“‘Everyone get your lines together to throw to the guy in the tanker bow,’ said Billy. “’His bow’s ten feet up so figure he’s going to need as much slack as you can give him. We come in on his starboard side, and try to get him a line to pull him away from the rocks.’
“‘What happens if he pulls us into the rocks?’ I said.
“‘Anyone who doesn’t want to come can stay here. I’m going,’ said Billy.
Peggy smiled at Harry and said, “That was the way Billy was. He always liked to jump in and get the job done, whatever it was. We figured he would be a banker like his father only work in New York or something and make a lot of money. I remember how scared I was. By this time the tanker captain had realized what we were trying to do. He had no choice but to accept our help. With the small boats pulling all at once, he had a chance he could clear the monument and be into the deep water of the channel again.
“Our boats had to make several passes before all lines were secure between the tanker and the outboards. The lines had to be kept long so that the tanker would not crush the wooden runabouts with its steel side. At Billy’s signal all engines began to pull. At first the tanker did not respond. The heavy weight of the fully laden tanker was too much for the small boats. On the deck two frantic seamen were working the small lines that we passed up to them. I remember one had a beard and I could see his teeth through the hair of the beard, his mouth was that far open in his fear. Sometimes the small propellers of our boats lifted out of the water to cavitate furiously in the air.
“Then, with a slight shift in the wind, the tanker began to ease away from the rocks, slowly at first then more quickly. The steel hull began to make way towards the channel.
“We looked toward the shore and several large boats, including the Coast Guard launch, were putting out to help. By the time we reached the town docks, the shoreline was crowded with onlookers. I remember that Billy’s father was there with the others from the bank, and Homer Kirby had come over from his shop.
Peggy paused, then said almost in a whisper, “We were heroes that day.”
She looked at Harry and, leaning forward, her arms around her knees, said, “Walker John helped me be that hero out on the water. The whole time I was trying to save that tanker it was as if he was in my boat with me, telling me what to do, how not to be afraid. The other kids agreed when we talked about the rescue afterwards. Without him behind us, we never could have done any of it. You know what was the most telling thing about him and us?”
Harry looked at her.
“The day all that happened, the day we were so brave, we didn’t stop to tell our parents, or our schoolmates. We went right to Walker’s shop, tied our boats at his dock and rushed inside all of us talking at once to tell him about the adventure, to see him smile at us. That’s what Walker was to us, Harry.”
“So why do you think he started the fire?” asked Harry.
“I don’t know if he did set it. On the other hand, I don’t think he was a victim himself like your paper seems to say. I’m surprised they haven’t burned your newspaper down for suggesting he might be innocent. As to whether he set it, that’s just what people say, what the witnesses say. I always thought that the black folk hated us whites, or as my mother would say, disliked us intensely, and when they got around us whites, they were getting even somehow for all the slave days long ago. If we can remember the Confederate War as long as we do, then they can remember the slavery, I guess. About him, I don’t know. I saw him, for the last time, the day of the fire,” she said, looking off at the pool and the children.
“How do you think you might have caused him to set the fire?” Harry asked.
She raised her hand, moving it in a circle as if she were trying to clear the air. “It was something very simple really. In those days though I took it all the wrong way.” She looked away from Harry as if she was ashamed of what she was going to reveal.
“Walker gave me a hug. It was the first time he had ever done that. I reacted the wrong way. I was at the shop with the other kids. We were working on the boat. Billy mentioned the award Walker had just received the night before at the Association awards meeting. Walker laughed and said it was due to our being his helpers and we should feel that we all shared in the award. He was so happy he started to hug each one of us in turn. When he got to me, I didn’t feel right about touching him. All of a sudden something happened in my head.”
She looked back at Harry, her eyes seeming to ask for Harry to forgive her, and went on, “It’s happened the same way with my other white friends with black kids they knew growing up. Somehow after all those years of his being my friend, I suddenly knew him as a black man, not as a loving brother figure, but as a real man, and I reacted to his black arm on my white shoulder. I pulled away. His face blanked just for a second before his smile came quickly back. It was as if he knew what was happening. I ‘ve consoled myself by thinking he wasn’t as angry at me as I was at myself, by thinking that he must have known I was just a kid, an immature unfeeling little white girl.“
Her eyes were tearing, that firm strong visage breaking into weak lines and said, “I’ve always wondered if my actions pushed him over the edge, made him do all those terrible things. I am wrong to think I had that much influence on him, but we were all of us close like brothers and sisters. Did I bring out some deep hidden resentment and sorrow, something he did not show me at that moment but felt inside?”
Harry knew now that it was more than the gin making her talk, that she was confessing to him, as if he, the world traveled newspaperman, was filling the role of one of the priests in Annie’s church, a wise priest hearing the confession of a parishioner to get absolution.
“I betrayed Walker with my reaction to him as a man and as a friend,” she said. “I’ll never have the chance to tell him how sorry I am.”
He helped her to stand. She said, looking again at the children at the pool, “They’ll never know what we had together that summer, the Patrol, Walker, all of us.”
