Storm Tide (18 page)

“Only himself.”

“Did the parents take it hard?”

Abel said he was about to call them. He was sitting at the accident site, talking to Johnny on his car phone. His men were securing the area, and the rescue squad was taking the kid to the hospital twenty miles away.

“And you think he’ll lose the arm?”

“What’s left of it,” Abel said.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph.” He stood, clutching the phone, and dizziness hit him. He ended the conversation sitting on the floor. “The parents will want to be off to the hospital immediately. I’ll call the mother in the morning.”

He struggled to his feet and climbed the stairs to his bedroom. Once he’d been able to handle a scotch before supper, a bottle of wine with his meal and a few brandies as he sat down afterwards with the newspaper. But he wasn’t drinking alone back then and that made all the difference. There were selectmen’s meetings and poker games, cocktails with clients and dinners with the family. He’d lost half the old crowd to illness, and the other half to politics.

The following morning he drove the length of High Street, as he did every day, slowly (he didn’t care who was behind him) and took in the inn with its huge porch and columns, the churches, so white and pure in the rosy light of the rising sun, redbrick Town Hall, perfectly restored after that little fire, and the street itself, washed clean every day at dawn—he’d made sure of that, wrote it into the job description of the Department of Roads, Bridges and Waterways twenty years ago after a visit to Paris. Johnny parked in the Town Hall lot, bought his three newspapers, walked to his table in the Binnacle. Conversation dropped to a murmur. Even the rattle of plates in the kitchen stopped, the dishwasher and the cook peering through the pantry window. They all wanted to know what to make of the explosion. Was it a serious
crime? A seventeen-year-old boy, no stranger to the police, attempting to make some kind of statement by blowing up public property? Or just mischief? Or was this the beginning of war, neighbor versus neighbor?

Nobody approached his table. These were tough, hardworking people; not shy about demanding their due, but respectful. They were churchgoers, some of them, but they were not moralists. There was a tradition of live and let live in Saltash. This was no small midwestern town with a distrust of what was too different, but a village whose economy had depended on the sea; that had sent its men all over the world and felt damned lucky if they made it home, no matter what their quirks and changes. What these people had always sought from him was a vision of how to proceed politically; how to survive in a state whose legislature saw their home as a playland in July and August and a hinterland from September to June. They looked to Johnny for the way around and through state laws never written for their benefit.

The waitress approached his table with a pot of coffee. “How are you today, Johnny? Two eggs, toast and griddle cakes?” He was Johnny to everyone, young and old, rich and poor, except at the office. He didn’t believe in humbling people before him any more than in driving fancy cars. People resented you for it. The greatest man he’d ever known drove a Buick and had people call him Jack, until he was elected president.

“Just coffee, dear. Just coffee this morning.” He made his point, saw people beyond this girl’s fine broad hips stop their chewing, rethink things in light of the accident.

“You feeling all right, Johnny? There’s a stomach flu going around.”

“To tell the truth, it’s the Compton boy, dear. I can’t get him off my mind. Has he truly lost that arm? We’ll have to find something for him, won’t we? And we will.” He lifted his eyes, addressing the other tables. “Once we make sure he gets the best damned care available.”

Gary Zora twisted around from the table behind. “What in the hell did the kid think he was doing, Johnny? Dike’s been through two hurricanes. And did he think he wouldn’t get caught?”

Johnny shook his head sadly. “I don’t think the boy himself knows. Only thing I thought about at seventeen was baseball and pretty girls.” He winked at Doris Fisher at the table next to Gary’s. She blushed and touched her fingertips to her tight gray curls.

“I don’t know where they get their ideas,” Gary said.

“What I want to know is, where did he get the explosives?”

“It was easy enough.” Gary was in the fire department and had either responded to last night’s call or listened on the radio. The juicy gossip attached to any rescue operation was one of the perks of a dangerous nonpaying job. “He just stuffed a copper pipe full with black powder from his father’s shotgun shells and laced it all through with a candle wick.”

“I don’t believe it, Gary. Saltash kids don’t do that kind of thing,” Johnny said.

Gary lowered his voice. “You know his father. The apple don’t fall very far.”

Johnny said, loud enough to make himself heard, “No parent would put his child up to this. No parent would ever want to see his boy lose his arm. Not over a petty municipal disagreement. Am I right?” he asked Birdie Hogan, watching from a corner table.

“Not here, Johnny. Not since I been.” Birdie wore coveralls, summer and winter, stained with motor oil, and was always coated with sawdust shavings. Going on seventy-five, he still worked his gas station and, out back, a firewood business. “Not in this town.”

Johnny could feel a consensus building, a general return to normality in the clatter of plates, the rise of cigarette smoke and conversation. He had flushed the issue like a pheasant into the open. People weren’t inherently mean-spirited or stupid, but the world was complicated. He left feeling better than he had in hours, knowing that he had set things right, let everyone know where he stood.

Although Abel Smalley assured him the kid had done more damage to himself than to the dike, Johnny asked Petersen, a retired engineer and chairman of the Board of Selectmen, to go down and take a look. He’d go by himself after dark when there wouldn’t be too many people around, or he could hear it now: Johnny Lynch was out there checking on his dike; Lynch’s dike, some called it.

