The rain has slowed to a fine drizzle. David’s tires slap methodically against the wet pavement. Something about the weather makes him think how Ruben Hart once rode these same roads on his bicycle. And there, in a flash, as if answering a call, the ghost of the young Ruben descends. David feels him, can almost see him, pedaling at his elbow. For a long minute, they ride together, side by side, the wind rushing past. Then it’s over. The ghost departs. David pushes ahead alone. He picks up speed and races over the wet road toward the library. Time is running out. December 29, 1929, is about to arrive. Fog is rolling in across Coulter’s Beach toward Tom Morrison’s cabin, which means it’s already thick out on the bay. All the signs, as they say, are pointing in one direction: Mr. Hart’s story is coming to the end.
The Newport Daily Journal, January 2, 1930
COAST GUARD RECEIVED TIP-OFF TO BLACK DUCK’S ROUTE
LAY IN WAIT TIED TO CHANNEL BUOY, UNDER COVER OF DENSE FOG
NEWPORT, JAN. 2—The Coast Guard cutter that opened fire on the Black Duck early Sunday morning, killing three men and wounding one, was tipped off to the rum runners’ route by a local police chief, according to the Coast Guard officer in charge, Capt. Roger Campbell.
An earlier report that the Coast Guard had stumbled by chance on the craft was incorrect, Campbell said.
“We got direct word from a local police chief that the Black Duck would be coming in to a beach along that coast. We knew they’d be steering for the bell buoy off West Island in that thick fog, so we tied up there to wait for them. Sure enough, they came along about three A.M.”
Campbell refused to name the source for the tip. He insisted again that the rum runners were warned before his marksman opened fire with a machine gun.
Questions have been raised as to whether the victims were given adequate legal warning before they were shot down. The federal statute on the pursuit of smuggling craft requires that a shot be fired in warning before effective firing is started if a suspect fails to halt when ordered.
DECEMBER 29, 1929
WE WERE STILL SITTING AROUND TOM Morrison’s table when, about 10:00 P.M., voices sounded outside the cabin.
Billy sprang up and went to open the door. Rick Delucca and Bernardo Rosario, his radio man, came in. Alfred Biggs was behind them. He’d brought his cousin Manny, from Portsmouth, along to lend a hand. Billy was surprised by that. He’d expected somebody else and gave the guy a look. He didn’t like outsiders coming in on his jobs.
“Manny’s okay,” Alfred assured him. “I’ll vouch for him personally. He’s a hard worker, and you’d be doing him a good turn. His family’s in need.”
Billy nodded. “Well then, glad to help. We’ll need an extra man out there, all right.” He shook Manny’s hand.
Sadie took one look at this army of strange boots coming through the door and scooted out from under the table. She retreated around the corner to Tom’s sleeping quarters. Tom looked as if he would’ve liked to do the same. Never had there been such a crowd in his chicken coops, and never, I’m sure, had he ever wanted one. Still, Billy was a favorite of his, and while he wouldn’t shelter liquor, he’d agreed to let the Black Duck’s crew meet there before the job that night.
“C’mon over by the stove and let ’em have the table,” he told Marina and me. We got up and sat down with our backs against the wall. Shortly, we were listening in on a discussion of logistics that must have taken place hundreds of times, for this was just another transport job in a long line of them, and nothing, including the fog, seemed specially out of the ordinary.
“I made radio contact with our vessel. She’s a schooner out of St. Pierre by the name of Mary Logan,” Bernardo Rosario began after they were all seated. “She’s safely anchored and we have her position. Her captain’s set to load from midnight on. He says it’s pea soup out there. You can’t see ten feet from your own nose.”
Billy nodded at Rick Delucca. “We’ll be steering by compass, heading for the bell buoys. Are the channel charts on board?”
Rick said they were there.
“All right. Now here’s something else. Tom doesn’t want liquor near his place. That means we’ll need transport off the beach tonight as soon as we bring the hooch in. A big load like this can’t lie out in the daylight.”
“We need to get word to our truck drivers,” Alfred Biggs said. “Somebody has to go up to Harveston right away and tell them to get down here.”
