The Season of Open Water (10 page)

“Do you know that you don't have to go?” he asked.

Of course she knew. She also knew that now there was no way to explain to Luce why she might not want to go anymore, why she might have changed her mind.

“I'm going,” she answered simply, then she walked to the truck and climbed in.

But now, standing in the wheelhouse of the boat, she feels a sadness. She feels, perhaps for the first time in her life, regret. She looks away from the shore back to the ship. She can hear her brother's voice, placing the order, issuing commands. He strides across the deck toward the first mate. The hem of his coat strikes out behind him. They are coming to the rail. Luce tells Devereaux and Borden to get back on the boat, and then Luce and a man from the
Dara
Lee
's crew pass the crates over the side. Luce boards and throws open the door to the false hold, and they load it until it is full. They push the few remaining cases to the stern, and Luce covers them with a tarp.

He comes back to the wheelhouse, revs the engine, and tells Will Borden to push them off. Bridge draws in the bowline, then comes to stand next to her brother, and they ride, the sea wind at their backs, the waves softer now underneath them. They speed through the cool black night toward shore.

Johnny Clyde meets them at Charlton Wharf just past the Knubble Rock at the end of Boathouse Row. Bridge says nothing, but she knows that on a regular night, on a real job, her brother would never have chosen that particular wharf. He would never be slack enough to unload in such a visible spot. He has grafted someone's help. Paid the Coast Guard off.

She will stay in the boat with him, and they will run it upriver. Devereaux and Borden squeeze into the cab of the truck with Johnny Clyde. He will bring them home with the booze.

The headlamps back out and swing around. The truck turns and heads down Boathouse Row. Luce keeps the boat on a soft idle as Bridge unties them off the cleat. She holds their port side tight against the pier until the truck's taillights have disappeared and the sound of the engine has eased into the night. She pushes them off. She coils the line four times around her arm and drops it on the deck of the boat. As Luce heads upriver on the flood tide, she comes to stand beside him at the wheel. He works the craft between Bailey Flat and Cory's Island, then swings back into the channel. They weave through the sailboats set at mooring in the harbor and press north toward the Point Bridge. She can see the new electric lamps set on the wharf, the dock house and the Shuckers Club, the Sinclair gasoline sign outside of Blackwood's store, the boats tied up at the town pier, the quiet dark shapes of trucks and cars. Farther up on the hill, by the pale spike of the Methodist Church steeple, she can see the windmill, its yellow arms lit like knives turning slowly through the moon.

They pass under the bridge, and Luce guns both engines. They speed through the steep black water. Bridge grips her brother's arm. He smells of the river. He smells of the salt and of the marsh. They press faster into the darkness up the open channel, the night soft and wet and cool around them, and she has the sense that they are moving away from what they have always known, hurtling forward toward some pitch black future, and this is the night that lies between. This night belongs to them, this end-of-the-summer darkness. This night is full of every moment of their past that they have spent together, and it is full of every possibility ahead. The wind rakes her hair and nips the corners of her eyes.

Luce veers around Ship Rock, a long deliberate right turn that circles them back behind the marsh islands. They pass the entrance to Crooked Creek, then Taber Point. The moon is ahead of them, a white deep line, whole and driven through the surface. Luce follows it, but driving slower now. Bridge leans over the side of the boat, her hand stretched out into the smooth warm riverwater. She can see the moon jellies, their startling green iridescence. They pass and break and spin out through her fingers.

As they come into the Let, Luce cuts off the engine and they drift. He draws a bottle of whiskey from one of the crates still left in the boat. He breaks the seal, hands it to her, and she drinks. It is good whiskey, strong. It burns her throat. It runs hot and fast to her brain. The river is full of stars. They drink and laugh about the night, the circus of it, the roguishness of it. They joke about the expression on Devereaux's face when Luce told them they would need guns—and about how Borden was nearly seasick by the time they came back in.

“More money than Heddy Green,” she remarks. “But no sea legs.”

Neither one of them mentions Henry.

