The Season of Open Water (7 page)

He could tell her that whatever she has seen in him tonight is not his everyday character. He could tell her that tonight, for the first time in years, he can feel something stirring in him, some old smooth river waking up.

“Do you know what sort of poetry they'll have later in the evening?” he asks her.

She shakes her head. “Arthur and I only come for the food.”

He smiles and looks away again. His eyes search the room for Bridge. She is still at the table. She has turned toward the woman seated next to her. She says something, then glances at him across the room. When she sees he is watching her, she looks away sharply. He smiles to himself. He will find her when the meal is cleared. He will go up to her and introduce himself. He will say nothing about the incident at Shorrock's store. He will ask if she has an interest in poetry. He will ask if he might call on her sometime. He eats a bit more of the food, and then he is full. He lays his knife and fork down on his plate. He looks up again across the room to the table where Bridge was sitting, but she is gone.

She steps outside into the darkness. The cold is sharp. It burns her throat, and the burning soothes her. It had unnerved her, the way he was looking at her, all of it had unnerved her, him being there, watching her that way, he had no right to be there, in her world. And every time she had glanced at him—sometimes without intending to do it—but every time her eyes had strayed to his face he seemed to sense it, and he would look up and catch her watching him. She shivers and pulls her coat more tightly around her as she walks. She shovels her hands deep into the pockets of her coat. It will be a long walk home. She thinks of him often, more often than she would like, as she walks down the steep of Handy Hill toward Hix Bridge. She thinks of him less once she has crossed the river. She begins to climb the hill on the other side. Her breath is white in the moonlight. Her head aches with the cold. But when she hears the rough sound of the car engine behind her, far off, but growing nearer, she knows who it is. She does not turn around. The sound fades as the car dips over the first rise, then grows louder, approaching. Her first instinct is to disappear, behind a shed, into the trees, to let him drive by. But she keeps walking, her body suddenly flushed with heat, and she senses, without knowing for sure, that he has come looking for her. Her shoes sound loud against the oiled dirt. The headlamps play ahead of her, casting her shadow tall and long on the road. The car slows down.

Henry Vonniker leans over and unrolls the window. “Can I give you a ride?”

“Oh, no thanks,” she answers, but she smiles, she tries not to, but she does. She keeps walking.

He lets the car run slowly alongside her. “It's freezing out. Let me drive you home.”

She stops and looks in at him through the open window. “It's not on your way.” His face is very pale in the darkness. His eyes sink into her.

“Please,” he says.

She hesitates for a moment, then opens the door and climbs in. His gloves are on the seat between them.

“Do you need them?” he asks her.

“No, I'm fine.”

“You have no mittens.”

“I forgot them at the Grange.”

He gives her the gloves. They are soft leather, flannel-lined. She slips them on. They are large on her hands. She has no feeling in the tips of her fingers from the cold. She rubs them through the gloves, bending them back and forth at the joint. “Thank you,” she says. She can feel him looking at her, and she wants to look at him, and at the same time, she is afraid. They are too close. The closeness terrifies her.

“What is it?” she says quietly, looking down.

“I'm sorry.” He looks away, out the front windshield.

“Shall we go?” she says.

“I don't know where you live.”

She laughs, suddenly more at ease. “No, you don't, do you?”

“I don't.”

“Take a left up ahead at the corner.”

He puts the car into gear, and they drive. He takes the turn, and they head up Pine Hill, past the woods and the chicken farm. She notices that he does not drive quickly. He looks straight ahead at the road. Through the window the cold clear night winds past. She feels torn by the silence. She wants to ask him why he came looking for her, why he came to the Grange, if he came because of her, and at the same time, she doesn't want to know. The feeling is coming back into her fingers. His hands are on the wheel, his skin white as bone in the dim light. They come to the end of the road. He stops.

“Left again,” she says.

He makes the turn. “Your name is Bridge.”

“Yes.” She smiles. She looks down at his gloves.

