Hatteras Light

by Philip Gerard

  Brian laid the rifle in the rack, where it usually hung.

  “Come on.”

  Now Max was in the pilothouse, too. “What goes on here?”

  “Nothing, nothing. My boy is afraid of you, that’s all.”

  Max noticed the rifle. He looked at the fisherman.

  “For sharks,” he said. “We hardly ever use it.”

  Max hesitated. Should he confiscate it? He decided he wasn’t a thief. “We’re not going to hurt you, boy,” the interpreter said. Alvin and Brian followed him down.

  The Germans were tense. They expected trouble. Alvin smiled but not too broadly. He moved their way directly, but not too fast. “He was frightened of you,” he said.

  Max had been among warriors for so long that he hardly remembered a time when he too might have been scared out of his wits at sight of foreign uniforms and oil-smelling guns gripped in expert, nervous fingers.

  “Who would not be frightened,” the officer said. “But we did not come to frighten you.” He was growing impatient, Max could tell. Like most mariners, he felt in jeopardy every moment he was off his own vessel. An attack on the U-boat now would strand him and his boarding party in enemy waters in an act of apparent piracy, exposed to capture and worse. He fidgeted and tried to get Max to hurry up.

  Max took his time. He liked the feeling of being on this boat, and he did not think beyond the present. Enlisted men have no business with the future.

  “We would like to trade with you. We need some things.”

  “Is that so.”

  “Yes.”

  In the end, Alvin gave up half of his coffee and most of his sugar, as well as half a dozen fresh eggs, some oranges, and an ounce of tobacco as a personal gift to the U-boat commander, who Max said used a pipe. Max had done well. They paid in American dollars, and they paid well. They could never spend them any-where else, and they had plenty.

  “Where did you get this?” Alvin asked Max, fingering the bills. They weren’t crisp but greasy with use. “It’s not queer, is it?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know, queer, phony, bogus—counterfeit.”

  Max laughed, and the other two sailors relaxed and laughed with him. For the first time, they let their gun barrels lower.

  “No it’s not ‘queer’ at all. It’s the true McCoy—isn’t that how you say it?” Max was doing fine. He was really quite pleased with himself.

  “Yes, that’s how we say it.” Alvin pocketed the wad of bills.

  “You’re having engine trouble, I take it?”

  “Cracked the head. We can’t fix it, if that’s what you mean.”

  Max said something in German, and one of the sailors slung his weapon and went aft to look at the engine. He was gone only a few minutes, and reported to the officer, who passed it along unnecessarily to Max.

  “He says he can’t fix it, either. You need a salvage part.”

  “That’s the way I see it,” Alvin agreed.

  “Under other circumstances, we would tow you in, but …”

  “I understand.”

  Max turned and discussed something with the impatient officer. Then he turned back to Alvin. “He says you can come aboard with us and take your chances. If the opportunity arises, we can come inshore and let you swim for it. That is the best we can offer.”

  Alvin shook his head. “Thanks, but we don’t swim.”

  Max put out his hand and Alvin took it.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Max Wien.”

  “MacSween? That’s a funny name for a German.”

  Max didn’t bother to correct him.

  “Well, good-bye, Mister MacSween. Perhaps we’ll not meet again.”

  Max suddenly felt guilty standing toe to toe with this man. He dropped the other’s hand abruptly and clambered into the rubber boat, feeling his cheeks flush hot. What he would have given to have an hour of talk on that sweet deck, breathing fresh air and listening to water slap against wood, not metal. They pushed off and drew quickly away from the Pelican.

  Alvin watched them go and heard the crack of the rifle before they had covered half the distance. Their officer leaned forward in his seat, shot through the back of the head.

  Alvin grabbed the rifle before Brian could throw in the bolt again. He shoved the boy to the far corner of the pilothouse and scrambled to get the glasses. He could see the dead man being hauled aboard by his mates. He could see MacSween waving his fist and glaring. He expected the impact of a shell.

  5

  BERGEN GOT off one shot before the plane came, a hurried shot that whistled by the Pelican’s mast and dashed up a geyser some twenty yards beyond her. As he was adjusting the range and his loader chambered another round, the lookout raised the alarm and the order was to limber guns and prepare to dive.

