Spartina (15 page)

Dick said, “You going to clear out after this? Go back to Virginia or North Carolina?”

“Hell no. I’ll fish up here through August. Tell you what. We’ll use spotter planes. Two days of spotter planes every week for a month. We’ll get some fish, absolutely get some fish. We’ll get five or six big fish.”

“Suppose it blows too hard. Suppose the water gets too hot.”

“Dickey-bird, we’ll go round Cape Cod if need be. I’ll do it. But you’re thinking negative. This is all positive.”

“Spotter plane,” Dick said.

“That’s right,” Parker said. “We’ll go first-class again. Hell, we’ll take your girlfriend and Schuyler along to make more movies. We get two fish at once, we’ll put Keith in the skiff. And you’ll get your boat in by Labor Day, Captain Pierce.”

Dick looked at the smudge of land again, felt
Mamzelle
roll in her awkward way.

“When you planning on going in?”

“After dark. Get in at ten p.m. In and out in an hour or so. No more than a dentist appointment.” Parker tapped his new teeth. “Painless.”

I
t was high tide when they went in. No moon. Some gusts of wind from the southwest, and a patchy sky.

When they slipped through the gut, Parker, who was in the bow looking astern, said, “Oh shit.”

Dick headed for Sawtooth Creek. “What’s that?” he said.

“Thought I saw a boat out there. Maybe not.” Parker started to come aft.

“Stay up there,” Dick said. “This motor’s too heavy on the stern as it is.”

Up Sawtooth Creek, he took the west branch past the flounder hole. Then the long narrow creek that wound way up into the sanctuary salt marsh. Dick stood up to keep an eye out for debris in the creek. The water was so high he could see over the spartina. They were edging north of Trustom Pond. Dick could see the pole light at the corner of Mary Scanlon’s parking lot. He hoped Parker would be quick—if the tide went out any, he couldn’t get through the culvert under the Green Hill Beach Road.

Dick cut the motor a good ways short of the parking lot. After he broke out the oars, he cocked his head, thought he heard a motor far off. It stopped. He rowed up to the bend in the creek that came nearest to the corner of the restaurant parking lot. Parker scrabbled up onto the bank, pulling the clam basket full of whelks. He disappeared into the slope of bayberry and sumac.

Dick kept an oar on the bank to hold the skiff. He cupped his right hand around his watch to see the luminous hands. He waited a while. He spit in the creek. It floated away, the tide was going out faster. He looked at his watch again, maybe seven minutes had gone by. He heard the far-off motor again, then Parker sliding down the bank. Parker got in, pulled in the basket. It was still full. Parker hissed at him, “Go.”

Dick rowed. Parker said, “What the fuck is that?” Dick heard the motor. He stood up. Over the top of the spartina he could make out the line of the creek they’d come up, not the channel itself but the dark break in the tall grass. Whatever was coming up was running without lights. The motor sounded high-pitched.

Dick cranked the outboard and got the skiff planing. If it was Natural Resources or Coast Guard, they’d have a Boston Whaler, probably a forty-horse. Dick figured he had a half-mile of creek to go before he got into the next pond. He could keep ahead of the whaler for that part. He wasn’t so sure what next.

He got through the slit under the road, another quarter-mile to the top of the pond.

When he hit the pond he stood up. The upper part of the pond was full of hummocks, channels winding all over the place. Some of them went all the way to the open part of the pond, some of them dead-ended in little backwaters. He eased back on the throttle and heard the whine of the other boat.

He said to Parker, “Whoever they are, they’re in our creek.”

He headed west, took a turn into a backwater. Parker, crouched in the bow, said, “Oh shit. It’s a dead end.”

Dick said, “No, it’s good. Get out. We’ll pull her out.” He tilted the outboard up, went forward past Parker and up over the bow. Parker climbed out, and they heaved the skiff’s bow up, their boots pushing into the stiff mud. They slid her along on her skeg for twenty feet. Dick went back with an oar and pried loose the edge
of the bank with the skeg mark running up it. It plopped into the water. He tried to prop up the spartina they’d flattened. He got some of it up, held some more up by pushing the length of the oar broadside against the base of the stems.

