Reprisal

by Mitchell Smith

  These had flashed bright in the helmet lamps, chambers floored in fine mud dust sparkling with the sediment of ages, and decorated with gleaming white stalactites, helectites, soda straws and stalagmites, snowy limestone curtains, translucent fans of calcite, clusters of delicate stone flowers as white and finely wrought as snowflakes.

  It was wonderful caving, and they'd managed to survey and map several miles of it with tape, compass, and inclinometer before Concave was closed, the narrow entrance barred with a steel gate, locked, and No Trespassing signs set on the access track up the ridge. The huge, deep, and many-storied paradise of perfect dark and coolness lay sealed again to its ancient stillness--broken only by distant echoes of water dripping, flowing, rushing through the earth.

  ...

  Gated and locked.--Frank had gone caving a few times. He disliked the perfect darkness always just beyond their small lamps' light, saw the stone's weight and closeness, felt the countless tons of rock above him in low places, and was uneasy. "Your thing, honey," he'd said.

  Joanna paused to let people pass--a couple with three children trailing--then walked on down the South Dock steps. The harbor opened wider before her, Old Lighthouse Point curving out from the right, the breakwater from the left, to almost meet at the sea's narrow entrance. A small harbor Frank must have imagined it packed in previous centuries with weatherworn whaling ships and sailing trawlers. Everything dark wood and tarred rigging, tangle and purpose all together, and smelling of sweat and the sea. ...

  Joanna went along the boardwalk beneath old warehouse pulley blocks, and past the ropewalk yard, trying to see it as Frank had, with the pleasure he took in all oceanic things. The odor of fish--not as many tourists strolling here; too busy, too smelly--the grinding scoot of forklifts down the wharf, shifting loads of catch. Busy men ... but still not working as the men and women of the past had worked. Extraordinary, what must have been the labors of the past.

  And how different the men and women then, who'd worked so hard ... and found no mercy if they failed.

  Asconsett a fishing port still. But for how much longer with stocks so low?

  "The fishermen," Frank had said, after a few days on the island--he'd come in from one of his first sails in the leased boat--"those guys have fished too well."

  More tourists. Three middle-aged women with schoolteachers' honorable and patient faces, walked toward her and passed. One of them glanced at her dark-blue suit, must have thought it odd, a peculiar thing to be wearing on a warm day in summer, out on the island. ... Joanna thought of going up to the cottage to change, but it was too much trouble.--Men were such a pleasure in that way. If they weren't gay, they didn't give a damn what women wore.

  Manning's, at the end of South Dock, had been a cannery once, now a processing facility for fish coming in. The Manning family had owned the big brick building, and the previous wooden buildings on the site, since 1734-according to their carved wooden sign along the wharf. Probably accurate enough, but not the oldest business on the island. The oldest was the bakery, Cooper's. Baking in the same tiny building off High Street, with two of the original wood-fired ovens still usable for special occasions, the Cooper family had run the business for more than three hundred years.

  "An absolute record for family business ownership," as Mr. Cooper had told her when she'd first gone in to buy his bread. "--Though I suspect some of us was Coopers by courtesy."

  A man and his wife walked past her, both a little plump, and stepping carefully on the slippery planks. A man and his wife. ... Something that no one would ever say again, ever see again when she went walking. She would be alone, or with Rebecca, or a friend. It was a lesson of loss Joanna felt she was relearning every few minutes --as a person diagnosed with cancer was reminded so frequently, when they didn't want to be. ...

  She turned in at Manning's, went through a door with Office stenciled on it, and walked up a narrow enclosed ramp as four fishermen in coveralls and green rubber seaboots came down it, laughing at some remark, rumbling down the planking like heavy herd animals.

  The office at the top of the ramp was very small, almost filled by dented black filing cabinets, a computer and printer, shortwave radio and microphone, and a large woman in a man's blue work shirt and oversized jeans.

  "I wonder if I could speak with Mr. Manning."

  "Business?" A no-nonsense woman.

  "No."

  "Well, you're lucky. He was gone to the mainland, but he's back. I guess you can go on into the plant." A dubious look at Joanna's suit and high heels.

