by Dawn Tripp
Luce does the ice work because it was his father’s work. The route he drives was his father’s route before his father died in the swine flu. The ice work is good work. Steady work. But he knows it is work that won’t last forever. He can see the writing on the wall. The newer summer homes, the homes of the rich—even some of the cottages down on the beach—they have the new ice chests that plug into the wall and need no ice to keep them cold. So when Honey Lyons stops by the ice pond that Thursday morning as they are hauling the last of the crop inside and asks Luce if he can have a short talk with him, Luce doesn’t hesitate. He walks with Honey Lyons outside.
Just a small job. Lyons says. One job, there might be more if Luce takes to the work. He has heard Luce is good with a boat, and some men he knows need someone for a job the night after next. Dirk McAllister was on for it, but they can’t seem to find him. The jimmy seems to have taken a cut that wasn’t his and got himself gone.
They have walked away from the icehouse toward the edge of the pond. The frozen hay cracks under their boots. Luce glances up toward the pines, their branches shattered with snow.
“Tell me the job.”
“You’ll be told if you take it.”
“I’ll take it depending on what it is.”
Honey Lyons grins, his face hard, and when he speaks, his voice seems to come from between his teeth. “What it is depends on if you’ll take it.”
Luce stubs his boot into a long blade of ice. He splits it with his toe.
“If this weather keeps,” he says, “the sides of the river’ll be frozen night after next, I’d bet, all but the channel.”
Lyons doesn’t answer.
“So the job’s not in the river, I’d bet.”
“I wouldn’t bet one way or other if I were you.”
“Is it mooncusser work?”
Lyons looks at him sharply. “You get this straight. Breaking up ships on rocks, salvaging someone else’s load, all that pirate stuff is for the dirt poors. You accuse a businessman of that, you’re only showing what you come from.”
Luce feels his face flush. “You know what I meant,” he says under his breath.
“I know what you said. You want the job or not?”
Luce doesn’t answer right away. His eyes swing across the frozen water. The crows shriek through the trees. “I want a third more than what you’re planning to offer,” he says.
Honey Lyons laughs. “If you tell me that up front, I might offer you a third less.”
Luce glances at him, then looks down at his hands chapped by the cold. “I can run the river at night better than anyone—you know that.” He peels one bit of skin off the nail.
Honey Lyons studies him for a moment. He does not say anything. He offers nothing more.
They stand together on the edge of the frozen pond. The clouds mass above the trees. Luce watches them, aware of the other man standing beside him, waiting, as the clouds tumble like boulders down into the pines.
“I’ll take it,” Luce says. He does not look at Lyons.
“Once you’re in, you’re in.”
Luce nods.
“Like I said, it’s the night after next.”
“Black-of-the-moon night.”
Lyons nods. “You’ll leave from the Point Wharf. You’ll come back into the river to unload. The stone pier, two landings up from the Meadows.”
Luce shakes his head. “No man with a drop of common sense would bring a boat upriver of the bridge this time of year, this kind of winter. You hit the wrong spot, ice’ll slice her bow like a knife through cheese.”
“Better not hit the wrong spot,” Lyons says. Then he smiles, the gold stub of his tooth sharp in the light.
That first night out, Luce meets Honey Lyons down at the Point Wharf on the east side, the sheltered side, behind the bridge. When he sees the boat tied up, Luce smiles to himself. The old man’s boat, he thinks. Lyons has a boy with him, Johnny Clyde. Just seventeen, Johnny comes from the Narrows in the north part of town. He is tall and skinny, black hair, pale skin, a soft apple face. He talks little.
“He’ll be your other hand,” Lyons says to Luce.
“Already got two of my own.”
Lyons shoots him a look, and in the dim light spilling from the dock house behind them, Luce can see a hard, cruel glint in the other man’s eyes. Then it is gone, and he gives Luce a sly, complicit smile. “You’re captain,” he says. “Johnny’s your mate. As long as you’re working for me, he’ll be your mate.”
From his coat pocket, Honey Lyons draws out a sealed package wrapped in brown paper.
