Water Dogs (6 page)

Later, Bennie learned that Gwen called from New York several times, leaving messages, telling Bennie her flight-arrival time—midday on his birthday—so that he could pick her up at the airport. Littlefield didn’t check the messages for several days. At the hospital, Bennie was propped up on pillows, drifting about. The doctor had piped a feed of liquid drugs directly into his arm: first morphine, which helped, then Dilaudid, which helped even more. He had remote controls: a red button in
his right hand fed more narcotics, and the nurse call button was within reach of his left hand. He talked on the phone with Julian, who told him he’d visit as soon as things at the restaurant quieted down. Littlefield didn’t visit, either—like their father, he hated hospitals—but he called Bennie’s room the next day and said
Listen up, it’s your brother
, and he told Bennie he’d be feeling better in no time. High on the painkillers, with the static on the line and the certainty in Littlefield’s voice, Bennie felt like they were characters in an old-style radio drama.

“That kid, LaBrecque. He’s still missing.”

Bennie wanted to know the details, immediately, but the shock he felt in his chest made him afraid to ask.

“Bennie, are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“LaBrecque got lost in the woods. He might have fallen into the quarry. Like you did. But no one’s found him yet.”

“People are still looking?”

“The cops. Folks from Musquacook and the island. But he might have skipped town, too. Hard to say right now.” Before he hung up, Littlefield told Bennie to get home as soon as he could.

It wasn’t the head injury that had him fouled up, or his broken leg. It was knowing that surely he could have died. Waiting to be released, Bennie had a decent amount of time to think about dying. Where was LaBrecque? Had the same thing happened to both of them and only Bennie was saved? In the bed, Bennie was floating, encased in softness, a quiet ocean. Once he even had a vision of raccoon babies, a tight bundle of fur beneath the spruce tree, at the bottom of the ravine. Under normal circumstances, he wasn’t one to think much about mortality, but in the hospital he started seeing himself disappear, melting into the snow right beside LaBrecque, the guy he didn’t know, with the gray eyes and the large white snowsuit. The way it seemed to have happened was that when Bennie fell off the edge of Keep’s Quarry he’d landed in the clean sheets and soft blankets of Parkview Adventist, and suddenly there were round-faced nurses wearing colorful shirts delivering
food and checking his blood pressure. Where had LaBrecque landed? Bennie knew his own body was twisted up and broken, but he couldn’t feel any of the pain. In addition to the concussion and broken leg, his hip and left shoulder were bruised. When the nurses asked him about the accident, though, the drugs he was taking kept him from the shame he might have felt for being a grown man playing paintball in the first place.

On Helen’s first visit to the hospital—the day after his fall, she’d heard about the accident from Julian, at the restaurant—she’d walked slowly into his room, unannounced, and Bennie mistook her for a nurse. He lowered the volume on the TV and brought his arm up out of the covers for a blood-pressure check.

“Hi, Bennie,” she said. She was holding one arm behind her back.

“Oh, wow,” he said, blinking. Her cheeks were bright from the cold outside. His vision seemed especially sharp—just minutes earlier, he’d pressed the pain button for a surge of Dilaudid, which had settled him, and brightened the room—and he focused on her eyelashes, both above and below each eye.

“I brought you a present,” she said, looking down, then bringing her hand out from behind her back and placing a miniature sailboat on the bed. “I don’t think this one’s a Sunfish. But I thought it was cool. They sell them in the bookstore, in the back, with the kids’ books.”

He looked down at the boat, with its blue hull and white sails. “It’s amazing,” he said, dreamily, indebted to her. “You’re amazing. I love you.”

Helen smiled, but her eyes showed some concern and she took a tiny step away from the bed. It was quiet for a minute before she said, “So things are going okay in here? You’re getting better?”

“What I mean is, yeah … you’re really great for coming. Sorry to … well, I’m just kind of out of it right now.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m glad you like the sailboat.” She smoothed
a spot to sit at the end of his bed, then turned and sat in a chair in the corner.

“You can sit up here,” he said. “I won’t tell you I love you again, I promise.”

She stood up from the chair and sat down on the bed. “You were hunting out there?”