The motor whined by, went down a channel to the open pond. It banked sharply as it suddenly slowed, coughed, and took up a lower note. Picked up again, hummed around the pond.

Parker crept up beside Dick. Dick told him to push up some more grass.

They lay there. The humming moved up a note. Parker said, “How long you planning to stay here?”

Dick thought. He said, “There’s a channel between this pond and Ninigret Pond. I was planning to go through to Ninigret and then out the Charlestown breachway. But there’s a bridge over the channel. All they have to do is put one guy there to cover that, then they come back this way in their boat.”

“What about we go back the way we came.”

Dick thought about that. He said, “What did you see in Mary’s parking lot? What made you come down?”

“There was this car,” Parker said. “You know, looked too ordinary.”

“If that’s a cop, he heard our motor. He can just come down and stand by the creek. We ought to … Let me think.”

In his mind, Dick could see the marshes—one marsh really, laced with creeks and dotted with ponds, divided by fingers of high ground. The whole marsh fringed by beach to the south. The chart of the problem was clear to him, but not the way out, not yet.

But what he saw more insistently, as he pictured the marsh from above, was the hummock where Parker and he lay beside the skiff. Himself dissolving. Not dissolving with fear, though he admitted that possibility. He could put that off for the moment. What was dissolving was something more important than nerve. It wasn’t
that there was that much wrong with bringing in some coke, Captain Parker’s Pep Pills for Sleepy Sailors. But there was something wrong with how
he’d
got there. And something else in him was being leached into the mud. It wasn’t Parker’s fault. This stuff didn’t do Parker any harm, it was part of Parker’s way of cutting along through Parker’s kind of life. But Dick saw himself leaking into the hummock.

He got to his knees and peered over the spartina. The whaler, or at least a white runabout, was in the middle of the pond, less than a half-mile away, scanning with a spotlight. The beam didn’t reach the edges. The whaler cut toward the edge of the pond and swung in an arc. Dick ducked back down.

He said to Parker, “We’ll go down the east side of the pond. There’s no way out the southeast corner, so they’ll be paying more attention to the creeks up here and the one into Ninigret. There’s a couple of little islands we can keep behind. Then it gets real grassy just behind the beach. We duck in there and wait till we hear them up at this end, then we carry the skiff up the back of the beach and on down the front. Launch her off the beach.”

“My arm’s still kind of weak,” Parker said. “How far we have to haul her?”

“Maybe thirty yards up to the top of the dunes. Across a gravel road. Then maybe two hundred yards to the water. You won’t need your bad arm, we’ll put a line around your shoulder. All you have to use your arm for is to dump them whelks.”

Parker grunted. He got up and took a look down the pond. “What are we waiting for?”

“Let them go round the pond a couple of times,” Dick said. “Let them get a little bored. If we’re lucky, they’ll wonder if we didn’t get in to Ninigret. They’ll have to take a look by the Charlestown breachway.”

“Or they may come back in here,” Parker said.

“It’d be good if they did that once before we start. Get it out of their system.”

They lay still.

Dick said, “How we going to meet up with Keith?”

“He’s just running her back and forth, half-hour southeast, half-hour northwest.”

“Jesus,” Dick said, “it ain’t going to be easy finding him.”

Dick turned on his side. The sky was cloudier. He was about to get up for another look when he heard the motor coming nearer. He did a little more housework on the spartina and lay down again. No point in even thinking of running off on foot—the skiff was in his name, registration number painted either side of the bow.

The whaler went by the mouth of the backwater at quarter-speed. Slowed down. Went into reverse with a clunk, gave a little dentist-drill whine as the prop pulled back and out of the water. The beam of light swung round. Dick put his face flat into the grass and mud. He was wet all down his front, thought he might have pissed himself. He listened for the shift to forward. His leg jumped once and he felt Parker’s hand clamp on it. He listened. A shypoke called one hoarse note way off to the west.

