by Dawn Tripp
Waitress Red has brought their food, is setting down the plates, Robbie almost knocks over Huck’s soda, and the jukebox strikes up the next tune, and Eejit is asking Huck to pass the vinegar and salt, and Huck’s arm doing it, the glass saltshaker moving across his line of sight, his own hand not his own, his hand like the rest of him, mechanical shadow.
——
He can feel the wind on his throat, the wind and the soft speed of driving that silver California road down the edge of the page, the photograph spread open on the table by his left elbow. Some ketchup has spilled into the glittering sea. He blots it with his sleeve, still driving down that West Coast highway. She is with him: Jane Weld, in a cool, fast car, the top down, his hands on the leather-wrapped wheel, her skirt blowing around her knees, driving through inexhaustible sunshine; peach trees set alongside the road, orchards where they will stop to wander through and pick the fruit whenever they get hungry or just have a notion for a bite of that delirious sweetness, no one will mind. You say her name, Jane, Jane, Jane, and she is with you there, in that car, driving through silver gelatinous sunshine down that photograph, just you and her, warm wind on your face, Jane, and the unclenched blue of the sky silking down.
“What’s bugging you?” Pard says, his voice almost a hiss, low enough the others won’t hear—that tone of his voice, Huckie knows, is reserved for him, and on cue he glances up. Pard’s looking at him, a dull, flat look on his face, that stoned-over look. Huck knows it. He shakes his head. “Nothing.” He digs into his food.
Every night this week there’s been something getting into the trash. Night before last, it came around, some creature scuttling through the garbage cans, metal lids rattling. Huck went out onto the porch to have a look, spotted that bushy black-and-white tail as the skunk made its way off in a waddle around the side of the corncrib. Easy enough, he’d thought at the time, to wait up for it, there on the porch. Skunk don’t move quick. Take a shotgun. Finish that thing off.
It’s what his older brothers would have done—what they would always say—something comes poaching onto your property, starts messing around with what’s yours, it’s your right to take it out.
He feels a chill. A pit in his stomach, bits of himself gnawed away.
It’s all been getting worse. Storm brewing, worse, his mother pregnant again, still picking back over old things—their midnight fighting louder—loud enough sometimes to wake him; those threats thrown around, not unlike years ago when Deadman Weld was still alive, pulling on their mother, that business between them wrecking the peace—the boys would overhear, how could they not? Her threatening to leave, their father threatening much worse—they were all home then—Junie home, and Huck being small would find his way into his oldest brother’s bed, Junie’s arm tight and strong around him, listening, eyes open to the dark, his face set.
Different now, Huck’s alone in the house, only him now and the baby Green. Different now, how his father’s grip on her has begun to slip. She’s on the edge of done, dealing from the upper hand. Just last night through the wall, he heard her say, “You were happy, Silas, with me thinking he’d picked up and left. Got news for you though,” she taunted. “I was never yours to begin with.” There was an awful silence then, Huck knew that breed of silence, and waited, his body braced for the familiar sound of his father’s hand across his mother’s face. He waited, but the sound didn’t come, didn’t, maybe never would, and it struck him then what Silas must have already known: She was gone for good this time.
“What’s bugging you?” Pard asks again, low stone voice.
Huck doesn’t answer this time, doesn’t look up.
Across the diner at the counter, a glass falls, the sound splintering, loud, ice cream soda splattered, a scuddy mess on the floor. The whole place gone rock-still for a moment, everyone turning to look. The food in Huck’s mouth tastes wrong, dry, a tarred, rubbery taste—all of this wrong, a nasty trick, his being here, anywhere here, all wrong. He takes a gulp of Coke to get it down.
Pard pushes his plate away, maybe a little harder than he has to, the edge of his plate strikes Huck’s, and suddenly then, across the room, the hair-teased brunette belts out some kind of shriek, and the guy who nabbed the dog-cookie-loaded wallet is standing up, wiping his hands on napkin after napkin, then walking fast toward the men’s room, and Pard drops his share of the money they owe for their food onto the table, Eejit still shoveling down french fries, and Huck, paid up as well, gets Eejit by the collar, saying, “We’re done, let’s get the hell out of here.”
