The Season of Open Water

by Dawn Tripp

  After supper, Cora pulls the shades on the windows that face the road, then goes back into the kitchen to mop the floor. Noel sits in the deep chair in the big room with his pipe, the back window cracked open behind him, while the children play cards on the cleared table. He does not feel the same love for his grandson that he feels for Bridge. Two years older, nearly twenty-one, Luce is slapdash, but not lazy. He works the ice route his father, Russell, used to work. He can handle a gun as well as his sister, but he does not have her cool eye or her patience. Noel has marked a streak in him—a restless greed, a devil nature that pokes its face up from time to time. But Luce knows the river. He has a feel for its channels, its holes and jogs. He can handle a boat up the narrow switch-back turns of Crooked Creek. He can run the rocks around Cory’s Island, even at night, and make a skiff disappear between the mudflats and the eelgrass at midtide. He knows every hidden beach and break and cove. He can run the river, from the head to the mouth, with his eyes closed.

  They are playing pitch, and it is Bridge’s turn to deal. Noel watches the swift relentless movements of her hands as she gathers the cards, breaks them apart, bends them back and lets the two halves fall. She slides the deck across the table to be cut.

  The horsehair stuffing in the chair has begun to rot out. Noel can smell it through the cloth. His teeth grind into the stem of his pipe. He can hear the rub of the grinding in his ear. The outside darkness presses up against the curtains, and he realizes that in his heart he has already decided he will do it. He will take the work. He will build them their boat. He will build it to run fast and light. He will tell Lyons he is in for the one job, and the one job only. He will not let himself get yoked in. He will take the work for the daylight reason of the money. It is a good reason. It is why most men of his means and circumstance have stepped into the rum trade. It is an economic necessity—this kind of work—in a day and age when it is not enough to work the river and the land. He will take this one job for the money, and no one will judge him for it. They will look the other way. He packs away his doubts—the decision is made. He smiles quietly to himself—it will be a breath of the old life for him, a little piece of the adventure.

  He looks up at Bridge. She holds her hand of cards close to her, the edges tilted in, her face impassive. She gives nothing away. It is dangerous, he knows, the way he loves her, when life, by nature, is as swift and fleeting as a change in weather—clouds, fog, mist— passing through an empty sky.

  She sets her last card down. “I’ve won,” she says, slamming the table.

  “Play again,” Luce says.

  “No, two out of three already. I’ve won.”

  “We’ll do three out of five.”

  “No good.”

  “Come on.”

  “No.”

  “Come on, Bridge.”

  “No!”

  She shakes her head and stands, and Noel sees the ripe and wicked glance she throws back over her shoulder to Luce as she steps through the back door out onto the porch, the tension pulled tight as fresh rigging between them. Luce follows her. Noel watches them through the window that looks out onto the backyard, their shadows moving through the crisp night, as they chase the hens into the chicken shed and then stand for a while, a pair of black knives, looking up into the clear night sky.

  He goes to bed early that night. Just before he sleeps, he has that old sense of someone walking soft across his eyelids. That night, he dreams he is young again, and out on open water. He dreams of the sharp salt wind, the stink of oil and blood baked into the deck wood by the sun, the flap of sails, the rip of water up against the hull. In his dream, he remembers how the hips of the sea thrust up underneath them and their keel ran deep into the gully of her spine.

  Bridge

  That night, waiting for Luce in the mud-thick darkness of her room, she lies on her bed, fully dressed, the stolen tin of oysters in the deep pocket of her coat. She hears the trucks pass: the low voices of the men, the tinkle of bottles in their crates, rockweed and salt hay stuffed around them to muffle the sound. Soon after, she hears the low swift knock on her bedroom door. They steal out. Luce carries the pail of baitfish and the poles, and she carries a small sack with two potatoes and the shank spade. They walk down Pine Hill Road in silence, past the houses with their shades pulled, the windows framed by yellow slits of light.

