The Season of Open Water (12 page)

Luce goes down to the boat with Johnny. Her hull is still low in the water, still leaking. Luce gets her out of the shallows, past the wave break, then he slips over the side. He is up to his waist in the water.

“Stay close to shore,” he tells Johnny. “Tide's high, you can take her on the backside of Cory's Island. If the patch on the hole breaks—it shouldn't, but if it does and she starts taking on water— just let her go and swim in.”

“I can't swim.”

“You'll swim.” Luce pushes him off and wades back to shore. He walks up the beach to the bathhouses, sits down on the floor of one, next to the cases. He puts his head down on his knees and sleeps.

Daybreak. The light wakes him. Johnny is still not back. Luce finds a few leftover coffee beans in his pocket. He gnaws on them. The drug sparks his nerves.

He steps outside onto the deck, and as he does, he spies a deer on the shade side of a shed, grazing through a patch of grass. It is a doe. She senses him watching. She lifts her head and her eyes are pure and soft and dark. She is beautiful. He winces, and she bolts. Her hindquarters flash white as she kicks over a low hedge and vanishes into the scrub.

Luce walks out onto the beach. The truck is settled in the sand, a crippled shape, its rear wheels sunk up to the axle. The sunlight reflects off the passenger side window, blinding. He takes another step out into the open, lured by the water. It is green and smooth, a morning sea, and the surface is flat with light sheaves of mist across it. The waves break low.

He hears the shriek of gulls. He looks and sees a small flock of them farther down the beach, flying toward him out of the west. They skim the water, trailing something along the shore. He squints, and it comes into view, a darker, oily moving surface—a school of baitfish chased by bigger fish, blues. The water boils as their tails slap up. The blues are working the baitfish, pushing them into the shallow water, trapping them against the shore. On the wind, he can smell the strong ripe scent of fish meat and blood. As they come nearer, he can see the baitfish flipping up, bits of silver flashing, the sheen of the oil, the strewn pieces of the dead. The gulls move in. They dive and swoop, picking off the baitfish that the blues have herded in against the shore.

The gulls are scavengers. He knows this. Sea-rats. This is how they work. This is how they survive. No sense of loyalty, no judgment or morals. No seesaw of conscience, good versus evil, right against wrong. As he watches them now, working the space, working their prey, moving in by turn to take their feed, he can sense a power in the world around him—a sheer, indifferent power like a tremendous pair of hands shuffling through the sky, the light, the slow calm water of the bay—and still, he watches the gulls. He cannot take his eyes off them. The idea comes to him then.

Later that morning when the work is done, Luce drops Johnny off at his house and drives over to the Peirce and Kilburn Shipyard in Fairhaven. He tells them he is looking to buy a work boat, a small fishing boat for the river, but with as strong an engine as a boat that size can carry, so if he would have the desire, he could take her out to fish off Cuttyhunk or even as far as the Devil's Bridge.

The man he talks to first takes him in to see another man who is working in a shop, turning dory boats. The smells of the shop—the sawdust, resin, linseed oil, and pine tar—remind Luce of Noel. Gritted dry air in his throat, on his lips. There is not a man working in that yard who recognizes him. There is not a man there he knows. When they ask his name, he gives a false one. He tells them that he sailed as a boat-steerer on the
Wanderer
before she was wrecked, and now he has a wife and kid, lives on Water Street in downtown New Bedford, and he is hoping to make an honest living for himself in a new trade.

They take him around the yard, show him a few boats that might suit his purpose, and he chooses one. He knows she is what he wants the moment he lays eyes on her—twenty foot, flat bottom—a simple design, the kind of design his grandfather might have built. He estimates that even oiled up with thirty cases, she will draw less than two feet of water. He will be able to run her in the shallows, among the rocks, and all the way up through Crooked Creek. He will be able to run her right up onto the beach. She is the kind of boat they used in the early bootleg years. No one would even think to use such a small and simple boat these days.

He has her fitted with a one-lunger engine so she will have the speed he needs. They tell him to come back for her the following week.

