Salvage

by Stephen Maher

  Falkenham’s smile was gone. “All right,” he said. “I just wanted to give you a little advice. Karen asked me to talk to you. She still cares about you, Phillip. You guys have a lot of history together and she’s worried about you. I’m worried about you.”

  Scarnum stared at him.

  “You told her you’ve got some bad people after you,” he said. “At first I thought it was a load of shit, but I still go down to the wharf sometimes, and yesterday I heard that maybe there are some bad cats after you. Heard your boat got shot up. So I told Karen I’d see if there was anything I could do to help.”

  “Like what?” said Scarnum.

  “I know a lot of people, Phillip,” he said. “If you want to get a message to somebody, or arrange a ceasefire, a meeting, I might be able to get a message to people who could get a message to some other people.”

  “To the Mexicans?” asked Scarnum.

  Falkenham smiled and shook his head. “Look, to be honest with you, I don’t give a shit what happens to you, but Karen does, and I care about what she cares about. I hear there’s some bad fucking Mexicans that think you have their fucking cocaine. I think your life is worth more than a bit of cocaine. I think you should give them what they’re looking for and get the fuck out of town for a while.”

  “How would it work?” said Scarnum.

  “Well, you could meet them and give them the stuff, or just tell them where it is. Hell, you could tell me where it is and I could pass the information to them. You’d be in the clear. It’s not personal with them. They just want their fucking cocaine. Then go away for a while. Time you come back, you’ll have a big cheque waiting for you. Could start a business, buy out Charlie. That’s a beautiful spot in there. Could make a top-notch marina with a bit of capital. Tear down those old shacks. I might like to invest in that. We could talk about that down the road.”

  Scarnum looked up and down the street. He furrowed his brow, scratched his head, pursed his lips, and then looked back at Falkenham.

  “Jesus, Bobby, you paint a pretty picture,” he said, leaning in and fixing him with a cold gaze. “Only problem is, I don’t have nobody’s fucking cocaine.”

  Falkenham looked away in disgust. He stared ahead and spoke coldly. “Phillip, Charlie and Annabelle look after you like a son,” he said. “You might not care about your own life, but have you thought about them?”

  He turned back and looked at Scarnum with cold, narrow eyes. “How would you feel if anything happened to them, eh?” he said. “You think these Mexicans are playing? You think they’re going to give up? ‘Oh well. I guess we should forget about our cocaine. Let’s go back to Mexico.’ You think that’s how they operate? Are you that fucking stupid?”

  Scarnum stood stock-still and stared at Falkenham. “Listen to me carefully,” Scarnum said, his voice flat and cold, each word spoken slowly. “If anything happened to Charlie or Annabelle, that would be very bad for you.”

  He stared into Falkenham’s eyes. “Do you understand me, Bobby?” he said. “I need to know you to understand me.”

  Falkenham put the SUV in gear and looked ahead. “Oh well,” he said. “I can tell Karen I tried.”

  Scarnum watched Falkenham drive away, then walked back across the bridge and up the street to St. Joseph’s Catholic church — a white clapboard building with green trim. There was an old lady praying in one pew and nobody else around. He crossed himself, kneeled at a pew, and prayed for ten minutes, hands clasped in front of him. When he was done, he crossed himself and went down to the basement. The door to the priest’s office — at the back of the church — was locked. He took out his pocket knife and jammed it between the doorknob and the jamb. He twisted the knob and the knife, and the cheap lock gave up.

  Scarnum went into the office. He pulled a chair up to the window there and peered out. He tore out the screen, opened the window, threw out his Zellers bag, and crawled out. He looked around, then scrambled up a bracken-covered hill to a white picket fence at the back of the church lot. He climbed it and dropped into the backyard of the house behind the church.

  There was a lady working in her garden there, kneeling, pulling up weeds. She looked up with a start.

  “Oh my goodness, ma’am,” said Scarnum. “I’m just taking a shortcut. Sorry to startle you.”

  Before she could say anything, he was down the driveway and out in the street.