“I figured that,” Billy said. “Anybody want to volunteer?”
Nobody said anything. Everybody wanted to go out on the Black Duck. Finally Alfred spoke up. “Let Manny do it. Our vehicle’s parked out there by the beach. He’d be a good one to go. He knows the roads around Harveston. Used to live there.”
“Is that so?” Billy asked.
Manny shrugged. “Do I have to?” he asked his cousin. “I was hoping to be out on the boat tonight.”
“You’ll get your chance,” Alfred said. “Just tonight, do what Billy wants. Take the car and round up the Harveston drivers. I’ll give you the address where they’re staying.”
Manny saw there was no use arguing and slumped back in his chair. I didn’t like his expression. He seemed like a whiner to me.
“We’ll be down a man, the same as before, without Manny,” Rick warned. “It’ll take more time to load off the Mary Logan.”
“I thought of that,” Billy said. “We’ve got a man right here to take his place.”
“And who might that be?” Alfred inquired. “Not old one-eye, I hope!”
Everybody laughed, which was mean of them. Tom put his lips together and took this rudeness without comment, but Billy wouldn’t stand for it. For all his adventuring and interest in profit, Billy Brady was a loyal friend to those he cared about.
“Leave Tom out of this,” he snapped at Alfred. “He sees further with his one eye than most people with their two.”
“Well, who is it then?” Bernardo demanded.
What Billy said next blew the top of my head off.
“Who we’ve got is Ruben Hart, if he’ll agree to it.” Billy gazed at me, straight and serious. “Will you, Ruben? It’d be a favor you could do me after the one I did you.”
Beside me, Marina sat up. “No, he won’t! What a terrible idea. His father would never let him go.”
“Well, that’s just it,” Billy said, giving me his wicked grin. “His father’s not here to have a say. So I’m asking Ruben direct. Will you be a fifth man on the Black Duck tonight? We could use your muscle, and you’ll have a night to remember, I guarantee it.”
There wasn’t any time to think about this amazing proposition, and even if there had been, I believe I’d have come to the same decision. It rose up through my blood on a reckless tide of defiance, the same wild feeling I’d been nursing all that year of wanting to get out and prove something to myself. Nothing I could do would hold it back.
“Yes, I’ll go!” I answered. The crew laughed again because I sounded so breathless. To my left, Tom Morrison slowly shook his head, but he didn’t say anything.
“Well, that’s settled,” Billy said. “Now it’s time we went down to the beach and got aboard the Duck. She’s gassed to the brim, ready to head for open sea. Manny will give you a lift home on his way to Harveston, Marina,” he added to her. “Watch the evening newspapers tomorrow. You might catch the Black Duck’s name in print.”
“Why would I want to do that?” Marina shot back. “It’s bad enough to have to worry about all of you. Now you’re taking Ruben? He’s too young and you know it!” She turned her back and wouldn’t look at Billy, even when he went over to her.
“Come with me a moment,” I heard him say in a low voice. When she still turned away, he took her hand and pulled her off around the corner to Tom’s private sleeping quarters. I never knew what he said to her in those last minutes before we left. I heard his voice, quiet and confiding, rising and falling, and no sound at all from her. He must have told her something that came close
to the right mark, though, because when they came out together, she was wiping her eyes and nodding.
“You know where she lives?” I heard Billy ask Manny while Marina went across the room to thank Tom for supper.
“Of course,” Manny said. “It’s Chief McKenzie’s place. I’ve been there before.”
An alarm should’ve gone off in Billy’s head at that, and maybe a faint one did, because I saw him stop a moment and give Manny that same careful look he had in the beginning. Then Marina came back and we put on our coats. Two minutes later, we headed out Tom’s door into the murk.
Looking back now, it seems that the ocean had never heaved with such a sickening roll or the fog been so glutinous as it was the night the Black Duck made its way out toward the schooner Mary Logan.
I was no seaman, but not a landlubber, either. I’d fished many times off a boat, and motored up and down the coast with friends since I was a kid. I knew West Island from sailing trips Jeddy and I had made out there for swimming and rock climbing on summer days. That evening, as we chugged out from shore, the island was invisible except for a threatening roar of surf.