They drink more, and she gets a little smart. She asks him how much he got paid for the night, and he tells her, and she threatens him with blackmail if he doesn't give her half.

“Come out with me again, and then I'll pay you.”

“I want my money first.”

“You have a taste for it, don't you?”

“For the money?”

“For the work.”

She shakes her head. “It's dull.”

“Nothing dull about this work, and you know it.”

“Dull to me,” she says, “but I suppose it's good enough to keep me out of trouble.”

He laughs. “What kind of trouble you planning to get into?”

“Any kind that finds me on the road.”

He looks at her carefully for a moment, sensing something, without knowing exactly what. “Come out with me again next week,” he says. “I've got a good job.”

“No. I'm on vacation.”

“Come on, Bridge. I'm just breaking you in.”

“Forget about it.”

“I need you,” he says.

She doesn't answer. She closes her eyes and leans her head against his shoulder. On the south wind that comes from over the dunes, she can hear the boneless sound of the surf.

Noel

When Noel goes out with Bridge the next morning to pull the potatoes, he can smell the liquor on her. He can smell it as clear as if someone had stuck his head in a piss-pot full of gin. He can smell it through the stink of perfume she has doused herself with to hide it. He can smell it through the reek of soap, through the sun-scrubbed scent of her clothes.

It is the first day of September. The potato vines have died back and turned brown. He works down the furrow ahead of her, pulling up the vines. He grips them close to the ground and the leaves droop around his hand. He picks off the baby potatoes stuck to the root and leaves the hill for her to work over with the fork. He is downwind of her, and the smell of the liquor leaking out of her young skin bristles in his nose. He says nothing. Asks her nothing. He listens to the scrape of the tines against the flesh of the potatoes. She moves slowly. From the corner of his eye, he glimpses her hands, tough with the dirt and strong. She wedges the fork down into the side of the hill, then levers it up, heavy with the weight of the potatoes. She shakes the earth loose and it falls away through the gaps between the tines. She lays the potatoes down beside the dug row to dry. She lays them down gently, the way he has taught her, with enough distance between them for the air to pass between their skins. He gets another whiff of the liquor.

This is not what he wants for her.

From the day she was born, she had awakened all of his old superstitions. Even in the first few months of her life, he had tried to keep a collar on her soul. When he put her down to sleep in her cradle, he would sneak a scrap of tin under her swaddling blanket. He placed it between the folds on her chest as a shield so that nothing evil in the night could take her. When she was older, the first time he took her out in the skiff, out onto open water, he smudged her face with ash so she would not be blown away.

Hannah told him once that Kauai and the other Sandwich Isles were born out of volcanoes. Each one had come from a crack under the sea and pushed its way up from those depths to grow thousands of feet above the surface. She told him that at one point every species of tree on Kauai had come from a seed blown at random across oceans on the trade winds; every species of bird had arrived there by mistake, having lost its way. She told him that before the first tribes arrived in their canoes, Kauai and the other islands had been home only to insects, birds, trees. There were no mammals— no rodents, no cattle or wild boar—until the first pigs were brought by man. Before then, those islands had been a veritable Eden, a territory of silence and beauty, untempered, untouched—as the Arctic must have been before the coming of the whaler—as his granddaughter was.

Now, as they work together down the garden row, digging up the potatoes, she falls a few paces behind. He can still smell the sullen reek of liquor off her skin. The sun warms the back of his neck, and he feels rage—a hotheaded burning rage toward Luce, for roping her in, for leading her down this tainted road. There is an ache in his chest, and it weighs him down as he works along the furrow, dredging up the vines.

When Luce stops by the shop that afternoon, Noel is scrimping with a needle into the panbone.

“Have you got some ten-inch nails, old man?”

“Should have.”

“Where?”

Noel nods over toward the shelves above the ice chest. “Might be there. Might be up top.”

Luce rummages through some cans on the lower shelf, then on the shelf above.

“Can I take this box here?”

“Sit for a talk.”

“Don't have time.”

“I talk short.”

Luce laughs. “Alright then.”

“Have yourself a cup.”

