Black Duck

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  That night seemed to last forever.

  I heard my dad get up, go in the bathroom and head back to bed. I heard a couple of doves outside my window fluttering their wings and cooing under the eaves where they’d built a nest. Around about 4:00 A.M. the cocks on a farm down near the river began to crow, and still I wasn’t asleep. My eyes were wide open. I was out there looking through the McKenzies’ window, into that kitchen where I’d eaten so many meals. Jeddy was upstairs asleep in his room, his baseball cap hung on the back of the door. Marina was across the hall in her own bed, dreaming whatever mysterious things girls dream. There were probably ten perfectly legal reasons why Police Chief Ralph McKenzie would be up late counting out stacks of money at his supper table. I just couldn’t right then think of what they might be.

  HOME IMPROVEMENTS

  A WEEK LATER, SCHOOL CLOSED AND THE summer began. The days grew hot, the beaches filled up with rich city folk who had summer houses along the coast.

  I began working full-time at the store. Jeddy kept on at Fancher’s chicken farm, though I know for a fact he was only part-time because I’d watch him go into the police station across from Weedie’s some mornings. He was starting a sort of unofficial apprenticeship, following in his father’s footsteps just as he’d told me he planned to. Some mornings I’d hang around outside Riley’s to catch his eye as he walked by.

  “Hi, Jeddy,” I’d say.

  “How’s it going?” he’d ask me back. That was it. If I tried for anything more, he’d pick up his pace and scoot away. I didn’t push it. I remembered what Marina said about him having to work things out. It seemed sad to me that he’d be protecting the honor of his dad’s position when Chief McKenzie wasn’t exactly living up to that honor himself.

  I was wary of the man now, afraid he might have seen me running away that night and have it in for me. He never said a word, but something about his manner, how his eyes brushed over me when he came in the store for his morning newspaper, gave me warning. “Don’t get in my way,” that look seemed to say. And I didn’t. I ducked back behind the shelves, kept out of his sight. I didn’t tell anyone what I’d seen him doing in his kitchen. It wasn’t my business, I decided, and anyway, my nose wasn’t so clean in that department, either.

  From continued espionage on the back stairs, I began to be aware that my own father was dealing regularly, both face-to-face and on the telephone, with racketeers from the Boston gang, under orders from Mr. Riley. The secret room beneath the storage building out back was in constant use. Many mornings, I saw fresh tire marks running across the back lot. Anyone could have noticed. They were heavy marks, the kind a laden truck might leave.

  One afternoon, John Appleby slid past me. “Hey, Rube. You want a job tonight?” he whispered.

  “What job?”

  “There’s a boat coming in up at Fogland Point. They’re paying twenty bucks a head to unload her.”

  It surprised me that he’d be involved. He was a year behind me at school and still had the baby face of a ten-year-old.

  Thanks but no thanks, I told him. I figured one thing my dad didn’t need on top of all his own trouble was me getting caught down on some beach.

  “Too bad,” John said. “It’s going to be fun. A bunch of us are going down. I guess your stomach couldn’t handle it.”

  “My stomach doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “That’s right, it’s your dad, isn’t it? He has you on a short leash, keeping you penned up and pretty for better things.”

  “Who says?”

  “Everybody.”

  “Like who?”

  “Jeddy McKenzie,” he said, smirking.

  I didn’t believe him.

  “Jeddy would never say that,” I told him, and walked off. John and I had never seen eye to eye. I was given better jobs at the store and had a higher position since I’d been there longer. My impression was he thought I didn’t amount to much and had only been hired because of my father.

  John Appleby wasn’t the only person to offer me shore work that summer. I could’ve been out a couple of evenings a week if I’d wanted. I began to hear about boys even younger than John who were making twenty or thirty bucks a job. Sometimes their folks would be in on it with them, sometimes they wouldn’t be. Even when they weren’t, it was obvious they knew what was going on. Parents were closing their eyes to it because the money was so good. You could hardly blame them; many in our town were in low-paying work like farming or fishing and that kind of money was helping them get through.

