Reprisal

by Mitchell Smith

  "Joanna, everybody makes mistakes--but you can correct mistakes."

  "Not all."

  "Determination and love can correct mistakes." Charis chose a lemon-colored pansy from the carton. "This one next."

  "You're asking a lot from love, sweetheart."

  "I believe in it. Joanna, it's the only perfect thing ... if you can start over again, with love." She held the little flower in her hand, gentle as if it were a baby chick.

  They worked awhile in silence, Charis selecting and Joanna planting, pleasantly lost in labor.

  Joanna came to the end of a row, and sat up to ease her back. She heard a car pull up in the street. Its door open, and slam shut. ... Then footsteps down the gravel drive. She supposed Carl Early might have come back. ...

  "Can you stand a visit?--Or would you rather not?" Captain Lowell, wearing loafers, good gray slacks, and a blue short-sleeved shirt, might have been a prosperous tourist except for his arms' exaggerated muscles, the wear of weather in his face. There was a narrow neat white bandage around his left forearm. He was carrying a small brown paper bag.

  Joanna stood. "No ... no, a visit's fine." And here was the man she'd struck with a knife, a man who had at least contemplated killing her.--Had life always been so odd, so risky and unstable? And how had that been concealed from her for so many years?

  Lowell looked slightly older than she'd remembered, certainly in his early forties. "... Just wanted to stop by, tell you how sorry I was to hear what happened--and ask if there was anything at all I could do for you." The island speech, its pleasant drooping cadences. "... Any chores, any work needs to be done, I'd be pleased to do."

  "Thank you, Captain, but really there's nothing. ... This is a friend, Charis Langenberg. She's staying with me."

  "Hi."

  "Hi. ..."

  Lowell smiled, held out the paper bag. "I brought you some fresh oatmeal cookies from Cooper's. Not much to bring. ..."

  "Oh, that's wonderful. Thank you."

  "I thought of a pie, but I didn't know what you liked."

  "Captain, believe me, we'll enjoy the cookies." Joanna stepped out from among the boxes of flowers, and saw Charis still kneeling in the grass, small rake loosely held--and on her face, besides a slight social smile, an odd expression ... familiar.

  "We have lemonade, if you'd like some."

  "I would like some lemonade."

  "Charis? Would you like some?"

  "Yes, I would--and I'll get it. You stay and talk." She put her small rake down, stood, and went across the yard to the back steps.

  "Pretty girl," Lowell said, and came to look at the flower beds. "You've done a hell of a lot of work."

  "Yes ... she was Rebecca's roommate at college." And having said that--and satisfied at how smoothly she'd said her daughter's name-Joanna was reminded of the expression she'd seen, recalled to her by Charis's just then. It had been Percy's intent and collected consideration, as she'd walked into the red dog's yard.

  "--How's your arm, Captain?"

  "My arm is still damn sore--two doctors visits for it, and a shot. Good thing you didn't go for the liver." There'd been no humor in the fox face, only in the pleasant uneven stresses of his speech--"Good thing you didn't go for the livah."

  They stood side by side, observing the garden beds. There were faint sounds of preparation in the kitchen. ... Captain Lowell smelled of cigars and clean cotton. There was the lightest, very lightest of beginnings--beginnings almost certain to come to nothing at all. And if anything, if ever, then not for a very long time. ... Still, Joanna felt that faint vibration in the air, of things unsettled between them, after that violent and foolish adventure.

  "See you got a little bandage of your own, there."

  "Not serious. I was prying up a can lid, and the knife slipped."

  "I suspect you're just not safe with anything sharp." Light-gray eyes observing her.

  "Could be. ..."

  And of course it was precisely the immediacy of tragedy, of her losses, that had roused the instinctive tropism toward a man, to resume any possibility left of life, whatever her griefs. ... The bestial element of cock and cunt, of continuing, risen swollen out of a billion years of loss and recovery. To that process, her sorrow--however fresh, unbearable--was beside the point.

  "You two have done a lot of digging. Planting just the flowers?"