  They walk through the village at the Head, past the closed store and the mail-stop, to Chape Clay’s garage. Luce slides the flat mouth of the spade through the crack in the door. He pulls it down in one swift run and springs the lock. The door swings in on its hinges, and they can see the hulking gleam of the new-style Ford pickup in the dark.

  Bridge slips into the cab, into the driver’s seat, pulls the brake and sets the truck in neutral while Luce pushes them out into the road. They roll over the bridge and turn left past the green. Luce gets in. “Come on,” he says, “move over.”

  She shakes her head. “Let me drive.” And he smiles and he lets her, she puts the truck in gear, pops the clutch, the engine starts, they drive without lights the rest of the way out of the village. She heads down Drift Road, past the orchards and the icehouse. They take the hill that runs past Howland’s farm and the black rolling shadows of cows clustered in the darkness.

  She turns left onto Hix Bridge Road.

  “I thought we were going to the Point,” Luce says.

  “No, let’s go around to the beach instead.”

  They pass the clambake pavilion and the teahouse. She lifts her foot off the pedal as they cross the bridge and pass over the river, thick bands of light flushing underneath them. They drive through the quiet village of South Westport, and she takes the sharp right turn onto Horseneck Road. The telephone poles set by the road seem to move alongside them, a small trail of staggering crosses through the night.

  They come down onto East Beach and drive along the warped arm of the Let. She starts to tap her fingers on the wheel, then catches herself doing it. She holds her hand still. They pass the new church, the second pavilion, its windows boarded closed for the winter. Just before the causeway, she slows and looks down West Beach Road. All the cottages are dark except for one—the third cottage in. Henry Vonniker’s house, she thinks. It must be his house. She feels a quiver in her stomach, a light flutter. There is a hedge out front, and above it, she can just see the top of his car in the driveway.

  “What are you looking at?” Luce says.

  “Who lives there, in that cottage, the one lit up?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  And she smiles to herself. She keeps driving. They cross the causeway to Gooseberry Neck and park the truck at the end. They take the rods and the pail of baitfish and walk the footpath through the bittersweet and false heather, the sea-myrtle and the pepper-bush, the beach pea scrub gone by.

  Once, as the path rises, Bridge glances behind them, across the water toward West Beach. On the bottom floor of the third cottage, she can see the glow of a lit window.

  “Are you coming, or what?” Luce calls back to her. She follows him. They walk past the kettlepond and then cross down over the windrows of mussel shells that lie crushed, blue-black and iridescent in the moon. They leave their boots in the sand, roll their pants up past the knee, and walk through the shoal water pools between the narrow strip of beach and the rocks that lie like sleeping lions in the low tide.

  Bridge can smell the reek of dead fish and rockweed, busted clams and cold wet sand. They cross the bar and walk through the rocks along the tip of the island, casting out into the shallows. Luce pulls in a fish on his first cast—a schoolie. He knifes it in the gills and hooks it to his belt. He rebaits his hook and, as they go on walking, he tells her, as he has told her a thousand times before, that someday he will make a good dollar, enough to leave this scab of a town. He will set miles, he says, between himself and this place. His voice is a cool whisper through the pull of water over the stones. He will take the train to California, then a ketch
to the island, Noel’s island, Kauai. Bridge smiles in the darkness. It is always the same ragged dream. She stops listening. She thinks of Henry Vonniker in his house. She wonders why he is awake—it must be close on midnight—she wonders if he always keeps late hours—if he is up reading or writing a letter. Did he hear the truck as they drove past? She wonders if he leaves a window open at night to let the sound of the wind on the water and the cold salt air from the outside world press in.

  “So what do you think?” Luce is asking her now.

  “Yes,” she answers.

  “You weren’t listening.”

  “I was.”

  “What did I say?”

  “You said you’d make off.”

  “Said more than that.”

  “A train to California—all the rest of it.”

  “I said I might go to Arizona first.”

  “That’s a dumb place to go.”

  “Hell it is.”

  “Arizona’s desert.”

  “You can buy a lot for nothing there.”