“What happened to the Patrol?” asked Harry.
She turned to him, “We all made choices because of the fire, Harry. The Patrol couldn’t help with the fire, you know. The fire was too big, too huge and we were too young, too little, too weak. Billy went away to camp. Senator didn’t go out in his boat as much. Catch stayed at his father’s shop. When I had trouble with my engine, I went to the Kirby shop.”
“What was that like?” asked Harry. “I mean, compared to going to Walker’s place.”
“In those days, Cheeks was there working on the boats. I never liked him, even in those days when he was younger and not so fat. He looked at me like, well, like I was the kind of woman that my sister, Lulu, hires to dance nude at the Motorboat.”
“What about Catch?” asked Harry.
“That was the strangest thing. I found out that Catch and I were only friends because of the Patrol and because of Walker. “She smiled as she said this. “The Kirby family and my father’s friends were not, let’s say, in the same social community here in River Sunday. The day I went to the shop to get my engine repaired, Catch was sitting on the edge of a table staring at me. He didn’t say anything, just looked away when I tried to speak to him. He and I have never been close since that day. We greet each other, and it’s friendly enough, but we were not the same kind of friends after Walker ran away.”
“So that’s what happened to ‘Walker’s Patrol,’” she said, talking softly over her shoulder as Harry followed her toward her house. “We lost it. We had it for a while, the concept of it, the heroism, and then we lost it. Nobody ever mentioned the Patrol after the fire, not us, not anyone. Funny, it seems these days as if it never happened, as if we never saved that tanker.”
Chapter 10
Monday, August 3, 9am
From what he had learned with the conversation with Peggy Tolchester, Harry was even more puzzled that the pleasant Walker of those early days had become the killer Walker at the time of the town f
ire.
He decided to talk with another member of Walker’s Patrol, his fellow poker player, the pragmatic Senator. He found him at a corner drugstore near the hotel. The store was a survivor of the fire and one of the last of the former businesses of downtown River Sunday, a store that still had the old chrome covered soda fountain stools and the smell of decades of prescriptions. Senator used this place as his office and was often here in the morning carrying on an audience with his constituents, discussing town and county affairs.
The tall waitress with her bright blonde hair pulled up in a bun handed Senator his coffee in a white mug. Harry had found a seat next to the politician and waited his turn while another citizen finished up with a complaint about potholes and then walked away.
“I know, Senator, you don’t take cream or sugar,” she said, efficiently wiping her hands on the dirty apron she had around her, her blouse trying to hold back a matronly chest that was as big as her hips.
Senator sipped at the edge of the hot coffee and targeted his half smile at Harry. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled front page of the Nanticoke Times.
“One of my constituents gave me this and told me I better get your paper shut down or it would be shut down for you. What do you think about that?”
Harry watched as Senator balled up the paper and tossed it behind the counter. “That’s what I think about that,” he said.
“Peggy said that you knew Walker John pretty well,” said Harry. “You didn’t talk much about him the other night at the Motorboat when we were playing poker.”
“Harry,” he replied, “when I was a kid, Tim Holt, the famous Western movie star, came to River Sunday, stopped in here and sat right where you are, while he drank a cup of coffee. He was my favorite cowboy hero. A buddy of mine told me he was in town and I ran all the way here.”
“Did you get his autograph?” asked Harry.
“I just stood and watched him,” Senator said.
“He must have broken this seat,” grinned Harry. “The cushion is about ready to fall off the post.” Harry demonstrated the wobble of the old chrome and plastic seat.
Senator said, “Everything in this town is worn out.” He stared at his coffee. “I wonder what the cowboy star would have said to me.”
“Movie stars have standard remarks to kids,” said Harry.
“It’s better that he didn’t say anything to me. I can imagine whatever I want.”
“Tell me about ‘Walker’s Patrol,’” Harry asked. Senator jerked his head slightly.
“That’s a long time ago. How’d you dig it up?”
“Peggy Tolchester,” said Harry.
Senator smiled. “I’m surprised she admitted ever getting her feet wet.”
Senator paused as if considering what he wanted to say, then said, “You know, Harry, I like playing poker with you even though you win all the time. But, honestly, man, after that newspaper article you published, I ‘m surprised you are still walking, that one of these country boys hasn’t busted your legs.”
“Lot of people seem to be worried about my health,” said Harry.
“Maybe you ought to listen,” said Senator. “Watch out driving back roads late at night. People gang up to throw big timbers at your car, run you off the road, maybe kill you.”
He drew his head back like he was talking to the ceiling of the pharmacy, one of the old metal types with the pressed flower designs, and said, “I knew Walker but we were kids and he was an adult. No way we could have seen the killer in him.”
“You think he was a killer?” asked Harry.
“Come on, Harry. You don’t know any different,” said Senator, not looking at him. “We were kids together here, Harry. Me, Peggy, Catch, Billy Elliott. We knew Walker, that’s all.”
“That’s something.”
Senator swirled his coffee. “What you have to understand is what it was like for me in those days, what my father was like.”
“What does your father have to do with Walker John?”