  "Yes, we thought just flowers. We've got pansies, marigolds, petunias ... and some perennials, too. Phlox--it's low-growing, so the wind won't bother it ...

  and sea lavender."

  "It'll be very pretty," Lowell said. There was a long silence, then he cleared his throat. "--Really came by here to apologize to you, personally, help any way I could. Apologize for coming up here after you that way, when you'd lost your husband and dad ... and worse to come." He took a deep breath. "We must have seemed pretty much a pack of hoodlums to you, that night."

  "Yes, you did. But I understood how serious it was for your people."

  "--Would never have let George hurt you, Mrs. Reed. I wanted you to know that."

  "I do know. I knew it then; I relied on it, Captain. But the truth is, all that seems unreal now--as if it were a scene in an opera. Do you know what I mean?--Something very dramatic, and slightly ridiculous."

  The captain had a rusty laugh, apparently not exercised lately. "--Damned if it doesn't. Us ... and Bobby. I'd say by those Englishmen, Gilbert and Sullivan. We had everything up here but the music." And after another long silence while they stood examining the garden beds, the first row of pansies.

  "--I still want to apologize for my behavior, handling you roughly, and so forth."

  In that old-fashioned formality, Joanna saw a young fox-faced boy with a grimly traditional island father--a hard-handed captain himself, no doubt.

  "Apology accepted, Captain. I'm collecting apologies on Asconsett."

  "Tom--not "Captain.""

  "Tom."

  "Well, you've been hit hard."

  "I have been hit hard. ..."

  "Here we are!" Charis came down the steps with a tray. A small pitcher of lemonade, three tall plastic glasses with ice cubes in them, and a plate of the oatmeal cookies. She was smiling, and Joanna saw nothing else in her face.

  "I'll hold it." Lowell took the tray, shifted it slightly to take more of the weight with his uninjured arm.

  "We need a chair." Charis went back up the steps to the kitchen.

  "We need lawn furniture.--We saw some at the hardware store, but we were busy with the flowers."

  "Hardware's the place," Lowell said. "--Light-built stuff, but it'll last a few summers. ..." When Charis came back with a kitchen chair, he set the tray down on it and took two cookies.

  Joanna enjoyed watching him eat. First cookie was gone in three quick bites.

  "How's the fishing going, Tom?"

  "Not going at all, just now. Eleanor's down --getting her diesel fixed--and that'll take a while, since I'm the one doing the fixing. Doing that, days--and preparing construction sites with a backhoe tractor."

  "Sounds like hard work," Charis said, and finished a cookie.

  "Well, the hard work is hand work, going in with a shovel at night, finish shaping the excavations-septic pits and drainfields for those two new-built houses down South Sound. ... Good medicine for excess pride." He smiled, and bent to take another cookie.

  "Excess pride?"

  "You bet. A while back, I thought I was a real special article. Lot of us did, out here. Owned three boats--well, half-share in the third--making very good money."

  "But not now. ..."

  "Now, I'm digging-in septic tanks.-Good for me, is the truth of the matter. My dad would have said so."

  The three of them stood in summer sunshine, drinking lemonade, chewing bites of oatmeal cookie. A slow breeze from the sea, passing through, shifted the sea-grape stems.

  "He likes you." Charis, in green pajamas, was standing brushing Joanna's hair by floor-lamp light as she sat in the bedroo
m rocker. "--Likes you even better because you stabbed him."

  "Charis, that doesn't interest me at all. Just the idea makes me tired."

  "But you like him."

  "I think he's a nice man. He's ... interesting."

  Charis had waited for the captain's story since his visit. Waited all afternoon, very patiently, while they planted the rest of the small flowers

  ... prepared the back beds for the perennials--the phlox, calendula, and sea lavender.

  Joanna had seen no reason not to tell the tale, with the basement cargo--its only evidence-long since gone off-island. ... But embarrassed relating her self-important adventuring, the show-off in-and-out of Manning's, she'd been startled by Charis's reaction.--No surprise or disbelief, no cautionary uneasiness at all. Instead, there'd been a clamor of delighted laughter over dinner's hamburger and mashed potatoes, enjoyment almost masculine in its force. The girl had listened, leaning forward in physical sympathy--with Joanna all the way.