“This is what you’ll give them for your order.” Luce reaches out to take the package, but Lyons’s hand snaps back. “Don’t even think about opening it, big boy. I’ll know it if you do.”
They leave on the ebb tide. The river is empty, frozen in patches. Luce steers them gently through the thin plates of skim ice. He gives the engine some gas once they pass Crack Rock, but then he cuts her back again as they come along the Lion’s Tongue. They pass Charlton Wharf, out the harbor mouth.
The ocean is cold, the air slick, the water and the sky black ahead of them. They run without lights, speeding out toward the bell, and then past it. The land drops out of sight behind them. For a while, they can still see a faint brushed glow over the horizon, but that too fades, and they are left steering through the night, the sea black as pitch underneath them.
They head south-southwest. They pass the ledge. At 11:25 off the port side, Luce spots first one sail, then another. The ship rises up as if she were rising out of the darkness, out of the sea. She is a schooner, a beautiful fisherman, trim and knockabout-rigged. Her masts are tall and strong. Her lines slope down in long and graceful curves.
Several smaller boats are already pulled up along her starboard side: other customers loading up their decks. One of the crew waves them in, and Luce pulls the boat into a clear space alongside her. Johnny Clyde throws the truck tire fenders over the rail and ties off a line. They climb aboard. Luce notices how the men take the pair of them in, eye them warily. They are strangers. Each man of the crew has a heavy Colt strapped to his hip.
One comes up to him. “We’ve got it all from a drink to a barrel. What’s your order?”
Luce hands him the package. The mate takes it up to the wheelhouse. As they wait, Luce takes a turn around the deck. He can see cases of liquor stacked and covered under canvases and tarps. There are huge barrels and smaller kegs pressed in tight pyramids aft. A man he takes to be the captain returns with the mate. He is tall, red-bearded. He extends his hand. Luce takes it, starts to introduce himself, but the captain cuts him off and shakes his head.
“Don’t want your name,” he says. “Don’t know the names of some of my own men. Don’t want to. Your boy’ll stay here. You come with me.”
He leads Luce down a steep ladder, belowdecks. The hold is divided into smaller walled-off compartments according to brand and price and kind. One berth holds nothing but champagne, another brandy, another gin. The whiskey room is twenty foot fore and aft, ten foot across, and crammed deck to overhead. The bottles are stacked in crates and sewed up in gunnysacks. The captain takes one, rips it open, and Luce can see five quart bottles of Cedar Brook, 100 proof.
“Your order’s for this. And twenty cases of Golden Wedding.”
Luce nods.
“Bring your boy down and oil up.” He takes out one of the bottles of Cedar Brook and holds it out to Luce. “Yours,” he says. “On me.”
Luce nods. He does not smile. He takes it.
Although the wind is behind them on the return trip in, the boat runs slower. She is sluggish, her hull sunk low in the water by the weight. Luce keeps her out to full throttle, and they speed through the brutal cold on the flat black sea. Spray strikes against his face. The wind cuts his eyes. He can feel the hot burn of the whiskey in his throat, the searing cold of the air in his lungs, and he feels brutally alive, cut free from his life, a part of something larger, s
omething grand and beautiful and strange, a territory without borders or names, a part of the cold and the burning and the speed and the limitless night.
He cuts back on the throttle as they come up to the Knubble Rock, through the mouth of the harbor, the engine running soft under the silencer. Once, on the other side of Cory’s Island, the bow nudges up into a thicker pack of ice, and Luce can feel the grinding impact against the hull. He backs away and steers her left, into the deeper channel.
They come in under the Point Bridge. He threads through the open running water between the shore-fast ice. They put in at the stone pier, upriver of Ship Rock. Luce can see that someone has broken up the ice alongside the pier and left two new lines coiled on hooks nailed into the piles. They tie up and unload the cases. They work quietly in the cold still darkness. They do not speak. When the boat is empty, they carry the cases up to the barn. The door is rolled back, and some distance away, up the drive, Luce notices two trucks waiting. A man gets out of one and comes toward them. Luce has never seen him before.
“It’s our job from here,” the man says. “Get scarce.”
