Harbor Lights

by Theodore Weesner

  He ignored her, moved on, avoided eye contact, though later, under threat, saw that he would have done better to return the money in her presence, to have made a face at her or even offered to share it with her. (She had premature breasts; who knew how things might have gone?) He angled to his seat, heard her squawk again, and hissed over his shoulder: “Shut up!”

  He denied all. The teacher made him empty the money and everything else from his pockets, and heard from Leon Plourde, recovering his jacket, that his money was missing, and, from Vera Burton, her eyewitness account, still he denied all. The money was his, they could ask his mother, and not only that, he said, but during recess he had heard them planning to trick him, and no, it wasn’t a lie! They were the ones lying! You could ask his mother, you could!

  In the vice principal’s office, he held to his story all over again. They were instructed, one at a time, to tell their stories, and he held to his, said they were the ones lying, and how could he not interrupt when they were telling lies? They could ask his mother, because it was money he was saving for a present for his dad and carried with him always, was money he was saving and shouldn’t have let them see in the first place, he knew he was guilty of that, of showing off, but he could prove it was his because you could see pencil marks he had put on the border of each bill—only they were hard to see now because he had done it two weeks ago when he first started saving the money—but how could he have done that if what they said was true?!

  That he had a way with words may have been lost on him at the time, but awareness leaped ahead when the vice principal said at last that if Virgil wasn’t willing to confess, there was nothing to be done about it, and the first rule, in any case, as every pupil knew, was not, under any circumstances, to leave valuables in the hallway where they could come up missing! Or to show off with money, he added on a glance at Virgil. It should be a lesson to them all, he said, and they were to return to their room because the incident was over, and he did not wish to hear another word about it, then or ever again!

  Only years later did Virgil see that his best opportunity in crisis management may have eluded him in failing to compromise Vera at the outset when she caught him red-handed, and that an added missed opportunity, when they came from the vice principal’s office and in response to Leon crying and slugging him in the back, was not to call the small boy chicken (which he knew himself to be) but to have said okay, take the money, it’s yours, what do I care? Nor to say he didn’t fear Leon’s brother at all, not for a second, though everyone knew—something he had also failed to factor into his reply—that Ronnie Plourde, an eighth-grader with facial hair, was a hockey player known for penalties, a muscle-bound boy who put the fear of God into eighth-graders, ninth-graders, teachers and coaches, too.

  Still another opportunity eluded him when Ronnie Plourde called him at home and told him to bring his brother’s seven and three more to school the next day or he was going to smash his face like a pumpkin. Given the chance to buy his way out of a corner—not an unreasonable amount for someone caught red-handed—he chose yet again to deny, swore he did not take the money! Leon was a liar! Went on trying to persuade himself that the hours of possession had made the money his, and only an idiot would surrender such an enormous amount.

  Off the phone, however, and as terror began taking him over, he started to pay a different price, and while he did not forgo his resolve (the money was his!) he progressed enough in cunning that he at least considered cutting his losses with a return call and counteroffer of eight dollars or nine dollars, even the ten dolloars Ronnie Plourde had demanded, anything to be free of the terror he was suffering. Only later did he see that the countermove would have saved him the plum-sized eyes, the bruises and taunts, the added terror with which he lived, plus a net payment of thirteen dollars, before the ordeal turned toward concluding (he lived with it yet today). Rather, he spent a night so frightened he hardly slept, and a day at school so terrified he trembled at every turn, only to wet his pants on the spot when he thought the day was over, when, returned to his own neighborhood, believing he was home free, pivoting to look behind him, he turned forward again to see Ronnie Plourde step from behind a tree before him, felt shocked urine soil his pants and pride, was pounded onto the sidewalk, pounded in the face, cried to no avail, and had his manhood disrupted for the rest of his life.