We went by safely and came out on the open sea, though how Billy Brady and Rick Delucca managed to navigate at all was a mystery to me. They stood side by side in the pilot house, one at the wheel, the other lounging over the charts, bellowing cheerfully back and forth, their voices all but drowned out by the Duck’s big engines.
Once beyond the lighthouse, Billy turned on a new course which put the wind behind us, and we slid even faster through the blinding white mist. For over an hour we thudded along this way, until it began to seem we were trapped in an endless dream and would never see the shapes of the real world again.
At last, lights blazed in front of us and we came up on the sprawling form of the schooner Mary Logan anchored bow and stern to keep her in place. Billy and Rick had struck her right on the button. I saw them raise their fists and touch knuckles in a kind of boyish glee. And when I think of it now, they still were partly boys at heart, taking pleasure in battling dangers that would’ve made older men sweat.
It took us over an hour to load the liquor onto the Duck. The Mary Logan’s captain was a niggler, intent on keeping his decks clean and his hull buffered against the side of our boat. After he and Billy had matched tickets—in this case halved one-dollar bills did the trick—he stood aside and offered no help from his crew. I worked like the devil, and so did Billy and everyone, to bring the load on board. It was whiskey for the most part, several hundred cases at least. When we’d filled every crook and cranny on the Duck, we packed her little lifeboat with more cases, roped them in under canvas, and lowered the skiff astern to trail behind us.
“There’s a night’s worth of New Year’s celebrating to be had off this!” Alfred Biggs called out with a grin.
“A week’s worth, you mean!” Bernardo shouted back, bringing a laugh from everyone. We cast off. Billy revved the big engines and we began the bumpy trip back to Coulter’s.
By this time, it was after 2:00 A.M. We were headed into the southwest wind now, facing the wallow of an ocean swell. My stomach started to go queasy. It wasn’t improved by the closeness of the fog, which seemed to thicken as we drew nearer to land, or rather to where we thought land must be. Once again we were in a ghostly, immaterial world. Billy, who was steering by the ship’s compass, cut our speed in case of miscalculation, and we went on blindly, keeping our ears tuned for the channel bells.
I was hanging out over the starboard rail, wondering if Tom Morrison’s crab stew was about to make an early exit, when I heard Rick Delucca bellow.
“Dead ahead! What’s that?”
We weren’t doing more than about five miles an hour. The sound of a bell buoy rang out, and all at once I saw a black shape rising up through the murk not fifty feet in front of us.
In the pilot house, Billy swore. He goosed the engines to try to swerve. A second later, we all recognized what it was. A Coast Guard cutter, one of the big seventy-five-footers, was tied to the bell. We came up on it fast and passed close, our bow going just under theirs. We’d no sooner cleared than a light shone straight at us, a horn sounded and something whizzed past my head. From behind me came the crash of splintering wood. It took me a few moments to realize what was happening. I heard that machine gun rat-a-tat-tatting, but it didn’t seem real.
By the time I caught on, bullets were slamming into the deck on all sides and the glass in the pilot house had shattered. Somebody screamed to take cover. I flung myself over the boat rail and hung just above the water. In the pilot house, a commotion had broken out. I looked and saw Billy go down. He fell over the wheel and Rick leapt to pull him up. Then the boat began to weave and lurch like a bronco. She’d veer one way, then another, and it was clear that no one had control of the wheel. I was trying to hang on and climb back over the rail, but after a violent swerve my hold broke. Off I came on a wave and dropped into the sea.
The sudden cold took my breath away. I clawed to get up the side again, but the boat suddenly bolted out of reach. Then the lifeboat was on top of me, hitting me on the head. I went for it like a drowning man, which I nearly was, and managed to haul myself into it and slide under the tarp. There I lay down on top of a pile of liquor cases.
Never have I been so cold in my life. I wasn’t trembling so much as shimmying from head to foot, and I curled myself up for what little warmth I could get. Meanwhile, the lifeboat careened after the Duck on its twists and turns, and a fear began to build in me that we were pilotless. I remembered Billy describing how, after his dad was shot, his boat had plowed into the rocks and exploded. When I raised the tarp to look for the shore, an icy slap of seawater hit me in the face.