  “It’s like picking dollars off a tree,” I heard a lobsterman say in the store. “Whether you like it or not, money’s growing up there. If you don’t put your hand out, somebody else will.”

  As July turned to August and August crept toward September, the rum-running traffic on our shores went into high gear. At night, I’d hear the hum of tires going over the road accompanied by the barely detectable drone of a muffled engine. Dark vessels slipped along the coast making for beaches that exploded with light and action for a few hours, then went back to being abandoned coves in the morning.

  The Black Duck was in the news. Aunt Grace saw the article in the morning paper.

  “Outfoxed the Coast Guard again,” she said in a gleeful whisper over breakfast. My mother, off in the kitchen at that moment, had banned the subject from our table. It pained her, she said, to think of such goings-on. What I thought more likely was that it pained my father to hear about something he wished he weren’t part of. That morning, as on nearly every other, he’d already left for the store.

  “What happened?” I whispered back.

  Aunt Grace leaned foward to show me the story. Two nights before, the Duck had been spotted by a Coast Guard cutter going up the West Passage. Ordered to halt and be searched, she’d sped off, leading the Guard on yet another merry chase. It ended with the cutter beached on a tidal sandbar along a barren stretch of coast. The eight guardsmen on board had been forced to swim ashore, swallow their pride and flag down help along the road.

  “I bet that about killed them,” I said.

  “It did!” Aunt Grace laughed. “They’re mad as hornets. Listen to this.” Bending closer, she read in a low voice:

  “Speaking after the incident, Captain Roger Campbell, officer in charge of the beached Coast Guard cutter, told the Journal, ‘The Black Duck is a coastal scourge in this area that must be stopped. Our government will not tolerate brazen lawbreaking of this kind. Someday someone is going to open fire on that boat.’”

  “I’ve heard of that guy Campbell before,” I said. “Isn’t he the one who fired on Billy Brady’s father?”

  Aunt Grace wasn’t aware of that, though she’d heard the Brady family was in the rum-running business. I didn’t tell her about Billy’s connection to the Black Duck. He’d probably been on board during the chase, maybe even at the wheel. His wicked grin flashed into my mind, and I imagined the enjoyment he must have had leading Captain Roger Campbell and his crew up onto that sandbar.

  My mother came in from the kitchen then, and we closed up the newspaper and began a discussion about whether the Chicago Cubs would get in the World Series against the Philadelphia A’s that fall. Aunt Grace was a maniac about baseball, a terrible know-it-all who kept up with all the players and could reel off statistics faster than a ticker tape. Nobody in town could outdo her.

  “You’ll never find a husband at this rate,” my mother would scold. “You want to build up a man’s ego, not squash it down under a pile of facts he should know better than you.”

  “I can’t help it if they’re all dumb as doornails,” Aunt Grace would fire back, just to irritate my mother even more.

  As that summer wore on, it seemed that smugglers were everywhere. You couldn’t fish down at the harbor in the evenings for fear of running into liquor landings. Families told their children to stay off the beaches at night lest they stumble on men with guns. Meanwhile, all anybody had to do to buy a bottle was head down to a cert
ain fish hut at the town dock at a certain time of day. And this was small potatoes compared to other sales going on.

  The rich summer folks were buying their stuff by the caseload, through their own private bootleggers. That summer of 1929, they entertained like never before, serving cocktails and wine, champagne and brandy on the wide front porches of their elegant seaside homes. Late, late into the night, you’d hear wild dance music coming across the fields from the shore. I got a job bartending at a couple of those parties, learned to make whiskey sours and rum tonics, and how to ice a martini glass. It was an easy way to earn a buck. I would’ve liked to keep at it, but September arrived. The season came to an end. The summer people went back to Providence or Boston or New York. School started again, and in October the stock market crashed. Huge fortunes went down the drain; jobs began drying up. Nobody felt like celebrating anymore.

  That didn’t stop people from wanting liquor, though. The smuggling went on. Oh, how it went on. As to who in our town was involved, about the only thing that could be said for sure was a lot of folks were suddenly making home improvements.