  Such was Virgil’s confused state as he crouched beside a sliding cabinet door in the dead end corner of the store, several aisles from Beatrice’s office, that he was hoping Ronnie Plourde and Warren Hudon would both die once and for all and leave him alone. His arm was bleeding, but the wound—ripped near his armpit as if by a nail—was not life-threatening, and what kept racing through his mind was how feeble he had sounded when the chips had been down (“Can’t we be reasonable here!”), that he had left Beatrice to her fate with her insane husband, that after thirty years of offering to care for her, to support her in all ways and run interference for her, he had been the one to run (what else was he to do?!) and might be seen to have acted unmanly.

  It happened so fast—he imagined explaining. There was no opening; he had to run for help, was a miracle the shot he received wasn’t worse … just inches … and it was then that he heard Warren’s cough and his voice calling his name, then that he collapsed within in recognition of his own mortality.

  Still, generating some grit, he duck-walked past an aisle, crouched ever more compactly, face and wet cheek nearly to the floor, gasping, to see if he might yet escape through the main door, or (as he imagined telling reporters) to see if it were possible to disarm Warren by jumping him from behind. He pressed to a cabinet, bleeding down his right side, damp with blood in his armpit, praying his chance was real, when footsteps, shoes, khaki pant legs, and the disgusting cough entered the aisle, approaching, brown shoes belonging, he knew, to Warren Hudon, he with whose wife he had carried on a lifelong affair, whose person he had vilified a thousand times or more, he whose hand carried that unanswerable weapon.

  The shoes Virgil dared not look at scratched toward him. Hardly able to breathe, he tried to raise a hand and beg Warren, jesusgod, tried to turn his face up and get words out, while voice and throat refused to work, and as the shoes stopped before him, he all at once found strength enough to scramble to one side, to his feet, to push off, and dragged himself one step, two steps before heat and metal stabbed his back and ribs, sent him lurching though continuing to think the front door was freedom, life, salvation, if only he could make it there and push through to the other side.

  He knew Warren was coming behind him, but struggled on. And it was as he reached a hand to the door that everlasting life exploded within him, that he and plate glass shattered together and he went sprawling onto the sidewalk, contriving yet to beg for mercy, thinking to offer, confess, own up in exchange for his life to every dirty little secret he had ever known. But the former chairman of a hundred committees and subcommittees, the former broker of countless deals, could manage to gurgle but a syllable before his hair was jerked back in a handful and his skull detonated, before he glimpsed, in a last shattered thought, the consequences of failing, in a crisis, to get an offer on the table.

  Warren

  Once, going on the water on a Sunday in three-foot seas, heartsick over life at home, wanting, however threatening the weather, to be on his boat, to be the strongest of lobstermen, he discovered in thirty minutes’ time that he could not run traps, waves were roaring and too deranged, the chopping of his boat too wild, and he was risking his life for no reason than to tempt fate and prove something to his aloof wife. It wasn’t lobsters he was wanting to uncage, but himself, and it was on that same outing, turning back, that he spotted two kayakers even more foolhardy than he, caught in the fuming mess and struggling for their lives within rising and falling tons of frigid water.

  They would have drowned had he not brought his boat slamming through the waves. He went at them, cut his motor to neutral and threw anchor, bellied in where on
e kayak kept fishtailing skyward and the other was twisting to one side and back, to one side and back, angled sixty degrees upward as he reached the passenger cavity with his grappling hook and helped bring the kayak and its half-drowned occupant back around. He worked with hands and hook, in near misses several times of going headlong into the turmoil himself. Getting alongside that kayak most in peril, getting a grip under the man’s ribs, he called up all the strength he ever possessed and lifted, pulled, dragged, and tumbled vessel and passenger onto the deck of the Lady Bee, into a mess of spilled bait, buckets, sloshing lines, gear, pots. Leaving the kayaker to himself, he engaged motor and dragged anchor, turned the Lady Bee’s prow to the other kayak twenty, thirty feet away—it would prove to be occupied by a woman also bereft of paddle—once more cut the motor and extended the grappling hook full-length to where she could get a grip, and holding her, pulling her, finally gripped and tumbled her onto the deck of the Lady Bee, too, where her partner had struggled to disengage and was on hands and knees, retching. Leaving them to gasp and spew water, Warren recovered anchor and wheel, and, in time, needing an hour to smash through angry seas in what was usually a ten-minute run, returned them into the harbor and to Fort McClary where, as they let him know by shouting at him with teary laughter, they had put into the water four hours earlier. He couldn’t help laughing with them, foolish children that they were. What was there to do but laugh when death had come so close? And there, hearing their shouted gratitude, feeling them squeeze his arms and shoulders, seeing them continue to weep and smile, he got them and their vessels offloaded in waist-high water, and held at anchor as they dragged their fiberglass shells to a VW minivan where they fixed the shells on top like an upside-down catamaran—all was increasingly comical, marked with laughter and tears—saw them wave and, of all things, throw kisses as they departed, and he kept grinning as he anchored there for the storm to abate, and as he made his way home to Narrow Cove.