“I saw you for the first time at Asa Sisson's funeral. Do you remember?”

“Yes.”

He does not say anything else, but she can feel that he wants to. She can sense the strange and fitful air between them, and she wants to touch him, his face, his hands. Every muscle in her body is tense.

“Here,” she says quickly. “The next house on the left, but you can just pull up here on the side of the road. This is fine.” She slips off the gloves and lays them on the seat. As the car rolls to a stop, she goes to pull the door latch.

“Wait,” he says.

She looks up at him, her fingers on the handle, the metal is cold, like ice.

“Could I . . .”

She stares at him. He is looking at her intently, searching her face, and she can feel a slow and quiet trembling deep at the end of her.

“Thank you for the ride,” she says. She pulls the handle and gets out of the car and closes the door behind her. She doesn't look back. She crosses the road into her yard and rounds the corner of the house. She stops there and waits in the darkness, until she hears the sound of his car pull away.

Over the next few days, she finds him sneaking around in her thoughts—a thin and solitary current that seems to have its own whim, its own restless mind. She thinks of him while she works in the shop with Noel or as she is doing chores around the house: dusting, cooking, feeding the stove. She sees his face as she sets the logs into the fire.

Later in the week, when she stops by Abigail Dean's hat shop to buy a few hairpins for her mother, she notices a dozen small blue bottles of perfume by the cashbox.

“Soir de Paris,” says Abigail Dean, her voice glossy over the French words. “It's all the rage and very expensive.”

Bridge nods. She fingers one of the brushed silver caps.

“Nice cap,” she says, then shrugs. Her hand drops to her side. “I can't wear fancy perfumes myself.”

“Why ever not? A young girl like you.”

“They make me itch. Big red spots like the hives.”

Abigail Dean's nose wrinkles. “That's quite awful.”

“It is what it is, I suppose,” Bridge answers. “But I'd like a small bag for those hairpins, if it wouldn't be too much trouble. I'd hate to lose one on my walk home.”

“Oh yes, of course. I'll dig a bag out for you. Just a moment.” Abigail steps into the back room of the shop.

Bridge picks up one of the small blue bottles of perfume. She turns it over in her hand, then slips it into her coat pocket. She leans back against the counter, and pretends to study the colored scarves, dyed wool and silk, hanging from pegs along the opposite wall.

Abigail Dean returns with a small paper bag. “It's well used, but there doesn't seem to be a hole in it.”

“That'll do fine,” Bridge says. “Thank you.” She puts the hairpins into the bag and folds the open edge over tightly. She walks out the door into the snow.

At home in her bedroom, she opens the small blue bottle and puts a few drops onto her fingers. The oil is slick and cool. It smells of crushed flowers. She rubs some into her wrist, some into her neck, and she lies back on her bed. She looks toward the window. There is ice baked around the edge of it. The rough winter light sticks in the snowflakes frozen on the glass, and they glow. She closes her eyes and thinks of Henry, with the warm scent of the oil on her skin.

She hears the door slam downstairs, the sound of her brother's voice below in the kitchen. She sits up sharply and screws the cap back onto the bottle. She stuffs it into an old sock and buries it in one corner of a drawer.

Part II

Mooncussers

Luce

She is all bones to him. For as long as he can remember she has been—a soft bag of limbs in his arms. And it was only that fall—before the first frost set in on the leeks, before the last tomatoes had gone by, when the icehouse had been emptied nearly to the floor and he had to wade through two feet of rotted-out, soaked straw—it was only then that he noticed how her body had begun to change.

