Game of Secrets

by Dawn Tripp

  Off K-I-P, she runs S-W-O-O-N down.

  “Drew both those damn O’s after the fact,” she says ruefully. “Could’ve used them, even just one, and done a little something more with that Z.” She shakes her head.

  I add up her score. “You’ve passed me by two.”

  “You’ve got a turn yet.”

  “This is quite a game,” I say.

  She does not answer.

  She has not drawn her new letters. Her hands rummage through the tiles in the box-lid like she is looking for the right ones, like her fingers will know when they touch their blank sides.

  She gives me a look, faintly ruffled—some old thought, of my father perhaps, or some other unspeakable crossing over between us, then it’s gone again, and her face, her eyes, are clear. She is like this for the most part. Ada. Doesn’t let things stew. Only Huck, it seems, can swamp her.

  “I know you might think it was wrong of me to do it,” she says now like she’s read my thoughts. “And perhaps it was, pitting one against the other, but you know, this morning, he just wouldn’t leave off. Kept yapping on about how that old skiff’s past saving and needs to be glassed in—all the leaks and rot and the ‘this’ and ‘that’—

  “ ‘That boat needs a new bottom is all,’ I told him this morning. ‘And if you weren’t such a lazy good-for-nothing, you’d go and cut a few planks to size, slap a new bottom on and, come to think of it, since you don’t seem to have half a mind, I’m going to ask Ray to do it for me.’ ” She pauses. “That shut him up, Jane, for a minute. He was some sore at me, I could tell.”

  Ada is harsh with Huck. She always has been. Calls him her trouble. Smoking cigarettes by the time he was five, born with the corner of his right ear folded over, it damaged his hearing in that ear, enough to keep him out of Vietnam.

  He never did leave town. Stuck around, stayed right underfoot. And Ada has always been tougher on him than the rest, always saying “That Huck, he’s the spit of his father, hidebound like his father was, sulky like his father.”

  She’ll throw me a look when she says it, a kind of queer look, like she’s checking in to read my face, to see what I will say, if I’ll agree.

  ——

  I set a D at the end of B-R-A-Z-E.

  “Rubbing it in?” she remarks. “What a waste—that Z.”

  “I’ll milk what I can.” I laugh. “Your go.”

  There are things that you learn when you play this game often.

  You learn, for example, that some letters can work more than one way.

  Unite. Untie.

  Heart. Earth.

  Pare. Reap.

  Those are obvious ones.

  There are others you might not think to look for.

  Listen. Silent.

  Angel. Angle. Glean.

  Chaste. Cheats. Scathe.

  Waiting in a doctor’s office once, I picked up a magazine and read about a fire that started in a small Pennsylvania mining town back in the early sixties when some trash, burned in the pit of an abandoned strip mine, caught an exposed vein of coal. The surface flames erupted and were doused, supposedly put out, but that fire got loose, got off on its own, and kept burning, for decades, underground.

  I read that and thought of Ada’s middle son.

  On fine nights in the summer, Carl and I will see him, Huck, parked down at East Beach, his F150 backed in near those heaps of cobblestone the highway department will bulldoze up into a loose wall to keep the sea from washing out the road. He’ll sit there parked, for hours. Just Huck, alone, that wild odd elusive thing about him you can’t pin down long enough to name. He keeps an Adirondack chair set in the pickup bed, and he’ll sit in that chair, facing the ocean, whittling a loaf of pine, drinking through a six-pack of orange Fanta, and freeing the shape of some creature from the hard of the wood, making shavings of it.

  “I suppose it was a little heavy-handed,” Ada muses now, “my saying that to him about Ray.” She moves a letter on her rack, knocks it between two others. “Ray hasn’t exactly been such a glory lately—all in a wrinkle over your girl.”

  She says this, and I remember then, I have not told her yet. About yesterday and what happened when Ray came by. I want to tell her. I am on the verge of telling her. Then I catch myself. She’ll just scoff—say some dismissive thing.