Luce and Johnny Clyde bring the boat back under the bridge. They tie up again at the wharf in the slip on the east side. Johnny Clyde gives Luce a lift in his pickup, a 1924 Ford that has one lean deep dent along the right tail side. He drops Luce at the end of Pine Hill Road.
“So we’re in then?” Luce asks him just before he closes the door. Johnny looks uncomfortable for a moment, unsure.
“Guess so, I guess. We are, I suppose. Dunno, really.” His eyes shift. He looks away and taps the steering wheel with his left hand.
“Sure then,” Luce says. “See you around.”
“Sure then,” Johnny says. “See you.”
The following week, Honey Lyons comes by the icehouse again, looking for Luce, and Luce walks away from his work that day and he does not go back. He runs the boat through that first winter, paired up with Johnny Clyde. They run twelve days a month on the dark of the moon. They run through mud-thick days and clear cold nights, stiff breeze, flat calm, heavy rolling seas. They run out to all types of ships anchored in Rum Row—tramp steamers and finerigged schooners, old sailing barks, the occasional tugboat, barge, or packet ship. Sometimes they will go out late, after the moon has set, and come back in through the fog just before dawn. They bring in crates of whiskey, bourbon, Double Eagle, Old Tom gin, Benedictine, cases of French wine and vintage champagne. They meet the shore crews and load crate after crate onto flatbeds and into the trunks of cars.
They follow each order Honey Lyons gives them. Once, when Luce hears news ahead of a patrol blockade gathering after midnight at the mouth, he dumps a load in deeper water among the rocks off Gooseberry Neck. He ties each case to a buoy and a block of salt that they keep in the hold. In three days, when the salt dissolves and the buoys float up to the surface, he and Johnny Clyde go back for them, on a full-of-the-moon night. They haul the cases up and run them into shore.
He notices that on the larger runs, money rarely changes hands. The deal is prearranged. Prepaid. Lyons will give him a note, a skinny package, an envelope, a coded message scribbled in black ink, and that is what Luce will take out to the rum-ship to exchange for the load. And he likes it that way. He likes having no money on him, nothing to tempt the thief in him, nothing to worry after, nothing to lose.
He takes to the work quickly. He learns the rules. He sees into the guts of the business, and he keeps his mouth shut, his ears open. Working out of the wharf, he begins to sense the unsettled tension between rival gangs. Swampy Davoll is the lead man of the Point crew. Luce knows him by sight, a tall, big-shouldered man with a thatch of white hair turned early, a wind-scarred face. He carves wood and is known through town as a good man. Tough as dried codfish, he’ll turn if you cross him, but the talk was he kept many a family in food and heat through the winter. If a fellow was hard up for cash, Swampy would give him thirty bucks and tell him to forget about it.
At the Point, the wharves are crowded with boats—a few built only for the rum trade that have never had another use. Others are work boats, cats, swordfishing vessels, draggers, a few skiffs. The Coast Guard cutter, patrol boat 317, keeps a space in a berth on the middle dock, opposite the boat Wes Wilkes runs with Caleb Mason, the Mary Jane.
One blustery Sunday, mid-February, when Luce comes down to the wharf to check the engine, to make sure the cold has not seized her up, Swampy Davoll steps out of the Shuckers Club across the road from Blackwood’s store. He lights up his pipe, takes a look around, and spots Luce down at the boat on the east pier. He walks over to him and asks him into the club for a game of cards. Luce goes. Three of them are already in there, at a table in one corner of the room past the slate pool table: North Kelly, one of the Masons, and Wes Wilkes, who is the youngest of Swampy’s gang, a few years older than Luce. They offer him a drink and a smoke, and the liquor is good. Wes Wilkes deals out the cards and they play, and Luce can see that Swampy is sizing him up, seeing what kind of cat he is. They know who he works for. They don’t like Honey Lyons, don’t trust him. And it is in that card game, when Luce has lost two hands, but is betting high in the third with three queens in his hand, that Swampy remarks casually, quietly, tapping used ash from the bowl of his pipe, that he has heard talk that Johnny Clyde, the young fellow Luce works with, might be Honey Lyons’s nephew, would Luce know anything about that? His voice is low, barely skims over the tinny sound of the radio set up on the ice chest. He matches Luce’s bet in the pot, and the third man in, Mason, folds.
