The Season of Open Water

by Dawn Tripp

  He drives away from the city. The trees thicken along the road. The fields open out. He is barely aware of the wheel in his hands. The car twists, making the turns on its own, slow, hypnotic, his foot down on the gas, gaining speed. The last autumn leaves cling to their branches. The shade bends toward him, then away, a stealth, slow-moving wind, he can feel it through the open window, and the world is drenched with color, stunning fluid gorgeous, and he drives, thinking of her, his mind spinning with the trees, sky, leaves falling, the sun and the shade and her body, this thought of her, the tincture of every other thought infused by her. He takes the last hinge of the road. He climbs the hill toward the sudden drop of the fields down to the ocean. The sky is stark, blue and endless, colors, trees, stones, wheeling and alive, the fields gold and shimmering underneath him, laid out in the midafternoon sun, and it is so beautiful, so breathtaking, this first glimpse of the view from the top of the hill, that he stops. He pulls over and gets out of the car. He stands at the edge of the road watching the wind as it works through the tall thick bleached salt hay and, for the first time since the night he was with her in the greenhouse, he has a sense of peace. From where he stands at the top of the hill, he can see the fields stretching down to the sea, the low and gentle shelter of the sky. There is a soft ache to the light. This is the moment he has been traveling toward. He is standing on the brink of it now, on the brink of the rest of his life with her. He will be with her tonight. He will hold her tightly. He will hold her tomorrow and the day after that. He will not let her go.

  They come then. Suddenly. A shocking blackness. Heavy pulsing wings. Crows. They burst out of the tall grass of the field. They shriek and rise. Four. No, five of them, six. They swoop and dive and rise again, chasing a smaller bird, a cowbird, out of the tall grass. They chase the cowbird high, higher, up into the unprotected sky. They form a loose circle around it to keep it contained, and then they begin to move in, a tightening knot. One swerves toward it, then another, beaks, claws slashing. The cowbird pauses once in midair, then darts suddenly, its wings swift, a small dark lightning, it skirts between two crows and it is out of the ring. The crows screech, scolding one another as the cowbird flies low to the ground across the field into the thickets. They chase it, still squawking among themselves. They hover around the thicket. Quietly they wait, but the cowbird is gone, deep in the brambles.

  The field is silent. The wind rakes softly through the salt hay. Silent. The world, the sky, the stones, the sea, all of it silent. Henry climbs back into his car, shaken. He drives the rest of the way home.

  She is not at the house. He finds the note she has left for him by the jasmine. Tonight, after ten, she has written. Just those words. He folds the note and puts it in his trouser pocket.

  He fumbles in the kitchen. There are crows trapped in his chest. He can feel the furious hack of their wings. He cuts off a piece of bread from the hard loaf, but he cuts it too thick for the toaster slats, his hand rough with the knife. He tries to cut the edge of one slice down, fails. He tears off a piece and gnaws on it, but it is too dry. He leaves it and goes outside onto the porch.

  The sun is settling into the sky. It moves deep, receding. It hangs low over the water tower on the far side of the harbor mouth. The light chaps the surface of the ocean. He sits on the porch steps— still with those wings in his chest—water, colors, light trembling, wild, uncertain.

  A couple walking passes by. A girl and an older man. Her father. He has seen them before. They live at the Point. He does not know their names. The man walks with a stick. He pokes it into shells, a bit of driftwood, a dead horseshoe crab. The girl drifts behind him in a long wool coat, her body thin, feet like minnows. She glances up at Henry as they pass by. She smiles. She is shy.

  Young gulls hover in a loose pack on the dry sand. The sanderlings have begun to flock up in their tribes. One rogue fish hawk, solitary, restless, casts long circles over the beach.

  The waves scour in, then fall away. Henry watches as the light shifts down through tidal pools, skates’ eggs, flat gray rocks and stones so white they seem to hold the moon inside them. The sky breaks down into a fire, and he looks west again. Far off, at the end of the beach, he can see the pair walking, the older man and the girl, still apart. They are close to the breakwater where the land hooks back into the dunes. Henry follows the girl with his eyes, cuts the details of her shape. She is as black as a doorway in the dying light.

