by Bret Lott
I’d never met him before. I’d seen these Department of Natural Resources men out on the water most all my life, one time got written up out on the Combahee, the river edge of Hungry Neck, for having no life jacket in the old jon boat I used to mess around in down there, another time stopped in the channel back behind Capers Island by some overweight geezer in a nineteen-foot Action Craft flats boat complete with a ten-foot tower rigged with all the radar you could want, only to check my fishing license.
I didn’t know this Major Alton Tyler. And Unc’d never mentioned him.
Yet I believed him, right then, enough to open my eyes, to see what next I had to do here, and I turned, looked up at him.
He was squatted there at the bow of his Boston Whaler, the boats most all the DNR drove, its hull almost overhanging the stern of the jon boat. He’d worked some kind of magic getting it in here, the hull pressed into the cordgrass all around, and Unc not hearing or feeling a thing. The searchlight, mounted back at the steering console, made him a silhouette to me, and I could see he had on the ball cap they all wore, and the holster at his hip, the pistol there. He had his elbows on his knees, but beyond that I couldn’t see his face for the light behind him, and for a second I thought of Unc against the night sky before all this had come down, the stars scattered behind him, before us nothing but the dumb idea of golf.
“Let’s go,” Tyler said, and reached down, touched my shoulder.
And as though I had no choice but to believe him, I stood up and moved past Unc in the boat, knelt at the bow, pulled on that ratty nylon rope tied to the cinder block onshore until the boat hit bottom. Unc’d stood tall the whole time, still carrying on with Stanhope—“You come on out to private civilian property,” Unc was yelling, “and try and pass it off like it’s military business, so let’s just see what the courts have to say,” while Stanhope seethed out, “If you continue to disregard our authority, I will have no choice but to further charge you with resisting arrest”—and I hauled out that plank yet again, dropped it and walked back on across, then moved right past Stanhope and his silent partner.
Stanhope turned from Unc then, said to me as I passed, “You will not leave the premises, Mr. Dillard, until my commanding officer notifies me of the status of our situation.”
But I just moved on up the lawn at the back of the Dupont house and onto their patio. I pulled one of the wrought-iron chairs from the wrought-iron table, scraped it across the brick pavers out here loud as I could, and sat down, my back to the house so I could watch it all.
Unc and Stanhope kept on over who was where when, never a word out of either about any night-vision goggles anybody’d seen, nor about this body. Eventually Unc strode on across the plank without so much as a wobble, came in close to Stanhope, the bills of their caps almost touching while they still yelled, and I knew Stanhope had no idea Unc was blind for how the two kept right on. Still nothing came out of the black sailor with Stanhope, the M4 down, trigger hand flat against the stock, his head turning now and again to scan the grounds.
Once in a while he looked at me, held his eyes on me long enough to let me know he was watching.
Mrs. Q came around again, and once she’d made clear to the Cuthberts she wasn’t going home, they ushered her over to the table, sat her in one of the chairs. Priscilla in her jogging suit and snarled hair hovered around her as though she might take the old lady’s pulse any second to see if she was still alive, while Mrs. Q sat stone still, hands locked in her lap, eyes out to the creek and the logjam of a jon boat and a Boston Whaler.
“The idea,” the old bag whispered right there next to me, unable even to look at me for how close I was and the mange she must’ve figured she’d get if she were even to glimpse my way. “The idea,” she whispered, “the idea.”
Grange Cuthbert took a seat across from me at the table, flipped the chair around so his back was to me, him just watching and shaking his head now and again. “A body,” he said once. “What in the hell is a body doing out here?”
It was then Jessup stepped into my line of sight on my right, his back to me too as he made his way across the patio and the ten yards or so down the lawn to Stanhope and Unc and the other sailor.
I’d forgotten about him for the big stinky pile of all this going down out here, forgotten for these few minutes about him going into Judge Dupont’s house to get that screaming nurse to quiet down, and I glanced behind me to the French doors to see if she was back out here, maybe cooled enough now to watch.
