Black Duck

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  Downstairs, a door slammed. I heard rapid steps leaving the house and looked out in time to see my father getting into the store truck parked in the yard. He often borrowed it for transportation. That evening he was taking it back. There was the whir of the starter, and the distinctive cough of the engine. The headlights came on, bright as twin suns in the dark. The night was moonless again, and perfectly clear. It was just as it had been two nights before, when the only illumination had come from a dusty froth of stars high overhead.

  Back at my desk, I stowed the pipe and pouch in a drawer and sat staring out into space. A picture of shadowy forms moving silently up a beach came into my mind.

  Tyler’s Lane.

  I’d been there, of course, despite what I’d let Jeddy think. I hadn’t planned to be, never would have been under ordinary circumstances. My mother liked to keep me home at night, as much for companionship as anything. My dad so often worked late at the store. Aunt Grace had a social life of her own. I was the only child at home. My older brother had moved away to take a job in Providence. My sister had married young and gone to live in Vermont. It’s the lot of the youngest to be clung to and fussed over. Except that night, I got lucky. Old Mrs. LeWitt went on the rampage for her medicine.

  BLACK DUCK

  “FOR GOD’S SAKE, CAN’T SHE WAIT UNTIL morning?” I heard my father bellow in the front hall. It was past ten o’clock. My parents had already gone to bed. He was downstairs in his pajamas. Dr. Washburn was at the door.

  She couldn’t wait, the doctor said. She’d sent word by his office. Her nerves would fray to pieces if she didn’t get her tonic.

  “Hell’s bells!” my father shouted. Mrs. LeWitt lived far out on the Point. Her prescription had come in late to Riley’s store from Providence that afternoon. Dad had brought it home with him and forgotten all about it.

  “Carl!” My mother hushed him over the hall rail upstairs.

  “Somebody must go tonight,” Dr. Washburn insisted. “I’d take it myself, but Mrs. Clancy’s come into labor. I’m late there already. Just stopped here on my way.”

  I was hanging out the door of my room, ready with a solution I thought my mother would never agree to, when:

  “Send Ruben,” I heard her tell my father. “He’s wide awake. He can ride his bicycle down there and be back in no time. It’s a beautiful night. He’ll come to no harm.”

  “Ruben!” my father yelled up in desperation. “Would you mind making a trip to the Point at this hour?”

  I was out in a flash looking over the rail. I said I wouldn’t mind. No, I wouldn’t mind at all.

  It was the sort of spring night that makes you want to leap like a wild animal. Outside, barreling down the Point road through the crisp salt air, a furious energy rose in my bones. I wanted to ride on forever. I’d been cooped up for years, or so it seemed, following directions and doing what was right, living up to expectations that were somebody else’s. You can only take orders for so long, I decided, then you’ve got to break free and make your own rules.

  The more I thought about this, and about where I was headed at present in life, which was working for my father at the store until the end of time, the faster I pedaled. I was in a state of high mutiny by the time I got out to Mrs. LeWitt’s. It took an act of pure will to put on a delivery boy’s polite smile as I came up on her cabin.

  I needn’t have bothered.

  Mrs. LeWitt, in a terrifying flannel nightdress and hair net, was in a far worse mood.

  “Well, it’s about time!” she shrieked. “Thought you’d never get here!” She snatched the package out of my hand and shut the door so fast she nearly took off my nose.

  I laughed bleakly at myself and set off for home, going slower. The bulb in my bicycle lamp had burned out. I pedaled nearly blind at first. Then my eyes began to adjust. Pale fields floated toward me out of the blackness. Stone walls hulked and spun past. Stealthy, scuttling creatures crossed in front of me, shadows come and gone. About midway home, I glanced toward the bay rising to view on my left and there, with my new night vision, caught sight of something I might otherwise have missed.

  Tiny lights were winking out on the water. Red, then white. Red, white.

  I knew what they were. A boat was on its way up the east passage, sending out a code. After a bit, the lights went dark and I couldn’t see anything.