  It was yesterday morning. Carl had just come home from pulling his pots. Marne was up, early for her, fussing with some quick-bread mix, then she sat down at the table in the same chair where she used to sit to eat her lemon ice. She loved that lemon ice when she was young. She’d kneel on the chair and work through a cup of it with three or four of those little baby spoons, and leave a sticky mess in the corner of the table. I used to wonder how it was that one person, so little herself, would need to use so many little spoons.

  It can be hard, having one like Marne. A child you never quite seem to learn. Wrapped in her own dark cloud, rattling around. She’s nothing like Alex. She never has been. Alex was my easy one. As a baby, he’d cry and I could soothe him. With Alex, it seemed, I always knew what to do.

  Yesterday morning in the kitchen, I was thinking this. I was thinking about those paper birds that Marne’s been making, it’s been almost a feverish thing with her—a need—I’ve watched her at it, how she takes that sharp tool to the paper, makes a crease, hard, exact, her strong fingers twisting a brilliantly colored paper square. Watching her hands you feel she’s on the verge of shredding it—astounding then, to see how she can make some creature of inestimable grace emerge.

  Yesterday morning, in the kitchen, I could feel the restlessness coming off her—not so unlike Huck really—that thing in her that can’t be smoothed out or contained.

  You don’t want that for them. You want to see them settled. They grow up, grow away, and you still want to know they’re tucked in their beds when you go in to turn out the light.

  I was thinking this when I heard the truck pull in, glanced through the window, and saw that it was Ray.

  “That girl won’t change,” Ada’s saying now. “I told Huckie just the other day: That girl your brother Ray’s stewing over, she won’t come around. Don’t I know her kind?”

  She says this so casually, so offhand, like she’s remarking on it to herself, like she’s forgotten I’m here, like she’s forgotten that my father was my father, and Marne is just as mine. She hasn’t forgotten. It’s intentional, what she says. Meant to sting.

  Her fingers that have been drumming lightly on the table stop. Her eyes are cast down, the shadow of her lashes on her cheek.

  I glance past her shoulder, toward the distant corner the other side of the wall by the swamp woods, a few rows of stones there, stubs really, that white marble they used to use, some of those stones so old the names have rinsed away.

  Ada plays R-E-N-T, nipping the double-word square. “In case you needed one more chance.”

  I smile. “No. I’m looking elsewhere.”

  “Some other corner?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’m down, aren’t I?” she says.

  I nod.

  She makes a face, drawing her letters. “And up to my ears in vowels.”

  I look at the board, and it occurs to me that I already know the outcome. I have had this sense before, in other games we’ve played, games that were close as this one is. It is there. The outcome. In the grid of what we have already laid down. In these last letters that still remain unturned.

  Yesterday, when Ray came by, Marne went outside. We could hear them on the porch, their voices sifting with the light breeze through the window screen. It was stilted at first between them, clunky and awkward. Then they seemed to settle in. Ray was asking her about California, about why she came back, and she told him how it wasn’t such a bad life out there, people started work at 7 AM to finish up at 3 so they could go sailing or hiking or skiing. Once, she said, she took a little boat out with a friend into the bay off Tiburon, and as they tacked, she looked back and saw the houses o
n the shore. They were so pretty there, she said, those houses, but she had the sense that she could poke her finger right through them, and that was it, she knew, for California, she was all done. She has never said half that much to me. She fell quiet then out on the porch, and for a moment Ray was quiet, too, then he asked if she thought she’d stick around. “Don’t know really where else I’d go,” she answered, but it wasn’t quite so casual. Then neither of them said anything for a bit, and I just sat there inside at the table with Carl, eating an oatmeal cookie. I looked around the kitchen, no cupboards still, only shelves, and above the sink, the pipes running down the wall as they were laid, and I thought about the first year we were married. We had no running water that first winter, just a privy out back by the old corncrib, and a well that kept freezing over, we had to break the ice up with a stick. There were two stoves in the kitchen then, one kerosene, and one of those early refrigerators, a Kelvinator with the motor on top that worked only some of the time. That first winter we lived here was a brutal winter, and we moved around each other through the cold of the house with the electricity of strangers.