But just as I turned, I saw over my shoulder the door close from inside, heard the slide of a dead bolt into place.
Didn’t matter if she thought she could lock herself away from a dead body, I thought, and turned back to face the melee. The authorities’d get hold of her soon enough. She’d end up questioned, just like the rest of us.
Jessup stopped next to the sailor with the M4. They looked at each other, nodded. Jessup put his hands on his hips, then crossed his arms, like he was waiting his turn. The sailor didn’t say anything to him, didn’t ask for his name or what he wanted. He only gave him that nod, then went back to scanning, hand still flat on the stock of his gun.
And though he had to be able to see Jessup maybe a couple feet away from him, Stanhope, still toe to toe with Unc, didn’t move his eyes from Unc for a second. It was like Jessup wasn’t even there, this man dressed in a black windbreaker and cap and pants who’d come from inside the house everything was all happening at.
Maybe they knew him, I thought. Or maybe they’d spotted him for being security: he still had his two-way in one hand.
And beyond them, still a silhouette for the searchlight, was Tyler, tending to the only thing really mattered out here: the body. He was kneeling way up on the hull and leaning over the edge, a big Maglite LED in his hand and pointed down to the water, its beam sharp as a Star Wars lightsaber. Slowly he moved it back and forth, looking at the woman. Now and again he put his radio up to his mouth, said something I couldn’t hear.
Then here was the Hanahan police, two dudes who looked no older than me coming like the rest of the world around the side of the house and into the light from that flood on Tyler’s boat. They had on their black wool sweaters, badges on their chests, hands on their holsters, and sort of nodded at us here at the table as they made their way down to Unc and Stanhope and the sailor, Jessup still without a word.
“Mr. Dillard,” they both said at the same time, the words solemn and quick. Unc turned his head to them, let out “Boys,” and nodded, then went on again with Stanhope, and maybe a few seconds later here came around the side of the house a deputy from the sheriff’s office, brown windbreaker and Smokey Bear hat on. “Leland,” he called out, then, quieter, said, “Poston, Danford,” to the two cops, and stepped up to the congregation.
That was when Stanhope broke, let his head drop so that he was looking at Unc’s chest. But even in the shadows and light out here I could see the way his jaw was working, the set of it. He wasn’t done.
“Harmon,” he said, and the black sailor shot out “Sir” and turned to him, the word and move so quick it seemed like bad acting, a bit player jumping his lines.
Unc hadn’t moved, his face still to where Stanhope’s had been, and I could see the smallest smile on him: he’d won this round.
Stanhope looked up at Harmon beside him, nodded hard to his left and away from the crowd, and the two moved a couple yards away toward the woods.
Unc looked over here at the house. He moved his head a little side to side, like he was scanning the place same as Harmon had, then called out loud, “Huger?”
I let him look for me a couple seconds more before I said, “Here.”
He lasered in on exactly where I sat, those sunglasses right on me. He looked at me a long moment while the cops and deputy and Jessup—everyone down there but the sailors—turned to me.
“You get us your thermos out that book bag of yours and pour us each a cup of that glorious instant coffee. This is going to
take a while.” He nodded, held his look on me.
But I hadn’t brought the bag with me from the jon boat, had left it there when I’d stood and walked away. “Left it on the boat,” I called out.
He pursed his lips, turned to the creek, then looked right back at me. “Sure would like a cup,” he said.
And it came to me, what Unc was trying to tell me: he wanted me to have hold of those goggles, no matter what.
I sat there a few seconds, the all of them—even Mrs. Q had turned to me by then—looking at me, waiting, like a cup of coffee out of a thermos was the only next thing could happen on the face of the earth. But Unc and I knew this wasn’t anything at all about coffee. It was about those stupid goggles, and nothing else. Unc’d found a body, but it sure seemed he was only worked up about being spotted with the goggles. All we had to do was to name Commander Prendergast, the fellow poker night chump Unc’d won them off of, hand them off to Stanhope, and the whole thing’d be over.