The boat is cheap and he pays cash. He has Johnny Clyde drive him over to the shipyard and drop him off there. Then he takes the boat and runs her west-southwest from Fairhaven out Buzzards Bay back to Westport.

He takes her into the river and ties her up against the marsh in the hidden pool at the end of Crooked Creek. In the boat, he keeps a quahog rake, a gaff, and a pail. He wades across the marsh through the damp suck of mud, the cordgrass and the cattails, to the higher ground behind the town dump. There is an old, unused wagon path that runs through the scrub. When he takes the boat out, he leaves the truck parked there, hidden in the brush at the end of the dirt road.

He starts with small acts of piracy, small acts of mooncussing. He breaks into barns, icehouses, haylofts, cellars, sheds. He salvages drops made by other crews. He hijacks loads of liquor from gangs that run out of Fall River. Then he drives the crates and cases twenty miles overland to downtown New Bedford, and sells them piecemeal, to rival gangs.

He knows enough to pull it off. He has a feel for the rhythms, the tics of the work, and he is careful. He chooses his jobs, picks his nights. He doesn't use Honey Lyons's truck. He borrows Johnny's smaller pickup. He never pirates a load of liquor too close to home. He doesn't mess with Swampy Davoll and his Point gang. He doesn't steal too much at a single given time. He picks off a few cases here, a few crates there. Several times a month, he takes the small boat, the new boat, offshore to meet with a barge or a steamer manned by a crew he has never worked with before. He pays cash for the liquor—his own cash—and he runs it in. He has done out the math. He can bring in one-quarter of an average-size load, split the profit with Johnny Clyde, and each of them will still make more than they would on a job for Honey Lyons.

He knows he is grazing trouble. The key, he understands, is to split himself—to work in a way that runs against reason, that runs against what is possible. He keeps up appearances. He and Johnny go on doing jobs for Lyons, working Lyons's boat out of the slip on the Point Wharf, and on the side they make their money, the real money—so much that Luce stops counting. He is smart enough to know not to spend it. He buys only poor-boy things, an occasional luxury, but nothing extravagant. He saves the rest. He gives some to Cora for safekeeping and buries the bulk of it under a ruined stone hearth in the woods.

Bridge

Within a week, she felt the shift in Luce. She knew he was sneaking around, and it didn't take much for her to knock a few pieces together and figure it out.

She watches him carefully but says nothing until one warm day in the midafternoon when they have rowed Noel's skiff to one of the islands downriver. It is a brilliant day, the first week of October. The sun is warm and it bakes them as they lie outstretched on the top of a massive rock, their arms bare against its cool uneven surface. She points out shapes for him in the clouds—a lizard, a Viking sword, the face of a bear.

“So tell me,” she says, “about what you're up to now.” She closes her eyes against the sun's glare. She does not turn toward him.

And he tells her. He tells her because he needs her. She is another pair of hands. She is smart and fast and good with a gun, and he can trust her.

He takes her with him to the old pesthouse, up the road on Pine Hill, back in the woods. It is the shell of a building, gutted by fire. He brings her up a wrecked staircase to the second floor, and she sits with him there, among the rot and cobwebs, as he builds a blind attic in the narrow crawl space above the ceiling. He cuts a hole in the top of a dressing closet. Bridge helps him load hard pine planks into a pull cart, and in the dark, they haul it through the woods to the pesthouse. Luce climbs up into the rafters, and she passes him the boards through the ceiling hole. He lays them down across the beams to make a strong rough floor.

It will be a resting place, he tells her, for loads between runs when they have brought in too much to sell it all at once or when the heat is on them. They will bring the bottles and the cases in at night and store them here.

Toward the end of the month, Luce hears news of a ship coming up from the West Indies. She will be anchored for one night off Browns Ledge.

Bridge drives the truck that night. It is a full-of-the-moon night, and they go out late, after the moon has begun to set, its heavy yellow eye growing larger as it falls. Bridge drops Luce and Johnny Clyde at the entrance of the trail that leads into Crooked Creek. She keeps watch as they walk across the marsh to the boat. From the road, she can see them working through the turns toward the river. She watches until they have disappeared. She waits an hour. Then she drives over the bridge, through the village at the Point, and up Main Road. She turns left down Cornell Road and drives around the West Branch past Gray's Gristmill and into Adamsville. At the phone-box, she places a call to the police—a tip—some men sighted in what she thinks might have been rum-boats on the beach at Richmond Pond near Brayton Point, the other side of town. They ask her name. She hangs up and drives back into Westport.