  Max Wien helped lower the dead Marina Artzt, Ernst, down the hatch. Captain Stracken watched, disbelieving. Ernst, their medical officer, was unrecognizable except for the insignia on his sleeve.

  Max had no time for reflection as he hustled down the ladder onto the cramped periscope bridge, the alarm going off all around him, men rushing to the forward part of the boat. But a sense of betrayal choked him. He had left the rifle, had counted on honor, and he should have known better. He thought of Ernst’s head bursting, and the sound of the hatch banging shut overhead signaled doom for him. It clamped the lid on whatever hope he may have had, slamming like a cell door at his back. He bit his lip and charged forward with the rest of them, piled in the sweat and filth, remembered the tang of salt in his nostrils, and waited for the depth bombs to come.

  When he put his face in his hands, it came away sticky with blood.

  6

  THE AEROPLANE THE LOOKOUT SAW was a mail plane from Beaufort that had strayed off course. It was not a sub spotter and it carried no bombs.

  But in Captain Stracken’s experience, an aeroplane often worked in concert with a destroyer, finding the prey, then signaling its position. He wondered if that American speedster was in the area. That one he could outgun. But their luck had been too good for too long, and he fully expected a destroyer to be hunting him before the hour was up.

  They would wait. That fisherman had no motor, one of the sailors had said so. She would be there when they came up for air tonight, and they would cut her to pieces to give Bergen target practice.

  Captain Stracken had some trouble seeing into the periscope, his eyes were so bright with anger and grief.

  7

  WHEN THE SHOT WENT over their heads and he saw the gunners covering their guns for sea, Alvin ran out on deck, shrugging off Brian. He spotted the aeroplane immediately and waved to the pilot with both hands over his head. He stripped off his red shirt and waved that, too, but he didn’t think the pilot even noticed him.

  8

  “DID YOU KNOW the emperor Napoleon hired Robert Fulton to build him a submarine? He was tired of the British fleet keeping him all bottled up.” Keith was dealing cards. They were playing war, he and Mary. Later she had to go down to the village, and she thought perhaps Keith and Dorothy would want to come along, it was such a lovely day.

  “Where do you learn these things? Are you sure it was Napoleon?” She had her hair pinned up, brushed and clean. But Keith had made up his mind to stop noticing her.

  “He never had submarines, that’s the point.” Keith’s hands moved, and the cards accumulated almost magically in two piles in front of them. “He challenged Fulton to blow up an old schooner in the harbor at Marseilles by using a submarine.” Keith had seen illustrations in a naval history text he had borrowed from Professor Rusonovsky, a retired old Prussian soldier. There was a sketch of Fulton’s cronies screwing a gimlet attached to a mine into the ship’s hull, all from the safety of their submarine chamber.

  They were playing out their cards now, Mary winning. She beat two queens in a row with kings. “Didn’t it work?” she asked.

  “It worked fine, that was the problem. Blew it sky-high,
right under their noses. They threw him out of France.”

  “I thought you said it worked.”

  He took two hands with a five and a seven to her three and four. “He scared the daylights out of them. They hadn’t realized, you see. No one ever realizes. It would revolutionize warfare, and they weren’t ready to take responsibility for it. Not even Napoleon.”

  Professor Rusonovsky’s lectures had turned more and more into diatribes against the war. At first Keith had been in awe of the bewhiskered old warrior strutting back and forth on the dais, punctuating his pronouncements with red fists sunburned on the battlefields of three continents. “The Germans did not want unlimited submarine warfare,” he would shout. “They were driven to it by historical necessity. Doesn’t that tell you where all this is going to lead?” Keith managed a fair impersonation of the professor for Mary.

  “Necessity? God,” she said.

  In his own voice, Keith said: “Seriously. Their fleet is all sunk or blockaded in harbor by now. What else can they do?” He explained the rest to her: how Fulton went to the British after the Peace of Amiens and how they turned him down flat, reasoning that as soon as one nation had the damned thing every nation would have to have one, and that would spell the end of British maritime dominance. “Fulton had no politics except the politics of progress, so he said.”

  “So do they all say.”