But Unc wasn’t going there. And the problem was I couldn’t tell why.
“Huger?” he said, and I could see now, over at the tree line past Unc and his brood of lawmen, Stanhope and the black sailor, Harmon, looking at me too.
I wanted to let Unc twist out there on his own right now, for whatever reason it was I had of my own. Maybe it was because I didn’t want to get up and walk all the way back down there and back across that plank again, and risk seeing one more time that body. Or maybe it was because I’d wanted to just give the damned goggles up when they’d first got here, because of what they’d made me see for Unc, me as always his eyes: the woman’s face torn up, the pale green of her flesh buoyed by the pole beneath her.
Maybe I wanted to have my own life, to live on my own and not have to ferry Unc through his days, me his chauffeur and caddy and coffee bearer and eyes every day I was alive.
Or maybe—and I knew this was it, finally—maybe it was because it didn’t seem like Unc gave a shit about this body, some woman who’d been killed and left in the marsh. Maybe what made me sit there a few seconds without answering him was because of that glee he seemed to be deriving at having beat Stanhope this round. While behind him down in the water was a body.
“Here you go” came from behind him, and I sat up quick, saw making his way across the plank from the jon boat Major Tyler, holding out in front of him my book bag, and already I was up and around the wrought-iron table and jogging the few yards down the lawn toward him, and then I stood among them all, these Hanahan police and the deputy and Unc, and Tyler.
He was taller than I’d thought, maybe six four or five, and I could see his face now for Dupont’s back porch light: he was a little jowly, had heavy eyebrows and a thick neck. Football, was the first thing came to me. He’d had to play somewhere when he was in college.
He nodded, gave a smile that was all business, my bag held out in his hand like some kid’s toy for how big he was.
I took the book bag, slung it quick over a shoulder. I nodded, said, “Thank you,” and wondered for a second why I’d never heard from Unc any mention of an Alton Tyler with the DNR.
Here was Unc with a hand at my elbow, leading me off and back toward the patio. “Thank you so much, Alton,” he said over his shoulder, then, a little too loud and meant, I could hear, for nothing more than show, “This coffee’s sure gonna do me good.”
And off to our right, at the edge of the woods, stood Stanhope and Harmon. I looked straight at them, too, saw their eyes were right on me, their mouths thin lines.
Harmon, his hand still flat on the stock of his M4, looked right at the book bag, and back up to me. He nodded.
I set the bag on the table once we’d gotten to the porch, opened it, careful not to let Grange or Mrs. Q or Priscilla see inside. There lay the goggles, and that construction helmet, at the bottom the old thermos and the travel mugs, and I pulled one out and the thermos, poured off a full cup for Unc, set the bag at my feet.
Unc made a big show of sipping at it, all for those two sailors watching every move over there. He wouldn’t sit down, though Grange had stood up when we’d gotten here and offered his seat. I’d offered him mine, too, but he’d have none of it, while Mrs. Q sat beside us whispering loud “The idea, the idea.”
By this time Priscilla’d given up trying to monitor the old lady, and stood beside Grange, all of us facing the creek while here came more neighbors: first the Bennetts, then the Moores, the Michauxs, the Balls, the Legares. The usual suspects, all of them anchored to Landgrave Hall for as long as the place had been here, each with portraits aplenty of dead ancestors inside the hallowed halls of their cottages, each with their own dedicated tables at the clubhouse. I knew already the front of the Dupont house was clogged with the golf carts they’d all driven over here, all of them talking low to each other now, shaking their heads, arms crossed, now and again nodding toward us here at the table, watching.
Tyler took first the deputy out onto the plank and across our boat onto his, shone that Maglite down into the water, the two of them talking, the beam darting back and forth. Then the deputy left, the two Hanahan cops moving out next to have their own peep show.
A minute or so later the EMTs came bumping up amidst all the neighbors, a gurney pushed and pulled and lifted and prodded by a man and a woman in white shirts and dark pants and latex gloves already on. The two of them labored to get the gurney close as they could to the water, no way for the truck itself to back in here. On the gurney was stacked their equipment, what looked all the world like a pile of tackle boxes.