She meets Luce and Johnny at the landing on East Beach Road. She backs the truck right down to the water, and they load as many cases as the pickup bed will hold. They leave the rest with the boat in the shallows and drive a quarter of a mile to a summer house that has been boarded up for winter. They back the truck down the drive until the tail end comes right up against the rolling cellar door. They will unload here, then go back to get the rest of the cases off the beach. Later, in stages, they will shift the entire load to the pesthouse.

Johnny Clyde waits in the cab while Bridge and Luce go around to the side of the house. Luce pries back the batterboard from one of the windows and jimmies up the sash. He pushes Bridge through first, then crawls in after her. They walk through the rooms toward the kitchen, the hollow sound of their steps on the floor. Sheets have been drawn across the furniture. The tables and chairs glow like hunched white elephants in the darkness.

Bridge pauses at a doorway. “Come here,” she whispers to Luce. He is ahead of her, halfway down the hall. He comes back. It is a library, every wall lined with books, two deep hulking chairs set together facing a dark fireplace, a small table set between them.

“When we're done, we'll come back for a smoke,” he says and squeezes her arm.

She follows him to the back of the house. They go down the steps to the cellar and pull back the bolt on the door. Johnny Clyde gets out of the truck, and they begin to unload. They work silently, quickly. They have stacked almost all of it when they hear the peal of sirens from farther up the road coming toward them. Luce walks quickly to the cab of the truck, pulls his .22 rifle from behind the seat. He draws it out by the barrel and, as he does, the trigger catches on a spring. The gun fires. The bullet rips past his wrist and shoots into Bridge. She can feel a searing pain through her side, and the shock of the impact, the shock of the blast, sends her back against the cellar wall. She strikes her head on the concrete and her mind goes black.

Luce watches in horror—it all seems to unfold in slow motion— each second drawn out, unbearable—she bends at the knees and the earth catches her, she wavers for a moment and her weight seems to settle as if she is poised in an uncertain prayer. She falls forward. Her face strikes the ground.

Henry

It is the sirens that wake him. They sweep through the night out of his sleep. Vague lights pass through the east-facing window. Then the sound veers away and begins to fade as the police trucks turn up John Reed Road, heading north.

He lies in the darkness. The shapes of the bedroom slowly advance into focus. The desk against one wall. The ivy plant. The low bookshelf. The sheen of the framed mirror hanging between the windows. The sky outside. Black. Black.

He is dozing off again when he hears the knock, a soft rap on his consciousness, so indistinct that at first he mistakes it for a ghoul in the brain, some old cruel thought seeking entrance. Then it comes again, the knocking louder, more insistent. He hears hushed voices and realizes that they are standing, someone is standing, on the porch below.

He throws on a robe and goes downstairs. He opens the door.

Through the screen, he sees Luce Weld. There is a boy behind him, carrying a third person.

“What is it?” Henry asks. “What do you want?”

“I need a doctor,” says Luce.

Henry hesitates.

Luce twists the knob on the screen. He twists it again hard, but the door is locked. The knob won't give. “We need a doctor,” he says. His eyes are wild.

“I'm not a doctor anymore. It's been years—”

“Fuck years,” Luce says. He presses his face up to the screen. “I need you to be a doctor tonight. Right now. I need you to unlock this goddamn door.”

Behind him, the person in the boy's arms stirs, a low sound, a dark stirring out of sleep, the cap shifts on the face and Henry can see that it is Bridge. He unlocks the screen, opens the door, and leads them into the kitchen. He clears off the heavy oak table and throws down a cotton tablecloth and several towels.

“Lay her down there. Carefully. Watch her arm. Keep her spine straight.” He checks her pulse, puts his cheek against her mouth. Her breath is slow and light, but even. He has time. He straightens and turns to Luce. “What happened?”

“She was shot.”