  Yesterday, at one point, Carl glanced up once from the newspaper and nodded toward the window.

  “You hear them out there?” He kept his voice low. “He laughs at her jokes.” He smiled at me. Outside on the porch, they were talking again, Marne and Ray. He was telling her about a boat he’d raised the week before, out past the Devil’s Bridge; he was telling her how the mast of that boat was stepped with silver dollars and the man who owned it, his father had built it, had stepped those coins himself around the mast, eighteen of them altogether, he wanted all eighteen back. “But when I got down there,” Ray said to Marne, “and cut the mast I found nineteen.” Marne answered something, her voice too quiet I couldn’t make out the words. I saw Ray’s shadow through the window, his shoulder coming up as he dug into his pocket. “Here,” he said then, and there was silence, and I knew what he had done. He had given her that coin. I glanced back at Carl, and I could see in his expression that he knew it, too, and something in how his eyes stayed on my face reminded me of that summer the highway opened, the summer before they took the old bridge down.

  Back then the sky, the fields, the trees, the light on the river belonged to us, all of it, we had grown up in that place and it was ours. It never occurred to us it could be different, it never occurred to us we were already caught up in the draft of something else, some new future, a speed we had no warning of and did not understand.

  Yesterday, sitting in the kitchen across the room from Carl, I thought of this, I could see it so clear: the hinge that summer was. His eyes strayed from my face, his eyes slipping over me. My body goes to water, still, when he looks at me that way.

  PEA-SHOOTER

  HUCK, FOURTEEN

  Summer 1962

  So far the season was tame. They only went through one bunny nest with the mower, rabbit babies flying out, chopped by the blade to squeaking pieces, going just everywhere. After that, it was all good drying days, then one long week of picking hay, forking it over to get the green out, rowing it up. One long week of driving the rake, his foot on the tripper, his father Silas-the-bastard bossing him on, shouting at him to keep them rows straight, calling him every name for “stupid” under the sun. His two older brothers, Scott and Junie, both fishing now, Junie laying up lobsters, working that boat out of Fairhaven, and Scott swordfishing down at the Dumping Grounds, so Huckie now was the only one left underfoot, the only one Silas-the-bastard could still keep his thumb on, roped in to do the bull work. And it was one long week of that work: getting that first cut of hay up into the barn, sweat pouring into his boots, blisters on his hands, the air in the loft thick and blue with haydust—haydust in his throat, hayseed down his back and in his clothes, around his crotch, making him itch, his face tattered gray, that seed stuck all to his skin for that one long week of work and wondering what the fuck is it all worth. One long week when the only thing he had to look forward to in a day was the end of it—at best some good thing his mother might have cooked up for supper, slumgullion one night, another night codfish and potatoes with those cream of tartar biscuits slathered in strawberry jam. One long week of squinting into the sun and knowing there was no way in hell he was going to grow up to be a hayshaker.

  Then on Saturday when his mother took the skiff downriver to the wharf to meet her friend, Huck went with her, hooked up with Pard down there, and they spent an hour shucking out four dozen littlenecks for Pritchard, Mr. P, who owned the fish market and the store. The littlenecks were for some garden shindiggedy luncheon up at the old Valentine Estate. They’d called in the order the day before, they wanted only the small ones, no cherrystones, and wanted them cut on the half shell on ice. It was Huck who got the idea, every eight or so, to leave one connected. He and Pard took turns at it, chose one quahog and cut it near all the way through, but not quite, leaving a sinew attached.

  “Can’t you just see it?” Huck said, cracking up, “some sucker tilting back that shell, slurping away, slurp, slurp, juice drippling all down his chin.”

  Then the work was done, and Mr. P paid them, gave them each a coffee milk, too. They drank those down, then jumped in the river, took the tide down to the Yacht Club, hung around there for an hour, looked at some girls, then when the tide turned they floated back to the wharf on the flood.