  I coasted to a halt to listen. A chorus of spring peepers rose from a nearby marsh. Then, as the wind shifted a bit, I heard clearly, coming up over the fields, the dull, repetitive thud-thud-thud of powerful engines driving through water. The boat’s lights flashed on again. It was signaling its position every minute or so. I couldn’t see, but suspected that someone on land was signaling back. In those days, houses on shore were few and far between and there was little to give direction to a boat traveling without lights under cover of dark.

  I watched until I was sure where the craft was going to put in, then leapt on my bike. A few minutes later, I turned down Tyler’s Lane, pedaling for all I was worth. Jeddy and I often came down this road to fish, or in our endless quest for lost pots. There was a rumor about town that the rocky beach at the end was a favored drop for smugglers. The Coast Guard must have heard this, too, because it wasn’t unusual to see a patrol boat bobbing offshore during the day, binoculars trained on the decrepit wooden dock that ran out from the beach. Now, on this perfect moonless night, I hoped the rumors were true. I wanted more than anything to see a bootleg landing close up.

  I was riding down the middle of the road, where it was less chewed up, when headlights flashed in back of me. The sound of shifting gears sent me over to one side and, seconds later, a car bore down. I swerved and rode full speed into a field of tall grass, flung myself off the bike and lay still. The outline of a huge Packard raced past, going headlong for the beach. I stayed low, breathing hard, and a good thing, too, because after a minute another machine went by, a fancy touring car of some kind, followed closely by what looked like a Pierce-Arrow. I raised up for a second look and saw the big, arrogant taillights flash red. All three vehicles were out-of-towners. No one I knew owned wheels of this caliber. Peering over the grass, I saw other lights down on the beach.

  The time had come to ditch my bicycle. I wheeled it to the field’s edge, laid it down in some weeds and began to walk toward the water, using a low hedge along the road for cover. The closer I went, the more I could see that those three cars weren’t by any means the all of it. The beach was boiling with activity. There must have been twelve or fifteen cars parked here and there, as well as trucks, a couple of delivery vehicles, even a horse van. On the beach itself, shadowy forms of men milled around in light cast by a row of headlights. They were the shore crew, silent for the most part, looking often out to sea.

  Soon, the sound of a boat’s engines could be heard and the wallowing form of a craft appeared out of the dark, slowly approaching the shore. I dropped to my knees and crawled up behind a pile of rocks at the far edge of the beach. What I saw next nearly stopped my heart.

  Mr. Riley, owner of Riley’s General Store, was standing not twenty yards away, staring intently at the incoming boat. He wore a fisherman’s cap pulled low over his eyes instead of the snappy fedora he sported on visits to the store. But his double-chinned profile showed up clear in the glare of headlights. Though he was short, far shorter than my father, his meaty chest gave him the hunched look of a bulldog. More than once I’d had the impression that my father played a careful hand around the guy.

  A shout came from one of the men onshore. Mr. Riley walked down to the water’s edge. He was wearing city shoes and stood fastidiously out of range of the waves. The speedboat, painted an anonymous gray, sat low in the water, obviously carrying a load. It approached the dock at a fair clip, waiting until the last moment before turning and killing its engines. The craft drifted neatly wharfside and lines were tossed toward the old dock’s pilings. An eager crew of men rushed out along the dock’s length. With the hull pulled snug, un
loading began.

  Wooden cases from the boat’s hold were lifted and passed along a chain of human hands down the dock and up the beach to the back of a waiting vehicle. The work went swiftly and largely without sound, except for grunts and occasional bursts of laughter when a heavy crate slipped or caused someone to lose his footing. Through the gloom, I picked out some men I knew from town. Henry Crocker, a local farmer, was there, along with Reg Blankenship, who raised hogs up the river. There was Horace White, a mechanic in the gas station at Four Corners, and Tony Rabera, a handyman and gardener for summer folk who needed upkeep on their vacation houses.

  In all, some twenty men labored to bring the cases up the shore. As each vehicle was filled, it drove off into the night and another truck or van or a fancy roadster backed up to the feed line. Like a silent film, the action played in front of me: the frantic movement of the shore crew, the flicker of headlights coming and going.