“Where?”

“Down the road.”

“I mean where on her.”

Luce shakes his head. “Dunno. The gut, I think. Or her side. She hit her head.”

“On what?”

“A wall.”

Henry reaches for the chain on the electric light above the table, but Luce grips his arm. “No light,” he says.

Henry looks at him. “If you want me to help her, I am going to have to work with light, and you are going to have to leave.”

Luce shakes his head. “I won't leave her.”

“I can't do a thing for her without light.”

“I won't leave.”

“You will leave.”

The boy who carried her stands off to the side by the stove. He clears his throat. “Hey, Luce,” he says, his voice jittery. “Maybe we should go finish up. I mean, I don't think we should just leave the—”

“Shut the hell up,” Luce says. The boy nods his head several times and is quiet.

Luce looks down at his sister. Then abruptly, he turns away. “I'll be back,” he says and, in one swift motion, he is out the door and down the hall, the boy behind him. Henry hears them leave. The low sound of the screen latch as it slips into place.

He turns on the light. She stirs. He finds the swelling on the back of her skull where her head struck the wall. He touches her body carefully, through her clothes, until he locates the hole in her side. He pulls up her shirt. She moans, waking. Her eyes open, staring unfocused. They close again. He rolls her body up, off the table, and locates the exit wound. It was a clean shot. A flesh wound. The bullet is already out of her. He lays her back down.

He takes the belt off his dressing gown and digs out a rope from a drawer in the pantry. He ties her down on the table so she won't roll off. Then he goes through the house and gathers the supplies he will need. Astringent from the medicine shelf in the upstairs bathroom. A bottle of rubbing alcohol. A tincture of laudanum. Morphine. Gauze. Two fresh washcloths. More towels. Vinegar. Wax. Thread. He pulls his doctor's bag from his dressing room closet. He has not opened it for over six years. He changes out of his nightclothes into an undershirt and trousers. He goes back downstairs.

She is waking, her eyes flicking open, then closed. She sees him, confused for a moment, the pupils dilate, she does not know where she is. She opens her mouth to speak and the pain hits her then, her eyes grow startled, huge. He puts his hand to her mouth and shakes his head. “Shhh,” he says. “Lie still. Don't move.” He takes a syringe out of his bag, sterilizes it, fills it to the lowest mark, taps it, then wraps her arm tightly until her vein rises. He pushes the needle in.

Within seconds, she can feel her mind begin to drain. The pain drops and is gone. Her eyes roll from side to side as she watches him move through the room around her. He is filling a pot with water from the sink, dragging a stool to the table. He sets the pot of water down onto it and there is steam rising, the room begins to swim. Another chair pulled over, a leather bag on it, open, he is rummaging through, locating something inside, and as she watches, she has the sensation that her body is floating inches off the table and there is water rushing underneath her, she is floating on the sea that has broken through into the room, and she can feel the cool flush of water on her skin and the heat of the drug through her veins, and the sea is a deep and distant roar, like a sound she has heard before with her ear pressed tight against a shell.

He cleanses both sides of the wound with water and a sponge. He swabs it with astringent, and then again runs water through it. The water drains off her into the washtub he has set on the floor. It fills with pink water and clots of her blood. The entrance hole of the wound is clean and round and small, but the exit hole is ragged, and again, he turns her onto her side. With scissors, he cuts away the ragged edges until the wound is wider but smooth. Then he holds the two sides together, and using a common needle and double waxed thread, he passes it into her skin. One at a time, he makes the stitches down the wound. He draws them tight and close and straight, leaving the threads loose until he comes to the end. Then he ties the tails of each thread, drawing them tight into hard double knots. He swabs the closed wound with alcohol, then lays her back down and dresses the opposite side.

She is sleeping again, he notices, as he rinses the needle in the tub on the stool. The water has cooled, and he watches his hands pass through it, dark traces of her blood around his nails. She is sleeping, and it is after two in the morning, and he realizes then that his hands had not shaken, not once, not at all. He picks her coat up off the chair to fold it, and as he does, a small piece of metal clatters to the floor. He bends and picks it up. It is the bullet, the head soft, mushroom-shaped. He washes it off and tucks it into his trouser pocket. She is still sleeping. He watches her sleep.