  Early afternoon by then, Pard had to get off, up to his job at the gas pumps. And it was as Huck was coming around the corner of the Evinrude shop, his hair still wet, the salt drench and weed smell of the river still on him, he came around that corner and saw it. The car. That sweet flip-top car belonging to the duck-butt clerk fream. That car just sitting there alone, parked out front of the Paquachuck. Empty. No sign of the nutter himself. Huck took a stroll by it. The top was down and on the red leather passenger seat, he spied a camera. He took a quick glance around and, seeing no one looking who would care, leaned in and grabbed it. He’d drag it back to the hurricane house, go pawn it or stash it somewhere. He cut behind the outboard shop, then paused a moment in the shade, looking down at the lens. He could see his own face, hair peeled back, only his face, skull-like, distorted there. The shade was cold. He shivered and walked back out into the sunlight, down to the little sandy beach where his mother was wading in the shallows with the baby, Green, on her hip. She was babbling away with Vivienne Butler, their voices carrying to him on the breeze, Mrs. Butler saying something about how she’d heard they’d pushed back the time of opening the new bridge now to August, saying there was something in the draw they couldn’t seem to get working right. Then his mother getting that tone in her voice, saying how that new road’ll do nothing but bring the town to rim-rack-and-ruin, shaking her head, her hair piled up and some loose curls of it falling down to touch her sunburned shoulders, his gorgeous mother, bands of thin clouds reflecting in the shallows where she walked. Huck snapped off a photograph. They had not seen him yet. They were gabbing now about something else, some recipe for piecrust Mrs. Butler had come across and how the secret of it was in the cider vinegar. “Can you believe it, Ada?” she was saying, “something so household and simple—”

  An egret passed behind them over the water. As it rose, its reflection thinned, flying away from itself. Huck snapped a photograph of his mother’s boat staked to the marsh, then another, the click of the film, winding, winding. A shrill whistle came from the docks, and the women turned their heads to look, seeing something there, but Huck did not look, only watched his mother through that small clear window of the viewfinder lens, his mother captured in that frame, she was less than the size of a periwinkle, her long arm wrapped around the baby on her hip to hold him set there, and her dress in a swirl around her as she waded deeper in, not caring if the water soaked past the hem, her dress like some pale yellow flower, a butter-and-sugar snapdragon opening, and the toes of the baby leaving darker prints of wetness across her hip. He snapped off one more shot and then somehow, for some reason,
didn’t want to look anymore. He melted away behind the shop before they saw him and with a funny twinge of something in his chest walked back to that smug car, still driverless, windows still open. He tossed the camera back onto the front seat where he’d found it. Let the nutter scratch his duck-butt head bald over that one. There was a pack of cigarettes on the shift. Lucky Strikes. Now, there’s a different story. He reached back into the car, boosted the pack, tucked it into his pocket, turned around, and ran smack into Mr. P, who in one glance let Huck know he’d broke the golden rule, he’d been caught.

  “I’ve got to run those littlenecks up,” Pritchard says, his voice knowing. “I was just coming to ask if you’d mind the register for me, for an hour or so.”

  Huck felt his face burn. “You can trust me, Mr. P,” he mumbled.

  Pritchard laughed. “I think as long as we both know I can’t, we’ll be fine. Give me an hour. The cash is in the drawer. Counted.”

  And Huck was just sitting there, in the muted cool quiet of the store, picking his toenails behind the counter, when the door opened, chimes rang, and Jane Weld walked in. Just her. He nearly fell off the stool, brushing off his hands on his pants as she walked to the back of the store. She picked a tin of sardines off the shelf, then a can of beets, then she came back up to the counter and set those two things down, and Huck could feel the cold and sweat all over him like it was two hundred degrees in the Arctic.

  She was right there across the counter, eighteen inches away, the other side of the world.

  “Is there nothing—I mean, anything, you need? Anything else?”

  He rang up the sale, he rang it up slow. His fingers shaking pressed down on the keys, numbers rolling around, popping up into the register window.