Finally, the ride quieted. From the waves’ motion, I sensed that we were circling around. Someone was at the Black Duck’s helm, though I didn’t yet know who. Then we must have come up on the Coast Guard cutter again. I heard Rick Delucca’s voice shout out:
“Put up your guns! I’ve got wounded men aboard!”
A guardsman barked back, “You’re under arrest. Bring your boat alongside!”
Rick did that. He’d no sooner touched hulls than two guards leapt onto the Duck’s deck and grabbed him. I was spying out from the lifeboat and saw how they dragged him onto the cutter, blood gushing from his hand. In short order, the Duck was lashed to the cutter’s side, and my lifeboat was hauled in from where it had been bobbing to stern. I had a bad moment thinking those guards might be curious about what was under the tarp. They roped the lifeboat tight behind the Duck’s stern and never bothered to look. After that, I kept my head down and had only my ears to tell me what was happening.
Rick Delucca was putting up a fight. The guards were trying to take him down into the cutter’s cabin. He kept pleading to stay on deck.
“My friends need help,” he cried over and over. “They’re hit. They’re bleeding! Let me go back aboard.”
They didn’t allow him that liberty as far as I could tell. I don’t think anyone else went over onto the Duck, either. An order was called out to cast off the bell, and the cutter got under way.
Later, the newspapers would report that “three rumrunners” all died instantly in the rain of bullets. I know that’s not true. Someone was alive for a while. I heard moans and knocking sounds from the Duck’s afterdeck, though by the time we made Newport, all was quiet up there.
The guards tied their cutter up to a pier, unroped the Duck and cleated her to a separate piling. I heard them take Rick Delucca away. He wasn’t saying much by then and, with all the blood he’d lost, was probably in shock. I know I was. I was shaking and quaking under the tarp so hard that it’s a wonder nobody noticed and came to find me.
After a while, the cutter sped off and the Black Duck sat unattended. The cutter’s captain went down the dock to call for medical help. He was Roger Campbell. I heard the crew address him several times. I wish now I could’ve risked taking a glance at the man I’d heard s
o much about, but I stayed low. Another half hour passed before the last of the guardsmen disappeared into the nearby Coast Guard station. I saw my opportunity and crept out.
It was dark, still too early in the morning for any show of sun. A bunch of Canada geese had flown into the harbor. They were huddled close to shore, honking in that sad, bleating way geese have when they’re cold and wondering where their next meal is coming from. I went up on the Black Duck.
Three bodies were lying together on her deck where the guards had dragged them. I went over and looked down. They were on their backs, shoulder to shoulder—Billy Brady, Bernardo Rosario and Alfred Biggs. Their eyes were closed and at first they didn’t seem that dead to me. They looked peaceful. It was as if they’d been stargazing, or telling stories to each other like boys on a camping trip, and had fallen asleep together looking up at the sky.
Except something was out of place. Someone had tried to put Billy’s captain’s hat back on his head. It was leaning crooked over one ear, a thing he never would’ve allowed in life. I reached out and took it off, but the spell was broken: I knew those men weren’t ever going to wake up again.
After that, I didn’t touch them. I stood back, holding Billy’s hat against my chest. The wind was cold. Seawater slapped against the pier, sounding tired and bored, as if after all nothing much had happened. I felt sick. There should’ve been more fury going on, people screaming or the sea howling over who was lying there. I saw how murderously quiet death is, how even Billy Brady with all his charm and wit wasn’t going to be able to talk back to it. That scared me worse than I’d ever been scared before. I got off his boat and ran down the pier.
Nobody saw me leave. I skirted the naval docks and took off down the road. The newspapers never got wind I was there that night. The Coast Guard didn’t find out. Rick Delucca never let on, either, I don’t know why. Maybe he was protecting me, or maybe he just forgot. He was in and out of court for the next two weeks, being arraigned and charged with violating the Prohibition laws. In the end, some deal went through, the charges were dropped and they let him go. People said he was never the same afterward.
Black Duck Page 16