Luce comes back for her before dawn. Henry brings him into the front room. Bridge is lying on the daybed by the window, her eyes closed. Henry explains the wound to Luce, its dressing and care. Keep both sides clean. Keep her still. He hands Luce a bottle of pills. Give her these. One with water for the pain. No more than two. They'll help her sleep it off. Luce nods, looking down at her. He does not look up, even after Henry has stopped speaking. He is unable to take his eyes off her. He starts suddenly. “Let me pay you,” he says, drawing out a pack of bills from his coat pocket.

Henry shakes his head. “No.”

“Take it.”

“No.”

“It'll be bad luck if you don't take it.”

“I'm not a doctor. I don't do this work anymore.”

Luce looks at him, bewildered. “Will she be alright?” he asks, and Henry is struck by the sudden change in his face.

“Yes. She's going to feel it for a while, but she'll be fine.”

Luce nods. He looks down at her again, unconvinced.

“It's a flesh wound,” Henry says. “Keep it clean. Keep it dressed. The stitches can be cut out in two weeks.”

Luce nods again. His sister's face is quiet, still, in the early light.

“She never sleeps this deep,” Luce says.

“I've given her something. A tincture. The same substance as what's in the pills. It's making her sleep.”

Luce shakes his head.

“She'll be fine,” Henry says again. “But she needs to rest. She can rest here if you like.”

Luce looks at him for a moment. “No, I'll take her home. She needs to go home.” He bends down, slides his arms carefully underneath her as if he has done this a thousand times, as if he knows her weight and how much strength her body will demand, and he lifts her as if he is lifting the world.

After they are gone, Henry cleans up the kitchen. He wraps the towels in the tablecloth, empties the washtub and puts his doctor's bag away. He makes a pot of tea. A slice of toast. He goes to the writing desk by the window and draws out a heavy leather-bound notebook. He takes out a pen, wipes dried ink off the nib. He turns to the end of the notebook, flips back several pages until he comes to a blank page. He enters the date.

October 27, 1928 . . .

And he writes. He wants to write about her, but he can't. What he writes is awkward. He can find only poor words for it.

That morning he goes, as he has gone every morning, to his work at the mill. But everything is changed. He hears the men talking in the cotton bins as they take their lunch. They talk in low tones about the strike. They talk about the different kinds of soup given out—the maggoty scrap bone, boiled until it sheds to broth— and how the best stuff comes from the Workingman's Club—peas and barley, chunks of real meat.

They break off when they see him coming, their eyes cast down or toward the window, glassy, vacant, staring straight ahead. And he finds that this morning, for the first time, he cannot tell himself what he has always told himself before: that it is a natural gap, the gap between the handful of bosses and the workers at the mill. They are continents apart. He can feel this, and he cannot tell himself it does not matter.

He leaves the mill early that day, and on his way home, he drives through the strike zones, through the north and south ends of the city, and he sees what he has put off seeing, what he has not wanted to see—all types of children, thin, Saxon-faced, dark-eyed Portuguese, children in good boots and decent coats, others with shoes out at the toes. Outside the Workingman's Club, they stand with their soup pails waiting on lines wrapped twice around the block. He sees the small crowds gathered at the Labor Temple, the scabbed ears of the mill workers, and the police barricades, the billy clubs. His car nudges through the wasted city streets, the windows of the empty tenements plastered with old newspapers, and superimposed over it all, over everything he sees, is an image of her body laid out on the heavy oak table—knife scars in the wood and her bare flesh soaked with yellow light, the bruised eye of the wound in her side where the bullet passed through.

Midafternoon, he drives back to the beach. He sits on the porch at the cottage for the rest of the day, deep into the evening.

A red sky at dusk—clouds like blood-stricken birds. And still he stays sitting there as the wind settles down and the hard night chill moves in. His body is stiff as shadow in the porch chair. The salt air soaks his face, his hair, and when he closes his eyes, there are birds exploding in his head. Their wings burst up, and her body is drifting in that nether space, falling slowly through their wings.