Then they are outside, the four of them, heading down Route 6, Huck a beat ahead and the other three walking behind, still laughing. Smith Williams drives by. Pard gives a shout, flags him down, and they pile in. He’s into the sauce already, they can smell the liquor on him, the reek of it filling the car. He tells them he’s just coming back from that bar down the Cove. “Saw your two older brothers there,” he tells Huck, and Huck murmurs something about “don’t it figure.” Pard talks Smith into stopping at the Congo package store to buy them two bottles of ginger brandy. He holds out the money, some extra as well, and Smitty answers with some cobbly, half-slurred logic about how the government’s got no right to tell people of any age what they can or cannot drink or buy or sell. At the Congo, he leaves them outside in the car still running, and Pard debates aloud the pros and cons of whether to borrow the car or wait for the booze, when Smith comes back with the brown-paper bag Pard asks if he could give them a lift down to the Point Wharf, and Smitty says, sure as hell why not, he’s got nothing else doing, just cruising around.
They take the new road. It’s open now all the way down to the State Beach Reservation the other side of the new bridge. Pard sits up front, yacking on with Smitty, telling him about the buttondown-shirt sucker who picked up that wallet, and they are laughing, talking, carving through the night down that new highway, sheets of fog blown across, bruising the dark. In the backseat, Huck leans his face against the window. He can feel the trembling shudder of the glass, the trembling shudder like it is inside him, his cheek against the body of the night, like a hunger, an unfinished country. He cannot think. He cannot tell her. How could he ever tell her? He closes his eyes and he is driving, still, down that other road, that other coast, with her.
Smith drops them down at the wharf, and they sit on the edge of the town dock, their legs hanging over. They break out the first bottle of that nice ginger brandy, pass it back and forth, a nip here, a nip there. They kill that one, then start on the second. Huck can feel the tingle work through his brain, warming him. He glances toward the bridge, the crowd of men fishing, packed in, lined up shoulder-to-shoulder across that old iron-and-timber span, while behind them in the night rises the brash hulking gleam of the new—they fish the tide, so their backs are to it, seeming unaware of that arched wash of steel looming up behind them.
“Slim pickings,” Pard’s saying now, in the middle of some new illumination. Some soapbox rant. “These are the facts. See—” And Huck decides he’s had his fill of listening to what he hasn’t even heard. He strips off his shirt and dumps himself off the side of the pier into the river.
Cold. Even in the summer night, the water like pins all through him. He holds his breath, sinking down, down, until his feet touch bottom mud, he crouches there, in the fierce pulsing silence of the dark underwater, holding his breath; he can feel the burn come in his chest, lungs slowly crushed, he holds still, old air like a blade, breath escaping, leaking out the side of his mouth, the high-pitched broken whistle of it, shrill. Bubbles rising. Could he stay here, down in this night world? Stay down long enough for everything the other side of the surface to change? His head spins, breaking. He pushes off, his body taut, shoots up through the skin of the river back into the known summer night. The other three have stripped off their shirts and jumped in, they swim around the docks, Pard in the lead, calling to Huck, the crook of white arms, splash, disappearing, voices echoing among the close, intimate black
oiled shadows of the piles.
Huck lets himself start to drift, downriver, floats on his back, looking up, chasing the sky. He feels some slithery thing come up from underneath him, a hand grasps his hair, what the hell, he starts to sit up, thrash, spitting water. It’s Pard.
“You dumb fuck,” Huck says, sputtering. “That was no joke.”
“I know what it is,” Pard says, his voice low though there’s no one else near. His hair is wet, plastered back, he treads water slowly, not seeming to move, his head just above the surface like it’s only his head bobbing there, pale, skin like bone. “You need to let it go, man. It wasn’t our fault. Who knew he was gonna turn?”
Huck just stares back. They don’t talk about it, have never since that day, it was just cloud between them, a moment so rushed and bewildered, it might not have even happened. He dives, against the current, comes to the surface, he starts swimming back toward the piers.
After midnight, the other three take off, head up to Robbie’s aunt’s house for the night to crash.
“Come on, Huckie,” Pard says.
Huck shakes his head.
“You think you’re going to walk all that way home?”
“Got to,” Huck says. “Tomorrow morning, I got to help my dad with the hay.”