  "--Or you want me to page him out here?"

  "No, that's all right. I'll go back."

  "Well, I think he's in the machinery room. You go all the way down the hall, keep going all the way to the end, and the machinery room is on the left. Just go out this door and keep going. It says "Machinery" on the door."

  Down the hall--the floor's dark wood planking stained and splintered--the summer's warmth grew less, refrigerated chill grew greater. The building shook slightly to the motion of shuttling fork-lifts, and there was a steady two-tone grumbling under the start-stop racket of their engines.

  Through a half-open door off the corridor to the right, Joanna saw that the low two-tone note came from conveyor belts of wide black rubber, thumping over their rollers down the length of a huge high-ceilinged room. The belts carried intermittent silver pavements of fish, mixed with shaved ice the same shining silver. The door allowed a draft of colder air, smelling of fish and machine oil. The corridor's planking trembled beneath Joanna's feet.

  The machine room's door was closed, and she knocked on it, but heard no answer. She tried the knob, and pushed the door open to bright light, the stink of refrigerant, and a deep, steady whining sound, as if a huge dog were unhappy.

  Two men were bent over a large vibrating gray steel box--and another, older, his face sunken and drawn as a spoiled fruit, was leaning on a mop propped in a big rolling bucket. He noticed her, reached out and touched one of the others. That man, very big and broad in clean and pressed coveralls, stood and turned a flat, pale face to her. His eyes were small, and a true green.

  "Yep. Can I help you?" A tenor voice.

  "Mr. Manning?"

  "That's right. What can I do for you?" A little impatience in his voice with a woman interrupting work. And an off-islander, some summer woman. ...

  "I wonder if I could speak with you for a minute, Mr. Manning. I'd appreciate it."

  No expression on the moon face. His eyes were startling sea-green, suited to a more beautiful man. "Okay. We'll go outside." He drifted up to her, very large in gray cotton coveralls, drifted her before him out into the hall, and closed the machine-room door. "Refrigeration," he said. "A problem every day." The door opened behind him, and the mop man came out, towing his bucket.

  "My name's Joanna Reed, Mr. Manning. I'm sorry to trouble you, but I wonder if you could help me with some information."

  The round face calmly noncommittal.

  "--My husband went out sailing almost two weeks ago. And he ... he was drowned."

  "Oh, sure. Oh, sure. That was a terrible thing. Reed. I heard he was lost."

  Mr. Manning made a massive grimace of sympathy. "My uncle exactly the same a few years ago. Uncle and one great-granddad a long time ago."

  "What I wanted--I just wanted to talk to someone, one of the fishermen, and ask if they'd seen him out there that day. Seen anything wrong." The mop man went slowly sloshing past them--mopped more carefully past her pumps.

  "Oh, right. Right. Out at sea."

  "Yes, I wanted to ask if they'd seen anything at all. Anything wrong ...

  unusual. So I need to know the names of the fishermen who would have been out there that day. And since they unload here ..."

  "Oh, yeah, I understand. You know, Mrs. Reed, the captains pretty much come in and out all the time. And they can stay out at sea a couple of days, maybe a week or two, they don't find fish."

  "I understand."


  "--So, a particular day is kind of tough."

  "It was almost two weeks ago. The seventh."

  "The seventh. Seventh. ... Well, I know Tom Lowell came in, unloaded on the eighth, so he would have been out there probably, coming in. Unloading being when I get their business--which these days is a lot of trash fish each load."

  "Lowell."

  "Right. Tom's got the Eleanor II. Named for his mom. ... So, there's him. And I think Billy Tucker's boat was out there. He was due in to unload, anyway.

  That boat's the Circe.--Bullshit name, you excuse my language. Some young guys like to pretend those are yachts they're fishing with."

  "Lowell and Tucker. ... Thank you very much, Mr. Manning. I really appreciate this."

  "Happy to help.--But you know, Mrs. Reed, anybody out there saw something wrong, they'd have said so. And they're not going to leave a guy out there, leave a boat in trouble."

  "I understand."