“Well, not exactly. We were playing a game. Shooting each other with paintballs. I’m sure it sounds pretty dumb.”

“Kind of,” she said.

“I mean, we do it pretty often. We’re safe about it. We wear eye protection.” He had his ankles wrapped in two constricting sleeves that inflated every few minutes, to make sure his blood was flowing properly. The machine rumbled on, squeezed his ankles, then switched off.

“Do you do it in that kind of weather usually?” She wasn’t looking at him—she was picking little pills off the thin hospital blanket.

“No,” he said. He wondered if she had heard about LaBrecque, and whether or not to tell her.

She looked up at him. “And you were drinking, too—right?”

“No, not really. Two or three beers.”

“We don’t need to talk about it now, but … I really don’t like it. Like, I feel really strongly about it. It’s kind of like hunting and drinking? You know?”

“I probably won’t do it again.”

“Forget it. I just … wanted to get that out there.”

“Can we talk about something else?”

“It’s like … the kind of thing you hear on the news. Drinking and hunting.”

“It wasn’t the beer, believe me. And you don’t need to worry about me. I’m really … perfectly fine right now.” He felt this was true, despite the head bandage, and the leg cast, and the IV in his arm.

After she left, he thought more about what he’d said to her. The Dilaudid was wearing off, but before he gave himself another dose he let himself feel stupid about telling Helen that he loved her. His last girlfriend,
Hillary Koeman, was so different from Helen—she was childlike and sweet, and she liked romantic dinners, and they saw each other almost every day and she even invited him to Vermont to meet her family, whom he envied (her parents and little brothers were all prodigies, or close to it, and kindhearted). But when he proposed to her after they’d been dating for six months, she thought it had come out of the blue. She was completely shocked. They didn’t break up right away, but it didn’t take long—perhaps a month of stalled conversations and halfhearted gestures of friendship.

After he’d first woken up in the hospital, one of the nurses had told him he had “blood on the brain” and that he may have torn his corpus callosum. They said he would be okay after a short recovery, and he agreed with them; his brain felt fine. The only problems came when he felt an itch. He would try scratching it but he couldn’t feel his skin. Even worse were those moments when the nurse’s aide attempted to give him a back rub—had the doctor called for this?—and as she did he could feel only the lightest touch against his skin. Nothing more substantial. He felt like he was wearing a costume and inside the disguise there was nothing but air.

He wondered about the latest news of LaBrecque. Maybe he had his own nurse, was getting his own back rubs. Bennie called home several times to see if there was any news, and he reached the answering machine.

The nurse’s aide had blond feathered hair, long fingers, and generously presented breasts, but in his bed all feelings were being fed to him or released from him through tubes and catheters. Bennie knew there might have been a world out there in which people were sitting in diners, eating real food, walking through the woods, talking about things as though they mattered, but that world felt distant. When the busty nurse’s aide left on his second night in the hospital, she bent down close to his face and told him, “It’s your job to just float there on your little raft.”

He flipped on the TV. He watched but he couldn’t concentrate. Animal Planet was often his best bet. Any show about pets and their doting
owners. No matter what he watched, his mind often returned to the winter he lived in Brooklyn with Gwen, a year after she’d first moved there, right after he’d dropped out of college. It was almost hard to believe now that he’d gone to the city in his early twenties and worked as a truck driver, moving artwork for an outfit in Queens. The sapphire lights on the truck’s dashboard; stopping for eggs and potatoes in Williamsburg; nearly dropping an obscure gilt-framed Monet in a town house on the Upper East Side; napping on the subway coming back from the warehouse; meeting Hillary Koeman while she was taking classes at Hunter College; her fantasies about Maine, which he was happy to fulfill; his proposal and their breakup; accidentally stepping through the side of a crate containing a sculpture made of twigs he was late in delivering to Sotheby’s; getting fired; helping Gwen find a new roommate; having Littlefield come down late at night to pick him up and drive him back to Meadow Island; the queasy relief he felt coming up over the Piscataqua River.

Since then, he’d spent time pretending he belonged in Maine. He’d been born there; that helped. After a while, the pretending had melted away. He knew they were real, his financial struggles, his misplaced plans. Being in the hospital—especially when it was nearly time for more Dilaudid, when his room looked dull and shabby—made him think about these realities.