“Not thirsty, thanks.”

“Have one anyway.” And it might be the edge in his grandfather's voice, but Luce does what he says. He pours himself a mug of water from the pail, drinks off the top, and sits down in the soft chair by the saw. He drums his fingers against the arm.

“Heard talk of you going west,” Noel says.

“Bridge tell you that?”

Noel nods. He goes on scrimping. “Never been out west, myself.”

“A guy I know told me it's fine out there. Arizona, I was thinking. Land's cheap. Five dollars an acre in some parts.”

“What guy told you that?”

“Just a guy.”

“Can't remember?”

“Can't.”

“Your fool cousin Asa maybe? Seeing as you're following his footsteps.”

Luce shoots him a look, but doesn't answer. He takes a sip of water and wipes his mouth with the back of his sleeve.

“Out west,” Noel goes on, “I hear they got crows the size of dogs.”

“Never heard that.”

Noel goes on cutting the needle into a small blank square on the panbone. “You know how those crows came to get so big?”

“No.” Luce shakes his head.

“Got eyes for their bellies, kept eating up everything they'd see.”

“That so?”

Noel looks up at him, straight in the face. “Sometime long back when, those crows—they came from here, just like you.”

Luce stares at him. He puts down his mug and leans back in the chair, his face creased as he takes in his grandfather's meaning. Then his features smooth out again and he smiles, but his eyes are hard.

“What are you goading me for?”

“You go on doing what you're doing,” Noel says, the needle ticking into the bone. “Hang your hat at whatever gin mill you want, oil up your boat heavy as you want, but you leave her out of it.”

“So this is about Bridge.”

“Seems it might be.”

Luce leans forward in the chair. “You think I have her on a leash, old man?”

“You're thick in the head, Luce. Always have been. But you know, it's finest kind with me for you to go on and do your crooked work, your puddling work. Have your big nights. Make your big money. Go on and do what you do. But you leave her out of it.”

Luce opens his mouth to speak, then he seems to catch himself, and slowly, deliberately, he grips the box of nails, and stands. “Bridge does what she wants,” he says walking toward the door. “You'd know that better than anyone now, wouldn't you, old man? Bridge's always done exactly as she wants.”

He steps through the door into the open sunlight, around the corner, and he is gone.

They move around each other carefully after that. Luce and Noel. They keep a proper distance.

There is trouble with the hens that September. On a morning early in the month, one sheds a drop of blood from the stretching as she lays, and at the scent, the others turn on her. By the time Noel comes in to check on them, they have picked her almost dead.

A few weeks on, he notices two hens seeming sluggish. As he sweeps down the hen yard, he finds worms in their droppings. Short white skittish threads. He treats them all. Moist mash mixed with a teaspoonful of gasoline. Once a week for two weeks, and every two weeks thereafter. They gain back their weight, they liven, but even after a month and no sign of the worms, they will still only pass an occasional egg.

The light cools. The leaves begin to turn. As the wind shifts around, and the blow comes out of the northwest, Noel finds himself thinking about Hannah, and it strikes him for the first time since she has been gone that perhaps she died because, in some small way, he slighted her. It is an absurd thought. He knows this. But it nags him nonetheless. That perhaps she died because he turned his back on her somehow, the life shriveled between them, and there was simply nowhere else for her to go.

He had not expected it. He finds he can admit this to himself at last. He could never have expected that she would be the one to leave.

Bridge

She is washing up the breakfast dishes that Saturday morning in September when Noel tells her she'll have to start work in the shop without him. He is taking the wagon down to the Point to collect the rest of the money Howie Sherman owes for the dory they built. He'll be back awhile later in the day.

“I'll go for you,” she says quickly, setting the last mug on the rack beside the sink and wiping her hands on the dishtowel. She doesn't look at him as she pulls on her boots.

“I was looking forward to the ride,” he says, curious to see if she'll pursue it.

“No, no. Let me go. I can take my bike. I'll be back before noon.” He watches her tie her bootlaces precisely. She gives a last tug to check the knot and stands up. “How much does he owe?”