  The hour when my mother would have expected me home had now come and gone. I knew I should leave, but I could not. A quarter hour went by, then another. Finally, with more than half a hold of cargo still on board, an ocean swell came in that caused the gray-hulled boat to roll and crash against the dock. Work halted while boat lines were untied and cast off. With a roar of engines, the skipper began the process of moving the speedster around to the other side of the dock, where it could be in the lee and more protected from the surge.

  All this took time, and at last I saw no way but that I must go. I crawled backward from my rock hiding place until I came to the edge of a field and could slide into its bushy shadow.

  From there, I felt safe enough to gaze back once more at the activity on the water. The rumrunner craft was in the process of approaching the dock again. The wheelman was a young man, dark and dashing as a pirate, it seemed to me. He revved the powerful engines, idled them and, with an expert hand, allowed the boat to drift into position. As it swung around into the dazzle of headlights, I caught sight for the first time of the ship’s name, painted along the starboard bow.

  Black Duck.

  A second later, the boat swung away. The dark captain brought the bow into the wind, revved up once more and cut his engines. Across the suddenly peaceful water I heard him give out a full-throated laugh of satisfaction. Then the chain of men on the dock began to reform for another round of unloading. With all eyes turned toward the water, I chose this moment to sneak away up the dark lane.

  THE SECRET

  MY MOTHER WAS AT THE DOOR WHEN I CAME in, but I was ready for her. I told her my bicycle lamp had burned out, that I’d been forced to walk a good part of the way home. Somehow, she believed me and I escaped to my room, where I lay awake, in a haze of disbelief. The Black Duck. At Tyler’s dock!

  She was half phantom, known all over Narragansett Bay for her daring runs and yet rarely glimpsed by ordinary folk. Her skipper was too smart and her crew too skilled. She’d eluded the Coast Guard and the Feds for years, and made a laughingstock of local police who tried to track her movements.

  Cornered against some dark beach, the Duck gunned her big engines and roared to freedom, leaving pursuers to wallow in her wake. If, by some fluke, she was caught carrying goods and ordered to halt for inspection, a dense cloud of engine smoke would erupt from her exhaust pipes and she’d speed away behind it into one of the hundreds of coastal inlets known to the crew.

  They were local men from local families with a need to make ends meet during hard times, different altogether from the big-city syndicates that were beginning to bully their way into the business at that time. Many folks quietly cheered them on around their supper tables, proud that one of their own could outsmart both the government and the gangsters. At Riley’s store, I’d listened in on more than a few back-aisle conversations.

  “Heard the Duck was up to Fogland last night, making a drop,” I’d hear a fisherman say, shaking his head in what should have been disapproval but sounded more like supressed glee.

  “That so?” a friend would reply, and several other men would suddenly materialize and gather round to hear the story.

  “Yup. The Coast Guard picked up a tip that she was bringing in a load of hot Canadian whiskey from an outside rig. They’d staked out three cutters up there waiting for her, and guess what?”

  “She got away!”

  “She did. Dumped her goods in the bay and got clean away. Led ’em on a wild-goose chase up the east passage.”

  “Oh, Lord, I wish I’d seen it.”

  “You could’a heard it if you was up there onshore. The C.G. had a spotlight on her and was firing across her stern. They ordered her to stop, but it didn’t do no good. She turned on the juice and disappeared.”

  “She does nearly forty, y’know.”

  “I heard she’s got a steel-plated hull.”

  “Her skipper’s out of Westport, somebody said. Making money hand over fist.”

  “He’s out of Harveston, I know it for a fact. And he’s not just in it for himself, they say. He gives from his profits to local families in need.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I heard it was.”

  “Somebody you know?”

  “Me? No. I don’t know who it is.”

  Nobody knew who her skipper was. Or nobody would own up to knowing. And now I’d seen him. I’d watched him at work in all his swagger and bravado. My first thought, tearing home on my bike that night, was that I couldn’t wait to tell Jeddy.