She is still thin, still a little wild. She has always been his. Trailing a slight distance behind him, the way any other young, not tame creature would. But it is only now that she has begun to put on a little flesh, only now that she has begun to grow into something more than simple bones, that it occurs to him that he could hurt her. That she could hurt him. The realization fills him with an odd sense of guilt, fear, and at the same time, a strange, complicated desire. He does not know what to do with this, but because of it, an unspoken, unspeakable line has begun to grow between them. It is not that he would cross it. He would risk losing her if he did. But the desire troubles him. He tries to duck it. He goes about his route selling ice—a quarter for a slab—a nickel for a poor-piece. After the first cold snap, he and Harry Spire walk down to check for skim ice on the ponds. And when Bridge comes to him in the early mornings through the short pitched tunnel that runs under the eaves, when she creeps into his bed, as she has done since they were little, and tucks herself like something small and warm under his arm, he tells himself that how they are together is nothing more than how they have always been.

He knows every breath of her—the yellow spot in her right iris, the slight discolored mark on the inside of her wrist. He knows how her hair grows from the root—a swirl around the back of her scalp. He knows her the way he knows the river. He feels he owns her the way he owns that kind of knowing.

They cut ice early that year. By mid-January the first crop is better than eight inches thick. For a week they go down to the ponds with the handsaws and the ice plow hitched up to a two-horse team. They set the horse saw, and Asa Vaughan leads them out across the ice, cutting the rafts five feet long, three feet wide. Luce and Harry Spire work behind with the double-barbed poles—they work the rafts of ice across the pond down toward the raise.

As they walk, the cold knifes into him. The snot freezes on his lip and he can feel the tightening of the skin. He cups one hand over his mouth and breathes out warm air to thaw it, then wipes his nose. The snot leaves a pearly skid down his sleeve.

With handsaws, they break the rafts into single cakes and haul them by pulley into the icehouse. The inside walls are sheathed with sawdust, and they stack the blocks of ice from floor to ceiling. Between each layer, they set down sawdust and hay.

Luce does the ice work because it was his father's work. The route he drives was his father's route before his father died in the swine flu. The ice work is good work. Steady work. But he knows it is work that won't last forever. He can see the writing on the wall. The newer summer homes, the homes of the rich—even some of the cottages down on the beach—they have the new ice chests that plug into the wall and need no ice to keep them cold. So when Honey Lyons stops by the ice pond that Thursday morning as they are hauling the last of the crop inside and asks Luce if he can have a short talk with him, Luce doesn't hesitate. He walks with Honey Lyons outside.

Just a small job. Lyons says. One job, there might be more if Luce takes to the work. He has heard Luce is good with a boat, and some men he knows need someone for a job the night after next. Dirk McAllister was on for it, but they can't seem to find him. The jimmy seems to have taken a cut that wasn't his and got himself gone.

They have walked away from the icehouse toward the edge of the pond. The frozen hay cracks under their boots. Luce glances up toward the pines, their branches shattered with snow.

“Tell me the job.”

“You'll be told if you take it.”

“I'll take it depending on what it is.”

Honey Lyons grins, his face hard, and when he speaks, his voice seems to come from between his teeth. “What it is depends on if you'll take it.”

Luce stubs his boot into a long blade of ice. He splits it with his toe.

“If this weather keeps,” he says, “the sides of the river'll be frozen night after next, I'd bet, all but the channel.”

Lyons doesn't answer.

“So the job's not in the river, I'd bet.”

“I wouldn't bet one way or other if I were you.”

“Is it mooncusser work?”

Lyons looks at him sharply. “You get this straight. Breaking up ships on rocks, salvaging someone else's load, all that pirate stuff is for the dirt poors. You accuse a businessman of that, you're only showing what you come from.”

Luce feels his face flush. “You know what I meant,” he says under his breath.

“I know what you said. You want the job or not?”

Luce doesn't answer right away. His eyes swing across the frozen water. The crows shriek through the trees. “I want a third more than what you're planning to offer,” he says.

Honey Lyons laughs. “If you tell me that up front, I might offer you a third less.”

Luce glances at him, then looks down at his hands chapped by the cold. “I can run the river at night better than anyone—you know that.” He peels one bit of skin off the nail.

Honey Lyons studies him for a moment. He does not say anything. He offers nothing more.