“You aren't planning any detour, are you?” he asks with a slight smile.

She ignores him. “What does he owe?”

“Thirty-two dollars.”

“Alright. I'll be back. Try not to stew around too much while I'm gone.” Then she is out the door and down the steps. She gets her bicycle from the barn and pedals off down the road.

She tells herself as she takes the turn at South Westport Corner that the thought of a detour might never have occurred to her if Noel hadn't slid in that last remark. But then she smiles, the wind pulling her hair away from her face, thinking about how she makes up these little lies, pretending to trick herself, when she already knows that she will take the long way home, she will ride by the beach, by Henry's house—he is not likely to be there, and she tells herself she is not even sure that she wants him to be there, although of course that is a little lie too. What is true is that since that night she left him behind at Al Devereaux's house, all she has really wanted was to see him again.

Within half an hour she has reached the Point. Howie Sherman's wife is outside, feeding the geese in the yard, and she goes into the house and gets the money for Bridge and invites her in for a piece of breakfast cake, but Bridge says, “No, thank you, we have a busy day in the shop today,” and she takes the money and puts it deep in the pocket of her trousers, then pedals down past the wharf, over the Point Bridge. The clouds box in packs through the sky like great white fists. The sun squeezes through. She can feel a light sweat on the back of her neck under her hair and she is happy and the air is cool on her face. Yesterday's wind has stripped the sand off the dunes and it piles in small drifts on the beach road, and when it is too soft and deep, she has to get off her bicycle and push until she comes again to a clearer stretch.

Henry is out in the driveway under his car, changing the oil, when he hears the creak of bicycle wheels coming down the road from the dunes. There is little traffic this time of year, and on another day he might have been curious to see who it was, but he has been having some trouble with the drain plug on the oil pan. The thing had been jammed. With a box wrench, he finally loosened it, and it seemed to be moving more freely now, the way it should move, along its grooves. He unscrews the last few turns with his fingers, and with his other hand, he gropes for the tin tray that he will place under the hole to catch the oil. But the bicycle stops on the road in front of his house, and he looks over and sees her. He drops the drain plug. Oil shoots down over his shoulder. The plug rolls away from him. “Damn,” he says, wedging his thumb into the hole to block it up again. The tin tray is out of his reach, the drain plug out of reach, and he is stuck now and he knows it.

She lays her bike down at the edge of his driveway and walks over to him. He has spread out the canvas, and on it, he has set down his tools in two neat and perfect rows, wrenches and screwdrivers, a ball-peen hammer. They are polished and they glint in the light. He has set out everything he will need: the funnel, four quart cans of oil, a few clean rags. She finds the drain plug on the ground. She picks it up and wipes off the sand, then squats down on the canvas near him and peers under the car.

“Do you need some help?” she asks.

“That's not very funny.”

She laughs and slips the tin tray under the car to him. He places it under the hole in the oil pan, removes his thumb, and slides out. He sits up, pushing his clean hand through his hair. It is disheveled and his face is flushed, a streak of grease down one side of his cheek. She gives him a rag, and he wipes the oil off his hands and arm. He wipes off his glasses, then puts them back on. He looks at her. “Thank you.”

She smiles. “You would have figured it out. You would have figured something out.”

He laughs, then pauses. “It's good to see you.”

She nods.

“Will you come in?”

“Not today,” she says, but she sits down on the edge of the canvas near him. There is an empty teacup and saucer on the ground. He notices her looking at it.

“Can I get you something to drink?”

“No. Thanks. I was just on my way home. From the Point.”

“Well, I'm glad you decided to come around this way.”

She smiles and picks up one of the adjustable wrenches. “This is nice,” she says, fingering the handle. “You don't use it much, do you?”

“I do in fact. I use it at least once every few months to make a fool of myself changing the oil in my car.”

“Well, just don't do it in the driveway next time. Park in the dirt and dig a hole. Let the oil run into it.”

“That would cut out one step, I suppose.”

“Can you handle the rest?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Do you do alright with the funnel?”