“That’s how I came to know Walker, because of my father,” said Senator. “Like most kids, I did exactly what he told me not to do.”
Harry nodded.
“My father, he didn’t like trouble,” said Senator. “He wanted me and the kids I hung out with to be careful about the blacks. He didn’t like, for instance, me going to Walker John’s barn to help out on building the race boats. So I went down there and hung out, to spite him. That’s how I got to know Walker.”
“Your father was a politician. He needed the black vote, didn’t he?” asked Harry.
Senator smiled and said, “You don’t get it. See, in those days civil rights workers from Boston and the North, came into River Sunday to register the black voters. My father said to me that going down to Mulberry and being involved with a black man, any black man, with the civil rights workers in the town was going to hurt him, cause him to have to make explanations, and he wanted me to keep out of there, that it was going to make all of us a lot of trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?” Harry persisted.
He looked at Harry. “Hell, Harry, I was only twelve. I didn’t know anything about segregation, that kind of thing. The black kids went to the black school, we went to the white. My father said people would burn our house down if he talked too much about changing the old rules.”
“Things are different now, right?” asked Harry.
Senator held the top of the counter as if he were trying to crush the chrome edge. Then his hands eased. He began to speak softly, in a different tone, not as sure of himself.
“My daddy was not much on boats of any kind. His grandfather and grandmother came from Ireland. They never liked the water. Wouldn’t even go fishing. I begged him to buy me a boat. My father said, and when he did, I suspect he thought he was finishing the subject for good with me, he said you got to build it yourself.
“Afterwards I was hanging around Walker’s shop. I told him what my father had declared and he went over to his desk. Walker always had answers. He came back with a list of boat kit companies. I wrote them and in a week or two I had all these catalogs. Then Walker and I sat down. He took the time out in the shop, cleared a table for me, and we looked through the magazines,” Senator said, moving his hand across the soda counter plastic surface as if he were clearing up spilled sugar.
“That’s when Walker put up the money for the kit. He said I could pay him back. He told me this was his investment in my future as a boat builder, that it was a good business deal for him. He had this way of making a person feel good. I did pay him down too. All but ten dollars that I still owed him when he set the fire and took off.
“I set up the construction in my back yard. My father didn’t say anything. He thought I’d got the money by working odd jobs. He’d come out and watch me once in a while, that’s all. I think he was surprised I had got so far on the project. Walker would come by my house but only when my father was away. He brought me clamps to hold the parts together. Once in a while he’d reach over and adjust something. He used to say that a good boat builder could see without measuring when something wasn’t level, or plumb.
“When I finished building the boat, Walker borrowed an old pickup truck from one of his friends in Mulberry and he brought it over. The two of us loaded her up to launch her in the river.”
He looked at Harry, and Harry thought he saw a tear in Senator’s eye, “Have you ever launched your own boat, Harry?”
“No,” said Harry.
“Inside, like in your heart, you feel something about putting your own creation into the water and seeing it float. Like you have won somehow against the odds. Especially for a kid, but I guess every person who ever built a boat has felt that way,” Senator said, staring at the rows of soda glasses behind the counter.
He went on, “Walker let me keep her at the mooring behind his barn. I put her over in a spot that was shallow when the tide went out. No one else wanted the space because it was deep mud. I’d slog
out barefoot at low tide and work on her. Mostly it was pumping rainwater. The boat itself never leaked a drop, I’m telling you.
Senator was silent for a moment, then said, his voice soft, “I still owe Walker that money. I could have paid his mother or sister but I never did.”
He looked Harry intently and added, “Cheeks isn’t going to find Walker John up in the swamp, Harry.”
“How can you be so sure?” Harry asked.
“Thirty years is a long time,” said Senator. “Of course, I’m not saying people haven’t claimed they saw him around River Sunday or, like some think, his ghost.”
“Ghost?” Harry asked and then remembered Lloyd’s article that he had seen in the newspaper files, the faded one from “Town Chats” titled “Is Walker John Douglas now considered one of River Sunday’s ghosts?”
Senator answered him in a low voice after looking around the pharmacy to see if anyone could hear him. “You’re going to think I’m crazy, Harry. I’m going to tell you something that I haven’t talked about for years.” He motioned to the waitress who shuffled over with the coffee pot.
Senator leaned closer, looked around, and then spoke in almost a whisper, “I was fishing one night up by the Wilderness. I was working along just trolling a little Pet spoon I had always had good luck with, out by myself. It came along blowing up some and I could see lightning off to the west over Baltimore.
“Pretty soon the waves started coming in. They began washing up to the tops of the sides of my boat and I was afraid I’d swamp. First thing you know my line got tangled in the propeller and I was in trouble. The rod was hooked and pulling on me. I cut the engine and leaned over the stern to see what could be done. Now another wave shook the boat and made me tumble out. I hit my right arm on the engine just enough to bruise it bad at the wrist. Hurt like hell and I couldn’t get my left hand on a grab place to pull me back in. The boat started drifting and I was all alone in the water.
Powerboat Racer (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 3) Page 14