They stand together on the edge of the frozen pond. The clouds mass above the trees. Luce watches them, aware of the other man standing beside him, waiting, as the clouds tumble like boulders down into the pines.

“I'll take it,” Luce says. He does not look at Lyons.

“Once you're in, you're in.”

Luce nods.

“Like I said, it's the night after next.”

“Black-of-the-moon night.”

Lyons nods. “You'll leave from the Point Wharf. You'll come back into the river to unload. The stone pier, two landings up from the Meadows.”

Luce shakes his head. “No man with a drop of common sense would bring a boat upriver of the bridge this time of year, this kind of winter. You hit the wrong spot, ice'll slice her bow like a knife through cheese.”

“Better not hit the wrong spot,” Lyons says. Then he smiles, the gold stub of his tooth sharp in the light.

That first night out, Luce meets Honey Lyons down at the Point Wharf on the east side, the sheltered side, behind the bridge. When he sees the boat tied up, Luce smiles to himself. The old man's boat, he thinks. Lyons has a boy with him, Johnny Clyde. Just seventeen, Johnny comes from the Narrows in the north part of town. He is tall and skinny, black hair, pale skin, a soft apple face. He talks little.

“He'll be your other hand,” Lyons says to Luce.

“Already got two of my own.”

Lyons shoots him a look, and in the dim light spilling from the dock house behind them, Luce can see a hard, cruel glint in the other man's eyes. Then it is gone, and he gives Luce a sly, complicit smile. “You're captain,” he says. “Johnny's your mate. As long as you're working for me, he'll be your mate.”

From his coat pocket, Honey Lyons draws out a sealed package wrapped in brown paper.

“This is what you'll give them for your order.” Luce reaches out to take the package, but Lyons's hand snaps back. “Don't even think about opening it, big boy. I'll know it if you do.”

They leave on the ebb tide. The river is empty, frozen in patches. Luce steers them gently through the thin plates of skim ice. He gives the engine some gas once they pass Crack Rock, but then he cuts her back again as they come along the Lion's Tongue. They pass Charlton Wharf, out the harbor mouth.

The ocean is cold, the air slick, the water and the sky black ahead of them. They run without lights, speeding out toward the bell, and then past it. The land drops out of sight behind them. For a while, they can still see a faint brushed glow over the horizon, but that too fades, and they are left steering through the night, the sea black as pitch underneath them.

They head south-southwest. They pass the ledge. At 11:25 off the port side, Luce spots first one sail, then another. The ship rises up as if she were rising out of the darkness, out of the sea. She is a schooner, a beautiful fisherman, trim and knockabout-rigged. Her masts are tall and strong. Her lines slope down in long and graceful curves.

Several smaller boats are already pulled up along her starboard side: other customers loading up their decks. One of the crew waves them in, and Luce pulls the boat into a clear space alongside her. Johnny Clyde throws the truck tire fenders over the rail and ties off a line. They climb aboard. Luce notices how the men take the pair of them in, eye them warily. They are strangers. Each man of the crew has a heavy Colt strapped to his hip.

One comes up to him. “We've got it all from a drink to a barrel. What's your order?”

Luce hands him the package. The mate takes it up to the wheelhouse. As they wait, Luce takes a turn around the deck. He can see cases of liquor stacked and covered under canvases and tarps. There are huge barrels and smaller kegs pressed in tight pyramids aft. A man he takes to be the captain returns with the mate. He is tall, red-bearded. He extends his hand. Luce takes it, starts to introduce himself, but the captain cuts him off and shakes his head.

“Don't want your name,” he says. “Don't know the names of some of my own men. Don't want to. Your boy'll stay here. You come with me.”

He leads Luce down a steep ladder, belowdecks. The hold is divided into smaller walled-off compartments according to brand and price and kind. One berth holds nothing but champagne, another brandy, another gin. The whiskey room is twenty foot fore and aft, ten foot across, and crammed deck to overhead. The bottles are stacked in crates and sewed up in gunnysacks. The captain takes one, rips it open, and Luce can see five quart bottles of Cedar Brook, 100 proof.