“Actually I would prefer if you would just come around again and do it for me.”

She laughs, looking down at the wrench in her hands. She turns the screw, and closes the clamp on one of her fingers. She tightens it, then opens it again, and he can see the whiter indentations the clamp has left in her skin.

“Keep it,” he says.

“The wrench?”

“I want you to have it.”

“No.”

“Please. It will be my first gift to you.”

She shakes her head and puts the wrench down with the others on the canvas.

“You'd use it more than I do,” he says.

“I don't doubt that.” She smiles and looks away from him toward the hedge and her bicycle lying on the ground at the edge of the drive.

“Don't go yet.”

She doesn't answer.

“Stay for a cup of tea.”

“No, thank you.”

“Coffee?”

“No.” She giggles.

“Then let me make a pot. I'll have a cup and you can stay.”

“You might drink very slowly.”

“You might change your mind.”

She looks at him then, the first time she has looked at him since she sat down, and her eyes are very pale in the sunlight, very blue. Then she looks away back toward the road.

“What's wrong?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

“What are you thinking?”

She tries to find the words to explain it, but they don't come to her. They are words she has not needed until now. But when she sees him, when she is with him, she can feel things open inside her.

“I want to see you again,” he says.

She doesn't answer.

“Is that alright?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Why?”

She shakes her head.

“Is it because of your brother?”

“Luce?” She glances at him, surprised. “No.”

“I worried about you that night you went out with him in the boat.”

She nods.

“Why do you let him talk you into it?”

“Talk me into what?”

“Into doing that kind of work for him?”

It's a way of life, she could have told him, but she did not expect he would understand that. Any more than he would understand the childish faith she sometimes held that if she went with Luce, she could protect him. If she was with him, he would not fall into harm.

“That kind of work isn't safe,” Henry says.

“Do you think,” she replies slowly, still averting her eyes, speaking to the shed across the yard, “do you think it is safe—my being here with you?”

He pauses for a moment. He wants to touch her. He wants to take her face in his hands and draw it toward him. “That's not the point,” he says.

“I think it might be.”

“It's not.”

“We're having our first quarrel,” she says, “aren't we?” And then she laughs again, looking down at her hands, and the sound of her laughter fills him with an inexpressible joy.

“Alright,” he says. “But tell me, what would be wrong with my seeing you again. What could be more simple than that?”

She looks around the yard, at the porch, the railing, the steps, the open toolbox, the empty china teacup and saucer lying near them on the ground. She touches the gilded edge of the cup.

“It's this,” she finally says. “It's difficult because of this.”

“Because of a teacup?”

“We don't have these.”

“You don't have cups?”

“Not these kinds of cups.”

“Why would that matter?”

“We don't have anything like them.”

“It doesn't matter,” he says. “It doesn't matter to me.”

“But do you understand it makes things more difficult?”

“No. I don't understand that at all.”

She looks up at him again and, for a moment, he thinks he sees a trace of anger in her eyes. Then she leans across the canvas between them, and she kisses him. Her mouth is warm on his.

“Please don't go,” he says quietly as she draws away.

“You know I'm not going to stay.” Her eyes are smooth and she touches the side of his face. Then she stands up and offers him her hand. She pulls him to his feet. As she walks down the driveway, he walks with her. She picks up her bicycle.

“Will you come back?” he asks. “Please.”

“I think so,” she says, and again she smiles, that warm shy smile that he loves.

“When?”

“In a while.”

“A long while or a short while?”

She laughs. “One or the other.”

“Do you promise you'll come?”

“Yes.”

And he watches her from the end of the driveway as she pedals down West Beach Road. At the turn, she looks over her shoulder and waves to him. He waves back and she passes out of view.

The oil on his shirt has begun to seep through and he can feel it, heavy on his skin. He is thirsty. His throat burns. On his way up to the house for a glass of water he pauses by the empty teacup and saucer on the ground. He doesn't mean to do it, he has no mental thought before he does, but he raises his foot and brings it down firmly. He feels the china splinter under his boot, and he leaves it there, in pieces on the ground.