While Bennie was in New York, Littlefield joined the Elks, bought a truck, spent his paychecks on beer and weed. He’d stopped calling their mother, though she would call him from time to time. The day Bennie got back from New York, the harbor looked pristine, the spruce forest and the ground beneath smelled like heaven—it had been raining—and the sky over the ocean went on forever. Littlefield, though, felt like a stranger. He knew his brother was glad to have him back, but Bennie could also sense his brother’s wariness. What had happened during their time apart—the things each of them had learned, the failures they’d had—seemed unsettling to Littlefield. Bennie didn’t know how to talk about this.

The ceiling in his room at the hospital was white. It seemed wet, like the underbelly of a flounder.

Before he switched the light off for the night, Lynne Pettigrew, a cop from the Musquacook Police Department, knocked on the door and entered his room.

“Bennie?”

“Hello?” he said.

“Can I talk to you for a minute?” Lynne Pettigrew was an old family friend of the Littlefields’; her mother had gone to high school with Coach. Bennie had never gotten to know her well, but their families had spent Easter together once when they were younger. She was of medium height but her shoulders were wide. Her brown hair was cut in a neat bob and she wore wire-rimmed glasses. Bennie knew she’d been a hockey standout at UNH. She coached the Brunswick girls’ team when she wasn’t policing.

“Sure.” He tried to sit up in bed, to look more presentable, but his ankles were still in the pressurized sleeves. It was difficult to move.

“You feeling okay?” she asked.

“Pretty good,” he said.

“You probably know by now that Mr. Ray LaBrecque has gone missing. Officers from various towns are helping out with the search.”

“My brother told me.”

“We’re looking in the quarry and all of the woods nearby. We even got the Brunswick guys to bring their dogs down, but nothing came of it. According to your brother and Julian Fischer, it was a pretty wide territory that was covered that evening. Hard to say where he went, exactly, with the storm and all that snow. There’s also a chance Mr. LaBrecque left town on his own accord. We don’t know yet. He’s a friend of yours?”

“No. I knew he was working with Boak and Shaw—Scotty Boak and Craig Shaw—out on Riverneck Island, right?”

“Would you know why he might skip work and leave town after that evening in the woods?” She stood near the bed, holding her black watch cap in both hands.

“No idea, Lynne.”

“And you hadn’t met him before?”

“Not until that afternoon.”

“Okay. Give us a call if you remember anything about Mr. LaBrecque, anything that you might think is helpful. You know where to reach me, Bennie, at the Musquacook station.” She placed a card on his bedside table. “Talk to me or Sergeant Thibideaux.”

“Thanks, Lynne.”

After she left, he called Littlefield, but there was no answer and he didn’t leave a message. He was stunned that LaBrecque hadn’t been found, especially now that other towns were involved with the search. Dogs, too. It seemed most likely that LaBrecque had left town without telling anyone, which would have been an odd choice in the midst of the storm.

The day before he was discharged was another sleepy one in the hospital. Helen came in the late afternoon, with a small vase of purple lilies. Bennie told her about Lynne Pettigrew’s visit, and Helen said she’d heard about LaBrecque’s disappearance, but not from her boss, Julian—one of the waitresses had told her. Bennie scooted over on the bed, both of them barely fitting side by side, her shoulder warm against his. They watched Animal Planet for a half hour, a show about cat rescues. When he switched the TV off, Helen said, “It’s just … I mean, running around with guns? Doesn’t that seem crazy to you? In a storm?”

“Can we not talk about this right now?”

“Sorry,” she said.

“You know, they’re fake guns. They shoot paint.”

Helen paused before saying, “But you were scared enough to run off the edge of the quarry. And that other guy had probably been scared, too.”

“I wasn’t scared,” he said. “I was just trying to avoid getting shot.”

“Doesn’t it sound crazy to you? When you say something like that?” she asked. She and Bennie were still looking at the TV. “It’s a game.”

“Pretending to hunt people?”

“Exactly.”

She squinted.

“It’s not like we’re hunting each other. It’s like—we’re soldiers.” As soon as he said this, he knew it was the wrong approach.