And Pard, because they are best friends, their lives fused that way, one the shadow of the other, always there, gives Huck a look like he might say more, but the other two are still hanging around within earshot, and he doesn’t. He leaves with them, walking up Main Road toward the church. Huck starts over the bridge, wondering who might drive by at this hour he could thumb a ride from. Halfway across the draw, he glances back toward the wharf. He stops then, his eye caught. The pencil-thin gleam of a mast. The Laura May, his uncle Swig’s boat, tied up in its berth. He stares at it, stares, his mind brittle, seesawing, beating like an insect, unstill.
* * *
Voices wake him, the rub scratch of burlap against his face, his neck cramped up. Voices in the wet dark, still bluish, before dawn, smell of coffee, smell of salt, cool air off the sea.
They are out on the deck, his uncle Swig and Carl Dyer, who works for him. Pitching in high school, Carl threw a fastball that became legendary. Pard as a rule has no heroes, but has dubbed Carl The Iron as he can strike a swordfish like nobody’s business. From the corner of the wheelhouse, Huck can see his uncle and Carl, leaning against the rail, drinking their coffee. They talk about hunting, some trip Carl took last fall, going after deer through the big woods down Maine, the edge of Allagash.
“Eighty miles in, they’re cutting. Virgin timber,” The Iron is saying. “You walk into those woods, you can walk for days, weeks, and not find your way out. Mountains up there’ll throw a magnet, you never know for sure if your compass reading’s true.” He’s got a low voice, Carl Dyer, strong hands, you notice his hands, you know what they can do with that harpoon. They wrap his mug of coffee now, steam rising off. “It’s not like down here,” he is saying. “Sure there’s plenty of deer to drive, but down here, you know you’ll always come out somewhere, some brook or wall or road, and know just where you are.”
Swig murmurs something, an assent, then silence awhile, both men leaning on the rail, looking out.
“So what do you think?” Swig says at last.
“It’s going to slick off,” Carl answers. “I say we go swordfishing.”
Swig turns around, his eyes fall on Huck curled up in the corner of the wheelhouse, a momentary flicker of surprise. Then his brows crease. “What trouble are you into now, Rat?”
“None. Swear it.”
His uncle gives him a smile.
“Let me go out with you, Swiggie.”
“Haven’t said we’re going yet.” Swig looks at Carl. “Are you fierce to go?”
“It’s a good day for it.”
Swig nods, glancing back at his nephew. “Alright then. Five bucks, Rat. For every fish you spot if we land it.”
A perfect day. Occasional clouds boxing in their packs like great white fists. The sea is glass, a slow-moving swell. They go south, southwest of Noman’s, twenty miles, to the Dumping Grounds, and Huck is up in the mast with The Iron; other boats already there, steaming around. One to the east of them, half a mile or so off, makes a sudden hard turn, smoke belching out, the dory lowered, shooting away.
Huck scans the sea, the mirrored surface of it, looking for a thin darker mass lolling about, a fish come up to sun. And the world, from this height, is vast—all world, all divine brightness, sea and sky unmapped blue stretching out in every direction away. To the north farther off, he can see the humped shapes of the islands, beyond that lies the mainland, a low dark scud.
It cannot touch him here. That mainland. Not any shithouse mouse strutting over it. No old bad things, midnight threats, nagging father’s finger. All that sums up to nothing out here.
“Sun’s hot,” he murmurs. The Iron doesn’t answer. Huck steals a glance at him, his square sun-darkened jaw, a day’s worth unshaven. He is tall, good looking in a straight-up sort of way, like he hit life and it all just went forward from there. He’s got his sight focused on something, near one o’clock off the bow, something he’s seen, his keen eyes, Huck looks, and sees it then himself—a flash, tiny, off the glare.
“Go on,” Carl says quietly, “you make the shout.”
“Fish!” Huck yells. “One thirty.” And Carl takes the upper wheel rigged in the crow’s nest, swings the boat around, and they steer onto the thing, Huck keeps his eye trained on the fin, Carl calling down to Swig in the wheelhouse below until they are near enough that Swig has it in sight himself.