  Those kayakers, children who had presumed the sea … they crossed his mind and raised unknown emotion in Warren’s heart as he sat in his pickup, lost to himself. Sitting there, not knowing what to do—maybe five minutes had passed since he jerked Virgil’s crispy hair and blasted a bullet through his head—it came to him that the kayakers might be grateful today, at last, to be alive, and he wished them well, wherever they were in life. Still, it was in that moment, looking to his hands and seeing he was marked with blood and matter, that a sense of wrongdoing took him over, an awareness of something being terribly wrong and being responsible. He moved the weapon from his lap to the passenger seat and, as if turning to something forgotten, reached his hands in their automatic way to start the truck’s engine.

  He had shot them and all was wrong. Oh, dear God, it was what he had done.

  In the next moment, as he drove from the parking lot, a police cruiser came his way with flashing lights and bellowing siren. Light and sound passed beside him like a television screen. He drove on. In spite of his sense of wrongdoing, he was grasping to believe that police, God, fishermen would understand, would forgive him and be on his side: Virgil and Beatrice … they had it coming, deserved it, it was something he should have done to them years ago.

  Still there was no relief, and wrongdoing kept pressing every opening he tired to occupy. What he had done was irreversible; he could see that. It was irreversible, and he would not be able to argue the point with Beatrice again, would never hear her judgment of what he had done.

  He continued driving slowly. His impulse wasn’t to escape, or to survive, but to explain, to persuade and be understood, to be forgiven. Who wouldn’t have done what he had done? Some years earlier a woman in Ogunquit had shot her husband fifteen times, emptied two clips into him, and the court had ruled it justifiable homicide for the cheating the husband had done, his flaunting in her face of cheating with younger, thinner women. Justifiable homicide.

  Wrongdoing maintained its grip on Warren’s heart, however, and as he drove along he began keening with uncertainty, with pain and in fear of being yet again on the wrong side of everything in life. To an imaginary judge he implored his wish only to be a husband while being cheated for thirty years! They had used him, she had said as much, had said he should have known—and he hadn’t known at all! They had duped him was what they had done, when they could have let him go. And when he offered forgiveness in exchange for a touch of friendship, they turned their backs on him, excluded him as if from existence. They refused to listen, even when he admitted he had brought a share of alienation on himself.

  As his heart raged, and he traced the marshlands curve into town, three howling/flashing police cruisers rose into view and wailed by, rising and falling like planes in an air show. He glanced to his mirror and kept knowing in his heart that everything was terribly wrong, was worse than the bodies they would find. Her precious store stained and violated with blood and glass, death and carnage. Yet again a realization came as if from on high that he would never see Beatrice again or be able to make his case. Nor might he dream, as he had so many times, of running into her in town and winning her over at last, or dream, as he had into a thousand nights, of possessing her as a woman, masturbating, fantasizing his lilac-scented, silken wife as she lay in an adjacent room behind a locked door. No, she was gone now, and terror kept coming up his throat, making him sick with what he had done.