  "--But you want to be sure, sure there was nothing weird, right? Maybe he was in a little trouble, didn't look serious."

  "That's right."

  "I can understand that. Tell you, though, nothing's easier than getting into trouble at sea. ..."

  Asconsett's fishing boats, fewer than they had been, tied up in the Pond past Manning's. They were ranked down nine long dock fingers--with many spaces between, where trawlers, draggers, long-liners and gill-netters, the mainstays and steel uncles of their island families, had been scrapped, or auctioned and sold off. ... The lobstermen, though burdened with right-whale protection, were doing better--lobster stocks were up. They moored their small boats the other side of the breakwater, in East Shelter.

  Joanna, in suit and silk blouse, and made awkward by her high-heeled shoes, stepped down the docks over and around coils of line, rusting machinery, and fine cloudy green mounds of net.

  The Eleanor II, a big trawler, black-hulled, her topsides painted white, was berthed stern-to at the end of the third finger. Several gulls--particolored dull gray, pure white--slid through the air nearby in slanting circles, but silent, not crying. There was a worn plywood gangway from the trawler's stern down to the dock. The boat's decking was battered gray steel, embossed in diamond-shape patterns for traction.

  The Eleanor II moved gently under Joanna, with soft groans as she shifted, a faint rattling sound from below. The boat smelled of diesel and fish, and was bigger than it had looked from the dock. ... A brute, and Frank would have loved to go out on her, would have been happy to work deckhand for a few days out in the Atlantic.

  "Seasickness?" he'd said to her once. "A person getting seasick? All you have to do is vomit!"

  Joanna walked along the port rail, careful to keep her suit's shoulder away from the boat's rust-dappled white superstructure. There was a steel ladder there, from the deck up to the boat's bridge, and Joanna hesitated, wondering whether to call or try to climb up. Her shoes weren't made for it.

  "Just what are you doing?--And who the hell are you, lady?"

  Joanna looked up and saw a dark face staring down. A beak-nosed, almost Arab face looking down from the bridge rail. "I'm sorry--"

  "This is private property, Miss Whoever. And what you do before you come on a boat, is you call for permission to come aboard!"

  "I didn't see anyone."

  "You call out. I'm liable, if you trip down there and hurt yourself."

  "Sorry. ..."

  The man swung onto the ladder, and came down it quickly as Joanna stepped back to get out of his way.--Coveralls, rubber boots, the fisherman's uniform.

  Black hair cut short, almost crew-cut ... and when he reached the deck and turned, was a lean man, not much taller than she.

  "All right, what can I do for you?" A dark face, looking sunburned, windburned

  ... with a high-bridged nose, and eyes so pale a gray that their black-dot centers seemed oversized.

  "Are you Mr. Lowell?"

  A nod. Lowell, having hurried down to her, now stood relaxed, leaning against his boat's superstructure--owner and captain, certainly. And not handsome; he looked like some fairy-tale fox who'd been transformed to a man.

  "My name's Joanna Reed. Mr. Manning suggested I come speak to you ... ask if you'd seen my husband out sailing."

  "Sailing?" Eyes so pale revealed nothing, even in a male's automatic flickering glance down at her breasts. A gaze impersonal.

  "--My husband was drowned thirteen days ago."

  "Oh, right, that Bo-Peep boat ... I'm sorry; that was real bad luck, lose him like that."

  "And I was wondering whether you or another captain might have seen him that day. Might have noticed anything, seen anything wrong."

  "Mrs. Reed, the constable already asked me and a lot of people about that.--I did see him out that day. We saw Bo-Peep a lot of times. He handled her all right, and that was a tubby old boat. Hope he hadn't bought her. ..."

  "Leased. We leased her."

  "Well, he handled her fine. I saw her going south-southeast first thing in the morning, that day ... maybe off a mile, mile and a half. So all I could tell, sail was set good, seemed to be going okay."

  "Nothing wrong?"

  "Nothing I noticed, Mrs. Reed. We were coming in--getting ready to unload. Saw him way out there, and we went on about our business."

  "I understand."