  He goes inside. He picks up the newspaper, opens to the sports page to read a few scores, but the numbers are a mess in his head. He throws it down again. He flips through his records, picks one out, and winds the phonograph. He sets the record on the turntable, draws the arm across and locks it in place. As the record starts to turn, he sets the needle into the groove. Music fills the room.

  He lies down on the daybed. Through the long window, he watches the darkening sky. The wind has shifted. It brings the fog in.

  Bridge

  Before she leaves to meet Luce that night, she goes into the shop, sits on the stool near the door and cleans her gun. She works the bolt back and forth and empties the unused shells into a pile on the workbench. She slips out the bolt, takes the cleaning rod, snaps in the wire brush and works it through the barrel to take down the flakes of old powder. Then she strings a strip of flannel rag into the rod, dips it in alcohol, and runs it up and down the barrel. She does the same once more with a second rag dipped in oil, and thinks of how when she was a child Noel had taught her to shoot woodchucks from the shadow of the backhouse door—she remembers the look of astonishment on his face when he saw how easily she snapped them off as they munched down the heads of his broccoli. Afterward he would gather them from the garden rows. He would find them among desecrated leaves, their small chests blown open.

  She rubs down the stock, smoothing the rag and working it into the wood with the gentle attention she has always used caring for her guns.

  Luce had told her that tonight she wouldn’t need it. “It’s not that kind of job,” he had said. “You’re bringing yours,” she had replied. “No reason for me not to bring mine.” Although the truth of it was, it really didn’t matter to her either way. Now all she wanted was for the night to be done, so she could get back to Henry. It makes her happy, thinking of him, his eyes on her face, his hands on her body—it fills her with a quiet joy. Sometimes when he looks at her, she feels like he is seeing all that she has seen and felt and grieved and wondered. Later tonight, when she meets him at the cottage, she will tell him this. She will tell him how she had felt that morning in his house, even after he had gone. She had felt that she belonged there. It had become familiar to her, almost home.

  She works the bolt again back and forth to make sure it runs loose and free. She loads the bullets, puts out the lamp, and leaves the gun leaning in the shadow against the outside wall of the shop. She goes into the house. Noel is in the kitchen, pieces of the old can opener on his lap. With his pocketknife, he works at the screw in the handle, trying to tighten it up.

  As she washes her hands in the sink, he glances up and notices how beautiful she looks. Her clothes are neat, her boots polished.

  “Where are you off to tonight?” he asks.

  She points to the can opener parts on his lap. “How many times are you going to fix that piece of junk?” she says with a smile. “Don’t you think it’s time to break down and splurge for a new one?”

  “This one here’s an old friend,” he answers. “You watch, Bridge. I’ll get it fixed right this time.”

  Before she leaves, she comes to the chair where he sits and bends to kiss him on the cheek, in her quick way, that constant way. Then she goes out, and the door settles onto its frame behind her, and Noel is left alone in the kerosene light.

  He cuts wood later that night. He takes two axes down to the woodyard. He works with the heavy one first, and when his shoulders grow sore, he switches to the lighter one. He stacks the last cords into the pile. As he is passing back through the ya
rd toward the house, he sees that Cora has left a shirt out on the clothesline. Its arms twist white as if there is a spirit trapped inside. Its chest fills with the wind.

  The grass is wet with the stiff green smell of rain. The fog has cleared. The moon has begun to press through the clouds.

  Henry

  Half past nine, and there is no sign of her. After ten, he reminds himself. Her note had said, After ten. He tries to arm himself with this. He keeps the phonograph playing, and he reads by the kerosene light. When the lamp burns down to a beaten glow on the end of the wick, he takes the empty tin out to the woodshed and refills it from the drum.