A man’s voice—“What the fuck’s that?”

A woman’s voice—“A bittern.”

“A what?”

“A kind of little heron.” It was Elsie. “They’re also called shypokes. You just about never see them, but you can hear them a mile away.” Elsie croaked like a shypoke.

“Yeah, great. You know where we are?”

The shypoke croaked back.

Another man laughed. Two men. And Elsie.

The first man said, “Cut it out, Buttrick. You know where we are?”

“Yes. Do you know where we want to go?”

“Go back to that bridge.”

“The cut into Ninigret?”

“Yeah. Let’s go.”

Clunk into forward. The motor went slow ahead, sounded like a kid blowing into soda with a straw. Parker let go his leg. The whaler sped up, got up onto a plane, headed south into a clear channel to the pond.

They slid the skiff back into the water. Dick poled it out into the creek, rowed to the east bank of the pond. He could see the whaler’s spotlight playing along the west bank. There were a couple of deep coves there would keep them busy for a bit. He leaned into the oars. They creaked, but the skiff was downwind of the whaler. There was a stretch of hard land that ran down the east bank for a quarter-mile, ended in a point with a little island off it to the south. He pulled as hard as he could without splashing. The skeg left a thin wake of phosphorescent plankton; each stroke of the oars left a pair of pale-green globes in the water.

Dick looked over his shoulder, picked out the gap between the point and the island, pulled into it and around to the lee of the island. Rested. The motor of the whaler was still humming low to the west.

It was only a hundred yards to the back of the beach. He rowed easy at the end, slid into the eel grass. There were some bushes along the shore. They pulled the skiff in among them. Above the bushes there was riprap laid along the steep bank. Dick climbed up to look up and down the gravel road along the crest of the dunes.

Dick rigged a loop of the bow line over Parker’s shoulder. He hoisted the stern, one arm around the outboard. He couldn’t see the cracks between the flat pieces of riprap, had to feel each step. The bow thudded onto a rock. Parker undid himself from the loop, turned backward, and hauled with one hand. He stopped to rest.

Dick picked up the stern and walked it uphill of the bow. He said, “Come up here. Drag her up.”

They got the skiff to the gravel road, blowing hard. Dick felt
exposed, kept on pulling across the gravel, down the beachside bank, rattling down the stones of the shoulder, then into the soft dry sand. He had to stop. He couldn’t hear anything but his own panting and the sound of the surf. Parker caught up, grabbed the stern line, pulled it over his shoulder with his good hand, and hauled. Dick grabbed the outboard and scuttled backward, his boot heels digging holes.

The surf got louder, and they got going faster on the downslope. Dick felt the harder sand. Parker put a hand on his back. Dick stopped, turned around. A wave ran a tongue to Parker’s feet. Dick looked up and down the beach. He could see the house lights from Green Hill, less than a half-mile east. If a jeep came from there without its lights, they wouldn’t see it.

Dick pulled the bow round toward the surf and got the oarlocks in their sockets. He said to Parker, “When we get her out a ways I’ll get in first. I’ll start rowing. You come in over the stern.”

When they got the skiff in knee-high, Dick saw a beam of light flash from offshore toward what Dick guessed was the Charlestown breachway. The light looked blue in the mist. If the light was just off the breachway, it was a mile and a half away. If it was the Coast Guard, say a small cutter, they could pick up the skiff on radar, be on her in three minutes.

Parker said, “Come on!” They waded in deeper. A wave rose up dark, chest-high. The skiff floated over their heads. She nearly pulled out of their hands as the wave spilled white around their waists.

Dick couldn’t see if there was another big one following. He went in over the gunwale and got the oar blades in the water. He got enough of a stroke in so the skiff went over the top of the next wave before it broke. He pulled again. Parker was holding on to the transom with one hand.