  He stayed on the back streets, walking toward the highway, looking carefully at the few cars that drove by. At Victoria Street he ducked into a country inn and sat in the corner of the quiet dining room — all frilly drapes and old-fashioned wallpaper — and ordered a cup of tea. After the waitress served him, he took out his new cellphone and called Angela.

  “They let you out of the big house?” she asked.

  “They haven’t built the prison yet could hold me,” he said, and they laughed.

  “You keeping a low profile?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “After I heard about your boat getting shot up, I decided to get out of town for a while.”

  “Good,” he said. “Don’t tell me where you’re staying. Don’t tell nobody. Is it all right? You need anything? How are you doing?”

  “Not bad,” she said. “Not bad. Bored. I quit smoking, so I’m bitchy. I miss partying.”

  “Just be glad you’re not still staying with the Zincks,” he said.

  She laughed, and then they were both quiet.

  “Phillip,” she said. “Are you gonna be OK? Are they gonna kill you?”

  “They’re gonna try,” he said. “I’m gonna try to stop them, but they’re professionals. Might be better at this shit than I am.”

  “Why don’t you just give them the fucking cocaine?” she said.

  “Jesus,” said Scarnum. “I don’t have no fucking cocaine. There was no cocaine on the boat. Fuck. If I had it, I’d give it to them. Do you think I’m that stunned?”

  “I think you might be,” said Angela. “Hard to tell how stunned you are.”

  He laughed. “Well, I don’t have no coke. Wish I did so’s I could give it to these fuckers and get a bit of peace.”

  “Fuck,” said Angela. “Be careful. Don’t let them kill you.”

  “I’m gonna try not to,” he said.

  Scarnum called Charlie next.

  “Still on the right side of the bars?” asked Charlie.

  “Yes b’y,” he said. “Look, I want to thank you again for helping me with the lawyer. And warn you that you want to keep a sharp eye out for rats around the boatyard for the next few days. I’m sorry to have to say it, but I’m a bit worried about them.”

  “Well, it’s funny you mention that,” said Charlie, “’cause Bobby Falkenham just left. Wanted to talk to me about the marina.”

  “He offer to buy you out?”

  “No,” said Charlie. “I think he knew better than to do that. Talked about investing in it.” He giggled.

  “I told him we was getting on just fine, but he walked around, told me how much money we could make if we fixed it up different. Get some of them big powerboats from Halifax at finger piers. Said I’d be surprised how much money you can make selling them fellows gas. I told him if I wanted to run a gas station, I suppose I’d buy a gas station.”

  “Have a look around, did he?”

  “Yes,” said Charlie. “Had a real good look around.”

  “He ask about me?”

  “Said Karen was right worried about you. I told him Annabelle is, too.”

  “Give her my love,” said Scarnum.

  “I’ll do that,” said Charlie.

  “And, Charlie, keep a good eye out for rats.”

  After making his calls he ate a bowl of chowder. It was full of fish and lobster and little hard squares of potatoes in a thin fishy broth, and Scarnum liked it so much he ordered another bowl.

  As it was getting dark, he asked the waitress to call him a taxi. He sat hunched low in the back for the drive to Chester and didn’t speak
to the driver. He got out on Highway 3, behind the Back Harbour, and climbed down into the woods.

  He walked along the brook through the woods in the darkness. He stopped near the bridge and took out the wetsuit. It had a neon green logo on the chest. He covered that with electrical tape and then changed into the wetsuit. He tucked his wallet and knife inside a freezer bag. He zipped the freezer bag inside the suit.

  Scarnum watched the boatyard from under the bridge until 2:00 a.m. Then he put his cigarettes, lighter, and cellphone in a freezer bag and tucked it into his wetsuit.

  The sky was cloudy and dark and the wind was blowing hard up the bay, sending low, fast waves to break against the stones along the shore.