  This fisherman seemed to look people in the eye-was certainly looking Joanna in the eye. No uneasy wandering gaze, no attention paid elsewhere after that quick glance at her breasts. "... We see day sailors and summer people sailing around out there every day. That Kestrel ketch docks here. And a couple of Hunters, and a Swan. Bunch of boats. Gets to be a zoo out there all up and down the coast. Wouldn't believe the shit we see out there, fucking up our sets, everything. Picking up lobster pots, too, in autumn--see a guy's markers, go right for 'em."

  "I know there are a lot of boats out there."

  "Only reason I noticed Bo-Peep at all, is we know that boat and your husband was out a lot. He'd come out early, and we'd see him. He was up and down the coast." Lowell was an older man than he'd looked at first; there was gray dusted through the cropped black hair.

  "Mr. Manning mentioned Bill Tucker. ..."

  "If he saw something? Well, when Bill fishes, that's pretty much all he does.

  Doesn't pay attention to much else. ... You know, Mrs. Reed, if any of us had seen something wrong out there, looked like a boat in real trouble? We'd have done something about it."

  "Well, thank you for talking to me, Captain."

  "No big deal. Sorry for your loss."

  "Next time, I'll call for permission to come aboard."

  A smile from Captain Lowell--his first. "You do that, and I'll put coffee on.

  Be a guest, then."

  But not, apparently now. "--I wonder if I could ask you one more thing."

  "Okay."

  "I wonder if you could tell me what you--what the fishermen think happened to my husband out there. He was a very good small-boat sailor."

  "--What happened out there, him falling off her and so forth? I can tell you exactly what happened, Mrs. Reed. What happened was some goddamn thing he never expected. That's what happened. That's what kills sailors."

  "Yes. ... Well, thank you very much for your help."

  "Not much help," he said, and walked beside her, a strong impersonal hand at her elbow as she went to the gangway, and down it to the dock.

  Joanna walked back up to the wharf and along it past the old chandlery, the ropewalk, and Manning's, to the street steps. It was a relief to climb up to Strand Street, to be getting away from the harbor, the sea--its salt smell, its sailing gulls and restless motion.

  She walked through tourists down Strand to Slope Street. The warm day had become too warm to climb that steep lane comfortably in the suit, stockings, and silk blouse. Slope Street was narrow, cobbled, and had no sidewalks. The cobbles, brought in originally from a mainland quarry in the eighteenth century--replacements still imported from that quarry
--had been kept for quaintness, apparently. Hard walking in high-heel shoes.

  She climbed to the end of the street, high on Sand Hill, opened the cottage's low pine-stake gate, and went up the steps to the door. The cottage door was painted brown, and always had been. Joanna supposed those earth tones were a reassurance to returning fishermen that they had left the uneasy kingdom of the sea for the restful land. ...

  She went upstairs to change, came back down in jeans and a T-shirt, and sat to work at the little pine desk in the living room. ... And what a relief not to have student papers to grade-attempts at poetry usually even grimmer than the attempts at prose. And White River students were supposedly an elite, cream of the crop. A chilling thought. ... Of course, there was an occasional talent, a Dave LaPlanche. Very occasional; Dave had graduated three years ago.

  This early would-be triptych, now--three illustrative poems concerning women's lives-had never become a triptych. Might be called a biptych, since this contributed nothing. Written so many years ago--obvious, superficial, in a didactic light-verse trot--as if, in writing the first two poems, she'd learned better than to write another. The first had prepared for the second, and the second, reluctantly, for the third. But the third, this clumsy puppy, had never been trained to follow.

  It's to time's ragtime rhythm the young girl Starts her slow stepping, swelling to unfurl. This child who weaved the early lace of life, What will she be after years make her a wife, Whose hips appeared at twelve and slowed her, Whose breasts came following lolloping after, Whose blood then spilled in leak and spatter, Whose childhood blurred then sagged to sugar? What but her selfhood purchased this growing? What spring of her past for future's flowing?

  How wider her hips must straddle for seeding, With accomplishment seen largely in breeding, With what--in later, lonely years--to be left, But her exhausted self, of even child bereft? Would she better fitted for a life have been, Living selfish, humorous, solitary, and