  It was not the police station but the harbor patrol headquarters where Warren pulled over to surrender. There was no last round in the Colt with which to accomplish the task, and he had not thought beforehand to use a bullet on himself, yet he was drawn to do so as he climbed from the cab and glimpsed the pistol left on the seat. He wanted badly to surrender, to explain and be understood, to be forgiven, but as he walked, he felt an urge to return to the passenger side, to fish a round from the oily bag and put an end to his terrible awareness of himself and his crimes, to blow them away and leave himself in a pile of nothingness on the pavement.

  He proceeded to a door next to a large two-story door, proceeded in what may have been cowardice, or retention of hope for forgiveness, however hollow he knew any hope to be. They had used and cheated him all those years, he was trying to persuade himself. Wouldn’t God understand and spare him the curse of damnation? Hadn’t that woman with her fifteen shots been understood and spared by God and the courts alike?

  A man in a white shirt bearing small gold collar insignia sat at a dispatcher’s desk and continued making notations as Warren entered and stood before him. “I shot them,” Warren got out. “He was with her, all these years. God Almighty, I shot them.”

  The man had looked up. “You did what—you shot someone?”

  “He was with her for thirty years. I tried to forgive them, but they wouldn’t hear it ….”

  The man was nearly smiling. “You shot someone? Where did this happen?”

  Warren uttered their names. “She owns—Maine Authentic is the store … they cheated me all these years … they said I should have known … I didn’t know anything.”

  The fireman’s brow had peaked. “You shot Virgil Pound—is that what you said—you shot Virgil Pound?”

  Warren was struggling against coughing or weeping. “I tried to forgive them, is what I was trying to do. I begged them to let me forgive them.”

  Over his shoulder the fireman was calling, “Goodman, you better get out here, Goodman! Sir, your name is—?” he added to Warren. “Are you armed, sir? You shot two people—is that what you’re saying?”

  Warren stood in awareness of all he had ever possessed or known sinking into fathoms of darkness. His life was like a key dropped over the side, falling away too quickly to ever be recovered. Dear God, why did it have to feel so wrong?

  THREE

  Marian

  She walked the beach at Seapoint in biting November air. Days had been slipping by, and she had been negotiating the hours of her life step by step, while seeming to arrive nowhere. The funerals and her statements to the police. The cleanu
p at the store and her fractured talks with employees and, thanks to Lori, staving off office and management chores, recordkeeping, meeting the payroll. Struggling with Ron and, at each step, resenting her father’s unpardonable deeds.

  What he had done before her eyes seemed never to entirely depart consciousness. Whatever his grievance he had no right to end people’s lives. His violation was so basic, it remained with her and disrupted who she was or would ever be.

  Maine Authentic, her mother’s awkward growing child. It never stopped demanding attention, feeding, cleaning, caretaking, adding part-time help, answering mail, and Marian felt it would overwhelm her if she did not find ways to control it. The baby inside her belly was also with her each moment and was also a burden, though one she was confident of managing—an object of newness and high hopes. The store, Ron, and her father were the opposite. The problem of her father would end soon, in his inevitable dying, but she imagined herself pushed and bullied by Ron and the store for years to come if things remained unchanged.

  What she wouldn’t give to have her mother with her again, if only for one last day or week. She’d absorb every word and bit of advice. She’d have her mother know she appreciated all she had done for her and, as it had turned out, had given her—far more than Marian had known existed. As it was, she planned to involve her mother in the birth of her baby in the deepest possible way. One would become part of the other, and they’d all start over again. She would will it so.

  Ducking her head into the sharp air, Marian acknowledged that hers had been a privileged life, but she also believed she had gained maturity in the shocking experience of recent weeks. Immaturity had fallen away like a wardrobe of old styles and colors. Her mother had given her so much (had any child in southern Maine been half as fortunate?) and on her sudden death had bequeathed more to her in properties, insurance, CDs, bank accounts than Marian had known existed. But Marian was realizing each day the relative insignificance of wealth. I guess you had to be there, she tried joking with Ron, to explain her emerging view of things, to which he replied, “Hey, babe, the bucks are real.”