“Your order's for this. And twenty cases of Golden Wedding.”

Luce nods.

“Bring your boy down and oil up.” He takes out one of the bottles of Cedar Brook and holds it out to Luce. “Yours,” he says. “On me.”

Luce nods. He does not smile. He takes it.

Although the wind is behind them on the return trip in, the boat runs slower. She is sluggish, her hull sunk low in the water by the weight. Luce keeps her out to full throttle, and they speed through the brutal cold on the flat black sea. Spray strikes against his face. The wind cuts his eyes. He can feel the hot burn of the whiskey in his throat, the searing cold of the air in his lungs, and he feels brutally alive, cut free from his life, a part of something larger, something grand and beautiful and strange, a territory without borders or names, a part of the cold and the burning and the speed and the limitless night.

He cuts back on the throttle as they come up to the Knubble Rock, through the mouth of the harbor, the engine running soft under the silencer. Once, on the other side of Cory's Island, the bow nudges up into a thicker pack of ice, and Luce can feel the grinding impact against the hull. He backs away and steers her left, into the deeper channel.

They come in under the Point Bridge. He threads through the open running water between the shore-fast ice. They put in at the stone pier, upriver of Ship Rock. Luce can see that someone has broken up the ice alongside the pier and left two new lines coiled on hooks nailed into the piles. They tie up and unload the cases. They work quietly in the cold still darkness. They do not speak. When the boat is empty, they carry the cases up to the barn. The door is rolled back, and some distance away, up the drive, Luce notices two trucks waiting. A man gets out of one and comes toward them. Luce has never seen him before.

“It's our job from here,” the man says. “Get scarce.”

Luce and Johnny Clyde bring the boat back under the bridge. They tie up again at the wharf in the slip on the east side. Johnny Clyde gives Luce a lift in his pickup, a 1924 Ford that has one lean deep dent along the right tail side. He drops Luce at the end of Pine Hill Road.

“So we're in then?” Luce asks him just before he closes the door. Johnny looks uncomfortable for a moment, unsure.

“Guess so, I guess. We are, I suppose. Dunno, really.” His eyes shift. He looks away and taps the steering wheel with his left hand.

“Sure then,” Luce says. “See you around.”

“Sure then,” Johnny says. “See you.”

The following week, Honey Lyons comes by the icehouse again, looking for Luce, and Luce walks away from his work that day and he does not go back. He runs the boat through that first winter, paired up with Johnny Clyde. They run twelve days a month on the dark of the moon. They run through mud-thick days and clear cold nights, stiff breeze, flat calm, heavy rolling seas. They run out to all types of ships anchored in Rum Row—tramp steamers and finerigged schooners, old sailing barks, the occasional tugboat, barge, or packet ship. Sometimes they will go out late, after the moon has set, and come back in through the fog just before dawn. They bring in crates of whiskey, bourbon, Double Eagle, Old Tom gin, Benedictine, cases of French wine and vintage champagne. They meet the shore crews and load crate after crate onto flatbeds and into the trunks of cars.

They follow each order Honey Lyons gives them. Once, when Luce hears news ahead of a patrol blockade gathering after midnight at the mouth, he dumps a load in deeper water among the rocks off Gooseberry Neck. He ties each case to a buoy and a block of salt that they keep in the hold. In three days, when the salt dissolves and the buoys float up to the surface, he and Johnny Clyde go back for them, on a full-of-the-moon night. They haul the cases up and run them into shore.

He notices that on the larger runs, money rarely changes hands. The deal is prearranged. Prepaid. Lyons will give him a note, a skinny package, an envelope, a coded message scribbled in black ink, and that is what Luce will take out to the rum-ship to exchange for the load. And he likes it that way. He likes having no money on him, nothing to tempt the thief in him, nothing to worry after, nothing to lose.