“See you then, Huck,” Carl says, setting his boot on the lower cable. He grabs hold of the upper one, slides down between them into the pulpit, and grabs the harpoon. From up in the mast Huck can see the fish floating, the widening dark mass of it below, and there’s a moment as they are steering onto it when the shape suddenly changes, seems to rise, fin, tail, the whole of that fish in mirage pried out of the water, levered up by the sun’s glare, like it’s floating there, suspended. Carl draws the harpoon back, throws it, his left hand in a loose grip guiding the pole, the iron drives through the surface, the lily sinking into the back of the dorsal, just alongside, and that fish, good and struck, sounds. The line runs fast, paying out of the tub as she goes, Swig cuts off the engine, swings the boat to starboard. When the line has run out to the end, Carl Dyer heaves the keg overboard.
Not much doing then, but to wait for that fish to tire out and die. They keep an eye peeled for another, but there isn’t one and an hour later, they search out their keg, haul in the line, rope a noose around the tail, hoist that swordfish up. One huge staring eye.
“Get back, Huck,” Carl says. He takes a knife to the gills, severs them. Gallons of blood rush into the water.
Almost evening when they come back into the harbor, dead low tide, they keep in the channel. As they round the Lion’s Tongue, the Point comes into view, cedar shake houses huddled together, the jut of the piers, a few boats already in, off-loading, fish being gutted, weighed. A crowd has gathered on the wharf, summer kids, white T-shirts darting, one girl with a sword dodges a boy on his bike, women laughing, gathered by the scales, waiting for a cut of fish to bring home for supper. Old-timers, milling more slowly, a few just sitting on the bench out front of the Wharf House, doing nothing and not wanting to but watch a day slip by.
As they pass Crack Rock, Huck sees her. Jane Weld. Isn’t that her? Standing on the town pier, alone and facing away, toward the old bridge and the brash lit shine of cars passing over the new. She is there, and it is just her, near the end of the pier, the perfect perpetual stillness of her, waiting on him like every dream he has ever had, the dusk gloss of the evening sliding over her bare arms, the curve of her neck, where her hair has blown to one side.
Turn, Huck thinks as they approach. Turn. He thinks it hard, the thought a burn, a magic. Turn, and then as if she hears him, so she does, sh
e turns and her eyes touch his, that strange glimmering distance of her sweeping through him. The throng of the crowd around her moves, breaks up again. Gulls wheel, circling the boat, they shriek, wild for the smell of that dead fish strung up. She lifts her hand, shielding her face from the light, her shoulders thrown back, a certain strength in how she stands, something bold and unexpected he had not glimpsed in her before, and everything around feels overcolored, bright cheap waste, everything but her, and she is there, and it is only her, the still point of stillness, lifted apart from every other moving thing.
How will he tell this to her? How can he love her and not tell her? But how to explain? It was just meant to scare him, send a bullet past his ear, scare the daylight out of that son-of-a-bitch—the gun a .22 they kept down at the hurricane house, took turns with it shooting rabbits, squirrels, tin cans. Huck had been griping on to Pard one night, griping on about Luce Weld—how his parents were fighting nonstop, all the grief that bastard caused. “We’ll fix it,” said Pard. Just like that, so matter-of-fact. He made it sound easy—such a simple plan: track Weld down in the woods where he hunted, Huck would distract him while Pard took aim, pushed a bullet past his ear. They’d send that bastard packing. It wasn’t meant to unfold as it did and wouldn’t have. Except that Weld turned, took a sudden strange step, almost lurching into the path of the bullet intended to stream past his face.
It was any other freakish stupid thing. Like throwing stones at a car passing by. All you see is the moving target, metal and glass. It never strikes you there might be something more to lose inside.
When he fell, they ran. He could have been dead, but maybe not, they didn’t stick around long enough to find out. The fall woods spun, and they ran through those trees spinning upside down. They kept close together, and once when Huck tripped, Pard reached back and grabbed his hand, pulling him up, and they kept running like that, a pair of dumb fools clutching hands. It was Swig they went to. He was the only one they could have gone to then, and when they told him he asked, “Was he moving?” and Pard looked at Huck, and neither of them really knew. It was Pard who Swig took back with him to the gravel pit. And when the boys met up together later down at the hurricane house, and Pard said nothing about it, Huck knew, but didn’t really know, didn’t really have to know, sure as shit didn’t want to, until that skull rolled out of the fill.