  He went on about how Fulton went to the Americans, who discouraged him so much that he gave up and designed a steamboat. But the Germans had already got hold of the idea, and one of their officers, Bauer, built his own boat. By 1914 every major power, even the backward Russians, had a fleet of submarines. Naval battles would never again be fought among only warships.

  “That’s awful.”

  “That’s what’s happening now.”

  “It can’t be turned back?”

  “Napoleon’s Ministry of Marine tried. It was inevitable, I guess. Things won’t be the same after this war, I promise you.”

  “But merchant ships, innocent fishermen—”

  “Our merchant marine is killing Germans in Flanders, from the German point of view. It’s all a matter of how far you’re willing to go.”

  “But no one is safe, anywhere.”

  “No. And wait till we see aerial bombardment.” The game was over. Mary had swept it all in the last dozen hands.

  “I’ve read about the blimps dropping bombs over London,” she said.

  “That’s nothing.” Keith collected the cards and tapped the deck on the tabletop. “They’ll build aeroplanes big enough to carry tons of bombs, whole fleets of them. It’ll come like rain, firestorm from the clouds. Mark my words.” He had lifted that line from Rusonovsky, whose students had finally deserted him in the patriotic fervor that swept campus. He was mocked as a seditionist, and even Keith had grown weary of the old man’s sermonizing, though now Keith found main truth in the Prussian’s words.

  “I don’t believe it,” Mary said.

  “Oh, it’s true. The old rules don’t apply anymore.”

  She whispered: “But they have to.”

  9

  AFTER KEITH CRANKED, he and Mary climbed into the Winton Flyer and fixed their goggles and settled the skirts of their linen dusters. Keith had one of the few motorcars on the island and was proud of it, even if it had flat springs, unmatched tires, and uneven paint. He had bought it at auction with most of his savings. It was no racer, but on the flat, hard road that lined the island like a spine it could do better than twenty miles an hour, faster on the beach with a following wind.

  “Can we bring Rufus?” Dorothy called. She stood on the porch with a man’s cotton work shirt tied by its tails around her midriff.

  “I don’t care,” he said. “Whatever you want.”

  Rufus bounded out of the house all feet and fur and took his position in the backseat, beside Dorothy. Keith offered her a pair of goggles, but she declined. “All set, Captain—take off.”

  They rode toward the inlet. Dorothy leaned up between them and said, above the noise of the motor, “Nobody has reported any sign of my father’s boat.”

  Keith let it go. Mary looked uncertainly at him, then turned to Dorothy. “Look, I know how you must feel. And I don’t want to get your hopes up, but I have a feeling they’re coming back. That’s all, just a feeling.” She had harbored no such hope about her own father Dennis Dant’s return.

  Keith wondered if Mary were lying to keep Dorothy’s spirits up. The island women had taken turns visiting Dorothy until yesterday, when she’d made it clear she didn’t want company: It had too much the quality of a wake.

  “They were all trying to make me feel good,” she said.

  “Virginia, Mrs. Patchett, even Mrs. Littlejohn. They were all trying so hard, but I feel bad. Can’t I just feel bad?” Dorothy was on the verge of tears again.

  Mary reached an arm back to console her. “They’ll come back, Dot. They will. They have to.”

  “Ginny has Jack, and you have Malcolm. But who do I have? Who?”

  Mary looked at Keith but did not say his name. She was contused about this. Rufus insinuated his big dark head under Dorothy’s arm and she hugged him hard and scratched behind his ears. His big brown eyes rolled with pleasure. Dorothy’s eyes were closed.

  10

  KEITH ROLLED the Winton Flyer down a concrete slab of wharf next to Oman’s Dock. Mary wanted to order some fresh fish sent up later. She had in mind a special meal for the crew.

  “You could have done that on the telephone,” Keith said.

  “And done what all the rest of the day? I like to watch the boats come and go.”

  Dorothy had composed herself. She would remain in limbo until someone would finally arrive with the truth, absolute and unalterable, and when that moment came, she knew, she would be relieved. In the meantime, there was Tim Halstead. After he’d left her early this morning, she had felt utterly abandoned, and she didn’t want that feeling ever again. She hadn’t felt guilty, but confused and in a kind of jeopardy she recognized but could not name.