  “Nothing’s nothing in a desert.”

  There is a pause. Luce casts out again into the deeper water off the bar. He draws the line in, and she can hear the slow rub of the leader through the metal eye.

  “Besides,” she says with a smile, “you’d never leave Ma.”

  He doesn’t answer. He swings the rod back over his shoulder. A long and aching cast. She hears the bait slap the surface.

  “You could come with me,” he says.

  “I could,” she replies.

  “Yeah, you could.”

  They fish in silence. Her feet are numb, the feeling below her ankles sucked down by the cold.

  Once, her hook catches on a rock. She jerks the rod, the line breaks free and comes back to her, aloof and strange over the waves.

  Luce is ahead, and he sees the signal first. The red light blinking off Little Beach at the break in the shore by Allen’s Pond. The light blinks a homemade code, and he can tell by the glow around it that they have set the torch in a box so it cannot be seen from the land. Luce draws in his line without taking his eye off the light as Bridge comes up behind him.

  “What is it?” she asks.

  He grips her arm and points seaward to the black swift-moving shapes of two craft heading in. “Listen,” he says underbreath, and she listens and she can hear it—that high-pitched, distant, unmistakable sound of engines running, finely tuned.

  “They’re heavy with a load,” Luce says. “Do you see how they ride in the water? That second one there—do you see—how low she goes—watch, when she hits light—there!—do you see the crates in her bow?”

  And she suddenly remembers that she has not told him.

  “They came by today,” she says.

  “Thirty foot each, at least, they must be. How much do you think it’s worth—that load they’re bringing in? Came down from Newfoundland, I’d bet. Or all the way from France.” Luce’s eyes are fixed on the boats, his face taut, rigid with excitement, his cheeks slashed with moonlight, and for a moment it frightens her, the hunger she sees in his face. “That’s what I should be doing, Bridge,” he says. His voice is hushed.

  “To wind up dead like Asa?” she says flatly.

  “I’d do the job ten times better than Asa.”

  “Doesn’t mean you wouldn’t wind up dead.”

  But he does not take his eyes off the two boats heading in toward the red blinking signal light on shore.

  “Honey Lyons came by today looking for Noel,” she says.

  “Yeah, what’d he come by for?”

  “He brought three other men.”

  “What other men?”

  “I’ve never seen them before. But they were top-dressed, spats, rake hats. Fancy car.”

  She sees it register then in his face, what she is saying. He looks at her sharply.

  “You think they want him to run?”

  “Might.”

  “He’s too old.”

  “He knows the river well as anyone. Can handle a boat better than you.”

  Luce doesn’t answer. He looks back toward the rum-running craft. They have reached the softer water of the bay. They cut off their engines and glide through the darkness on the tide, a strong clear line toward the beach and trucks waiting on shore.

  Luce and Bridge leave the shallows. They climb back up to where they have left their things—the potatoes and the baitfish pail. They move to a higher point that faces east-northeast. They watch from there.

  Distant black shapes moving against the sand, men working, unloading crates off the boats, crate after crate, passed down a chain, man to man, strung from the shallows to higher ground, and loaded into the trucks. As the boats speed off back out into the black water, the trucks back around, straight in a line. Luce and Bridge can see their headlamps filing up the dirt path around Allen’s Pond toward Horseneck Road.

  The baitfish pail is between them. Bridge crouches down. She puts her hand in and she can feel the shiners, their noses quick through her fingers. They cut, darts of silver through the pail. There is one in particular, smaller than the rest. She tries to follow it with her eyes as it pounds back and forth, a half-mad thing, small nose, small fins, into the sides of the pail.

  Luce says something, but she does not hear him.

  “What’d you say?” she asks.

  “What’s up with you tonight?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Yes, there’s something. Something’s been gnawing at you all day.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “Since last night at Asa’s.”

  Her head snaps up.

  “That’s it then,” he laughs. “Dead cousin Asa’s got you spooked.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Luce.”

  “Sure I do.”