  I wasn’t the only one who noticed that a new roof went on the McKenzie house in early November. Or who heard Fanny DeSousa boasting about her fancy electric stove. John Appleby’s parents built a whole barn. Other families were quietly affording indoor bathrooms, new porches, secondhand automobiles.

  The Harts were right in there with the best of them, I’ve got to say. We installed heat in our second-floor bedrooms. My mother went to Providence and bought herself a fox-fur stole. She wore it into Riley’s store the next day, looking about as silly as a peacock in a chicken house.

  “For pity’s sake, keep it at home, can’t you?” my father shouted at her when he came back that night. She burst into tears and ran upstairs.

  I felt sorry for her. She’d always wanted a stole. Now that they had the money to buy it, she couldn’t understand why my father was so angry.

  I knew why.

  “They’re paying me to keep my mouth shut. That’s how I make my living now, by shutting up,” I heard him tell Aunt Grace later that same night.

  “Oh, Carl, you mustn’t say that. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  “I’m not being hard on myself. If I don’t say it, who will?”

  “What else can you do? Everyone’s in the same boat.”

  “I could stand up and put a stop to it. I could tell them all to go to hell.”

  “Tell who?” Aunt Grace asked. “Mr. Riley, you mean? He’s no more in charge than the King of Siam!”

  That was true enough. While Mr. Riley continued to send orders from his prison cell, the Boston College Boys had long ago taken over the reins of his operation, and many others along the coast. Not only courtroom judges were in these gangsters’ pockets. Their influence now extended into the offices of a good number of Rhode Island legislators, as my father well knew. Aunt Grace was right. There was no one to appeal to, and even if there had been, who but a lunatic would blow the whistle on a game that was making so much money for everyone, at every level?

  The stakes were about to go higher, though. Unbeknownst to my father and all but a few in our town, a larger and more powerful gang of players was already poised on the horizon, ready to strike.

  A NEW WIND

  THE FIRST I KNEW ABOUT THE NEW YORK mobsters coming into our area was about a week before Thanksgiving. A stranger with a flashy tan fedora cocked over his forehead came in the store and bought a pack of cigarettes. Then he sat on the public bench just down from our front door to smoke them. Anybody who came by, he struck up a conversation.

  “Name’s Stanley Culp, and that’s a fine old cemetery you’ve got there behind the church,” he’d remark.

  Or: “You mean there’s a police station in this sweet little town? Can’t imagine what ever goes wrong here!”

  Or: “What, that place there’s the post office? Not much bigger than a postage stamp, is it? Haw, haw!”

  He’d raise his hat to the pretty farm wives driving in for supplies. “Morning, ma’am, fine-looking boy you’ve got there. Nice weather we’re having. Yes, I’m from New York City, you guessed right.”

  The reason people were guessing right about his origins was his car, which was a fancy twin-six engine Packard sedan with New York plates. He didn’t let on what his business was, but soon enough people began to understand. He was there for the special purpose of making friends.

  He gave fifteen dollars to the Bishop’s Fund at St. Mary’s and an equal amount to the collection plate at the Congregational Church on Sunday morning. He tucked a dime into the pocket of any child who came past his bench, which picked up business at the store’s candy counter a good bit.

  When Abner Wilcox, whose wife, Marie, had just died after fifty years of marriage, wobbled up on his cane, Stanley Culp bought him a chocolate bar and talked to him for a solid hour. That was an act of unusual kindness. Though everyone in town was suspicious, we all had to admit that Mr. Culp was doing good.

  “And asking nothing in return. So far,” Mildred Cumming whispered when she came in for a soda pop one afternoon. She’d been keeping her eye on him from the police station.

  “Charlie’s having kittens wondering who he is,” she added. “I’ve never seen him in such a state.”

  “What’s the chief say?” Dr. Washburn asked her. He’d come by for a hunk of store cheese and some pipe tobacco.