  “Isn’t this Patchy’s slip?” Mary said. “I thought he had a boat down here.”

  “And so he did,” Oman said. “He’s an odd duck, that one. Worked like a nigger the last couple of days and then slipped his cable before sunup. Beat the other boats out. Damnedest thing.”

  Mary ordered blues and soft-shelled crabs. When the boats came in this afternoon, Oman would send her a parcel of the best.

  “How’s the man-mountain keeping in all this excitement, Mary?”

  “They’re going out so much, you know.”

  “I’ve heard. It’s time we put a stop to that pirate, if you ask me.” Oman turned to Dorothy. “Anything I can do for you today, Dot?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then I guess you’ll have a cup of tea with me, seeing we’re not working. I’m keeping pretty shabby company these days. I could use the conversation.”

  They followed him inside the corrugated tin shed that contained his office and the tables for cleaning fish. Oman’s boy Ricky was hosing the place, then sweeping the water out the open side facing the dock. The office was just an old desk and a filing cabinet set back in the far corner of the shed. Oman pulled up some crates for his guests to sit on, and over tea told them that some of the Cape men had been in touch with some of the village men and together they were planning a meeting.

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow, I think.”

  “Littlejohn’s?” Keith said.

  Oman shook his head and scratched it. “Too many folks for that closet. It’ll have to be at the church.”

  There was only one church of any size, the Presbyterian church just south of Buxton at a site the U.S. Post Office inexplicably called Frisco, but which none of the islanders called by any name at all. The place was just the church and a few houses, anyway.

  Mary said, “I don’t see what we can do.”

  Dorothy sipped her tea.

 
Oman fiddled with his yellowed meerschaum. “I don’t go in much for politics myself,” he explained. “You want politics, talk to Littlejohn. Ask Littlejohn about politics.”

  “How’s that?” Keith asked.

  “Never mind. How’s your brothers getting along? How’s that cranky old man of yours? Haven’t seen him around.”

  “You’ll see him coming, all right. He’s toting a rifle, waiting for the invasion.”

  “Ah, the courage of the armed man.”

  Keith talked about his family while Dorothy sipped her tea. Oman puffed his pipe, and Mary watched the colors change at the windows. Watching the light, she felt she might soon arrange a palette, stretch a canvas, and paint again. She would start tomorrow.

  Dorothy said, “Where did Peter Patchett go, Mister Oman?

  “Go?” He laughed. “Well, I don’t suppose he went anywhere,” he said between leisurely puffs. “That is to say, he didn’t tell me. But he’s always trafficked on the Sound, he never goes out onto the big water.”

  Dorothy nodded. She was on the verge of a thought, but it slipped away like an eel in dark water.

  11

  ALL ALONE WAS Patch Patchett.

  Ahead was a vision of open water, and he headed for it, skipper of a well-found boat. He’d studied the charts, but how they translated into a green sea he didn’t know. Still he would try.

  He knew the rest of it all had somehow gone too far. Men were forgetting themselves, as he had the first day on the beach when all that mattered was getting out of the way of exploding sand dunes. Now he had collected himself, despite a wife who did her best to confound him and two kids who defied his best parenting, which he knew had never been any too good.

  But men all around him were getting caught up. The U-boat was their problem. Alvin Dant and Brian would be his problem. Patchy smiled. The others would be surprised. “Patchy?” they would say—“not Patchy!”

  His father had pulled an oar with the Chicamacomico crew up north. There had been a storm and a wreck on the shoals and Patchy’s father, though bony and loose-limbed, was Captain Dailey’s No. 1 just as Jack Royal was Malcolm’s No. 1 and should have been with his crew. But there he had stood by his wife’s deathbed, dripping water off his sou’wester onto the floor. His wife, Patchy’s mother, had said, “What are you doing here?” And there had been no answer, only a look of shame in his father’s eyes. So Patchy’s father had never gone back to the station but got a job first at a shipyard in Norfolk and then dragged four-year-old Patchy north with him from port to port to grow up on the sawdusted floors of rough taverns and learn variety in swearing and fornication by the time he was fourteen.