Another shuffle and twist of the neighbors, and here now were two men and a woman coming out into this all, the three of them in wet suits and with a black duffel bag each, scuba tanks on their backs. They headed right down to the water, stepped across the plank one at a time—the Hanahan cops’d come back on ground when the EMTs showed up—and then were out there with Tyler.
That was when I left.
I leaned over, picked up the book bag with one hand, and sort of took a side step away from Unc and Grange and the table. I looked one last time at the whole circus going on out here, at the dozen or so people standing in their bathrobes and whatnot all watching, and at these lawmen with their hands on their hips, and at Stanhope and Harmon too, who’d been caught up like the rest of everyone else by the ghoul-work coming up next, and at the boats jammed in here, and at Tyler back on the bow of his, the only man out here, it seemed, who’d had the kind of bearing and calm the finding of a dead body called for.
I meant to go around the house on the other side. I meant to keep from having to say word one to anybody. Pretty soon SLED would show up and the whole South Carolina Law Enforcement Division investigation would start in earnest, not just the retrieval of a crab-picked body out of pluff mud. They’d find me. They’d come over to the house, knock on the door, and start asking away the predictable questions—Why were you out here? How did you find it?—with a bonus question thrown in for good measure: Why did you leave the scene?
And none of this—none of it—would be over for who knew how long.
I sure didn’t know, because, I understood as I looked at them all, I still wasn’t over the last bodies I’d seen. Though I’d told myself I was, managed enough times to convince myself that the all of that was over, I knew, with this girl coming up from the dark into that green porthole of sight, that here it all was again. My life and what I’d seen and done only as far away as the thin skim of muddy water that’d kept her hidden until Unc levered her up.
I turned then, safe, I figured, and already on my way home, though Mom was probably up and sitting with a cup of coffee, fuming at why her son and his father couldn’t just play golf in daylight like the rest of the whole stupid world.
And there, inside the French door window, was that Guatemalan nurse. She had a handful of curtain pulled back, her face nearly pressed to the glass, her black hair tight into a ponytail or bun, I couldn’t tell which.
Our eyes met a second, just lon
g enough for me to pause, to take in the fact she was there and looking at me, before she let go the curtain, disappeared.
But the moment between us lasted just long enough for my momentum to shift for that pause, my feet already moving, and I bumped the smallest way into the wrought-iron table.
Not a second later here was a hand on my shoulder: Unc.
I turned to him, had no choice. But he only looked at me, those sunglasses lasered in yet again.
“Go on,” he whispered. “Hide the goggles. Tell your momma we’ll all be all right.”
I took a breath, nodded, though he had no way to see.
But he knew.
The strobe on the orange and white EMS truck shredded the front of the Dupont house into bright red pieces, the clot of golf carts and the cops’ Charger and deputy’s Crown Vic all quivering in the pulse. Up closest to the house was a black Suburban, no doubt what the sailors had arrived first on the scene in; behind the EMS was parked another truck, a huge and dark Silverado, on its door, I could see from here, the bold white letters DNR, above it the round logo: the search and rescue truck.
I hung back in the shadows on this side of the house, watched for more neighbors rolling up, saw none. And of course as I stepped out, started across the yard, here came the headlights of another vehicle pulling into the drive, and I ducked down into a wax myrtle at the edge of the grass, made myself small as I could.
Yet another Silverado, those letters and logo again. The DNR agent Tyler’d called in.
He edged up to the bumper of the Crown Vic, and the dome light in the cab came on. Then I heard the door slam shut, the cab dark again, and saw somebody moving off quick to the hubbub ahead.
I ran across the lawn and the gravel drive, headed right on up and past the tee box, the camp chair I’d been sitting in still parked there. I slowed down, turned and sort of jogged backward a few steps, looked at the chair and the lights and carts and vehicles all beyond it: a circus, the center ring a body.