  At quarter past eleven, he puts down his book, goes over to the phonograph, and switches it off. The needle grinds to a halt. He lifts it, slides the record into its case, and closes the lid of the box. As he starts to walk back toward his chair, he sees a pool of wavering shadows from the lamplight on the floor. He stops, transfixed, staring at those strange elusive shapes. The smell of the jasmine spills through the room—that dusky, everywhere scent reminding him.

  He hears gunfire. Shots out of the west. He goes up to the second floor, then takes the narrow flight of stairs into the attic. He goes to the window and looks west toward the end of the beach, the harbor mouth and Charlton Wharf. He can see the orange bursts of light, the lean bright slice of tracers through the dark, shadows scuffling on land by the pier, masses of craft on water—several smaller boats, the shape of draggers, spar-ring off the larger black hull of a Coast Guard cutter, its lights thrown on full beam. And as he is watching—it seems impossible at first—a trick of sound—but he hears another round of shots, fainter and more distant, from the east. He crosses the attic to the opposite window, the window that looks toward Little Beach. Again he sees orange flashes and masses of shadow on the sea. He is frozen, his hands pressed against the cold glass. He knows she is out there somewhere in that darkness, but he does not know where to find her. He is aware of the sound of his own breathing, and silence. He is surrounded by the heavy stiff black silence of the indoor night, every sound from the world outside muffled through the walls, the world outside moving so fast, her, somewhere out there in that darkness, in that danger. Somewhere in that night she is not safe.

  He remembers what she told him once about decoys—how they are always in the shape of their own kind. She had described two ponds baited with wood-carved birds and a duck blind, her brother Luce’s blind, set on the marsh between them, “he would always wait between them,” she had said, and then smiled, the slow and melting smile that he loved, and her eyes had glanced away from him as if for a moment she were turning back toward that still water and the decoys placed in the reeds, the other flock, the live flock, moving in.

  “My brother is a good thief, because he always works against what you’d expect, what you could imagine.”

  Slowly now, Henry turns toward the third window, the south window under the dormer that looks out onto the dark ocean, her words still in him: “He always finds the last place anyone would think to look, and so often, you know, it is the place that is most obvious, most exposed.” And Henry looks out into the deep well of the dark moving ocean, toward the long slung arm of Gooseberry Neck that divides the bay.

  Bridge

  That night was a good sand night. The wind had kicked into the west just after sundown, and by ten it had driven the beach hard as new macadam. The tide was on the ebb. A dark sky. The moon slipping through the clouds.

  They drive over the Point Bridge, down the beach road past the seasonal restaurant and over the low dune. They drive out onto the hard sand, then turn east and head toward Gooseberry along the water’s edge with the headlamps out.

  They park by the rocks below the causeway and walk across it to the island. They cut in on the old path, the one they had walked together so many times. Luce stamps down the overgrown places with his boots, and they wind through the middle of the neck past the inland pond. They cross out onto the beach that faces east. The boat is there. Luce had driven it over earlier in the day and left it anchored in the cove.

  They wade into the shallows and wait, eels running over their feet.

  He had laid it out for her as they drove. He had told her how it would all go down—and as they wait in the shallows, looking northeast toward Little Beach, it unfolds exactly as he said it would.

  There was one rum-ship, a Canadian vessel, and two gangs. The gangs had split up the load, fifteen hundred cases, over a hundred thousand dollars’ worth. It was a big operation, a Syndicate job. After unloading half her hold off Inner Mayo Ledge to Swampy Davoll’s gang, who would then run it back into the Point, the rum-ship had come in past Hen and Chickens and anchored just offshore of Little Beach. There were dories waiting for her there.

  “Isaac Bly’s gang from Dartmouth,” Luce whispers.

  Bridge strains her eyes against the darkness, looking out across the black water toward the far-off paler strip of sand. She tries to match the faint slight movements she can see with what she knows they are doing—unloading the crates off the smuggler into the smaller boats, then running them in, carrying the stuff up the beach, filling trucks and cars; crates of liquor heaped in piles at the edge of the shore.