  “I’m quite sure you don’t.”

  He does it then, one swift jerk of his leg, his foot kicks the pail and it turns over on its side, a soft rush as the water empties out, the fish flush into the sand. And perhaps it is what she should have expected. Perhaps it is what she should have known he would do.

  The cry of a nightbird hammers through the stillness.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” she says.

  Luce shrugs. “They’re no use.”

  “That was cruel.”

  “But you forgive me.”

  She shakes her head. “No.”

  He digs a fire-pit in the sand, lines it with rocks, then slips into the brush to gather driftwood. He leaves her there, at the tip of the island, and still she watches them—the baitfish—small, wet-skinned, smooth, flipping slower now, breathless, caked with dirt.

  She looks across the water back toward shore. She can see the hidden curve of Little Beach, quiet now, the empty sand rinsed by the moon.

  She finds a smudge on her wrist. She rubs it out. She crosses her arms under her head and lies back, her thoughts grow liquid, moving dark wind, blue flax, sweet crushed fern, the smells of deep fall, the last smells, bayberry, wild grape, salt rose, pine. The darkness is cold. The stars pierce the sky, harsh white scraps of distant light.

  She had felt the change in her grandfather that morning—he was more quiet, kept more to himself—and she knew it was about the money. Maybe he was kicking himself for not taking the job. He had told her, hadn’t he?—it was a job he wouldn’t take.

  It was not the first time he’d been approached. She knew this. The first time was years back, when the rum trade was just starting up—back when they still used small boats—any craft that would float—catboats, dories, skiffs. It was clear and simple business then— nearly legitimate business. The rum-zone was only three miles offshore and supply ships like the Arethusa, with her captain Bill “the real” McCoy, would hang off Nomans Land for weeks. The small boats went out to meet the mother ships, took on their load, then sped back in.

  In those early years, she knew, there was no hijacking, no piracy, no go-through men. It was before t
he big syndicates, before the mystery sinking of the John Dwight and the slaughter of her crew. Bridge was just twelve that afternoon when Rui, the Port-i-gee, came by. He wore an old monkey jacket. It was noontime. Luce was gone, on the ice route with their father. Cora was gone to the store. Noel had known Rui back on Nomans Land. They had shipped together on the Sarah Mar. Rui was a salvageman now. He was a trapper, and he hawked his skins and old scrimp and Sailor’s Valentines down along the city wharves. Bridge had stayed in the shop, knocking off bungs with a wooden mallet, while the two men yarned outside. She had overheard Rui telling Noel about the new business, the rum business, about how you could make fifty dollars for one night’s work if you read the water right.

  “Is that your taste, Christmas?” the Port-i-gee had asked.

  “Not mine, Rui,” Bridge heard her grandfather say, “but you’re an old rascal, and I wish you well.” He had laughed then, low, went into the house and came back with a bottle of brandy and a fruit-cake. He called to Bridge and told her to come outside, sit with them, have a bite of cake. When Rui said it was time for him to be getting on, Noel went down to the orchard to pick him a sack of fresh pears off the tree. Bridge and the Port-i-gee watched him together, as he twisted the small pears from the ends of their branches, taking only the ones that were ripe and easy to pull.

  “You know, girl,” Rui had said, his face lopped in shadow under the brim of his hat, “I knew your pappy back on island.” His voice was thick with accent. “Nomans Land. I knew him back when he was small as that wheelbarrow. Had no fear, your pappy, even as a young scrap, he’d swim out to the break off Stony Point, catch the waves out there on storm days, past where the rest of us would go. He’s fish, your pappy is, gills in his throat you don’t see.”

  Bridge had not answered him. She said nothing to him that day. She nibbled on the cake, her teeth digging in to find the chunks of sweet date. The sun was relentless and made chewing slow. With small bites, she took in what the Port-i-gee told her although it had no match for what she knew. She looked across the yard to her grandfather, the light on his shoulders, his careful, brutal hands still gathering pears. She could not imagine him small. He was a country to her.