He used to know all the kids in town when his own were in school, and even after, when he used to read his favorites out loud,
A Child’s Christmas in Wales
,
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
. This Compton boy was a blank. The girls in his office said there was something funny about the kid, always on his bicycle, always by himself, riding up and down High Street as if he never had a friend or a home. The girls said the kid’s father was at fault. Palmer Compton was as loud as he was nasty, thought the best way from point A to point B was to run everyone down in between. He had one issue, never gave a lick about anything else in town, and he beat it like a deaf mule, so long and hard that even people prone to agree got mad sometimes and voted the opposite way.
Palmer Compton had always been against the dike. He thought the whole town was out to keep him from making a living, when everyone knew the old days of shellfishing were over. Sure there would always be a living for those who were scientific about it and had their own shellfish grant. But scratching clams from the wild? Trying to feed his family with a pail and rake? That was good for the tourists and picturesque, but the money lay in developing the land, in building. If the dike was gone tomorrow and the whole valley flooded over, there still wouldn’t be enough shellfish to support more than a few families. Johnny had done everything he could to bring this town into the future, to open it up to real prosperity, to get it in the Sunday travel sections and the guidebooks. But here was this fool Palmer Compton railing about a dike drying up the shellfish, when the dike kept flood tides out of land that could profit the entire town.

Next, Johnny called Sams, the medical examiner, and asked him to find out about the kid. If God forbid the boy died, there’d be a martyr; as if a one-armed half-wit bicycling back and forth on High Street wasn’t symbol enough. He’d have to come up with a job for the kid—quietly. Roads and Bridges was out, obviously. Then an idea struck him: with one arm, the kid might qualify for handicapped. There was a lot of money floating around for the handicapped; state and federal. Johnny was sure he could find a job, maybe for the county: get the kid out of Saltash.

The new secretary rapped on his office door. He liked to keep it open if he wasn’t seeing a client, to make everybody feel like family. He’d been watching Crystal and he liked what he saw. The old girls cooed over her, and lately he’d heard giggling in the office, the way it used to be.

“Mr. Lynch? Selectman Petersen’s on the line.” She was only thirty-odd, but she’d been around the block a few times. She had a fine body, thickening around the waist, although that had never bothered him about a woman. Her skills were rusty; he doubted she had done legal work for years. He didn’t hire her for her skills, and certainly not because of her father; he hardly owed any favors to Doc Sinclair. He’d kept the dentist out of jail and got the case of the woman whose tongue he had cut up settled out of court.

Then he’d urged Doc Sinclair, with his shaky hands and his drug habit and his history of trouble, to move on. The man had blown it. Sure it was paradise out here, but you had to know your limits. He’d hired Crystal for the same reason he’d sometimes go fishing instead of the office on the first hot days of June; the same reason he’d once
come back from a hunting trip with a pony for his daughter. It was a willful submission to temptation, a vague infrequent admission that there was more to his life than politics and the law. He hired her because it amused and titillated him to have her around. And of course because Maria wanted her. At least she did know something about computers.

He made a point to act businesslike in her presence. He couldn’t afford to embarrass himself. But the simple truth was that it had been years since he’d found himself smiling for no reason. “Put him on, please, Miss Sinclair … Ralph? What’s it look like over there? Give it to me straight.”

“Nothing to give,” Ralph Petersen said.

Prying information out of Petersen took persistence, but his silence worked both ways. The man was unshakable. Never made promises he couldn’t keep or shot his mouth off to the newspapers; never lashed out no matter who attacked him at a meeting. He was bald as an egg, with a straight white mustache that looked glued on. Petersen liked to make you feel as if you could answer your own question if you just thought hard enough. His only gesture was to touch the ends of his mustache, as if to make sure they were still there.

“So the explosion didn’t harm anything?”

“Everything looks the way it did yesterday and the day before. There’s evidence of a small fire—”

“Where?”

“On the rocks just above the dike’s floodgate. There’s a little carbon residue, that’s all.”

“The state will find something,” Johnny said. The state had been trying to open the dike for years, along with Audubon and the birdwatchers, the bullies like Palmer Compton and the tree-hugging retirees. They’d commissioned scientists and studies trying to prove the dike was detrimental to the town. Any idiot could tell them that once it was removed, the water would rush right up the valley, flood the golf course and the homes and the best land in this town, destroy the natural habitat of fox and deer and coyote.

Johnny had been fighting them for years. Every time he knocked one enemy out, a new one stood up to take his place.. He needed another year, maybe two, to sell off the remaining lots and see his profits. Until then he was counting on the Board of Selectmen to keep the dike in place. If it came down to a final threat to take the case to court, the board could agree to a compromise, a small opening of the floodgate, a little each year to test the impact of change on the
ecosystem. Both sides could use ecology to their advantage. He’d worked all that out with Petersen. As long as Johnny managed to keep the majority of the board loyal to him, he’d be all right. This was still his town. Nobody was going to take it away without a fight, and there wasn’t anybody out there big enough or smart enough to fight him and win.

D
AVID

    Saltash wasn’t a hard town, but the general consensus was that the Compton kid had it coming. In grade school he used to run people off the sidewalks with his bicycle. When he took up skateboarding, he liked to charge in front of moving cars and dare the drivers to hit him. He was a dangerous combination of a need to be noticed and a complete lack of fear. He’d finally made the local headlines last summer, when he stood up in his flimsy rowboat and harpooned a disoriented dolphin just off the town beach. A hundred sun bathers and the stunned local fishing fleet watched helplessly as the suffering creature towed the kid halfway across the harbor before it bled to death.

The kindest thing I heard was attributed to Johnny Lynch. He was going to see that the boy got the best medical care, physical therapy, and job training. Saltash took care of its own, people said—meaning Johnny Lynch did. Look at Stumpy Squeer. Look at Crazy Jane Villa, who used to pull her dress up to her chin on the town green. Johnny Lynch saw they were never sent away, that they lived in their family houses with fuel for the winter and enough to eat.