  She does not ask, but she knows that Luce must have tipped off the Feds, because she can see it does not surprise him when they come, swarming out of the night from the land-side, trapping the rummies on the narrow strip of Little Beach, and it is mayhem— distant black shapes running, shouts, gunfire echoing over the bay, truck engines starting up, headlights backing fast around, more shots. The dories are abandoned in the shallows, half unpacked, some with their full load still on them. The Feds will be vastly outnumbered, she knows this, because they have been split between the site at Charlton Wharf and the site on Little Beach that she and Luce are watching now. Her brother would have waited to tip them. He would have waited until it was late in the evening, too late for them to call up an adequate reserve. There are men at the edge of the shore now—Feds—they are firing out at the rum-ship. She has already begun to nose around. She cuts off her lights and throws her throttle open, heading straight out toward the black and heavy sea.

  Bridge watches with Luce. She is close to him, less than three feet away. This is how he said it would happen, and they would wait, watching from the hook in the shore of the neck. No one would see them. No one would think to look for them there. The Feds would round up what they could of the gang and bring them in, but in the end it would be a numbers game. There simply would not be enough of them to deal with all that liquor. They would have to leave it, at least a good part of it. They would have to leave and come back with more men, more trucks, to haul it away.

  And that, she knew, was what they were waiting for, that rip in the night when the land would fall silent again, the rum-ship gone, the gang scattered, the beach empty with those crates of liquor piled on the sand and lying heavy in the dories in the shallows. The Feds might leave a man behind, two at the most, but they would post them at the top of the road. No one would expect a boat to come in off the sea.

  “Just awhile longer,” Luce whispers to her. “Not long at all now.” The smuggler speeds past them, headed toward open water. She has just come level with the tip of the island when out of the darkness the patrol boats appear, two lean fast shadows, engines roaring. Bridge hears the call of the Klaxon horn. One patrol throws a searchlight, but the smuggler revs her engine and refuses to heave to. The gunfire begins.

  The patrol fires one burst—a stream of orange tracers beating through the night—and then a second. Abruptly, inexplicably, the rum-runner swerves. She takes a hard turn, a hundred and eighty degrees, and guns it. She comes back fast, headed straight for the firing patrol as if she would ram it. The patrol darts left, just barely avoiding collision, and fires another pan of machine-gun bullets toward the runner’s engine room. The smuggler slows, then stops. She lies still, dead in the water. No sound off her. No light.

  A few hu
ndred yards of black water separates her from the shoal at the tip of the island. There is a sudden explosion, the night shattered, a burst of flame—yellow, orange, red, blue. Fire roars off her deck, a huge ball of fire soaring up into the sky.

  Bridge grips Luce’s arm. “Did you do this?” she whispers. He shakes his head, staring, his face lit by sheets of rippling orange flame. She can see it all reflected in his face. He pulls her down to kneel in the shallows. They crouch behind the rocks. Her coat sleeves drag in the water, and she can feel the cold soaking through to her skin. Still they watch, as the wind blows strong out of the west and drafts the flames high. The fire arcs up like a demon, sparks shooting out and falling onto the deck of the patrol. The patrol backs away as the fire leaps out, then edges in again. There is the smell of burning. There are men screaming. Bridge can hear them—the rumrunner’s crew, six or seven crowding against the deck rail. She can see their hands, their faces, their coats on fire, and they jump, first one and then another, then the rest at once. They jump off the starboard side, their arms like freakish orange birds, into the black water. The ship falls back into flames, the sound of timbers cracking as her hull caves in and she is consumed. She lists to one side, then begins to sink, her bow nodding up as her stern drops. Lower and lower in the water she goes. The flames thin down. The steam hisses off her, rising like a fog on the black surface where she disappears.

  The two patrol boats come in from either side toward the men in the water. They pan their lights over the waves. They steer carefully through the wreckage and pick up the men from the smuggler’s crew. The men are shrieking, some of them, crying from their burns, lost in the water, their arms flailing. But the patrols find them. They come alongside each man and hoist him up onto deck, and when the last man is found, they turn and speed off through the night heading east-northeast up the bay toward New Bedford harbor.