  Scarnum was already chilled when he crept from under the bridge and lowered himself into the icy water. He swam along the edge of the water, trying to stay in the shadow of the land, until he came to the wharf in front of Isenor’s. He waded out along the end of the wharf and then pulled himself along beside it until he got to the floating dock. He tried to be very quiet. From the water, he reached up and untied the canoe from the dock. He looked inside and checked that the paddles were still there. Then he swam around so his head was on the water side of the canoe. He stretched his left arm under it and grabbed hold of its little keel. Then he swam down the bay, keeping the canoe in the shadow of the wharf, then in the shadow of the land. When he was a hundred yards down the bay, he pulled the canoe out of the water under the shadow of a big elm. He climbed in and started paddling down the bay. He used the Indian stroke.

  Out in Chester Basin, the wind picked up and it drove choppy little waves to splash against the bow of the canoe. The wind tried to pull the bow around, so Scarnum had to paddle hard, with short, hard, sharp strokes, to keep the canoe facing the wind. It took him more than an hour of hard paddling to get out to the end of the peninsula to Twin Oaks.

  Several times, waves splashed in over the bow and Scarnum was afraid the boat would be swamped and he’d have to try to swim ashore. The wind was very cold, and he shivered in the damp wetsuit.

  “I’s the b’y that builds the boat,” he sang through clenched teeth. “And I’s the b’y that sails her.”

  He pulled the canoe up on the lawn of the house next to Twin Oaks and slid it under a tree. He crouched for a while, watching the long lawn between Falkenham’s house and the wharf, but nobody was moving. He slipped into the water and swam to the wharf.

  He pulled himself up onto the floating dock at the base of the big wharf and then climbed the wooden ladder up to the wharf. He peeked over the edge and looked up at Karen’s fish shed at the end of the wharf, over the water. The silvery, weathered spruce shingles glistened faintly in the light from a lamp on the wharf. The windows were dark.

  He climbed back down the wooden ladder, pulled his pocket knife out of his wetsuit, and slowly, quietly, set to work on the nails that held it to the wharf. After five minutes of work, he was able to wrench the ladder free. He eased it down onto the floating dock and then slipped into the water, under the wharf. He pulled the ladder behind him.

  It took him a while to figure out how he was going to get the ladder to stand upright underneath Karen’s studio, but eventually he was able to wedge it on a stone footing and lean it against one of the wharf’s thick poles. It was slimy with seaweed, and he tore the palm of his hand on the barnacles as he put the ladder in place.

  Then he climbed it, very carefully, until his head was touching the hatch in the floor of Karen’s studio. Slowly, he pushed up on it with his head, and the hatch opened. He peeked into the room. Someone was in the bed, but from his angle, he couldn’t see whether it was one person or two. He could hear Karen snoring faintly.

  He pushed his arms up through the hatch and, trying to be very quiet, pulled himself up, wriggling, until he was bent at the waist with his legs hanging in the air below the wharf and the hatch cover resting on his back. He stretched his arms out and pressed the palms of his hands flat on the weathered old floorboards and pulled himself forward. When his legs were up, he turned, still on his belly, and quietly closed the hatch.

  He stood and saw with relief that Karen was alone in the bed. Only the top of her head was visible above the duvet.

  He took off his ski mask and stood and listened to her breathing for a moment before he called her name.

  She sat up with a start, switched on the bedside lamp, and gaped at him. She was wearing a loose white T-shirt.

  “Phillip?” she said. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “Shh,” he said “It’s me. I just need to talk to you for a few minutes then I’ll leave.”

  She looked around. “How the fuck did you get in here?”

  “I came in through the hatch in the floor,” he said. “I needed to talk to you and I don’t know what kind of security you have. I didn’t want to knock in case Bobby was in here with you.”

  “Bobby’s not here,” she said. “I don’t know where he is. You could have knocked.”

  She threw off the covers and got out of bed and looked out the window up at the house. Scarnum looked at her long, pale legs.

  “Jesus, for that matter, you could have just called. Crazy motherfucker.”

  They both laughed then.

  “Well, I didn’t know.”

  “You scared the fucking shit out of me,” said Karen. “Jesus.” She still looked dazed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I find myself in a bit of a tight spot and I needed to talk to you. If you want me to go, I will.”

  “What are you gonna do?” she said. “Call up the Batcopter and get it to pick you up? Jesus H. Christ. What are you wearing?”

