my elbow while we three stood there in the foyer of our home. No wonder she’d gone to the shooting range.

  He’d kissed Mom on the cheek. And she’d taken it.

  I leaned forward to rest my forehead against the steering wheel, as if that might do anything for me at all.

  And saw in the side-view mirror a set of headlights again: that same dumbshit black Suburban, sweeping through from behind us one more time, as though there might have been a spot open up since the last time he drove by.

  For a moment I thought of giving him this one. I thought of starting the engine, then rolling down my window and waving him in as I gunned on out, swerved up onto the Whaley driveway and crashed right through those garage doors. Then I’d find Prendergast and do my best to beat the living shit out of him.