“I’m not saying I know for a fact that it’s true,” Swampy murmurs when Luce doesn’t answer. “I’m just saying you might want to watch your back.”
Luce will say nothing to Honey Lyons about that conversation, nothing about being invited into Swampy Davoll’s place for a round of cards. He winds up winning that particular hand with his three queens that beat out Swampy’s pair of aces. He says nothing to Johnny Clyde the next time he sees him, but he watches them both a little differently from then on.
When he is down at the wharf, working over the boat, scrubbing her deck, wiping down the salt spray caked on her pilothouse window, he listens. He hears all the talk outside the papers: of how they store the loads of liquor in horse barns, vegetable cellars, haylofts; how they run it to the city in school buses, hearses, pickups, and wagons, in new sedans and old Maxwell touring cars, their backseats pulled out, bottles hidden in every spare compartment. He hears the story of the man from Tiverton murdered and put in a barrel of cement because he talked too much, and that other one about Helmut Gifford, who took five slugs to the gut and survived. He hears behind-the-back-talk about the legends: the rumored sightings of Al Capone, the Idle Hour, the Black Duck and her captain, Charlie Travers, who works out of the Sakonnet and shows her heels to every patrol that tries to chase her down. He hears the tale of the old farmer’s house over by Barney’s Joy—a house that was gutted in 1921, then bought by a Syndicate man and rebuilt for the rum-running trade, with a cellar floor raised and lowered by hydraulic pumps, a second cellar hidden underneath. The house was known to be a haven for the rummies, and the Feds had searched it four times and never turned up a trace, never found the gin stored in the water tanks, gin running through the pipes, gin coming out the cold water faucet on the kitchen tap.
He hears lower talk, hushed talk, about mooncussing and the hijacks, the go-through men, the occasional double-crossing of one gang by another. He hears about the salvagers, local fishermen mostly, willing to take the risk, who scavenge drops made by the inshore crews. They will watch a chase from land and mark the crates of liquor dumped overboard; while the Feds and Coast Guard are busy chasing down the gangs, the fishermen will steal out with their dories and their skiffs. They will drag up the cases and the sacks with homemade grappling gear—oyster tongs and corkscrew poles. They will clear the load before the rummies have time to get back to it. They move it to their own hiding places and sell it in the city
themselves.
Luce works through the weeks, the months, toward the first thaw. He does his jobs for Honey Lyons, and he keeps his head down. He learns who can be trusted and who to keep an eye out for. He hears what kind of graft is going on, who can be bought with a bribe, and who is tipping what. He stores away what he overhears, and from time to time he has the sense that he is ordering these details for some future ambition, some future use.
Down at the pier one afternoon as Luce is straightening the kinks out of the anchor chain, he overhears a row between Honey Lyons and Swampy Davoll. They are sitting on the bench underneath the Sinclair gasoline sign, and it is queer enough to see them sitting there, two men who are known as enemies, as unmixable as oil and water, to see them sitting there like an old bickering couple at opposite ends of the same bench. Watching from the corner of his eye, Luce notices that when they speak, they do not look at one another, they look straight ahead. The other men from Swampy’s gang have moved off the bench and given them room, a wide berth. They talk low, but the wind is out of the northwest, behind them, and their voices carry across the pier to Luce. They are talking about Dirk McAllister, still gone missing.
“Coming up on three months now. I know you know something, Lyons,” Swampy Davoll is saying.
Honey Lyons shrugs. He palms his pack of cigarettes. “From what I hear, your man Dirk was skimming off what wasn’t his. Talk is he made south with quite a piece of cash.”
Swampy looks across the water toward the Point Bridge and beyond it, upriver toward Ship Rock. “Bullshit. Cuts no ice with me.”
Honey Lyons lights a cigarette, throws down the match. It settles in the dirt at his feet. “I’m sure he’ll turn up one of these days. Maybe toward spring.”
Swampy gives him a long cold look. He is a good eight inches taller than Honey Lyons, and his hands are tremendous, but sitting that way, on the bench, they seem nearly equal size.