  Only later in my room, thinking back to the men onshore, men I knew and respected and who knew and trusted me, I began to have second thoughts. Jeddy was my friend, but there was so much at stake. Not least, there was my own father, the manager of Riley’s store. I wasn’t sure what Mr. Riley was doing on that beach, but I thought it best for my dad if no one heard his boss was there. Chief McKenzie was breathing fire to put a stop to the Duck. Jeddy might swear he’d never tell him, he might truly believe we could keep a secret between us, but he loved his dad and stood up for him, and I knew how easy it would be to make a slip.

  Newport Daily Journal, December 31, 1929

  BLACK DUCK TRIPLE SLAYING UNAVOIDABLE, OFFICIAL DECLARES

  FAIR WARNING TO HALT WAS GIVEN

  NEWPORT, DEC. 31—The Coast Guard cutter that fired on the Black Duck last Sunday, killing three men, gave a clear signal for the vessel to stop and surrender according to D. W. Hingle, commander of the Newport Coast Guard Station. The patrol boat opened fire with a machine gun after the Black Duck veered and attempted to flee.

  “The loss of life is sad but was unavoidable,” Hingle said in a statement last night. “The laws of the United States must be maintained. The smugglers defied the government officers and took their punishment. They have no one to blame but themselves.”

  The Liberal Civic League has asked for further investigation, and questions of negligent homicide have been raised by state residents who charge the Coast Guard with being “out of control” in their pursuit of smugglers.

  “This was murder, pure and simple,” said Henry Borges, of the League. “The crew was unarmed. Bullet holes are stitched down the side of the pilot house. There is no evidence that any ‘fair warning’ signal was given.”

  The dead are Alfred Biggs and William A. Brady of Harveston, R.I., and Bernardo Rosario of New Bedford, Mass. The sole survivor, Richard Delucca, also of Harveston, is in Newport Hospital, being treated for a gunshot wound to the hand.

  The Interview

  IT’S AMAZING THE COAST GUARD EVER caught up with anybody back then, David Peterson says to Mr. Hart. The smugglers could run circles around them in their souped-up fishing boats. It must’ve been frustrating.

  It was, Mr. Hart agrees.

  They’re in the kitchen for another round, the third day of their interview, which is taking on a life of its own. David didn’t even need to knock when he arrived this morning. Mr. Hart’s door was wide open.

  I read that the Coast Guard was supposed to give fair warning to suspected rum-running
boats before they could shoot, David says. Blow a horn or shoot off a warning gun. They had to catch the crew with smuggled liquor on board or they couldn’t arrest them. I guess that’s why the bootleggers were always dumping stuff overboard.

  Mr. Hart gazes at him thoughtfully, as if he’s taking his measure. You sound like you’ve been doing some research.

  I went to the library after we finished here yesterday. Found another old newspaper article, David says.

  He doesn’t reveal that he’s been reading up on the Black Duck shooting in particular, which he’s begun to realize was a big deal back when it happened. People were outraged. They wanted the Coast Guard investigated for murder. The case never went anywhere, though. Two weeks after the event, the Coast Guard was cleared by a federal grand jury of all wrongdoing.

  None of this can David discuss with Mr. Hart. The ground rules for this interview have been established, though nothing has been stated outright. They are: Don’t Ask and You May Be Told. The old man is especially wary of questions that attempt to connect him personally to the Black Duck.

  Don’t believe everything you read in the papers, he says now. There’s usually a world of difference between what’s reported and what probably went on. Behind every story there’s another story.

  David nods. He’s aware that people often don’t agree with how the news is reported. His father cancelled his subscription to the Providence Journal after reading an editorial about toxic weed-killers that sent him into a rage.

  I’m not paying another cent for this birdbrained newspaper! he’d yelled. Next they’ll be calling for a ban on mousetraps!

  Whatever happened to the Black Duck out there in the fog, the “murk” as Mr. Hart calls it, has been further eclipsed by the passage of time. Most people from that day have died. There’s no way of getting back there for a clear view.