  “Chief McKenzie’s been out of town all week. Far as I know, he doesn’t know anything about it.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “Took Jeddy up hunting to Vermont for the Thanksgiving holiday. Said he needed a break.”

  “I can believe that,” the doctor replied. “From what I hear, he and Charlie’ve been spending more time going at each other than after these infernal bootleggers.”

  Relations between Chief McKenzie and his deputy had gone sour over the summer. They rarely covered cases together anymore, and had been seen arguing in public. Charlie’s manner, never specially pleasant on even his best days, was now continuously surly, while the chief went about with a new smugness, as if he’d received some promotion that Charlie didn’t qualify for. And perhaps he had. I was still keeping a wary eye on the chief, and one thing I’d noticed was that Mr. Culp’s Packard wasn’t the only vehicle with New York plates showing up regularly in town. More than a few afternoons, there was another car, a racy black sedan, parked in plain view in front of the police station.

  About an hour after Mildred left with her soda, Charlie himself came over. He stood outside the store and started a conversation with Mr. Culp that was soon audible all the way back into the stockroom, where John Appleby and I were stacking crates. We went up front to see what was happening.

  “As official law-enforcement deputy of the town, I’m ordering you to vacate these premises!” Charlie was yelling when we got there.

  “Oh, come along,” Mr. Culp said, giving him a friendly grin. “I’ve been having a grand time meeting these folks.” He gestured toward Dr. Washburn and the small crowd of us who’d come out of the store. Fanny DeSousa was there, and Aunt Grace, too, over from the post office. “Can’t see no reason to leave now.”

  “I know why you’re here. You can’t frighten me!” Charlie bellowed, sounding scared down to his underwear.

  “Frighten you?” said Mr. Culp, looking up lazily. He knew who Charlie was the same way he knew everything about our town. A week of sitting on that bench had accomplished a lot more than just us getting to know him. “Why would I want to frighten you? If I was to want anything, it’d be to say this: if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. That’s my message to you.”

  Charlie brayed out a laugh. “So, you think you’re going to join up with us? Hah, that’s a good one. You can’t barge into a town like this.”

  Mr. Culp smiled. “No, no, you misunderstand. I’m not doing nothing like barging in. I’m telling you, real nice, it’s time to take a powder.”

  Ch
arlie practically expired with fury over this. “Take a powder! Meaning what?”

  Mr. Culp removed his flashy hat and set it down on the bench beside him. “What’d you say your name was?”

  “My name is Deputy Sargeant Charles Pope!”

  “Yes, Deputy Pope, meaning this. About now, if I was you, I’d be heading on back to that run-down caboose of a police station. I’d put my feet up on the desk and take a good long snooze.”

  Charlie let out a snort and shook his head.

  “Let me put it even more clearly,” Mr. Culp went on. “There’s a change coming, a new wind in this town. If you try to stop it, why, my guess is it’ll blow you down.”

  All of this was said in a mild tone, as if Mr. Culp was sorry to be speaking these words but saw no way around it. What he meant was only vaguely understood by most of us looking on, but Charlie knew. His eyes bulged and his tongue came out for its snaky flick over his lips.

  “You won’t get away with this,” he snarled. “Chief McKenzie’s due back tomorrow. He won’t tolerate it!”

  Mr. Culp smiled. “Oh, I don’t think the chief’ll mind too much. Ralph and I have come to an understanding about matters of this kind. Now, go on along before somebody has to take you.”

  To our amazement, Charlie did. He turned and walked away toward the police station on legs stiff with rage. Stanley Culp watched him. When Charlie had disappeared, he took out his pack of cigarettes and offered them around to the men, passing over John and me and Fanny DeSousa and Aunt Grace. It was still considered improper in our parts for ladies to smoke in public, and like us, they wouldn’t have expected to.

  “Fine cold weather we’re having,” Mr. Culp said when he’d seen to it that everybody was lit up. “I hear autumn’s the choice season on this coast. Better than spring, they say. Clearer, bluer, beautiful sunrises and sunsets. You never want to leave a place like this in the fall, am I right?”