  “A wetsuit,” he said. “I paddled over in a canoe — Bobby’s canoe, as a matter of fact. I’m trying to avoid some Mexican chaps who wish me ill. I shouldn’t like to run into them just now.”

  “I know,” she said. “I saw them here. Tuesday night.”

  She walked across the room and picked up a bottle of Laphroaig. “Want some of Bobby’s whisky?” she asked.

  “Jesus, do I ever,” he said. “I’m fucking chilled to the bone.”

  She rinsed some glasses. “That water must be as cold as a witch’s tit,” she said.

  “Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey,” he said.

  “As cold as a whore’s heart,” she said.

  “As cold as charity,” he said, and they both smiled at their old routine.

  “See if the fire’s still burning,” she said. “Stoke it up and we’ll have a little chat.”

  Scarnum stirred the embers and added some kindling and a couple of hardwood splits. He crouched in front of the open wood stove, warming his hands and shivering.

  Karen came over with the whisky. She put the bottle and two glasses down on the coffee table and went over and pulled a heavy wool blanket off the foot of her bed.

  “Here,” she said. “Take off your wet, uh, wetsuit, and wrap yourself in this.”

  She sat on the rug in front of the wood stove and watched him peel off his wetsuit, with some effort, until he stood naked in the firelight.

  She sat cross-legged, and he could see that she wasn’t wearing panties. He looked down at her and felt the heat from the fire on his naked flesh. He started to harden. “Jesus, Karen,” he said.

  He reached out, his hand shaking, and took a lock of her hair in his hand.

  She reached out and stroked his thigh with her fingertips. Then she took his penis in her hand.

  “Oh Jesus,” he said, and he ran his fingers through her hair. “How I’ve missed you.”

  “I know,” she said. “I know.”

  And she stood up and wrapped her arms around his neck. He buried his face in her hair and held her tight and they both cried.

  Then they made love on the rug in front of the fire, first with him on top of her, moving very slowly inside her, then with her on top of him, until she came, grinding down on him, the fire lighting up her pale, naked body and her gol
den-red hair. Then they moved to the bed and he took her from behind, gripping her hips and pounding at her fiercely, both of them panting, sweating, and red-faced, until he came with a violent shudder.

  He pulled her to him then, and smooshed her face into his chest.

  “I never stopped loving you,” he whispered in her ear. “It’s a bit fucking pathetic, actually.”

  She held him tightly.

  “So, me and Bobby were having a drink in the big living room, up at the house, on Tuesday night,” she said. “We watched a movie on TV — Captains Courageous, actually — after he came back from the yacht club.”

  She looked at Scarnum. “You ever see it?” she asked. “Captains Courageous?”

  “No,” he said.

  “It’s really good,” she said. “Black and white. About this spoiled rich kid who falls off the deck of a steamship and gets rescued by Spencer Tracy, who’s the captain of a Grand Banks schooner.”

  “I read it,” said Scarnum “Kipling. One of my father’s favourite books.”

  She mimicked an upper-class English accent. “Oh, I read it, actually,” she said. “Kipling. Didn’t realize it had been filmed.”

  He tickled her then and she giggled and kicked at him. They were wrapped in blankets in front of the fire, with whisky and cigarettes.

  “So, it was right at the end, when the kid gets back to his family, and he’s a changed man and all that, when there’s a bang on the door. Bobby gets up to see who it is, and who is it but Villa and Zapata.

  “Bobby’s like, ‘Gentlemen, I’m busy right now. Why don’t we talk business tomorrow?’ And then he, like, looks at them and stops himself.

  “They’re both wet, and they look, uh, I’d say very, very unhappy.” She laughed.

  “The big one, with the scar on his cheek, has a very angry face. And he’s holding his neck, where there’s this wicked-looking fresh scar, like he had been hung.”

  “Hanged,” said Scarnum.

  “What?” said Karen.

  “Hanged,” he said. “When you hang someone, like by the neck until dead, they are hanged, not hung. Look it up in the dictionary.”