  "Oh, that is absolutely wild!--And shit, I missed it!" Charis restless in her chair. "I would have helped you; we could have gone in together. Then, if they'd chased us, that would have been just too bad." And hearing the last of it--nighttime melodrama in the cottage, in this kitchen--she'd said, "He was lucky." Meaning Tom Lowell had been lucky.

  "Don't you know how to use a knife?" Charis had put down her glass of milk and gotten up from the table with a small steak knife, to demonstrate. "Never overhand, Joanna. Always up from under--left and right and left and right.

  ..." Doing a little dance down the kitchen, grunting, striking quick as a sewing-machine needle, guarding with her left hand.

  Sitting down, she'd said, "A major creep showed me that. I guess it was all he had to give." Then salted her salad.

  "Sweetheart," Joanna had said, "--y're as odd as I am."

  Charis had seemed pleased. "Merci du compliment."

  ... The brush was smoothing, soothing its way down Joanna's hair. "So, not even a future interest in the captain?--Maybe in a year or two, if you do decide to come out to the island to stay?"

  "Charis, I suppose anything is possible. But if the time ever comes that I can bear to think about that, about some man--even if I was living out here--I probably wouldn't consider a fishing captain."

  "No? He seems very nice."

  "No. ... It's an occupation thing, a cultural difference. There have to be at least a few interests in common."

  "But your husband--wasn't Mr. Reed a soccer coach?"

  Charis had been right, the shrewdest stroke was up from under--and as if Joanna had forgotten completely until now, as if he hadn't died until now, Frank stood in front of her, listening and merry--and then was torn away.

  Charis stopped brushing. "Oh, that was so stupid. That was such a stupid thing to say."

  Joanna tried to answer, reassure her, tell her that she'd already spoken names, herself. That persons had to be mentioned sometimes.--Were better mentioned, than not at all. She intended to say that, but she couldn't, and sat silent.

  "Forgive me," Charis said, and the brush recommenced its slow massage.

  ... That night, in light uneasy sleep, Joanna dreamed she was crewing on the Eleanor II. They were at sea--riding a rough swell the color of steel being twisted and turned under light. She was crewing, greasing something in the machinery of a winch. She didn't know what she was doing, but her gloved hands seemed to.

  Frank came forward, a happy man in stained coveralls and rubber seaboots. Salt spray had soaked the right side of his coveralls. He came forward as she was working, stood beside her, swaying to the sea's motions, and watched. Then he reached out and touched her shoulder. "Use plenty," he said. He needed a shave.

  ... Then the job was somehow done, and Joanna walked around to the starboard side--the boat was rolling as Lowell turned her. Looking up at the bridge's side window, she saw his face, the motion of his shoulder and left arm as he spun the wheel.

  The boat was rolling heavily in the trough. Joanna felt vibration surging through the deck plates as the engine worked to bring her round. She reached out to steady herself, gripping the wire rail with her right hand. She must have taken her gloves off; the wire was so cold it burned.

  Rebecca, bundled in yellow oilskins, was standing far down near the stern, holding on to the wire rail and talking with a friend--a tall girl, her face familiar, her dark-blond hair broken loose in the wind. The girls were laughing at something Rebecca had said. ... In the distance, rain was coming, slanting into the sea.

  "Oh, dear." Joanna, sounding to herself like a dismayed old woman, woke. She lay recalling the dream, but remembering no emotion in it--as if it had been a painting of people at sea, in which she was only a figure standing by a trawler's rail.

  She lay half in moonlight, and heard the soft crawling sound of beginning rain through the bedroom window. It must have wakened her. ... The sound grew gradually louder, but no rain came down.

  A soft sound and clearer, now. Gravel crunching under a car's slow tires. ...

  Joanna turned the covers back and got out of bed. She stepped fully into moonlight, went to the window, and looked down through the screen.

  The VW was passing slowly underneath. Charis, in moonshadow, strained almost horizontal behind its open driver's-side door--pushing the little car along the drive. She stretched, silent, strove like a running leopard in slow motion, and the car moved along. It passed with soft shifting-gravel sounds under the window, steadily out the driveway ... then past the curb and into the street.

  Joanna went to the bedroom's front window ... and saw Charis, blond hair burnished by moonlight, stand up from shoving and climb quickly into the driver's seat. Then, with the car's door still a little open, she freewheeled the VW silently down the hill ... under tree shadows, and was gone.

  Joanna heard the car's engine start below, at the end of the street, and thought for a moment she might still be dreaming, it had been so strange ...

  and seen in the moon's dream light. She started back to bed --then knew she was awake, by the cool specifics of the floor under her bare feet.

  But it had been so odd that she went out into the hall, crossed in darkness to the other bedroom, and knocked softly on its closed door. No answer. And how could there be. She'd seen Charis leave.

  Joanna opened the door and looked inside. This was a smaller, darker room.

  Charis kept it very neat. Kept the bed neatly made up ... and it was neatly made up now.

  "Charis ...?" It was becoming a habit, calling people who were not there.

  Shame came to Joanna like a chill--shame at seizing on a young girl's kindness, and remorse at her roommate's suicide. Leaning on it, gripping it, stretching it to assist her loneliness through a summer--through a summer and into the next year. She'd grappled Charis to her with need, used her and used her up, even taking advantage of the girl's own loneliness, her childhood tragedy, to hold her closer.

  ... Now, at night and silently, Charis was apparently running for at least a little freedom. A short escape, if only a drive alone and without Joanna Reed.

  A short escape, because all her things were there, her suitcase still in the corner. It should be funny--a savior angel having to steal away for a breath of her own air.

  Joanna thought it would be funny, if it didn't mark so completely her future loneliness. Charis would be back, returning silently later in the night ... to pretend to contentment in the day.

  Joanna went back to her room, and to bed-fled into bed under moonlight and the covers, to drive herself to sleep as she'd done before, when her deaths were fresh.

  Charis drove south through Asconsett--the town deserted under a moon almost full, only the streetlamps warming its light. She drove through town and out on South Sound Road. There was no traffic at all. The night breeze, cool, saltier than the day's, poured through her as she traveled a rocky coast, its surf silver.

  Charis was weeping, the wind chilling her tears as she drove. Unaccustomed tears.--T
ears of anger at being disturbed, threatened even obliquely just when everything was perfect, perfect after so much time, so much effort. ... And anger at having to leave Joanna alone, having to sneak out of their house like a teenager dating a bad boy.-And all just to gather information in case of increasing intrusion, in case something needed to be done. But careful was better than careless; she'd learned that long ago.

  More than a mile down South Road, the shore rising higher above a stepped reach to the sea, she'd passed several houses. Fishermen's cottages higher, above the road ... mainlanders' vacation houses down to the left, along the sea.

  There'd been lights still on in two or three homes, but no work site, no work being done.-Charis drove slower, so as not to miss it.

  The distant lighthouse's whitewashed granite was just visible, its beam sweeping ... slow sweeping ... to flash out over the sea.

  That great light's passing made the night's dark deeper, so Charis noticed lesser lights down on a shelved clearing to the left, below the road's bluff.

  She slowed, steered into the left lane ... and saw a big white pickup truck, worn and rusted, parked on the shoulder beside the top of a rough construction driveway. The driveway, graveled dirt, was cut into the bluff and ran very steeply down to the clearing, the grade apparently too much for the old pickup truck to manage.

  Charis pulled over to the right side of the road and stopped. She opened the glove compartment, found a clump of old Kleenex, wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Then she got out of the car and walked back to the pickup. Keys had been left in its ignition--an Island habit--but the big truck was a mess, nothing anyone would want to steal, anyway.

  She stood, looking out over the site. ... There were two houses below. New, still scaffolded for painting, they stood side by side in moonlight out at the clearing's edge, above a stony shore. They were big two-story houses, elaborate with decks, widow's walks, and cupolas.